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As the last(?) great frothing mess of the 2016 election cycle sputters its way through another set of breaking news alerts and mysterious sources described only as "people familiar with the matter"—truly, the very top ranking of all anonymous claimants—the national news media ends the campaign where it began: In a reflexive, buffoonish race to to the bottom of their brightly painted barrels.

In lieu of actual reportage, cable news — which always needs material to fill its 24-hour mandate — has had to fall back on hours on end of pure speculation. Comey said, in his internal memo, that he was trying to be careful in how he disseminated this information on the eve of an acrimonious election. But he does not seem to have understood that in this era of constant news he created a perfect storm for confusion, misinformation, and — in some sectors — unhinged conspiracy. There is an appalling disconnect on cable news between what has actually been said and what is being implied or perceived, and it is doubling back on itself and expanding. [...]

10 days away from the resolution of this election, one way or another, the news media is demonstrating serious weakness with reporting uncertainty and ambiguity. At the risk of sounding too naïve about the role of truth in journalism, it would be appreciated if clarity were prized over controversy. But then again, this election has been defined by the breakdown of our best intentions in the Byzantine political-media complex, where time must be filled, takes must be filed, and we as a nation have struggled to wholly apprehend what we have become.

Whatever one may think of Mr. Comey, the effects of his letter were both predictable and inevitable. House Republicans would immediately and blatantly inflate the so-called significance of the move; sources whose motives are described only as being "familiar with the matter" would rush to leak details hinting at the most salacious possible interpretations—including completely implausible ones; journalists who have been repeatedly fooled by those same specious claims by those same specious sources would dutifully report the most theoretically sensational new bits yet again; television's pundits would furrow brows and spend their available air time speculating on the speculations; the hired partisans would once again lie outright with new assertions about how the speculation proved this or that. Nearly all of it would be be debunked, many weeks or months later, but the speculated-upon versions would be still be considered gospel long after the truth was out.

It is inherently dishonest—and a fixture of the cable news model, a multi-network circus in which every clown and trapeze artist must compete with the others for the attention of the crowd. The product is the performance, the props are merely the props. “News” is merely the ball or hoop or pin juggled on this particular day, and it is our own damn fault if we expected any more than that.

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At Daily Kos on this date in 2002—Mexico won't back US Iraq resolution:

Why is it that all of Bush's international "friends" are abandoning the US? Russia's Putin, whose soul had passed the Bush test, has already sided with the evil French in opposition to the US's "bomb Iraq" UN Security Council Resolution. In most ways, that was to be expected.

But now Bush's supposed best friend, Vicente Fox, has announced his opposition to the measure. Mexico has one of the rotating seats on the Council, and along with Ireland is one of the swing votes. Yet the Americans, who assumed Mexico would vote with them, are showing they are no one's bitch.

And Bush is pulling one of those famous temper tantrums he throws when he doesn't get his way.

In a nutshell, the “Freedom Caucus” in the U.S. House of Representatives consists of people who think Speaker Paul Ryan isn’t conservative enough. Anyone who has examined the publicly proclaimed policy positions—in particular on economic and budgetary issues—that Ryan has put forth understands exactly how extreme such a position is.

These right-wingers have sought to make life difficult for Ryan, just as they did for his predecessor John Boehner, throughout his time as speaker. After Election Day, assuming Trump loses, they are planning to make Ryan’s life even harder as payback for how the speaker has essentially ignored his party’s nominee after the “grab them by the pussy” tapes came out. The Freedom Caucus apparently wants to block Ryan from being re-elected as speaker—if the Republicans maintain their House majority, that is. Trump, for his part, has publicly hammered Ryan in recent weeks, and has privately made clear his belief that Ryan should be punished for his lack of support.

As one prominent Freedom Caucus member, North Carolina Rep. Mark Meadows, said recently: “A lot of people who believe so desperately that we need to put Donald Trump in the White House—they question the loyalty of the speaker.” Virginia Rep. Dave Brat similarly offered: “There’s a huge chunk of people who want to see a fight taken to D.C.,” and added: “leadership comes and smacks our guy? That’s where you’re going to put down a marker? Really? And the American people are just scratching their head saying, ‘Really? That’s rich.’”

But what exactly does this coming battle in the House mean for congressional Republicans, and, more importantly, what does it say about the Freedom Caucus’s priorities—the things they supposedly believe in and want to make law?

Is it their blonde hair color, or is it their having the temerity to ask uncomfortable questions that generates such anger from men like Donald Trump and Newt Gingrich? Both Hillary Clinton and Megyn Kelly seem to get under the skin of these misogynists better than anyone else on the planet. And both women seem to do it without hesitation and without needing to point fingers for emphasis. They do it with a sure-footed poise that is a wonder to behold.

Unless forced to spend time in the waiting room of the dealership where my car is serviced, I don’t watch much of what Fox News Channel broadcasts (car dealers usually provide great coffee and crappy television). But last week’s confrontation of Newt Gingrich by Megyn Kelly was one of those clips that made the rounds on news sites and social media. A little looking unearthed the entire eight-minute segment. 

While The Kelly File likely won’t be taking up space on my TiVo anytime soon, it was hard not to be impressed by this woman’s skill and determination to discuss what she wanted to discuss, and not settle for a walk through the alternate reality that Newt was describing. She skillfully brought him back to a discussion of the harm that Trump may be causing down-ballot races regardless of how Republicans may have outpaced Democrats in early voting in a few states. She mentioned that Donald Trump has been sinking in the last 40 polls—Newt responded that polls are not always accurate because of that one time way back in history when the “liberal” Detroit newspaper said that the Republican candidate was going to lose, but he won the governorship of Michigan anyway. Or something like that.

This may go down as one of the more wonderful mini-bits of the election. Sources in the Trump campaign say New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie indeed got tapped to be Trump's vice president, but Trump then took it back from him. And Trump did it after then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort tricked his candidate into meeting with Pence by telling Trump his plane was broken.

“Trump cares about who’s the most loyal and who kisses his a–- the most, not who’s the most qualified and what’s the best political decision,” a source close to the campaign told the New York Post. [...]

Christie “said all the BS that Trump likes to hear, and Trump said, ‘Yeah, sure I’m giving it to you,'" [a] second source told the newspaper.

But Manafort ... oh, this is wonderful. Manafort duped him.

Then Trump's campaign chairman at the time, Paul Manafort, arranged for the GOP nominee to meet with Pence in Indianapolis on July 13. He then told Trump his plane was having mechanical problems so the GOP nominee had to stay in town another night.

Pence used the time to try to win the spot, while Trump's advisers warned the issues Christie would bring with the Bridgegate controversy would destroy the GOP nominee's presidential campaign.

It worked. The dumb ploy actually worked. Donald Trump picked his vice president because his own campaign manager sabotaged his flight plans to give Pence a night to make his case.

This election is amazing.

Many economists already have weighed in about what would happen to the U.S. and the world economy if Donald Trump were elected president. Most give a thumbs down to his proposals and policies of massive tax cuts and trade restrictions (and we’re using the term “policies” loosely), but a new academic study was able to measure the Trump effect in real time during the first presidential debate.

The debate between the Orange Menace and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton on Sept. 26 was the most-watched presidential debate in U.S. history, with more than 80 million viewers—and that’s just on television. Poll after poll (except for the troll-driven online polls artificially pumped up by Trumpeters) showed that Clinton basically cleaned Trump’s clock.

And no one was happier about Clinton’s performance—and Trump’s collapse—than investors around the world.

According to a story in The Atlantic with the non-subtle headline “Why Investors Are Terrified of a President Trump,” an “event study” by two economists showed that world markets reacted to Clinton’s Trump-thumping with major rallies.

Clinton’s victory triggered the financial equivalent of a worldwide happy dance. Soon after the debate ended, stock markets celebrated the news of Trump’s loss. Markets in the U.S., U.K., and Asia soared, the price of crude oil rose, and the currencies of America’s closest trading partners, such as Mexico and Canada, ticked up as well. It was “the most consequential single event (so far!) during the 2016 general election campaign,” [the paper’s authors] wrote.

This Ross Douthat column attempting to explain How Donald Trump Happened is an almost-comical look into a delusional conservative movement that does not, even now, understand How Donald Trump Happened. Behold, as "serious" conservatism earnestly explains how t'was all the fault of the base voters doing base voter things while the conservative upper crust, the ones that write columns and advise presidents and appear on the news channels say serious conservative things and insist to viewers that conservatism is the only True Path, evidence be damned, stood too much by and too much silent.

And it's the first few bars of the song we're going to be hearing for the next four years or more.

Every political movement in a democracy is shaped like a pyramid — elite actors on the top, the masses underneath. But the pyramid that is modern American conservatism has always been misshapen, with a wide, squat base that tapers far too quickly at its peak. [...]

The peak is small because conservatives have always had a relatively weak presence within what James Burnham, one of modern conservatism’s intellectual godfathers, called the “managerial class” — the largely liberal meritocrats who staff our legal establishment, our bureaucracy, our culture industries, our universities. Whether as provincial critics of this class or dissidents within it, conservative intellectuals have long depended on populism to win the power that the managerial elite’s liberal tilt would otherwise deny them.

This is a damn flowery way to say that conservative base does not respect or see value in intellectualism, and that conservatives branding themselves as such must suckle at raw populism's teat in order to gain so much as a scrap of attention from their would-be underclass. It's also a lovely brush-aside of an intellectual conservative movement that continues to make no headway into the "managerial class" of industry and eduction due not to conspiracy or bias against them but due to their own intellectual weakness and a base misunderstanding of what "intellectualism" is. Holding an ideological preference in opposition to prevailing evidence is not intellectualism, it is demagoguery; rejection of your ideological pronouncement is not bias against you, but a demand for more rigor than you have provided.

As a full-time activist, blogger, and radio show host, I live on the internet. Social media, blogs, and news sites are my life. I find that their reach and ability to communicate en masse online make them one of many tools instrumental in fomenting widespread change

My personal goal is to talk to and exchange ideas with all millennials and real, progressive Gen Xers and baby boomers. Otherwise, one reaches a point of diminishing returns. And as my nephew Brandon tells me all the time, "Hey tío, things will change when you baby boomers die off.” He just may be right.

It was encouraging to see that my millennial buddy was encouraging other millennials to vote. He has stature with his peer group because he does more than just post or complain: He teaches. He activates. He runs for office. He engages. He posted the following:

When we fight for policies that help people under the age of 35, politicians refuse to pass them because people under the age of 35 don't vote, therefore, we don't matter. The polls are open until 6 pm every day this week. I don't care who you vote for, but please go vote. If we don't vote, we don't matter.

After he voted he posted a message stating how difficult it was to make a choice. My heart sank, as it was obviously painful for him. He mentioned that he spent a lot of time in the voting booth fighting between his head and his heart: Clinton or Stein. Ultimately, he made the right choice. But the tone of his message was depressing, and it's likely he took the message down for that very reason. By the time I responded, the message was gone so I started a new thread:

A dear friend of mine said he was in the voting booth contemplating his vote between Hillary Clinton and Jill Stein. He said it was difficult. To him and to the scores of millennials like him and many of my baby boomer and GenX friends who know we need much more progressive policies than those being offered, I offer this:

The Affordable Care Act recently made news for rate increases. Trump and the GOP are trying to use these increases as political weapons. 

One of the things he doesn’t tell you is that some of these increases could be attributed to the failure of the GOP to expand Medicaid. He also doesn’t tell you that he has no plans to fight rate increases. 

Without further ado, here’s more on this, and some of the other things he’s not telling you about the Affordable Care Act. 

Washington Post reporter David Fahrenthold has been researching Donald Trump's charitable efforts throughout the election season. His comprehensive essay on what those efforts turned up reads like a Dickensian satire. Not only are Trump's charitable efforts few, far between, and almost exclusively self-serving, his attempts to play the role of a philanthropist without doing the philanthropy part seem like a far more malevolent version of an Andy Kaufman prank.

The highlight of the piece, without question, is the story of Donald Trump showing up at a charity event for the Association to Benefit Children, strolling onto the stage, and plopping himself down in the seat reserved for one of the event's real top donors.

Trump was not a major donor. He was not a donor, period. He’d never given a dollar to the nursery or the Association to Benefit Children, according to Gretchen Buchenholz, the charity’s executive director then and now.

But now he was sitting in Fisher’s seat, next to Giuliani. [...]

Afterward, Disney and Buchenholz recalled, Trump left without offering an explanation. Or a donation. Fisher was stuck in the audience. The charity spent months trying to repair its relationship with him.

Rather than ejecting Trump from the podium in front of the audience and causing a scene, they let him stay; their reward was not one thin dime from the billionaire before he trundled off again, apparently under the assumption that his shining presence was all the benefit those children needed.

Looking back, it was yet another case where if only someone had humiliated Trump in the manner he deserved rather than gritting their teeth and putting up with his asininities, it would have saved America a lot of time down the road. The same dynamic would play out in the press and in the Republican primaries twenty years later. The stupid and stingy man strolls onto the national stage like he owns the place, and everyone is too concerned with keeping up the appearances of a serious election to point out that the buffoon hasn't done a thing in his life that would suggest he deserves to be there and can't string together more than ten words in defense of his new hobby as political savior-of-the-moment. We really need to be crueler to our moneyed stupid people; the nation is not their therapist.

The rest of Fahrenthold's piece is equally good and revealing, and we should take a moment here again to recognize that there is no damn way he should end up with less than a Pulitzer for his efforts. He by himself did what all the arrayed forces of cable television could not: He asked whether Trump's on-stage claims about his past were true, and then tasked himself with finding out.

North Carolina is perhaps the ultimate swing state in 2016: It’s the only one with truly competitive races for president, Senate, and governor. Remarkably, though, not a single seat is expected to change hands in the state’s House delegation, where Republicans hold a lopsided 10-to-3 advantage over Democrats. While there are many reasons for this, gerrymandering is one of the most important. In this post, we’ll examine why, using the three different maps shown above to demonstrate how wildly divergent outcomes are possible for congressional elections in the very same state.

American congressional and legislative elections almost all take place under a system of single-member districts, where only one candidate can win. That requires breaking up a state into smaller parts to create a redistricting plan. However, voters from each party aren’t equally distributed throughout a state. Although North Carolina is roughly evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans as a whole, big cities vote heavily Democratic while many rural areas lean strongly Republican. Consequently, many districts naturally will favor one party or the other even if we didn’t intend to draw them that way.

Traditionally, nonpartisan redistricting uses criteria such as making sure all districts have the same population, keeping cities and counties whole, geographic compactness, and drawing communities that share a common culture or demographics together. At the same time, it disregards partisanship and where incumbents live. Gerrymandering is the act of favoring the latter set of critera over the former, to intentionally make certain districts more biased toward or against a particular party, candidate, or even a region or racial group than they otherwise would be if neutral principles were followed.

You might have previously seen this excellent Washington Post graphic of abstract red and blue squares that shows how gerrymandering can swing elections. The three maps pictured above do the same thing, illustrating the matter more concretely. By comparing the actual Republican-drawn congressional gerrymander used in 2012 and 2014 with both a hypothetical Democratic gerrymander and a nonpartisan alternative, we can see just how easily gerrymandering can turn an evenly divided swing state into either a 10-to-3 Republican advantage, or a 9-to-4 Democratic one.

That the most openly racist major party presidential nominee in at least a century chose to speak at historic Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, was jarring enough on its own. The candidate who appeals to neo-Confederate extremists chose the location where the original Confederacy finally was broken as a backdrop. The candidate whose party ridiculously touts its long-since forfeited lineage from Abraham Lincoln seemed to need to pound the final nail in that legacy's coffin. The candidate whose vocabulary seems limited to a mere couple hundred words chose to contrast himself with the author of the most celebrated oration in American history. And where Lincoln invoked the better angels of our nature, Donald Trump whined, ranted, and threatened legal action against the growing number of courageous women who have stepped forward to testify that his bragging about molesting women was not mere words.

Trump at Gettysburg was one of the most cravenly bizarre moments in a campaign that has steadily redefined the concept. And yet somehow, appalling a spectacle as it was, that very spectacle overshadowed something deeper and more systemic about Trump's chosen location on that chosen date. Because almost exactly one week after that speech, which would be yesterday, comes the anniversary of something that the appalling spectacle of Trump's entire campaign has somehow managed to cast in the shadows. Something that has defined the Republican Party for three decades, and has defined the fundamental problems about one of the most fundamental national conversations we should be having about fundamental policy.

Donald Trump's extremism is the culmination of decades spent by the Republican Party enabling, catering to, and empowering extremism. He is not an anomaly. As I wrote back in February: Donald Trump is the candidate the Republicans deserve. He is the nominee the Republicans deserve. The entire party apparatus created the conditions that made Trump's nomination not merely possible, but inevitable. They built that. But even outside of that extremism, mainstream GOP doctrine has been dangerously wrong on the very issue the Republican Party has pretended to build its very brand on.

Regrets, I have a few—and  going down the rabbit hole with a rather outspoken conservative friend of a friend this week is one of them. We were at a local establishment that serves adult beverages. We have a few of these places in Wisconsin.

The discussion started out simply enough: He assumed that I, as a veteran, would vote for Donald Trump. That was the last somewhat sane thing he said. Before I could escape, he unleashed a frightening statement (paraphrased here, but this is the general gist of the conversation): “Hillary Clinton is not winning, the polls are lies, and we as Americans have the right to form a well-organized militia and forcefully remove the government as it is stated in the Bill of Rights. You remember that if this election is stolen from Donald J. Trump.”

At this point I had to reach down and pick my jaw up off the floor, much like a cartoon character. There was a whole lot to unpack there.

I should have walked away at this point, but I could not. Instead I calmly and politely explained how our election system works (as he clearly did not know), and that just in Wisconsin alone you would have to bribe some of the 72 county clerks in the state to rig a statewide election—and it’s fairly certain at least one of them would go public about an attempted bribe. I also mentioned that in the last 16 years, there have been around 30 or so cases of voter fraud out of millions upon millions of votes cast. So I asked him, “Just how will the election be rigged if Trump loses?”

His response triggered the moment of realization that I should have walked away. It was time to frantically look for tin foil to make a hat so I would not be infected by whatever radio waves had gotten to him. He started with, “I don’t know how they are doing it. But they are. People have already been caught at voter fraud in several states and it is already proven that dead people are registered and have voted.”