A lot has happened in the past two months. Donald Trump survived a bullet to the head by a would-be assassin; Joe Biden failed to survive a presidential debate. Kamala Harris has been the Democrats’ replacement candidate for such a short period of time that media are still talking about a Harris “honeymoon” — and she just got around to releasing a policy platform this week.

And yet, the first ballots are already in the mail and on their way to voters. Alabama, the first state to drop ballots in the mail, started shipping them out on Wednesday to absentee ballot applicants as well as military and overseas voters.

There are 55 days between Wednesday, the official start of election season, and Nov. 5, the date that still bears the moniker of Election Day. When ballots went out in Alabama Wednesday morning, only 52 days had passed since Biden got booted out of the race.

The length of time from the launch of Harris’ campaign to the first ballots being mailed was one-tenth the number of days Biden spent on vacation during his presidency.

A baby conceived on the day Harris launched her campaign could be legally aborted today in 32 states and the District of Columbia.

When the astronauts currently stranded in space left for the International Space Station, not only was Biden still Democrats’ nominee, but his career-ending debate against Trump hadn’t even happened yet.

When ballots went out Wednesday, the first Trump-Harris presidential debate, and likely

The New York Times encouraged a reader last week to “help” a 97-year-old woman with advanced memory loss — who is “becoming nearly impossible to communicate with” — to complete her ballot. 

“When the situation is hazy, my inclination would be to err on the side of helping someone to vote, because voting is such a central form of civic participation,” wrote the Times’ “Ethicist” Columnist Kwame Anthony Appiah.

The Problem

A reader wrote the Times, saying the grandmother has “advanced” Alzheimer’s and hearing loss. The reader wanted to know if it would be “unethical” to help the elderly woman vote in November, likely having the grandma do “the mechanics of voting” while family members “advise her.”

The reader claimed to have helped the grandmother fill out her absentee ballot in 2020.

“She held the pen while we did our best to explain each office and issue. If there was any confusion, we would tell her how we voted, and she would do the same,” the reader wrote. “Is it unethical to help her vote again this November?”

The reader wrote that the elderly woman’s “cognition was in decline four years ago, but it was not as degraded as it is now.”

“I foresee things playing out similarly to the last general election, in which she performs the mechanics of voting while we advise her,” the reader wrote. “Before her illness, we were familiar enough with her political opinions to be reasonably confident about whom and what she would vote

Vice President Kamala Harris wants to tinker with the tax code because “working families deserve a break.” She promoted the plan in Tuesday’s debate with former President Donald Trump and in her newly released agenda.

The Harris plan would give “more than 100 million working and middle-class Americans … a tax cut,” her agenda says. But what she really means is she wants to create more government spending and give some folks free money, on the backs of taxpayers who don’t qualify for the pricey plan.

Harris aims to bolster the Child Tax Credit and the Earned Income Tax Credit, and beyond that, to boost the Child Tax Credit to $6,000 for families with newborn children.

These tax credits were meant for lower-income people, but the plan will likely have unintended consequences, according to Warren Hudak, a federally licensed tax practitioner and past president of the Pennsylvania Society of Enrolled Agents. He has testified before Congress on tax matters.

“The problem is, it’s not targeted. It’s not outcomes based,” Hudak told The Federalist. “Who are we helping, and how are we helping? The problem with the tax code — using it for these kinds of policies — it just gives away money to use for anything they want. I can tell you, there’s a reason why they’re poor, and it isn’t because they make great choices.”

Think about it. What happens when you (if you) get a tax refund? Some Americans put it into savings, use it to buy a