The nation may survive, but the wound to hope and order will never fully heal - US elections 2016: the october surprises

Reaction 1 to Assange story: I like the idea of the Ecuadorian Embassy's IT guy changing the Wi-Fi password in exchange for doing chores. Like a parent of teenagers who is slightly too pleased with his cleverness. "Julian, you can have today's password once your room is clean."

Reaction 2: Damn, now we may never find out the REAL smoking gun lurking in the Clinton emails. I'm sure he was just about to get to the really juicy lizard-people type stuff.

xp only with RIGHTEOUSNESS

i like that he calls it a "state actor" when actually it's his airbnb host

attention Ned and Elvis:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/darrell-issa-doug-applegate-trump_us_58038d74e4b06e04759557c5?google_editors_picks=truere

Hey i've worked with one of the vets quoted in that article! Weird

said it on twitter but assange is like "mom please let me back on the internet! I hate it in this house!! life is so unfair"

Oh believe me, seeing Issa go down in flames would be a cherry on top of the cake here.

Meanwhile, general antsiness

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/10/house-republicans-firewall-election-229910

A pretty WTF moment at a Trump rally tonight, in GIF form. Trump ought to just own his sleaziness, when he tries to look wholesome he just looks so much worse, JFC

https://twitter.com/goangelo/status/788182679220912129

you know that feeling like you've been swimming in a marsh-like cesspit....

that's how I feel after seeing that

why is he trying to kiss a small child, does he just kiss all human females

"After holding this child like a puppet for an uncomfortable length of time, I'm going to purse my lips together and slobber on the side of her cheek...and that's when the Black voters start pouring in."

Sopan Deb, the reporter, posts transcripts from Trump interviews on Twitter, and they're pretty amazing - not just because of the word salad, that's to be expected at this point, but because of the way he just bulldozes right past questions from even the most favorable of interviewers.

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/788150475258343424

does the trump campaign believe hillary actually profits from donations to the clinton foundation? is there evidence of this? that's sort of where this conspiracy breaks down for me.

like, i think it's reasonable to criticize her for allowing herself to be influenced by soft money donations, but i don't know if it makes sense to see the foreign donations to the clinton foundation as that. at most, it created a conflict of interest when she was secretary of state, which is worth taking seriously i guess, but isn't as obviously sinister as the republicans are implying

does the trump campaign believe hillary actually profits from donations to the clinton foundation?

Well, that's how his foundation works, so why wouldn't hers work the same way? (/trumplogic)

at this point i am working off the rubber/glue theorem when i hear anything trump says

<trumplogic>
By blind trust, you mean the Trump's children run the Trump org during a presidency?
</trumplogic>

if you can get behind the paywall i think this jpod lament for the RNC is decent
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/truly-forgotten-republican-voter/

kinda scattershot

But the truly forgotten Republican voter never bought Trump’s new outfit. I mean the Republican person who believes in limited government and a strong national defense and some kind of a moral frame for our politics

he still believes there are more of these people than the thirty or so people who write for Commentary, NR, First Things, whatever

the abuse he's been suffering from trump voters on fb & twitter has made him much more endearing to me this election

what's derbyshire been up to?

Can we please acknowledge how great Dave Bautista's tweet is that DJP linked

https://twitter.com/TomLlamasABC/status/788177327679115264

he should keep saying stuff like this it's good

http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/6632.html

Hard to summarize, but makes many thoughtful points. It opens thus:

Domestic politics in the United States are worse at this moment than they have ever been in my sad 46 years of life. And if your response is "they did it", whoever they are, you are, I think missing the point, missing the problem. We are in this together. Once we've made a civil war of it we have already lost, however just the side you choose to fight on. Often moral errors feel like moral imperatives at the time.

The piece as a whole strikes as being remarkably ahistorical and self-refuting at points. Like:

A nation-state is a relatively new form of human community. Its singular problem is scale. Among nation-states, there is a strong inverse correlation between nation-state “success” (however we want to measure that) and “socioethnic fragmentation”. Nation-states “work” when their members are most powerfully attached to common, broadly shared, communal identity. When members attach themselves primarily to more local or parochial identities, destructive politics of intercommunal struggle often plague the polity. Unfortunately, many people understand this relationship in a very simple, static way. The Nordic countries are famously “homogeneous”, and so are unusually successful as nation-states. Lebanon is a hodgepodge of sects and ethnicities, and has a hard time thriving.

1. We don't know how to measure the real success of a nation-state, which is a new thing (to whom?!?!?)
2. But there are some successful ones, like the Nordics!! (oh okay, sure, because that's been a long-standing state of affairs)
3. When people are diverse, nation-states have trouble! (this is born out by the world's dominant superpower about to elect, for a third time, a president backed by a phenomenally diverse coalition)

xp"

But it is also obvious that, within the Republican Party, Trump’s support comes disproportionately from troubled communities

yeah, those troubled communities with an average income of 75K+, driving the big new trucks.

there are so many problems with that article that I barely know where to start, but using "orthogonalize" in the 2nd paragraph and almost worshipping Vox are two other yellow flags

I'm really getting sick of "never before have we been so fucked up!" narratives. The War of 1812, the Civil War, the Depression, WW2, the Civil Rights movement, Vietnam, Watergate - that's all in the past! We've got a guy who said his opponent should be in jail, on television, and people read other people's emails, and it is all just so unseemly, my heavens, we're doomed.

That was my issue with Taibbi's piece- he can turn a pithy phrase for sure, and he makes a few good points, but then he ends with "we've never been so stupid and fucked up!" Which is just such a self-obsessed, blind, completely ignorant and "truthy" statement on its face.

Not to mention all that garbage converges right along with Trump's rhetoric.

Yeah the Civil War was, notably, a profoundly fucked up culmination of the deeply fucked up preceding three centuries.

my theory is that it's generalized mass hysteria brought on by unprecedented exposure to new communications technologies. at some point you hope this outbidding will exhaust itself.

Tired of the hottake olympics in general

The assassinations of Garfield and McKinley were not a big deal because the Republic was doing so awesome in those days we didn't need anybody in charge

xps i mean, if the printing press brought on the reformation, what's facebook and twitter gonna do? (im being half-facetious)

When two people I don't care for Twitter beef

https://twitter.com/LouiseMensch/status/787091647247028224

Thanks, that Twitter thread was like unwittingly opening up a trash can filled with with maggots.

Can't wait!!!

http://trmp.news/#comingsoon

Sorry if this was posted already.

http://www.newyorker.com/cartoons/daily-cartoon/morning-monday-october-17th-three-weeks?intcid=mod-latest

Truthfully, just bored at this point.

lol scroll down all the way on that one

sorry to ruin the joke just trying to prevent anxiety attacks

Deep dive on Trump trying (and failing) to get much built in SoCal.

http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-trump-california-20161017snap-20161017-snap-story.html

http://www.adl.org/press-center/press-releases/extremism/adl-joins-with-pepe-the-frog-creator-social-media-campaign-save-pepe.html

lol scroll down all the way on that one

just more fundraising bumpf based on terror tactics

I was pretty bummed to see that within the past few days the number of Trump lawn signs in my neighborhood jumped from 2 to about 20.

i noticed this upthread & it tracks with what relatives have worried about driving across places like western pennsylvania - oh no, look at all the trump signs & none for clinton... it's my understanding that yard signs are pretty much a waste of money for campaigns and if trump wants to waste $$$ on giving them out ("The Trump-Pence campaign will begin the distribution of 30000 yard signs throughout the state Saturday") instead of building a field organization, go ahead. you don't see many for clinton because you have to buy them yourself (and my experience is that campaign stuff from their website takes months to arrive anyway)

i clicked on the trmp.news thing & caught on pretty quick because there's no way anyone associated with trump would build such a clean looking modern responsive website

xpost
Much sympathy to Pepe's creator, but satire works a lot better when you have a definite target of ridicule. I suggest a cartoon Billy Bush, Trump could just be the straight man as himself, but using Billy's weakness for the socially distasteful side of conservative ideology to unwittingly pull his family of energy-industry plutocrats into a series of awkward comical situations.

https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/12743

also xp
https://thenib.com/pepe-the-frog-to-sleep-perchance-to-meme

To have it all on one page: http://trumptwitterarchive.com/#/