Our Dark Orange Future, Con't

Should Donald Trump win and Republicans retain Congress in November, GOP House Speaker Paul Ryan is promising massive, draconian austerity cuts across the board and plans to make sure the Democrats have no power to stop him.

Typically, party leaders offer at least the pretense of seeking bipartisanship when discussing their policy plans. But Ryan is saying frankly that Republicans would use budget reconciliation — a powerful procedural tool — to bypass Democrats entirely. It’s the same tool Republicans slammed Democrats for using to pass the 2010 health care law over their objections.

While GOP leaders have made empty threats to use reconciliation to repeal Obamacare in the past, Ryan is making it clear that this time he plans to use it when it counts. And he would likely have support from a Trump White House. Larry Kudlow, an economic adviser to the GOP presidential nominee, said he is also strongly urging Trump to embrace reconciliation in order to pass sweeping tax cuts. 

Ryan peeled back the curtain on his strategy at a news conference after a reporter suggested he would struggle to implement his ambitious agenda next year. After all, it was noted, Republicans are certain to lack the 60 votes needed in the Senate to break Democratic filibusters on legislation. So Ryan gave a minitutorial on congressional rules and the bazooka in his pocket for the assembled reporters. 

“This is our plan for 2017,” Ryan said, waving a copy of his “Better Way” policy agenda. “Much of this you can do through budget reconciliation.” He explained that key pieces are “fiscal in nature,” meaning they can be moved quickly through a budget maneuver that requires a simple majority in the Senate and House. “This is our game plan for 2017,” Ryan said again to the seemingly unconvinced press.

Now granted, Ryan has made promises before and he's fallen on his face.  But a Trump administration would remove the final obstacle to a Ryan budget, and you can kiss Obamacare, Medicare and Social Security goodbye if that happens.

I suggest we don't find out if Ryan's telling the truth or not.

That's Real White Of You, Con't

Five Thirty Eight's Harry Enten breaks the bad news to Trump fans: he just doesn't have the numbers with white voters in order to win in November.

Four years ago, Romney beat President Obama among white voters by 17 percentage points, according to pre-election polls. That was the largest winning margin among white voters for any losing presidential candidate since at least 1948. Of course, even if Trump did just as well as Romney did, it would help him less, given that the 2016 electorate will probably be more diverse that 2012’s. And to win — even if the electorate remained as white as it was four years ago — Trump would need a margin of 22 percentage points or more among white voters.

But Trump isn’t even doing as well as Romney. Trump is winning white voters by just 13 percentage points, according to an average of the last five live-interviewer national surveys.1 He doesn’t reach the magic 22 percentage point margin in a single one of these polls.

So if he's doing worse than Romney, why is Clinton still only predicted to have a modest win?  Third party support from Millennials.

Trump’s less-than-overwhelming margins among white voters in the polls listed above are a big reason why all five surveys showed him trailing Hillary Clinton overall. In fact, Trump would be losing by a larger margin, but third-party candidates are getting support from younger and minority voters, so that Clinton is slightly underperforming Obama among these groups. But the magnitude of Clinton’s struggles with young and nonwhite voters isn’t anywhere big enough to cancel out Trump’s relatively poor showing among white voters.

In other words, Clinton winning by four or five points would be something like eight or nine if Johnson and Stein were out of the picture and those voters made a Clinton v. Trump choice in November instead.  Not saying that will happen, but that's why this race isn't a blowout.

To be more specific, Trump is trading one type of white voter for another. Even as he piles up support among white men without a college degree, he’s on track for a record poor performance for a Republican among white voters with a degree. And right now, that tradeoff is a net negative for Trump, compared with Romney. If a ton of new white voters without a degree flooded into the electorate, that could change the math for Trump. But such a surge doesn’t look like it’s in the offing. 

So yes, at this point you can expect a Clinton win.  It's looking more and more likely every day as Trump continues to lose more voters than he gains with his racist rhetoric.

StupidiNews!

• As many as two million in Florida, South Carolina and Georgia have been asked to evacuate out of the path of Hurricane Matthew as the storm is expected to gouge the southern coast this weekend.
• A Maryland government contractor has been arrested and charged with stealing classified material from the NSA in what could be a second Edward Snowden style document theft.
• Poland's parliament rejected legislation that would have all but outlawed abortions after tens of thousands of women demonstrated against the measure in rallies around the country.
• Embattled medical testing startup Theranos will close its testing labs and fire 340 as CEO Liz Holmes restructures to focus on testing devices.
• Cable giant Charter is joining AT&T to sue the city of Louisville over blocking access to utility poles to prevent competition from Google Fiber in what could be a battle with national implications.

Last Call For Weld Damn There, Bill

Looks like Mike Pence isn't the only Veep candidate more interested in shaping a post-Trump GOP than helping his running mate win in November.

The Libertarian vice presidential candidate, William F. Weld, said Tuesday that he plans to focus exclusively on blasting Donald Trump over the next five weeks, a strategic pivot aimed at denying Trump the White House and giving himself a key role in helping to rebuild the GOP. 

Weld’s comments in a Globe interview mark a major shift in his mission since he pledged at the Libertarian convention in May that he would remain a Libertarian for life and would do all he could to help elect his running mate, Gary Johnson, the former Republican governor of New Mexico. 

But things have changed. Johnson has committed several high-profile gaffes in recent weeks that revealed apparent weak spots in his foreign-policy knowledge. Meanwhile, Trump had seemed to be surging back into contention after he fell well behind in the polls in early August. 

While Weld insisted he still supports Johnson, he said he is now interested primarily in blocking Trump from winning the presidency and then potentially working with longtime Republican leaders such as Mitt Romney and Haley Barbour to create a new path for the party after the election.

“Maybe somebody is going to come up with a new playbook, and I don’t know who it’s going to be, but it would be fun to participate,” Weld said in a telephone interview from Atlanta, where he was holding a fund-raiser and rally and planned to watch and tweet about Tuesday night’s vice-presidential debate featuring his major-party rivals, Democrat Tim Kaine and Republican Mike Pence.

Insert joke about Libertarians just being Republicans who want to legalize weed here.

In all seriousness, if Bill Weld wants to keep Donald Trump out of the White House, the best thing he can do is talk Gary Johnson into dropping out and supporting Hillary Clinton. We all know that's never going to happen, but that would be not only the most effective way to stop Trump, it would also be the right thing to do.

At least Weld has his eyes on the larger picture.

As far as rebuilding the GOP, well the Republican party will still exist in some form after 2016, what form that takes I couldn't tell you.  The last time they tried to fix their problems, the post-mortem of 2012 was thrown in the nearest incinerator and it produced Trump and the current era of overt GOP racists.

Fixing the party again may get us somebody worse.  You know, like Ted Cruz.

Mike's Pence-ive Defense Of Trump

I'm with Vox's Matt Yglesias on last night's debate: Mike Pence pulled off a pretty good demonstration of how the GOP will continue after Trump loses in November: simply pretend The Donald never happened.

Republican Party elected officials in contested races around the country have been grappling with a basic but profound issue all year — how do you stand up for the GOP and conservative principles and against Hillary Clinton without getting sucked into defending every crazy, offensive, or weird thing that Donald Trump said? It can be a tough line to walk, as New Hampshire Sen. Kelly Ayotte learned this week. 

Debating Tim Kaine Tuesday night, Mike Pence taught a master class in how it’s done. Every time Kaine attacked, Pence parried and deftly shifted the conversation to something else entirely. 

When Kaine demanded that Pence defend Trump’s secrecy on his taxes, Pence ducked and talked about how low taxes are good for economic growth. When Kaine offered an extended list of Trump insults that he said he couldn’t believe Pence would defend, Pence didn’t defend them — he pivoted to complaining about Clinton and the “basket of deplorables.” Pence was tight, disciplined, and focused on his talking points. He never took the bait, never let himself get dragged into unfavorable terrain, and simply ignored subjects he didn’t want to discuss. 

It was a genuinely bravura performance, one that a passel of GOP senators and Congress members running in tough races ought to study. The problem is Trump is at the top of the ticket.

In other words, the GOP are already masters of gaslighting and fact-free rhetoric, so why wouldn't pretending Donald Trump is invisible not work in 2018 and 2020?  Vox's Dara Lind follows up on this and a lot of it comes back to race:

The question is this: Has the median American voter has moved so far to the left on race in the last decade that she won’t get upset by the implication that America’s race problem runs so deep it probably includes her? (Democrats only other option is mastering the art of mobilization of nonwhite voters so thoroughly that they can change where the median voter is by changing the population of voters — a much tougher battle.) 

Or is it just that Donald Trump, short-tempered and Twitter-fingered as he is, is such an anomaly that he liberates Democrats from the task of moderating their own message?
Mike Pence, by all appearances, believes the latter: that there is a large population of people who really don’t like being called racist but who, for Trump-specific reasons, don’t like Trump. 

It’s not that Tim Kaine (or Clinton, or other Democrats) can’t defend their racial ideology. At least during the section on implicit bias — one of the clearest, most honest segments of the night — Kaine showed he was willing to address the meat of what Pence was saying. 

But it’s not clear that Kaine (or Clinton, or other Democrats) think that those defenses will persuade enough of the American public. Kaine wasn’t satisfied simply to offer an explanation of what implicit bias actually is, and how it manifests itself in criminal justice. He felt the need to pivot to a riff on Donald Trump’s insults, and all the things the Republican nominee hasn’t apologized for. 

The political theory behind what Mike Pence was doing Tuesday night — the theory behind the new law-and-order conservatism — is that without Donald Trump to pivot to, Democrats won’t win the argument on race with “mainstream” America. 

In other words, pretend that somehow, Donald Trump's overt racism does not represent the GOP as a whole, and there are plenty of Republicans who are going to buy into that and move on after November.  The Village Media certainly will.

So yes, expect the "Pence Defense" going forward.  "We're not racist, gay-hating Islamophobic bigots, that was Donald Trump, and you're the real racists for thinking otherwise!" will be the order of the day until at least 2020.

How well they will be able to get away with it depends on a number of things, but that's what's coming for sure.

Orange You Going To Be His Friend, Kelly?

The Donald Trump rain of destruction on GOP downticket candidates is starting to take a real toll on Republicans being able to keep control of the Senate and several state legislatures (not that Republicans not named Trump aren't somehow contributing to their own demise) but NH GOP Sen. Kelly Ayotte looked comical this week when stuck with the question of whether or not Trump makes a good role model for America's kids.

Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.) said she would “absolutely” point to Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump as a role model for children but still declined to endorse him for president in an awkward answer to a debate question Monday night.

During the second debate of 2016 in the critical New Hampshire Senate race, Ayotte, who faces a tough challenge from New Hampshire Gov. Maggie Hassan (D), was asked whether she sees Trump as a role model. 

“Well, I think that certainly there are many role models that we have, and I believe he can serve as president, and so absolutely I would do that,” Ayotte said. 

When asked why she still won’t endorse Trump outright, she reiterated that she differs with him on certain issues and then pivoted to hit Hassan for the governor's support of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. 

“Because I’ve had some disagreements with him, and I’ve been quite clear about those disagreements,” Ayotte said. 

“And this is an area where Gov. Hassan has been lockstep with Secretary Clinton. I haven’t heard major disagreements that she’s had with Secretary Clinton, so who’s going to stand up on behalf of the people of New Hampshire?”

And then Ayotte immediately ran away from her own statement, screaming.

Following the debate, Ayotte walked back her comment in a statement sent by the campaign, saying she "misspoke." She said neither Trump nor Clinton are good role models for her own children.

"I misspoke tonight. While I would hope all of our children would aspire to be president, neither Donald Trump nor Hillary Clinton have set a good example and I wouldn't hold up either of them as role models for my kids," Ayotte said.

Those pretzel knots that GOP candidates are tying themselves into over Trump are cutting off blood flow to the brain. Who knew?

StupidiNews!

• Residents of the Bahamas are bracing for Hurricane Matthew, now a strong Category 3 storm, as it churns northward towards Nassau and Miami after devastating Haiti and Cuba yesterday.
• Voters in more than a dozen states are already casting early voting ballots for president as Americans are taking advantage of the chance to vote ahead of November 8th.
• Three scientists as part of an international team are splitting this year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry for work on molecular machines that could lead to new materials.
• Miami has taken the dubious honor of top spot among America's most unequal cities when it comes to income, edging out Atlanta and New Orleans.
• Hacker Guccifer 2.0 has released what he claims are documents from the Clinton Foundation, but some of the documents appear to be public domain and even propaganda.

Last Call For The Junior Varsity

Observations of tonight's Kaine vs Pence debate:

• The Vice-Presidential debate was mostly a wash, as they tend to be.
• Tim Kaine did a better job of defending Hillary Clinton than Mike Pence did defending Trump, but that's because Pence wasn't defending Trump, he was running for the GOP nomination in 2020.
• I have no idea what Elaine Quijano was doing, but it wasn't moderating this fight either.
• Kaine let some huge fastballs over the plate go and didn't swing at them.  Pence's record as Governor in Indiana should have been fertile ground for him, but Kaine let Pence get away with it.
• Having said that, Pence spending the entire night pretending that Donald Trump didn't exist isn't going to stop Trump's fall in the polls.
• Neither man is very exciting, huh.  Kaine comes across as that cool dad in accounting that you wish would stop talking about how awesome vaping is, and Pence comes across as the asshole lawyer at the sports bar who had one beer too many and is now asking very loudly to see the manager. They're about as telegenic as watching a video of a fireplace in 4K HD.
• This debate maybe moved the needle a fraction of a point at most, and flip a coin to see in which direction.
• I'm going to miss Joe Biden.

Surprise! The October Surprise Has Been Postponed

Pretty sure Donald Trump is crying into his taco bowl this morning as Julian Assange and his Russian pals at WikiLeaks aren't ready to quite deliver that "Clinton-destroying bombshell" that Roger Stone promised yet.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said on Tuesday the organization would publish around one million documents related to three governments and the U.S. election before the end of the year.

Assange denied that the release of documents related to the U.S. election was specifically geared to damage Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and said he had been misquoted in that regard.

Assange also signaled changes in the way Wikileaks is organized and funded, saying the group would soon open itself to membership. He said the group was looking to expand its work beyond the 100 media outlets it already works with.

About all that Assange has left is his "credibility" in delivering doctored leaks fed to him through Moscow and even that's starting to look pretty threadbare at this point.  If he can't deliver the October Surprise in October, it's not going to be much good to Assange, Trump, or Putin if whatever it is drops in the lame duck session while President-elect Clinton is taking over from President Obama.

Vladimir can't be very happy with Assange or Trump right now.  He's got a White House to try to pressure over Syria and you know, he's working hard to put a Moscow-friendly Republican in the Oval Office, really hard you guys.  It's exhausting being a mastermind.

Maybe this time he's finally outsmarted himself.

StupidiNews!

• Hurricane Matthew continues to dump feet of rain on Haiti and southeastern Cuba today and could threaten Florida by the end of the week, Gov. Rick Scott has already declared a state of emergency.
• Russian President Vladimir Putin has suspended a plutonium clean-up treaty with the US over Syria, saying the treaty now qualifies as a bargaining chip with Washington.
• Three British scientists have been awarded this year's Nobel Prize for Physics based on the trio's work in exotic phases of matter and superconductors.
• Former Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine and current Indiana Gov. Mike Pence will square off in tonight's Vice-Presidential Debate at Longwood University near DC.
• Facebook is taking on Craigslist and eBay with its new Marketplace app, rolling out to all mobile users in the US, UK and ANZAC regions this week.

Last Call For Rusted Orange Steel

Another week, another Kurt Eichenwald story in Newsweek on Trump's malfeasance, this time involving how he screwed US steel workers in favor of his current favorite free trade bogeyman, China.

Plenty of blue-collar workers believe that, as president, Donald Trump would be ready to fight off U.S. trade adversaries and reinvigorate the country’s manufacturing industries through his commitment to the Rust Belt. What they likely don’t know is that Trump has been stiffing American steel workers on his own construction projects for years, choosing to deprive untold millions of dollars from four key electoral swing states and instead directing it to China—the country whose trade practices have helped decimate the once-powerful industrial center of the United States. 

A Newsweek investigation has found that in at least two of Trump’s last three construction projects, Trump opted to purchase his steel and aluminum from Chinese manufacturers rather than United States corporations based in states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin. In other instances, he abandoned steel altogether, instead choosing the far-less-expensive option of buying concrete from various companies, including some linked to the Luchese and Genovese crime families. Trump has never been accused of engaging in any wrongdoing for his business dealings with those companies, but it’s true that the Mafia has long controlled much of the concrete industry in New York. 

Throughout his campaign, Trump has maintained that some controversial decisions for his companies amounted to nothing more than taking actions that were good for business, and were therefore reflections of his financial acumen. But, with the exception of one business that collapsed into multiple bankruptcies, Trump does not operate a public company; he has no fiduciary obligation to shareholders to obtain the highest returns he can. His decisions to turn away from American producers were not driven by legal obligations to investors, but simply resulted in higher profits for himself and his family.

So Trump loves to buy American unless buying Chinese is cheaper and makes him more money in the long run.  It's almost like his screaming about how America doesn't make good stuff anymore is just a ruse, as he's happy to buy overseas if it lines his pockets.

And this is the guy who is going to bring back high-paying factory and mill jobs to the US, when he won't even buy US steel that's already being made here?

I'd really like to know what all those "lifelong Democrats" who haven't voted for a Democrat for president since Carter think of Trump buying Chinese steel, because it sounds like to me that he only cares about his own damn self and always has.

Clinton And Criminal Justice

The main complaint I hear from other black voters who are hesitant to support Clinton is that she has no real plan for criminal justice reform and to end mass incarceration.  Now, nobody I've talked to plans to vote for Trump, and maybe one or two are thinking about Stein or Johnson, but the choice is much more "I plan not to vote for anyone unless they earn it" on the issue of police.

So what is Hillary Clinton's policy on fixing our broken policing system in America?  She made her case in Charlotte over the weekend.

In a humble church with a familiar name, Little Rock A.M.E. Zion, Hillary Clinton on Sunday made a passionate case for police reform and a direct appeal to the city's black voters, whose support she needs to win this swing state. 

Less than two weeks after the death of Keith Lamont Scott, a black man killed by police, Clinton arrived here Sunday morning with a message of sympathy for a grieving community and political promises, including “end to end reform in our criminal justice system — not half-measures, but full measures.”

She acknowledged that when it comes to understanding the plight of black families in America, she will never be able to replicate the symbolic empathy of President Barack Obama. “I’m a grandmother, but my worries are not the same as black grandmothers who have different and deeper fears about the world that their grandchildren face,” Clinton said. “I wouldn’t be able to stand it if my grandchildren had to be scared and worried, the way too many children across our country feel right now." 

Clinton’s visit to Charlotte was critical — she was so eager to visit that the campaign announced a trip last Sunday, when the city was still grappling with violent protests and looting. The trip was ultimately delayed by a week at the request of local lawmakers.
On Sunday, she was accompanied by her senior policy adviser Maya Harris, longtime aide Capricia Marshall and senior staffer Marlon Marshall, who is overseeing the campaign’s African-American outreach. 

Clinton’s challenge in North Carolina, where current polls put her trailing Donald Trump by about 3 points, is boosting the African-American vote that landed Obama a victory in 2008, when he won a state that had gone to the Republican nominee in the previous seven presidential election cycles. The key was Mecklenburg County, which includes the city of Charlotte, where Obama beat John McCain by more than 100,000 votes.

And that's true: black turnout in Mecklenburg, Orange (Chapel Hill), Durham and Wake (Raleigh) is the key to Clinton winning the state.  But more importantly, she does have a real plan for police reform.

Since the beginning of her campaign, Clinton has called for training police to de-escalate tense situations; common-sense gun reforms; and ending the “school-to-prison pipeline” by investing in education. But the Charlotte trip offered her a critical opportunity to make the case directly to black voters, with 36 days to go in the race. 

And the political message of the day was clear. Robin Bradford, who heads up the National Action Network’s Charlotte chapter, implored the congregation that “if you don’t utilize your right to vote, then you have no right to say anything.” 

“We do more than pray,” Clinton added in her remarks. “Everyone can vote.”

And that's important.  It's easy to dismiss Clinton's stated policies in all the noise over Trump and everything else, but they are there, and they are a universe better than anything I've seen out of Trump or Johnson or even Stein on this.

Black Lives Still Matter

Another day, another police shooting of a black man, another name as a hashtag on social media, this time in LA as an officer gunned down Carnell Snell, Jr. fleeing on foot after being pulled over for suspected auto theft.

The Los Angeles Police Department says it is investigating after an officer fatally shot a black man following a foot chase. 

LAPD officers say the incident started when they tried to perform a traffic stop early Saturday afternoon on a car with paper license plates. Officers suspected the vehicle, which contained at least two occupants, was stolen. The car failed to stop and officers gave chase, according to authorities. 

When the car finally came to a halt, two men fled on foot in different directions, the LAPD said in a statement. Two officers chased one of the suspects, following him to the rear of a nearby residence. 

An officer whose name has not been released then fatally shot the man, less than two blocks away from where the foot pursuit started. Paramedics declared the man dead at the scene of the shooting. 

No officers were injured and a handgun was recovered at the scene, the LAPD said. It was not clear Sunday what happened to the other man who fled the car. 

Several CNN affiliates and the Los Angeles Times identified the man killed by police as Carnell Snell Jr., 18. His mother, Monique Morgan, was visibly distraught as she told reporters her son was shot five times. 

Last time I checked, fleeing police on foot was not a capital crime, neither is grand theft auto.  The "handgun recovered at the scene" is what bothers me, as we've seen in both Charlotte and South Charleston that police don't have a problem with planting a gun at the scene to justify a "righteous shoot".  We'll find out that Snell "was no saint" and that the LAPD had no choice but to execute him on the spot, as always.

As with any officer-involved shooting, LAPD's Force Investigation Division will investigate and present its findings to Police Chief Charlie Beck. The chief, along with the LAPD board of commissioners, will determine whether the officer complied with the department procedures. 

The Los Angeles District Attorney's Office also plans to review evidence collected during the investigation. 

Crowds gathered near the scene of the shooting and remained there into the evening, but the demonstrations were peaceful. Police monitoring the protest initially wore riot gear, but removed it later, according to CNN affiliate KTLA.

So nobody else was hurt as a result of this at least, but anyone who expected the LAPD to be any different from the NYPD or any other major police department in this country was fooling themselves.

But black lives still matter.

StupidiNews!

• By a narrow margin, Colombian voters have rejected a peace plan that would have ended a 50-year civil war with FARC rebels, throwing the future of the country into doubt. 
• Residents of Haiti, Jamaica and Cuba are facing the strongest hurricane in a decade as Category 4 storm Matthew churns northward into the Caribbean today.
• The Nobel Prize in medicine has been awarded to Japan's Yoshinori Ohsumi for his work on autophagy, the process of cells recycling parts, errors in which can create a host of diseases.
• UK PM Theresa May says Britain will begin the process of withdrawing from the European Union starting in early 2017, including immigration curbs.
• The changeover of control of the internet's root zones has been moved to international group ICANN from the US despite a last-minute effort by Republicans to scrap the deal.

Last Call For Harlem's Hero

Watch Luke Cage on Netflix.  It's by far the best of the Marvel Netflix series for a number of reasons, but most of all it's unapologetically black.






And I love it.

Sunday Long Read: Broken Like Me

I know at this point in the proceedings that articles on the fascinating pathology of the "economically anxious middle-aged white Trump voter" are passé but this one by WaPo's Stephanie McCrummen stood out, as she talked to Melanie Austin of Pennsylvania and her boyfriend, Kevin Lisovich.

The first time she had seen him, at a rally in June, she was just beginning to realize how many people saw the world the way she did, that she was one among millions. At the time, her hips were still sore from a series of injections intended to calm her. She had gotten them in February, during a difficult time in her life, when she had been involuntarily hospitalized for several weeks after what she called a “rant,” a series of online postings that included one saying that Obama should be hanged and the White House fumigated and burned to the ground. On her discharge papers, in a box labeled “medical problem,” a doctor had typed “homicidal ideation.”

Melanie thought the whole thing was outrageous. She wasn’t a person with homicidal ideation. She was anxious, sure. Enraged, definitely. But certainly not homicidal, and certainly not in need of a hospital stay.

“It never crossed my mind that I’m losing it,” she said several months after her release, and a big reason for this conviction was the rise of Donald Trump, who had talked about so many of the things she had come to believe — from Obama being a founder of the terrorist group ISIS, to Hillary Clinton being a co-founder, to the idea that U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia may have been murdered in a White House plot involving a prostitute and a pillow.

“They say they found a pillow on his face, which is a pretty unusual place to find a pillow,” Trump had told the talk-radio host Michael Savage, who was using his show to explain the scenario to his 5 million weekly listeners, who then spread it on Facebook, where it wound up in Melanie’s feed.

To Melanie, this was the glory of the 2016 presidential election. The truth about so many things was finally being accepted, from the highest levels of the Republican Party on down to the grass roots of America, where so many people like her didn’t care what some fact-checker said, much less that one day Trump would suggest that Obama wasn’t born in America, and on another say maybe he was.

More and more, she was meeting people who felt the same as she did, joining what amounted to a parallel world of beliefs that the Trump campaign had not so much created as harnessed and swept into the presidential election. As Melanie saw it, what she had posted about Obama was no different from what a New Hampshire state legislator and Trump campaign adviser had said about Hillary Clinton, that she “should be put in the firing line and shot for treason.”

“If it’s time to lock me up, it’s time to lock up the world,” Melanie remembered thinking when she had heard that.

And so when she was released from the hospital with instructions to “maintain a healthy lifestyle,” she did what seemed to her not only healthy but also patriotic. She began campaigning for Trump.

“Trumpslide 2016!” she posted on Facebook a few days after she got home in March.

“Lets build a winning team and GREAT UNITED STATES OF AMERICA!! #Vote for #Donald #Trump for #President!” she posted in May. “#STOPHILARYCLINTON #STOPBERNIESANDERS #SHUTUPMITTROMNEY.”

In June, Melanie heard that Trump was holding a rally in an airplane hangar near Pittsburgh, so off she and Kevin went. On a blazing Saturday afternoon, her red “Make America Great Again” hat bobbed amid the thousands streaming past hawkers selling “Trump that Bitch” T-shirts and “Bomb the Shit Out of ISIS” buttons and a man handing out pamphlets about the apocalypse.

There are millions of people out there like Melanie Austin, and they are sure as hell going to vote.  They've guzzled the FOX News, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Infowars Kool-Aid for the last 20 years and they see Trump as their ticket back to the glory days.

This is the heart of the modern GOP.  They're not going gently into that good night and they will continue to have outsized control over our politics for decades.  And if we're not careful they're going to win it all in 2016.

The Master Debaters

As anticipated, Saturday Night Live's opening presidential debate sketch last night was hysterical with Alec Baldwin as The Donald and Kate McKinnon as Hillary.

“Good evening America,” Baldwin said as Trump. “I’m going to be so good tonight. I’m going to be so calm and so presidential that all of you watching are going to cream your jeans.”

At one point Baldwin refers to moderator Lester Holt as “jazz man” and perfectly pronounced China the way Trump often does. He then quickly takes credit for already winning the debate, “If Hillary knew how, she would have done it already. Period. End of story. I won the debate. I stayed calm. Just like I promised. And it is over.”

Holt then told him he couldn’t leave because it was a 90-minute debate.

“My microphone is broken,” Baldwin as Trump said, looking panicked. “She broke it with Obama. She and Obama stole my microphone and took it to Kenya and they broke it and now it’s broken.”

He then starts sniffling and pretends like it’s someone else before ultimately blaming it on Clinton. “She’s been sniffling all night.”

“Secretary Clinton, what do you think about that,” Holt asks.

“I think I’m going to be president,” McKinnon said.

I think Hillary's going to be president too.

Courting Disaster

The fall term of the US Supreme Court gets underway Monday, and it will only have 8 justices because Republicans took the unprecedented step of denying President Obama's nominee, Merrick Garland, even the courtesy of a confirmation hearing.  Now the court will attempt to go about its business and will remain shorthanded until one of two things happen: Democrats retake the Senate, or Republicans win the White House.

For the first time in decades, there will be only eight justices, not nine, to begin the new term. Also absent are the kind of big-ticket cases — involving immigration reform, affirmative action, abortion, same-sex marriage and the Affordable Care Act — that in recent years have catapulted the Supreme Court to the fore of American civic life.

Instead, the short-handed court has assembled a docket of more-modest cases — albeit ones that touch on contemporary controversies such as the role of race in criminal justice and politics, free speech and perhaps the treatment of transgender students.

Of far greater consequence is the fate of the court’s ideological balance. And on that question, the court finds itself like the rest of the country: waiting to see what happens on Nov. 8.

It has been nearly a half-century since a presidential election promised such an immediate impact on the court. Senate Republicans have refused to take up President Obama’s choice of Judge Merrick Garland for the seat of the late Justice Antonin Scalia, arguing that a newly elected president should fill that vacancy.

As of Sunday, Garland has been waiting 200 days for the Senate to act on his nomination. Obama tapped Garland a month after Scalia’s death in February. But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has been adamant that the Senate will not even hold a hearing on Garland, the chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

The next president’s impact on the court could go well beyond that one choice and be felt for decades. Three of the current justices are now older than other members who recently retired from the court, suggesting more departures to fill.

A victory by Donald Trump would continue the modern tradition of courts dominated by Republican-appointed members. But Hillary Clinton’s success could upend the status quo at the Marble Palace, producing nominees who would cement abortion rights, affirmative action and gay rights, and challenge hard-won conservative victories on gun rights, strict voting laws and campaign finance.

Any discussion of the Supreme Court these days, Stanford law professor Pamela S. Karlan said at a recent preview session at William & Mary Law School, can be summed up in two words: “It depends.”

And so we move on.  But I will always remember that the Republican party reserved the unprecedented step of denying the first black President a hearing on a Supreme Court nominee...yet another indication that as awful as Donald Trump is, he is merely the symptom of a broken, racist, hateful party that controls Congress.

Last Call For Trumped By The Press

If it's October, it must be time for that famous Surprise we keep hearing about in politics, and wouldn't you know it, Donald J. Trump got a hell of one in the NY Times this evening.

Donald J. Trump declared a $916 million loss on his 1995 income tax returns, a tax deduction so substantial it could have allowed him to legally avoid paying any federal income taxes for up to 18 years, records obtained by The New York Times show.

The 1995 tax records, never before disclosed, reveal the extraordinary tax benefits that Mr. Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, derived from the financial wreckage he left behind in the early 1990s through mismanagement of three Atlantic City casinos, his ill-fated foray into the airline business and his ill-timed purchase of the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan.

Tax experts hired by The Times to analyze Mr. Trump’s 1995 records said tax rules that are especially advantageous to wealthy filers would have allowed Mr. Trump to use his $916 million loss to cancel out an equivalent amount of taxable income over an 18-year period.

Stop. Rewind. Playback.

Which means Trump most likely skipped 18 years of income taxes.

Eighteen.  Years.

Although Mr. Trump’s taxable income in subsequent years is as yet unknown, a $916 million loss in 1995 would have been large enough to wipe out more than $50 million a year in taxable income over 18 years.

The $916 million loss certainly could have eliminated any federal income taxes Mr. Trump otherwise would have owed on the $50,000 to $100,000 he was paid for each episode of “The Apprentice,” or the roughly $45 million he was paid between 1995 and 2009 when he was chairman or chief executive of the publicly traded company he created to assume ownership of his troubled Atlantic City casinos. Ordinary investors in the new company, meanwhile, saw the value of their shares plunge to 17 cents from $35.50, while scores of contractors went unpaid for work on Mr. Trump’s casinos and casino bondholders received pennies on the dollar.

“He has a vast benefit from his destruction” in the early 1990s, said one of the experts, Joel Rosenfeld, an assistant professor at New York University’s Schack Institute of Real Estate. Mr. Rosenfeld offered this description of what he would advise a client who came to him with a tax return like Mr. Trump’s: “Do you realize you can create $916 million in income without paying a nickel in taxes?”

Mr. Trump declined to comment on the documents. Instead, the campaign released a statement that neither challenged nor confirmed the $916 million loss.

Trump was such an awful businessman, that he lost nearly a billion dollars on casinos and real estate, but hey, he got to use that to skip out on nearly two decades of taxes.

But he's a man of the working class.

So how did the Times get a hold of Trump's 1995 returns, anyway?

The documents consisted of three pages from what appeared to be Mr. Trump’s 1995 tax returns. The pages were mailed last month to Susanne Craig, a reporter at The Times who has written about Mr. Trump’s finances. The documents were the first page of a New York State resident income tax return, the first page of a New Jersey nonresident tax return and the first page of a Connecticut nonresident tax return. Each page bore the names and Social Security numbers of Mr. Trump and Marla Maples, his wife at the time. Only the New Jersey form had what appeared to be their signatures.

The three documents arrived by mail at The Times with a postmark indicating they had been sent from New York City. The return address claimed the envelope had been sent from Trump Tower.

So somebody with access to Trump's documents in Trump Tower sent this to the Times in order to do him in. He has a mole in the campaign and they just torched him.

Enjoy your weekend, Don.

The Other Side: She's A Master Baiter

The post-debate spin cycle that Trump was expected to try to recover from and move on to next week's Veep match-up and town hall debate a week from Sunday instead turned into several days of Hillary Clinton using the same tactic that worked so effectively in the debate itself against Donald Trump, and even the folks on the right like Hot Air's Jazz Shaw are wondering how much of a beating Trump's numbers will take due to his inability to prevent himself from taking Clinton's bait on former Miss Universe Alicia Machado.

The problem here is that this is absolutely working for Hillary Clinton and she’s jumping on the bandwagon as hard as she can. (It also reinforces her “man who can be goaded by a tweet” theme.) And why wouldn’t she? The debate probably didn’t go as well for Trump as it might have, but up until that point Clinton was on the ropes. There was one bad story after another about her with many of them being serious enough that the MSM couldn’t avoid talking about them. Her numbers were tanking nationally and in multiple swing states. Trump fans had reason to be at least cautiously hopeful because it wasn’t as if she was going to unveil yet another policy initiative which was suddenly going to turn the electorate around.

And then this happens. Some dusty old story about about a beauty pageant contestant who is far from a role model but does happen to hit the media narrative bullseye of being both Hispanic and in possession of two X chromosomes. And because Donald Trump apparently can’t stand seeing a moment of the day when everyone isn’t talking out him he decides to hoist this flag up to the yardarms and go charging into battle in the middle of the night. The major problem here is that having the media talk about somebody else (specifically Hillary) was actually working for Trump. We were at a point where all he needed to do was keep looking at least marginally serious about some significant campaign issues, even if they seemed a bit dry and boring, and allow Clinton to collapse into a pile on her own.

Now the worm has turned for the umpteenth time in this election and the cable news networks have a new shiny object to play with. Clinton’s numerous flaws and ethics problems slink off to the back burner again and the remaining undecided voters are handed a new reason to question Trump’s seriousness and credibility. It’s time to get off this Miss Universe train let the news about Clinton’s many problems pull her under. Can Donald do it? I’m starting to have doubts.

Trump's ego has always been his weakness, especially when the person attacking it is a woman.  It's a tactic Clinton saved until the final six weeks of the election and it was a smart move.  Trump can't help himself.  That "a man who can be baited by a tweet" line so perfectly encapsulates The Donald that it's comical to see him fall for it like a dipstick time and again.

The reason why it's so destructive is that as with any bully, once you rob them of the power to harm you, they end up looking like sputtering fools.  That's exactly what Clinton did here, and Donald can't shut up about calling women fat now on national television.  Before, taking Trump seriously was something that the Village media failed to do at their own peril, and it helped lead us directly to the moment we're in now.  But now everyone's laughing at him, and Trump cannot stand it.

He looks like a loser, the worse sin possible in the Book of Trump.  And Clinton's living rent-free inside his nightmares, exactly where she wants to be.