It's not. I think it's even deeper than that. We are being fed news stories that match articles we've already read due to website tracking and therefore, we just get continual reinforcement of whatever views. Literally, dividing the country into two extremes.

I've asked this before and never got a good response. I supported Bush on Afghanistan and opposed him on Iraq. What position am I allowed to take on actions Obama has taken or Clinton might take in order not to be viewed a hypocrite?

And even if the Democrats roll over and join the GOP on a number of issues, there are still very clear differences on issues like LGBT rights, minimum wage, health care, climate change, etc.

Also its without much nuance, to be honest. Most Democrats really weren't all that pissed with Bush for drone warfare.

Would people be less upset about drones if they were just called remote control aircraft as they were for decades previously? Personally, I'm all for anything that keeps our soldiers safer.

At the heart of it all: Who shall be master?

I dunno, it sounds tough on the surface, but it's an easy distinction for me to make personally, probably because it's more of a question of the disparity of someone's level of outrage, rather than the specifics of their position. As long as someone is displaying something close to an equal level of thought and emotion, you could change the particulars of your position every day, and it probably wouldn't set off any of my alarms, but some of the folks that are absolutely frothing to call Trump Hitler on my Facebook feed have been playing see-no-evil for the past 8 years.


Personally, I think the most distressing thing about drones is just the willful secrecy and lack of oversight..it's hard for the public to have an honest discussion about them, let alone trust how they're operating, if nobody's liable for even reporting how/when they're used.

Is it me or was last night better than tonight (so far)?

Last night had Obama and Diamond Joe, of course it was better.

Please ... not blue!

Whew, white.

Chelsea did a great job.

With the notable exception of Mr. Khan. He was incredibly powerful.

I also liked the Reverend from a bit before him.

Eh, tonight was okay but last night was better. Yeah Mr. Kahn was pretty powerful, great line.

I'm good with rich people being taxed more. The thing about corporations paying their fair share ... I want to know how she defines that. There will be a negative impact to the stock market if she wins (but it'll adjust with time).

Big business wants Hillary. Not necessarily because of her policies but because of stability. The devil you know.

I do like Trump's corporate tax plan though. Knock it down to 15% and allow companies to repatriate money for a one-time 10% tax.

Just saw a snippet of the former MI governor Jennifer Granholm impersonate Carly Simon. Pretty cute, had a good chuckle.

About 50 secs in.

Jennifer Granholm Channels Carly Simon To Mock Donald Trump

To me, the root cause is that we, as a society, have gotten a lot more tolerant of willfully anti-social behavior.

This is driven, at least in part, by media saturation (and its anti-social behavior, i.e. people yelling at each other on cable news) and the relative anonymity afforded by using the internet.

I mean, it's one example, but compare Trump to this:


And that was only 8 years ago.

I thought that Mr. Khan's speech was the one part of both conventions that has a chance to break though the chatter. Particularly that image of him pulling out a Constitution and offering to lend it to Trump. It's short; it's simple; and it's a powerful visual. Whoever scripted that moment for the DNC did a great job.

dola:

And though this has nothing to do with anything, I am still curious. It was a perfect prop: blue border with a picture of the Constitution on the front. A little worn and weathered like it's been read a lot.

Was it his? If it was his, was it already worn, or did they crease the page for him? If it wasn't, did they send an intern out to buy a bunch of pocket constitutions so that they could see which one looked best on camera? And was there one person in charge of bending and folding it to make it look weathered?

I can appreciate the shout-out to the media as mostly culpable. We didn't just "evolve" on our own, though face to face communication plays some small role. We are sheep as we spout so many times against one another. The media (MSM, web news, AM radio, Facebook, Twitter) herd us with uncanny effectiveness.

Face to face conversation would probably be better though because we aren't so brazen in our approach. But how are we different than the media? We all live with the unwritten but well respected rule that we don't talk about politics, religion, and race....the media aggressively discusses those issues but almost exclusively one-sided in every venue mentioned above. Why? Viewership, listeners...and ultimately...money. At our expense, of course. This is the legacy of America's freedom of speech. We are blowing it as much as we are blowing our 2nd amendment rights and our private industry rights.

My guess is that he obtained it as part of his naturalization process -- and that he doesn't take his citizenship for granted as many of us do.

Dola:

Fox News Plays Benghazi Commercial Over Khzir Khan's Anti-Trump Speech At The Democratic National Convention

Charles makes a good point here. I think I agree with him that it easily could be assumed that neither of the parties involved knew what they were doing or saying in this exchange over the e-mails.

Charles Krauthammer: Clinton Campaign Contradicts Hillary's Story About Emails | National Review

What exactly are we blowing of our 2nd amendment rights?

I don't get that and its a really strange argument to make, calling for anyone to commit a crime (which hacking is) regardless of whether they're a foreign power isn't something any candidate should be doing.

PS - I don't think Trump was at all serious, but it was in poor taste and aimed at making people think poorly of his rival ... as most of his rhetoric is, it has to be really as he has no credible policies of his own.

I don't really see that, it's being too literal. I'd argue that by asking them to hack into the system to find the deleted e-mails, it implies they get access to all the other e-mails. This includes all those produced and those that are classified that were produced but not to the public.

I think he was serious at that point in time. In the news conference the reporter challenged him a couple times and he kept on going about it.

Khan is the type of person that the GOP should be attracting. He, and those like him, would respond to a conservative message if that message wasn't drowned out by hate. That should worry the GOP more than any single line in his speech.

Decent enough speech, but Hillary has never been the orator that Barack and Bill (Clinton) have been. A few good lines though, definitely.

I've seen a few articles, tweets, comments, about how Republicans are a bit sad that Trump allowed the Democrats to position themselves as the party of values, patriotism, and God and they did it oh, so smoothly.

So regardless of what you think about Debbie Wasserman Schultz, she sure threw together a fantastic convention.

I don't think he was serious - I think he is very clever and knows what will get him coverage in the press, that is something entirely different ..

If the election comes down to discussing topics and viewpoints on serious issues and having to indicate a viable platform Trump loses as he has little knowledge and fewer plans from what I can see, however if it stays at the reality TV level of sound bytes and outrageous comments he's in with a shot ...

That confused me too. We always talk a good game after a mass shooting, but our country's current gun laws are to the right of Antonin Scalia.

But let's be honest here. We heard these exact same comments at the early stages of the Republican primary race. We are not dealing with a conventional political race in any way, shape, or form. If there's a prototypical 'Teflon' candidate, Trump is it. Verbal body blows by his opponents or misplaced comments by him just don't seem to affect him one bit. He just keeps chucking molotov cocktails onto the situation.

The Republican establishment candidates learned it the hard way. Hillary did fine in the confines of her convention. However, the next stage of the election (debates and campaiging) is where Trump really did extremely well in regards to drawing voters into his camp. He's like Phil Hellmuth at a poker table. He'll just keep poking and poking, regardless of how bad it may look, in order to get you off your game. He's going to be doing that exact thing to Hillary Clinton over the next three months. Her ability to get elected over the next stage is going to have very little to do with her policies and much to do with whether she can remain calm and look 'presidential' under the heat of Trump's verbal attacks. It's certainly a great test for her because there are a lot of leaders out there in the world who will test her much the same way if she is elected.

plus, what are 'private industry rights'? That's a new one.

The right to pollute the environment, sell contaminated products, and pay people next to nothing for their labor.

Yep. Looks,just like the one my student had when he was getting his citizenship.

BTW, that was an awesome day, shy Ethoiopian kid got to graduate high school and become a citizen on the same day.

If you want to go with the Hellmuth example that's fine, but given the attacks HRC has endured over the last 25 years (some justified, some not), I am really, really confident that with Trump's silliness, she can "dodge bullets, baby."

Exactly. Also, given the ease with which the interns running her Twitter feed appear to be able to bait Trump into stupid tweets, I think he's the one who should be worried about looking presidential.

Indeed. If there is ANY candidate who could stay calm in the face of any assertion or implication and poke back to make Trump erupt, it's Hillary Clinton.

But I don't think it matters too much on his end. As I mentioned before, he beat 15 other people who were trying to look presidential, mainly because they failed to negotiate the Trump minefield.

I should mention that although I currently would vote for Trump, there's a pretty good chance I'll sway to Johnson in the end.

Fourth Circuit strikes down NC voter restrictions: http://www.ca4.uscourts.gov/Opinions...d/161468.P.pdf

Probably not a huge deal for the presidency because if NC is that close than Clinton has probably already won Virginia, Florida, Ohio, and Colorado. But it may be huge for Senate control.

Umm, I believe you that such articles exist. I'm hard pressed to think they didn't come from liberal authors OR a few stray former conservatives/pseudocons who are dealing with some butt hurt over the beating Trump administered to them.

The reaction I've seen would put Republican disgust with the Ds at an all-time high. The parade of repulsive character after repulsive character to the stage pretty much rendered any hope of rehabbing the party's image moot for a very long time. Even the anti-Trump'ers I know were on a steady rant about that most of the week.

Erick Erickson is a former conservative/pseudocon?

Erickson's credibility took a huge (yuuuuuge) hit during primary season. He wasn't all that notable to begin with frankly, at this point, just a butt hurt loser yapping.

Oh, sorry I misunderstood you. You were upset that actual conservatives were criticizing the pseudocon Donald Trump.

Winning a primary takes a different group of voters than winning the general.

Trump being goaded into saying stupid shit on Twitter will not help him with the middle 10% that's up for grabs (assuming both candidates basically start with 45% in the bag-ish). It simply wasn't a liability in the primary.

Plus, it's also clear that while Clinton probably has an army of interns/staff doing her Twitter feed, Trump appears to do most of his, himself. There's a good chance they'll just keep him exhausted trying to conduct Twitter wars 24/7. :D

Seriously, though, none of his primary opponents had both the resources and the drive to attack and goad Trump on social media.

Jon's using the traditional definition of "conservative", which is "return us to the 19th or 18th century, plzkthx". This differs from the modern GOP, which is aiming for on or about 1951.

Not sure if it means anything, but I'm in north Florida this week and the Jacksonville station is playing a ton of Clinton ads and so far zero Trump ads.

He doesn't have much money to advertise with.

Dems to win NC spiked to 53 cents on PredictIt.

Also, McCrory's re-election price dropped from .43 yesterday to .36 right now.

Wait, so there's actually a FIFTH candidate considered to be "in the race"?
(Granted, that's a pretty low bar to meet, but still)

I don't know that -- until updating my ISideWith quiz just for the heck of it -- I'd even heard the name of this Castle fellow.

Rolling back the early voting was done specifically to eliminate the black vote. No other way to look at it after seeing the data.