Some weeks, we pre-empt our own talking points here and just deliver a rant (because sometimes the circumstances seem to almost require it). This week, however, we're going to pre-empt the entire Friday Talking Points column. For some reason, we just don't think handing out awards to Democrats (good and bad) or providing talking points is the important thing, this week. At this point, the Democratic talking points are kind of set in stone; new ones wouldn't do much good with such little time between now and Election Day.

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Two years ago today, we were all glued to our television sets to find out who had won the 2020 presidential election. We didn't find out that night, of course, we had to wait days and days before the final results were in: Joe Biden had decisively beaten Donald Trump, with the exact same Electoral College split as happened in 2016 -- an election Trump had always liked to refer to as "a landslide."

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In the past week or so, the Democratic Party has been doing an excellent job of getting out on the campaign trail and making a closing political argument. Both Barack Obama and Bill Clinton have made or will make appearances. President Joe Biden's speech today is a part of this full-court press, but one has to wonder why it took the Democrats so long to get so engaged with the process.

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I almost didn't do a Hallowe'en column this year, because it's pretty obvious what both sides of the aisle would be frightened by. Who controls Congress after the midterms would have (as always) been the easy way to go with today's stories. I could have easily written the basic tales in one tweet: "Republicans win, Democrats horrified... or Democrats win, Republicans horrified."

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We have to admit, we're more than a little worried about the upcoming midterm elections. Not about who will win (that's a different subject), but about the elections themselves. Because for the first time in a very long period in American history, one of the major political parties is openly attacking the election system itself. This is a dry run for the 2024 presidential election, and at this point it is impossible to say that Election Day (and the counting of the votes thereafter) won't be marred by intimidation, internal sabotage, and/or outright political violence. And that's a pretty sad state of affairs for American democracy.

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I start with a simple truth: nobody knows what the midterm election results will be. I don't know, you don't know, and the people who get paid to tell you they do also don't know. Of course, this is always true -- nobody can perfectly accurately predict the future -- but it used to be that politics was at least somewhat predictable. Polling would show what the voters were thinking, and it usually played out on Election Day.

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President Joe Biden made an announcement today that few people probably watched, but which will nonetheless help tens of millions of American families out in the future. This is all part of an ongoing effort (the president's "Competition Council") to end abusive practices in pricing by corporations and other businesses. Today, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau announced a new rule which will ban banks from charging two "junk fees" that are particularly insidious.

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Those of us of a certain age will immediately recognize that title as being the catchphrase of Emily Litella. At the dawn of Saturday Night Live, Litella was a character (played by Gilda Radner) who would appear on the "Weekend Update" fake news segment of the show. She would rant and rave about something or another, while getting one or two key words absolutely and utterly wrong. In one memorable appearance, she took to task those who were complaining about "violins" on television. After working herself into an indignant frenzy, Chevy Chase would always gently correct her ("that was violence on television... not violins"), and she'd then abruptly reverse course -- always ending with a prim: "Never mind."

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Next week, millions of students and former students are on track to have $10,000 to $20,000 of their student debt wiped off the books. Republicans are incensed and are desperately fighting to halt this debt forgiveness before it can happen. It is a perfect example of the ideological divide between the two parties -- one of whom is trying to help millions of people while the other fights against it tooth and nail.

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Republicans have always had a good chance of winning at least one house of Congress in the upcoming midterms. As things stand, it looks a lot more likely that they'll take control of the House, but they could also win the Senate. So what would they do if they did win control of either one or both houses? Probably not a whole lot, in terms of substantive legislative goals, since Joe Biden will still be sitting in the White House (with a veto pen at the ready). But Republicans aren't really campaigning on substantive legislative issues much anymore, because they have followed the lead of their base and are much more interested in style over substance. What we can definitely expect from a Republican Congress is spleen-venting, and lots of it.

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