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This is a news story. On NBC. Right now.

This critical medical event, lasting for whole seconds, also merited a story on CNN. Did you know that Hillary coughed during a speech in January? It’s true! And she also coughed at another speech barely thirty days — and about thirty speeches — later. CNN may not notice when Donald Trump is caught sliding money to two attorneys general to buy his way out of a lawsuit, but they are right there with the details on this vital issue.

Now the question will be how this is reported tomorrow. How many Trump surrogates will be invited onto morning shows to tell us that Clinton has … what? Ebola? Hantavirus? Beriberi? And most importantly, will it be a “gate?” No. it has to be a “ghazi.” Coughazi. Just look how nicely that fits.

The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Is Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, And Driving Us Crazy

By Michael Mann and Tom Toles

Published by Columbia Press. Paperback available for pre-order now. Available on Kindle within 24 hours.

The cover of the book says it all. The Madhouse Effect lives up to its name as the primary author, paleo-climatologist Michael Mann, has about been driven to the brink more than once by the insatiable drive of fossil fuel interests and their political shills in pushing climate change denial.

This time, Mann teamed up with award-winning cartoonist Tom Toles. The Pulitzer Prize-winning artist added illustrations exhibiting the tedious and often unintentionally hilarious contortions forced on climate change deniers, as the empirical evidence for anthropogenic global warming has grown to the point that publicly rejecting it resembles a comedy sketch.

This book is an easy recommend. Read on to see why.

It’s hard to believe that were he still with us today, Freddie Mercury (born Farrokh Bulsara), the lead singer of Queen who died nearly 25 years ago from AIDS, would be 70 years old today. 

To many, Mercury was the greatest rock and roll singer of all time. Besides his four-octave vocal range, he was a gifted songwriter and composer, and an incredibly charismatic showman who was often described as a man “who could hold an audience in the palm of his hand.” Queen, as a band, was made up of four amazingly talented musicians—probably the only band to have every member individually write songs that went to number one—but the fact is, Mercury was the heart and sound of the band and once he was gone … 

Anyway, in honor of Freddie’s birthday, let’s take a trip down memory lane and enjoy some of his finest moments.  

[Trigger warning: These videos are from the 1970s and ‘80s, so be prepared for some unfortunate hair and fashion!]

During the Republican primary, numerous news outlets fixated on the number of Democrats leaving the party to register as Republicans in places like Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. Theories for the exodus ranged from Trump's appeal to a new set of voters to a duplicitous attempt by Democrats to tilt the GOP primary in Trump's direction. But what's actually happening is more akin to a realignment of registered Democrats who have actually been voting Republican for many years. And perhaps more importantly, registration among new voters is trending distinctly Democratic. Nate Cohn writes:

The biggest shifts are occurring in the places where it’s most obvious that registered Democrats have been voting Republican in presidential elections.

Take a place like Holmes County, Fla. In 2012, the Democrats had 56 percent of registered voters there. But President Obama won just 15 percent of the vote. Since then, Democrats have fallen to just 36 percent of registered voters.

This pattern repeats itself in traditionally Democratic states across the country, or wherever Democrats have a big registration advantage that no longer shows up in presidential elections. In Florida and Pennsylvania, it’s an extremely strong predictor of the proportion of voters who have switched from Democrats to the Republicans.

But as older Democrat-in-name-only voters shift to their rightful home, the Democratic party is seeing a big advantage in registration among new voters.

Among the approximately one million voters who have registered this year in the seven traditional battleground states where voters can register with a party — New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Florida, Iowa, Colorado and Nevada — Democrats have an eight-point registration lead, 37 percent to 29 percent, according to data from L2.

The Democrats hold this new-voter edge in every state — even the ones where their overall registration tallies have dwindled.

Tefere Gebre is an Ethiopian immigrant who arrived in the United States as a teenage refugee. Today, he is the executive vice president of the AFL-CIO. (If you think of union members as white guys in construction helmets, broaden your vision!) With his immigrant experience freshly relevant in light of this year’s presidential election, he tells his story at Medium and in a video you can watch below:

I was joined by three friends and my nephew, and we hired a guide to lead us across the desert to the Sudanese border, which should have taken two-and-a-half weeks. Half way through our trip, our guide and his accomplices robbed us at gunpoint. We had to keep moving, but we had no idea which direction to take.

We survived by eating what we could find and walking at night, when it was cooler. Sometimes we found ourselves in the same place we were a week ago, but we couldn’t stay in the desert, we had to make it or we would die.

Some cattle herders helped us make it to the border on the 93rd day of our journey. I had lost 33 pounds.

I eventually made it to the United States but not without many more roadblocks. I want everyone to know that as an immigrant, living through these things, you are essentially on your second or third life by the time you make it here.

That’s why we need to continue to fight for the American ideal of welcoming those brave people who want to be free.

It doesn’t matter if you’re Muslim, Mexican or Ethiopian.

Watch him tell his story below.

Here's a frustrating find from Lawyers, Guns & Money: Who you support politically can alter your perception of the weather. Of course, it's about global warming—or rather, global warming and support of Donald Trump, as surveyed by Yale Law School's Cultural Cognition Project.

December of 2015 was the warmest ever recorded in New Hampshire, by far. Indeed, in temperature anomaly terms (degrees above or below average) it was the warmest of any month for at least 121 years. January, February and March of 2016 were less extreme but each still ranked among the top 15, making winter 2015–2016 overall the state's warmest on record — eclipsing previous records set successively in 1998, 2002 and 2012 ...

Seeing in this record a research opportunity, colleagues and I added a question to a statewide telephone survey conducted in February 2016, to ask whether respondents thought that temperatures in the recent December had been warmer, cooler, or about average for the state. Two months later (April), we asked a similar question about the past winter as a whole. Physical signs of the warm winter had been unmistakable, including mostly bare ground, little shoveling or plowing needed, poor skiing, spring-like temperatures on Christmas day, and early blooming in a state where winters often are snowy and springs late. Not surprisingly, a majority of respondents correctly recalled the warm season. Their accuracy displayed mild but statistically significant political differences, however. Tea Party supporters, and people who do not think that humans are changing the climate, less often recalled recent warmth (Hamilton & Lemcke-Stampone 2016). Although percentage differences were not large, these patterns echoed greater differences seen in studies that asked about longer-term changes. Our February and April surveys had found counterparts on a much more immediate, tangible scale.

They came back and asked the question again in July of this year:

The one issue on which Donald Trump hasn't been a total nightmare is social insurance, with his vow to stay hands off of Social Security and Medicare. But his close friend and advisor, Tom Barrack, says that won't last, because Trump is listening to people like him, executive chairman of the private equity firm Colony Capital.

"I want to keep Social Security intact ... I'm not going to cut it, and I'm not going to raise ages ... [T]hey want to cut it very substantially, the Republicans, and I'm not going to do that," Trump said during a radio interview this spring.

But Trump economic adviser and longtime friend Tom Barrack seemed to suggest that stance is driven by politics -- and that, if elected, Trump might change his tune. […]

"He's not making the case [for "reform"] because it's a political suicide to make this case," Barrack said. "If you go up and start saying I'm going to attack Social Security, I'm going to attack Medicaid, I'm going to attack all these [federal] departments—we now have 17% about of the workforce employed by the government. There goes those votes. So no smart politician is going to step into this milieu."

Trump himself acknowledged as much in that spring radio interview, noting that if you propose cutting Social Security "you're going to lose the election. […] [A]t the end of the day, somebody's gotta say you've got to move the retirement age up two years."

You can bet your grandmother's Social Security check that Trump would turn on that dime once he started hearing from his Wall Street buddies.

Can you chip in $3 to keep Donald Trump's hands off our Social Security?

The fastest growing voting bloc in Florida is known as NPA for "No Party Affiliation," and those voters now account for 26 percent of the Sunshine State electorate, according to data collected by the University of South Florida in Tampa. Part of that uptick is coming from Florida's growing Latino population, which is quickly diversifying away from the once dominant, GOP-affiliated Cuban Americans. In fact, with more than 1 million Puerto Ricans, Florida is gaining on New York as home to the largest concentration of Puerto Ricans who’ve left the island.

The rapid change in party affiliation and voter demographics is causing consternation for candidates in the state, particularly among Republicans. Washington Post reports:

The demographics are changing rapidly here in Central Florida, a mecca of undecided voters stretching from Orlando to Tampa that helps swing state elections and that is rapidly becoming home to more Puerto Ricans, Venezuelans, Colombians and Dominicans. [...]

Republican candidates up and down the ballot also have to contend with GOP nominee Donald Trump, who has alienated many Latinos in the state with his talk of immigrant criminals, a massive border wall and aggressive deportations.

The combination of factors sets the stage for a remarkably unsettled election for Republicans in Florida, a crucial battleground state that could help determine who wins the White House and Senate. Sen. Marco Rubio [...] is a top target for Democrats in November, while Trump is trailing Democrat Hillary Clinton in the presidential contest here.

Clinton has been running a consistent 3 to 4 points ahead of Trump in the average of Florida polls since the conventions. Additionally, Trump has almost no ground operation in the state, opening just one campaign office to Clinton’s 34 there. But beyond the implications for this election cycle—which could be significant—the demographic shift among Latino voters in Florida could alter the state’s political landscape for years to come.

The Federal Communications Commission has decided not to appeal a court ruling that says states can impose laws restricting localities from creating public broadband services. The FCC voted to block states from imposing these restrictions back in February 2015 and the states sued, winning in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.

The cities that were seeking to expand municipal broadband networks—Chattanooga, Tennessee and Wilson, North Carolina—were also involved in the case. The cities have not yet said whether they will appeal.

The FCC relied on a novel legal argument in the case. Congress authorizes the FCC to promote competition in local telecommunications markets and to remove barriers that prevent infrastructure investment, and the FCC said that this authority allows it to preempt the state laws. But Congress never specifically authorized the FCC to preempt state laws, a fact that judges cited in overturning the FCC decision.

The New York Times describes what this could mean for the small businesses and people living in these cities. One example is Vick Family Farms, which has dramatically increased production and sales to Europe thanks to ultrafast internet provided by the city of Wilson, North Carolina. Now they could potentially be unplugged.

"We're very worried because there is no way we could run this equipment on the internet service we used to have, and we can't imagine the loss we'll have to the business," said Charlotte Vick, head of sales for the farm.

The loss of business to local farms is of far, far less concern to the state's Republican lawmakers than the health of Big Telecom.

Like everyone else, black workers’ union membership rates have declined in recent decades under the relentless assault from anti-union bosses and politicians. But black workers are more likely than other groups to be in unions, and they are seeing the benefits, a new report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research shows:

… during the period from 2010 to 2015, Black union workers on average earned $24.24 per hour, compared to $17.78 for their non-union counterparts, which translates to union workers earning about 36 percent more. Among Black women, union workers earned 37 percent more than non-union workers ($23.18 per hour, compared to $16.92 per hour). Black male union workers earned about 35 percent more than their non-union peers ($25.38 per hour, compared to $18.87 per hour). Only 11.4 percent of Black workers in low-wage occupations were represented by unions, but those that were made on average 39 percent more than non-union Black workers in low-wage occupations ($15.60 per hour, compared to $11.25 per hour).

That overstates the situation a little, because black union workers are more likely to be older and more educated, and tend to work in higher-wage industries and higher-wage states. That said:

Even after controlling for these fundamental differences between the union and non-union workforce, the union wage advantage remains practically large and statistically significant. For Black workers overall, unionization raises wages on average by 16.4 percent. For a Black worker earning the average non-union wage, this translates to about $2.92 per hour. For Black women, the regression-adjusted union wage advantage is 13.6 percent, and for Black men it is 19.3 percent. Black workers in low-wage occupations have a union wage advantage of 18.9 percent.

It’s another strong reminder of how unions fight inequality in the workplace and beyond.

Did you know former Bush Secretary of State Colin Powell, like the Clinton family, also has a charity? Probably not, because nobody has ever given a damn.

So what about the charity? Well, Powell’s wife, Alma Powell, took it over. And it kept raking in donations from corporate America. Ken Lay, the chair of Enron, was a big donor. He also backed a literacy-related charity that was founded by the then-president’s mother. The US Department of State, at the time Powell was secretary, went to bat for Enron in a dispute the company was having with the Indian government.

Did Lay or any other Enron official attempt to use their connections with Alma Powell (or Barbara Bush, for that matter) to help secure access to State Department personnel in order to voice these concerns? Did any other donors to America’s Promise? I have no idea, because to the best of my knowledge nobody in the media ever launched an extensive investigation into these matters.

(Side note: I know I'm getting old because I seem to be only one of a handful of people in America who still remember Enron, and why Enron was bad, and who continues to be concerned about the flaws in the American economic model that encouraged what was essentially nothing more than a taxpayer-targeting grift that would foretell the scams that led to the great recession itself; a new Wall Street model that would show contempt for producing things when all the smart top-floor money could be had in making bets about bets about collections of other bets about companies that actually did. But I digress.)

What makes all the talk of Clinton Foundation "scandals" so maddeningly familiar is that for every serious, non-fraudulent story written so far, nobody has ever been able to find a "there" there. Was there any wrongdoing whatsoever? Nobody can find any. Is the Foundation a legitimate charity doing key, worldwide charitable work? Nobody disputes it. Are they good at what they do? Charity watchers say yes. We are nonetheless chained to a news game of Telephone, in which small snippets of fact are rolled and molded into stories that can never produce any actual scandal, but which we are repeatedly told might look bad if you considered only a few snippets here and discounted all the other snippets over there, repeat, and so on.

And it would not be so risible, were it not for The Drudge Effect.

Donald Trump's ground game has been anemic from the get-go and now a side-by-side comparison from PBS NewsHour shows Hillary Clinton has up to three times as many paid staffers in more than a dozen key battleground states. 

As of Aug. 30, Hillary Clinton has 291 offices in those 15 battlegrounds. Donald Trump has 88. (Those figures include joint presidential and party offices.)  Both campaigns pledge that more offices are coming.  

Trump's biggest concentration of offices are in Ohio (Trump 16/Clinton 36), Virginia (Trump 18/Clinton 29), and WI (Trump 22/Clinton 33).

But forget about his gaping deficit in Ohio: He’s got just one (yes, 1) office in Florida to Clinton's 34 offices. Here are a few other notable states:

Pennsylvania: Trump 2/Clinton 36

Colorado: Trump 8/Clinton 18

Iowa: Trump 9/Clinton 24

Michigan: Trump 0/Clinton 23

North Carolina: Trump 0/Clinton 30

Trump reportedly has big plans to open another 132 offices in the weeks to come. But what's the rush, right?

“Offices are bricks and mortar,” said Trump Florida strategist [Karen] Giorno. “That doesn’t make a campaign. What makes a campaign is the people. And we have an army of people we have not deployed yet.”