Today, the Supreme Court punted. Or, to be more properly seasonal, they ruled that a runner didn't touch second base so they invalidated his home run. The case before them was Masterpiece Cakeshop versus Colorado Civil Rights Commission, a test case that dealt with the limits of the freedom of religion and the state's right to regulate commerce to assure equal treatment under the law for all. However, the ruling did not directly address that weighty constitutional issue, but rather ruled that the state behaved improperly in its decision-making process. They didn't rule on the decision itself, in other words, but rather how it was arrived at. This is the big reason why the ruling was not another 5-4 decision, but rather 7-2. If the high court had ruled on the actual question before them, no matter how they ruled it most probably would have been another close 5-4 split.

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It was another rollicking week in the world of politics, which is admittedly not saying much in the era of Trump. It was revealed this week that the death toll on Puerto Rico from Hurricane Maria was not just higher than had been officially reported, but at least seventy times higher, and in fact was more than twice as high as the death toll from Hurricane Katrina. You'd think this would be a gigantic media story, but (sadly) you would be wrong. Just like everything else about the devastation, most certainly including the media's treatment of it, this bombshell report was largely ignored this week. No wonder Puerto Ricans feel like second-class citizens, when they keep getting second-class treatment like this.

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Illinois just became the 37th state to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. Since the necessary constitutional requirement for adopting amendments is ratification by the state legislatures of three-fourths of the total number of states, this would seem to indicate that if only one more state did so, the Equal Rights Amendment would become the Twenty-Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution. But it's not quite that simple.

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The best quip I've heard about the explosive television news today has got to be: "This was the problem all along: Having Roseanne back meant having Roseanne back." In other words, the show was great and funny and all of that, but Roseanne Barr (the actress, not the Roseanne Conner character) had, in the years that intervened between the original run's cancellation and the reboot, completely gone off the rails. She was not just a Trump voter, to put this another way, she was out-Trumping Trump in her support of crazy conspiracy theories. And, yes, some of those crazy conspiracy theories were also pretty racist or (at the start, she later became staunchly pro-Israel) blatantly anti-Semitic.

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We've always been planning a meeting with Eastasia. What's that? Oh, wait... we've never been planning a meeting with Eastasia. Any suggestion of such a meeting has been tossed down the memory hole -- along with the commemorative coins we prematurely minted to celebrate it.

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Mainstream media political pundits are often accused of focusing too much on "the horserace" aspect of elections, to the detriment of the actual issues being fought over in the race. It's so much easier to just watch the polls go up and down (and bang out an article about it) than it is to do a deep dive into what candidates are actually running on. At the most, the pundits will critique candidate television ads, always with an eye on how they are affecting the polls.

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Last week, Connecticut became the twelfth state to join the "National Popular Vote Interstate Compact" (usually referred to as the N.P.V. movement), which aims to legally ensure that the presidential candidate who gets the most votes nationwide actually becomes president. This interstate agreement won't take effect until the total number of their Electoral College votes hits 270, which is the number required to win the presidency. With the addition of Connecticut, they have now reached 172, which means they only need to add states with fewer than 100 more Electoral College votes for the plan to become reality.

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Before we get to all the Trumpy news of the week, we had to headline what is going on in Paul Ryan's House, since it hasn't been getting enough attention yet. Because the House Republicans are revolting!

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Last night, Ohio took a half-step towards the goal of ending political gerrymandering by removing politicians from the process of redistricting House seats after every decennial U.S. Census. The ballot initiative that passed in last night's primary election is somewhat convoluted, but will at least provide some sort of brake on rampant gerrymandering for purely political purposes. It may only be a half-step (or, if you like baked metaphors instead, half a loaf), but it certainly is a half-step in the right direction.

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Before we get to the fresh lies emanating from the Oval Office this week, we have to begin with a look back. Because not only has President Donald Trump now hit the milestone of lying over 3,000 times while in office, but apparently it's getting too much for even Fox News personalities to take.

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