Nate Silver’s 538 deserves journalism’s worst timing award.  On August 11, 538’s Harry Enten all but crowned Hillary Democratic nominee claiming that the Bernie Sanders surge was “over“.  A few hours later, the first of two polls came out showing Sanders ahead by 7 in New Hampshire.

Black Lives Matter organizers have launched Campaign Zero as part of their fight against police violence. At their website, they grade several of the Presidential candidates on a 10-point scale. Bernie Sanders rates highest with a score of 8. Hillary Clinton received a 2.

The world economy still suffers from a global lack of demand.  That's what caused the market correction in China that sparked a (temporary?) contagion in the rest of the world.  When it comes to the economic basics -- energy, grains and metals, everything's in a bear market.  The Daily Beast asked me to write about the markets and I took my stab. Basically, I think that China is deflating too early.

Over the past few days an awful lot of bad news about and for Hillary Clinton has come out. First the polls: In New Hampshire, she may well be behind Vermont's Senator Bernie Sanders. CNN and Fox polls of Democratic primary voters, released within the past few days show her support below 50% for the first time in this election cycle, including in must-win states Pennsylvania and Ohio. In two short weeks, Sanders halved her 36% lead nationally over him.

Although "Doctor Cleveland" is my nom du blog, I've been splitting time between two cities for years. Like many academics in my generation, I've struggled with the "two-body problem" as part of a couple with teaching jobs at universities in different places. We've had homes in both places, but I've been the primary commuter and my spouse has held down the home front.

Here's a question:  If you were a state lawmaker (male, married) known for sniffy, holier-than-thou, just awful Tea Party politics and you were having an affair with another sniffy holier-than-thou Tea Party lawmaker (female, married) and you realized you were about to get caught, how would you handle it?  Would you think, seriously, that the best way to deflect from the real affair was to invent a phony story about being accused of a liaison with a male prostitute and then get really pissed at the person spreading that story, even though that person was you?

Fox News got record-breaking ratings for its Republican debate in Cleveland. It got one of the top-ten highest cable TV ratings of all time; the other nine are sporting events, mostly big bowl games on ESPN. So Chris Christie and the boys got better ratings than Tony Soprano, and if you'd like to make your own Mad Men joke, here's the place for it. On the other hand, thousands of Fox viewers have denounced Fox's moderators as biased and unfair.

Over on another site, I instinctively defended the premise that the Black Lives Matter protesters were foolish, at best, for protesting at Bernie Sanders events. No real need to recap the arguments here, but I've since read some convincing explanations for why BLM should, in fact, target progressive events where they want to emphasize the importance of their message in the line-up of priorities being discussed.  Heck, while I immediately took the "don't shout him down, free speech doesn't work that way," stance, Sanders went back to the drawing board on his own policies and priorities.

Over at TPM, I wrote a piece about my enjoyment of Trump's using pro wrestling style rhetorical tactics against his fellow Republicans.  While I would, of course, like to see a steel chair, lead pipe or figure four leglock involved...

In Wherefore the Gender Gap, I noted irony in the fact that women greatly prefer Hillary Clinton to Bernie Sanders given Hillary Clinton's initial reaction to deceptively edited video purporting to show Planned Parenthood conspiring to sell fetal parts. Clinton called the dishonest video “disturbing” and refused to rule out government hearings into Planned Parenthood's practices.

Yesterday, some 16 months before the next presidential election, the Republicans launched the first in a l-o-o-n-g series of candidate debates.  Four hours later, the second one took place.

The pundits are all over the map. The NYT's Nate Cohn picked Rubio, Walker, and Kasich. He thinks Bush flubbed it, and Trump "had the weakest performance." But the Atlantic called Trump's performance "one of the standouts of the night," lauding him for turning "weaknesses into strengths" and says Jeb made "a strong impression." CNN and WaPo opinionators agree with Cohn that Rubio was the winner, but Josh Marshall calls him "all but invisible." Ann Coulter weighs in, "Every GOP I'm talking to hated Rubio & Kasich, " but Laura Ingraham at Fox News tweets "@GovMikeHuckabee and @JohnKasich." A Republican focus group in Pella, Iowa described Ben Carson as "ready for prime time," "brilliant," and "someone you can really trust."

Go figure.

A Fox poll released August 3, shows a remarkable gender gap among Hillary Clinton supporters. 60% of women who say they will vote in the Democratic primary prefer Clinton over her closest competitor Bernie Sanders who garners a mere 16% of the female vote. By contrast 38% of Democratic men support Clinton's candidacy and 32% support Sanders. What's interesting about this is that Sanders is stronger than Clinton on the issues that women say matter most to them. This became obvious in their different responses to a secretly filmed and deceptively edited video of Planned Parenthood representatives that falsely purports to show them plotting to profit from abortions.

A University of Cincinnati cop has been indicted for murder. He killed an unarmed black citizen named Sam Dubose, whom he had initially stopped over a minor traffic issue: no front license plate. Why are we still doing this?

We've heard this story before. A ridiculously minor offense, the kind of thing that cops routinely let go, escalates into homicide when a cop kills a black citizen who has no weapon. After Eric Garner and Mike Brown, after Tamir Rice and Freddie Gray and Sandra Bland and Walter Scott, we are still doing this. Why?

I heard the sad news yesterday that E.L. Doctorow has died.   I've read and loved several of his books, so of course I feel as if I know him personally.  I loved Ragtime and The Book of Daniel and Billy Bathgate.  I couldn't get into Loon Lake,but I'll accept that as my problem and not his.  World's Fair and Homer and Langley are both sitting on my shelf waiting to be read. 

His writing is what I would call "luscious with an edge".  It's stylistic and mesmerizing but you know there is something dark lurking nearby.  There is no relaxing with a Doctorow novel, even in the midst of the quiet, beautiful parts.  He will grab you and hold you and take you to places unexpected and thrilling.  He will force you by sheer wordsmithing to accompany him.  He will make you stop and read over and over again the same brilliant, awesomely brilliant, passage. 

He was, as everybody knows, quite a writer.

Imani Gandy who writes "Angry Black Lady Chronicles" is angry at Bernie Sanders. She excoriates him profanely for his admittedly poor response to activists at the Netroots Conference who disrupted first Martin O'Malley and then Sanders and mocks his involvement in the civil rights movement.  Here's my response to Ms. Gandy.

Any discussion with or at Bernie Sanders about race should start as follows:

Why did Donald Trump say in public that John McCain is ""not a war hero" because he got "captured?" Is Trump insane? Not quite, but close. Trump most likely has a major personality disorder. That's not a medical diagnosis, which I can't give; I'm not a psychologist or psychiatrist, and I haven't met Trump.

I don't believe Donald Trump is really running for President. Even before The Donald decided to slam John McCain as "not a war hero" because he "got captured" (as if Trump, who did not serve, would ever have been trusted with a plane),  it hasn't looked like a real campaign. I'm not convinced that Trump will ever consent to a real FEC disclosure filing, and I don't believe he will ever expose his ego to the risk of public defeat at the ballot box. Trump will only stay in if he finds some built-in excuse for losing, like running as a third-party spoiler.

Dear David Brooks,

Thank you for writing to Ta-Nehisi Coates on behalf of white America!  Since you took that on yourself, I suppose the rest of us lumped into this class have been saved a lot of time.  Though, could you have been less embarrassing and condescending about the whole thing?

When you say:

So President Obama is having a couple of pretty good months for a lame-duck President. Obamacare upheld, same-sex marriage legalized nationwide, and the Confederacy-lovers suddenly on the ropes. Things can change fast in national politics, and this post might seem completely wrong in six weeks, but right now, today, Obama's opposition seems about as hapless as they've ever been: unable to cope with events, usually on the defensive and mostly on the wrong foot. And yes, some of this is the usual ups-and-downs of partisan politics.