Hello and welcome to the unclear and present politics podcast, our Patreon side show, I guess, where we talk about the issues. I don't have my soundboard with me. I am away from home.

Unclear and present politics. We talk about the issues. And I would like to note real quick, regular listeners know the deal here. But this is also showing up on the main feed.

Hello, main feed listeners.

And consider this a preview.

This is one of the things we're doing over at the Patreon.

If you'd like to listen to previous episodes of Unclear and present politics and listen to future ones, come sign up at patreon.com slash unclear pod.

Patreon listeners, thank you for your support as always.

And this week, we skipped last week because we're busy.

We're busy people.

We have lives and jobs.

Some of our jobs.

You have a job. I kind of have a job. I have a job that they're like,

you know, they're letting this slide for now. Right. Well, let's see how long we can get away with it.

It's basically, you know, I'm doing a regular podcast at the time, like the opinions every week. And so that's,

that's my out. They're like, okay, as long as you're doing opinion podcasting for us,

we're not going to bother you too much. Anyway, this week we are going to talk about,

at first at least, we're going to try to get into the shutdown a bit, and we have some shutdown thoughts.

But our first topic this week is just the business happening up in Maine.

So next year, Senator Susan Collins, I'm supposed to say Olympia Snow, but she hasn't been in office for years.

No, same difference.

Same difference. Same difference.

Senator Susan Collins is up, although I'll say the existence of Olympias, no, it's actually an important data point here.

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