It's Labor Day weekend; time to start paying attention to the election

As some sayer of sooths will point out.  At some point.

-- A couple of fresh contenders for the crown of Daily Jackass (honestly, these two seem like the third-string players scrambling for a roster spot) include Tessa Stuart at Rolling Stone with the compilation of greatest hits, and Brent Budowsky at The Hill, calling for a debate between Gary Johnson and ... Bernie Sanders.

 Two of the most genuinely pathetic pieces I have read this cycle. 

-- If you don't understand why Trump has managed to erase Clinton's large and long lead (there's a Mel Brooks/Blazing Saddles joke there) in the national two-horse race polls, just look at one thing: the incessant media coverage of his ridiculous and pathetic immigration "plan".  It's not just because Hillary's Foundation is crumbling or that her e-mail Scandal O'Day resembles a a case of herpes, it's because Trump and his minions dominate the discussion everywhere you look.  I try my hardest to ignore the daily spew but it's become impossible.  What's truly remarkable is how his surrogates manage to catapult the propaganda in the least effective way: #TacoTrucksOnEveryCorner, as if that were a bad thing.  Yes, it's hate speech and bigotry and we'll all be the worse for the experience even after he's finally gone away.  Unless he doesn't go away; consider the horror that the media asks him to comment on every single policy initiative of President Clinton's during the next four years, as they did with McCain following 2008 and Romney after 2012.

Turn him off.  Maybe our corporate teevee media will get the message if the ratings start going down, but I doubt it.

-- Vladimir Putin says he doesn't know who hacked the DNC.  And at this point, what difference does it make?

In an interview two days before a G20 meeting in China with U.S. President Barack Obama and other world leaders, Putin said it might be impossible to establish who engineered the release of sensitive Democratic Party emails but it was not done by the Russian government.

"Does it even matter who hacked this data?" Putin said. "The important thing is the content that was given to the public." 

"There’s no need to distract the public’s attention from the essence of the problem by raising some minor issues connected with the search for who did it," he added. "But I want to tell you again, I don’t know anything about it, and on a state level Russia has never done this."

I believe him.  Which is more than one could say about most of what both Clinton or Trump have had to say about the matter.