Aloha and Namaste everyone and welcome to Impolitic with John Heilman, a puck and Odyssey

join featuring lively in-depth conversations with the people who roam the quarters of power

and influence in America weaving the warp and wharf and weft of our politics and culture.

Rarely, rarely, if ever, have the immortal words of Ferris Bueller,

life comes at you fast, been more obviously, screamingly, achingly applicable than they are

to the week now drawing to a close in American politics and, unfortunately, also global economics and finance.

On Monday, it seems like a year ago, on Monday, Corey Booker took to the well of the United States

Senate and started talking and talking and talking some more.

He kept talking for 25 hours straight all the way through to Tuesday night,

breaking the record for the longest speech in the history of the upper chamber,

a record previously held by the arch segregationist Strom Thurman's filibuster against the 1957 Civil Rights Act.

A couple of hours after Booker finished, the results rolled in from a handful of closely watched off-year elections,

the most important of which revolved around a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, a race that turned

into the most expensive state judicial contest in history, thanks in large measure to won Elon Musk,

who not only devoted $25 billion of his own cash, but so much energy, effort,

and even FaceTime to the campaign that he managed to turn it into a referendum on him.

And as a result, bought himself a brutal drubbing for his troubles, as the Democratic candidate

Susan Crawford won a whopping double-digit victory, propelled by off-the-charts turnout of voters,

enraged at the prospect of a carpet-bagging,

free-spending oligarch,

who fancies himself some kind of genius,

but in fact, it's so dumb

...