Yesterday I wrote about a Washington Post poll of battleground districts which found that women favored Democratic candidates by 14 points. This was notable but not a world record or anything.

However, most of the WaPo polling was done pre-Kavanaugh. Today, CNN has the results of polling done within the past few days and it shows women favoring Democrats by a stunning 30 percentage points:

I’m really not sure what to think of this. It’s almost too big to believe. And yet, the polling for men looks pretty ordinary, so there’s nothing obviously wrong here. If this really does demonstrate the effect that Kavanaugh has had, liberals shouldn’t feel any qualms about continuing to attack Republicans with gusto about their treatment of women. Republicans are doing their best to scare us away from this by claiming we’re a “mob” that lost support thanks to our assault on Kavanaugh, but don’t believe it. We should keep our attacks loud and strong.

Of course, there’s no reason I should think anything different. I happened to get my advance copy of the November issue of MoJo today, and I have a short piece in it saying exactly that: namely that the white working-class backlash of 2016 was a small and temporary thing. Based on the evidence, I think the backlash was almost solely due to the fact that a black man was in the White House for eight years, and it began fading away the moment he was gone. Overall levels of sexism, racism, and xenophobia are probably back to their 2008 levels already, and Donald Trump’s naked and unrelenting bigotry—which may have served him well during the precise historical moment he ran for president—is now losing him more votes than it gains. Certainly it looks like this has been the case for his handling of the Kavanaugh affair.

This seagull is sitting patiently on a rock near Portmagee, Ireland, on the route out to the Skellig Islands. However, until I pulled up this picture to post it, I had never noticed the bird right below the seagull. Does anyone know what it is?

UPDATE: And the answer is … a baby gull! This is either a herring gull or a ring-billed gull along with a juvenile gull of the same species. The juvenile is showing the usual brown markings of a first-year gull. Probably an offspring of the adult hoping for a handout.

Olivier Douliery/CNP via ZUMA

Jonah Goldberg sez:

Confirming Brett Kavanaugh was the best outcome at the end of a hellish decision-tree that left the country with no ideal option. Reasonable people may differ on that. But what seems more obvious: It’s all going to get worse. Because everyone is taking the wrong lessons from the Kavanaugh debacle.

Goldberg’s lesson is, roughly, that politics is nasty and now it’s going to get even nastier. But that’s not the right lesson either. The right lesson is that the Supreme Court is just too damn powerful. That’s why everyone goes nuts over it.

Consider. Neither Congress nor the states can pass laws that outlaw abortion. The Supreme Court won’t let them. Likewise, Congress has tried to pass various forms of campaign finance reform for more than 40 years, but every time the Supreme Court steps in to hobble it. Gay marriage is the law of the land because the Supreme Court says so. Congress tried to renew the Voting Rights Act, but the Supreme Court killed it—almost literally for no reason except that they were tired of it. Cities can no longer regulate handguns because after 200 years of silence, the Supreme Court suddenly decided it didn’t want cities to regulate handguns. They’ve wiped out affirmative action; prohibited states from banning interracial marriage; restricted police interrogation by insisting on the presence of counsel; banned prayer in public schools; elected a president in 2000; ruled that schools don’t need to be equally funded; and are almost certainly about to embark on a long line of rulings favoring corporations and restricting the regulatory power of the EPA and other agencies.

Some of these are decisions you probably like. Some you don’t. More to the point, though, is that I could go on and on with examples like these. Now considering all that, which would you say is more powerful: one Supreme Court justice out of nine or one senator out of 100? The question answers itself.

When did the Supreme Court become the most powerful branch of government? During the New Deal, maybe. Certainly the Warren Court cemented its power. And the past couple of decades have made its ultimate power beyond any real question. Does anyone doubt, for example, that the court could, if it felt like it, declare adequate medical care a constitutional right of all US residents and force the federal government to make Medicare (or some similar substitute) available to all? Maybe that sounds crazy to you since the current makeup of the court is more likely to do just the opposite, but if gay marriage can become a right overnight, why not health care?

I’m not sure what the answer is here, but it has nothing to do with lifetime tenure of Supreme Court justices. It does have something to do with Congress’s habit of passing vague laws that are wide open for multiple interpretations. Mostly, though, it has to do with the Supreme Court simply deciding that it has a whole lot of authority, and the Constitution providing no real recourse for the other branches of government to do anything about it. As a result, confirming Supreme Court justices is by far the most important thing Congress does, and that’s especially true in a highly polarized era like ours where passing even routine legislation is all but impossible. Until that changes, Supreme Court openings that change the balance of the court are going to remain the nastiest fights in all of American politics.

Ting Shen/Xinhua via ZUMA

The revolving door revolves some more today:

FOX won’t find anyone smarter or more talented than Hope Hicks. So happy for my friend. They are beyond lucky to have you and the East Coast misses you already. https://t.co/mUQUlip5oc

— Sarah Sanders (@PressSec) October 8, 2018

The “new” Fox was created by selling off the entertainment side of the company, and now consists of Fox News, the Fox broadcasting network, several local Fox stations and Fox Sports. Hicks will be in charge of communications for the whole company, the LA Times reports, but “It’s not immediately clear how much of a role Hicks, 29, will have at the New York-based Fox News, where communications has been run for several years by Irena Briganti.”

In the meantime, UN Ambassador Nikki Haley will be leaving her post at the end of the year. I wonder what her reward will be?

Bastiaan Slabbers/NurPhoto/ZUMA

Both sides in the Kavanaugh affair would like to think that it’s going to motivate their base to turn out at a higher rate than the opposition’s base. I get that. But this from Peter Kirsanow is ridiculous:

Because of my daily radio commentaries in the Cleveland market, listeners frequently contact me with their observations on the passing scene. Many have expressed revulsion at the behavior of Democrats and mainstream media (but I repeat myself) during the Kavanaugh saga. Some of the listeners are black, and more than a few are done with Democrats.

Of course, these are mere anecdotes, but recent polling shows President Trump’s approval rating among blacks increasing dramatically. Consider: Trump got 8% of the black vote in 2016 (about standard for GOP presidential candidates). A year later, notwithstanding the avalanche of hysterical accusations of racism and white supremacy, his approval rating doubled to 18%. Today his approval rating ranges between 31-36%. That doesn’t precisely translate into a similar percentage of black votes for Trump or Republicans, but it’s a blaring alarm to Democrats who depend on getting 90% + of the black vote just to be competitive.

As you can probably guess, it’s not true that a third of African-Americans approve of President Trump. The 36 percent number that Kirsanow cites comes—surprise!—from a Rasmussen poll, which might as well be conducted at a GOP convention in Wyoming for all that they’re worth anything. Everyone knows this. The real number for black approval of Trump is in the neighborhood of 10 percent.

On the list of things that ought to be analyzed as clear-headedly as possible, polls are right on top. One of the dumbest things you can do is to twist poll numbers around to convince yourself of things that are manifestly not true. It doesn’t change the facts on the ground, and it doesn’t help you to win elections.

So why bother with this nonsense? Do conservatives actually believe this stuff? Or do they know better, but think it motivates their base to hear things like this? It’s a mystery.

Here’s the latest in my Overexposed LA™ series: a nighttime view of the not-especially-famous 2nd Street tunnel, all lit up in green. At the top right is the much-more-famous Walt Disney Concert Hall, designed by Frank Gehry. I have an overexposed picture of that too, which I’ll show you in a couple of weeks.

I have an appointment this morning to renew my driver’s license. If you never hear from me again, at least you know what happened.

10:30 UPDATE: The DMV has no record of my appointment. Also, if I had wanted a Real ID so that I can fly on airplanes, I should have brought my passport, Social Security card, and a current bill. I have none of that. Anyway, without an appointment I have to go off to a little room and fill out an application on one of the computers.

10:45 UPDATE: All done!

10:46 UPDATE: I’m at the first window. Do I have my confirmation number? No. You should have written it down. There’s a pen at every station. What was I supposed to write it on, my hand? Oh, they’re supposed to give you a piece of paper. They didn’t. Can you look it up by my last name? No, sorry, here’s a piece of paper. Do it again.

10:53 UPDATE: My second attempt was successful and I have been assigned # G249. We are currently serving # G193.

11:15 UPDATE: We are up to # G219.

11:40 UPDATE: For some reason, the G series has stalled at #G248.

11:49 UPDATE: # G249 has finally been called!

11:54 UPDATE: No credit cards are allowed. Only cash and debit cards.

11:55 UPDATE: Off to the camera line.

12:04 UPDATE: Done. That’s 94 minutes from start to finish. Is that good or bad these days?

The Washington Post has surveyed 69 close congressional districts, almost all of them currently in Republican hands. Here are the overall results:

The most interesting thing about the poll is the gender divide. Men prefer Republicans on average by 5 points. Women prefer Democrats on average by 14 points.

This poll was taken over the past two weeks, as the Kavanaugh affair was at its height, and it helps to answer a question: will there be more backlash among men or women? The answer sure appears to be women, whose support for Republicans has dropped to an astonishingly low 40 percent.

If things stay this way, it’s hard to think of a more deserving result. Over the past month Republicans have demonstrated as loudly as they can that they couldn’t care less about women or any of the issues women care about. They deserve a gender-based shellacking about as badly as any political party ever has.

I was talking to a friend yesterday and the subject turned to politics. He thought the Republican tax cut was a great idea because America had the highest tax rate in the world and we couldn’t compete with other countries. I laughed and told him that was totally wrong. Then he said that Trump might not be the greatest president ever, but at least he’s kept all his promises. I laughed again and told him Trump hadn’t even come close. Then the conversation turned to Brett Kavanaugh, and he complained that Sen. Dianne Feinstein had deliberately held onto Christine Blasey Ford’s letter until the very last second before releasing it. I laughed again and said that was exactly the opposite of what happened. Feinstein did her best never to release it, but it got leaked by someone outside her office.

There were a couple of other things he was wrong about, and eventually he said, “Well, look, if this stuff is wrong then how come Democrats aren’t correcting it?” I mumbled some stuff about Fox News and Rush Limbaugh and asked him where he was getting his information. The answer, it turned out, was mostly the Sunday chat shows.

So if this anecdotal conversation is to be believed, conservatives are highly successful at pushing their talking points on the Sunday morning shows—which are mostly watched by moderate political types—but liberals either don’t push back or don’t do it in a way that’s very memorable. Or else liberals just don’t bother showing up. Since I never watch the Sunday shows, I don’t really know which it is. Comments?

Three reporters, one conservative pundit, and nobody to offer a liberal or left perspective on the news.

How the biased media sticks it to the right. https://t.co/f2yrqN9gaB

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) October 6, 2018

A new study from researchers in California has reached some astonishing new conclusions. An interdisciplinary team composed of members from physics, physiology, statistics, and atmospheric sciences began with results from a metastudy of sperm concentration in men. This study (chart on left) confirmed that sperm concentrations have been declining since the early 70s. At the same time, measurements from the Mauna Loa Observatory show that CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere have been rising during the same period (chart on right):

After validating a parameterless model based on surprisingly common consumer software packages, the team derived a transformation equation based on τ = 1 at 1973 for the Mauna Loa data:

y =  π +κx, where π = -238 and κ = -ln(11)

The math behind all this is too advanced for most laymen to understand, but it can be illustrated in chart form quite beautifully:

The correlation is nearly perfect. As CO2 levels change, sperm concentrations in male semen change right along. As the authors put it, “Our global manhood is being steadily shriveled into effeminancy by our huge and rising emission of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.” We need to do something about this right away.

IMPORTANT NOTE: My readers are mostly liberals, and believe me, I know what you’re thinking. Those are just two straight lines. The fancy Greek letters in the equation just change the slope and offset of one of them. Correlation doesn’t mean causation. And you’ve provided no causal mechanism at all.

Right. I get it. Now STFU. Do you want to fight climate change or not? If you do, there’s no harm in a little white lie that convinces men their balls are shrinking, is there? If you think about it, it’s one of the few things that might actually get a reaction from conservative white guys. So just go along, OK?