Good morning. The midterm elections are two weeks and one day away. This is the kind of discourse happening in small races around the nation:

Election Night is not supposed to end well for Democrats. It doesn't seem as though we're looking at a Republican tsunami, but Washington is going to be even more deadlocked over the next two years, which seems hard to believe.

Ebola is alive and well as a political football, even though we all know who to blame for the growing tears in our public health safety net. But the good news is that Ebola as a disease is probably not going to be the epidemic that our politicians keep promising.

But an epidemic is coming. As I already mentioned, we have fifteen days until the midterm elections. That means we have sixteen days until the 2016 presidential race really kicks off, in the media if not in reality. If you're looking for an event to symbolize exactly how ridiculous all this pre-election preening can get, you can't do much better than this: Rand Paul and Chris Christie got into a fight over who would be the better Republican politician to reach out to inner city black voters in the middle of a $75,000,000 apartment in New York City packed with rich white people. This is the quality of hypocritical horseshit we are going to be eating with a knife and fork for the next two years. This is what the future looks like.