Why it's Trump's to lose now (seriously)

An expert who has successfully predicted every US presidential election since 1984 forecasts a Trump victory on November 8.

His historic-scientific "keys to the presidency", a 13-point system, posits that if the incumbent party (Democrats this year) fails on six or more of the following points or "keys", it will lose the White House to the challenging party. As such, he notes five guaranteed strikes already against Hillary (highlighted red), with a sixth possible (orange).

1. Party Mandate: After the midterm elections, the incumbent party holds more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives than after the previous midterm elections.
2. Contest: There is no serious contest for the incumbent party nomination.
3. Incumbency: The incumbent party candidate is the sitting president.
4. Third party: There is no significant third party or independent campaign.
5. Short-term economy: The economy is not in recession during the election campaign.
6. Long-term economy: Real per capita economic growth during the term equals or exceeds mean growth during the previous two terms.
7. Policy change: The incumbent administration effects major changes in national policy.
8. Social unrest: There is no sustained social unrest during the term.
9. Scandal: The incumbent administration is untainted by major scandal.
10. Foreign/military failure: The incumbent administration suffers no major failure in foreign or military affairs.
11. Foreign/military success: The incumbent administration achieves a major success in foreign or military affairs.
12. Incumbent charisma: The incumbent party candidate is charismatic or a national hero.
13. Challenger charisma: The challenging party candidate is not charismatic or a national hero. 

If anything, one can easily see how things are actually considerably worse for Mrs. Clinton. I would personally add four more key strikes (or near strikes) against her:

2. Bernie seriously challenged Hillary for the incumbent party nomination.
6. Per capita GDP growth in Obama's second term clearly tailed off compared to his first term (notwithstanding a bump in household income last year).
8. We've seen plenty of social unrest reminiscent of the sixties just in the past year and a half.
10. Syria has been a fiasco and it's only getting worse - and the Democrats won't be able to keep it off the election's radar.

Finally, key 13 is another questionable: Donald Trump sure is charismatic, and though he may not be a hero at all, much of the electorate seems to want a villain anyway.

So by this coldly scientific-historic assessment, it's actually Trump's to lose now. And few of us doubt how he'll lose - in fact, why he's still trailing in the polls.

Why Republicans shouldn't complain about Trump's embrace of Putin

The scandal that the Republican establishment is making out of Trump's embrace of Vladimir Putin is yet another sorry attempt to paint the GOP as more moral and principled than it actually has been in practice. Indeed, Democrats and Republicans alike have a long history of embracing left-wing and right-wing authoritarian regimes, respectively, as "friends" or even "allies"; dictatorship itself is never the cardinal sin as far as Washington is concerned - opposition to typically partisan US interests is.

Just as Republicans during the Cold War wholeheartedly supported right-wing paramilitary thugs and murderous reactionary juntas in Latin America as "freedom fighters" against the existential threat of international communism, their Democratic counterparts were equally enamored with the violent Marxist or Maoist insurrectionists that fought against them, whose own records of governance and human rights whenever they did seize power were anything but benign.

In fact, Trump's dalliance with Putin merely exposes the naked self-interest of our foreign policy without inhibition - with democracy and human rights only secondary concerns - which our political establishment has for so long tried to hide. As with everything else this election year, they just can't cover it up any longer, and that's why they're in a tizzy.

For instance, we have an entire cottage industry in the defense and intelligence establishments that has been in cahoots for decades with the Islamic fundamentalist regime of Saudi Arabia - a government and society that can only be described as undemocratic, unrepresentative, and in important ways less socially progressive than Putin's Russia or even rival theocracy Iran. But don't expect anyone in the political and economic establishment on either side of the partisan divide - from Hillary Clinton herself to all our standard congressional Republican defense hawks who rely on customers like the Saudis for their local pork-barrel weapons-making jobs - to complain much about the Saudis' notorious second-class treatment of women (which has admittedly marginally improved in recent years).

Similar things can be said about our relationship with China, although as with Russia, China's inherent geopolitical incompatibility with our global dominance means that its authoritarian excesses are likewise more scrutinized than those of a close ally like Saudi Arabia.

In fact, Russia is politically and socially freer than China, yet because we're not as economically intertwined with it, it's more of an adversary than China; China in turn is politically about as closed as Saudi Arabia and socially more liberal, yet because the Saudis are our main proxy in the Middle East and rely on our protection, we simply don't have the strategic and defense cooperation with the Chinese as we've had with the Saudis since the 1970s.

In the new post-post-Cold War era, Republicans in particular should be breathing a sigh of relief that we're finally coming out of a self-stifling period of trying to be what we can never be on the world stage: a referee governed strictly by our highest idealistic principles. The truth is, we've never secured the freedoms we cherish by siding only with those with identical or even generally like values as ourselves. The real world has never worked that way. Trump's realism with respect to Putin - even if mixed with an uncomfortable personal affinity with a foreign strongman - is another blast of fresh air.

Pope Francis' Pharisaic past is key to his present radicalism

In his three and a half years as pontiff, Pope Francis' groundbreaking change of both tone and teaching - his progressive and even radical shift - is both a confirmation of the broader state and direction of the world, especially the Judeo-Christian Western world, and also a harbinger of how a new equilibrium between tradition and progress will be sought.

More specifically, however, it's also a reflection of his own personal history and clerical career, which in itself is something of a microcosm for the kind of adaptation and evolution that a modern believer has had to face in the twilight of the second millennium AD and turning of the third. Few of Francis' critics appear particularly aware of how deeply his past shapes everything he says and does as the successor of Peter, for if they did, they'd probably be less surprised or at times even scandalized.

For starters, the erstwhile Jorge Bergoglio comes from a strictly conservative social and spiritual background. Despite a loose period of life as a typical young adult in Peronist Argentina in the late fifties and into the sixties, his early faith remained grounded in a traditionalist view of liturgy and moral teachings, passed on to him by his middle-class parents, during a formative period in which the Church around him lost much of its flock to far more progressive versions of both, many of which ended up straying badly from important longstanding dogmas.

As such, the pope knows quite intimately what his conservative and traditionalist critics are really made of: like St. Paul when he was originally the zealous Pharisee, Saul of Tarsus, Francis wasn't merely conservative or traditionalist himself, but quite an active partisan in his fundamentally reactionary beliefs.

That alacrity was largely why, only a few short years after his ordination to the priesthood in the Society of Jesus at the age of 33, he found himself appointed the national director of the illustrious Jesuit order at the very height of its embrace of so-called "liberation theology" throughout Latin America.

With an emphasis on quasi or even overtly Marxist social justice ideology, liberation theology effectively reduced Jesus to a Che Guevara-like egalitarian crusader, and the Church effectively to a countercultural socialist workers' and peasants' movement that swore an atavistic allegiance to him. This was anathema to established Catholic teaching, and the young Father Bergoglio fought passionately to suppress it both within the Jesuit order and throughout the broader Church in Argentina throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s.

He found himself naturally aligning with the right-wing military government that seized power and launched a so-called "dirty war" of violent persecution against left-wing political and social dissidents in 1976, which lasted until its fall from power in 1983 and claimed thousands of lives in extrajudicial torture and executions. This exposed him to later charges of complicity in the state-sanctioned suffering of progressive members of the Argentine clergy, especially his own liberal Jesuit order itself.

Disgraced in the wake of the reestablishment of socialist rule in the 1980s, the now middle-aged Father Bergoglio was largely ostracized both within the Jesuit community and the wider Church. He could have withdrawn into a lifelong resentment and bitterness, but instead took the trial as a higher calling for deeper conversion. It was, figuratively speaking, his meeting with the Lord Jesus on the road to Damascus. The year was 1986, and his change of heart was sealed by the intercession of the Virgin Mary, the "Undoer of Knots" - as is well-documented in his own recollection.

To this day, Pope Francis can proudly point to his youthful zealotry in defending Catholic tradition when it was most inconvenient and unpopular to do so, much like Paul could boast of the faith of his Jewish fathers even long after his powerful turn to the superior way of Christ. He has long overcome all self-guilt and shame over his role in purging the Church of those he perceived to be heretics, because in his discovery of the boundless mercy of God, he has recognized that reconciliation - both with oneself and one's enemies - is the very essence of the Gospel.

And so his papacy is all about tearing down walls and building bridges. For an ancient institution that has for so long been defined primarily by its barriers to free entry and movement - by its heavily guarded gates and imposing ramparts - that's bound to rock the boat, and quite dramatically at that.

Ultimately, the Catholicism - indeed, the Christianity - that Francis is evangelizing is about the final dissolution of all that divides and alienates humanity both from itself and from God. Where his opponents and detractors accuse him of tolerating sin and immorality, his radical outlook points to just the opposite: true holiness and virtue are only attainable when the individual soul is stripped of all its natural and even supernatural defenses and safeguards - that is, from its primeval disordered tendency towards fearful self-preservation - and is thus unshackled to embrace the Divine Providence in its rawest and most undiluted form.

What's behind Trump's resurgence: utter bankruptcy of status quo

So what's behind Trump's shocking resurgence in the polls, barely three weeks after the entire establishment and mainstream media had written him off as the complete joke they'd always hoped he really was?

Well, obviously we're seeing what potential there is with better campaign management - one that shifts gears to bridging divisions instead of fanning them. But more fundamentally, we're seeing the ever fuller exposure of the utter bankruptcy of the status quo in Washington and more generally the elite ruling class as a whole.

This is far, far bigger than Hillary's specific credibility problems which only seem to get worse and worse in regards to the deleted State Department emails and the "pay-to-play", "non-profit" Clinton Foundation...at issue here is ultimately the very legitimacy of the system itself - or more specifically, the way it's gamed or "rigged" to favor a select few vested interests and interest groups with the right access channels.

Our democracy has been "captured" by all manner of corporate and special-interest lobbies for so long now, which has so glaringly segregated our society into relatively few "haves" and a far wider cross-section of "have-nots", that the very notion that we should just continue "business as usual" is becoming anathema to much of the electorate. And critically, this is especially true of the largely independent-leaning center, which has long seen through the deceptive veil of our increasingly pointless culture and ideology wars to recognize how an effective duopoly of national politics has systematically entrenched a virtual monopoly of the most deep-pocketed rentier-plutocrats.

As this long-running exposé of our country's particularly polished form of corruption reaches an ever broader audience with ever intensifying scrutiny, the likes of Hillary and the political establishment of both parties is getting their butts grilled...and unless they have a genuine change of heart, this is just the beginning of their pathetic meltdown.

In the past, they could hide behind the tried-and-true excuses: "We're still the best country in the world!", "Everyone still wants to come to our country!", "Democracy is still the least bad form of governance compared to all the others!"

The reason this defense is crumbling is that even the most compelling apologies for the status quo have their limit - and if we haven't reached it in the 2016 election cycle, we're pretty darn close.

We're collectively a society heading in the wrong direction - effectively regressing towards second or even third-world standards and practices, however gradually and insidiously...this is completely unacceptable, not least because much of the poorer developing world is in fact experiencing an improvement of governance just as we're experiencing a decline.

In this environment, it might hardly matter to the Democrats that their lame-duck incumbent is enjoying stellar approval ratings (50+ percent) for a lame-duck in an election season; it's becoming entirely possible for a cool-headed, independent-thinking voter to respect Obama in his twilight months yet also conclude that some radical break is needed with the status quo.

When something's broken or bankrupt, no amount of kumbaya or good feelings can substitute for a dangerous conviction that those responsible must be held accountable and can't be allowed to keep doing what they've done before.

What's really behind Trump's resurgence is that Hillary and the Democrats have already made their most compelling case - that America remains the exceptional and indispensable nation...as if that deeply ingrained belief wasn't the source of our disillusionment with the country's current state to begin with.