SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – AT 11:52 P.M. ET: 

CAPTURED – A suspect has been captured in last night's mall shooting in Washington state, in which five died.  We'd been told, right after the event, that the wanted suspect was believed to be Hispanic.  It turns out he is not.   He is 20-year-old Arcan Cetin, whose family came from Turkey.  (We shouldn't make assumptions, but it's starting to sound familiar.)  We know that he went to high school in the state of Washington, was known as a loner, and had a run-in with police last year.  We expect to hear more in the coming days, as the investigation proceeds.  Nothing has been ruled out.

DEAD HEAT – FROM ABC:   The race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump has narrowed to essentially a dead heat nationally in the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll, raising the stakes dramatically for the first presidential debate Monday night.  A vast 74 percent of Americans plan to watch the debate. And while eight in 10 say it won’t change their minds, that leaves more than enough to shift the balance in an increasingly closely fought contest, with unprecedented levels of qualms about both major-party candidates...In all, 44 percent of likely voters say they’d vote for Trump if the election were today, numerically his best since spring. Forty-six percent prefer Clinton, unchanged from an ABC/Post poll early this month and virtually unchanged since June. The 2-point gap between them is not significant, given the survey’s margin of sampling error. The race has closed from an 8-point Clinton lead in early August.  We should note that, until this up-to-the-minute poll came out, there seemed to be a trend back to Clinton.  The polling later this week, after the debate, should tell us a great deal, but it may not tell us what will happen six weeks from Tuesday, election day.

HIM, TOO? – FROM BRITAIN'S GUARDIAN:    Ghanaian professors are calling for a statue of Mahatma Gandhi to be removed from their campus because they claim he was racist and considered Indians to be “infinitely superior” to black Africans.  A statue of the Indian independence leader was unveiled at the University of Ghana in June by the Indian president, Pranab Mukherjee, who had delivered a speech calling on students to “emulate and concretise” Gandhi’s ideals.  More than 1,000 people have since signed a petition calling for it to be torn down, saying that not only was Gandhi racist towards black South Africans when he lived there from 1893-1914, but that he campaigned for the maintenance of the caste system in his own country.  “We can do the honourable thing by pulling down the statue,” read the petition, which was delivered to the university council on Thursday. “It is better to stand up for our dignity than to kowtow to the wishes of a burgeoning Eurasian super-power. Some harm has already been done by erecting the statue. We have failed the generation that look up to us, namely our students.”  I mean, really. Wasn't Gandhi supposed to be perfect?  Ain't that what the movie said?  In fact, he was a major-league whackjob, whose ideas probably held India back.  He fought Britain, a modern, civilized nation.  Had he had to fight Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia, he would have been gone in a day.

September 24, 2016