Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has tried to divert media attention from his poor debate performance, claiming that he “eased up” on Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and suggesting that he would use personal indiscretions of former President Bill Clinton to attack her in the future. By attempting to change the media conversation, Trump seeks to deflect attention from not only his performance, but also from issues raised during the debate such as his taxes, his birtherism, and his attacks on a former Miss Universe.

And news outlets have fallen for his manipulation, a media misstep that a CNN panel acknowledged while discussing the matter. More

When this election began, I was like millions of millennial men: a “Bernie bro” rooting hard for Sen. Sanders.

Watching the candidate of my dreams get steam late and lose in the primary wasn’t so different from watching my favorite football team not have enough energy to complete a fourth quarter rally. Hopeful, exciting, but ultimately deflating and disappointing.

When Hillary Clinton became the presumptive Democratic nominee, I was distraught. Months before I had written about her on Huffington Post, explaining that I despised her not for her gender — as some of her supporters accused — but for her hawkishness, her center-left policies, her husband’s crime bill that incarcerated so many people of color, her support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and her inability to get progressive on climate change policy.

I’ve spent almost every waking hour of every day following this election, reading about Hillary, Donald Trump, both parties’ platforms, and the under-qualified Libertarian and Green Party candidates running. During these months of obsessing over my choice, I’ve watched my position slowly shift. I’ve felt myself start advocating for Hillary more than advocating a vote against Trump, culminating in last night’s debate when she finally, totally, completely won me over.

In an election that features one of the most well-documented liars and scam artist businessmen to ever run for public office, much of the attention has been on him — how we can’t put him in office, give him keys to a nuclear warhead, trust him in the most powerful position in the world. Some of it has been more positive: how he’d turn the system on its head, be a Washington outsider, completely rewrite the script. While it’s easy to make the case for voting against Trump, it occurred to me during the debate last night how much we’ve taken Clinton for granted.
...When November rolls around, you’ll have my vote.

And you’ll get it enthusiastically.

More

CNN:

Libertarian presidential nominee Gary Johnson offered an outta this world solution on Sunday to the planet's environmental crises. "We do have to inhabit other planets. The future of the human race is space exploration," Johnson said on ABC's "This Week." Johnson was responding to a question about comments he made in 2011 at the National Press Club when he said people should think about global warming in the long term, because one day in the distant future, "the sun will engulf the Earth."

Josh Marshall took a long, hard look at today's shitty poll numbers—which don't look good for Clinton—and managed to pick out this kernel of corn:

The Charlotte Police Department released dashboard camera and body camera videos of the Keith Scott shooting over the weekend, but they still left a lot of unanswered questions.

Local news station WFAA reached out to former FBI agent M. Quentin Williams — who has written an entire book on how to prevent yourself from getting shot during confrontations with police — to see if he could provide some definitive analysis of what the video shows.

Among other things, Williams concedes that the videos don’t show whether or not Scott was holding a gun during the shooting, as we don’t get a good look at his right hand from the footage that’s been released.

All the same, Williams said that Scott appears to be complying with the officers’ commands.

“He’s complying in every way — he didn’t get out shooting, he got out backwards complying, but it only takes a millisecond to turn and shoot this officer and this officer,” he said.

All the same, he said that if Scott was holding a gun in his right hand, the police might have been justified in shooting him.

“It’s a tough call but since these officers are in danger I could see why some might consider it justified,” he explained, although he once again emphasized that there is nothing in the videos to indicate Scott was holding a gun.