As one might have expected Missouri senators Eric Schmitt’s epic faceplant in his interrogation of Jack Smith provided great fodder for late night comedians.

Here is Jordan Klepper.

And here is Seth Meyers

I thought that I would start the week with some laughs before the usual dreary news kicks in.

The Onion News Network reports on a minimum wage bill that Congress might actually pass.

Trump’s BFF Natalie Harp seems to have become a news mainstay.

Here is Jimmy Kimmel having his monologue interrupted by her (played by Kimmel’s wife).

And here is SNL’s cold open that also features Trump’s curious attempt to ingratiate himself with Zohran Mamdani.

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Texas has long been a tease for Democrats. While it used to reliably elect Democrats to major offices, in the mid-1990s, it swung sharply to the right and since then has consistently elected Republicans to statewide positions. Democrats have felt that they had a chance to regain ground in previous election cycles but after some glimmers of hope, Republicans were able to beat back the challenges.

This year seems to provide one of the best chances to get a US senate seat with James Talarico competing against Ken Paxton. Paxton is widely viewed as a weak candidate, who is scandal-plagued on many fronts both major and minor, public and personal, in addition to having a lackluster personality. While being a state official on a $153,000 salary, he has managed to acquire 15 properties and has refused to give an accounting. Since he is the Texas attorney general, no charges were filed against him. Republicans would have had a much better chance if they had renominated incumbent senator John Cornyn but Trump, out of a sense of pique because Cornyn was not totally servile to him, threw his weight behind Paxton and got him the nomination.
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In response to my post wondering why Trump hates Canada and suggesting that that country may look elsewhere to trade and even join the EU or BRICS, there were some very informative comments about other options to those extreme steps. As result, I decided to look into this topic more closely and discovered that other serious commentators have explored various options

The short answer is that while it is theoretically possible for Canada to join the EU, it is also unlikely since it would have to surmount major obstacles, a major one of which is the long land border with the US that would require more stringent customs checks. (Recall the thorny issues with the much shorter Ireland-Northern Ireland border after Brexit took the UK out of the customs union (that allowed free transport of goods over national borders) while Ireland stayed in.)

Back in January 2025, just after Trump took office, an editorial from The Economist made the case for why Canada should join the EU, citing Trump’s openly expressed contempt for Canadian sovereignty and its then-prime minister Justin Trudeau. It argued that both Canada and the EU had much to gain from such a union, and that Trump’s recent jingoism and threats of tariffs have only made the case stronger.
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As expected, Reform party leader and generally odious person Nigel Farage has won the Clacton byelection that he triggered by resigning his seat. There were 34 candidates but none from any of the major parties, who accused Farage of pulling a stunt to try and avoid a parliamentary inquiry into money he received from a cryptocurrency billionaire.

But Farage cannot be pleased with the result, because of the low turnout and that his main opponent was Count Binface, a joke candidate who won nearly 27% of the vote, the first time that he has not lost his deposit of £500, which requires a candidate to get 5% of the vote.

After a campaign in which a record-breaking 34 candidates vied for the coastal seat, Farage held on to Clacton, with 22,239 votes (62.8%) of the vote.

His nearest competitor, Count Binface, a parody candidate dressed as an intergalactic rubbish bin, won 9,455 votes (26.7%). The turnout was 44%.

Farage did not attend the traditional ceremony where the results are announced, because he was afraid that he would be embarrassed by Binface.

This annual event, where Washington-based journalists meet, eat, drink, and schmooze with the people they cover, with other celebrities thrown in, is a disgusting example of the incestuous world of politics, shattering the illusion that these reporters are hard-hitting seekers of the truth even if their work antagonizes politicians. This year Trump was the main speaker and to say that he bombed is putting it mildly. Even his ardent supporters found it hard to find anything good in his rambling tirade of venomous insults.

Jon Stewart, in a funny skewering of Trump’s dreadful speech says that the event should be put in the dustbin. As a stand-up comedian, Stewart knows how to tell jokes and he brutally dissects Trump’s ineptness at telling even the simplest ones.

That’s about right.