Куагмаяр

I guess Putin's "end of combat operations" announcements are about as credible as President Bush's were.

Can they really be this stupid?

I'm a bit flabbergasted watching my Trump supporting friends following their leader and going on all-out attack on Alicia Machado. It's so incredibly stupid. Clinton brought up Machado at the debate as an example of how cruel Trump is to women. And Trump's response is... to heap more cruelty on her. So what if, after Trump emotionally abused her she went on to participate in crimes or made a porn film (I'm not saying that either charge is true. They are just what Trump and his followers are accusing her of. Actually, it appears that the porn star allegation is false, but that hasn't stopped the Trumpians from talking about it), none of those claims rebut Clinton's charge against Trump. In fact, what has happened since the debate bolster's Clinton's claim that Trump is cruel and belittling to women.

I feel really bad for Ms. Machado right now. But I am getting a little enjoyment from watching the Trump team so gleefully shoot itself in the foot.

Not an Aleppo moment

I don't understand why this is considered to be "another Aleppo moment" (other than the fact that Johnson made a joke using that phrase). Johnson was asked to name a foreign leader he admires and he could not come up with any. Everyone's assuming this means that he doesn't know the name of any foreign leaders, but maybe he does know some names but doesn't admire any. That is a perfectly reasonable position to take. Most leaders are not admirable people, IMHO.

It does look like Johnson was trying to remember the name of a former Mexican president. Because Johnson used to be the governor of a border state, maybe he knew the leader he had trouble naming. But again, who cares? Blanking on a name should not exclude someone from the presidency. The issue in Johnson's "Aleppo incident" (sounds so ominous) was that it showed that Johnson was not following the war in Syria. He didn't just blank on a name in that case. He was asked about Aleppo and Johnson didn't recognize that word at all, which can only show that he was not paying any attention to a major conflict in the world. That is a serious issue. Not being able to remember or name, or taking the reasonable position that there are no foreign leaders worthy of admiration is not.

The Principles of Marco Rubio

Even though just this week Senate Republicans were grandstanding about how merely sending an ambassador in Havana would be some unforgivable favor to the oppressive Cuban regime, I expect not a single Republican Senator will change his vote because of this.

Supporting my thesis that Trump is not a smart person

I don't think Trump is using these invalid online surveys to manufacture a lead in the polls in some new lie to the public. I suspect he doesn't know what a scientific poll is.

Why does he keep bringing up Rosie O'Donnell?

I realize this is way down the very long list of reasons why Donald Trump would make a terrible president, but I think that giving a guy who has had a decade-long jihad against Rosie O'Donnell because she once said something mean about him that much political power is a really bad idea.

Will there be another one?

There are some die-hards who are claiming otherwise, but the consensus seems to be that Hillary "won" last night's debate.

So what are the odds that he doesn't show up to debate number 2? I think there is now a reasonable chance that he won't.

...and it looks like that's what Rudy is counseling.

Trump's home town paper

Is this the first time a newspaper has run an anti-endorsement?

...and the WaPo has its own anti-endorsement today. I ask once again, is this precedented? Papers regularly endorse candidates (and the NYT and WaPo endorsed Clinton yesterday), but have they ever run a separate editorial to say the other candidate should not be elected?

Between Two Ferns

I thought Clinton's "Between Two Ferns" appearance was great. I completely agree with the co-creator that there is little chance that Donald Trump would ever agree to do it. But wouldn't it be great if he did?

Flagging can't do that much

I realize this is not something that anyone who is trying to be elected to office can say, but it seems pretty clear that predicting who is going to later be a terrorist is really hard, if not impossible. We can up the scrutiny if we want, but the more you do that the more non-terrorist get their lives ruined, and that can easily become a bigger problem than terrorism itself. Terrorism is a really really small problem in this country, after all. Statistically, you are so much more likely to be hurt by... well just about anything else. Wrecking the lives of people with any connection to certain scary parts of the world is going to hurt more people than terrorism will. Plus, it might drive more people to terrorism, rendering the whole thing a useless sadistic enterprise.

So let me get this straight...

...Trump didn't pay several staffers on his campaign, causing them to resign en masse, but he has continued to pay his former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski even after Trump fired him in June?

Trump isn't just a race-baiting, mostly policy-free, demagogue, he's also a guy who makes some really odd decisions that are hard to explain or reconcile with his other decisions. I guess I am supposed to apply Trump's Razor to a situation like this, but in this case, I don't know what the stupidest explanation would be.

Freedom!

Others have written about Codias, the new social network for conservatives. Because conservatives just can't get their views onto regular social media, or something. In any case, this is sure to take off because facebook alternatives have had remarkable success in recent years. I was just +1ing a post that made that very point.

Codias did load when I clicked on it. My favorite part of the home screen is where it says (under the "Freedom" heading): "We don’t censor conservative views," because not censoring only conservative views is totally the opposite of censorship!

Why this could be the next Conservapedia. Although sadly, Codias doesn't have a Conservapedia entry yet. It doesn't have a Wikipedia entry yet either, I wonder which one will get one first.

Eki?

In recent years, the first post here on January 1st on this site is my list of predictions for the upcoming year. Every time I do that I make a prediction whether any of the five former Soviet -stans will have a change in leadership in the upcoming year. My prediction swings back and forth from year to year, but the lack of change in Central Asia has been pretty consistent. Until earlier this month (or possibly last month) when Islam Karimov, (now former) President of Uzbekistan died. And now there's this.

I have no idea how series these heart problems are, but is it possible that we will have not one, but two changes in the head of state in Central Asia in a single year?!?!?!

This alone would have decided my vote

Witness the contrast between Trump and Clinton.

5 seconds

Has anyone ever actually believed that the five second rule was based on science? It has always been more of a joke than a serious claim that needed to be debunked.

We don't give a shit about the world unless Donald Trump brings it up

From the BBC Global News podcast:

[After discussing the accidental bombing of Syrian military forces by the U.S.]

Emilio San Pedro: And how is this playing in the U.S. media and is it having any effect on campaigning for the presidency?

Laura Bicker: It's interesting I've been glued to the U.S. networks all day and not a single mention has been made so far of what is happening in Syria today. I'm sure that will change. They are obsessed solely with the U.S. election.

Bicker did then go on to predict that the American networks might mention the incident in the next news cycle. But only because Trump might try to use the incident to criticize the Obama administration for not following his own half-baked policies.

I'm getting tired of the Daesh explanations

Just about NYT story that involves the Islamic State includes something like this:

“These attacks confirmed that the U.S. clearly supports the terrorism of Daesh,” SAMA television, a state-run news outlet, said, using an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. 

How long do they have to explain to their readership that "Daesh", means the Islamic State, which is also known as ISIS or ISIL?

On one level I understand why they still do it. Most Americans not use "Daesh" for the Islamic State. ISIS is the only one that has really caught on. (I suspect that ISIL would have fallen into disuse by now if it wasn't President Obama's preferred term for the group). So when they quote some foreigner referring to "Daesh", I guess the Times feels the need to explain what that is.

However, in the above example, was SAMA television broadcasting in English? No, SAMA only broadcasts in Arabic. So the whole quote was a translation from Arabic. Why not translate the word "Daesh" as well?

There will be only two (unless Trump doesn't show up)

We go through this to some extent every presidential election cycle, but I expect that Stein and Johnson supporters are going to be pissed that neither qualified to participate in the September 26 debate. Here's why I don't share in the outrage:

1. There are a lot of people who run for President each year. Libertarians and Greens might complaint that their candidates don't get much attention, but they have gotten a hell of a lot more attention than the official nominees for the Constitution Party, the Socialism and Liberation Party,  the Reform Party, the Workers World Party, America's Party, the Socialist Party USA, the Prohibition Party, the Veteran's Party, the American Party (South), the American Solidarity Party, the Nutrition Party, the Socialist Equality Party, and independents like Evan McMullen, not to mention a shitload of other people who think they are running for president but have not actually gotten on any significant number of state ballots. Unless you're willing to let everyone who says they are running for President onto the debate stage, you need some criteria for deciding who gets on the stage and who doesn't.

2, The criteria to qualify for the debate stage set by the Commission on Presidential Debates is not on its face unfair. To qualify the candidate needs to be on the ballot in enough states to get a majority of electoral votes and to be polling at least 15% in an average of five polls by major media organizations. Maybe others will disagree and think they should be different (I could buy a 10% polling threshold, or argue over which polls should count in the average), but now is not the time to make that argument. The rules were set months ago. If they were inherently unfair they would have been unfair before you found out that your preferred candidate didn't make the cut.

Opportunity squandered

I have talked before about how little coverage policy differences between the Presidential candidates have gotten in this election. But this week there was actually potential for policy to come to the fore. The Trump campaign tried to roll out an actual policy proposal, paid family leave. Of course, his proposal was both half of what Clinton had already proposed, and pretty half-assed in that the funding component made no sense.

But hey, we actually had two competing proposals! The press finally has the chance to dig into each one and people can debate about the relative merits of each! We finally had the opportunity to have a substantive policy debate relating to this election, about a real issue that could affect the lives of actual Americans.

Yet it is already clear that is not going to happen. The Trump side is completely unwilling to have a substantive policy debate and effectively shut down any chance for a debate by denying that Clinton had a paid family leave proposal. The media could have pressed the Trump camp on that easily refutable claim, and they still can, but they won't. Instead we have a big spotlight on whether Trump is still a birther, his latest bullshit dodge on releasing medical records, and his substance-free appearance on a late night talk show. I don't understand why those things are so much more attractive to the news media than what is supposedly their purpose of informing the public about real issues. But there's no question that they are.

If Trump's immigration policies had been in place in the 60s, it would have saved us from Dr. Oz

I wonder if Donald Trump would be as much of a fan of Dr. Oz if he knew that his actual name is Mehmet Cengiz Öz.

And hey, by pulling up his wiki page this morning I learned that Dr. Oz went to Tower Hill, the rival school to my high school. However, Dr. Oz is a bit older than me so I never would have yelled at him back in my cheerleading days.