The Washington Post: Hillary Clinton’s Christian faith, once a political weapon, all but absent from 2016 campaign

Church attendance also has been all but absent from Mrs. Clinton’s schedule, except when she’s turned up behind a pulpit to stump for votes, particularly in predominantly black churches, where her appearances focus largely on how she intends to work with religious leaders to accomplish shared political objectives. [...]

The reason for the shift, analysts say, is twofold. Mrs. Clinton is taking on an opponent, Republican Donald Trump, who is seen as one of the most nonreligious presidential candidates in modern history. Pew polling from earlier this year found that just 30 percent of American voters say they consider Mr. Trump religious, while 48 percent said the same about Mrs. Clinton.

Perhaps more importantly, she now leads a party that, among its white base, if not its core black and Hispanic members, has become an increasingly secular institution. Recent polling shows the Democratic Party includes in its ranks nearly four times as many atheists and agnostics as the GOP.

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Channel Criswell: David Lynch - The Elusive Subconscious

Vox: Why race and identity will remain the dividing line in American politics for a while to come

For the past half-century, the party system has moved from one organized around economics to one organized around social/identity issues. This transition has happened quite slowly, and for the past three decades these two issues have essentially fused along a single cross-cutting dimension for an unusually long time, which is probably the reason politics became so deeply polarized. [...]

For Democratic Party leaders, there are three benefits to maintaining race and identity as the primary dimension of conflict in American politics.

The first reason Democrats want to make politics about race and identity is that they probably hold the majority position, at least if the 2016 election cleavages hold. And going forward, the electorate is only going to grow more diverse and more highly educated, which means that if Democrats get to be the party of tolerance and cosmopolitan social values in a politics organized around these issues, they will be in a strong electoral position. [...]

If the Republican Party were just a party of strategic politicians who wanted to win elections, and had no constraints from activists, donors, or its own principles, its strategy would be very simple: Tone down the racism and identity politics, focus on the economic populism that Trump has at times channeled, and became a truly populist party. If Trump had run a strong populist, anti–Wall Street, anti-TPP, "end the crony corruption of Washington" campaign, he might be winning now. [...]

But perhaps the bigger obstacle keeping Republicans from moving into the potentially winning populist position is that the business and wealthy elites who have long controlled the Republican Party from the top would be horrified to see Republicans take a populist turn. [...]

A more decentralized Congress will likely produce more cross-partisan coalitions, and probably more legislation, but also more uncertainty and possibly chaos.

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Vox: Donald Trump is doing worse with Latinos than the previous 6 Republican presidential candidates

The survey, by America’s Voice and Latino Decisions, found that if the election were held today, 70 percent of registered Latino voters would vote for Hillary Clinton. Only 19 percent would vote for Trump. About 2 percent said they won’t vote for president, 4 percent said they’d vote for someone else, and 4 percent said they’re undecided or don’t know. [...]

In 2000 and 2004, Bush got 35 and 40 percent of the Latino vote. That was up from the share of the vote that Ronald Reagan (35 and 37 percent), George H.W. Bush (30 and 25 percent), Bob Dole (21 percent) got. It was also higher than what John McCain (31 percent) and Mitt Romney (27 percent) got in subsequent elections.

Trump’s numbers, then, are below the previous six Republicans to run for president. And they’re especially low at a time when the Latino population has grown — from 14.8 million people in 1980 to 55.2 million in 2014.

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The New Yorker: Obama the Conservationist

Last month, Obama designated eighty-seven thousand acres in central Maine as a new national monument. He bypassed Congress to make the designation, invoking the Antiquities Act, which was signed into law by Roosevelt in 1906. (The act allows the President to create national monuments “by public proclamation.”) And, on August 24th, he added almost three hundred million acres to the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, northwest of Hawaii; the additional acres made Papahānaumokuākea (pronounced “Papa-ha-now-moh-koo-ah-kay-ah”) the largest ecological preserve on the planet. Obama has now put more acreage under protection than any other President, though the bulk of it is underwater. The historian Douglas Brinkley recently dubbed him “a 21st-century Theodore Roosevelt.” [...]

For many in Congress, underfunding isn’t enough. Last summer, Representative Cresent Hardy, a Nevada Republican, offered an amendment to an appropriations bill that would have sabotaged the Antiquities Act, curtailing a President’s ability to create national monuments. (National monuments are a lot like national parks; most are managed by the Park Service, and many—including the Grand Canyon, first designated by Teddy Roosevelt—have gone on to become parks themselves.) The Hardy amendment was approved by the House but then dropped in the bill’s final version.

More recently, Representative Rob Bishop, a Utah Republican, who is the chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, tried to prevent Obama from creating the preserve in central Maine. Bishop, too, has introduced legislation to undermine the Antiquities Act, which he has called “the most evil act ever invented.” (Last year, he was recorded suggesting that anyone who supports it ought to die.) The Republican National Committee’s 2016 platform—a hair-raising document if ever there was one—seems to subscribe to this sentiment. It calls on “national and state leaders and representatives to exert their utmost power and influence” to wrest land away from federal protection.

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