Aszilvasy

Donald Trump got a significant bump from wrapping up the Republican nomination a couple of weeks ago, while Hillary Clinton—even though she will be the nominee—still has a strong opponent in the race who is making the case against her, as well as against the fairness of the nomination process itself.

Bernie Sanders has won most of the races this past month, and the chaos at the recent Nevada Democratic Convention only increased the bad blood. Negative feelings toward Clinton felt by some Sanders' supporters are, without question, affecting the Clinton v. Trump poll numbers. Some percentage of Sanders voters are currently saying they are undecided, or voting for Trump or even, if there’s such an option in a given poll, "other" (i.e., Sanders).

When the Democratic race is settled and both nominees are in a similar position regarding the supporters of their primary opponents, we'll have a much better sense of where this race stands. It will likely look much more like it did about six weeks ago, before Trump swept the Northeast and pretty much wrapped things up.

For example in 2008, while both nomination races were going on throughout February, the polling averages showed an Obama lead over McCain, but McCain got a bump and went ahead after securing the Republican nomination in early March. Obama began closing in on McCain and went past him a few weeks later in the polling average, after the bump faded and Obama's grasp on the Democratic nomination began to look more secure. When the Democratic race ended and Clinton endorsed him in early June, his lead grew. Other than a few days after the Republican convention in early September, when McCain led by a point or two thanks to his convention bounce, Obama remained ahead from early April right up to the election.

BALTIMORE (AP) — A Baltimore officer was acquitted Monday of assault and other charges in the arrest of Freddie Gray, dealing prosecutors a significant blow in their attempt to hold police accountable for the young black man's death from injuries he suffered in the back of a police van.

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Guns Replaced with Selfie Sticks is a Tumblr blog that features only stills from films, in which the guns held by movie characters have been replaced with selfie sticks.




More - after the jump


Guns Replaced with Selfie Sticks

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From Gerald Murnane’s “In Praise of the Long Sentence” (Meanjin, Autumn 2016), a crotchety but interesting essay:

In 1986 I was invited, along with several other writers, to give a short talk at the Melbourne Writers Festival on the subject ‘Why I write what I write’. I was not surprised when the other writers talked about childhood experiences, subjects that inspired them, or concerns that drove them to write. I chose to talk about none of these, and my short speech must have impressed at least one member of the audience, the then editor of Meanjin, Judith Brett, who published the speech a few months later. My speech began ‘I write sentences. I write first one sentence, then another sentence. I write sentence after sentence…’ I made no mention of grammar in my speech. I spoke more about such matters as the shape of meaning, the sound of sense, the contour of thought. These were all expressions I had learned from other writers’ efforts to explain why some writing, to put it simply, is better than other writing. I quoted a remarkable passage by Virginia Woolf in which she claimed: ‘A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it … and then, as it breaks and tumbles in the mind, it makes words to fit it.’ I wrote my speech 30 years ago, and I’m as pleased with it today as I was then, but I acknowledge that my essay, so to call it, is no sort of compelling argument for grammatically sound sentences. Rather, it seems to suggest that I trusted for most of my life in a sort of instinct. I trusted in a sort of instinct and looked only for apt or suggestive forms of words, and yet I never needed to violate the principles of traditional grammar. […]

Several times during the writing of this piece, I may have seemed to be trying to justify my use of long sentences. Certainly, I left off writing this piece now and then and pondered on my liking for such sentences and my interest in punctuation and traditional grammar. These preferences of mine may have a simpler explanation than I sometimes try to find. During the first ten years of my life, I was closer in time to the nineteenth century than to the present century. For most of my childhood I read books written long before my birth, books by R.L. Stevenson, Charles Kingsley, Charles Reade, William Henry Hudson. Even our English textbooks at secondary school recommended the prose of Charles Lamb, Thomas Hardy, George Borrow. I long ago gave up reading contemporary writers, but I still look often into Hardy’s novels or Lavengro or The Romany Rye. Perhaps I learned the subtle rhythms of left-branching nineteenth-century prose in the same way that the authors of that prose learned the rhythms of their Cicero or their Livy. I would be far from disappointed to learn that this is so.

Anyone who refuses to like or understand contemporary art is self-doomed to irrelevance (which is not the same as inferiority), and anyone who claims “to know more about sentences than Thomas Pynchon or Frank Kermode” is in some sense a blithering idiot, but I like his statement “that meaning for me was connection; that a thing had meaning for me if it was connected with another thing.” Via wood s lot.

At age 40, David Ortiz is off to the second-best offensive season of his long and distinguished MLB career. He’s also set to retire at the end of the year, no matter how well his 2016 season with the Red Sox ends up going.

“My body, man,” Ortiz explained to Yahoo’s Jeff Passan. “My body’s pretty beat up. Remember, if you look at guys my size, they don’t last. I noticed that seven or eight years ago. That’s why I needed to start doing things right. I lost 25 pounds. I started eating better, do things better. But let me tell you: It’s not easy, man.”

He makes a compelling case. But for the purposes of building a Hall of Fame résumé, Big Papi might also be making a strategic error in hanging up his spikes: A few more years of even modest production could mean the difference between enshrinement and not.

To judge Ortiz’s Hall chances, I used Jay Jaffe’s JAWS score, which balances the peak and total wins above replacement for each player relative to the average for his position — in Big Papi’s case, first base. (Yes, Ortiz has spent most of his productive years as a designated hitter, but since the position has existed since only 1973, JAWS lumps Ortiz in with first basemen.) My model uses logistic regression to turn a first baseman’s JAWS score — and whether he was a known performance-enhancing drug user¹⁴ — into a probabilistic prediction of whether he’ll be inducted in Cooperstown someday.¹⁵

Right now, Ortiz’s Hall of Fame odds are right on the boundary. If he decided to retire tomorrow, his current JAWS total of 42.6 would yield a 25.4 percent prediction for the Hall, about a one-in-four shot. But Ortiz is in a critical part of the curve: Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS system projects that he would add another 7 WAR (for a JAWS score of 46.2) if he played through 2019, and with that boost he would be almost a coin flip to make the Hall, with a predicted probability of 46.3 percent. Although he may not realistically be able to add that many WAR anyway — projections are an imperfect science — each small contribution boosts his chances substantially.

Obviously, this methodology is a simplified way to quantify Ortiz’s Hall of Fame prospects. In addition to his prodigious regular-season achievements, Ortiz is a postseason hero who helped lead Boston to a curse-breaking World Series win. He also has the specter of a positive steroid test hanging over his record — which can be enough for some Hall of Fame voters to deny a player, regardless of his on-field contributions. So Ortiz’s case comes down to a lot more than just his JAWS total.

But at this point in his career, every little bit helps. With a place in Cooperstown on the line, maybe Ortiz will reconsider his decision to retire and keep slugging away for another couple of years.

Bernie Sanders has no plausible path to secure the Democratic nomination: To earn a majority of pledged delegates, he'd need to win 68 percent of those left outstanding, even though he’s only won less than 46 percent of available delegates to date. But instead of acknowledging this reality, Sanders’ campaign is now taking a scorched-earth approach toward its opponents—even if that means helping Donald Trump win the White House.

An alarming new report from the New York Times details Sanders' destructive ramp-up, explaining that the senator is now hoping to "inflict[...] a heavy blow on Hillary Clinton" and is "willing to do some harm to Mrs. Clinton" so that he might "arrive at the Philadelphia convention with maximum political power."

And the Sanders campaign is quite insistent that it doesn't care whether its attempt to seize this supposed fount of power jeopardizes Democrats' chances at holding the White House, as long as it keeps Sanders' non-existent hopes alive:

Tad Devine, a senior adviser to Mr. Sanders, said the campaign did not think its attacks would help Mr. Trump in the long run, but added that the senator's team was "not thinking about" the possibility that they could help derail Mrs. Clinton from becoming the first woman elected president.

"The only thing that matters is what happens between now and June 14," Mr. Devine said, referring to the final Democratic primary, in the District of Columbia. "We have to put the blinders on and focus on the best case to make in the upcoming states."

There you have it. Sanders is flat-out "not thinking about" whether his efforts to hurt Clinton could aid Trump—he's just going to "put the blinders on" and worry only about himself, not the national and global issues at stake. It's an absurd and outrageous win-at-all-costs strategy: absurd because Sanders cannot even win, no matter what “power” he might grab hold of; outrageous because Trump poses an existential threat to this country—and to this world.

Sanders claims he still wants to influence the Democratic agenda, but if he finishes out his campaign by trying to tear down the one person who can actually stop Trump, how can he expect anyone at the Democratic convention to listen to what he has to say?

Dear Donald Trump supporters,

Can we talk again?

In a recent Tweet, your candidate said this of Bill Clinton:

Amazing that Crooked Hillary can do a hit ad on me concerning women when her husband was the WORST abuser of woman in U.S. political history

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 17, 2016

Trump also went on Fox News and told a national TV audience that Bill Clinton may be a rapist, airing an accusation made by Juanita Broaddrick during the 1990s.

This is doubtless uncomfortable for the Clintons, especially given Hillary Clinton’s recent statement that all accusers should be believed. But it seems to me that Trump supporters should find this turn in the campaign uncomfortable, too.

Think about it. There are only two possibilities.

Perhaps Donald Trump truly believes that Bill Clinton is a rapist, or at best “one of the worst abusers of women” in U.S. history, as he said. And therefore, Trump invited a man he believes to be a rapist to his wedding, where Trump had his new wife pose beside the ostensible abuser, Trump smiling as the man he believed to be a sexual predator posed with his arm encircling his new bride’s waist.

See for yourself.

And don’t miss this one either. Later, Trump went on Fox and said of Hillary Clinton and the man he believes to be a rapist, “I’ve known her and her husband for years and I really like them both a lot.” He even chatted on the phone with Bill Clinton before getting in the race. In this telling, Trump has a deeply weird attitude toward rapists, abusers of women, and the sorts of photos one takes at one’s wedding.

Or maybe Trump doesn’t actually believe that Bill Clinton is a rapist, or one of the worst abusers of women in history. Rather, he is cynically and falsely publicizing a rape accusation, knowing the accused may well be innocent, because spreading it will help Trump to win power. A frivolous or disingenuous rape accusation would typically make Trump supporters apoplectic. It’s the sort of thing they accuse the liberal media, lying politicians, and “social justice warriors” of perpetrating. They regard false rape accusations as serious if not unforgivable transgressions. Yet in this telling, Trump is engaged in that behavior for pure political benefit.

There’s no way to determine what Donald Trump truly believes.

But it’s got to be one or the other, and either option ought to make him look bad in the eyes of many of his supporters, given their own beliefs. So why doesn’t this bother Trump supporters? Even apart from Bill Clinton’s history with women, whatever it really entails, I understand why they’re so averse to Hillary Clinton.

I am too. I promise. For so many reasons. But there are other options if you hate typical politicians or want to tell the establishment to go to hell. So why aren’t they similarly averse to Trump?

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) said that the United States suffers from an “under-incarceration” problem in a Thursday speech rejecting a bipartisan criminal justice bill.

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Well, this is slightly embarrassing. The Texas GOP's 2016 party platform contains a badly-written sentence that accidentally implies most Texans are gay.

JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel's defense minister announced his resignation on Friday, saying the governing party had been taken over by "extremist and dangerous elements" and that he no longer trusted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu following reports that he was to be replaced.

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…is "Tardy Mark", at least according to one roll of the dice by The Daily Show's Trump Nickname Generator:

Trying it a few more times, I get "Deadbeat Mark", "Bad at Improv Mark", "Got Lost at Sea Mark", …

But in fact there's a story behind "Tardy Mark".

When I was in the first grade, I used to walk to and from school every day. By road, it was about a mile, but if I cut across a cow pasture, through a patch of woods, and up a hill, it was only about half that. At the edge of the cow pasture was an endlessly fascinating brook, where I liked to build dams, catch frogs and crawfish, and so forth. And school was kind of boring. So I was often a bit late.

One day in late September, I was summoned to see the principal, Mr. Ardel. He was eight feet tall and had eyes of flame.

"Mark," he said, "you've been tardy three times this week, and seven times so far this month. This is serious, do you understand?"

"Yes, sir," I said.

"This habitual tardiness must end now. Tell me that you will not be tardy again!"

"Yes, sir".

"Say it!"

"I will not be tardy again."

"Good. Now do you have any questions?"

"Yes, sir. What does 'tardy' mean?"

For some reason, this annoyed him, and another meeting was scheduled that involved my parents as well.

 

 

This New York Times correction is totally pimpin'.

Ralph Nader is an ass, yes. But he’s also a wrong ass.

But in an interview with U.S. News, Nader expressed more positive thoughts about Trump's candidacy than Clinton's [...] “He's questioned the trade agreements. He's done some challenging of Wall Street – I don't know how authentic that is. He said he's against the carried interest racket, for hedge funds. He's funded himself and therefore attacked special interest money, which is very important”

Remember, even Donald Trump himself says not to take anything he says seriously. Nader pretends that he shares some sort of ideology with Trump, when Trump is explicitly making shit up as he goes along, exhibiting no ideology beyond self-worship. And of course, it’s telling he completely ignores Trump’s racism, bigotry, and misogyny. 

For the last several days, the Beltway media have been gripped by the impasse between the GOP’s presumptive 2016 presidential nominee and the Republican speaker of the House. “Paul Ryan,” Politico announced, “is stuck in a Trump trap.” Endorsing the uncouth vulgarian overwhelmingly supported by GOP primary voters, Tiger Beat on the Potomac argued, “is a major risk to Ryan’s brand.” Josh Barro agreed, declaring “Ryan's real priority is policy, not power.” He’s just “not ready” to give his backing to Donald Trump “because he's genuinely despondent and sees no good options available to himself.” Writing in the Washington Post, Ruth Marcus went so far as to pen a speech a pained Speaker Ryan could deliver to explain “my reservations about what a Trump nomination would mean for our party--and, more important, what a Trump presidency would mean for our nation.”

Yet for all of this manufactured drama, there has been little discussion about the real difference between Donald Trump and Paul Ryan. To be sure, the purportedly “serious” and “thoughtful” idea man Paul Ryan would not use expletives in campaign rallies or boast about the size of his phallus. And while Ryan at least sticks to his core convictions, Trump’s gymnastic flip-flops show he has none at all.

But one of these two Republicans is a charlatan, a polished con man of the people who uses elegant spreadsheets, impressive policy jargon, and soaring rhetorical flourishes to create an elaborate façade for massive tax cuts for the rich, oceans of red ink for the U.S. Treasury, and devastating spending cuts to programs designed to help the most vulnerable Americans. The other man is Donald Trump. To put it another way, Paul Ryan is a dumb person’s idea of a smart person; Donald Trump is a smart person’s idea of a dumb person.

Consider, for starters, their respective tax plans.

Angela Corey’s campaign exploits a loophole to prevent a large group of voters from supporting her most credible challenger.

Mike Webb is running for Congress from Virginia's 8th District as a conservative Republican, but didn't get the primary nod earlier this month at the state's GOP convention. So now, he's running as an independent.Actually, scratch that. Now, he may not be running at all.His website is down, and earlier today, he posted a story on Facebook intending to trash the Democratic incumbent. It mentions some prank calls he received from a staffing agency in the candidate's district (as if the calls were the fault of the Congressman). To verify the story, he posted screenshots of the agency's information as it appeared on a search engine, along with his phone records showing the calls (unintentionally giving away his own home address and phone number). But the most interesting things were the unclosed tabs in his browser.

An obituary for a Virginia grandmother and former nurse claimed her death stemmed from the upcoming election.

"Faced with the prospect of voting for either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, Mary Anne Noland of Richmond chose, instead, to pass into the eternal love of God on Sunday, May 15, 2016, at the age of 68," the obituary, published Tuesday in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, said.

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U.S. Secret Service was investigating presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump's longtime butler, after Mother Jones reported he wrote on Facebook that he thought President Obama should've been killed in his first term.

The campaign went on to say it disavowed the statements the butler made as he continued to critique Obama on Thursday, telling media outlets that he would like to see the president hung from "the portico of the White House," CNN reported.

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One way in which Amazon differs from a conventional supermarket or a place like Walmart or Target is that it offers relatively little in terms of "store-brand" products. There's the Amazon Basics line of electronics accessories and there are Amazon Elements baby wipes, but not much else. But Greg Bensinger reports in the Wall Street Journal that's about to change, with Amazon prepared to roll out the Elements diapers that have long been rumored, plus a much larger array of products that will "include nuts, spices, tea, coffee, baby food and vitamins, as well as household items such as diapers and laundry detergents."

Why? Bensinger cites Bill Bishop, who runs a consulting company called Brick Meets Click, suggesting that "private-label goods boast higher profit margins than name brands because companies save costs on marketing and brand development."

Seeking higher margins would be a somewhat bizarre strategy for Amazon, which has historically had no profits whatsoever but recently stumbled into a high-margin web services business. My guess is that if Amazon goes big into store-label products they'll be priced aggressively to gain market share at razor-thin margins. The goal isn't really going to be making money, it'll be filling more trucks.

Amazon is trying to get better at delivery

Right now, Amazon is much more than a retailer of physical goods. But the retail of physical goods is still at the core of its corporate identity. And at the moment, the company is involved in a massive multifaceted push to get better at the delivery element of that.

For years, the company has offered free two-day shipping to Amazon Prime members. But these days, a wider and wider array of products is available for Prime one-day shipping or even prime same-day shipping.

This is an important strategic initiative for Amazon. If it can make one-day shipping the new normal, it'll make life that much more difficult for hypothetical future competitors. And to the extent that it can make same-day shipping a reality, it will be able to intensify the competition against brick-and-mortar retail and possibly dominate the buzzy but unproven on-demand delivery sector.

Mastering delivery means high fixed costs

The key thing here is that routinized one-day delivery is going to require a ton of infrastructure. You need warehouses near all the major population centers, the warehouses need to be staffed with people and/or robots, and you need to be putting tons of trucks in the field actually doing the door drops.

Amazon has lots of initiatives in the field ranging from drones to physical stores to try to support this ambition, but the ideas all have something in common — they are capital-intensive and involve high fixed costs.

That means that to make it work, you need to spread the cost across as many deliveries as possible. Making generic versions of household staples and selling them cheaply seems like an excellent way to do that. The fact that competitors are counting on these to work as high-margin items only means that the opportunity to steal a price advantage is real.

In most cases, obviously, the idea of earning nothing on each item sold and then making it up in volume is a joke. But for Amazon it's no joke. Each zero-margin item it sells helps create the infrastructure to meet more and more customer needs faster and faster.

Yesterday's version:

Today's version has a different headline and picture:

For many principled conservatives, the rise of Donald Trump has proved to be a rude awakening. Their coalition is much less principled, and much more open to manipulative populism, misogynistic vulgarities, and xenophobic appeals than they imagined. As talk radio host Tony Beam put it on the day Ted Cruz dropped out of the GOP primary, making Trump the presumptive nominee,  “I have to face the fact that maybe that is who we are. You've probably seen the numbers. 6 or 7 out of 10 Republicans—I think it's been consistently 6 out of 10 agree that we ought to ban all Muslims from coming to the United States. And so maybe this whole thing is a collective voice saying to me, you think this is not who we are? Yeah, it is. Wake up, dude.”

Unfortunately, the rude awakenings keep coming.

For years, Breitbart.com, the web magazine of the populist right founded by the late Andrew Breitbart, has published laughably shoddy journalism, like the smearing of Juan Carlos Vera and the claim that a drunken President Lyndon Johnson boarded a plane and then accidentally dropped nuclear weapons on the United States.

Many conservatives have nevertheless regarded the site as part of their movement.

This primary season, the site has been aggressively pro-Trump. And here’s what Breitbart.com’s front page looked like late Sunday evening and early Monday morning:

That isn’t an anti-Semitic dog whistle—it’s a human whistle. You’d have to be deaf to miss it. And no, it doesn’t matter that the author of the article is himself Jewish.

(It isn’t clear whether or not he wrote the headline.)

Red State's Ben Howe reacted with understandable disgust:

I’m not rethinking my conservatism in any way. What I’m rethinking is my allies. My shitty, racist, xenophobic, awful, idiotic allies.

— Ben Howe (@BenHowe) May 16, 2016

If that bigoted, deeply irresponsible headline remains atop the site Monday morning, a lot of conservatives will react with similar disgust, some publicly, many others privately. As they do so, they might reflect on all the bygone events suggesting that the people who run Breitbart.com would be like poison for movement conservatism––and their coalition’s prospects in the months ahead, as parts of the “alt-right” that Breitbart.com panders to will keep embarrassing Republicans by advocating on behalf of their nominee with ugly anti-Semitic tropes.

You know the definition of chutzpah—someone who kills their parents then asks the court for mercy because they’re an orphan? Donald Trump is looking to give that definition some competition. A recording has surfaced of Trump pretending to be his own publicist in a 1991 call with a reporter. That’s something Trump did regularly back in the day, but of course he doesn’t want to admit it now, because “yes, I pretended to be my own publicist to fluff myself even more to the press than I’m comfortable doing under my own name, even though I’m a total narcissist” is not the most flattering thing to say about yourself, and again, narcissist.

Asked about that recording by the Today show Friday morning, Trump repeatedly denied having posed as publicist John Miller. That’s moderate chutzpah, considering we can all listen to the recording and hear for ourselves that it’s Trump talking, but here’s the real deal:

When was this, 25 years ago? Wow, you mean you’re going so low as to talk about something that took place 25 years ago about whether or not I made a phone call I guess you’d say under a presumed name … let’s get on to more current subjects.

Why are you asking me about stuff from 25 years ago, says the man who’s made clear that one of his major lines of attack against Hillary Clinton will be over stuff her husband did in the 1990s. Her husband was the one who cheated, but hey, she was, says Trump, a “nasty, mean enabler.” But while Clinton’s response to her husband’s actions is fair game as a campaign centerpiece, reporters asking Trump about his tawdry habit of pretending to be his own publicist is “so low.” Trump better get used to being asked about things from 25 years ago, though, because there is plenty in his record that’s worthy of scrutiny.