Onyx Lynx

Just as with absolute numbers, the positive or negative nature of the media coverage is of no importance. What is important is the distance from 0—or irrelevance—one is at any given time. This idea, which the constantly trolling Donald Trump has exploited to perfection, we’ll call the Kardashian coefficient, or |k|.

Toward that end, our team questioned police officers on a number of different topics, asking them to call out certain patently false statements:

· Police can tell when a suspect is lying
· People confess only when they have actually committed the crime they are being charged with
· Most judges and jurors fully understand court instructions
· Eye-witnesses are always the most reliable source of case-related information
· Most mentally ill individuals are violent
· All psychopaths are criminals
· We need to be ‘tough on crime’ by giving convicted felons harsher punishments
· The death sentence is an effective way to deter criminal activity
· Excitement improves memory

Research has demonstrated that none of these statements is true, yet we found that, in our questionnaire of 50 true or false items just like this, our sample of police officers scored no better than the general public. Police officers got 39 per cent wrong and members of the public got 37 per cent wrong. The police seemed to know as little about these important policing issues as everybody else.

Making matters worse, we found that our sample of officers generally indicated they exhibited higher confidence in their judgements than the general public, making them more confidently wrong.

On Thursday, Senator Jerry Moran, who is also the former head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, came out and said what needed to be said: Senators should meet with Merrick Garland, hold hearings, and vote. Because the Constitution demands it.

• Nikolaus Harnoncourt, conductor
• Lawrence Van Gelder, journalist and critic

WASHINGTON (AP) — Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump is claiming that the man who tried to rush the stage at his Ohio rally Saturday morning is connected to Islamic State militants — an allegation Middle East experts dismiss as farcical.

On Sunday, Trump signaled to his legion of followers that it might be time to express their anger by becoming "disruptors" at Sanders' events.

"Bernie Sanders is lying when he says his disruptors aren't told to go to my events," Trump wrote on Twitter. "Be careful Bernie, or my supporters will go to yours!"

I'm glad that Yggy [Matthew Yglesias] here has finally seen the light. But he should have been denouncing this jackass nine months ago, where Trump should have been run out of the party instead of being enabled by Yglesias and the Village because Trump somehow represented the "legitimate and very real grievances of working-class white men", with folks telling themselves that Trump would "moderate" in the general and couldn't possibly be as awful as his critics were warning us:

[...]

He was worse. Now he may be President. Was it worth your professional reputation to say "Hey guys maybe he's not so bad", Matt? Because my question is if you're making judgment calls this badly, exactly why should we listen to you in the future?

Okay, see, that makes it even worse. You're saying that Trump actually knows better. Like he knows perfectly well that most Mexicans are not rapists, most Muslims don't hate America, and that whether or not Megan Kelly was on her period has no bearing on how she does her job, he's just ginning up hatred and anger to attract the worst element of American society into his camp, consequences be damned. Which is probably at least partly true. Trump can't possibly be as stupid as he seems to be. But you pointing that out isn't really helpful to him.

Simply put, a population that makes up the core of the Republican base has been committing suicide, overdosing on opioids, and drinking itself to death at a rate comparable to the AIDS epidemic. And the Republicans not only spent zero time trying to help them during the Bush and Obama years, they didn’t even seem to know that this was happening to them.

Yet, she wants us to believe that now when she is elected to the Presidency, she will crack down on an industry that provided her and her husband with such lucrative sinecures. Color me — skeptical, at best. And you wonder why young people, many of them crushed under a heavy burden of student loan debt, and their parents, as well, don’t trust her?

It's really incredible, when you think about it. We are so accustomed to conservative hypocrisy that we seldom stop and marvel at how blatantly brazen they have become.

There's another pattern you've probably noticed. It has to do with conservatives and their relationship to:

A) The black guy in that big white building they don't control anymore, and
B) Facts.

It occurs to me that if the Senators won't do their jobs, they shouldn't get paid. Just like anyone else, if it's too much trouble for them to advise and consent on President Obama's nominee because of some non-existent rule, they should simply forfeit their taxpayer-funded paychecks and benefits until such time as they feel led to do so.

• (Uses a term I hope won't exist in real life, with bonus Monty Python sketch.)
• Rubio's Virginia.