Happy Halloween from The Dumbest Story of the Week! This is the week I learned about 6-7, and I am dumber for it. A man in Taiwan discovered just how durable his Apple AirPods are in the strangest manner possible. The bar for joining ICE is staggeringly low, and is anyone surprised? A criminal springs a criminal! Trump commutes George Santos' seven-year sentence, and he is out just in time to TP his house for Halloween. Charles Barkley may be Alabama's next governor, and it is unclear how he could do any worse than his predecessors. Meanwhile, next door in Mississippi a bunch of test monkeys are on the loose that may or may not be infected with diseases. AI thinks that Doritos are guns. And my friend Dana Knudson joins me to teach me about the black market for LEGOs, which are actually called LEGO. I stand corrected.

This episode is another opportunity to pull myself – and hopefully all of you - out of the morass that is our weekly news cycle and focus on one topic and one person. I stumbled upon this week’s guest because he wrote a piece in The Guardian that resonated with me. It is called Democrats Are Captive To Outdated Norms. It’s Endangering Democracy, and it got me to thinking about_ how I am represented by my “team,” which is, ostensibly - and because I don’t have a better option - the Democratic Party,” and what we can do to move things in a better direction. A direction of action rather than strongly worded letters to aspiring dictators. So, I reached out to the author of that piece, Ryan W. Powers, and I cajoled him into doing a short interview. Ryan bills himself as a legal analyst and former Big Law attorney who writes a weekly Substack newsletter on democracy, dissent, and the law. He calls it _The Powers Project.

An investigation by POLITICO revealed this week that Young Republicans engaged in a little "locker room talk" this year, including talking about suppressing Epstein documents and gas chambers, as well as using racial, homophobic and antisemitic slurs and joking about rape. One of them said that he "loved" a certain long-deceased fascist German leader from 90 years ago. Charming. Trump is still killing boaters in the Caribbean and Border Patrol officers murdered a family dog in El Paso. War crimes, anyone? Trump and his neck genitals make the cover of Time, but he isn't pleased about it. SCOTUS tells Alex Jones that he is indeed responsible for that $1.4 billion defamation suit. Dr. Demento and a Marine Corps colonel retired. Former national security adviser John Bolton got indicted. Ace Frehley died. Remember to practice safe phone at this weekend's No Kings protest!