SAY WHAT? - In resistance both poignant and enraged, thousands of Iranians - largely women but also many men - have thronged the streets for the last two weeks to protest the murder in police custody of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old  Kurdish woman reportedly beaten to death after being arrested by Iran's brutal "morality police" for... improperly wearing the hijab. From the northwestern city of Saqez, Amini was visiting Tehran with her family Sept. 13 when she was arrested by the officially named Guidance Patrol, who enforce the Islamic Republic's strict dress code, for  "unsuitable attire." Her family were told she would be released from the police station after a “re-education session.” Instead, eyewitnesses said police beat her in the police van, and again at the station. Amini collapsed a few hours later, was taken to Kasra Hospital, fell into a coma, and died three days later. Police say she suffered sudden heart failure; her family say she had no heart problems, a leaked medical report showed severe head injuries and skull fractures, and seemingly everyone in Iran except those in power believe Amini was murdered by the state agents of “a monster which came out from the deepest and darkest cave of religious fanaticism.”

SAY WHAT? - As always, the competition was stiff. But this week's Head-Spinning Right-Wing Hypocrisy Award goes to former A.G., longtime fan of mass incarceration, and egregious, serial abuser of the prosecutorial power of office as a political weapon Bill Barr, who went on the T.V. - Fox, duh - to whine that New York A.G. Letitia James suing the Trump Mafia was an "abuse of office" and "political hit job" that "grossly overreaches when she tries to drag the children into this." Whew. There are so many layers of irony, fraudulence, hilarity and out-and-out dickishness here - where to begin? James' 220-page lawsuit, the result of years of exhaustive investigation, found that for decades Trump committed even more "staggering" criminal fraud than everyone thought, issuing annual financial statements packed with lies that wildly inflated the worth of almost all his crappy properties - for example, tagging the gaudy Mar-A-Lago as worth $739 million when its actual worth was maybe $75 million - to get loans, while simultaneously deflating them to avoid paying taxes.

"With the help of his children and senior executives at the Trump Organization," James said after the lawsuit was filed, "Donald Trump falsely inflated his net worth by billions of dollars to unjustly enrich himself and cheat the system." Of course his "children" - endangered animal-killer Don Jr., 44, fashion grifter and icky daddy's girl Ivanka, 40, doofus Eric who stole money from a kids' cancer charity and took the 5th over 500 times in a deposition for the suit though "only the Mob takes the 5th," 38 - are almost middle-aged executives of a multi-million company they helped manage while raking in millions from it, and oh yeah one was a "senior presidential adviser." Still, Barr argued in laughably patronizing fashion, none had the smarts to understand things like loans or contracts or financial statements: "The children aren't going to know the details of that, nor are they expected in the real world to do their own due diligence." And besides, Hunter Biden.

SAY WHAT? - Whoa. The frenzied, hateful, gonzo base - in thrall to a cheap con man they blindly deemed "a vessel for God" - albeit a smiting, lying, transactional, grifting one - was always bad. Now, it's worse. Like, Leni Riefenstahl worse. With the pressure mounting - lawsuits, prosecutors, a Jan. 6 Committee bearing down - a flailing Trump has veered sharply to the right, threatening mob-style "problems like we've never seen" and posting brazenly QAnon-flavored missives and photos, including one sporting a "Q" lapel pin with, "A storm is coming." Subtle. Aptly, he ended "the week he went QAnon" with a feverish, hate-spewing rally in Youngstown, Ohio. Ostensibly there to endorse cracker Senate candidate J.D. Vance - ever-gracious, he sneered, "J.D. is kissing my ass" - he was really there to rave, literally. Ulysseus? Introduced by an equally demented Klan Mom MTG - he is the GOP's "one true leader" and God help us all - he railed to the less-than-massive crowd about a fictional America in ruins: No border, invasion by "millions of illegal aliens," crashing economy, enemy-of-the-people media, "horrible convicts," spying Obama, an "unhinged persecution." Aaron Rupar - thanks again for sitting through this - summarized the tired jeremiad: “Murders, shootings stabbings, r-r-r-rapes, carjackings are skyrocketing.”

SAY WHAT? - On a good day for duplicitous zealots peculiarly fixated on controlling women's bodies, Lindsey Graham, a childless, partnerless ghoul who's never experienced any pregnancy welcome or not, proposed a nationwide abortion ban backed only by a tiny, rabid minority that four months ago, and many times before, he insisted he opposed in the name of evidently fictional "states' rights," offering up a mountain of lies, dodges, racist taunts and delusional gobbledygook in a hapless attempt to mask his hypocrisy. Graham boasted his "Protecting Pain-Capable Unborn Children from Late-Term Abortions Act," a title he may have swiped from John Cleese, reflects "a consensus view by the most prominent pro-life groups in America," seemingly unaware that, ideologically, the most prominent pro-life groups in America reside many thousands of self-righteous miles to the right of a majority of Americans, roughly 70% of whom have long supported the right to abortion. (For proof, see even Kansas for God's sake.) The ban is also, in name and intent, a lie. "Pain-capable" fetuses at that stage, according to vast medical evidence, do not exist; and 15 weeks into a 40-week pregnancy - or two months before a fetus is viable - is not "late term," again according to established medical terminology or any pregnant woman who's tried to comfortably sleep in, say, her ninth month.

SAY WHAT? - High-minded, big-hearted, deeply substantive: We love the lofty tenor of our national political discourse. Just kidding. Aristotle's sanguine tenet, "They should rule who are able to rule best," is forcefully refuted by the Senate race in "the perennial battleground state" of Pennsylvania, where ill-equipped, pill-pushing, uber-rich clown and GOP candidate "Doc Oz in his Gucci loafers" has plunged ever deeper into the gutter with multiple debacles in his campaign against the "unapologetically progressive" John Fetterman. To wit: Oz' inflation-themed grocery shopping trip to "Wegner's" to make crudités - Fetterman: "In Pennsylvania, we call this a veggie tray" - got so badly burned it sparked a parody site. Then he mis-counted the houses he owns, claiming two when public records show it's 10; they include a Palm Beach mansion he calls "my 'chi' source" that just earned him a bigly tax exemption after a multi-million-dollar renovation paid for by years on TV hawking fake miracle cures, also hydroxychloroquine. After he crassly mocked Fetterman's May stroke - an "unconscionable" act that "goes against every tenet of medicine" - 100 doctors launched "Real Doctors Against Oz," blasting his slimy history of peddling "dangerous fad diets" and "using his medical degree (as) an ATM for personal gain," and declaring him "a major threat to public health" for his opposition to abortion. The final cringe factor: A re-surfaced interview in which he proclaimed incestuous, possibly under-age, sex between cousins "not a big problem...It's fine."

SAY WHAT? - Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand on Wednesday joined several local New York Democrats in condemning Starbucks' recent firing of two union leaders in the state, part of a string of terminations the company has carried out across the country in recent months as it tries to crush worker organizing.

"We are writing to express our dismay around the firings of Austin Locke and Joselyn Chuquillanqui, two Starbucks partners who were also union leaders at their stores," the New York lawmakers wrote in a letter to Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz and the rest of the company's management.

"We have heard reports that the company has been targeting pro-union partners and firing union leaders all over the country," they added. "We continue to stand by these workers and would like to remind you that all workers have the right to join a union, and that retaliation based on exercising these workplace rights is unlawful."

"We urge you to respect workers' right to organize and follow the law," the lawmakers continued. "We stand in solidarity with Austin and Joselyn, and other partners in New York, in calling for you to reinstate these two workers."

Starbucks has fired dozens of union leaders across the nation since December, when employees in Buffalo voted to form the company's first union in the U.S.