The State of the Senate, Con't

Sabato's Crystal Ball Senate team, Kyle Kondik and J. Miles Coleman, are moving Iowa's Senate race between GOP incumbent Joni Ernst and Democratic challenger Teresa Greenfield to Leans D from Toss-up, meaning that the Dems are now favored to take control of the upper chamber. 

In Iowa, Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) is looking increasingly like an underdog against her Democratic challenger, Theresa Greenfield. At the presidential level, Iowa is looking like a true toss-up, and Greenfield seems to be running at least even with — and often better than — Joe Biden in the state.

For political junkies, perhaps one of the most anti-climactic features of the 2016 election was that, across the 34 states that saw contests, the senatorial results lined up perfectly with the presidential picture. That year, no Donald Trump-won states sent a Democrat to the Senate, or vice versa. But Iowans may be in a more split-ticket mood now — or, they may even deliver the Democrats a sweep in the topline races.

As of Monday, Greenfield’s average lead in the RealClearPolitics average was 4.8%, while Biden was up by a more meager 1.2%. Perhaps tellingly, most of that difference comes from Ernst underperforming Trump — her average polling share stands at 42.5%, compared to Trump’s 46.3%. So it makes sense that, despite his sagging national fortunes, Ernst generally is still trying to frame herself as a firm ally of the president.

For Senate Democrats, last quarter’s fundraising numbers were truly historic. For the period spanning from the start of July to the end of September, Democrats in key Senate contests across the country raised a combined $265 million. In Iowa, Greenfield set a state fundraising record — her $29 million quarterly haul was roughly four times what Ernst raised. Candidate fundraising isn’t everything — outside groups are also spending heavily in the state, and Senate candidates in past cycles have lost to lesser-funded opponents — but going into the final stretch of the campaign, Greenfield seems to have the momentum.

In 2014, Ernst had the luxury of running against a gaffe-prone candidate in then-Rep. Bruce Braley (D, IA-1). Though Braley was initially seen as a strong recruit, he fumbled early in the campaign when he was caught on tape speaking derisively about the state’s other senator, Chuck Grassley, at a fundraiser. If Republicans took the Senate majority that year, Grassley was in line to chair the Judiciary Committee — Braley dismissed the veteran senator as a “farmer from Iowa” who didn’t go to law school. Fairly or not, Braley’s campaign never really recovered from that episode, and 2014 ended up being a disastrously bad year for Democrats across the country.

In last week’s debate, Ernst had something of a Braley-esque gaffe herself. Though her down-to-home image plays prominently into her campaign, she didn’t know the break-even price of soybeans, an important cash crop for the state. Greenfield, by contrast, nailed the price of corn when asked. Senate debates across the country have taken on increasingly national tones, but we’d expect Democrats to use Ernst’s debate answer on such a local issue to cast her as out of touch with the state.

The soybeans gaffe seems symptomatic of Ernst’s reelection effort: in 2014, playing up her rural persona and vowing to “make ‘em squeal,” she rode her motorcycle onto the national scene as a political outsider. After a term in the Senate, and running in a totally different environment, Ernst’s campaign seems to have lost some of that 2014 zeal. Though Iowa hasn’t ousted an incumbent senator since 1984, we see Greenfield with the upper hand. The race is moving from Toss-up to Leans Democratic.

Moving Iowa to the Leans Democratic category before North Carolina wasn’t something we’d have expected for much of this year. In April, the Crystal Ball identified a quartet of Senate races that we identified as the Democrats’ “Core Four” states to flip. Back then, it seemed that Democrats’ most feasible path to a bare 50-seat-plus-VP Senate majority ran through Arizona, Colorado, Maine, and North Carolina — in fact, at the time, we cited Montana as the Democrats’ next best pick-up prospect. We now see Democrats as at least modest favorites in those first three states, while Sen. Steve Daines (R-MT) seems to have a slight edge over his challenger, Gov. Steve Bullock (D-MT), in Big Sky Country.

But that's still only a net gain of three seats, and while that would put Kamala Harris as a tie-breaker, the Dems need one more seat, and that mens Cal Cunningham prevailing in NC.

With today’s update, North Carolina is the only Toss-up race left on our senatorial board. Since news broke of his extramarital activities a few weeks ago, former state Sen. Cal Cunningham (D-NC) continues to lead first-term Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC). In some surveys that have been conducted since the scandal broke, Cunningham has, perhaps counterintuitively (or maybe completely expectedly?), expanded his lead in some polls — although both his overall share of the vote and his lead over Tillis in polls are a little smaller than before the scandal broke, according to the RealClearPolitics average.

As we discussed recently, amidst all the dizzying news cycles of the Trump era, Cunningham’s affair may seem outright vanilla, and voters may not end up caring. But Republicans are adamant that the affair has, at minimum, hurt Cunningham’s image. Perhaps the key factor is whether the scandal remains in the headlines and what new developments emerge. Over the weekend, the joint editorial boards of the Charlotte Observer and the Raleigh News and Observer issued an unusual dis-dorsement in the race, noting that they would have endorsed Cunningham, but because of the scandal and how he has handled it, they declined to back either candidate. Given the uncertainty there, plus the state’s purple hue, we’re hesitant to write off Tillis.

 

Still a toss-up in my old home, and there's always Steve Bullock in Montana. 

Vote!

StupidiNews!

• The former CEO of Blue Bell ice cream is facing wire fraud and conspiracy charges in Texas over an alleged cover-up of the company 2015 listeria outbreak in its products.
• The FBI has arrested a Maryland man over a plot to kidnap, torture, and murder Democratic Presidential nominee Joe Biden and his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris on national TV.
• Taiwan's Defense Minister says it is not seeking a "new arms race" with China after the Trump regime sold the island nearly $2 billion in missiles and artillery.
• The death toll from a deadly military crackdown by Nigeria's government has now reached 56 as Amnesty International is warning the world that more deaths will follow.
• NASA successfully landed the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft on tiny asteroid Bennu, touching the surface for six seconds, collecting samples, and leaving safely in one swift maneuver.
  

Last Call For Russian To Judgment, Con't

The FBI threw together a hasty press conference tonight to announce that both Iran and Russia have US voter registration information in hand, and that they are using it to run disinformation operations against US voters. Iran in particular was running an operation where Democratic voters in states like Florida and Alaska received emails from a group purporting to be white supremacist terrorist group Proud Boys, stating that if they did not vote for Trump, that the group would "come after" them.

The U.S. government has concluded that Iran is behind a series of threatening emails arriving this week in the inboxes of Democratic voters, according to two U.S. officials.

Department of Homeland Security officials told state and local election administrators on a call Wednesday that a foreign government was responsible for the online barrage, according to the U.S. officials and state and local authorities who participated in the call, all speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity. A DHS officials also said they had detected holes in state and local election websites and instructed those participating to patch their online services.

The emails claimed to be from the Proud Boys, a far-right group supportive of President Trump, but appeared instead to be a deceptive campaign making use of a vulnerability in the organization’s online network.

First identified on Tuesday by local law enforcement and elections officials in Florida and Alaska, the emails were soon turned over to federal authorities, according to U.S. officials.

The messages appeared to target Democrats using data from digital databases known as “voter files,” some of which are commercially available. They told recipients the Proud Boys were “in possession of all your information” and instructed voters to change their party registration and cast their ballots for Trump.

By suggesting the group had gained access to privileged data, and also possibly penetrated electronic systems to detect how people were voting, the emails seemed designed to create the appearance of an election breach, said cybersecurity researchers. Such a move may serve to undermine confidence in the integrity of the democratic process without posing a genuine risk to the election, these researchers said.

“You will vote for Trump on Election Day or we will come after you,” warned the emails, which by Tuesday night were said to have reached voters in as many as four states, three of them hotly contested swing states in the coming presidential election.

The domain enlisted for the misleading operation, officialproudboys.com, was recently dropped by a hosting company that uses Google Cloud services, according to Google Cloud spokesman Ted Ladd. Without a secure host, the domain stood vulnerable to exploitation, cybersecurity experts said. Voters using Comcast, Yahoo and Gmail accounts were affected.

In addition to reports from Florida and Alaska, a voter in Pennsylvania told The Washington Post she had received one such email, though she suspected it may have been linked to her previous registration in Alaska. The Pennsylvania attorney general’s office had not received reports about the messages, a spokesman, Mark Shade, said Wednesday.

In the worlds of the great Peter Falk as Detective Columbo, "Just one more thing..."

And that thing is this: acting Director of National Intelligence John Ratliffe actually spent the press conference seemingly trying to both clear the "good name" of the Proud Boys and to pin the email attacks on Iran as targeting Trump, when Democratic voters were the ones targeted.

That seems wildly fishy to me. FBI Director Chris Wray followed up at the press conference with news that Russia also was running operations to "influence public opinion" as he put it. Now, Russia would greatly benefit from, say, hacking the Proud Boys domain and sending out these emails to 1) hurt Democrats and 2) allow the Trump regime to pin the blame on Iran.

I don't trust either Ratliffe or Wray. Ratliffe is a known liar, and Wray, in case we've all forgotten, was Chris Christie's lawyer on BridgeGate.

No, this all reeks to high heaven. Keep a weather eye out for the rest of this story. It involves Russia and the Proud Boys, I'm sure of it.

As for Wray himself, well, there are bigger problems.

President Trump and his advisers have repeatedly discussed whether to fire FBI Director Christopher Wray after Election Day — a scenario that also could imperil the tenure of Attorney General William Barr as the president grows increasingly frustrated that federal law enforcement has not delivered his campaign the kind of last-minute boost that the FBI provided in 2016.

The conversations among the president and senior aides stem in part from their disappointment that Wray in particular but Barr as well have not done what Trump had hoped — indicate that Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, his son Hunter Biden, or other Biden associates are under investigation.

  

Wray won't pull a Comey, Barr was completely AWOL from this conference, and he's vanished for weeks actually, ever since Trump contracted COVID-19 earlier this month. The next two weeks could be as fateful in American history as they come.

Lowering The Barr, Con't

With the very real prospect of losing the election in two weeks weighing down his (Heart? Mind? Soul? Trump has none of these actually) prospects for remaining a free man, a furious Donald Trump turns to Bill Barr to engineer a special counsel investigation into Joe Biden before the election, something that even Barr is refusing to do at this point.

President Donald Trump on Tuesday called on Attorney General William Barr to immediately launch an investigation into unverified claims about Democrat Joe Biden and his son Hunter, effectively demanding that the Justice Department muddy his political opponent and abandon its historic resistance to getting involved in elections.

With just two weeks to go before Election Day, Trump for the first time explicitly called on Barr to investigate the Bidens and even pointed to the nearing Nov. 3 election as reason that Barr should not delay taking action. Trump has been leveling accusations of corruption against Biden without verified evidence for months, but is stepping up the pressure in the final days of the campaign.

“We’ve got to get the attorney general to act,” Trump said in an interview on “Fox & Friends.” “He’s got to act, and he’s got to act fast. He’s got to appoint somebody. This is major corruption, and this has to be known about before the election.”

Julian Zelizer, a presidential historian at Princeton University, suggested that Trump’s pressure campaign on Barr has moved into uncharted territory for presidential politics.

“The question is, Does Barr erode the guidelines and reforms from the post-Watergate era and move forward with this?” Zelizer said. “We are seeing a total politicization of the justice system in the final stages of an election.”

Trump’s pressuring of Barr comes as national and battleground polls show him facing an increasingly narrow path to reelection. The president has repeatedly cited Hunter Biden’s past —often with unsubstantiated claims — as a reason that voters can’t trust Biden in the White House.

The president has been promoting an unconfirmed New York Post report published last week that cites an email in which an official from Ukrainian gas company Burisma thanked Hunter Biden, who served on the company’s board, for arranging for him to meet Joe Biden during a 2015 visit to Washington. The Biden campaign has rejected Trump’s assertion of wrongdoing and noted that Biden’s schedule did not show a meeting with the Burisma official.

Trump has yet to specify what crime he believes the Bidens have committed, but that has not stopped him from going as far as suggesting to voters that Biden belongs in jail.

The Justice Department did not respond to requests for comment on the president’s call for an investigation.

 

We're still operating under the assumption that Trump won't have Biden arrested before the election, or after the election. We're under the assumption Trump will go quietly, without triggering nationwide violence from his cult. We're under the assumption that the election, in fact, will still even happen.

 

In 2020, these are assumptions and nothing more. 

They always have been.

They could be wrong.

The Most Taxing Of Explanations, Con't

Good morning.

 

Donald Trump is hiding a secret foreign bank account in China. 

President Trump and his allies have tried to paint the Democratic nominee, Joseph R. Biden Jr., as soft on China, in part by pointing to his son’s business dealings there.

Senate Republicans produced a report asserting, among other things, that Mr. Biden’s son Hunter “opened a bank account” with a Chinese businessman, part of what it said were his numerous connections to “foreign nationals and foreign governments across the globe.”

But Mr. Trump’s own business history is filled with overseas financial deals, and some have involved the Chinese state. He spent a decade unsuccessfully pursuing projects in China, operating an office there during his first run for president and forging a partnership with a major government-controlled company.

And it turns out that China is one of only three foreign nations — the others are Britain and Ireland — where Mr. Trump maintains a bank account, according to an analysis of the president’s tax records, which were obtained by The New York Times. The foreign accounts do not show up on Mr. Trump’s public financial disclosures, where he must list personal assets, because they are held under corporate names. The identities of the financial institutions are not clear.

The Chinese account is controlled by Trump International Hotels Management L.L.C., which the tax records show paid $188,561 in taxes in China while pursuing licensing deals there from 2013 to 2015.

The tax records do not include details on how much money may have passed through the overseas accounts, though the Internal Revenue Service does require filers to report the portion of their income derived from other countries. The British and Irish accounts are held by companies that operate Mr. Trump’s golf courses in Scotland and Ireland, which regularly report millions of dollars in revenue from those countries. Trump International Hotels Management reported just a few thousand dollars from China.

In response to questions from The Times, Alan Garten, a lawyer for the Trump Organization, said the company had “opened an account with a Chinese bank having offices in the United States in order to pay the local taxes” associated with efforts to do business there. He said the company had opened the account after establishing an office in China “to explore the potential for hotel deals in Asia.”

“No deals, transactions or other business activities ever materialized and, since 2015, the office has remained inactive,” Mr. Garten said. “Though the bank account remains open, it has never been used for any other purpose.”

Mr. Garten would not identify the bank in China where the account is held. Until last year, China’s biggest state-controlled bank rented three floors in Trump Tower, a lucrative lease that drew accusations of a conflict of interest for the president. 

 

Sure. No reason to believe that a man with a long history of Russian, Middle East, and European money laundering isn't also in bed with the Chinese government in order to spread the Trump brand name around in exchange for favors.

The account is associated with a front company for Chinese military intelligence. Trump has taken tens of millions of dollars out of the account despite the front company not actually doing much of anything. In other words, it's a patently obvious money laundering slush fund where the Chinese government pays Trump off.

Keep in mind also that the Trump regime has been attacking Joe Biden on China for a year now. It's because Trump is doing secret business with China, so of course he thinks Biden is too, because that's how this game works with Trump. Everyone is as corrupt as Trump is. This of course explains why Trump has been attacking Biden on China for months and months.

The most corrupt politician in American history, full stop.

StupidiNews!

• Archaeologists in Oklahoma have found human remains at the cemetery where experts are looking for victims of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre.
• The CDC reports that deaths in 2020 are 285,000 more than in a regular year due to COVID-19, suggesting that the actual death toll from the virus in the US may be much higher than reported.
• The fiancee of Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi, killed in Saudi Arabia purportedly at the order of the Saudi Crown Prince, is suing the prince's US holdings in court.
• China is defending giving an experimental COVID-19 vaccine to thousands of Chinese citizens, saying it is necessary to help those "most in need".
• Democrats are blasting FCC Chairman Ajit Pai's plan to "revise Section 230" of the Communications Decency Act, saying it could force Twitter and other social media to shut down.
  

Last Call For USA Today, All The Way

Four years after USA Today endorsed voting against Trump, and third parties got enough of the anti-Trump vote for him to win the Electoral College, the national newspaper finally gets around to doing the actual right thing and endorsing Joe Biden. 

Four years ago, the Editorial Board — an ideologically and demographically diverse group of journalists that is separate from the news staff and operates by consensus — broke with tradition and took sides in the presidential race for the first time since USA TODAY was founded in 1982. We urged readers not to vote for Donald Trump, calling the Republican nominee unfit for office because he lacked the “temperament, knowledge, steadiness and honesty that America needs from its presidents.” We stopped short, however, of an outright endorsement of Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee. This year, the Editorial Board unanimously supports the election of Joe Biden, who offers a shaken nation a harbor of calm and competence.

Recent polls show that more than 90% of voters have decided between Biden and Trump, and nothing at this point will change their minds. This editorial is for those of you who are still uncertain about which candidate to vote for, or whether to vote at all. It’s also for those who settled on Trump but might be having last-minute doubts.

Maybe you backed Trump the last time around because you hoped he’d shake things up in Washington or bring back blue-collar jobs. Maybe you liked his populist, anti-elitist message. Maybe you couldn’t stomach the idea of supporting a Democrat as polarizing as Clinton. Maybe you cast a ballot for a minor party candidate, or just stayed home.

Now, two weeks until Election Day, we suggest you consider a variation of the question Republican Ronald Reagan asked voters when he ran for president in 1980: Is America better off now than it was four years ago?

Beset by disease, economic suffering, a racial reckoning and natural disasters fueled by a changing climate, the nation is dangerously off course. We spoke to dozens of people in Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin, battleground states that helped propel Trump into the White House in 2016. Many declined to comment, citing a general disgust with the election or fear of speaking out publicly. While some said they were personally better off, most of those willing to talk on camera expressed anguish and dismay about the nation's direction

I am definitely not better off today than I was four years ago. I think America in general is much worse off today now that Donald Trump has unhooked us from so many of our traditions and our safeguards. … He is trying to tear down the Affordable Care Act, which is criminal.

Anita Giltner of Holland, Michigan

The way (Trump) has handled (COVID-19) so far has just been gross mismanagement. … Trump has repealed a bunch of environmental restrictions, which is really important to me because my age group and my demographic are the ones that are going to inherit the Earth.

Daniel Viar, of Rochester Hills, Michigan, who didn’t vote in 2016

It's getting worse. … There’s not a lot of food around, there’s not a lot of money around, people are getting evicted. … I just wish the United States could pull together. … Why do we got to fight against each other? It’s too much.

Lucinda Young of Toledo, Ohio

You have a president who is … mocking people, attacking people on Twitter. … We’re dealing with diversity and racism right now in our country, and we need a new leader who stands up and faces these challenges, like Joe Biden. ... I think it’s time for a change.

Mecca Vaughn of Milwaukee 

 

It doesn't look good for Trump any way you slice it, and with two weeks to go, the final push to unseat him is on.

 

Mitch Better Have My Money, Con't

Mitch McConnell now believes he has the votes for another doomed Senate GOP Covid-19 package that prioritizes only what Republicans want: more money for businesses and COVID-19 liability shields, and he's expecting our broken media to give him a last-minute win that saves his Senate control.

 

The Senate will hold two votes next week on a Payroll Protection Program bill and $500 billion coronavirus relief package, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said on Saturday.

Why it matters: Hopes for a broader stimulus deal before November's election are fading as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Treasury Secretary remain deadlocked in negotiations on a potential package that McConnell has said his caucus has no appetite for. 

President Trump said last week he would "absolutely" go higher than a $1.8 trillion offer, and that he has directed Mnuchin to do so. But McConnell said he would not put such a deal on the floor, saying on Thursday, "My members think half a trillion dollars, highly targeted is the best way to go." 

Pelosi said Friday that she and Mnuchin would likely continue negotiations over the weekend, per Reuters. The House passed Democrats' revised $2.2 trillion coronavirus relief bill earlier this month.

Details: The Senate will first vote on Tuesday on the PPP measure, before voting Wednesday on a $500 billion stimulus bill that is nearly identical to the one that Democrats blocked in Sept. The stimulus package includes additional unemployment benefits, more than $100 billion for schools, and additional funding for testing, contact tracing and Operation Warp Speed.

What he's saying: "Working families have spent months waiting for Speaker Pelosi’s Marie Antoinette act to stop. They should not have to wait any longer," McConnell said in a statement Saturday.

 

This kabuki act failed last month, so I don't see why McConnell thinks Pelosi will take all the blame now, but that's what our broken media is for, I guess. 

The reality is that McConnell only cares about liability protections for corporations from COVID-19, and once he gets that, there won't be a dime coming for anything else heading into a Biden administration. McConnell will gleefully let the country rot in a depression if he maintains control of the Senate, and there won't be enough Democratic votes to change the filibuster rules even if the Democrats do win the Senate back.

The message is only Mitch McConnell matters.

NEW: @senatemajldr McConnell told his members in a closed door lunch that he told the White House not to agree to a COVID deal with Speaker Pelosi ahead of the election, according to three sources familiar

W/ @JulieNBCNews

1st reported by @ericawerner and @JStein_WaPo

— Leigh Ann Caldwell (@LACaldwellDC) October 20, 2020

I wish voters here in Kentucky would put an end to his career, but they never will.

 

Vote Like Your Job Depends On It (Because It Does)

A Florida company is under fire for including a letter in their recent pay stubs to employees stating that if Biden wins, plant layoffs may have to begin immediately.

Some employees at a Florida manufacturing company feel they were threatened with being laid off if they did not support President Donald Trump.

Daniels Manufacturing Corporation is based in Orlando. Its office displays a large Trump flag on the flag pole outside the building.

According to campaign finance reports obtained by WESH, the company and its president George Daniels has contributed more than $600,000 in this election cycle to President Donald Trump and groups supporting other Republican candidates for office.

While there's nothing inherently wrong with companies supporting political parties or candidates, some employees think what Daniels Manufacturing Corporation did in a recent paystub went too far.

Their paystubs included a letter from Daniels himself warning them that their jobs could be in danger.

"If Trump and the Republicans win the election, DMC will hopefully be able to continue operating, more or less as it has been operating lately," the letter read. "However, if Biden and the Democrats win, DMC could be forced to begin permanent layoffs in late 2020 and/or early 2021."

Stan Smith is a DMC employee, but after getting that letter, he said he's planning to quit.

"Everybody has a choice to make their own decision," Smith said.

Some workers told WESH they were too afraid to speak about the incident for fear they would lose their jobs. Still, others said they supported the president and didn't find the letter offensive or threatening.

"I don't feel like it was correct, to do something like that," Smith said. "That's like me coming to work--because we had all these black killings--and I should come in here and I should wear a Black Lives Matter shirt and bring out hats and pass them out to everyone. I felt like it was unfair."

Daniels declined to be interviewed on camera about the letter, but he issued the following statement:

"I have been doing this for years. I have an obligation to let workers know what could happen, based on the outcome of an election. They certainly should vote for the candidate they want."

Sure. Vote for whomever you like, also if the person your boss hasn't given $600,000 to loses, you might be laid off immediately. But vote for whomever you like.

If this somehow isn't flamingly illegal, certainly nobody in Florida or the Barr Justice Department is going to look into it anyhow. But if you don't think letters like this are going out this week to employees all over the country, you haven't been paying attention.

StupidiNews!

• In a 4-4 ruling, the Supreme Court lets stand a Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision allowing the state to continue to accept and count mail ballots up until three days after the election.
• Ireland has become the first country to re-implement lockdown protocols due to a major wave of new COVID-19 infections in Europe, health officials say more countries will likely follow.
• Both US and British officials are pointing fingers at Russian military cyberattacks against the Tokyo Olympics next year, as well at 2017 French elections and more.
• Thursday's scheduled Presidential Debate will go on as both Donald Trump and Joe Biden will have their mics muted so that the other candidate can make their two-minute answers uninterrupted.
• Apple is turning the old "Remember when MTV played videos?" joke into Apple Music TV, an ad-free service that does nothing but stream videos 24/7.
  

Last Call For The Village Idiots

Not only has the NY Post's "bombshell" story on Hunter Biden been revealed to most likely be deliberate Russian disinformation shopped to the paper through Steve Bannon and Rudy Giuliani, but now the NY Post story itself is falling apart as there are now several questions about how the story came to be coming from NY Post staff themselves.

 

The New York Post’s front-page article about Hunter Biden on Wednesday was written mostly by a staff reporter who refused to put his name on it, two Post employees said.

Bruce Golding, a reporter at the Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid since 2007, did not allow his byline to be used because he had concerns over the article’s credibility, the two Post employees said, speaking on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation.

Coming late in a heated presidential campaign, the article suggested that Joseph R. Biden Jr. had used his position to enrich his son Hunter when he was vice president. The Post based the story on photos and documents the paper said it had taken from the hard drive of a laptop purportedly belonging to Hunter Biden.

Many Post staff members questioned whether the paper had done enough to verify the authenticity of the hard drive’s contents, said five people with knowledge of the tabloid’s inner workings. Staff members also had concerns about the reliability of its sources and its timing, the people said.

The article named two sources: Stephen K. Bannon, the former adviser to President Trump now facing federal fraud charges, who was said to have made the paper aware of the hard drive last month; and Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, who was said to have given the paper “a copy” of the hard drive on Oct. 11.

Mr. Giuliani said he chose The Post because “either nobody else would take it, or if they took it, they would spend all the time they could to try to contradict it before they put it out.”

Top editors met on Oct. 11 to discuss how to use the material provided by Mr. Giuliani. The group included the tabloid veteran Colin Allan, known as Col; Stephen Lynch, The Post’s editor in chief; and Michelle Gotthelf, the digital editor in chief, according to a person with knowledge of the meeting. Mr. Allan, who was The Post’s editor in chief from 2001 to 2016 and returned last year as an adviser, urged his colleagues to move quickly, the person said.

As deadline approached, editors pressed staff members to add their bylines to the story — and at least one aside from Mr. Golding refused, two Post journalists said. A Post spokeswoman had no comment on how the article was written or edited.

Headlined “BIDEN SECRET E-MAILS,” the article appeared Wednesday with two bylines: Emma-Jo Morris, a deputy politics editor who joined the paper after four years at the Murdoch-owned Fox News, and Gabrielle Fonrouge, a Post reporter since 2014.

Ms. Morris did not have a bylined article in The Post before Wednesday, a search of its website showed. She arrived at the tabloid in April after working as an associate producer on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show, according to her LinkedIn profile. Her Instagram account, which was set to private on Wednesday, included photos of her posing with the former Trump administration members Mr. Bannon and Sarah Huckabee Sanders, as well as Roger J. Stone Jr., a friend and former campaign adviser to Mr. Trump. (In July, the president commuted the sentence of Mr. Stone on seven felonies.)

Ms. Fonrouge had little to do with the reporting or writing of the article, said three people with knowledge of how it was prepared. She learned that her byline was on the story only after it was published, the people said.

 

Expect more of this garbage fire propaganda in the last two weeks as the Trumpies empty their vomitorium of bullshit in hope of making something stick to Biden. If anything, it's a life preserver to try to keep the most rabid members of the base believing they have a shot at winning when they don't. Not even Rupert Murdoch's choicest US tabloid is backing this story.

Besides, even FOX News passed on this obvious disinformation. Colby Hall at Mediaite:

Mediaite has learned that Fox News was first approached by Rudy Giuliani to report on a tranche of files alleged to have come from Hunter Biden’s unclaimed laptop left at a Delaware computer repair shop, but that the news division chose not to run the story unless or until the sourcing and veracity of the emails could be properly vetted.

With the general election just three weeks away, Giuliani ultimately brought the story to the New York Post, which shares the same owner, Rupert Murdoch. The tabloid has been exhaustively covering the contents of the laptop — which include everything from emails regarding Hunter Biden’s work for a Ukrainian company to personal photos of the recovering addict — with each morsel being amplified in the conservative media world, including on Fox News’ top-rated opinion programs. Thus far, the Fox’s News division has only been able to verify one email from the tranche leaked.

The former New York City mayor and personal attorney to President Donald Trump has long had a working relationship with Fox News, the cable news network whose opinion shows have an overwhelmingly pro-Trump point of view.

But according to two sources familiar with the matter, the lack of authentication of Hunter Biden’s alleged laptop, combined with established concerns about Giuliani as a reliable source and his desire for unvetted publication, led the network’s news division to pass. Fox News declined to comment on this story.

Some of Fox News’ top news anchors and reporters have distanced themselves from the story. During an on-air report that largely focused on how social media platforms handled this story, Bret Baier said, “Let’s say, just not sugarcoat it. The whole thing is sketchy.”

“You couldn’t write this script in 19 days from an election, but we are digging into where this computer is and the emails and the authenticity of it,” he added.

Chris Wallace also called the story “suspicious” and said, “I can understand the concern about this story. It is completely unverified and frankly, Rudy Giuliani is not the most reliable source anymore. I hate to say that, but it’s just true.”

It's the same garbage from 2016, only the names have been changed.

 

It won't work, and besides, nearly 30 million Americans have already voted. 

 

It's not 2016. It took long enough for us to get back to a winning hand, but it';s not 2016 anymore.

Let's finish them off.

Clinton Derangement Syndrome Is Still A Problem

It's depressingly terrible but in no way surprising to me that the main reason Hillary Clinton lost a close electoral college contest to a serial sexual predator coked-up racist game show host was because our broken media has spent literally my entire adult life, more than a quarter-century now, telling anyone they can that Hillary Rodham Clinton is an awful, evil, soul-sucking bitch, and four years after that election we still have millions of Democrats happily voting for Joe Biden now who would still rather have Donald Trump in the White House than Hillary Clinton.

Samantha Kacmarik, a Latina college student in Las Vegas, said that four years ago, she had viewed Hillary Clinton as part of a corrupt political establishment.

Flowers Forever, a Black transgender music producer in Milwaukee, said she had thought Mrs. Clinton wouldn’t change anything for the better.

And Thomas Moline, a white retired garbageman in Minneapolis, said he simply hadn’t trusted her.

None of them voted for Mrs. Clinton. All of them plan to vote for Joseph R. Biden Jr.

“I knew early that Trump definitely wasn’t the guy for me,” recalled Mr. Moline, an independent. But when it came to Mrs. Clinton, “I guess I had a bad taste in my mouth from her husband’s eight years in office.” He voted for Gary Johnson, the Libertarian candidate, a decision he regrets, and he feels at ease backing Mr. Biden.

“I identify more with Biden — whether that’s being a male chauvinist, or whatever you want to call me,” he said.

The point seems almost too obvious to note: Mr. Biden is not Mrs. Clinton. Yet for many Democrats and independents who sat out 2016, voted for third-party candidates or backed Mr. Trump, it is a rationale for their vote that comes up repeatedly: Mr. Biden is more acceptable to them than Mrs. Clinton was, in ways large and small, personal and political, sexist and not, and those differences help them feel more comfortable voting for the Democratic nominee this time around.

Mr. Biden also benefits, of course, from the intense desire among Democrats to get President Trump out of office. And a majority of voters give the president low marks for his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, the dominant issue of the race. But a key distinction between 2020 and 2016 is that, four years ago, the race came down to two of the most disliked and polarizing candidates in American history, and one of them also faced obstacles that came with being a barrier-breaking woman.

Mr. Biden now leads Mr. Trump in many public polls by bigger margins than Mrs. Clinton had in 2016. In private polling and focus groups, voters express more positive views of Mr. Biden than of Mrs. Clinton, though they know far less about his decades in political office, according to strategists affiliated with both Democrats’ campaigns.

Interviews with dozens of voters, union members and Democratic strategists reveal a party embracing Mr. Biden — a 77-year-old white man — as a familiar political pitch, though some bristled at what they saw as the gender bias in that assessment.

“The Republicans did a fantastic job of making Hillary Clinton seem like the devil for the last 20-plus years, so she was a hard sell,” said Aaron Stearns, the Democratic chairman in Warren County in northwestern Pennsylvania. “It’s just a lot easier with Joe Biden because he’s a guy and he’s an old white guy. I hate saying that, but it’s the truth.”

And four years later there are still people who blame Clinton's loss on her "being a bitch." It amazes me how stupid people are, even after documenting the atrocities for the last dozen years on this blog. 

So yeah, the chief factor in Biden's win is going to end up being that he isn't Hillary Clinton.

The GOP's Race To The Bottom, Con't

Good morning.

Republicans are racists, and they can't stop being racist.

U.S. Sen. David Perdue intentionally flubbed the name of Joe Biden’s running-mate Kamala Harris at a rally Friday for President Donald Trump in Macon, drawing immediate criticism from his Democratic challenger Jon Ossoff and others who called it a “racist tactic.”

As Perdue warned that the Democratic presidential ticket of Biden and Harris would bring “radical socialism” to the country if elected, Perdue dramatically struggled with Harris' name, to the delight of the crowd.

“Kamala? Kamala? Kamala-mala-mala? I don’t know. Whatever.”

Harris and Perdue have served together in the U.S. Senate since 2017, including as members of the Senate Budget Committee. His campaign spokesman John Burke said the Republican “simply mispronounced Senator Harris' name and he didn’t mean anything by it.”

“He was making an argument against the radical socialist agenda that she and her endorsed candidate Jon Ossoff are pushing,” he said.

Ossoff swiftly criticized his Republican opponent on social media.

“We are so much better than this,” Ossoff tweeted, urging supporters to chip into his campaign. He later added: “We are so much better than this.”

And Nikema Williams, who chairs the Democratic Party of Georgia, said he owes voters an apology.

“Senator Perdue’s intentionally disrespectful mispronunciation of Senator Harris' name is a bigoted and racist tactic straight from President Trump’s handbook,” said Williams.

Long a staunch Trump loyalist, Perdue earlier told the crowd that the president had been sent by God.

“This guy is providential. He didn’t happen by accident,” Perdue said. “How in the world in our political system could Donald J. Trump come on the scene in 2016 do what he did? Tell me. God’s watching.”

The Trump campaign scheduled the rally in Macon as a series of recent polls show Trump and former vice president Joe Biden neck-and-neck in Georgia. Trump, who won the state by 5 percentage points in 2016, has little clear path to victory if he loses Georgia in November.

Along with Perdue, state GOP leaders including Gov. Brian Kemp, Sen. Kelly Loeffler, Rep. Doug Collins, former Georgia governor and current Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue, and 14th district GOP nominee Marjorie Taylor Greene also attended the rally for Trump.

 

They trashed Obama's name for years and they still do. They'll trash Kamala Harris's name and they will. But they'll have to put President in front of Obama, and they'll soon have to put Vice-President in front of Kamala Harris, and they damn well know it.

 

It's far from just Perdue, too. Look at the crew of assholes at the Trump Georgia rally, Brian Kemp, mask hater and racist voter subtraction master, Doug Collins, who happily defended Trump's racists tweets time and again, Sonny Perdue, corrupt Agriculture Secretary and food shortage guru, and Marjorie Taylor Greene, QAnon racist, anti-Semite, and general conspiracy crank.

 

What white supremacist Republican racists hate that more than anything is that their kids will learn to pronounce Kamala correctly and start to see her as a human being.

StupidiNews!

• New wildfire evacuations continue in Colorado and Utah as fresh blazes in both states have already scorched a combined 10,000 acres over the weekend.
• Israel says the latest Middle East country it plans to normalize ties with is Bahrain, embattled PM Benjamin Netanyahu says a deal could be reached next month.
• Thousands protested at the Supreme Court building on Saturday to demonstrate against Donald Trump's nomination of Amy Coney Barrett for the Supreme Court.
• A year after President Evo Morales fled the country, Bolivians return to the polls to elect a new President and Congress, Morales ally Luis Arce is leading in the polls.
• GM's automated driving startup Cruise has received permission to test five vehicles in San Francisco, CEO Dan Ammann says "truly driverless vehicles" will be in test by 2021.
  

Last Call For Orange Meltdown, Con't

As I have been saying for the better part of a year now, it's now very clear that if Donald Trump loses this election, he will be indicted when he leaves office. I guarantee you this. He knows it. And he will do everything in his power, legal or otherwise, to prevent this scenario. A helpful primer on CNN:

 

Without some of the protections afforded him by the presidency, Trump will become vulnerable to multiple investigations looking into possible fraud in his financial business dealings as a private citizen -- both as an individual and through his company. He faces defamation lawsuits sparked by his denials of accusations made by women who have alleged he assaulted them, including E. Jean Carroll, the former magazine columnist who has accused him of rape. And then there are claims he corrupted the presidency for his personal profits. 

As President, Trump has been able to block and delay several of these investigations and lawsuits -- including a yearlong fight over a subpoena for his tax returns -- in part because of his official position. Many of those matters have wound through the courts and will come to a head whether he is reelected or not. 

But with the polls showing that Democratic rival Joe Biden is leading in the race, the stakes become much higher for Trump if he loses the election. A raft of legal issues, including a criminal investigation by New York prosecutors, will come into focus in the weeks after Election Day. 

"In every regard, his leaving office makes it easier for prosecutors and plaintiffs in civil cases to pursue their cases against him," said Harry Sandick, a former federal prosecutor in the Manhattan US attorney's office. "For example, he is claiming a higher protection from subpoenas in the criminal cases and also in the congressional subpoena cases, [and that] is based largely on the fact that he is President." 

Some have suggested a formal apparatus for investigating Trump after he leaves office. Rep. Eric Swalwell, a California Democrat, has floated the creation of a "Presidential Crimes Commission," made up of independent prosecutors who can examine "those who enabled a corrupt president," as he put it in an August tweet. "Example 1: Sabotaging the mail to win an election." 

The most serious legal threat facing Trump is the Manhattan district attorney's broad criminal investigation into the financial workings of the Trump Organization. Prosecutors have suggested in court filings that the investigation could examine whether the President and his company engaged in bank fraud, insurance fraud, criminal tax fraud and falsification of business records. 

In the course of that probe, Trump has challenged a subpoena to his accounting firm for eight years of tax returns and financial records. Five courts have ruled the subpoena is valid, and last week Trump faced the latest setback when a federal appellate court denied his appeal, ruling that the grand jury subpoena was not overly broad or issued in bad faith. On Tuesday, Trump's lawyers asked the Supreme Court to block the enforcement of the subpoena to allow it time to appeal to the court. Trump already lost an appeal to the highest court in July, when it ruled that the president is not immune from a state grand jury subpoena. 

New York prosecutors have said the tax records, working papers and documentation around business transactions are crucial to their investigation, which has been underway for more than a year. 

There are legal questions as to whether a state prosecutor could file charges against a sitting president. 

"He's so powerful right now. They know that they can't indict him right now so there is an incentive to build their case and get ready. I think what happens if he loses and leaves office that things will move very quickly," said Jennifer Rodgers, a CNN legal analyst and former federal prosecutor.

 

Now I don't buy for a second that Eric Swalwell would be allowed to go after Trump on federal stuff. If that was really possible, Pence would pardon him on the last day (and who knows, Pence may do just that on January 19th.) But the state crimes, particularly the NY state investigation into the Trump Organization, that's enough to put Trump away for good and he knows it.

"Maybe I'll have to leave the country. I don't know." -- Trump on what could happen if he loses to Biden pic.twitter.com/NGrXDwjaSd

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 17, 2020

 

Don't be surprised if Trump is conveniently out of the country on January 20th. He may not be coming back anytime soon, either.