The Afternoon Links are back! Where have they been, you ask? Regular readers of other TWS newsletters (JVL, Kristol Clear) know: I'm now a proud father of twin girls. They are a handful, but the dog has taken to them! If only he could hold a bottle ... So, fret not, the Afternoon Links are back, but expect that they'll come at a wider range of times than the usual 4 p.m. Parenting advice? Twin tips? Let me know. 

My beloved Indians failed to make the World Series this year, but what a World Series it has been. Lucky for me, I'm sleeping no more than three hours at a time, so I don't. miss. a. thing. As a Cleveland fan, there's not much of a pivot to football, since the Browns are having a winless season. The Browns have, to put it delicately, never been really good since they returned in 1999. But one of the joys of watching them lose has been offensive tackle Joe Thomas, who set an NFL record for consecutive plays: 10,363. Until last week, when he sustained his first season-ending injury since he played at Wisconsin. Over at Sports Illustrated, Joe wrote up his first impression of watching from the bench (read: couch). It's well worth your time. He may never get a Super Bowl ring, but he's a future Hall of Famer for sure.

Speaking of Ohio, be sure to earmark a half-hour for Tim Alberta's Politico Magazine story about John Boehner in retirement. It's amazing. Hill rats like myself have long known about the awesome candor of John Boehner, but Alberta shows the rest of the world: Be forewarned, the language is salty. Here's a taste:

“Gowdy—that’s my guy, even though he doesn’t know how to dress,” he says. Then Boehner leans back in his chair. “Fuck Jordan. Fuck Chaffetz. They’re both assholes.”

Speaking of dogs, a Louisiana man wanted "a lawyer [,] dog" and a court there actually denied his claim that police ignored his request for a lawyer. It's actually stunningly bad ruling. Here's the quote:

"If y'all, this is how I feel, if y'all think I did it, I know that I didn't do it so why don't you just give me a lawyer dog cause this is not what's up."

Naturally, the Internet has taken to memeing the ruling with dog memes.

Maybe Ed Gillespie isn't in that much trouble... or maybe this is the worst political ad in recent months. The Latino Victory Fund has an ad tying Virginia gubernatorial candidate Ed Gillespie to Donald Trump and the Charlottesville protest, and it is obscene. It features various minority children running from a pickup truck flying a ginormous confederate flag and an Ed Gillespie bumper sticker. Implying, of course, that the guy in the truck is trying to kill them like Heather Heyer. 

It cuts to footage of the racist alt-righters in Charlottesville with the reader questioning: “Is this what Donald Trump and Ed Gillespie mean by the American dream?" Trump's response to Charlottesville was... lacking, as we've covered here at TWS, but Gillespie? Denounced the rally fairly quickly and didn't bumble and stumble like Trump did. 

In a shock to nobody, American airlines don't rank too highly in an Economist ranking of international airlines. Delta did best, American Airlines did the worst. Asian carriers typically fared best.

No, Jeff Flake isn't to blame for the Senate's dysfunction. Jason Johnson, an aide who has worked for Ted Cruz, went on a tweet storm to attack retiring Arizona Senator Jeff Flake for the Senate's dysfunction. In reality, the list is a numbered account of how Jeff Flake is insufficiently Ted Cruz, who knows absolutely nothing about sowing the seeds of dysfunction... And at Yahoo News, Jon Ward has a substantive breakdown of each of the claims. Ward correctly observes that the difference between the Jeff Flakes and the Ted Cruzes of the Senate is "a difference that is at the heart of the division rending the Republican Party." And, it's also a look into how sloppy the claims by Johnson are, and how Trumpism corrupts.

Fall is the forefront of the season wars. Listeners of the Weekly Substandard podcast know that fall is experiencing a Trump vs. Establishment-like fight between pumpkin spice and maple. But fall has always been a divisive season. At the Atlantic, Julie Beck has a fun interview with Colin Nissan, author of the well-known "Decorative Gourd Season" essay on the essay and all things fall. My favorite bit was Nissan's word to the fall haters:

"I just don’t know how you can hate it. It’s cozy, there’s delicious foods, the foliage is beautiful. There are built-in activities to fall. Maybe it’s the people who love summer so much and they feel like fall just means winter’s coming. But fall is it’s own beast. You just have to relish it."

It's great to be back, and I hope you'll send me good stories you've read over the intervening weeks, and going forward. Happy fall!

—Jim Swift, Deputy Online Editor

Please feel free to send us comments, thoughts and links to dailystandard@weeklystandard.com.

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