TODAY

Alas, as everybody anticipated, the effort to get pupils back in school is turning out to be a disaster. Joe Biden put his foot in his mouth again as we all expected but I suspect it will make no difference to the election. I don't think I have ever seen a time when people's opinions were so completely set in stone this early.

Since I seem to have gotten myself in the business of making predictions, I will make another one. I anticipate that when early voting begins, apparently here in North Carolina before anywhere else, the response will be overwhelming. Even if it takes the post office two weeks to deliver the absentee ballots they will be in well before the election. My sense is that there are tens of millions, perhaps scores of millions, of voters who are so eager to vote that they will cast their votes the instant it becomes possible. Oh, there will be endless efforts at voter suppression and some of them will be successful but I doubt that the election will be anything like close enough for those efforts to make a real difference. I hope to God I am right about this.

A small correction of something I got wrong. I should have described the Jonathan Swan interview as giving us early signs of dementia, not signs of early onset dementia which is something different. But even I did not anticipate the comical mispronunciation of Yosemite and Thailand.