Vladimir Putin told him that he had won the 2020 election and there would have been no way that he could have possibly lost if it weren't rigged because you have mail-in voting.

There is always the risk that you redraw this hoping for the optimal result, and it is not the optimal result.

All right, August 22nd, rapid response Friday, Janessa Seymour, what's up?

I'm doing good. It is a cold, rainy day,

and I have some hot tea, so I am pretending things are great and enjoying the inside of my apartment.

No, we're having one of those, too. I was wearing an overcoat. I just keep forgetting that we're in the same time zone.

I'm used to recording to somebody who lives in the past, but here we are together in the present. Just hanging out and talking about incipient fascism once again, but I have to say, we're going to start off with some good news on the D.C. front. You know, they were actually able to scale them back a bit. It's small good news, but we'll take what we can get. But then we've got to talk about this thing in Texas. I've been trying to follow it, but it's more your lane here with the voting stuff. So I'll talk about the redistricting and what's going on with this nutty quorum thing and why a state representative is locked inside the state house and filing a habeas petition from inside the building. That's a new one for me. Then I want to talk about a couple of USCIS policy changes that I don't think are going to make a lot of news but are potentially really important and very scary. And again, just the duration of this presidency, no matter how long it may last, we have some pretty scary new policies that are going to give USCIS a lot more discretion over who can become a resident and a citizen. It's the kind of thing that would really slip through, I think,

and that probably will slip through for the most part. But it's a massive shift in policy.

And I want to be sure we talk about it so people can understand all the different ways that the executive branch can mess with the immigration system that are, there's nothing to do with Congress.

So we'll talk about that. And then we'll get on to a fun footnote, a classic footnote here about Columbia v. Columbia.

Mom and dad are fighting.

Really a weird dispute that's happening between two entities that happen to share the name Columbia.

One of them is the one you think it is.

So we'll talk about it.

But I've got to say, I don't understand this lawsuit, not a civil lawyer. I mean, I understand the suit, but I don't understand why it's being brought. I'm capable of reading a complaint, folks. But yeah. So we will get through all that and see what we can see about what's going on this week in the news, explaining what we can out of this crazy time that is a little hard to explain sometimes,

but we're doing our best here. So let's get on with it. We'll take a quick break, and we'll come

back and talk about what is going on in Texas. This episode is brought to you by HelloFresh.

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