Last Call For Small Ball Rand Paul

You know what, I'm beginning to think Rand Paul might not even make it to the Kentucky GOP caucus he bought.

Struggling to gain traction in the Republican presidential race, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) this week will turn his attention to fundraising for his Senate reelection efforts.

Paul, who is running for president and reelection to the Senate simultaneously, will attend fundraisers for his Senate campaign on Wednesday and Thursday in Washington, D.C., according to invitations for the events obtained by The Hill. 

One Republican operative with close ties to Kentucky politics warned against reading too much into Paul’s Senate fundraisers, saying it’s not a sign that Paul is giving up on running for president, but rather a necessity of running for two offices at once. 

The operative said it’s a good use of time for Paul to fundraise for the Senate while he’s in Washington. Paul can tap groups that may be friendly to his Senate bid but aren’t inclined to commit to him, or any candidate, while the GOP presidential field remains this large.

Paul, he noted, isn’t going all in yet on fundraising for Senate – he’s not on the ground in Kentucky fighting for resources with the candidates running for statewide office, where elections for governor on down will be held this November.
A spokesperson for Paul’s Senate campaign did not return a request for comment.

Still, one Kentucky Republican operative said the fundraisers will inevitably be viewed through the prism of Paul’s fledgling presidential campaign. 

“Some of this is self-evident,” the Kentucky Republican operative said. “If he thought he’d be the nominee, he wouldn’t spend time hedging his bets and raising money for the Senate race. I think that tells you everything you need to know.”

Nobody at this point believes Rand Paul has a serious shot.  He's been stuck in the single digits nationally and isn't in the running for Iowa or New Hampshire at this point.  I don't know how long he can pretend like he's still a viable candidate, but I hear there's a lot of that going around in the GOP currently.  Right now Rand is trying to win South Carolina, for instance.  I guess that's a plan.

Everyone's waiting on the other guy to drop out so that they can stay in and pick up staffers and donors to live to fight another day, but if even Jeb Bush's donors are demanding that their paid and bough for candidate start producing bu Halloween, the half-dozen other Republicans floating around the 2% mark like Rand here don't have long in this race at all.

Game On In The Queen City

Cincinnati is hosting the area's first major college eSports tourney this weekend, and I'm all for it.

Games at UC's Fifth Third Arena usually involve basketballs or volleyballs. This weekend, however, the play will be with magic spells, swords, and guns, on computers.

The All Midwest Collegiate Invitational is expected to draw about 500 competitors and spectators for games like League of Legends, Super Smash Brothers, and Hearthstone.
Tournaments like this are common on the East and West coasts, but Stelanie Tsirlis says that's inconvenient for game players in the Midwest. 

“They have to travel out there. They have to buy the plane ticket, the ticket to get into the event itself.” 

Tsirlis is a senior at Miami University and a gamer herself. She's also the chief marketing officer for AllMid, which is a collection of game players from her school, UC, Xavier, Ohio State, and others.

Together, they're out to play and to earn some respect for their sport. 

There will be prizes, both cash and game credits. Tsirlis says some of the games pit individuals head-to-head, and others are for teams.

“What I like the most about the invitational this weekend is that our League of Legends tournament on the competitive side has the actual collegiate teams from all the colleges that are participating.” 

Tsirlis says there are even some colleges in the U.S. that are offering scholarships for gamers. 

“There aren’t many,” she admits.

“I know that there are some universities that support eSports as club sports. But to have an actual varsity team is kind of rare.” 

Tsirlis says she hopes this weekend's invitational will show universities that eSports are legitimate and a big deal. 

“People are invested. People are interested. And the eSports industry itself is about to explode. It’s a baby industry. I think it would be smart for any university to hop on that bandwagon and start recognizing any eSport as an actual sport and start supporting those students who play.”

Laugh all you want, but I find eSports to be a better deal to students than exploiting college football or basketball athletes for multi-million dollar programs that they'll never see a dime from, and risking career-ending and even life-threatening injuries to play.  Nobody gets concussions from playing a couple Hearthstone matches.   Nobody buys kids hookers, blow, tattoos and cars to play League of Legends.  Coaches don't get five million a year to scream at kids playing Super Smash Bros. Melee.

It's a hell of a lot less corrupt and more morally acceptable than any major traditional college sports program out there in 2015.  If the point is to let college kids play games, I'm 100% behind the AllMid an other eSports tournaments.

For now, at least.  Once colleges figure out how to market this, they'll start exploiting kids for free labor I'm sure.  But it still won't be as bad as college football.

Bitter Home Alabama, Con't

I've talked before about Alabama pulling the one-two punch of requiring a driver's license in order to vote in 2016 and then closing down 90% of county driver's license offices to "save taxpayer money". If there was still any reasonable doubt as to this being a massive disenfranchisement of thousands of black voters by Republicans, it has been obliterated by the first round of driver's license office closings, nearly all coming in majority black counties. Kyle Whitmire of AL.com:

In 2011, Alabama lawmakers approved the state's voter ID law, making it illegal to vote in Alabama without a government-issued photo ID. 

For most folks, that's a driver's license. 

In those 29 counties you might be able to register at the courthouse, but you won't be able to cast a ballot there unless you have that ID. 

That's not just an inconvenience. That's a problem. 

But it gets worse. 

Look at the list of counties now where you can't get a driver's license. There's Choctaw, Sumter, Hale, Greene, Perry, Wilcox, Lowndes, Butler, Crenshaw, Macon, Bullock ...
If you had to memorize all the Alabama Counties in 9th grade, like I did -- and even if you forgot most of them, like I have -- you can probably guess where we're going with this. 

Depending on which counties you count as being in Alabama's Black Belt, either twelve or fifteen Black Belt counties soon won't have a place to get a driver's license. 

Counties where some of the state's poorest live. 

Counties that are majority African-American. 

Combine that with the federally mandated Star ID taking effect next year, and we're looking at a nightmare.

Or a trial lawyer's dream.

There are eight counties in Alabama where at least 75% of the population is black.  Every one of those counties is losing its drivers license office.  This is such a blatantly obvious attempt at voter suppression that civil rights lawsuits will be filed by the truckload, and I don't see how the state can defend its actions...but if the courts somehow decide this is constitutional (and with this SCOTUS it all depends on whether or not Justice Kennedy wants to see America's dark past)  expect a whole lot of driver's license office closures in a lot of red states.

We'll see where this goes, but I remind you that at least for now, Alabama Republicans are definitely getting away with this at the moment.  And I'm not sure if that will ever be changed.

StupidiNews!

• Hurricane Joaquin has grown into a powerful Category 4 storm thrashing Bermuda, but the forecast track takes it out into the Atlantic where the worst should avoid the US East Coast.
• US Army officials say eleven people were killed when a C-130 transport plane crashed in Jalalabad, Afghanistan early Friday, including six US troops. 
• Russian jets have launched another round of airstrikes in Syria in a campaign that Russian military officials say could last three or four months.
• Mobile carrier T-Mobile says data on as many as 15 million people could have been exposed when hackers stole credit application information from credit-tracking firm Experian. 
• The FCC says it will put an end to "endless" fees and price gouging for prison inmates who want to call their loved ones or talk to their lawyers.

Last Call For The Cycle Of Tragedy

Another hideous mass shooting, this time at a community college in Oregon, where 14 people died including the gunman who opened fire on students in class. President Obama once again addressed the nation as mourner-in-chief, but this time around he expressed significant frustration at Congress for failing to act yet again on gun control.

During a brief televised statement delivered at the White House , the president lashed out at those who oppose gun limits by saying that their answer to such tragedies are more guns, not fewer.

“Does anybody really believe that?” he asked, clearly outraged.

The Oregon attorney general said that at least 13 people were killed Thursday when a gunman opened fire on the campus of Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Ore.

Mr. Obama pointed out that states with more gun restrictions tended to have fewer gun deaths, and countries like Britain and Australia with far stricter gun laws have much fewer gun deaths.

“So we know there are ways to prevent it,” he said.

He pointed out that the federal government had responded to mine disasters to insisting on safer mines, weather disasters by improving communities and highway deaths by insisting on safer roads and cars. But guns are so immune to such a response that Congress has forbidden the federal government from even collecting some statistics about guns.

Mr. Obama asked news organizations to tally the number of Americans killed by terrorist attacks over the last 10 years and to compare that with those killed by domestic gun violence. And he implicitly compared the trillions of dollars spent and multiple agencies devoted to prevent the relatively few terrorist deaths with the minimal effort and money spent to prevent the far greater tragedy of gun deaths.

And then he challenged voters to make gun safety a priority.

“If you think this is a problem, then you should expect your elected officials to reflect your views,” the president said.

And he promised to continue hammering away at the issue for the rest of his presidency.

“And each time this happens, I’m going to bring this up,” Mr. Obama said. “Each time this happens, I’m going to say that we can actually do something about it.”

And each time it happens, Mr. President, our Congress will make sure nothing is done.  And until we as voters start firing members of Congress over lack of gun safety laws, nothing will change.

It's not on you, Mr. President.  It's not on Congress, to be honest.  It's all on us.

Race To The Bottom In Pennsylvania Schools

A new study profiled in The Atlantic finds that in Pennsylvania's heavily segregated school districts even the presence of 5 or 10% students of color greatly reduces the funding a district gets from the state.

In America, schools with a lot of minority students are chronically underfunded. Is that the case because these students are poor, and poor communities have fewer resources for funding their schools? Or, is it because of the color of these students’ skin?

Unsettlingly, recent research from data scientist David Mosenkis finds that poverty alone does not explain the underfunding. Mosenkis delved into funding data for 500 school districts in the state of Pennsylvania. Because richer school districts are able to drum up more cash through taxes, they should receive less state funding, and poorer districts should receive more. He looked at how much money they received and sorted those findings based on race and income.

Using a broad scope, Mosenkis found what one might expect: On the surface poor districts do receive more state funding than rich schools. But when he delved deeper into the data, sorting by race, what he found was disturbing.

If you color code the districts based on their racial composition you see this very stark breakdown. At any given poverty level, districts that have a higher proportion of white students get substantially higher funding than districts that have more minority students.” That means that no matter how rich or poor the district in question, funding gaps existed solely based on the racial composition of the school. Just the increased presence of minority students actually deflated a district’s funding level. “The ones that have a few more students of color get lower funding than the ones that are 100 percent or 95 percent white,” Mosenkis said.

Issues with scarce budgets and troubled urban schools aren’t new, and they exist all over the country. In an article published in The Atlantic in 1954, Henry I. Willett attempted to answer the question of whether or not public schools cost too much by saying, “The amount spent for educational purposes as compared with amounts spent for many other items and services, including luxuries, would indicate that the importance of education in our democracy is not yet realized: and the hour is growing late.”

In Pennsylvania, the crisis is particularly acute. The state’s former governor stripped the education budget significantly. In the years since, schools have shuttered, teachers have been fired, and the schools that remain are existing on bare-bones budgets. Earlier this year, two children died after getting sick at district schools where no nurses were on duty due to budget reductions. Pennsylvania is also one of the only states in the country that hasn’t had a specific formula in place for distributing government aid to its districts. That’s left lots of room for partisan politics and funding bias.

The results are pretty shocking.  At every level when controlling for class, majority white school districts in the state get more funding from the state per student than districts where the majority consists of students of color:



Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf, elected last November, is trying to change that.  But Republicans in the state's legislature have yet to pass a budget.  

We're repeatedly told the problem can't be systemic racism because in 2015 that simply doesn't exist, it's just class.  This study controls for class and greatly seems to prove otherwise, and the state is far from alone.

The Mask Slips Again...

...and a Republican accidentally admits the truth.  Today's contestant: presumed incoming House Speaker Kevin McCarthy shows that he's not too bright.

Sean Hannity was pushing hard, asking House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy to name some promises his Republicans had actually delivered on. He scoffed when McCarthy said the party would start undoing the Affordable Care Act -- "you have the power of the purse!" He talked over McCarthy when the leader and candidate for Speaker of the House suggested that the party did not need to cut funds for President Obama's "amnesty," because courts had taken care of it. Only halfway into the interview did McCarthy finally catch a break.

"Everybody though Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right?" McCarthy asked. "But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping. Why? Because she's untrustable. But no one would have known any of that had happened, had we not fought."

"I give you credit for that," said Hannity. "I'll give you credit where credit is due."

Oh Kevin, you special little snowflake.  You walked right into the jet intake on this one.

"This is a damning display of honesty by the possible next Speaker of the House," press Secretary Brian Fallon said in a statement emailed to POLITICO. "Kevin McCarthy just confessed that the committee set up to look into the deaths of four brave Americans at Benghazi is a taxpayer-funded sham. This confirms Americans' worst suspicions about what goes on in Washington."

Committee Chairman Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) has long insisted that his aim is solely to understand what went wrong in Benghazi, and not to attack Clinton. "‘While much outside attention has been paid to the former secretary, this investigation has never been about her and never will be," he said in September.

But on Tuesday night, McCarthy suggested the opposite to Fox News host Sean Hannity.

But as Martin "BooMan" Longman reminds us, the biggest open secret in Washington isn't exactly breaking news.

Now, I know that in certain Beltway circles telling the truth is considered one of the worst possible gaffes, but McCarthy bragged about the effectiveness of this smear campaign precisely because he wanted to remind people that the Republicans deserve credit for finding ways to effectively fight back against the Democrats. In other words, he was reminding the Republican base voter that there actually areexamples where the Republican leadership did something extraordinarily partisan and obnoxious and that it worked. The reaction will probably be exactly what he hoped for. He gets a pat on the head and a couple of “Atta Boys.”

The idea that Republican members of Congress will clutch their pearls in horror that McCarthy defended their performance is a big reach, in my opinion.

These folks are so beyond the norms of behavior that you’d expect of your children that it’s absurd to hold them to those kind of standards. When one of them gets caught in a lie, that’s a badge of honor, and it’s not even remotely problematic to get caught telling the truth if the truth is that you’ve been lying.

If you think I am engaging in hyperbole here, just remember back when Mitt Romney set the land-speed record by telling 533 lies in a mere 30 weeks- (and that tally ended in August). Republicans did not blink. They had no problem with Romney’s pathological relationship with the truth. If anything, they wanted him to be a more convincing liar.

Look at Carly Fiorina right now. She’s doing well, recently, and how many of the people running against her have questioned her truthfulness? It’s not an issue for them. It’s not something they can score political points with, because the base does not want their heroes to tell the truth.

So no, it won't hurt McCarthy with his base one bit.  Whether or not it will hurt him with the Village...well they've been attacking Hillary for years now.  Why would this make them stop?

StupidiNews!

• Category 3 Hurricane Joaquin is churning northward from the Bahamas where it could make landfall anywhere from Myrtle Beach to Nova Scotia over the next few days.
• Oklahoma GOP Gov. Mary Fallin has stayed the execution of Richard Glossip over issues with the lethal injection drugs the state plans to use, a new date has been set for November 6.
• Afghan military forces say they have retaken the city of Kunduz days after losing it to the Afghan Taliban, but US forces say they are unable to confirm the situation on the ground.
• German Chancellor Angela Merkel's government says it will more vigorously enforce German asylum rules in an effort to stem the record tide of refugees entering the country.
• The CIA has apparently pulled several officers from the US Embassy in Beijing after massive hacks exposed the information of millions of government employees earlier this year.

Lat Call For Shutdown Countdown, Con't

Looks like we get to have the real shutdown fight in December, folks.

With only hours to spare on the last day of the fiscal year, Congress approved a temporary spending measure to avert a shutdown and keep the federal government operating through Dec. 11.

In the House, the measure was approved only because of strong support by Democrats — a sign of just how angry rank-and-file Republicans remain over their powerlessness to force policy changes on the Obama administration.

In one last display of their fury, House Republicans on Tuesday adopted another resolution to cut off government financing to Planned Parenthood. The resolution was to be sent to the Senate, where Democrats were certain to block it.

Ultimately, the internal Republican fight over the bill and how strongly to confront the White House cost John A. Boehner his job as speaker. Mr. Boehner’s resignation announcement last week essentially assured Democratic support for the measure. But the temporary spending bill does nothing to resolve the core disputes between Republicans and the White House, setting up even bigger battles in the months ahead.

Congressional Democrats and Obama administration officials said they were eager to begin negotiations with Republicans on a longer-term spending measure. It is far from clear, however, that any deal can be reached soon, given the upheaval in the House.

So for now a shutdown has been avoided.  How much will get done between now and December 11th, who knows. Kevin McCarthy will be under big pressure to prove he's not John Boehner and if he can't, the GOP mob will run him out of town on a rail too.  Will than mean a shutdown right before Christmas?

I'm still very much betting on it.

Dirty Red Ed Is Out

John Boehner isn't the only tri-state area Republican retiring from the House when the GOP has the largest margin of control in 90 years.  KY-01 Republican Ed Whitfield is packing it in too, and facing a major ethics scandal to boot.

Rep. Ed Whitfield (R-Ky.) said Tuesday that he will not seek reelection in 2016. 

Whitfield is the subject of a House Ethics Committee investigation regarding allegations that he improperly used his office to help his wife lobby Congress for the Humane Society. 

But the Kentucky Republican made no mention of the ethics investigation while announcing his retirement.

“Representing the people of the 1st District for 21 years has been an honor,” Whitfield said in a statement. “While many Americans are frustrated with the institution of Congress, I still believe that politics is a worthy vocation and I know many men and women of character will always be willing to serve.” 

House rules prohibit lawmakers’ spouses from lobbying their offices. Whitfield’s wife, Constance, is a registered lobbyist for the Humane Society Legislative Fund. 

The House Ethics Committee announced in March that it had opened an investigation following a report from the Office of Congressional Ethics alleging that Whitfield’s wife lobbied for multiple bills her husband supported regarding animal welfare. Whitfield has denied the allegations, maintaining that he introduced the legislation of his own volition.

I mean granted, there are a lot worse ethics violations than "my wife lobbied for the Humane Society" but Ed's been running his Paducah/Murray district since he was swept into power during the Contract With America election in 1994.

More importantly, Ed Whitfield runs the House Energy Committee's Subcommittee on Energy and Power, which means he's been a one-man wrecking crew against global warming legislation and of course denies climate change is even a problem.

Frankly that's one less jackass Republican in the House to muck things up.  We'll see who the Kentucky Democrats can get to run against him.

Fahrveg-Nuked, Con't

It's hard to overstate just how much trouble Volkwagen is in right now over their diesel emissions cheating scandal, and Germany has now put the automaker on the clock in a big, big way.

Germany is coming down hard on its biggest carmaker over the diesel-emissions crisis, giving Volkswagen just over a week to come up with a fix to a problem eight years in the making. 

Yesterday, VW received a letter from Germany’s Federal Motor Transport Authority, signed by transport minister Alexander Dobrindt, demanding that it deliver a binding plan and schedule to fix the 11 million “cheat code” diesel cars by October 7. 

If Volkswagen can’t present a viable solution by then, according to Dobrindt, the German government would have no choice but to ban the 2.8 million affected cars from driving on that country’s roads. Switzerland has already banned affected cars from being sold, new or used, and other countries continue to investigate their options; the U.S. arm of VW issued a stop-sale order on new diesel VWs last week. 

Volkswagen plans to present its solution within days to repair the affected cars, a spokesman said, and will notify customers and regulatory authorities around the world in writing. That’s not the only issue for VW, though, with German prosecutors opening up a criminal investigation of former Volkswagen Group CEO Martin Winterkorn over his role in what it is calling a “fraud scandal” that has shattered public confidence in the world’s biggest carmaker. The U.S. Department of Justice also has opened a criminal investigation.

So Volkswagen has a week to present a plan to come clean on millions of diesel cars, or they're sunk. They still might be sunk, frankly.  It will take a long time for the world's largest automaker to recover from this, and they won't be number one for much longer.

We'll see where this goes.  I only wish the US was as serious as Germany when it came to punishing bad corporate actors like this.  And again, who knows which other diesel engine manufacturers are guilty?  I don't think Volkswagen is alone in this, do you?

Last Call For Turtle, Shelled?

First Orange Julius got squeezed, now will Mitch the Turtle get shell shocked?  Probably not, but it should be fun to watch him squirm.

Now that House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) has announced that he will step down, some conservatives in the Republican party are turning their attention to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY).

Roger Villere, the chairman of the Louisiana GOP, urged McConnell to resign in a Saturday Facebook post.

In an interview with the Washington Times published on Sunday, Villere said that McConnell is hurting the Republican party.

"Mitch is a good and honorable guy, but the base is leaving our party," Villere said. "I’m out in the field all the time and we have all our elections this year for state offices, and it’s hurting us tremendously with our elections."

He said that the majority leader should have pushed harder against President Obama's agenda while leading the Senate.

"Mr. McConnell could have suspended consideration of confirmations for all presidential appointees, except for those who are essential to national security, until the president rescinded his unconstitutional executive action on amnesty," he said.

Villere suggested that McConnell did not fight hard enough to repeal Obamacare and defund Planned Parenthood. He said that McConnell's support for a temporary funding bill that provides funding for Planned Parenthood will hurt the Republican party.

"If we lose the battle, we will never win the presidency again in my lifetime," he said. "I've worked for 12 years as chairman to build this party, and I just don’t want to see it all go down the drain because they aren’t willing to fight for what we believe in. Our base is demanding we do something or they’re going to leave us."

Well, here's hoping you're right, Roger.  I certainly don't want to see another Republican president in my lifetime. Amusing then that the Senate easily passed a funding bill on Monday to avoid a government shutdown Wednesday night, and the presumed new Speaker following Boehner also wants to surrender (and is sadly trying to pretend that the Democrats are the ones shutting the government down when the Republicans control both chambers of Congress.)

Nope.  Tea Party Republicans are about to lose again.  You got Boehner's head for your wall, but once again you've accomplished nothing.

Bevin Blowing It?

WVXU political reporter Howard Wilkinson sees the 2015 Kentucky Governor's race as very close if not favoring Republican Matt Bevin.

It’s rather amazing, really, since over the past 44 years only one Republican, Ernie Fletcher, has held the governor’s office in Kentucky; and Fletcher, whose administration was plagued with scandal, was knocked off by the incumbent Democrat Steve Beshear, who is term-limited out this year.

And Bevin, who ran for the GOP U.S. Senate nomination against Sen. Mitch McConnell and was squashed like a bug, barely squeaked out of this year’s four-candidate GOP gubernatorial primary with an 83-vote win over James Comer, out of about 214,000 votes cast.

But, in fact, it’s the only really competitive gubernatorial race in the country, in a year when most of the political junkies around the country are deeply fixated on the 2016 presidential election.

There really hasn’t been much polling in the race lately. At the end of July, the Bluegrass Poll, conducted for Kentucky’s two largest newspapers and two prominent TV stations, showed Conway up by a slim three percentage points. On June 23, Public Policy Polling, a North Carolina firm, had Bevin up by two percentage points.

But some time ago, Sabato’s Crystal Ball, a weekly politics newsletter published by Larry J. Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, moved the Kentucky governor’s race from the “toss-up” category to “leans Republican.”

“Both national party committees see Kentucky as a winnable race,’’ said Kyle Kondik, a political analyst who is managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball.

Bevin, Kondik said, “is not really a great candidate; and it may be a question of how much of his own money he is willing to spend on this.

“But President Obama is extremely unpopular in Kentucky; and you have the Trump phenomenon going on in the Republican presidential race,’’ Kondik said “It’s a sign of how nationalized politics has gotten even in state races.

So this move by the Republican Governor's Association makes no sense whatsoever.

The Republican Governor's Association has stopped running TV ads for Matt Bevin with a little more than a month to go in Kentucky's competitive governor's race.

The association has spent $3 million on six ads for Bevin, mostly attacking his Democratic opponent, Jack Conway, for supporting the policies of Democratic President Barack Obama. But with two other governor's races this fall RGA spokesman Jon Thompson said the group is "re-evaluating what is best for us to do."

"We continually re-evaluate what role the RGA plays of how helpful we can be," Thompson said, adding the decision does not mean the group has lost faith in Bevin's chances of winning. He said the group could go back on the air before November.

The move is a big blow for Bevin, who has aired just one TV ad of his own after spending more than $1 million of his personal fortune to win a four-way Republican primary in May. And it comes one week after Conway began airing a series of TV ads titled "In his own words" that splice together clips of Bevin contradicting himself on issues including education, agriculture, taxes and health care.

Whenever Conway aired a new ad over the summer, the RGA would usually respond. But not this time. Thompson said the move is normal given "multiple governor's races" the group has to plan for. But the only other races on the calendar this year are in Mississippi and Louisiana. The association has not spent money in those states yet, although Thompson said the group is likely to begin airing ads in the Louisiana governor's race.

If Bevin's winning, or this race is close, why not put Conway away?  There's only 2 other governor's races on the ballot this year, Mississippi and Louisiana.  Bobby Jindal is term limited and the real race for Louisiana won't be until late November as there's a runoff expected, and Phil Bryant isn't in any danger of losing in Mississippi.  The RGA hasn't spent a dime in those states, and after the GOP picked up governor's seats in states like Maryland (Larry Hogan) and Illinois (Bruce Rauner) in 2014, the RGA is pretty powerful. Plus, getting a win in Kentucky would be a massive boost, all but assuring that the GOP could shut down the most successful state insurance exchange and Medicaid expansion in the country.

So it makes no sense to stop now unless Bevin is leading massively, or he's losing.  If he's winning, why not release your numbers showing him winning handily?

No, something's badly wrong in Bevintown.  Maybe Conway can pull this out after all.

So why leave Bevin high and dry now, six weeks before the election?

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/2015/09/28/4061032_rga-stops-running-tv-ads-in-kentucky.html?rh=1#storylink=cpy

Snap Judgment In North Carolina

Since GOP Gov. Pat McCrory took over North Carolina in January 2013 and Republicans gained complete control of the government, the NC GOP has cut jobless benefits back so far that the state no longer qualifies for federal unemployment dollars, they have eliminated the state's earned income tax credit for the poor, they have purged the state's regulatory commissions and filled them with McCrory cronies, they have ended medical school programs that taught abortion procedures, they have wrecked the state's public education budget, and implemented a regressive tax on repair and maintenance services.

At every turn, NC Republicans are continuing their crusade to smash the state's poor population and give as much money as possible to the wealthiest. And now, their hatred of the poor in the state is so all-consuming, that they are kicking people off SNAP benefits after three months even though the program is 100% funded by federal dollars and the state won't save a dime by doing it.

North Carolina Republican state Senator Norman Sanderson argued last week that reducing food assistance would force people to get a job or pursue higher education. 

A bill to ban so-called sanctuary cities offered by state House Republicans last week also aimed to cap food stamp benefits at three months for most unemployed adults without children. Even though the Supplemental Assistance Program (SNAP) is paid for with federal dollars, state Republicans argued that people in counties with double-digit unemployment should no longer be eligible to receive assistance after the initial three month period. 

Democratic state Sen. Angela Bryant offered an amendment on Thursday to overturn the food stamp cuts, saying that there are not enough jobs to go around in rural counties.
“Over several sessions here were have reduced funding for job training and education,” Bryant pointed out during floor debate. “So we are basically relegating them, I guess, to steal for food.” 

Bryant asserted that there were better ways to police the abuse of SNAP benefits, but her amendment was dead in the GOP-controlled Senate. 

“I think that everybody in this chamber would agree that one of the best things we can do for anyone who has found themselves caught up in the — whether it’s the SNAP program or unemployment or any other of the program that we offer to people who are in emergency situations — one of the best things that we can do is to help them find a job,” Sanderson said. 

The senator added: “And I think that we will be amazed that when this goes into effect, and I don’t know the exact number of people that this can ultimately effect, but I think you are going to see a lot of them either go and get that 20-hour a week job or they’re going to enroll in some kind of higher education to improve their job skills. And that’s exactly what we’re trying to get here.”

Quick math here: 20 hours a week times 50 weeks times $7.25 an hour is $7,250, for one person that's well below the 2015 poverty level of $11,770.  For a family of four, the poverty level is $24,250.  Even a full time job at $10 an hour is well under this level.  People at this point in their lives would easily qualify for SNAP benefits federally, but NC Republicans are literally turning down federal tax dollars just to hurt the poor.

And they're going to go to college?  With what money, exactly?  They're still going to be poor, and these clowns know it.

No, this is just outright punishment of the poor,  It's what Republicans do.

StupidiNews!

• US airstrikes are assisting Afghan forces as they try to retake the city of Kunduz from Taliban fighters and reverse the Taliban's largest military victory in Afghanistan in over a decade. 
• Both President Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro called for the end of US sanctions against Cuba at the UN General Assembly's annual meeting of world leaders.
• The Senate has easily advanced a spending bill that will avoid a shutdown through December 11, the plan is to pass the bill on Wednesday and send it to the House for a quick passage.  
• The global investigation into Volkswagen's diesel emissions cheating has expanded to Sweden, where prosecutors are considering a separate anti-corruption case against the automaker.
• Apple is reporting that initial sales of the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus have broken records as the new models have gone on sale in China at the same time as the rest of the world.