Here is something to remember about all those election predictions you are hearing these days. Some pundits have a better record than others.

Buzzfeed has an interesting list of five prominent prognosticators on the Right who were way off base in their predictions in the last presidential race, beginning with Rush Limbaugh.

It seems like a long time ago now that North Carolina lawmakers passed the ban on smoking in most bars and restaurants. It was actually just three years ago that Governor Perdue signed the legislation into law. It took effect at the beginning of 2010.

It was passed over the objections of the anti-government crowd currently in control of the General Assembly who predicted all sorts of economic harm to restaurants, none of which has materialized.

Opponents of the smoking ban also questioned the health benefits of reducing exposure to secondhand smoke, despite a wealth of evidence that the health benefits were real.

A Time Magazine article this week details the latest confirmation that smoke-free laws across the country are saving lives. Thank goodness that common sense and concern for public health prevailed over the naysayers in North Carolina.

Check out what is happening in Louisiana, where out-of-state billionaires are trying to buy the state school board and allow this to continue.

….the state has begun funding schools that refuse to teach evolution, teach that the Loch Ness Monster is an example of scientific proof that humans and dinosaurs once coexisted and claim that the Ku Klux Klan had some positive impact on this nation’s history

Bill Moyers, as he often does, raised an issue recently that is mostly missing from this year’s presidential debate, the stunning and still growing income inequality in the United States.

Watch his interview with Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone and journalist Chrystia Freeland, author of “Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else.”

Here’s the first revealing question and answer from the transcript.

BILL MOYERS: Income inequality has soared to the highest level since the Great Depression, with the top one percent taking 93 percent of the income earned in the first year after the recovery, the first full year after the recovery. Why are the two candidates not talking about inequality growing at breakneck speed?

CHRYSTIA FREELAND: You know, I think because it is still a taboo in American political life and in American cultural life. One of the economists I talk to he works for the World Bank. And he said to me, you know, and he’s a specialist in income inequality.

And he said, “When you go to think tanks you say you’d like to do a study about poverty, they say, ‘That’s fine. That’s great. We’re happy to fund it,’ because writing about poverty makes everybody feel good and feel that they’re being charitable and beneficent. But if you say, ‘Actually, I want to study income inequality,’ and even most dangerously, ‘I want to study what’s happening at the very top of the distribution,” what Branko Milanovi? said to me is the think tanks immediately pull away because they say, “Our donors won’t like it.”

Here’s something that ought to be part of tonight’s presidential debate, five ways to reform Wall Street from Sheila Bair, the former head of the FDIC who was appointed by President George W. Bush.