Australians all let us rejoice. For we are done with thee.  Vexatious litigant and wage-thief, Clive Palmer, fools no-one with his yellow billboards of lies; targeted Facebook ads, texts and social media trolling about a Labor death tax in his eight million dollar campaign to “Give Labor the boot”. The trojan horse of his UAP, an $80m fake political party, paid for by Clive’s businesses, set up solely to subvert democratic process, pulls up lame in Queensland’s state election, Saturday, as punters confound predictions and flock to re-elect Labor.

Mr Incredibility, Clive, did promise, last year, he’d pay 800 former workers at Queensland Nickel’s Townsville Refinery. Three years late. Yet it was the Commonwealth which had to stump up $66m in unpaid entitlements.

As Labor’s Chris Bowen points out in parliament, Queensland Nickel couldn’t afford to pay its workers’ wages, but it could afford to pay $135 million to a company owned by Mrs Anna Palmer, days before going into receivership. Give Labor the boot? Clive just wants a freer hand with his companies’ wage theft.

Back to the twerk-bench, Palmer. Bunnings influencer and puppet PM for mining, banking and gambling cartels, Scott Morrison, also cheers the nation by spending a long week in Queensland, campaigning with the Liberal candidate. Party sources claim LNP leader, Deb Frecklington would have done far worse without Scotty to hold her hand and help her with the obligatory yet hokey-blokey Hi-Viz vest and hard hat costume changes. But it’s hard to see how. The LNP vote has gone backwards. Deb will be lucky to remain leader

Frecklington did miss out on a ride at the ADFs Redbank facility in Ipswich when Scotty took off to do a few laps and burnouts in a tank. The PM did manage to fit in eleven others and two cabinet colleagues.

“There were only two spots at the top,” Morrison says. “I am sure there are safety issues around these things. ” Too dangerous for a woman? Scotty needn’t worry. Deb’s in enough danger as it is.

How good is paternalism? It’s touching to see the Morrison government maintain its policy towards empowering women by supplying a male minder. Just as joyous, is news that fellow saboteur, US citizen, “Big Rupe” Murdoch, whose News Corp -a political party cum media empire -enjoys federal government subsidies, while paying almost no tax in Australia, fails utterly in its desperate bid to nobble QLD Labor.

Queensland Labor may win up to fifty-two seats in a major victory for Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk who, along with Dan Andrews in Victoria has been pilloried mercilessly by a Morrison government and its Murdoch partner for putting public health before wealth; the profits of a business elite who campaign for “open borders” and the easing of restrictions which have saved us following the fate of the US and the UK.

Johns Hopkins University, reports 9,007,298 Americans have been diagnosed with coronavirus by Saturday. Forty-eight thousand people are currently hospitalised with Covid-19. Trump lies about turning a corner.

Britain enters a second lockdown as Covid-19 cases reach a million, whilst America sets a grim new daily record of 100,000. In the lucky country, Aussie exceptionalism thrives; we pretend that we are somehow immune to the pandemic’s global devastation. It will all be over by Christmas and other comforting myths, are cruel hoaxes spread eagerly by a mass media claque orchestrated by Big Rupe’s News Corp.

Richard Cooke writes in The Monthly that News Corp in Australia: “… isn’t a normal news organisation any longer. At News Corp – in an inversion of journalism’s ideal– the old-fashioned, straight-down-the-line reporting is expendable and surplus to requirements. It is the unhinged propaganda outfit that is central to the identity of the company. It is the core that is lunatic, not the fringe.”

News Corp gave Britain Boris and Brexit and the US, Trump, sustained by a constant diet of sycophantic lies from a fawning Fox News. Yet Trump’s unhappy with the network now running what he calls anti-Trump ads. Wouldn’t have happened in the old days. (Former CEO) “Roger Ailes was the greatest”, Trump says.

“Lying predator praises lying predator” tweets Californian Congressman, Democrat Eric Swalwell. Yet things need not be this way. News comes this week of Joe Hockey, now a member of Sky’s stable of hacks, use of a thought partner, a novel concept which Labor pursues with DFAT in a senate estimates committee.

Joe “Hello World” Hockey had a “thought partner”, Alex Tureman, to help him do his job as Ambassador to Trump’s Court. And what a job it is. Alex doubtless helps finesse Joe’s G’Day, 100 Years of Mateship suck up to Trump campaign. Just one fly in Hockey’s ointment – all fifteen patrons chosen are white and male. Glaring omissions include former PM, Julia Gillard, a distinguished fellow at The Brookings Institution.

It’s the concept that sucks says The Lowy Institute, which decries “once again the apparent triumph of stale thinking, and the lazy fusion of the Anzac legend with the US alliance.” The old John Howard playbook.

To be fair, Hockey does promise to fix his mistake and he does try to revive “Friends of Australia” caucus in Congress, a former lobbying group defunct for decades. Again, attention to detail brings him unstuck.

“I’m not so sure about this mateship campaign. Have you seen the logo? It looks like the eagle is buggering the kangaroo,” laughs Mike Green, a former senior official in the George W. Bush administration.

Defining relationships is a bit of a bugger in Macquarie Street. So NSW Premier, Gladys Berejiklian, resorts to sophistry when Icac enquires into the status of her close friendship with bosom buddy and confidante whom she says she hoped to marry of some eight years standing -at least – former Wagga MP Daryl Maguire.

Gladys Berejiklian explains Daz is  – “not a boyfriend” – just a friend with benefits – such as her house-key. Access to her office. What was she thinking? Surely Icac would relax if Maguire was just her thought partner.

Bravo Joe. Too bad, Glad. Don’t let anyone tell you that getting someone else to do your job is wrong because it’s “irregular”. Who cares if DFAT Secretary Frances Adamson says it’s not the ‘normal way’ in Thursday’s senate Estimates Committee hearing.  Abnormal is the new normal all round the world. And look how Abbott got Credlin to do all the PM stuff he couldn’t understand. Cutting aid by $1.4bn a year from 2014? Perfect.

Thought partners have been a thing for a long time, helping you avoid your own dumb ideas, assumptions and actions and enabling you to innovate. They are not to be confused with thought leaders who are people clearly and widely recognized as leading experts and visionaries in their field.

Noam Chomsky interviewed in the New Yorker on how Donald Trump is the “worst criminal in human history” comes to mind.

Slum-lord millionaire Jared Kushner is a thought partner for father in law Donald Trump – as is Ivanka, prompting creative stuff like peace in the Middle East and The Don’s leaving hospital for a drive-by salute to his many QAnon fans cheering him on – as they see it –  in his battle against his nemesis; a secret elite Democrat child-trafficking ring. Dominic Cummings is clearly vacuous Boris Johnson’s thought partner du jour.

Who can forget Cummings’ brilliant defence for breaking curfew because he needed to go for a twenty-five mile drive (40km) to test his eyesight? As you do. He’d temporarily lost his vision after a bout of coronavirus.

Kushner is far more dangerous. He proudly explains Trump’s disastrously politicised coronavirus strategy to Bob Woodward in a way that reveals an abdication of leadership chillingly familiar to Australians.

“The states have to own the testing,” Kushner says. Or as Morrison would put it, “I don’t hold the swab”.

“The federal government should not own the testing. And the federal government should not own kind of the rules. It’s got to be up to the governors, because that’s the way the federalist system works.”

“But the President also is very smart politically with the way he did that fight with the governors to basically say, no, no, no, no, I own the opening. Because again, the opening is going to be very popular. People want this country open. But if it opens in the wrong way, the question will be, did the governors follow the guidelines we set out or not?”

The Washington Post’s Paul Waldman notes how Trump “politicized every public health measure necessary to control the virus”, Fans now refuse to wear masks as a badge of loyalty to the president. Congregate to breathe the same air; complain about how their “freedom” was being attacked. Freedom?

In March, the Trump administration imports a million Chinese-made diagnostic tests. It’s Jared Kushner’s secret plan to bring in billionaire business types who knew nothing about medicine but who could “get shit done”. A bit like Twiggy Forrest and his useless PPE. The tests are found to be contaminated and unusable.

All is not well abroad, or “overseas” as we prefer down under, as a pandemic rages while California burns, exposing corrupt, inept, leadership and busting free market ideology. Much as our federal government loves doing nothing in the land of the laissez-faire-go – banking on “herd immunity” as it’s misnamed and wishing the market will sort out the coronavirus –  is causing a public health catastrophe world-wide. Experts also worry, that unless we keep punters alive – with money in their pockets – they may be unable to buy products.

Or services. Whenever Federal Treasurers need to show the good side of an economy tanking badly, they blow hard about transitioning. We are getting out of making things or digging up rocks in favour of paying mates to thought-partner us, or nurse, or teach in a “service economy”. China’s helping wean us off our traditional exports by cutting back on Australian coal, barley, wine, beef, lobster and other imports. In brief, they’ve stopped buying our stuff – since we insulted them over Covid, following Trump’s lead.

Donald Trump lies to a Michigan rally that “our doctors get more money when someone dies from COVID”  But Coronavirus is helping put the lie to neoliberalism itself and patently false beliefs that the market solves everything or that we need small government – although it has crippled health departments worldwide.

Less pillar of small government than tower of ineptitude, Boris Johnson is on the blower. Useless as a trapdoor on a submarine – or as evasive, reactive and inept as our own PM, the UK PM, who’s too busy playing to ever do any work, talks up a storm about how it’s time for bold action on climate change.

Our own bullshit artist, Scotty, is quick to strike his own ludicrous pose in return.

“We will not be dictated to by anyone”, he bullshits, channelling the best of John Winston “We Will Decide” Howard’s babies overboard oratory, based on a fiction equal to anything Scotty spins. Wee Johnny’s thought partner in 2001 was Jane Halton whose shocking memory fail currently prevents her shedding any light on Crown Casino’s doings.

Not be dictated to? Unless Donald Trump tells us to bag China. Or any US President needs a coalition of the willing to add bogus legitimacy to any illegal war on an oil-producer. Or anyone from gas, oil or coal.

Happily, the game of mates, or crony capitalism, the biggest game in town, is thriving and helps explain why Matthias Corman and family got free Helloworld flights in 2017, from a company run by Hockey’s mate, Andrew Burnes just before Cormann’s department awarded Helloworld a million dollar contract.

Joe was a big shareholder in Helloworld in 2017 with $1.3m in shares, but it didn’t stop him teeing up a meeting between Helloworld subsidiary Qantas business travel and the Embassy’s Head of Operations.

Not long after, cops were on the job looking for whistle-blowers. As you’d expect in an era of AFP raids on journos who risk national security to allege misconduct by one or two bad apple troops in Afghanistan. Hockey’s shares in Helloworld are down to about $1.72 from $5.00 four years ago.

If he still owns any. But who could have foreseen how Covid would cut global travel and tourism? It’s down to about fifty-six per cent of its 2019 levels, according to the UN’s World Tourism Organisation. Poor Joe.

Naturally, Matthias paid back the $2780.82, blaming “administrative oversight” – that old imp -as you would – if someone blew the whistle on you. The system is working perfectly. Just as Tony Abbott, and Scott Morrison’s prayer-mate Stewart Robert and Ian Macfarlane, the MP who got a job with mining lobbyist Queensland Resources Council, minutes after he left parliament, gave back the $250,000 worth of Rolex watches which they kept only because “administrative oversight” had led them to believe they were fake.

Chinese instant noodle billionaire, Li Ruipeng, would have loved the boys for handing the time-pieces back. Especially when they said they only kept his timeless gifts because they thought they were counterfeit. If only the four Cartier time-pieces awarded by watch-lover Christine Holgate could have suffered the same fate, Scott Morrison would not today be cruising for a bruising. But let’s not overwind the suspense. Just yet.

There’s still time for a big, fat Australian divorce and political payout. Taxpayers will foot the bill. Holgate’s on a pittance compared with her predecessor, former banker Ahmed Fahour, whose final pay day, three years ago netted him a cool $10.8bn. There’s a bit of a fuss over AusPost’s fat cat executive salaries while parcel contractors starve on sham contracting and must use and pay for their own vehicles.

Always in touch, Holgate suggests that to clear the backlog, caused in part by the Morrison government law cutting deliveries, that contractors use their own cars in their own time; treat work as charity. Or slavery.

Are the Cartier watches the last straw? It’s Holgate’s Marie Antoinette moment. Yet ticked-off Morrison’s attack on Holgate, AusPost CEO, for giving timepieces worth $20,000 to reward execs for getting banking into post offices – in 2018 – is about to bite him on the bum. Turns out Holgate’s husband, Mike Harding is a bigwig in Santos’ natural gas. Getting Mike offside could dim Scotty’s big fat gas-lit, gas-led recovery.

There’s report that Holgate’s been weeping for four days. Lawyer Bryan Belling says the PM’s performance in question time upset his client. Upset? PM Shouty McShoutface acts “appalled and shocked” that the CEO had awarded four executives $20,000 worth of watches for wooing three out of the big four banks, into the AusPost tabernacle. It is “humiliating” for Christine. No-one tells her she is to be stood down.

Holgate-gate may be the most expensive outrage Scotty has ever confected. Mr Belling is totting up the cost to his client. There’s reputational damage, pain and suffering, loss of future earnings. And his fees, of course.

No-one doubts CEO Holgate was doing the right thing – at least by our usury cartel, the banksters.

Banks will bring their greed, the pursuit of short term profit at the expense of honesty, Commissioner Hayne says in his interim report. When misconduct was discovered, it often went unpunished. Who’d not want to bring banks into the tent? It’s a win-win. Holgate is offering banks a chance to redeem themselves. Yet shocking as her treatment is, think of those thousands of workers now being sacked by text message.

“Is it a cheap shot to point out that as millionaires and political elites wrestle over the potential millions of dollars in payouts, there are people losing their jobs under a government which can’t even be bothered to measure what constitutes poverty?” asks Crikey’s David Hardaker.

Labor’s Communications spokeswoman, Michelle Rowland, helps contextualise Holgate-gate.

The Australia Post board “is a dysfunctional swamp of former Liberal politicians, party hacks and mates of Scott Morrison”? Don’t hold back, Michelle. Tell it like it is. The board’s “incapable of executive oversight” and must be cleaned up? All appointments were made by Mitch Fifield. What could possibly go wrong?

But it is a Morrison government, Bernard Keane reminds us. “This is the most corrupt federal government since the 1970s, and possibly much longer — that has constantly indicated it will reward its friends and punish its enemies, and use taxpayer funding — or, more accurately now, borrowed money — to serve its partisan agenda. As the sports rorts affair demonstrated, it is also unashamed about it.”

Brazen. Luckily, we’re spoilt for choice with a range of distracting local scandals including the NSW inquiry being conducted into Crown Casino by former supreme court judge Patricia Bergin SC. Pats is miffed to discover that Crown plans to expand into its beaut new Barangaroo money laundry before her review of its suitability is due. Has Packer jumped the gun? Or is the rule of law in the Morrison government as increasingly irrelevant as it is in Gladys Berejiklian’s grubby state of close personal friends and their mates, NSW?

The Ballad of Gladys and Daz, a rehash of Frankie and Johnny is all over the nation’s airwaves as the NSW Premier, a “private person”, who “stuffed up her personal life”, Gladys Berejiklian, performs her victim shtick on Sydney Radio, post Alan Jones. Glad’s a consummate actor. She makes a desperate and cynical bid to rebrand her story from corruption to unlucky in love.

It works for about a week. Then her staff reveal that they’ve shredded evidence of how she may have rorted over $250 million in council grants to favour coalition electorates. Now, former NSW Attorney-General Tony Morris calls on her to resign.

The Premier’s office says Wednesday that Gladys “was not the decision-maker in the Stronger Communities Grant Fund”. Yet she gives email approval for 11 grants, including $90 million for Hornsby Council. Yet you can’t fault Berejiklian’s special pleading,

“I know the people of this state know I have done nothing wrong. I never have and I never will.”

The first leg of the Premier’s double is run well. Gladys’ melodramatic narrative of a woman wronged is eagerly sold by a NewsCorp that loves to help vested interests prevail. A cowed, gutted, ABC is on board instantly. Yet Glad’s story is a shrewd sidestepping of Icac law which obliges any premier to declare any relationship which is likely to detract from the Premier’s discharge of her elected duties and responsibilities.

Barrister and Labor MP, Adam Searle, Opposition leader in the NSW upper house, argues the Premier was legally obliged under s. 11 of the act to ­report what she knew about Mr Maguire’s activities to ICAC.

Yet, “she’s done nothing wrong” becomes a media mantra. Thanks, Rupe. And look how well she did with the bushfires. The sheer genius with which she tackled the pandemic. “Hardworking” is said to be her virtue. The Ruby Princess is not mentioned. Or Was Not Her Fault. But by the Tuesday after The Cox Plate, former auditor general Tony Harris explains patiently that destroying records is in itself an offence; a breach of the State Records Act.

“A pathetic, pigeon-livered apology” is how Alan Jones dismisses the NSW Premier earlier this year. Gladys’ explanation of the Ruby Princess fiasco, where 2,700 infected passengers were allowed off the cruise ship, is a disastrous, display of incompetence, cover-up and buck-passing, in which Federal government officials from Border Force play such a key role that Scott Morrison forbids them to answer any questions in Brett Walker’s inquiry. Jones would open all borders and go full Trump or Boris Johnson, if he had his way.

But how the mighty are fallen. Jones now talks to himself on Sky; tails Bolt, Credlin and Murray in ratings- after he killed off station advertising revenue and his career with his misogyny. Jacinda Ardern deserved “a few back-handers” , he said and “a sock down her throat”. It cost his station six million dollars. But clearly, there’s no penalty for inciting violence against women on Sydney radio if you are rich old white guy with mates.

Sloe-eyed, Glad “bares all” for Ben Fordham, Jones’ successor. Listeners learn that her close personal friend Daryl Maguire, former MP for Wagga just had one of those political careers that end when you deceive a lot of people. Such a relief to learn she’s not the only one with dud judgement in NSW government. She’s always tried to be as open as possible, she says, guardedly.

Rashly, she books a guest spot on high priest of sleaze Kyle Sandilands’ KIIS, Emerald City purveyors of prurience. Kyle invites Gladys to “get her freak on”.

“You’d think the premier and Kyle Sandilands couldn’t be two more polar opposites but then I was having sex with seven people at the radio station I worked at in Perth when I was living over there,” he brags.

“Well that’s a record I can’t break,” Gladys rejoins, unwittingly signing herself on to the hot to trot list.

Ever ready with the relevant political question, stud-muffin Kyle asks Gladys if she ever “dabbled in same sex relationships”, a follow-up to his earlier wondering aloud on microphone if she were “a mad lesbian”. Glad’s done nothing wrong; just been busted not declaring her relationship with an person of interest to Icac.

Two of the Premier’s staffers help shred Berejiklian’s credibility further in confessing to destroying documents. Destroy any paper trail to NSW’s Shred Prefect. Gladys approved projects which allocated $250m in council grants under the Stronger Communities Fund in ways which can be seen to favour Coalition electorates.

Sleaze and self-interest, if not outright corruption also define the Morrison government, Bernard Keane writes which may help explain why the part-time PM declares his “absolute support” for Gladys, as, indeed, he did for Turnbull just before knifing him to become PM. Things look crook, but Glad is not going anywhere.

Gladys spins her secret relationship with the former MP for Wagga, dazzling Daryl Maguire as a dud choice in boyfriends. Yet Daryl’s confessions to Icac include taking developers up to the Premier’s office. He also admits to running a profitable visa scam, an alarming revelation to our PM who was Minister of Immigration at the time. Morrison whips himself into a lather of faux outrage, Thursday over Australia Post’s Christine Holgate.

“I was appalled, and it is disgraceful and not on,” Morrison says of Ms Holgate’s giving Cartier watches to four executives as a reward for a $66m deal to get three of the nation’s four big banks into post offices. The deal was announced two years ago. An “award”, she claims. For three quarters of success? Imagine if they’d cracked the whole cartel. If she doesn’t front the inquiry? “She can go,” Scotty fulminates.

Glad is yet to resign, however. Lame-duck Premier of NSW, a state run by “colourful identities”, a Melbourne Cup field of spivs, shonks, shock-jocks and brown paper bag-men?  What’s changed? Alan the Parrot Jones bullied Berejiklian into allowing The Everest Cup to be projected on to the sails of The Sydney Opera House in 2018.

Glad’s backers include the Waterhouse clan, producers of Fine Cotton (1984) featuring Bold Personality, a ring-in over 1500 metres at Eagle Farm badly disguised with white paint, peroxide and brown hair dye.

Glad’s in strife over pulling the Icac wool over her relationship with “not really a boyfriend”, Daryl Maguire, former Harvey Norman franchise manager and sofa salesman who swept her off her feet with his pillow talk about himself and his finances. “Woo-hoo” she says to a boast he makes of a fat profit. Not –Whoa!

But it’s not just about aiding and abetting. Berejiklian was in trouble once she knew Daryl was in business, writes Jack Waterford – even if, as she claims, she was studiously uninterested in the details. She had no right to assume that he was following the rules – and every responsibility to challenge his bragging about making money; check his register of interests.

Bedazzled by Daz, the premier has ended a fine romance with the people of NSW by testifying that her eight-year fling was not an intimate relationship  – although the Icac Act doesn’t require any specialised definition. and that although she hoped to marry him, her dangerous liaison with the dodgy Maguire was not serious enough to warrant introducing him to her family or friends. She kisses goodbye forever to the last shreds of her political credibility.

“Given that Daryl Maguire had a key to the Premier’s north shore home for many years, and while cohabitating came and went as he liked as recently as last month, doesn’t this demonstrate an intimate personal relationship and the Premier’s failure under the ministerial code of conduct to declare all of Daryl Maguire’s business interests?” asks acting parliamentary ethics watchdog, One Nation’s Mark Latham.

Yet all is not doom and gloom. Matty Cormann will be a shoo-in as OECD secretary given our heroic carbon chicanery. No-one in Paris will notice how The Announcement Artist, as Nick Feik calls Scott Morrison, a PM who makes it up as he goes along, stacks his hand-picked National COVID-19 Coordination Commission with fossil fuel shills led by a former Fortescue exec with their gas-led recovery boondoggle. Meetings are secret. It’s a cabinet-in-confidence- committee, a brazen fiction disputed by constitutional scholars.

Luckily, we’ve now got Abbott on the BOT (UK Board of Trade), an atavism revived by Theresa May in the faint hope that another talking shop will solve the problem of what to do post-Brexit. Tone can talk up all the unsold cheap coal we have lying around now that China has cancelled its orders. Barley, beef and wine? It’s important, says our, PM not to get ahead of ourselves. Let’s just see what evolves. Look backwards a bit. Jog on the spot. Pop down to Bunnings.

But how good are those carryover Kyoto credits? Not only can the Cormannator speak French, he can turn himself Green as a frog; happy to lie that we are on track with our Paris emissions reductions targets – when blind Freddy can see we’re not. Robert Hill’s cynical sophistry in Kyoto in ’97 is neither forgiven nor forgotten.

Big investors fear a catastrophic market crash, triggered by the China Virus, (as Uber-Sinophobe, Donald Trump derides Coronavirus) collides – in bad Feng-Shui-with a US Presidential Election, a monster baby-contest between Trump family mafioso Psycho Don and Joe Neoliberal, whose supporters include Big Pharma’s bagmen, banksters, property speculators and private equity and hedge fund managers who have kicked in $21m. Not being Trump boosts Joe’s appeal although he loses points for sniffing women’s hair.

“I need you very badly,” Joe Biden Jnr begs a hundred fat cat donors at the Carlyle Hotel in New York’s Upper East Side last summer “[If I’m elected president] No one’s standard of living will change, nothing fundamentally would change.” All cats crave routine. Fat cats especially. Joe promises the rich will get to keep the biggest slice of the pie; keep milking the till, rip off the poor; still win every trick in the game of mates.

But if grovelling goes down a treat with the top end of town, (Joe has at least thirty-two billionaires backing him, backing them,) his campaign returns the donation of George Kaiser whose fortune stems from stakes in oil and gas. Biden is not accepting contributions from fossil fuel industry executives.

Sadly, at the arse end of the world, as Keating found us, Albo is sucking up to Joel Fitzgibbon instead of asking him to join the Liberals or the Nats. Thursday brings report that Labor will back Morrison’s gas-led recovery scam to enrich Santos and fellow fossil fuel corporations while boosting domestic gas bills beyond working families’ budgets – as fugitive methane, 84 times more potent than CO2 warms our atmosphere.

“Labor is endorsing the government’s economically and scientifically illiterate embrace of gas at the behest of opponents of climate action in the CFMEU’s mining and energy division and the right-aligned AWU. Australia now has bipartisan stupidity for an energy policy, write Bernard Keane and Glenn Dyer.

Could old Joe toad actually turn into liberal prince? His platform promises to boost unions, invest in green infrastructure and spend money on education.  Biden also offers a public option for health insurance. Elizabeth Warren’s bankruptcy plan gets his blessing while he’s OK with partial forgiveness of student debt.

At least NASA astronaut Kate Rubins cast her vote for America’s next president, 408 kilometres above the Earth’s surface, from aboard the International Space Station.

A wag tweets “It’s easier for a white person to vote from space than for an African American or Latino to vote in their home zip code.”