Hi, dear listeners, this is Kate Riga. I'm here to make a quick pitch that you consider

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listening and supporting us. We couldn't do it without you. Hi, this is Josh Marshall and this is the Josh Marshall podcast featuring Kate Rika.

We've had a couple kind of, I wouldn't say they're dispiriting episodes of the podcast.

I actually thought, I'm trying to think if it was our last episode,

I thought, I think it was the last episode. I actually thought that was one of the best episodes

we had done in a while just in terms of the sort of conceptual coherence. And I think Kate and I both had

a strong sense of what we were in that episode to talk about it, and we talked about it and so forth.

But they've also been kind of bleak episodes.

And today, you know, the sort of the overall, you know, political forecast is, I'm not sure it's bleak, but it is still, you know, we're still down there at, you know,

Drake's passage at the southern tip of South America and the boats like flying around and

flipping circles and the hundred foot tall waves and all that kind of stuff. That's where we are.

And that's where we're going to be for a long time. But today, we've

got, you know, we had these elections last night that were pretty favorable for the Democrats.

I was a little concerned that with those races down, obviously the Democrats lost those two

special elections down in Florida. And I was a little concerned that there had been so much press attention.

There had been a couple polls that showed, I'm not sure I have the pronunciation right, Josh

...