Bill O’Reilly asked Donald Trump tonight if his birtherism has hurt him with black voters.

No, he didn’t try to nail down Trump on whether he still thinks that nonsense. No, he didn’t find it important that Trump may or may not still believe an insane conspiracy theory about the sitting President of the United States.

He just asked if it hurts his poll numbers.

Trump said “I don’t know, I have no idea” before pointing out he doesn’t talk about it anymore.



O’Reilly asked Donald Trump tonight if his birtherism has hurt him with black voters.

No, he didn’t try to nail down Trump on whether he still thinks that nonsense. No, he didn’t find it important that Trump may or may not still believe an insane conspiracy theory about the sitting President of the United States.

He just asked if it hurts his poll numbers.

Trump said “I don’t know, I have no idea” before pointing out he doesn’t talk about it anymore.

Which, honestly, is kind of an insufficient answer.

CNN’s Dana Bash said what many voters have long suspected. The media has lowered the bar for Donald Trump and goes easier on him with their coverage because they expect less out of the GOP nominee.

Bash was talking about the presidential debates when she provided a perfect example of the media’s double standard in the way they cover Trump and Clinton.

Dana Bash said, “I think the stakes are much higher in this debate and all the debates for Hillary Clinton because the expectations are higher for her because she’s a seasoned politician. She’s a seasoned debater. You know, yes we saw Donald Trump in the primaries debate for the first time, but he is a first-time politician. So um, for lots of reasons. Maybe it’s not fair, but that’s the way it is. The onus is on her.”

Since when does being a first-time candidate mean that the media expects less and grades on a curve?

An old colleague and I were having breakfast this morning when he looked up at the news (I can’t remember which network …MSNBC, I think) and noticed a split screen of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. He lamented long about how terrible both candidates are in this election and I guess we just have to choose the lesser of the two evils or, as he put it, “…put on a blindfold and just pick. It doesn’t really make any difference.”

And that’s when I went off.

I am really sick and tired of people saying both candidates are equally horrible choices, how much America thoroughly hates both of them to the core, that there’s not a single positive trait in either one of them and wow, if only we had voted for that guy behind the deli counter or the neighbor’s cat, America would be WAY better off.

Fuck you. Fuck the deli guy and fuck your neighbor’s cat.

Holding the Senate was always an uphill climb for Republicans this year because they are defending so many more seats than Democrats. But Donald Trump’s polarizing candidacy is converging with long-term shifts in voting patterns to make the hill even steeper.

Since the 1970s, the share of voters who split their tickets—supporting one party for president and the other in Senate races—has steadily declined. If that pattern persists in November, Republicans will likely lose their slim upper-chamber majority because the most competitive Senate races are clustered in blue or purple states where Trump faces the greatest resistance. To maintain control, Republicans will need either a dramatic Trump recovery in states such as Illinois and Wisconsin—or to convince more voters to split their ballots in Senate races than either side has typically persuaded lately. Neither will be easy.

In one respect, Democrats have helped Republican candidates to escape any Trump undertow. Although some individual Senate candidates have linked their opponents to the blustery nominee, Hillary Clinton has mostly chosen not to tie Trump to conservative thought but rather to define him as a fringe departure from it. Republicans are hopeful that will help conservative-leaning voters who can’t stomach Trump revert to their usual party loyalties in Senate races. “Voters are [receiving] multiple messages telling them that you can vote a different way down the ticket,” says Alex Lundry, co-founder of the GOP voter-targeting firm, Deep Root Analytics.

But those messages are competing against a long-term evolution in voters’ behavior that has made it tougher for all senators to survive in effect behind enemy lines—in states that usually prefer the other party for president. As party-line voting inside Congress has reached near-parliamentary levels, voters have responded by treating congressional elections less as a choice between individuals and more as a parliamentary-style referendum on which side they prefer to control the majority.

In yet another case in a rising trend of African-Americans losing their lives over nothing, a man in Las Vegas has been fatally shot. Mohammed Robinson, 31-year-old father of two, got into an altercation with a woman at a McDonalds for apparently failing to hear her request to hold the door open for her.

The woman then complained to her male companion, who promptly drew his weapon and shot Robinson dead.

He leaves behind a girlfriend and his fourteen-year-old daughter, who cannot comprehend why her father has been suddenly taken from her. “My dad would open the door and hold it for the lady but he probably didn’t hear her. I love him. I wish he was still here” mourned Miniya Sampson.

Robinson’s youngest daughter is just three months old and is suffering from a blood sepsis infection.