Last Call For Rigger Mortis

Donald Trump's dangerous rhetoric is now openly threatening to ignite a crisis in confidence among the American voter weeks before the election even happens.

Donald Trump has repeatedly called this year's presidential election rigged and has coyly said "I will keep you in suspense” on whether he would accept a Hillary Clinton victory, but many Republicans are less circumspect, according to a new poll.

Only half of Republicans would accept Clinton, the Democratic nominee, as their president. And if she wins, nearly 70 percent said it would be because of illegal voting or vote rigging, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Friday.

Conversely, seven out of 10 Democrats said they would accept a Trump victory and less than 50 percent would attribute it to illegal voting or vote rigging, the poll showed.

The findings come after repeated statements by Trump that the media and the political establishment have rigged the election against him. He also has made a number of statements encouraging his supporters to fan out on Election Day to stop ineligible voters from casting ballots.

The U.S. government has accused Russia of a campaign of cyber attacks against Democratic Party organizations and state election systems.

Clinton has said she will accept the results of the election no matter the outcome.

The poll showed there is broad concern across the political spectrum about voting issues such as ineligible voters casting ballots, voter suppression, and the actual vote count, but Republicans feel that concern more acutely.

For example, nearly eight out of 10 Republicans are concerned about the accuracy of the final vote count. And though generally they believe they will be able to cast their ballot, only six out of 10 are confident their vote will be counted accurately.

Among Democrats, about six out of 10 are concerned about the vote count. They, too, believe they wi1l be able to cast their ballot, but eight out of 10 are confident their vote will be counted accurately.

The problem with this idiotic "both-siderism" is that there's very real evidence that Democratic voter suppression is happening in red states and the fact that this will be the first presidential election since the Roberts Supreme Court neutered the Voting Rights Act, and the latter especially will have serious consequences.

This year's presidential election will be the first in a half-century without the significant presence of federal observers at polling places. That's because in 2013 the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, and when the court wiped out that section, the statute that provided for election observers went, too.

The landmark decision in Shelby County v. Holder doesn't mean civil rights officials are totally disarmed. The Justice Department will still send out "hundreds" of "monitors" to oversee Election Day compliance. But the number is smaller than it was before, and monitors can only enter the polling place if local officials agree. Observers, by contrast, had a statutory right to be inside polling places. They were trained specifically for the task. There also were many more of them, and they had far more authority than monitors.

"We can't deny the costs of Shelby County" in terms of enforcement powers, says Vanita Gupta, assistant attorney general for civil rights.

"The hope is that just by having the presence of the federal government at polling sites, even if we may be slightly more diminished or spread thinner, that our sheer presence has sufficient deterrent effect and gives voters the confidence that they need to feel like the process is fair," she adds.

Gupta says she expects federal monitors to fan out over half the states on Election Day.

None of these monitors, however, will have the automatic legal clout that observers did. Unlike monitors, observers typically were stationed inside polling places to watch partisan poll watchers and to make sure rights were enforced. They would also verify that the number of voters jibed with final vote tallies. Indeed, they could even go inside the polling booth to make sure assistors were accurately recording the votes of people who needed help casting their ballots.

Gerry Hebert, who served in the voting section of the Justice Department for 21 years, says the presence of federal monitors is "good as far as it goes, but it doesn't really replace that kind of on-site complete oversight within the polling place."

So yeah, that's what the real issue is, Donald.

Scion Of The Times

Donald Trump, a man who managed to go bankrupt running casinos and probably couldn't figure out how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich without burning down three neighborhoods in the process, is finding out the hard way that being an orange racist snack product is in fact bad for branding.

Amidst reports that occupancy rates at Trump Hotels have slipped this election season, the company has announced that new brand hotels will no longer bear the Trump name.

The newest line of luxury hotels, geared towards millennials, will be called Scion, the company said.

“We wanted a name that would be a nod to the Trump family and to the tremendous success it has had with its businesses, including Trump Hotels, while allowing for a clear distinction between our luxury and lifestyle brands,” Trump Hotels CEO Eric Danziger said in a statement.

Although Trump Hotels has said the new name has nothing to do with the eponymous businessman’s presidential campaign, empty rooms at the hotels have caused officials “to reduce rates during the peak season," according to New York Magazine.

Nightly rates at the newly-opened Trump International Hotel in D.C. plummeted below $500 while practically every other five-star property was sold out for the International Monetary Fund conference two weeks ago. And after his remarks about Mexican immigrants, two celebrity chefs backed out of their contracts to open a restaurant in the hotel.

According to Hipmunk, bookings at Trump Hotels plummeted 59 percent during the first half of 2016 and data from Foursquare shows a 17 percent drop in foot traffic at Trump properties since June 2015, when the reality TV star announced his presidential bid.

Trump Hotels, however, refutes the analysis.

“Our business at Trump Hotels is stronger than ever and we are incredibly excited about the future of Scion, the newest brand in our hotel portfolio,” Ivanka Trump, who is the executive vice president of development and acquisitions for the brand, said in a statement.

“The data reported by both Hipmunk and Foursquare is manipulated to appear meaningful, when, in reality, the information is inconsequential and does not provide an accurate representation of our performance,” a Trump Hotels spokesperson told Travel + Leisure.

The hotel occupancy data is also rigged, apparently.  Who knew. What you do know is which hotels to avoid in the future, right?

A Series Of (Clogged) Tubes

If you're like me, you had to deal with serious problem getting on some of your favorite internet sites on Friday because of a massive attack on the net's ability to handle and route web site requests.  It would be like if all the East Coast's traffic lights went from green to red and back to green every couple of seconds, because they all got conflicting commands to change the lights.  Nobody would be able to get anywhere, and that's what happened with Dyn's DNS servers and internet traffic 24 hours ago.

Dyn offers Domain Name System (DNS) services, essentially acting as an address book for the Internet. DNS is a system that resolves the web addresses we see every day, like https://www.WIRED.com, into the IP addresses needed to find and connect with the right servers so browsers can deliver requested content, like the story you’re reading right now. A DDoS attack overwhelms a DNS server with lookup requests, rendering it incapable of completing any. That’s what makes attacking DNS so effective; rather than targeting individual sites, an attacker can take out the entire Internet for any end user whose DNS requests route through a given server.

“DNS registrars typically provide authoritative DNS services for thousands or tens of thousands of domain names, and so if there is a service-impacting event the collateral damage footprint can be very large,” says Roland Dobbins, a principal engineer at Arbor Networks, a security firm that specializes in DDoS attacks. 

DDoS is a particularly effective type of attack on DNS services because in addition to overwhelming servers with malicious traffic, those same servers also have to deal with automatic re-requests, and even just well-meaning users hitting refresh over and over to summon up an uncooperative page.

Now, Internet backbone companies like Dyn deal with these attacks all the time.  But this was an attack of such incredible scale that it took even them by surprise.

The overall picture is still somewhat hazy, but more information has become available as the day has progressed. Initial reports indicate that the attack was part of a genre of DDoS that infects Internet of Things devices (think webcams, DVRs, routers, etc.) all over the world with malware. Once infected, those Internet-connected devices become part of a botnet army, driving malicious traffic toward a given target. The source code for one of these types of botnets, called Mirai, was recently released to the public, leading to speculation that more Mirai-based DDoS attacks might crop up. Dyn said on Friday evening that the security firms Flashpoint and cloud services provider Akamai detected Mirai bots driving much, but not necessarily all, of the traffic in the attacks. Similarly, Dale Drew, the chief security officer of Internet backbone company Level 3, says that his company sees evidence of their involvement.

So America's internet-enabled devices, from cameras to DVRs to baby monitors to thermostats and lighting, are all small computers able to serve as unwilling hosts in an army of devices that can send these requests to flood the internet's traffic cops, and America just hasn't been thinking about how many of these devices there are, or how to secure them from malware that recruits them as a massive network of attackers.  The problem of course is that this scenario shouldn't have taken Dyn by surprise at all:

There’s also a potential motive to use a Mirai hack against Dyn, or at least a certain irony in it. The company’s principal data analyst, Chris Baker, wrote about these types of IoT-based attacks just yesterday in a blog post titled“What Is the Impact On Managed DNS Operators?”. It appears he has his answer. And that all DNS services, and their customers, should be on notice.

And the notice is "We failed.  Do better.  The next attacks will be coming."  The reality is that expecting American consumers to upgrade the firmware on their internet-enabled toasters is exactly what led to Friday's event, because the companies selling "the Internet of Things" aren't selling them with any protections.  And we're going to be dealing with cleaning that up for quite some time.

Pants On Fire Time Again

It's actually kind of refreshing to see an awful political analogy from the Village these days that doesn't involve Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, but this one from the WSJ's James Taranto may be one of the all-time duds ever misfired as he compares Obamacare to...exploding cell phones?

Outside of politics, perhaps the worst new-product launch of 2016 was the Samsung Galaxy Note 7. Released in August, it was recalled twice and finally withdrawn from the market last week, all because the device has a tendency to catch fire or explode.

It’s an apt analogy for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, known colloquially as ObamaCare—and that’s not our opinion but that of President Obama himself. Here’s the president in a speech yesterday at Miami Dade College in Florida: 

The point is, now is not the time to move backwards on health care reform. Now is the time to move forward. The problems that may have arisen from the Affordable Care Act is [sic] not because government is too involved in the process. The problem is, is that we have not reached everybody and pulled them in. And think about it. When one of these companies comes out with a new smartphone and it had a few bugs, what do they do? They fix it. They upgrade—unless it catches fire, and they just—then they pull it off the market. But you don’t go back to using a rotary phone. You don’t say, well, we’re repealing smartphones—we’re just going to do the dial-up thing. That’s not what you do.

It turns out ObamaCare compares unfavorably even by that analogy. Several years ago this columnist switched our TV and internet service to Verizon Fios, the fiber-optic service offered by the company whose local operation was long ago known as New York Telephone. Signing up for Fios, it turned out, also entailed giving up traditional copper-wire analog phone service in favor of the newfangled digital kind.

We hadn’t used a rotary phone since childhood, but we happen to own an antique one. This morning we plugged it into the wall and attempted to dial a number. It took a long time, as you have to dial 11 digits now even for a local call—but it worked. If you like your phone, you can keep your phone (save for the Note 7). Verizon 1, ObamaCare 0. 

Well, if you think a national health care exchange is like making a phone call, sure, Taranto has a point.  He goes on to cherry-pick and complain about the parts of Obamacare that haven't come to pass yet, mainly because individual GOP governors have done everything they can to make sure the system fails, with the stated goal being that enough broken, badly running GOP spit and bailing wire nightmares will cause the whole health care system to collapse.

They don't really have a plan B.

That would be the correct analogy to the Samsung Note 7.

But we could instead talk about the tens of millions who have insurance now and the fact that despite Republican sabotage, the plan is still covering more than 90% of Americans.

But sure, let's keep making lazy, silly, and ignorantly cutesy analogies about a guy the GOP has chosen to replace with an orange racist snack product covered in cat hair.  We should really trust the judgment of the folks who thought Donald Trump should be president, right?

Tell me another one.  Pants on fire.

Time Is On My Side

If you thought the Comcast-NBC/Universal deal was bad for the American media consumer and the landscape of competition in a wolrd where information comes from fewer and ewer sources, wait until you see the new AT&T Time Warner merger.

AT&T Inc is in advanced talks to acquire media conglomerate Time Warner Inc, and a deal could come as early as this weekend, the Wall Street Journal reported. 

The talks around the cash-and-stock deal have come together quickly, the Journal reported on Friday, citing people familiar with the matter. 

Time Warner's shares were up 8.2 percent at $89.77 in late morning trading. AT&T was down 2 percent at $37.87. 

Time Warner, which has a market value of about $65 billion, is an attractive target because of its premium cable channel HBO, the CNN news network, film studio Warner Bros and other media assets. 

AT&T, which has a market capitalization of about $238 billion, has already made moves to turn itself into a media powerhouse, buying satellite TV provider DirecTV last year for $48.5 billion. 

Time Warner Chief Executive Jeff Bewkes has not been willing to sell in the past. The company rejected an $80 billion offer from Twenty-First Century Fox Inc in 2014.

AT&T and Time Warner were not immediately available for comment.

So a short list of what AT&T would control after this merger:

• CNN
• HBO
• The CW Network (well, half of it, the other half belongs to CBS turns out)
• DirecTV
• AT&T Mobile
• BellSouth
• Southwestern Bell
• New Line Pictures
• Warner Bros. Pictures
• Cricket Wireless
• Bleacher Report
• Nascar.com
• NBA.com
• DC Comics

All under one company's control.  Yeah, this seems like a great idea.  Sign me up, right?  What if the new company decides to tell Comcast and Charter "Hey, we're only going to carry HBO on DirecTV from here on out."  Maybe that won't happen.  Maybe it will.  But these guys would control a gigantic pile of movies, sports websites, two mobile phone companies, a whole crapload of baby bells, a TV network, a ton of cable networks and DC Comics on top of all that.  Who needs cable when you have mobile, satellite, and a whole lot of "last mile" utility poles?

Now you tell me that's a good idea.

And You Can Call Me Al

The annual Al Smith dinner in NYC, a fundraiser for Catholic charities, usually sees both candidates take the stage in a presidential election year to take some shots across each other's respective bows a few weeks before Election Day, all in good fun. Of course this year one of those candidates is Donald Trump, and things went, well, exactly as you would expect them to have gone considering Trump's history.

Donald Trump said Thursday he was in a room full of wonderful people at the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner in New York.

“Or as Hillary calls it, her largest crowd of her season,” he said with a chuckle, as Democratic rival Hillary Clinton laughed, too. “This is corny stuff.”

But as his remarks progressed, Trump’s speech turned more biting.

“Here she is tonight, pretending not to hate Catholics,” he said. Several in the crowd booed.

Trump went on: “Everyone knows of course Hillary’s belief that it takes a village, as in Haiti where she’s taken a number of them.” That was met with more jeering from the crowd. Clinton’s smile was still on her face, but she didn’t laugh.

Both candidates were, for the most part, good-natured yet tough on each other, but Trump apparently misread this particular audience gathered in his heavily Democratic hometown. Still, despite the booing spells, Trump got strong laughter from throughout the room at his best jokes. The loudest roar of approval came at the expense of his wife.

“The media is even more biased against me than ever before," Trump said. "You want the proof? Michelle Obama gives a speech and everyone loves it. It’s fantastic. They think she’s absolutely great. My wife Melania gives the exact same speech! And people get on her case! And I don’t get it! I don’t know why!”

At another point, Trump made light of his assertion that Clinton's use of a private e-mail server while secretary of state constitutes a punishable crime.

"We've proven that we can actually be civil to each other," Trump said. "In fact just before taking the dais Hillary accidentally bumped into me and she very civilly said 'Pardon me.'"

Yeah, the guy got the biggest laughs when he went after his wife and the woman he's running against.  I think I'm noticing a pattern here.  Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton may not have Barack Obama's natural comedic delivery gifts, but she does have 25 years of DC fighting experience in arenas such as these. She got some shots in too at the Waldorf Astoria ballroom last night.

Clinton, who spoke second, began with the self-deprecatory remarks and gracious gestures that have been the hallmarks of previous dinners.

She got big laughs when she told the audience: “I just want to put you all in a basket of adorables.”

She told Trump that if he didn’t like what she was saying, “Feel free to stand up and shout ‘wrong!’ while I’m talking.” That was a reference to Trump’s habit of interrupting her comments during the three presidential debates.

Clinton also shifted to more biting tone as her speech progressed, and added that after Trump’s speech that she’ll “enjoy listening to Mike Pence deny that you ever gave it.”

Trump, with his arms folded, laughed.

Still, Joy Reid summed it up best this morning:

Trump was in a room with precisely the kind of people he has spent his life yearning to be accepted and respected by, and they booed him.

— Joy Reid (@JoyAnnReid) October 21, 2016

For Trump it was being made to look like a national laughing stock all over again like Obama did to him five years ago at that now infamous 2011 White House correspondents dinner.  If you thought his meltdown was bad before...

...stay tuned.  I think the final two weeks and change of this campaign are going to be amazing.

StupidiNews!

• A magnitude 6.2 earthquake rocked Japan early Friday with the epicenter west of Osaka, tens of thousands lost power but officials are working to restore it.
• The US Department of Education is looking into Baylor University's response to sexual violence on campus, the school has been accused of undermining prevention efforts.
• The head of the UN's Human Rights Council has all but accused Russia and Syria of war crimes for the siege of Aleppo, saying civilians and hospitals are being specifically targeted. 
• British American Tobacco will buy the remaining 58% of Reynolds American that it doesn't already own to create the world's largest tobacco company in a $47 billion deal.
• Several automakers testing self-driving automobiles in California are upset about the state's new proposed rules that would require at least a year's worth of testing data for approval.

Last Call For Spies Like Us

So if you recall the news that yet another NSA contractor was busted for stealing classified data back in August, well it turns out that there's a whole new level of problematic with what the FBI found when they looked deeper into this rabbit hole.

Government lawyers on Thursday said they would prosecute a former National Security Agency contractor accused of stealing classified information under an espionage law, a move carrying far more severe penalties than previously announced charges.

Harold Thomas Martin spent over two decades pilfering classified information from multiple government agencies, federal prosecutors said in a new filing made in a U.S. District Court in Baltimore. They expected to bring charges that included violations of the Espionage Act, the filing said.

The amount of stolen data is estimated to be at least fifty terabytes, enough to fill dozens of hard drives, prosecutors said, adding that the alleged criminal conduct "is breathtaking in its longevity and scale." Some officials have said the trove may amount to the largest heist of classified government information in history.

An attorney representing Martin was not immediately available for comment.

Among the material allegedly stolen by Martin included a top secret document that contained "specific operational plans against a known enemy of the United States and its allies," the prosecutors said.

U.S. officials announced in a criminal complaint earlier this month that Martin, 51, was taken into custody in Maryland in August and charged with felony theft of classified government material. It did not allege a motive.

The FBI is investigating possible links between Martin and the leak online this summer of secret NSA hacking tools used to break into the computers of adversaries such as Russia and China, U.S. officials said.

In other words, this guy was most likely one of the most successful Russian moles in history.  He stole classified data over more than twenty years and did untold damage to the US intelligence community.

I'm glad this guy got caught but I think we're going to be spending a long time cleaning up after this guy.  I'm old enough to remember Aldrich Ames, and Martin here makes Ames look like a cub scout.

What Actually Rigging An Election Looks Like

Ohio is arguably the key state for Donald Trump, he simply can't win the presidency without it (no Republican has won the White House without it) but the efforts by the Kasich administration and Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted to throw one million mostly black and low-income voters Ohio voters off the rolls has now been deemed illegal, and those voters will now be able to vote on provisional ballots.

A federal judge in Ohio laid out a plan on Wednesday for the state to restore voting privileges for people who were illegally removed from the state's voter rolls over the past five years.

The ruling stems from a case in which the ACLU and other plaintiffs sued, saying Ohio's process for removing people who had died or moved away from voter rolls was illegal because it purged people simply for not voting and not responding to a letter from the state.

Voting rights cases have become pivotal battlegrounds ahead of the Nov. 8 election between Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump.

The American Civil Liberties Union and others have challenged laws in Wisconsin, Michigan and North Carolina over voting rights issues.

In the Ohio case, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati said Ohio's process for removing inactive voters was illegal, reversing an earlier ruling by U.S. District Judge George C. Smith.

In response, Smith on Wednesday ordered the state to allow people who had been removed from the rolls to cast provisional ballots on election day.

Those ballots will be checked against voter rolls, and if people were purged in the years 2011, 2013 or 2015, their votes will be counted and their registration restored.

Again, Husted tried to purge more than one million Ohio voters off the rolls over six years for the crime of not voting and not immediately responding to a letter that was often sent to an old address.  That will now be reversed.  How many provisional ballots will be cast, I don't know, but the plan was absolutely to lower turnout and give the state's elections to Republicans.

I'm glad the courts stopped this idiocy.

Something Something Accept What You Cannot Change

If there was somehow any doubt that Hillary Clinton will be the next president (with a commanding six point lead in the RCP average and an 85% chance of winning at Five Thirty Eight) last night's debate all but slammed the door in Trump's orange face.

It’s over. There will be no more presidential debates between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. (Hopefully.)

The final debate looked, at first, like it could have been pretty normal. At the start, there were some Trumpy moments — but for the most part, it appeared like both candidates, thanks to Trump’s slightly better behavior, were going to mostly stick to the issues.

Then Trump happened. By the end of the debate, Trump had insulted Latino immigrants in Spanish, continued to say that he would not concede the election if he lost, and called Clinton “such a nasty woman.”

In many ways, it was a fitting end to what’s been a very odd election season. But it also offered yet another reminder that we are living in very strange times.

But the real signal as to what Trump will do with all that anger when he loses big in November is as obvious as it comes.

Thirty minutes before the debate, Trump’s Facebook page went live with a video. It ran with the message: “If you’re tired of biased, mainstream media reporting (otherwise known as Crooked Hillary’s super PAC), tune into my Facebook Live broadcast. Starts at 8:30 EST/5:30 PST -- you won't want to miss it. Enjoy!” The ensuing show had its own anchors and guests.

For any other candidate, this may come off as unremarkable. But Trump’s wording, the original anchors and guests, and ongoing rumors suggest this is a tease of “Trump TV” — a business venture Trump might launch after his failed presidential bid.

Matt Yglesias explained for Vox:

While Trump and his team do not appear capable of winning a general election in the United States, they certainly have the right mix of skills and experience to operate a successful media company, folding the existing Breitbart and Hannity franchises together with the Trump brand to form Trump TV or Trump Media.

Trump’s people, for their part, haven’t done much to dispel the rumors. Here’s what Trump campaign CEO Steve Bannon said recently, according to CNN anchor Brian Stelter’s newsletter:

Bannon did not deny talk about a potential "Trump TV" network or streaming service. When asked if there is anything to the rumors, Bannon responded with a smile and said, "Trump is an entrepreneur." He repeated the answer again later. "Trump is an entrepreneur." He also pointed out Trump's social media prowess on Facebook and Twitter. "Look at the engagement. It's incredible..."

The Facebook Live video, however, suggests that Trump’s team isn’t even bothering to wait until after the election to pull this off.

Donald Trump: red meat salesman in the New Clinton Age.  It's about the only job he's actually qualified for, frankly.  But he'll ride that tornado through the American psyche doing as much damage as he can and will most likely profit from it.

Then again, this is a man that went bankrupt running casinos, a business model absolutely designed to part suckers from their money.  If he can't even get that right, maybe Trump TV won't be long for this world.

I hope.

StupidiNews!

• The first new US nuclear reactor in 20 years went online this morning as the TVA's Watts Bar 2 reactor was switched on after decades of cost overruns and safety concerns.
• The trial of Ammon Bundy and seven fellow accused conspirators goes to a jury today after their armed takeover of an Oregon wildlife center in January.
• British PM Theresa May says Britain will play a "full role" in the EU up until Brexit is official, and will remain a "strong and dependable partner" after.
• Philippine President Rodrigo Dueterte says the island nation will say "goodbye" to America and improve foreign policy ties with China as he visits Beijing for a summit this weekend.
• The newest weapon in fighting antibiotic-resistant infections may be the bacteria in our own digestive systems as researchers are looking into creating new drugs based on gut microbes.

In Science We Trust

A new Pew Research poll on which professions are trusted finds Americans believe in the medical community acting in the country's best public interest the most, followed by the US military and the scientific community overall.

About three-quarters or more of Americans are confident in the military, medical scientists and scientists in general to act in the best interests of the public. But fewer than half of Americans report similar confidence in the news media, business leaders and elected officials, according to a Pew Research Center report released earlier this month.

One-third of the public (33%) has a great deal of confidence in the military and an additional 46% say they have a fair amount of confidence. The high ranking of the military is consistent with a 2013 Pew Research Center survey, which found 78% of the public said the military contributes “a lot” to society. 

Similar shares of Americans express at least a fair amount of confidence in medical scientists (84%) and scientists (76%). 

The public expresses less confidence in school and religious leaders. About two-thirds (65%) say they have a great deal or fair amount of confidence in K-12 principals and superintendents and 53% have a great deal or fair amount of confidence in religious leaders. 

Americans are least confident in the news media, business leaders and elected officials to act in the best interests of the public. Majorities have not too much or no confidence in each of these three groups, a pattern that is shared across the political spectrum. For example, majorities of both Democrats (68%) and Republicans (78%) say they have not too much or no confidence at all in elected officials to act in the best interests of the public, in keeping with previous Pew Research Center studies showing near-record low trust in the federal government.

The survey also shows that Republicans trust professions less overall than Democrats or independents with the obvious exception of the military, and that religiously unaffiliated Americans have serious trust issues with religious leaders overall.

Overall the news media is only trusted by a little over a third of the country to act in the public's best interest, a little less than business leaders at 41%, but political leaders are in the basement at 27% (there's that number again...)

I would think after this election that all three groups would want to take a serious look at themselves as to why so few Americans trust them to act in the public's best interest.

Because for the most part?  They don't.

The Other Side: The 5 Stages Of Trump

I'd say this clinical autopsy of the Trump campaign from David Freddoso at the DC Examiner is about as antiseptic as it comes, as at this point we're well past ignoring the GOP elephant in the room that is Donald Trump's unprecedented meltdown.

One of the strongest arguments Trump made during the primary in support of his own candidacy was his promise to self-fund. In focus group after focus group, with voters across the ideological spectrum, the pledge proved widely popular. It gave his supporters — and many rank and file conservatives who viewed Trump with skepticism — comfort that Trump possessed the means to fund a competent campaign, despite Trump's dismissal of a typical finance or campaign infrastructure. Even establishment Republicans were heartened by the notion that, if nominated, Trump would not divert resources from the rest of the Republican ticket. 

As winter turned to spring, Trump secured the nomination and his campaign made no attempts at online or direct-mail fundraising. This was a critical error on his team and a missed opportunity to seize financial support from a dedicated and fired-up grassroots base. Warning signs about Trump's lack of fundraising were dismissed by members of the press and justified by his apologists due to recurring assurances that Trump was worth billions and would self-fund. 

As spring turned to summer, not only did Trump refuse to put significant sums behind his effort, but he structured his campaign to use donor money to reimburse himself for campaign loans. Predictably, high-dollar donors sat on their wallets and publicly questioned Trump's commitment to victory. They demonstrated little desire to fund an organization that came across as dedicated to subsidizing Trump companies as opposed to field offices, staff and basic campaign operations. 

As Trump capitulated to pressure and filed paperwork with the Federal Election Commission to forgive his loan, he continued to use costly and inefficient Trump facilities, airplanes and products. This was occurring as Clinton's operation encouraged frugality with donor funds, similar to the Mitt Romney, Barack Obama and George W. Bush campaigns before it. 

Now it's crunch time. Unsurprisingly, Clinton has the resource advantage to put more states in play with each passing week. The burden has fallen to the Republican National Committee to finance, organize and execute a national ground game in support of Trump as well as endangered House and Senate Republicans across the country. Establishment Republican donors, most of whom were ardent supporters of Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, have stepped up to give significant funds to Trump victory programs with the RNC. Some are even funding a top-tier super political action committee effort in an attempt to soften Clinton's support in targeted Senate states.

Despite Trump's claims to be worth $10 billion and his insinuations that he owns a store worth more than Romney, Trump has put only slightly more of his own money into his campaign than Romney dedicated to his first campaign in 2008. When you take into account all the campaign money squandered on Trump companies, Trump may actually spend less than Romney did in 2008.

Yes, and keep telling yourself that the reason Trump is going to get mauled is because he didn't spend enough money.

Really is no hope for these guys, is there? Hey "principled conservatives", ask yourself why this race has been over since May.

StupidiNews!

• At least 19 people are dead after a hospital fire in eastern India Monday night, more than 100 were injured by flames and smoke.
• Retired US Marine Corps Gen. James Cartwright has plead guilty in a deal with federal prosecutors to lying to the FBI over leaks involving the Stuxnet computer worm and Iran.
• Russia's defense minister says that Russia and Syria will pause air strikes on Aleppo in order to allow UN aid convoys into the area on Thursday.
• Apple has shelved its automaker project for now, scaling back plans to enter the US auto market itself and instead to partner to create self-driving cars.
• The website for Senate Republican fundraising is one of thousands to have been infected with skimming software that stole credit card data for at least six months.

Last Call For Supreme Obstruction

If you think either President Obama or a future President Hillary Clinton will be able to make any Supreme Court nominations with a GOP-controlled Senate in charge, well the "moderate" John McCain would like to put an end to that notion.

Almost immediately after news of Justice Antonin Scalia’s death broke, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) proclaimed that “this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new President.” And, with rare exception, this has been the Senate GOP’s message since Scalia’s seat became vacant — let the election happen first, and whoever wins that election gets to pick the next justice. 

Nevertheless, in a Monday interview with a Philadelphia radio host, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) admitted that Republicans will continue to block anyone the next president nominates to the Supreme Court — at least if that president is Hillary Clinton. 

“I promise you that we will be united against any Supreme Court nominee that Hillary Clinton, if she were president, would put up.” 

“The strongest argument I can make” for why Pennsylvania voters should reelect Republican Sen. Pat Toomey, is that a Republican Senate can “ensure that there is not three places on the United States Supreme Court that will change this country for decades.”

Scalia's seat on the court has been vacant now for seven full months.  There's no reason to believe that a lame duck session will approve his nomination unless voters give control of the Senate to the Democrats again.

We can do something about that in a few weeks, guys.

Trump Cards, Con't

An increasingly erratic and desperate Donald Trump continues to accuse Democrats and the entire US government of "rigging the election" at his rallies, Trump and his surrogates are specifically accusing the Obama administration of allowing massive voter fraud at poling places.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and his surrogates amplified their rhetoric on the racially charged issue of voting fraud, accusing Democrats of systematic cheating that could throw the election to Hillary Clinton.

Trump said in a Twitter message Sunday that the Nov. 8 election is “absolutely being rigged” at polling places and through media coverage. Former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said election fraud was a sin committed almost entirely by Democrats in America’s inner cities, where populations tend to be heavily minorities.

“They leave dead people on the rolls, and then they pay people to vote those dead people four, five, six, seven, eight, nine times,” said Giuliani, one of Trump’s most prominent supporters, on CNN’s “State of the Union.” He added, “dead people generally vote for Democrats.”

Cheating by Republicans is rare, Giuliani said. “They don’t control inner cities the way Democrats do,” he said.

These are pretty awful accusations, not to mention the blatantly racist assumption that it's the "inner city", code word for us awful black people of course, that Giuliani is accusing of mass voter fraud.  This is a former mayor of NYC for crying out loud, and yet here we are.

So yes, Trump and his campaign surrogates are openly accusing the Democrats of voter fraud and election rigging weeks before the election has even happened because "everybody knows" Democrats cheat.

To say such rhetoric is dangerous and irresponsible is a massive understatement.  Trump is trying to take the American election process with him in his collapse, and if the events in NC this weekend are any indication, he's well on his way to doing so.  No wonder then that a majority of Trump supporters now agree that the American election system is rigged.

I expect it to be far higher after they lose.  And that will be a disaster for the country.

Our Little Domestic Terror Problem, Con't

Whoever is behind acts like this needs to stop it immediately, because hey, this too is domestic terrorism guys.

The weekend firebombing of a North Carolina Republican headquarters drew national attention Sunday, with one state GOP official calling it an act of “political terrorism.”

Hillsborough police say the incident at the Orange County GOP headquarters occurred when a bottle of flammable liquid was thrown through the front window of the office that housed the local GOP headquarters.

The words, “Nazi Republicans get out of town or else” and a swastika were spray painted on the side of an adjacent building. Officials said the bomb ignited inside the office. No damage estimates were available.

“This highly disturbing act goes far beyond vandalizing property; it willfully threatens our community’s safety … and its hateful message undermines decency, respect and integrity in civic participation,” Mayor Tom Stevens said in a statement. “Acts like this have no place in our community.”

Hillsborough police and the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives were continuing to investigate. The incident took place in Orange County, home of the University of North Carolina in nearby Chapel Hill.

The county is overwhelmingly Democratic. Democrats and independents outnumber Republicans 5-1.

Democrats condemned the bombing. “The attack on the Orange County HQ @NCGOP office is horrific and unacceptable, Hillary Clinton’s campaign tweeted. “Very grateful that everyone is safe.”

N.C. Democratic Party Chair Patsy Keever called the bombing “outrageous.”

“The North Carolina Democratic Party strongly condemns this attack,” she said. “Violence has no place in our political system … Our deepest sympathies are with everyone at the North Carolina Republican Party.”

Dallas Woodhouse, executive director of the state GOP, called the bombing “political terrorism.”

“The office itself is a total loss,” he said. “The only thing important to us is that nobody was killed, and they very well could have been.”

Later, Woodhouse said, “Whether you are Republican, Democrat or Independent, all Americans should be outraged by this hate-filled and violent attack against our democracy. … Everyone in this country should be free to express their political viewpoints without fear for their own safety.”

Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/politics-government/article108627627.html#storylink=cpy

For those of you unfamiliar with NC, Orange County is home to UNC-Chapel Hill and is just west of Durham.  It's very liberal, part of the Research Triangle Park and has a lot of suburban areas, in fact it's about the most liberal county in the state (maybe Buncombe County and Asheville) and for this kind of thing to happen here, well.

Here's the thing though, we've seen Democrats raising money to help the NC GOP rebuild the office. That's a nice sentiment, but it's misguided for two reasons, one, because the NC GOP is most certainly fundraising on this out of anger and not sorrow, and two the Republicans are taking this as a tacit admission of guilt and will blame "violent Democratic rhetoric" for this, as if somehow it's not Donald Trump saying we need Second Amendment solutions to America's problems.

Believe me when I say being raised as a liberal Catholic from a New York family that I intimately understand the concept of guilt and it motivating our actions to take action to be the better world we want to see, but this isn't the way to do it.

Nor do we need to be attacking the folks that did give.  Again, I understand the impulse.  It will not be received in the spirit in which it is being offered, believe me.  Sometimes doing nothing is better in the long run.

I have my suspicions about the incident still.  Whoever did it, needs to face the full extent of the judicial system.  Republicans are already howling for blood as it is.

StupidiNews!

• Iraqi forces, backed by US air power and military advisors, have begun the military effort to retake the Iraqi city of Mosul from ISIS, which has controlled the city since early 2014.
• The federal defamation trial against Rolling Stone magazine over a debunked 2014 rape allegation story at the University of Virginia begins today.
• China has launched its longest planned manned space mission to date as the Shenzhou 11 mission is expected to see two astronauts dock with the Tiangong 2 space lab.
• After a series of mechanical issues, the US Navy says its latest Littoral Combat Ship, the USS Coronado, is ready for duty in Southeast Asia.
• The FAA has officially banned all Samsung Galaxy Note 7 smartphones from all flights after the now discontinued phone was launched with battery charging problems leading to fires.

Last Call For The Master Debaters

Saturday Night Live. That is all. See you guys Monday.

The Paper Trail

The Arizona Republic recently endorsed Hillary Clinton for president, and the response from Trump supporters has been nothing short of death threats against the paper and its supporters for doing so. The paper's publisher and president, Mi-Ai Parrish, responds to the community about the threats made against the paper and herself, specifically:

 

To those of you who have said Jesus will judge me, that you hope I burn in hell, that non-Christians should be kept out of our country, I give you my pastor grandfather. He was imprisoned and tortured for being a Christian, and suffered the murder of his best friend for also refusing to deny Christ. He taught all that freedom of religion is a fragile and precious thing.

Much as my grandfather taught, I also know there are a lot of things worth standing up for.

To those of you who said we should go live with the immigrants we love so much, and who threatened violence against people who look or speak a different way, I give you Jobe Couch.

He was the Army cultural attache and Alabama professor who sponsored my aunts and my mother when they arrived in America from Korea after World War II. There are dozens of descendants of his kindness. Citizens with college degrees, a dentist, lawyers, engineers, pastors, teachers, business owners, a Marine, a publisher and more. Uncle Jobe stood for the power of America as a melting pot. He taught me that one kind man can make a difference.

To all the other people who we heard from, who thanked us for our courage and our bravery, or who were bold enough to disagree with us on principle — the people who didn’t threaten to bomb our homes or harm our families — I have something for you, too. To you, I give my gratitude. I’m grateful that you stood up to say that we live in a better world when we exchange ideas freely, fairly, without fear.

To all of you who asked why we endorsed — or what right we had to do so — I give you my mother. She grew up under an occupying dictatorship, with no right to an education, no free press, no freedom of religion, no freedom to assemble peaceably, no right to vote. No right to free speech. She raised a journalist who understood not to take these rights for granted.

Don Bolles and Nina Pulliam are gone now, and Uncle Jobe is, too.

But the journalists I introduced you to here walk into the newsroom every day to do their jobs.

When they do, they pass by an inscription that fills an entire wall, floor to ceiling. It is 45 words long. It is an idea that is in my thoughts a lot these days.

It is the First Amendment.

For those of you playing at home, the First Amendment says this:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

It's held up for quite some time, frankly.  And it has because of people like Mi-An Parrish.  By the way, Don Bolles, the Republic reporter that Parrish referenced?  Killed by a car bomb 40 years ago for what many believed was for following a story on organized crime.

Violence against the media in America is nothing new, folks.  But a presidential candidate and his supporters openly calling for it over an endorsement of a political opponent?  That's pretty much beyond the pale, even for this country's bloody history.