Early voting’s underway. My voting site is the Willye White Park fieldhouse, a mile north of where I live — a place I have enormous affection for, even though I only ever go there for one reason, every two years or so: to vote.

It feels like a sacred ritual — a feeling that goes back to the late ’60s. As I recently wrote: “The first election in which I was old enough to vote (the voting age was then 21) was Nixon vs. Humphrey. I was a fervid anti-Vietnam war zealot and chose to skip the election, thinking there was no real difference between the candidates. But I quickly began regretting that decision as the Nixon presidency claimed hold of the country; I vowed never to skip another election . . .”

Israeli officials keep repeating that Israel is fighting on multiple fronts. The truth is that Israel chooses to fight on multiple fronts. The two claims are fundamentally different. 

 Recently, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu went as far as saying that his country is fighting on seven different war fronts, all driven by the objective of "defending ourselves against ... barbarism." 

Even as war keeps spreading, the world is outgrowing many other forms of violence and cruelty. Violent crime outside of war is decreasing in many countries, and so is the death penalty, which is now limited to a small and shrinking list of mostly the worst national governments on Earth and 21 U.S. states (plus six that have paused without yet permanently banning capital punishment). Those 27 states include OH.

Click here to tell your state legislators to catch OH up with the country and the world.

We are living in a golden age of humorous political commentary. This is not surprising, given the abundant comic material oozing from every pore of the American body politic these days. From Donald Trump’s bizarre declarations about illegal immigrants (“They’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats!”) to Kamala Harris’ indigestible word salads (“It’s time for us to do what we have been doing, and that time is every day”), from Marjorie Taylor Greene’s befuddled culinary claims (“Pelosi’s Gaspacho Police [are] spying on members of Congress”) to Tim Walz’s addled declarations (“I’ve become friends with school shooters”), the comedy quotient in American public life has never been higher.