Cameos From Zion (#CameosFromZion) edited by Stephen Darori : The Trump meltdown continues, and at the worst possible time .Abbreviated Pundit Round-up:

Abbreviated Pundit Round-up: The Trump meltdown continues, and at the worst possible time

Above graphic is perhaps a new poll for you. Here is the Times Picayune data. Today is when post debate poll data should start to roll in.

USA TODAY's Editorial Board says Trump is 'unfit for the presidency'. I am picturing Donald Trump at 3 am roaming a Trump hotel scarfing up issues of USA Today in front of the room doors so the guests don't read it.

The overwhelmingly probable conclusion is that Trump does things that don’t seem to make sense because he is a political neophyte who doesn’t know what he is doing.

Trump has been losing from the beginning

The core fact about Donald Trump’s general election campaign is that it’s been singularly ineffective. Not only is he down in the polls right now, he’s been consistently down in the polls for virtually the entire breadth of the campaign.

Shhh. Don’t tell the media.

Politico:

What the FBI Files Reveal About Hillary Clinton’s Email Server

The interviews—taken together and reconstructed for this article into the first-ever comprehensive narrative of how her email server scandal unfolded—draw a picture of the controversy quite different from what either side has made it out to be. Together, the documents, technically known as Form 302s, depict less a sinister and carefully calculated effort to avoid transparency than a busy and uninterested executive who shows little comfort with even the basics of technology, working with a small, harried inner circle of aides inside a bureaucracy where the IT and classification systems haven’t caught up with how business is conducted in the digital age. Reading the FBI’s interviews, Clinton’s team hardly seems organized enough to mount any sort of sinister cover-up.

Questions? Shadows? Cover-up? No. This has been the story from the beginning, and the media blew it spectacularly and often.

This is remarkable, given the source

Hillary-Hatred Derangement Syndrome

The end of the election is now in sight. Some among the anti-Hillary brigades have decided, in deference to their exquisite sensibilities, to stay at home on Election Day, rather than vote for Mrs. Clinton. But most Americans will soon make their choice. It will be either Mr. Trump or Mrs. Clinton—experienced, forward-looking, indomitably determined and eminently sane. Her election alone is what stands between the American nation and the reign of the most unstable, proudly uninformed, psychologically unfit president ever to enter the White House.

Ms. Rabinowitz is a member of the Journal’s editorial board.

A Challenge For Obama’s Successor: Being a Casual, Cool President

When Hillary Clinton appeared last week on “Between Two Ferns,” the intentionally awkward meta-talk show where host Zach Galifinakis deadpans while peppering guests with insultingly barbed questions, it was a sign of something eight years in the making.

Such an appearance by a presidential candidate would’ve been wholly unexpected in 2008 or 2004. Now, it’s emerging as perhaps the dominant approach that 2016’s candidates are taking to media appearances—from Donald Trump’s hair-mussing appearance on Jimmy Fallon’s “Tonight Show,” to Ted Cruz’s online video cooking bacon on the smoking barrel of an AR-15 rifle.

Why Are the Different Presidential Forecasts So Far Apart?

Part of the discrepancy comes from the use of different information. The PredictWise number — 74 percent — incorporates a sharp jump in betting markets that occurred during the first presidential debate. This jump, if it’s real, is not yet reflected in polls, which take days to conduct.

But most of the difference has to do with different model assumptions. Poll-based models need to take a position on two key questions: How useful are older polls? And to what extent do states move together?

The answer to the first question informs how heavily the model weights new information. Weighting new polls very heavily means you can be quicker to respond to new trends and to pick up turning points, but it also makes your forecast more unstable and more likely to react to noise (what we like to call “chasing shiny objects”). Ideally a forecast finds a balance between these two extremes, trading some quickness for stability.

The second question informs how much a shift in one state causes shifts in the others. If all the states were perfectly correlated and moved uniformly, a two-point swing toward Mrs. Clinton in South Carolina would mean a two-point swing toward Mrs. Clinton in Maine, Kansas and everywhere else. If the states are totally uncorrelated, movements in South Carolina would tell you nothing at all about Maine.

But what if OH moves differently than other states? What if IA does?

Jennifer Bendery/HuffPost:

So what is the takeaway from Trump’s five-year crusade to force the nation’s first black president to prove he’s an American? It’s that a man desperate for attention was willing to appeal to the worst in people to get it, and leaders in the Republican Party were willing to go along for the ride so they didn’t lose those voters in their next elections.

That’s depressing.

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Lucia Graves

✔@lucia_graves

Great piece in @Vox on the increasingly political role of women's magazines, spotlighting scoops from @prachigu http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/9/30/13089842/feminist-women-magazines-trump-clinton-election …

10:33 PM - 30 Sep 2016

Don’t underestimate Cosmo. Women’s magazines are taking on Trump.

Women’s magazines are a secret weapon in politics. Hillary Clinton has noticed.
vox.com

31 Retweets

74 likes

HuffPost:

The “Star Trek” universe has united in a bid to defeat Donald Trump.

More than 100 past and present cast and crew members from the hit TV shows and movies have come together under the “Trek Against Trump” banner to try to stop the GOP nominee from taking office.

George Takei, Zoe Saldana, J.J. Abrams and Will Wheaton are among those who called Trump “an amateur with a contemptuous ignorance of national laws and international realities” in a blistering Facebook post on Thursday.

Greg Sargent/WaPo:

What Trump’s tweet really says is that Machado’s effort to secure the vote for herself is suspect, because Clinton may have helped smooth that process, to Clinton’s own benefit. This is a version of the longtime charge that Democrats only want to create a path to citizenship for Latino immigrants in order to pad the voter rolls in their favor, and surely this will thrill Trumpist voters who are very upset about the ways the country is rigged in favor of various minority groups.

But the merits of that argument aside, it is politically awful for Trump — given his need to expand his appeal — to be questioning this effort at political integration by a former Latina beauty queen who is publicly urging more Latinos to participate in the election and is publicly declaring her pride at becoming a U.S. citizen who can now exercise her right to vote.

Sam Wang, Julian Zelizer, Rick Perlstein (podcast):

A previously unknown subculture has emerged onto the political scene thanks to the 2016 presidential election. The alternative right, known as the “alt-right,” is a diverse group of people who identify as right-wing and are unified in opposition against mainstream American conservatism.

The movement — which has gained attention through their support of Donald Trump’s campaign — has been associated with white nationalism, white supremacism and right-wing populism and other fringe groups. But who exactly comprises the alt-right? Where did the group first originate? Is this a new phenomenon? And have we seen glimpses of such a movement throughout history?

In episode 13, professors Julian Zelizer and Sam Wang interview Rick Perlstein, author of The New York Times bestseller “Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America” about the origins and implications of the alt-right and its connections to the Republican Party.

22h

Kyle Griffin

✔@kylegriffin1

In 148 years, the San Diego Union-Tribune has never endorsed a Democrat for president.

They're endorsing Clinton:http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/opinion/editorials/sd-hillary-clinton-endorsement-for-president-20160929-story.html …

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Kyle Griffin

✔@kylegriffin1

"Vengeful, dishonest and impulsive...Trump could be our Chávez...We cannot take that risk." —San Diego Union-Tribune:http://bit.ly/2cGsE8N pic.twitter.com/EnejcciCJy

10:44 PM - 30 Sep 2016

103 Retweets

95 likes

Gail Collins/NY Times:

But recently, people have begun to give Johnson the attention he’s been demanding incessantly for the last year, and it turns out — he’s an idiot. We’ve all heard that he responded to a question about the Syrian crisis with “And what is Aleppo?” He had the same look of wonderment when he was asked about his international role models. “Who’s my favorite foreign leader?” he responded blankly, as if Chris Matthews had demanded that he name his favorite Fiery Furnaces song.

So even if voting for a third-party candidate with no chance of winning was not a ridiculous cop-out, we’ve eliminated Gary Johnson. That leaves only three options for people who hate both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

A) Announce you’re not going to vote, saying, “I know, Afghan voters braved death threats from the Taliban to go to the polls, but I am just too depressed.”

B) Follow the Ted Cruz lead and say you’ve decided to vote for Donald Trump. Perhaps you could wear a badge saying “I’m like Ted.” Your friends might feel this means you’re so obsessed with self-promotion you’d throw in your lot with a person who insulted your wife and suggested your father might be connected to the Kennedy assassination. But I’m sure they’ll understand you’re really only interested in the repeal of Obamacare.

C) Go vote for Hillary Clinton. Nobody sulks during critical moments.

Cameos From Zion (#CameosFromZion) edited by Stephen Darori

Saturday, October 1, 2016

The Trump meltdown continues, and at the worst possible time .Abbreviated Pundit Round-up:

Don’t underestimate Cosmo. Women’s magazines are taking on Trump.

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