California Wildfires

Huge coverage at the Los Angeles Times.

Also, "Woolsey fire explodes to 70,000 acres overnight; 2 deaths reported amid fight to save hillside communities."

And at Daily Mail, "A-list fire panic: Caitlyn Jenner's sprawling hilltop Malibu house and the 'Bachelor' mansion are burned, flames reach Kim and Kanye's home and smoke envelopes Lady Gaga's nearby pad as worried Will Smith shows how close he is to the danger zone."

A STATE OF EMERGENCIES: Fires threaten Californians in the north and south while one community deals with the anguish of two kinds of fire in the wake of a shooting followed by an evacuation. Early look @LATimes. pic.twitter.com/lfjR6iXx4P

— michael whitley (@michaelwhitley) November 10, 2018

Good lord this is my street 🙏🏻 https://t.co/IVmsw7pMp9

— Valerie Bertinelli (@Wolfiesmom) November 10, 2018

Pray for Malibu— and #TheBachelor Mansion... pic.twitter.com/D9t8VxFXeo

— Mike Fleiss (@fleissmeister) November 9, 2018

Today's Shopping

At Amazon, Today's Deals. New deals. Every day. Shop our Deal of the Day, Lightning Deals and more daily deals and limited-time sales.

See especially, Outland Living Series 401 Brown 44-Inch Outdoor Propane Gas Fire Pit Table, Black Tempered Tabletop w/Arctic Ice Glass Rocks and Resin Wicker Panels, Espresso Rectangle.

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And, Ray-Ban Classic Clubmaster Sunglasses.

BONUS: James M. Scott, Rampage: MacArthur, Yamashita, and the Battle of Manila.

Getting Into Harvard

At NYT, "Getting Into Harvard Is Hard. Here Are 4 Ways Applicants Get an Edge":

A federal case against Harvard has brought to light many of its closely guarded admissions secrets https://t.co/CGdXLwd8x9

— NYT National News (@NYTNational) November 8, 2018

For three weeks in October, Harvard’s admissions system was on trial before an often standing-room-only crowd in a federal courtroom in Boston. Harvard was accused of discriminating against Asian-American applicants, but the university firmly denied this throughout the trial, which ended last week.

Through testimony and internal documents, the case provided an eye-opening look into the often guarded and opaque admissions process at Harvard. With some 40,000 applicants and about 1,600 available seats, Harvard argued, some students would inevitably be left out.

How admissions officers went about that sifting process seemed to some in the gallery like an exercise in cynicism, which perpetuated the established ruling class, and to others like a noble pursuit, which lifted “diamonds in the rough,” of all backgrounds, into the future elite. Here’s what we learned about who gets an admissions edge:

‘A.L.D.C.’s

Harvard gives advantages to recruited athletes (A’s); legacies (L’s), or the children of Harvard graduates; applicants on the dean’s or director’s interest list (D’s), which often include the children of very wealthy donors and prominent people, mostly white; and the children (C’s) of faculty and staff. ALDCs make up only about 5 percent of applicants but 30 percent of admitted students.

While being an A.L.D.C. helps — their acceptance rate is about 45 percent, compared with 4.5 to 5 percent for the rest of the pool — it is no guarantee. (One of those rejected despite being a legacy was the judge in the federal case, Allison D. Burroughs. She went to Middlebury College instead.)

Harvard’s witnesses said it was important to preserve the legacy advantage because it encourages alumni to give their time, expertise and money to the university.

Students from ‘sparse country’

Every year, Harvard sends out thousands of recruitment letters inviting high school juniors to apply, based in part on their P.S.A.T. scores. Students who take Harvard up on the invitation are about twice as likely as other applicants to be admitted.

In “sparse country” — 20 largely rural states where relatively few apply to Harvard — the university drops the P.S.A.T. score cutoff for white students to qualify for an invitation. In 2013, white applicants with P.S.A.T. scores of 1310 were invited to apply from sparse country, compared with 1350 for white and Asian-American women and 1380 for white and Asian-American men outside of sparse country. Black, Hispanic, Native American or other minority students needed an 1100 or better to be invited to apply, regardless of location.

Effervescent (or reflective) applicants

Admissions officers are urged to look for applicants with “unusually appealing personal qualities,” which could include “effervescence, charity, maturity and strength of character.”

Outgoing students seemed to benefit most, according to court documents and testimony.

But new guidelines issued days before the trial began last month caution officers that character traits “not always synonymous with extroversion” should be valued, and that applicants who seem to be “particularly reflective, insightful and/or dedicated” should receive high personal ratings as well.

At trial, Harvard did not dispute that Asian-American applicants received, on average, lower personal ratings than applicants of any other race or ethnicity. The plaintiffs said this was evidence of Harvard’s stereotyping of Asian-Americans as industrious but dull. Harvard said it was not the result of discrimination; rather, it was partly because of weaker support from high school teachers and guidance counselors.

“We do not endorse, we abhor stereotypical comments,” the dean of the Harvard admissions office, William Fitzsimmons, testified.

Those with a compelling life story, who have overcome obstacles

Court documents, including guidelines issued to admissions officers, repeatedly showed clear advantages given to poor students and those from disadvantaged circumstances. But stories of besting challenges of other kinds also gave applicants an edge.

In his application, Thang Diep, a Harvard senior who came from Vietnam as a child, talked about being bullied for his accented English, and how affirming it was when a Harvard professor was the first teacher to pronounce his name correctly.

Sarah Cole appeared in court to testify that as a black student from Kansas City, Mo., she had worked hard to get a scholarship to a prestigious private college-prep school, but suffered socially for it. She said white teachers told her she was not smart enough to excel, and customers at her job laughed at her for wearing a Stanford T-shirt...

Still more.

Harvard's going to lose this case, especially on the effervescent" criteria, which systematically limits Asian acceptance rates. 

'Your Love'

Honestly, I don't remember this song from the '80s, so since 93.1 Jack FM's been playing it, I checked it out.

The haircuts are the pure giveaway, lol.

From Tuesday morning's drive-time, the Outfield:

I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For
U2
6:46am

All Along The Watchtower
Jimi Hendrix
6:42am


Riptide
Vance Joy
6:38am

Surrender
Cheap Trick
6:34am

Longview
Green Day
6:23am

Your Love
The Outfield
6:19am

Radioactive
Imagine Dragons
6:16am

I Won't Back Down
Tom Petty
6:13am

Shout
Tears For Fears
6:07am

Summer Of '69
Bryan Adams
6:04am

Polarization Makes Gains in Senate, But Costs Republicans the House

A good piece, at LAT, "Republicans depend on Trump’s polarizing approach to gain in the Senate, but it costs them the House":

Throughout his 22 months in office, President Trump has focused intensely on a single political priority — maintaining the support of his base, even at the risk of alienating millions of other voters.

Tuesday night’s election proved both the wisdom and the risk of that approach.

In a deeply divided country, Trump’s efforts to stoke his supporters’ enthusiasm helped his party expand its margin in the Senate. But his heated attacks on opponents and denunciations of immigrants also helped Democrats retake control of the House and make major gains in races for governor.

White House aides were quick to pronounce the outcome a victory for the president. But if it was, it came with ominous overtones for his next big political challenge, in 2020.

Democrats won significant victories statewide in each of the big mid-Atlantic and Midwestern industrial states where Trump secured his upset victory two years ago. Their control of the House will give them license to investigate him and his associates for the next two years, a prospect no president welcomes, especially not one seeking reelection.

Overall, Democratic congressional candidates won considerably more votes than their Republican opponents. Like winning the popular vote in the presidential race, that doesn’t give a party any additional power. But as a rough gauge of public sentiment, it sets a troubling marker for Trump.

In 2016, he became only the fifth person in American history to win the presidency while losing the popular vote. No one has pulled that off twice.

The night provided a split decision in which the country’s liberal, Democratic cities and its conservative, Republican rural areas moved further apart politically than ever, leaving neither side with the sort of clear majority needed to resolve major national issues.

That’s not just a political abstraction. Settling big national issues almost always requires one party having the political strength to put its ideas into law.

Without that, Congress can only tinker: Both Trump and Democratic leaders, for example, have said they might agree on more money to build and repair roads, bridges and other types of infrastructure.

But Tuesday’s results point to two more years of political trench warfare and the worsening of major problems — an immigration system that both parties decry as broken, a healthcare system that remains the world’s most expensive even as it fails to cover everyone, rapidly rising federal debt, festering inequality.

Unsurprisingly, roughly three-quarters of voters in exit polls conducted for the major television networks said that the country is becoming more divided politically. Fewer than 1 in 10 said Americans are becoming more united.

For a generation, despite the efforts of four consecutive presidents starting with Bill Clinton, neither party has been able to create a long-lasting electoral majority. This period stands as the longest in more than a century in which neither party has managed to maintain clear dominance, controlling both the White House and Congress.

People in both parties who run campaigns, as well as academic experts who study them, provide a surprisingly consistent list of the reasons why stalemate has proven so persistent.

Personal leadership shortcomings are not the main problem, said UCLA political science professor Lynn Vavreck, coauthor of a newly released book, “Identity Crisis,” which analyzes the causes of Trump’s 2016 victory.

“I don’t think this is a failure of these leaders” as individuals, she said.

Instead, successive presidents have been stymied by a fundamental shift in politics in which both of the two major parties have grown more homogeneous and the mix of national concerns increasingly has turned toward issues of identity. Those two trends hardened partisan lines, making bipartisan compromise tougher and complicating any effort to forge a broader coalition.

Legislators “can shave a dollar per hundred off a tax bill, but how do you get gradations of equality?” Vavreck asked. “These issues are harder. It’s harder to see what compromise would look like.”

As each party has grown more internally united — one liberal, one conservative — party membership has increasingly overlapped with other ways in which people identify themselves — race, religion, region, even occupation and the entertainment choices people make. That has alienated the two sides further from each other, said Lilliana Mason of the University of Maryland.

“If you’re a Democrat, and you go to church with a Republican … it makes you understand them in a way that you wouldn’t have,” Mason said. As Americans have sorted themselves out along partisan lines, “we’ve seen a move away from cross-cutting identities” of that sort. As those dwindle, “people tend to be more intolerant” of those they see only as adversaries, she said.

Republican voters are now overwhelmingly white, conservative, older, rural, often evangelical Protestants. Democrats have have become the party of cities, of racial and ethnic diversity, of college graduates and younger people, and are largely secular. And politics increasingly revolves around “who you are, what your identity is,” Mason said.

Partisan media outlets and social media choices reinforce those identity lines.

A person watching CNN or MSNBC would find that “the world they’re reporting on is a different universe than the world Fox News is reporting on,” said longtime Republican strategist and pollster Whit Ayres.

“You have the ability to listen to only those outlets that reinforce what you already think” and emphasize “the rightness and goodness of your side and the evil and wrongness of the other side.”

Polling provides extensive evidence of the strain that sort of partisanship causes. Almost two-thirds of Americans, 63%, say that when they talk about politics with people with whom they disagree, they find they have less in common than they thought, according to a recent survey by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center.

Over half of Americans, 53%, say they find such political conversations “stressful and frustrating,” Pew found.

That number has grown since 2016, when partisan divisions already ran deep...

Still more.

Lilliana Mason, Uncivil Agreement

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, Lilliana Mason, Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity.

Angry East German Men Fueling the Far Right

At the New York Times, "One Legacy of Merkel? Angry East German Men Fueling the Far Right":

One Legacy of Merkel? Angry East German Men Fueling the Far Right - The New York Times https://t.co/3AWDhXWafo

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) November 6, 2018

EBERSBACH-NEUGERSDORF, Germany — Frank Dehmel was on the streets of East Germany in 1989. Every Monday, he marched against the Communist regime, demanding freedom and democracy and chanting with the crowds: “We are the people!”

Three decades later, Mr. Dehmel is on the streets again, older and angrier, and chanting the same slogan — this time for the far right.

He won freedom and democracy when the Berlin Wall came down 29 years ago on Nov. 9. But he lost everything else: His job, his status, his country — and his wife. Like so many eastern women, she went west to look for work and never came back.

To understand why the far right is on the march again in Germany, it helps to understand the many grievances of its most loyal supporters: men in the former Communist East.

No doubt the far right has made gains across Germany. The Alternative for Germany, or AfD, won 13 percent of votes in last year’s elections, enough to make it the leading opposition voice in Parliament. It is now represented in every one of the country’s 16 state legislatures.

But support for the AfD in the East is on average more than double that in the West. Among eastern men, the party is the strongest political force, with 28 percent having cast their ballots for the AfD last year.

Eastern Man, a figure long patronized, pitied or just ignored in the West, is in the process of again reshaping German politics.

No one more embodies the frustrations of eastern men — or has been more the object of their ire — than Ms. Merkel, an eastern woman who rose to the pinnacle of power and provides a daily reminder of their own failure.

Yet Ms. Merkel never became the ambassador for the East that people yearned for: Living standards in the region still lag those in the West, even after what is perceived as a traumatic economic takeover.

Mr. Dehmel calls her a “traitor” and worse.

After reunification, Mr. Dehmel recalled, western men in suits and Mercedes-Benzes arrived in his eastern home state of Saxony, soon running businesses, running universities, running the regional government, “running everything.”

And that was before more than a million asylum seekers, many of them young men, came to Germany in 2015.

“I didn’t risk my skin back then to become a third-class citizen,” said Mr. Dehmel, now 57, counting off the perceived hierarchy on his fingers: “First there are western Germans, then there are asylum seekers, then it’s us.”

One-third of male voters in Saxony, where he lives, cast their ballots for the far right last year — by far more than any other place in the country...

More.

Today's Shopping

Thanks for your support everybody. October was strong for my Amazon sales promotions. And every little bit helps (i.e., I get to splurge on more books for myself, hehe).

Today's election day, so I won't be having too much blogging until after dinner time. I'll be checking the election returns on the cable networks, and if there's something particularly interesting, I'll be posting some entries.

Be sure to get out there and vote!

In the meantime, here's the promotions.

See, Today's Deals. New deals. Every day. Shop our Deal of the Day, Lightning Deals and more daily deals and limited-time sales.

Also, Lasko 5572 Ceramic Tower Space Heater with Logic Center Digital Remote Control-Features Built-in Timer and Oscillation, Silver.

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More, Outdoor Products Mountain Duffle Bag.

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Here, Samsung 75NU7100 75" NU7100 Smart 4K UHD TV 2018 with Wall Mount + Cleaning Kit (UN75NU7100).

BONUS: William Egginton, The Splintering of the American Mind: Identity Politics, Inequality, and Community on Today’s College Campuses.

What's at Stake in Today's Midterm Elections? Both Sides Say 'Everything'

From Susan Page, "What's at stake in the midterms? Both sides warn the future of our democracy is at risk":

What's at stake on #ElectionDay? https://t.co/vZHzZA16Fy

— USA TODAY Politics (@usatodayDC) November 5, 2018

WASHINGTON – What's at stake?

Democrats warn that the midterm elections Tuesday will undermine the future of America's democracy unless President Donald Trump's authoritarian instincts are curtailed. Republicans argue that the nation's sovereignty is at risk if Democrats prevail.

"Fear is the dominant issue, bar none," said Jeffrey Engel, director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University.

That's particularly remarkable because the economy is strong and the nation doesn't face an instant foreign policy crisis, although there are trouble spots around the world. Instead of a sense of peace and prosperity, the final weeks of the campaign have been dominated by violence and conflict: the mass murder of worshippers at a Pittsburgh synagogue, the mailing of improvised explosive devices to more than a dozen leading Democrats, the images of a caravan of Central American asylum seekers making their way across southern Mexico.

The campaign has crystallized clashing visions of what defines the nation: America First or an increasingly diverse population?

Keep reading.

America's Weimar Moment

This is a great piece, from Joel Kotkin, at the O.C. Register, via Instapundit, "Lurching to a new Weimar":

America seems to be heading inexorably toward a Weimar moment, a slide toward political polarization from which it could be increasingly difficult to return. Weimar — that brief, brilliant and tragic German republic of the 1920s — was replaced by Hitler’s murderous regime in 1933.

Like Weimar, our politics are increasingly defined by violence, whether the Pittsburgh massacre, the mass mailing of bomb-laden parcels, dueling mobilizations on the border, the shooting of Republican Rep. Steve Scalise or, less lethally, the antics by unhinged partisans such as Maxine Waters. Respect for the basic folkways of a functional republic is vanishing, damaged by the angry narcissism of both President Trump and his often-hysterical media enemies...

Let’s start by stating that Donald Trump is no Adolf Hitler, and his increasingly cowed Republican Party no National Socialist clone. But his intemperance has widened gaps that were already gaping. And certainly, his prior, mistaken refusal fully to denounce the alt-right activists at Charlottesville displayed a terrifying ignorance about white nationalists and their agenda.

Yet, less obviously, the road to Weimar is also being paved by his opposition. Trump was elected legally, but from the beginning his opponents — including senior member of the Democratic Party — devalued his election and threatened his impeachment. By claiming to be the “resistance,” as opposed to the loyal opposition, they have set in play a tit-for-tat political war game that is becoming all too real.

In a democracy, norms of transcending partisanship matter. It was the refusal of the various parties in Germany, notes City University of New York historian Eric Weitz, to express faith in free speech and democratic norms that undermined that country’s democracy. In Weimar Germany, he notes, lack of faith in liberal principles infected many, if not most, of the top aristocrats, intellectuals, clergy, bureaucrats and industrialists — most eventually welcomed the authoritarian Nazis. “Democracy,” Weitz notes, “needs democratic convictions and a democratic culture.”

More at the link.

Sabato's Crystal Ball: Final Picks for Election 2018

Larry Sabato and company got egg on their faces in 2016, like just about everybody else, of course.

But I think this projection sounds about right.

See, "Final Picks for 2018":

There is the shifting political landscape that emerged nationally in 2016, with some traditionally Democratic blue collar small cities and rural areas across the North moving toward Trump and the Republicans, and some traditionally Republican suburbs dominated by voters with high formal educational attainment breaking sharply away from Trump and the GOP. Those latter areas make up a significant share of the competitive House districts, many of which seem poised to deliver for Democrats on Tuesday, although some Trumpy, traditionally Democratic turf is part of the Democratic House calculus too.

Keep reading.

Danielle Gersh's Election Day Forecast

Should be quite nice out tomorrow for casting your ballot.

Here's the lovely Ms. Danielle, for CBS News 2 Los Angeles:

Why We're Headed for Huge Turnout

From Charlie Cook, at Cook Political Report:

A week before the midterm elections, both parties are filled with anxiety. Like football wide receivers who have been blind-sided one time too many, many Democrats are hearing real or imaginary footsteps—residual trauma from the 2016 election, when they thought things were going so well until they didn’t.

Similarly mindful of history, Republicans know that midterm elections are referenda on incumbent presidents and that President Trump is a particularly polarizing party leader, evoking the strongest emotions. They also know that in times of one-party rule across the White House, House, and Senate, it’s difficult to shift the blame to anyone else, so midterm elections are particularly explosive.

The Democratic nightmare of Nov. 8, 2016, a day in party history that will live in infamy, was triggered by overwhelming support for Trump in small-town and rural America, combined with white, working-class voters in trade-sensitive manufacturing areas. These were the places and types of people that Franklin D. Roosevelt attracted to the Democratic Party during the New Deal. They had begun flocking to the GOP before Trump came along, but with him as the face and the leader of the GOP, they shifted with much greater enthusiasm. Needless to say, ambivalence towards Hillary Clinton on the other side was a factor as well.

Education has become a key defining variable: The Republican Party has re-centered to those with less than a four-year college degree, and of course men, with ties to women and those with degrees loosening. This is what realignments look like. The gender gap that has been around at least since the days of Ronald Reagan is growing wider. Grievances among certain groups accumulated during eight years of President Obama, the rise of the tea-party movement being one obvious outward sign, then all exploded in 2016, with Trump lighting the fuse.

Any discussion of the voting patterns of these white, noncollege voters should note that this is a very big and broad group. It should be segmented into those who are and have long been conservative, middle-of-the-roaders, and finally those who are liberal and populist, who supported Bernie Sanders in 2016 and are intrigued by Elizabeth Warren, with few sympathies for more-establishment Democratic figures. Noncollege whites are not a monolithic group. It is also important that those who are conservative, white, evangelical Christians—whether they are college-educated or not—are a very distinct and important voting bloc. At least for whites, the Democratic Party has become the secular party.

While many Democratic strategists accuse fellow party members of being bedwetters, overly fretting about what happened two years ago, some very smart Democrats who examine a lot of data and early-voting patterns privately say they are seeing some signs that more Republican/conservative-leaning white working-class voters are showing increased electoral interest that is reminiscent of 2016. Possibly they’ve been triggered by outrage over what they perceive to be unfair attacks on Brett Kavanaugh during the fight over his Supreme Court nomination or, more recently, the caravan of Central American immigrants working their way up through Mexico toward the U.S. border—something they interpret as a middle finger aimed at Trump and the United States...

Keep reading.

Winds of Change in Conservative Orange County

The O.C. was at one time a bastion of American conservatism, but those days may be long gone.

At the L.A. Times, "In Orange County, land of reinvention, even its conservative politics is changing":

If you want to understand how Orange County went from being a conservative fortress to a political battleground with four congressional seats at stake, read this epic @joemozingo https://t.co/FBj9P8HjLp

— (((Mark Z. Barabak))) (@markzbarabak) November 5, 2018

In La Palma Park Stadium in Anaheim, a month before the Bay of Pigs invasion, 7,500 students and parents skipped school or work and gathered to learn about communist plans to take over the United States.

“Right now, we have a 50-50 chance of defeating the communist threat,” Herbert Philbrick, a former FBI agent, told the crowd on March 8, 1961. “Each day our chances grow less.”

Walter Knott, of berry-farm fame, sponsored the five-day “Christian Anti-Communist School” to help Orange County see the world that he saw, one where big government and liberalism led to Soviet domination.

The message stuck. Within the decade, Orange County would have 38 chapters of the conspiracy-minded, ultra-right-wing John Birch Society, which called Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower a “communist tool.” Knott and actor John Wayne were members, as was the county’s congressman.

The rightward mobilization during the suburban explosion of the 1960s gave Orange County a national reputation for hard-line conservatism with a crackpot edge — “nut country,” in the words of Fortune magazine.

The county’s deep pockets funded right-wing candidates and movements throughout the nation. At home it spawned popular but ultimately doomed measures such as the Briggs Initiative in 1978 to ban gays and lesbians from working in public schools, and Proposition 187 in 1994, which would have denied public services to immigrants in the country illegally.

The Republican Party reached its peak in the Reagan era and has been slowly losing its membership edge since 1990, as the diversity of Los Angeles and the world at large started to bleed through the so-called Orange Curtain.

Registered Republicans today outnumber Democrats by only 2 percentage points, down from 22% at the peak, with a large contingent of self-declared independents positioned to swing elections either way. The GOP has a chance of losing four congressional seats in the county in Tuesday’s midterm election. If so, it would be the first time since the 1930s that Orange County would be without Republican representation in the House.

A GOP loss of even one or two seats would be significant, not as a turning point so much as a powerful sign of change — hastened by dislike for President Trump — in this one-time heart of American conservatism.

Orange County seceded from its northwestern neighbor, Los Angeles, in 1889, led by fiercely independent ranchers, sheepherders, beekeepers, citrus growers and crop farmers who had bristled under the control of a rich city 30 miles up the rail line.

The county then was a constellation of small farm and dairy towns in the north and scattered resort towns along the coast. In the south, the basin tapered off into a narrowing valley between the Santa Ana Mountains and the coastal San Joaquin Hills, where sheep and cattle ranches had thrived since California was part of Spain and Mexico.

Americans had taken over the ranchos in the late 19th century after a devastating drought left many old landowners of Spanish ancestry, the Californios, broke.

Lewis Moulton was one of the Yankee migrants. He came from Boston in 1874 and grazed sheep on the open range from Oceanside to Long Beach. Family lore has it that natural gas seeps were so rich in some spots that, as he camped, he would light them to cook his breakfast.

After two decades of renting land, he and a Basque shepherd, John Pierre Daguerre, had enough money to buy Rancho Niguel, which they eventually expanded to 22,000 acres. It was rugged, isolated country, good mostly for grazing. The cheapest land was the steep part near the coast, between what would become Laguna Beach and Dana Point — about $15 an acre. Today, small fractions of an acre go for double-digit millions.

In the second half of the 20th century, these backwater ranchers and farmers, the Moulton family, the O’Neills, Floods, Irvines, Segerstroms, would physically and culturally shape Orange County into the suburban giant it is today.

But there was always an underclass that made their dreams work...

Lots more at the link.

Richard Ben Cramer, What it Takes

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, Richard Ben Cramer, What It Takes: The Way to the White House.

Pete Davidson Mocks Republican Candidate Who Survived IED Attack in Afghanistan (VIDEO)

Dan Crenshaw is the Republican running for the House in Texas' 2nd congressional district. He's a former Navy Seal member who served five tours of combat, two after he lost his right eye in an IED attack in Afghanistan.

Pete Davidson, famous for recently breaking off his engagement to Ariana Grande after less than a week, mocked the military veteran in the "Weekend Update" segment on Saturday. It didn't go over well. (I never watch anyway, but caught the outrage on Twitter.)

At USA Today, "SNL's Pete Davidson slammed for mocking Republican candidate who lost his eye in war."

Fun fact: Dan Crenshaw did three tours BEFORE losing the eye. After he lost the eye, he went back and did two more. https://t.co/mn8XueBd8w

— Emily Zanotti (@emzanotti) November 4, 2018

Emily Miller is Ted Cruz's Campaign Spokeswoman

I've been following Emily Miller for a long time. She used to be on Fox News as a D.C. pundit. Then she was on a local network newscast. She had her book come out, Emily Gets Her Gun, which was widely publicized, as was Emily obtaining her concealed carry permit in D.C., which is a bureaucratic nightmare.

In any case, I saw her tweeting all the time about Texas and I wasn't paying that much attention. But then she was getting picked up by the media while on the campaign trail with Ted Cruz and I googled it. She's Cruz's spokeswoman.

A good lady. She's really taken to the Lone Star State:

How we roll... #CruzToVictory #CruzCrew #Midterms2018 #KeepTexasRed https://t.co/FDAWFb1Ghu pic.twitter.com/cfFRhTZ7dA

— Emily Miller (@EmilyMiller) November 4, 2018

How #JobsNotMobs Took Off

At NYT, "Tracing a Meme From the Internet’s Fringe to a Republican Slogan":

Fascination: Tracing a Meme From the Internet’s Fringe to a Republican Slogan https://t.co/AM1w2qaK7a

— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) November 5, 2018

Since President Trump’s election, his loyalists online have provided him with a steady stream of provocative posts and shareable memes, often filtered up from platforms like Reddit through media channels like Fox News. In return, Mr. Trump has championed many of their messages as his own, amplifying them back to his larger base.

This feedback loop is how #JobsNotMobs came to be. In less than two weeks, the three-word phrase expanded from corners of the right-wing internet onto some of the most prominent political stages in the country, days before the midterm elections...

Keep reading.

Mother of All Meltdowns: If No Blue Wave, Leftist Rage Will Be Off the Charts

Heh. This is great.

At American Greatness, "The Stages of (Liberal) Grief: Anger":

Hot off the presses: my take on how liberal ANGER will intensify after Nov. 6. https://t.co/S2fNoz6ZPE #TrumpDerangementSyndrome #Midterms2018 #Midterms #MidtermElections #MidtermElections2018 #RedWave #RedTsunami #RedWaveRising2018 #RedWave2018 #REDWAVECOMING #Republicans #gop

— Nicholas L. Waddy (@WaddyIsRight) November 4, 2018

Having explored the historical genesis of liberal derangement, especially in the wake of Donald Trump’s election in 2016, and having disclosed the role to be played by Denial after the probable failure of Democrats’ “blue wave” in 2018, we now proceed to the next stage of our analysis. We turn our attention to the forms of liberal Anger that are likely after November 6th.

Anger is, as previously discussed, the dominant emotion discernible in the Left’s reaction to Trumpism. In fact, rage is rampant among liberals. What has kept this anger in check, however, is a sense of assurance that the Trump phenomenon is something akin to a death spasm among conservatives. Leftists have long assumed that “progress” of the sort they desire is inevitable, and indeed they can point to many victories won in the last few decades. Moreover, soaked as they are in identity politics, the Left puts great stock in America’s changing demographics. They presume—understandably, given their inveterate anti-white racism—that the “browning” of America can only foretell doom for Republicans.

They ignore the obvious counterargument: this country has been “browning” for a long time, and the Republican Party is today stronger than it has ever been since the 1920s. In any case, it cannot be overstated how integral it is to the peace of mind of liberals to assume that the Republican Party will soon die an ignoble death, and therefore, they believe, any upsurge in nationalism or conservatism is a temporary aberration. The march of history towards the broad, sunlit uplands of progressivism will soon resume.

The failure of the “blue wave” would be a punch in the gut to this attitude of complacency and self-satisfaction on the Left. The American people will have chosen Trumpism and Republicans not once, but twice. As leftists see it, this will mean an affirmation of “hate” and a rejection of their own worldview of “inevitable” progress. The liberal throng (sometimes understandably mistaken for a mob) will have expended vast energies, and donated vast sums, to achieve a victory that remains elusive if not utterly improbable. The bile will rise in leftist throats as it begins to dawn on them that the last gasp of conservatism, which they perceived President Trump to hail, may instead be an enduring realignment of American politics that is favorable to Republicans. They will despair at the fact that millions of women and minorities, who by rights belong on the Democratic plantation, deserted the cause. They will, in short, experience anger on a scale that will make 2016-18 seem like child’s play.

What will be remarkable about liberal anger post-November 6, however, is that for the first time most of it may well be directed inward rather than outward. What do I mean by that? Up to now, divisions and grudges on the Left have been deferred and subordinated successfully to the overarching project of reversing the effects of the 2016 election. The one thing on which the Left could agree was that it despised Donald Trump and everything he stood for (even if , in some instances, what he stood for was the exact same thing Democrats had long been supporting). A truce was arranged, whereby Democrats and liberals would sweep under the rug any lingering questions about the methods by which Hillary Clinton and the “moderates” in the Democratic Party defeated Bernie Sanders and the progressives in 2016.

Even Clinton’s appalling ineptitude in her conduct of the 2016 election would be forgotten. Liberals would let bygones be bygones, and they would refocus on the urgent task of discrediting and obstructing the work of the Trump administration, and of removing President Trump from office. This left-wing consensus, this facade of liberal unity, will soon collapse in a heap in the early morning hours of November 7, absent the prophesied “blue wave.” Consensus and unity were always understood to be necessary because they were the price of victory in 2018 and beyond. When that victory does not arrive, it will be bedlam.

Liberal anger, therefore, should crest in the weeks and months after the midterms, and it will engender a great deal of internecine fighting among leftists. The Democratic establishment will struggle mightily to tamp down this ugliness, and the media will struggle to conceal it. We can anticipate strident calls from the Sanders wing of the party for the resignation of DNC chairman Tom Perez. He may well heed these calls. Activists will push for the party to move to the left on major issues, and their insistence that a Democratic House, if one is elected, produce articles of impeachment against the President will be more akin to an ultimatum or a threat than a mere request. Impeachment, however, will be unlikely to materialize, because Democrats representing swing districts will not cooperate. These Democratic Congressmen will therefore be subjected to a steady stream of invective from their fellow Democrats. The Democratic caucus, in short, will be riven by divisions as serious as those scarring the Democratic Party as a whole. It is doubtful whether a Democratic House could even function under these circumstances...

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