This week, Donald Trump addressed the fears many are having over artificial intelligence by sending out a message: "The only control or 'guardrails' that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!"

Many people's reaction to this was simple: "OK, so it's official then... we're screwed." Plenty of other scathing comments appeared online, with our favorite being: "You didn't know there was a 'b' in the word dumb."

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This week, the Supreme Court actually did the right thing. That statement shouldn't be as astonishing as it is, but these days it is a rather rare thing to behold. The justices ruled that Donald Trump's scheme to hand the U.S. Postal Service extraordinary powers to determine which mail-in ballots were acceptable and which were not was unconstitutional and therefore could not be implemented before this year's midterm elections (which are roughly a month and a half away).

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There is no better example of the maxim "Everything Trump touches dies" (or just "ETTD") than the ongoing saga of the once-proud John F. Kennedy Memorial Center For The Performing Arts. Today, the board -- chaired by none other than Donald Trump himself -- voted to close the Kennedy Center indefinitely, because those meanie judges won't let Trump slap his name on the outside of the building. Trump's planetary-sized ego won't rest until everything he sees in Washington D.C. has been renamed to honor him, plain and simple. So the likely outcome (barring other judicial interventions) is that the Kennedy Center will remain dark until the next president is sworn into office. Because ETTD.

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We're going to begin today with a record-setting number. Today, the nationwide average of the price of diesel fuel hit a new high of $6.05 per gallon. It's the first time in American history that diesel has sold for more than six bucks a gallon, in fact. The price of diesel has risen around 20 cents within the past week, which is going to be felt by everyone. Your car or truck may not run on diesel, but you know what does? Farmers' tractors and all their other farm equipment. And the trucks and trains that transport all the food farmers produce -- as well as just about everything else you buy -- to your local stores and supermarkets.

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In all honesty, that title is (to be charitable) an exaggeration. To be uncharitable, it is a lie. Donald Trump did not actually tell 5,000 lies in his speech to the Republicans' odd midterm convention last night, and I for one am glad he didn't (to do so, he would have had to speak for a lot longer than he did, and for Pete's sake the speech was long enough as it was...). But he did tell a whole bunch of whoppers, no matter what the accurate tally of them actually was. And the biggest lie he told last night was the one about how "every adult citizen" in America would get $5,000 to spend, but only if the GOP won enough seats to retain control of both the House and Senate.

To anyone salivating at the prospect of spending five grand of free cash in the near future: don't. You are never going to see that money, period. It just ain't gonna happen.

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Here we go again. Our toddler-in-chief threw another tantrum this week, because he was mad at Canada. Donald Trump was astonished that Canada didn't immediately knuckle under and agree to all his kooky demands, so he went ahead and opened up a whole new trade war with our neighbor to the north. These demands (to show you how inane the negotiations must have been) included trying to force Canada to reject their bilingual nature and get rid of all that French stuff. Canada refused. So Trump announced a new 50 percent tariff on Canadian goods. Canada then announced their own tariffs on American goods. Trump then threw his tantrum, announcing that he had just renamed Lake Ontario, which will now officially and henceforth be known by the U.S. government as "Lake America" (or possibly "Lake Of America," Trump didn't seem too sure). Which (of course) spurred the internet to respond. The site MapQuest helpfully pointed people to a tool they could use to rename the lake to anything they wished, which (of course) led to all sorts of amusing new names for it (Lake Epstein Files? Lake Hormuz? Lake Cheats At Golf? Lake Gulf Of Mexico?). The funniest one (to us, at any rate) came from "Mister Cool" on the site formerly known as Twitter, who posted an image showing: "Lakey McLakeface."

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In the ongoing legal battle over the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, one Democratic congresswoman has so far prevailed in court. She has gotten a judge to order the removal of Donald Trump's name from the exterior of the building and from any and all references to the name both online and at the Kennedy Center itself (even in the gift shop). The judge ruled that Congress was the one to create the Kennedy Center, so it would take an act of Congress to change that name.

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It's always amusing (to me, at any rate) when one of the fantasies inside Donald Trump's feverish brain collides head-on into a brick wall of reality. This often happens inside of a federal courthouse, which is where the most recent example comes from. At the close of last week, Jeanine Pirro had to eat a healthy heaping of crow by filing a court motion to dismiss her laughably-thin case against a former Olympian, who had been accused of vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and charged with a felony which could have landed him in jail for 10 years. Pirro did an abrupt about-face in the court filing, admitting that the evidence clearly showed that the damage to the Reflecting Pool was not actually caused by the Olympian in any way, but instead was the fault of shoddy work done by the contractor Trump had personally hired to do the job.

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Rahm Emanuel has apparently launched his 2028 presidential bid. A wonky story about him appeared prominently in today's Washington Post, on the subject of his ideas for fixing education in America. He also recently tossed out a different provocative idea during a recent speech, which further indicates he is in the process of building a political platform to run on. Rahm Emanuel is one of those politicians with an outsized opinion of his own popularity and a strong conviction that the country is ready for him to lead it. That's nothing new -- people like that are a dime a dozen in Washington -- but his new idea is certainly an interesting one: instituting a mandatory retirement age for everyone in the federal government.

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As one of the last decisions the Supreme Court handed down in this year's term, they upheld the concept of "birthright citizenship" enshrined within the Fourteenth Amendment. Barely.

The stunning thing wasn't the ruling, which was expected. The truly stunning thing is that the decision was partly 6-3 and partly 5-4. It should have been at least 7-2, with the only dissenters being Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas (who always vote the way Republicans want them to vote, no matter how clear the legal evidence is on the other side). Honestly, the decision should really have been 9-0, since the case is so cut and dried. Having it only 6-3 (or 5-4) shows that too many conservative judges are complete hypocrites when they swear up and down that they are "originalists" or "textualists" who only take into account what the Constitution (or any amendment) meant by the people who drafted it. Whenever that lofty principle becomes inconvenient in a case, too many of the conservatives just start making stuff up instead of reading the clear and unequivocal language of a law or an amendment.

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