USA Today:
The White House has invited Ahmed to Astronomy Night at the White House on Oct. 19, which brings students together with government scientists and NASA astronauts. “It will be an opportunity to talk about science and our solar system and the universe,” White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said Wednesday. “We are hopeful that Ahmed will be right at home here.”
Zach Beauchamp:
It's not hard to figure out why school officials and police in Irving, Texas, decided to arrest, interrogate, and suspend a 14-year-old student who had brought in a homemade clock. The student, Ahmed Mohamed, comes from a family that is Muslim and of Sudanese descent.
This is textbook racial and religious profiling: Mohamed looked like what the Irving police thought terrorists looked like, so they treated him differently.
It's also the perfect example of why profiling doesn't work. And yet, the idea remains disturbingly popular. Just Tuesday, the writer Sam Harris endorsed profiling on a radio appearance: "If Jerry Seinfeld’s going to the airport, [and] he gets the same search that someone who looks like Osama bin Laden does, that’s a crazy misuse of resources."
But Harris, like other proponents of profiling, is wrong: According to security experts, profiling doesn't work, and may actually be counterproductive. It's also dehumanizing and leads inevitably to abuses — as Ahmed's infuriating case demonstrates.
Politico:
For once, it wasn't all about Donald Trump. After the billionaire businessman steamrolled the rest of the Republican field during last month's primetime debate, Trump's rivals managed to get in their punches—and airtime—during the second showdown.
The first question of the night went to Carly Fiorina, who opted not to take the bait and slam Trump. But when Fiorina was asked to respond to Trump’s “Look at that face” remark disparaging her appearance, she was devastatingly succinct.
“Trump says he heard Mr. Bush very clearly,” Fiorina said, playing off Trump’s critique of Bush’s statement earlier this summer that “women’s health issues” are overfunded. “I think women all over this country heard very clearly what Mr. Trump said,” Fiorina said.
More politics and policy below the fold.
Conservative
Rick Wilson:
All my life, the Republican Party has been my political home. Helping it succeed has been my work for decades. It was never perfect, but families never are.
Flawed, and given to wrong turns from time to time, we had good years and terrible years. We elected presidents, took back Congress after decades, lost it, and took it back again. Our leaders ranged from bad to extraordinary. But through it all, the GOP was the one party even vaguely amenable to limited-government conservatism, to at least some adherence to the Constitution over the social preferences of the moment, and to the constraints on government power that our Founding Fathers so cherished. It was nice while it lasted.
Today the Republican Party has two choices before it: It can either reform itself, or fracture and surrender to the Troll Party.
Erica Grieder:
And so I have another warning for any anti-Trump Republican strategists who may be reading this: All of these criticisms are true. But none of them are going to work. The problem is that they’re all criticisms. As such, they give Trump an opportunity to cast himself as the aggrieved party, and playing the victim is, I suspect, the first thing they teach at carnie college. Here’s how it works:
His supporters have already succumbed to the premise that Trump is a conservative outsider—a noble underdog, determined to fight the establishment and to speak truth to power. Having accepted that premise, they are predisposed to take any criticism or disagreement as further evidence for Trump’s claim that he is surrounded by powerful enemies who are determined to thwart him for their own selfish or corrupt or ideological reasons. His ultimate failure will be taken as proof that the game is rigged—against the candidate, but also against people like themselves, his supporters.
It’s shameful that some grown adults would respond to valid criticism so disingenuously, and it’s ominous that they would be rewarded for doing so. But there you have it; Trump is trundling down a well-trod path.
How should Republicans respond? I continue to think, as I did in August, that it’s a bad idea to make common cause with a carnie, as several of Trump’s rivals have done. Life is an iterative game, and strategic decisions made in 2016 may have long-term consequences for candidates like Scott Walker and Ted Cruz. Such calculations certainly help explain the growing acceptability of this victim mentality, which I fear will have long-term consequences for all of us.
By contrast, I think that over the long-term, Perry’s approach will prove to have been a better one. As my colleague Dave Mann put it yesterday, the governor “left on his own terms...he was beaten, but unlike last time, he wasn’t broken.” Perry also, significantly, didn’t break the party in his bid to become its presidential nominee. In suspending his campaign, he went out of his way to affirm his support for conservatism, and to call out contemporaneous trends that threaten it. Republicans should thank him for that, because the party has no future if it’s defined by reference to a person rather than a philosophy.
Olivia Nuzzi:
Trump has ridiculed so many people and places and things that enterprising content creators have made Trump insult generators in his honor. Regular English words are for the time being inextricably linked to Trump because he deploys them so frequently from his insult arsenal: loser, in particular, but also lightweight, stupid, weak, and clown.
But it’s not just that Trump is a prolific and vitriolic critic—it’s that the way Trump tends to make his disapproval known comically calls to mind the schoolyard bully.
Bullying, according to the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, “involves repeated exposure of one person to physical and/or relational aggression where the victim is hurt with teasing, name calling, mockery, threats, harassment, taunting, social exclusion or rumors”—or, to put it more concisely, the entire Trump doctrine.
His behavior can be intimidating. Like when, in July, he stood at the lectern at a South Carolina rally and read aloud to the world Lindsey Graham’s personal cellphone number. It was difficult not to wonder, as Trump gleefully encouraged his audience to “give it a shot” and call Graham, whom he might doxx next.
Mediaite:
Jimmy Kimmel pranks have now gone political.
Republican primary frontrunner Donald Trump spoke to a large crowd in downtown Dallas, Texas, on Tuesday evening, and Jimmy Kimmel Live sent comedian correspondent Jake Byrd to troll The Donald himself.
Outside the American Airlines Center, Byrd got multiple Trump supporters to chant “DTF!” thinking it stood for “Donald Trump Forever,” when really it’s an acronym for “down to fuck” made popular by reality TV show Jersey Shore. He also interrupted several man-on-the-street interviews with Trumpians to make faux-derogatory comments about Megyn Kelly and other Trump nemeses.
But the best pranking was saved for during the actual speech: The Kimmel team somehow secured a seat for Byrd directly behind Trump. The comedian wore his “DTF” hat throughout much of the event: