Vee

Re: The Kingdom- Carol: "You're shitting me, right?" Morgan: "It's a lot." LOL! Good start to episode 2, Carol's on the nose zombie hallucination aside. Her reaction to the whole circus before and after her meeting Ezekiel was priceless. Equally great was Ezekiel unmasking himself to Carol. "I used to act in community theater." In other news, Ezekiel is at least the third lead of color (counting Tyreese) that Melissa McBride has major chemistry with. I'm still for Carol and Morgan myself. They've each made each other evolve. Khary Payton's got it, though. Another cute up up and coming actor among the Kingdom's ranks: Logan Miller, from recent gay indie Take Me to the River, as hapless Ben.

Old Harry Reid plays for keeps.

538, which has been hyper-cautious to a serious fault, is presently putting overall Senate odds at 54%.

New NH poll has Hillary up by 11. MSNBC is basically saying its over. Again mulling landslide. FL black turnout looks poised to exceed 2012, which shocked me.

The last days of Trump. Meanwhile: He's calling unfair on Hillary being re-re-cleared while bitterly annoyed that she got Jay-Z and Beyoncé. "There's no guitars, no pianos!"

Meanwhile, Nate Silver is losing his [!@#$%^&*] on Twitter over having his (overly-cautious, IMO) polling model questioned. He factors in every single outlier and BS poll and then his model becomes schizoid. I think he's a good guy but he got flattened by having Trump win the primaries - which he insisted couldn't happen - and has been wildly overcompensating ever since, and it's made him irrational and his model deeply flawed.

The media is clearly reporting on Hillary's momentum, though. Literally, it's headlines and stories with the words "Hillary" and "momentum". We can only blame the media so far. I understand being worried, but there's a difference between legitimate concern and letting the concern-trolling of overhyped outlier polls or right-leaning Politico get the best of us. Most everything is moving in Hillary's direction. I'm not seeing polls going his way, I'm not seeing serious and consistent or reliable reporting claiming he has truly breached the blue wall. And I'd need more than outliers or a handful of headlines to buy into that kind of counter-narrative. There's a reason the mainstream press isn't running with it, either.

I don't know where you're getting this. Every article, media report (and poll) I've seen explicitly says Hillary has the momentum, not Trump. She's also still well in the lead. The Nevada early turnout alone has many pundits burying him. And no, I don't think he wins Michigan. I also don't think we'll lose the Senate.

Finally watched the premiere. Considerably tamer than I expected, but still ugly. Scott Gimple is a very talented showrunner IMO, but his yen for writing in weird montage was at its worst here - the endless jump-cuts of each character in Rick's mind, with little quick flashes, the shots of them being hypothetically battered, then the lame fantasy sequence. All super-cheesy stuff he usually doesn't go for. Between that and the torture tease it was easily TWD's weakest season opener ever. After a certain point the show's bag of tricks to prolong stuff - focus on a single task while flashing back and forth - gets old, especially when they're not trying to innovate in the ways they often do and the only thing they're putting off is a tired gorefest like the Negan double-kill promised to be. (It was gory, but not nearly as much as I'd expected.) It can only go up from here, and I say that as someone who thinks the Season 6 finale was deeply underrated. That premiere was balls, and I blame the overwhelming pressure over Negan and Lucille from the fanboy audience/Kirkman/geek media. I think if they get back to doing their own thing their way - and Jeffrey Dean Morgan can be a part of that, so long as Negan is not invulnerable forever - they will be alright. But I can't really argue with any claim that the show devolved into misery/torture porn in that premiere. That's a claim often unfairly leveled at the show IMO whereas the comic absolutely is misery porn, but in that premiere it was at its worst. Utterly botched on every level, except the great performances and the wonderful final scene with the survivors struggling to pick up the pieces and help Maggie and Sasha (also really lovely: the moment they gave Sasha and Rosita). And before Carl gets to it: Yes, the Negan/Rick interplay near the end got vaguely sadomasochistic.

I don't discount some of the glee, but I think a lot of them are absolutely terrified and/or contemptuous of Trump. You need only look at yesterday's grassroots twitter movement on behalf of Katy Tur, who Trump continues to abuse and single out at rallies by urging his audiences to attack her. Some journalists are more glib than others as they're in the bubble. And yes, CNN's handling of Lewandowski vs. Brazile is beyond the pale. But there's a difference between the media's glib disconnect from realities and traditional conservative lean - which causes them to cluck about any Democratic win as "not a mandate" so don't get happy, liberals - versus how they've reacted to Trump. The media has gotten more liberal, albeit very slowly with fits and starts, over the last 15 years, and I think most of them are horrified by him. The problem is that it's their bubble and bias that took them this long to stop treating him as just another GOP candidate and more as a horrific nightmare, and now you see most of them still trying to pimp a horse race because that is always the morning order from their producers to save their weekly numbers. But do I think most of the coverage on CNN or MSNBC is favorable to Trump in the last month-plus? No. Meanwhile: Deadspin on Donald Trump's treatment of Donald Jr.

The media smells blood about the FBI and has almost since the end of last Friday, to their credit. I think they are often lazy and facile, but in the end, no, I don't believe most of them want Trump in office. There is a Republican lean in the Beltway media, always has been and maybe always will be, but there is a difference between that crowd and Trumplandia.

Everything I've seen says they're breaking for Hillary. I think you're putting too much into the media's usual drive to keep the horse race til the last hour by hyping outliers. Meanwhile: The DNC thinks it may have been bugged; Howard Hunt would be proud. Per Josh Marshall, Latino turnout is up by 100% in Florida, 60% in NC and 25% in CO and NV.

Giuliani is in hot water - backtracking on CNN after gloating that he'd gotten a heads-up from his FBI sources on their mutiny. New PPP polls have Hillary up by 5 in Michigan, VA and 3 in Colorado.

They got their entire 'investigation' of Hillary from the Breitbart-sponsored book "Clinton Cash". When they didn't get traction with that compelling lead inside the Bureau or at DOJ, they began leaking to the WSJ and then to the press at large, prompting Comey to attempt to intercede by putting out his idiotic statement in the hopes of stifling further leaks. Here's another piece about it, though the Daily Beast article a page or two ago really covers it best. I think another one back there from an inside source also says much of the regional FBI offices are "Trumpland" or Breitbart lovers. I've never lived through anything like this, though you hear stories about Hoover, obviously. The idea that the FBI could have gone so rogue is incredibly disturbing. Someone will have to clean house.

Kurt Eichenwald's latest expose on Trump and Russia. As to the FBI, here's Rachel Maddow. Seems like the entire NY office of the FBI is very chummy with Giuliani and obsessed with Breitbart. Brian Williams seems to enjoy fûcking with Mark Halperin for being a Trump shill (this is not the first time he's done it), and I appreciate it.

In other news, Melania Trump just gave a wooden, tepid and poorly received speech about the evils of bullying - yes, this from the Trump campaign - which may or may not have been plagiarized from... wait for it... Marla Maples.

The Daily Beast and The Guardian do essential reporting on the right-wing arch-conservative makeup inside the mutinous ranks of the FBI.

Josh Marshall dissects the FBI internal meltdown - a bunch of conservative agents stroking themselves over, of all things, the right-wing, Breitbart-funded book "Clinton Cash".

Spotted the last little A.J. from AMC in 2011 in Insidious: Chapter 3 last night. They use a lot of recent soap kids in those movies, oddly enough.

The long-whispered-about Trump underage rape case may be breaking today or tomorrow.

CNN just rolled out an outlier Nevada poll which seasoned pollsters in and out of Nevada (including Jon Ralston) are roundly mocking.

Lawrence O'Donnell just unveiled Hillary leading Trump by 8 in Florida. Getting 28% of the Republican vote. That's of all voters, not just likely and early.

We get it: It's 2005, you can post pictures without showing any ability to resize them and gifs that remind everyone just how horny you are at all times.

Yeah, I really don't think these states are 'tightening' as much as some sources claim for the sake of the horse race.

That ABC poll is an outlier and not typical. It's also national, which means much less at this point. The real numbers are still all in Hillary's favor. There was no movement on her numbers after Friday's Comeygate. Meanwhile, the alleged conservative cabal inside the FBI has gone totally rogue - reactivated their year-long dormant twitter account just to post documents from a Bll Clinton/Marc Rich investigation from 2001.