Last Call For Russian To Judgment

What happens when increasingly unprotected and already vulnerable US voting systemss meet Putin's latest spyware weapon?  A recipe for a blue wave that vanishes before it's ever recorded.

Russia’s GRU has secretly developed and deployed new malware that’s virtually impossible to eradicate, capable of surviving a complete wipe of a target computer’s hard drive, and allows the Kremlin’s hackers to return again and again.

The malware, uncovered by the European security company ESET, works by rewriting the code flashed into a computer’s UEFI chip, a small slab of silicon on the motherboard that controls the boot and reboot process. Its apparent purpose is to maintain access to a high-value target in the event the operating system gets reinstalled or the hard drive replaced—changes that would normally kick out an intruder.

It’s proof that the hackers known as Fancy Bear “may be even more dangerous than previously thought,” company researchers wrote in a blog post. They’re set to present a paper on the malware at the Blue Hat security conference Thursday.

U.S. intelligence agencies have identified Fancy Bear as two units within Russia’s military intelligence directorate, the GRU, and last July Robert Mueller indicted 12 GRU officers for Fancy Bear’s U.S. election interference hacking.

The advanced malware shows the Kremlin’s continued investment in the hacking operation that staged some of the era’s most notorious intrusions, including the 2016 Democratic National Committee hack. The GRU’s hackers have been active for at least 12 years, breaching NATO, Obama’s White House, a French television station, the World Anti-Doping Agency, countless NGOs, and military and civilian agencies in Europe, Central Asia, and the Caucasus. Last year, they targeted targeted Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill, who’s facing a hotly contested 2018 re-election race.

“There’s been no deterrence to Russian hacking,” said former FBI counterterrorism agent Clint Watts, a research fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. “And as long as there’s no deterrence, they’re not going to stop, and they’re going to get more and more sophisticated.”

As sophisticated as it is, Russia’s new malware works only on PCs with security weaknesses in the existing UEFI configuration. It also isn’t the first code to hide in the UEFI chip. Security researchers have demonstrated the vulnerability with proof-of-concept code in the past, and a 2015 leak showed that commercial spyware manufacturer Hacking Team offered UEFI persistence as an option in one of their products. There’s even evidence that Fancy Bear borrowed snippets of Hacking Team’s code, ESET said.

Malware that invades the motherboard and is impossible to get rid of?  Sounds like the perfect weapon to wreck America on, say, an important election.

Not saying it's going to happen of course, but then again, there's no reason to believe that the Trump regime is going to do anything should Russia decide to make a move using this little surprise, either...

Supreme Misgivings, Con't

The Senate confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh today were a complete and utter disaster for the GOP in every conceivable way.

“It looks like she’s crying,” Hilda Darkins said, as several retirees around her dabbed their own eyes. “Who can blame her?”

At the Mid-County Senior Center in Lake Worth, Fla., two dozen people sat around circular tables, facing the television. They watched Christine Blasey Ford, who was watching in silence as Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) read lengthy opening statements.

Then Ford herself began to speak.

“She looks scared, and she looks nervous. But I think she’s telling the truth,” said Myrtle Facey, 78, a retired cashier. “She may have waited a long time to talk about it, but this is something that will never leave you, no matter what happens. You always remember it. You may not think of it every day, but it will always be with you, just like learning the ABCs. You never forget.”

On Thursday morning, Ford’s testimony — about an alleged sexual assault in the early 1980s by Brett M. Kavanaugh, now a nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court — transfixed Americans in coffee shops, subway cars and Capitol hallways. It was a moment with tremendous political stakes: Kavanaugh’s nomination itself seemed in doubt, and with it a firmer conservative majority on the nation’s highest court.

Dr. Ford gave a heartfelt, emotional testimony and it destroyed any doubt that she was assaulted by Brett Kavanaugh some 30 years ago. It became a national event of importance.

The power of the moment — the reason that people cried in airplane seats and called into C-SPAN to tell their own stories of sexual assault — was in seeing Ford tell a story of private pain before a massive public audience.

It was to see her speak, without knowing yet who would believe her.

“16A: Crying. 14B: Crying. 17C: Weeping,” Ron Lieber, a New York Times columnist, wrote on Twitter from a flight headed from New York to Salt Lake City, listing the reactions as passengers watched the hearing on seat-back televisions. “I am one of the criers.”

As the hearings began, some of the busiest places in the country fell quiet. At the New York Stock Exchange, Brad Smith — an anchor for the news site Cheddar — said normally frenetic traders were all watching the TVs. Phones rang in the background, unanswered.

In the Capitol building itself, the halls were quiet, as senators not on the Senate Judiciary Committee bunkered in their offices to watch TV.

At the Department of Housing and Urban Development, so many employees watched the hearings on their computers that the I.T. department warned they would overwhelm the network.

In one therapist’s office in Washington, two women sat in the waiting room, listening to the hearing on tiny cellphone speakers. One reached for the other’s hand.

And then later this afternoon, America met the real Brett Kavanaugh, and the real Senate GOP.

After riveting testimony from Dr. Blasey, Judge Kavanaugh took his turn before the Senate Judiciary Committee to proclaim his innocence — and outrage.

He opened the second half of the high-stakes hearing with a scorched-earth defense, denying he had ever sexually assaulted someone and denouncing a “frenzy” bent on destroying his nomination.

“This confirmation process has become a national disgrace,” he said in an opening statement that he said he wrote himself on Wednesday. “The Constitution gives the Senate an important role in the confirmation process, but you have replaced ‘advice and consent’ with ‘search and destroy.’”

He condemned Democrats who he said had searched for reasons to sink him weeks before, only to turn to dark accusations. He pointed back at deep-seated liberal grudges, going back to the presidency of Bill Clinton and the victory of Mr. Trump as evidence of the animus. And he warned of dire consequences for the federal judiciary in decades ahead if nominees face a path like his.

And when he recounted his daughters praying last night for Dr. Blasey, he broke down in tears.

“My family and my name have been totally and permanently destroyed by vicious and false additional allegations,” he told the committee. But he vowed never to withdraw.

“You may defeat me in the final vote, but you will never get me to quit,” he said. “Never.”

Dr. Ford was filled with fear and trepadation as she laid herself bare before America.  Judge Kavanaugh was incandescently incensed that he had be inconvenienced by this mere woman on the way to his Supreme Court appointment for life.

The Judiciary Committee will vote tomorrow on Kavanaugh's confirmation, the entire Senate on Saturday, and nothing makes me think that Brett Kavanaugh won't be sworn in by Monday to start destroying 80 years of classic liberalism, civil rights, and equality.

But America won't soon forget this hearing, this day.

And they will speak in November at the ballot box.

The Blue Wave Rises, Con't

Yesterday I talked about how Republicans were cutting campaign funds to seats they had given up on as indefensible as America gets closer to midterm elections in less than six weeks. Now, Republicans have a bigger problem as they are finding out that there's basically no such thing as a safe House district anymore as more and more GOP-held seats that were out of the picture as recently as last month are now completely in play, and Republicans are scrambling to defend them.

Internal Democratic polling conducted in August and September revealed the party's candidate leading or trailing by small margins in a dozen seats on the outer edges of the battlefield. And outside money is already starting to flow beyond the 50 or so districts that initially drew major TV ad reservations.

The GOP's top House super PAC, the Congressional Leadership Fund, funneled nearly $3 million into a few sleeper races that had previously received little national attention. And the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee booked more than $100,000 of airtime in Republican Rep. Mike Kelly’s northwestern Pennsylvania district, which President Trump carried by 20 points.

“For Republicans, this is a game of Whac-A-Mole,” said John Lapp, a Democratic strategist who served as the DCCC’s executive director in 2006. “With a battleground map this big, they simply can’t be everywhere. There are competitive races in blue, purple, and ruby-red districts popping up every day.“

The CLF launched ad buys last week in seats held by Reps. George Holding of North Carolina, Fred Upton of Michigan, and Rodney Davis of Illinois, where private Democratic polling has found tight contests.

Two or more internal Democratic surveys conducted in the past two months found single-digit races in seats held by Republican Reps. Jaime Herrera Beutler of Washington, Rob Woodall of Georgia, Vern Buchanan of Florida, Ted Budd of North Carolina, Ann Wagner of Missouri, Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, and John Carter of Texas, and in Florida's open 15th District.

And multiple Democratic polls have found a single-digit race in Montana, where former state Rep. Kathleen Williams is challenging Republican Rep. Greg Gianforte.

Several of these seats are in costly media markets, which can complicate the ability of outside groups from either side to make a serious investment. But nearly all are districts Trump carried by margins ranging from 5 points to 13 points, and the polling is a sign of increasingly unfavorable atmospherics for Republicans after a turbulent summer.

"Almost nobody should assume that they’re cruising," Republican pollster Glen Bolger said. "If the president won by 10 points or less, it's a competitive race."

Most federal election years there's maybe 20 competitive House races.  Even with all 435 House seats up for grab every two years, most elections see maybe 5% of those seats ever in any danger of changing hands, and maybe half that as truly competitive, counting both parties.

2018 is massively different.  Republicans face defending more than 70 seats, that's nearly a third of their caucus, and 50-60 of those seats are legitimately in play, with 25 or so true tossups.

Now we're seeing 8 more seats shift from in play to competitive.

Cook Political Report's House ratings find a similar shift.  Democrats have 4 open seats to defend that are competitive and 9 more that are in play (a normal election cycle total) but Republicans now have 68 seats that are competitive and have to defend another 25 on top of that.

The losses for the GOP could be catastrophic, on the level of 2010 for the Democrats, just from the number of seats in play.  Yes, Dems could gain 60 seats.  It's that bad for the GOP right now.

It's only going to get worse if we provide the finishing blow.

StupidiNews!

• A man was arrested at Dublin airport in Ireland after breaking onto the tarmac to catch his missed Ryanair flight to Amsterdam, the man was detained for questioning by police.
• Donald Trump has rejected Canadian PM Justin Trudeau's offer to meet personally over NAFTA talks, Trump is threatening new auto tariffs on Canada and NAFTA talks have stalled. 
• The 5th Circuit has upheld Louisiana's law requiring abortion clinic doctors must have hospital admitting privileges, in a 2-1 decision the court ruled the law was not undue burden on women.
• Donald Trump is unhappy with the Fed raising interest rates to 2.25% yesterday, saying he doesn't agree with Fed Chairman Jerome Powell's decision to do so six weeks before midterms.
• Japanese space exploration company ispace says it will purchase two SpaceX Falcon rockets and go to the moon by 2030, company founder Takeshi Hakamada sees lunar tourism by 2040.

Last Call For Russian To Judgment, Con't

A sobering warning from Natasha Betrand in The Atlantic that there's a definite reason why Donald Trump wants Brett Kavanaugh confirmed on the Supreme Court as the new term begins October 1: he would almost certainly be the deciding vote in an upcoming SCOTUS 5-4 case decision that could give Trump pardon power over state crimes as well as federal ones.

A key Republican senator has quietly weighed in on an upcoming Supreme Court case that could have important consequences for Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.

The Utah lawmaker Orrin Hatch, who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee, filed a 44-page amicus brief earlier this month in Gamble v. United States, a case that will consider whether the dual-sovereignty doctrine should be put to rest. The 150-year-old exception to the Fifth Amendment’s double-jeopardy clause allows state and federal courts to prosecute the same person for the same criminal offense. According to the brief he filed on September 11, Hatch believes the doctrine should be overturned. “The extensive federalization of criminal law has rendered ineffective the federalist underpinnings of the dual sovereignty doctrine,” his brief reads. “And its persistence impairs full realization of the Double Jeopardy Clause’s liberty protections.”

Within the context of the Mueller probe, legal observers have seen the dual-sovereignty doctrine as a check on President Donald Trump’s power: It could discourage him from trying to shut down the Mueller investigation or pardon anyone caught up in the probe, because the pardon wouldn’t be applied to state charges. Under settled law, if Trump were to pardon his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, for example—he was convicted last month in federal court on eight counts of tax and bank fraud—both New York and Virginia state prosecutors could still charge him for any crimes that violated their respective laws. (Both states have a double-jeopardy law that bars secondary state prosecutions for committing “the same act,” but there are important exceptions, as the Fordham University School of Law professor Jed Shugerman has noted.) If the dual-sovereignty doctrine were tossed, as Hatch wants, then Trump’s pardon could theoretically protect Manafort from state action.

If Trump were to shut down the investigation or pardon his associates, “the escape hatch, then, is for cases to be farmed out or picked up by state-level attorneys general, who cannot be shut down by Trump and who generally—but with some existing limits—can charge state crimes even after a federal pardon,” explained Elie Honig, a former assistant U.S. attorney in New Jersey. “If Hatch gets his way, however, a federal pardon would essentially block a subsequent state-level prosecution.”

A spokesman for the senator denied that his brief was inspired by the Mueller investigation, noting that Hatch has “worked for years to address the problem of overcriminalization in our federal code” and wants the Court “to reconsider the rationale” for the doctrine “in light of the rapid expansion of both the scope and substance of modern federal criminal law.”

But while Hatch has earned his bona fides in the arena of criminal-justice reform, the timing of his filing is nevertheless significant. For months, the Gamble case has been analyzed through the lens of the Mueller investigation, and Brett Kavanaugh, Trump’s nominee to replace the retired Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, could be on the bench by the time the Court reconvenes this fall. The justices decided to hear the case one day after Kennedy announced his retirement.

In other words, this case was hand-selected to send to the Supreme Court, and Kennedy's retirement the last obstacle Trump needed gone in order to install the SCOTUS vote that would assure his federal pardons would mean that state charges could not be brought on the same crimes.

Trump could then pardon everyone involved, including himself, and then be insulated from state charges.  All of it would go away, investigation, charges, or not.

This is what Kavanaugh has to be on the court to do.  This was the plan all along.  Mueller may lower the boom on Trump, but the means are in place for him to escape completely from any sort of justice, along with all his co-conspirators.

A Republic, if you can keep it...

The Blue Wave Rises, Con't

Across the river in Ohio, things are looking a lot better for Democrats then they were two years ago when Trump won the state by 8 points, as Dem Sen. Sherrod Brown looks to be on the path to easy reelection and in better news, Dem Richard Cordray has tied up the Governor's race with Mike DeWine.

"Two years have made a big difference in the outlook of Ohio voters," Dr. Lee M. Miringoff, the director of the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion.

"Donald Trump won the state by more than eight points. But, now, a majority want more Democrats in Congress as a check on his agenda."

Both Cordray and DeWine get support from 47 percent of likely voters; six percent say they're undecided.

Among registered voters, it's the same tie at 47 percent each. That's a tightening from NBC/Marist's last poll in June, which showed DeWine up with registered voters, 46 percent to 42 percent.

When candidates from the Green Party and Libertarian Party added to ballot, Cordray and DeWine both pull 44 percent.

The two gubernatorial hopefuls have similar favorability ratings among likely voters, with Cordray having lower negatives. Forty-four percent of likely voters view him favorably, compared to 28 percent who view him unfavorably (+16) .For Dewine, he's viewed favorably by 47 percent of likely voters and negatively by 36 percent (+11). Twenty-eight percent of likely voters aren't sure how to rate Cordray, while 17 percent are unsure about DeWine.

In the Senate race, Brown holds a 13-point lead over Renacci among both likely and registered voters, 52 percent to 39 percent, unchanged from June's NBC/Marist poll.

Brown's lead comes thanks to a 29-point advantage with likely independent voters and a 49-point lead among likely moderates. Renacci trails with every demographic breakdown — income bracket, education level, race, and age group — except for his 4-point advantage with likely male voters. Brown holds a 29-point lead with likely female voters.

These results sit against the backdrop of relatively stable approval numbers for Trump among all Ohio adults. Forty-three percent approve of Trump's job as president, compared to 49 percent who disapprove. In June, 40 percent approved and 48 percent disapproved of his job performance.

What a difference two years of Trump makes.  In early 2017, Brown was considered among the most vulnerable Democrats in the midterms, and Mike DeWine was considered a shoo-in to continue John Kasich's GOP policies.

Now Brown has a double-digit lead, and Cordray has tied the race up with six weeks to go. Suddenly, Trump isn't so hot in a state getting pummeled by tariffs on farmers and automotive parts makers.

And in the House, Republicans are already starting to pull the plug on losing campaigns in order to try to save the competitive races they can.

Republicans are performing critical triage to their midterm spending strategy as they seek to hold on to their House majority in a difficult midterm year.

The House GOP’s campaign arm pulled the plug on its remaining ad buys last week for the Pittsburgh media market, where Rep. Keith Rothfus (R-Pa.) is desperately fighting to hang on to his seat in a race against Rep. Conor Lamb (D-Pa.).

It’s grim news for Rothfus, who has largely been seen as a dead man walking since redistricting left him with a Democratic-leaning district and a difficult opponent in Lamb.

For the GOP, it’s likely a sign of things to come as the party seeks to target its money toward the races most likely to save its majority. Democrats need 23 seats to take back control of the House, and the GOP is defending dozens of seats that are seen as vulnerable.

“It’s a giant chessboard,” said one longtime GOP operative. “There’s obviously limited resources, and you need to make tough decisions. This is sort of an art form as opposed to a science.”

It's a giant chessboard, but with Trump tied around their necks, the game is now sink or swim, and they're drowning.

The Whole Saturday Night Massacre Thing, Con't

The Village media is desperately trying to redeem themselves after Monday's Rod Rosenstein "is he fired or isn't he" fiasco, and frankly they're not doing a very good job of it if this is the best they can do.

Rod J. Rosenstein’s departure seemed so certain this week that his boss’s chief of staff told colleagues that he had been tapped by the White House to take over as second-in-command of the Justice Department, while another official would supervise the special counsel probe into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, people familiar with the matter said.

But by Monday afternoon, the succession plan had been scrapped. Rosenstein, who told the White House he was willing to quit if President Trump wouldn’t disparage him, would remain the deputy attorney general in advance of a high-stakes meeting on Thursday to discuss the future of his employment. The other officials, too, would go back to work, facing the prospect that in just days they could be leading the department through a historic crisis.

Inside the Justice Department on Tuesday, officials still struggled to understand the events that nearly produced a seismic upheaval in their leadership ranks — until it didn’t — and they braced for a potential repeat of that chaos later in the week.

Some officials said that Matt Whitaker, Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s chief of staff, had told people he would be taking over for Rosenstein — an indication that the deputy attorney general’s departure was all but certain — and were surprised when it was announced that Rosenstein would remain in his job. Sessions began telling people on Sunday that Rosenstein might be in trouble, according to people familiar with the matter. Others said they learned all the developments from news reports that evolved throughout the day.

The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to reporters.

While it remained possible that Rosenstein could still resign or be fired imminently, people inside and outside the department said it seemed increasingly more likely that Rosenstein would stay in the job until after November’s elections and then depart, probably along with the attorney general. Two White House officials said Tuesday that Trump is unlikely to fire Rosenstein until after the midterms.

Forcing out the deputy attorney general in the next month could motivate Trump’s detractors to turn out for elections in which dozens of congressional seats are in play and Republicans are fearful they are at risk of losing control of the House. And those who have observed Trump and Rosenstein together or have been told of their interactions said the president seemed to hold Rosenstein in somewhat higher regard than he did Sessions.

“For all of the president’s bluster, I’m not sure he doesn’t have at least some grudging respect for Rod,” said James M. Trusty, a friend of Rosenstein and former Justice Department official who works in private practice at Ifrah Law.

 Breaking all this down,this is where the Washington Post is on Rosenstein:

1) We're just telling you what our sources told us, so it's not our fault if they burned us.

2) We're still carrying water for them because we need access to the White House.

3) Somebody talked Trump out of firing Rosenstein at the last minute, but we're not telling you who.

4) We don't know when Rosenstein is going to be fired, or who will replace him overseeing the Mueller investigation.

5) He's probably going to survive until after the election, but then all bets are off.

We'll see what happens on Thursday, but Rosenstein's days seem as numbered as Jeff Sessions's are, and that doesn't bode well for the Mueller investigation to ever be allowed to be completed.

StupidiNews!

• China has denied access to a US naval ship scheduled for shore leave in Hong Kong next month in protest of US sanctions on Chinese purchases of Russian military equipment.
• Flooding continues in South Carolina as areas largely spared by Hurricane Florence's direct wrath are now facing swollen rivers, record flooding, and evacuation orders.
• Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan says that Turkish courts will decide the fate of a US pastor held on charges of terrorism as relations between Ankara and Washington continue to deteriorate.
• Donald Trump faced laughter at his UN address after mentioning his administration was the best in American history, but the rest of his speech was a list of grievances against the world.
• Ride-share giant Uber has been handed a major win, with the 9th Circuit agreeing that driver disputes should be handled by arbitration and not class-action lawsuits.

Trump Cards, Con't

The Trump White House is clearly losing on both the Brett Kavanaugh and Rod Rosenstein fronts, because they're about to pick yet another culture war fight in order to "rally the base".

Federal health officials canceled an FDA contract for human fetal tissue research Monday night and announced a review of all such research projects.

The announcement, citing “serious regulatory, moral, and ethical considerations,” revives a political issue that last flared in 2015 and led to congressional hearings. That fight came over anti-abortion political activists who covertly videotaped Planned Parenthood doctors and employees of Advanced Bioscience Resources (ABR), a cell tissue firm based in Alameda, California, that provides such cells to researchers.

The canceled contract would have paid $15,900 to ABR for human tissue that would make a laboratory mouse’s immune system more similar to a human’s. (ABR did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

“Mice with human immune systems are incredibly valuable for research of terrible diseases, and there really is no alternative,” Lawrence Goldstein of the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine told BuzzFeed News. Such cells have figured prominently in the development of vaccines against diseases such as rubella, rabies, polio, measles, chickenpox, and shingles.

The bottom line is that such cells would be otherwise discarded, he noted, and bioethics reviews going back to the Reagan administration have approved of their use to benefit human health.
The move to audit fetal tissue research was applauded, however, by David Daleiden of the Center for Medical Progress, the anti-abortion activist who ran the covert videotaping project.

“HHS’s newly-announced review of fetal tissue procurement and experimentation must be exacting, and it must terminate all other agreements for baby body parts,” he said in a statement.

That this is happening six week before midterm elections is not an accident in the least.  Neither is the fact this is happening to distract from how badly the Kavanaugh nomination fight is going, or from the Rosenstein firing trial balloon.

Still the results will almost certainly be decades of research lost, because DEAD BABY PARTS FACTORIES or something stupid, because this is America now.

Trump Trades Blows, Con't

The "October Surprise" for midterm voters may already be here: Trump's 10% tariffs on $200 billion in Chinese imports that went into effect this week means higher prices are already starting to hit voters at the register.

The latest impact will begin to hit Monday as new 10 percent tariffs Trump slapped on over $200 billion in imports from China are scheduled to go into effect. That tariff rate is set to rise to 25 percent on Jan. 1 if the Chinese don’t capitulate to White House demands. Trump has also threatened to bump the total up to more than $500 billion in imports, which would hit nearly every product China exported to the U.S. last year.

Economists expect that to translate into higher prices for consumers across the country and special pain for low- to middle-income voters who make up much of Trump’s base — and are least able to absorb increased costs for consumer goods such as air conditioners, clothing and furniture. Republicans are counting on getting Trump supporters to the polls in November to hold off projected Democratic gains in the House and potentially the Senate. Forcing consumers to pay higher prices could make that harder.

“If you are kind of in the middle- or lower-income groups, you are buying a lot of what economists call tradable goods and you’ll be hit a lot harder,” said Kyle Handley, assistant professor of business economics and public policy at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business. “This is basically the Trump voter who is going to see the biggest hit to their total spending.”

Evidence is piling up that consumers and businesses are growing increasingly nervous about Trump’s trade policy.

Consumer sentiment measured by the University of Michigan dropped last month to its lowest point in nearly a year, with the decline centered in lower-income households most sensitive to higher prices. The sentiment index ticked up again in preliminary results for September. But nearly a third of those surveyed cited concern over tariffs when assessing the economy. 

A survey of chief financial officers unveiled last week by Deloitte found that 42 percent said business conditions would improve next year, the lowest in two years, with executives “overwhelmingly worried” about trade policy and tariffs.

Walmart recently warned it will need to raise prices on a huge swath of products imported from China. Other large consumer-product companies including Procter & Gamble, Nestle and Coca-Cola announced price increases over the summer, partly because of tariffs, and warned of more to come.

The only two things thing Republicans really have going for them are Trump's Supreme Court picks, and the fact they've not managed to completely crash the Obama economy yet.   Both of those are in serious jeopardy before midterm elections, it seems.

Throw in rising oil prices from Iranian sanctions and I think voters are going to start changing their mind about the GOP very, very quickly. And let's not forget that these corporations with "no choice" but to pass tariff price hikes on to consumers are banking record profits right now thanks to the trillions in Trump tax cuts they are getting.  They could afford to swallow these price increases if they wanted to.  They won't, because profit is all that matters.

Maybe even quickly enough to affect voting in November.

StupidiNews!

• Florida Democratic congressional candidate April Freeman died unexpectedly Monday, Freeman was running to fill the 17th House District seat vacated by GOP Rep. Tom Rooney.
• Attorney Michael Avenatti is promising that yet another accuser of Trump Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh will come forward in "the next 48 hours".
• Oil prices have risen to four-year highs after Donald Trump promised to crack down on Iranian oil sales at the UN as part of increased economic sanctions against Tehran.
• The defamation lawsuit against Donald Trump by adult film star Stormy Daniels looks to be facing dismissal after a federal judge commented that Trump was "engaging in free speech".
• Satellite radio company SiriusXM will buy internet streaming music service Pandora for a reported $3.5 billion, with the deal expected to close in early 2019.

Last Call For Russian To Judgment, Con't

The New Yorker's Jane Mayer examines the case that Russian interference in the 2016 elections not only helped Donald Trump, but helped him in a decisive manner, as laid out in a new book out this week called Cyberwar.

Politicians may be too timid to explore the subject, but a new book from, of all places, Oxford University Press promises to be incendiary. “Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President—What We Don’t, Can’t, and Do Know,” by Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor of communications at the University of Pennsylvania, dares to ask—and even attempts to answer—whether Russian meddling had a decisive impact in 2016. Jamieson offers a forensic analysis of the available evidence and concludes that Russia very likely delivered Trump’s victory.

The book, which is coming out less than two months before the midterm elections, at a moment when polls suggest that some sixty per cent of voters disapprove of Trump, may well reignite the question of Trump’s electoral legitimacy. The President’s supporters will likely characterize the study as an act of partisan warfare. But in person Jamieson, who wears her gray hair in a pixie cut and favors silk scarves and matronly tweeds, looks more likely to suspend a troublemaker than to be one. She is seventy-one, and has spent forty years studying political speeches, ads, and debates. Since 1993, she has directed the Annenberg Public Policy Center, at Penn, and in 2003 she co-founded FactCheck.org, a nonpartisan watchdog group. She is widely respected by political experts in both parties, though her predominantly male peers have occasionally mocked her scholarly intensity, calling her the Drill Sergeant. As Steven Livingston, a professor of political communication at George Washington University, puts it, “She is the epitome of a humorless, no-nonsense social scientist driven by the numbers. She doesn’t bullshit. She calls it straight.”

Indeed, when I met recently with Jamieson, in a book-lined conference room at the Annenberg Center, in Philadelphia, and asked her point-blank if she thought that Trump would be President without the aid of Russians, she didn’t equivocate. “No,” she said, her face unsmiling. Clearly cognizant of the gravity of her statement, she clarified, “If everything else is a constant? No, I do not.”

Jamieson said that, as an academic, she hoped that the public would challenge her arguments. Yet she expressed confidence that unbiased readers would accept her conclusion that it is not just plausible that Russia changed the outcome of the 2016 election—it is “likely that it did.”

An airtight case, she acknowledges, may never be possible. In the introduction to her new book, she writes that any case for influence will likely be similar to that in a civil legal trial, “in which the verdict is rendered not with the certainty that e=mc2 but rather based on the preponderance of evidence.” But, she points out, “we do make most of life’s decisions based on less-than-rock-solid, incontrovertible evidence.” In Philadelphia, she noted to me that “we convict people on probabilities rather than absolute certainty, and we’ve executed people based on inferences from available evidence.” She argued that “the standard of proof being demanded” by people claiming it’s impossible to know whether Russia delivered the White House to Trump is “substantially higher than the standard of proof we ordinarily use in our lives.”

Her case is based on a growing body of knowledge about the electronic warfare waged by Russian trolls and hackers—whom she terms “discourse saboteurs”—and on five decades’ worth of academic studies about what kinds of persuasion can influence voters, and under what circumstances. Democracies around the world, she told me, have begun to realize that subverting an election doesn’t require tampering with voting machines. Extensive studies of past campaigns, Jamieson said, have demonstrated that “you can affect people, who then change their decision, and that alters the outcome.” She continued, “I’m not arguing that Russians pulled the voting levers. I’m arguing that they persuaded enough people to either vote a certain way or not vote at all.”

The effect of such manipulations could be momentous in an election as close as the 2016 race, in which Clinton got nearly 2.9 million more votes than Trump, and Trump won the Electoral College only because some eighty thousand votes went his way in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. In two hundred and twenty-four pages of extremely dry prose, with four appendixes of charts and graphs and fifty-four pages of footnotes, Jamieson makes a strong case that, in 2016, “Russian masterminds” pulled off a technological and political coup. Moreover, she concludes, the American media “inadvertently helped them achieve their goals.”

Jamieson stops short of saying Trump was elected illegitimately, but does posit that without the Russian social media blitz and the American media that amplified the messages of chaos and doubt, Trump would have come up short in the electoral college.  80,000 votes out of 130 million is six-tenths of one percent, and yet that influence was decisive in those three states.

But the conclusion is clear: Without Russia, Donald Trump would have lost.  What we as Americans choose to do with that information in the months and years ahead is up to us.

That Whole Saturday Night Massacre Thing, Con't

As I mentioned on Friday, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, the DoJ official overseeing the Mueller investigation, was targeted with an NYT hit piece late last week with the intent of cover for his firing.

Understand that this story was leaked to set up Rosenstein as the "Deep State" mastermind behind the "coup" against Trump, with the time period of course suggesting that the Mueller probe was part of Rosenstein's "plot".  They are not trying to just undermine the Mueller probe, they are trying to end it.

Today, the Trump regime tried to "stealth fire" Rosenstein with an Axios story.

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein has verbally “offered to resign” in discussions with White House Chief of Staff Kelly, according to a source close to Rosenstein, but as of now, it’s unclear whether his resignation has been accepted. The source said it’s possible nothing happens today.

Background: Rosenstein talked last year about invoking the 25th Amendment and wearing a wire during Trump meetings, the N.Y. Times' Adam Goldman and Michael S. Schmidt reported last week. He denied both allegations.

Clarification: This article and headline have been updated to add that it's unclear whether the resignation offer has been accepted.

But apparently nothing did happen today other than Rosenstein going to the White House for a previously scheduled National Security Council meeting to fill in for Jeff Sessions while Donald Trump and several cabinet members are in New York for three days for UN meetings.  Bloomberg fell for the Axios story, as did all the other major news outlets.  Now, it's a Thursday meeting between Trump and Rosenstein once Trump gets back from New York.

The one person who didn't get fooled in the press?  NBC Justice correspondent Pete Williams.

BREAKING / MORE: Pete Williams reports that Rosenstein doesn't want to resign and will likely force the White House to fire him. https://t.co/Wgxu5A5LWE

— Tom Winter (@Tom_Winter) September 24, 2018

So once again, it seems like the Trump regime had a plan to fire Rosenstein today by Village executioner, only Rosenstein called their bluff.  Why?  Because it matters whether Rosenstein is fired, or if he resigns instead.

If Rosenstein were to depart, it was also unclear whether he would be fired, or he would resign. In Rosenstein's case, this could make a big difference as to whom Trump can select to replace him as deputy attorney general.

The question of who would oversee the Russia probe is slightly different, however, because Rosenstein has been effectively wearing two hats since Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself last year from any role overseeing Robert Mueller's investigation. One hat is that of deputy attorney general. The other is that of acting attorney general for the Russia probe, because Rosenstein was acting as a stand-in for Sessions.

Any replacement of Rosenstein by Trump, therefore, would be a replacement of his deputy attorney general position, not a replacement of the other role, acting attorney general for the Russia probe. That responsibility would go to Solicitor General Noel Francisco, and experts agree that the law gives Trump little control over that aspect of the succession.

Still, the question of how much control Trump would have in who replaces Rosenstein could have far-reaching implications. A Rosenstein replacement could take steps to protect the president from investigation, to seal records, withhold funding from Mueller, and otherwise slow the work of the special counsel to a crawl.

And if Trump appoints yes-man Brian Benczkowski as I have surmised for some time now, the plan is to kill the Mueller probe through neglect while Noel Francisco bravely provides the cover of "objectivity".

It's still entirely possible that Rosenstein is fired on Thursday.  We'll see.  But this really, honestly looks like a poorly attempted distraction from the Kavanaugh nomination going down in flames, and our Media Betters bought it hook, line, and stinker.

Meanwhile, let's not forget what the real goal is here.

“If in fact Rod Rosenstein does end up resigning today,” Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow said on his radio show Monday, “I think it clearly becomes necessary and appropriate, for whoever the person who is put in charge of this … I think it’s really important that there be a step back taken here, and a review, a review that has to be thorough and complete.”

He called for a”time out” on the inquiry, and said that the person who takes over oversight of Mueller’s inquiry needs to look at “all of these allegations that are both surrounding this inquiry and that initiated this inquiry,” including the Trump-Russia dossier that was compiled by an ex-British spy, as well as the appointment of Mueller.

The question isn't if Trump ends to Mueller probe, but how ham-fisted it will be when he does.

Supreme Misgivings, Con't

With new allegations of sexual harassment during his college years, Trump's Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, may have just met his match in the slayer of sexual harassers, The New Yorker's Jane Mayer and Ronan Farrow.

As Senate Republicans press for a swift vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh, President Trump’s nominee to the Supreme Court, Senate Democrats are investigating a new allegation of sexual misconduct against Kavanaugh. The claim dates to the 1983-84 academic school year, when Kavanaugh was a freshman at Yale University. The offices of at least four Democratic senators have received information about the allegation, and at least two have begun investigating it. Senior Republican staffers also learned of the allegation last week and, in conversations with The New Yorker, expressed concern about its potential impact on Kavanaugh’s nomination. Soon after, Senate Republicans issued renewed calls to accelerate the timing of a committee vote. The Democratic Senate offices reviewing the allegations believe that they merit further investigation. “This is another serious, credible, and disturbing allegation against Brett Kavanaugh. It should be fully investigated,” Senator Mazie Hirono, of Hawaii, said. An aide in one of the other Senate offices added, “These allegations seem credible, and we’re taking them very seriously. If established, they’re clearly disqualifying.”

The woman at the center of the story, Deborah Ramirez, who is fifty-three, attended Yale with Kavanaugh, where she studied sociology and psychology. Later, she spent years working for an organization that supports victims of domestic violence. The New Yorker contacted Ramirez after learning of her possible involvement in an incident involving Kavanaugh. The allegation was conveyed to Democratic senators by a civil-rights lawyer. For Ramirez, the sudden attention has been unwelcome, and prompted difficult choices. She was at first hesitant to speak publicly, partly because her memories contained gaps because she had been drinking at the time of the alleged incident. In her initial conversations with The New Yorker, she was reluctant to characterize Kavanaugh’s role in the alleged incident with certainty. After six days of carefully assessing her memories and consulting with her attorney, Ramirez said that she felt confident enough of her recollections to say that she remembers Kavanaugh had exposed himself at a drunken dormitory party, thrust his penis in her face, and caused her to touch it without her consent as she pushed him away. Ramirez is now calling for the F.B.I. to investigate Kavanaugh’s role in the incident. “I would think an F.B.I. investigation would be warranted,” she said.

In a statement, Kavanaugh wrote, “This alleged event from 35 years ago did not happen. The people who knew me then know that this did not happen, and have said so. This is a smear, plain and simple. I look forward to testifying on Thursday about the truth, and defending my good name--and the reputation for character and integrity I have spent a lifetime building--against these last-minute allegations.”

The White House spokesperson Kerri Kupec said the Administration stood by Kavanaugh. “This 35-year-old, uncorroborated claim is the latest in a coordinated smear campaign by the Democrats designed to tear down a good man. This claim is denied by all who were said to be present and is wholly inconsistent with what many women and men who knew Judge Kavanaugh at the time in college say. The White House stands firmly behind Judge Kavanaugh.”

Ramirez said that, when both she and Kavanaugh were freshmen at Yale, she was invited by a friend on the women’s soccer team to a dorm-room party. She recalled that the party took place in a suite at Lawrance Hall, in the part of Yale known as Old Campus, and that a small group of students decided to play a drinking game together. “We were sitting in a circle,” she said. “People would pick who drank.” Ramirez was chosen repeatedly, she said, and quickly became inebriated. At one point, she said, a male student pointed a gag plastic penis in her direction. Later, she said, she was on the floor, foggy and slurring her words, as that male student and another stood nearby. (Ramirez identified the two male onlookers, but, at her request, The New Yorker is not naming them.)

A third male student then exposed himself to her. “I remember a penis being in front of my face,” she said. “I knew that’s not what I wanted, even in that state of mind.” She recalled remarking, “That’s not a real penis,” and the other students laughing at her confusion and taunting her, one encouraging her to “kiss it.” She said that she pushed the person away, touching it in the process. Ramirez, who was raised a devout Catholic in Connecticut, said that she was shaken. “I wasn’t going to touch a penis until I was married,” she said. “I was embarrassed and ashamed and humiliated.” She remembers Kavanaugh standing to her right and laughing, pulling up his pants. “Brett was laughing,” she said. “I can still see his face, and his hips coming forward, like when you pull up your pants.” She recalled another male student shouting about the incident. “Somebody yelled down the hall, ‘Brett Kavanaugh just put his penis in Debbie’s face,’ ” she said. “It was his full name. I don’t think it was just ‘Brett.’ And I remember hearing and being mortified that this was out there.”

Ramirez acknowledged that there are significant gaps in her memories of the evening, and that, if she ever presents her story to the F.B.I. or members of the Senate, she will inevitably be pressed on her motivation for coming forward after so many years, and questioned about her memory, given her drinking at the party.

And yet, after several days of considering the matter carefully, she said, “I’m confident about the pants coming up, and I’m confident about Brett being there.” Ramirez said that what has stayed with her most forcefully is the memory of laughter at her expense from Kavanaugh and the other students. “It was kind of a joke,” she recalled. “And now it’s clear to me it wasn’t a joke.”

If things were somehow not devastatingly bad for Kavanaugh's nomination chances before, they just took a cannonball to the gut in the last 24 hours.  Deborah Ramirez has put her entire existence on the line.  She will be crucified, the way Dr. Christine Blasey Ford is being crucified, the way Anita Hill was crucified 20 years ago.

Let's not forget either that Senate Republicans knew about the Ramirez allegations last week, and quickly demanded a vote for Monday before those allegations could be investigated, or before either Ramirez or Ford could testify.  Only when America made that politically impossible did that schedule change.

I predict, I hope, that this breaks GOP Senators Collins and Murkowski, and that it ends this farce...and you know what?  Somehow, I don't think that Dr. Ford and Ms. Ramirez are the only ones. But I agree with Steve M. that the cold hard reality is that Kavanaugh will be confirmed.

The GOP seems dug in; the message from the right is, in effect, "pics or it didn't happen" (pics or at least documentation). Republicans will hang tough and refuse a further delay or an FBI investigation of any of the charges; they won't call Ramirez as a witness (assuming she'd be willing), and they'll declare Kavanaugh exonerated no matter how persuasive Christine Blasey Ford is in Thursday's hearing, or how evasive Kavanaugh is.

They need base voters to be fired up in November, and that won't happen, as I've said in recent days, unless they own the libs. So unless Kavanaugh himself gets cold feet, or unless Avenatti somehow produces credible witnesses to a gang rape, this process won't be derailed.

The key will be winning the spin war. They have to dominate the media with the message that Democrats and Blasey Ford didn't lay a glove on Kavanaugh. If he doesn't blurt out out a Perry Mason-style confession, they'll claim vindication no matter what happens.

They could ask Kavanaugh to withdraw, then run on a stab-in-the-back message in November -- we have to defeat every possible Democrat because they're evil liars who fabricate stories in order to destroy their enemies. But they believe that failure at lib-owning will be fatal to them in November. So they're going to press on, and in the end I still think they'll win.

If Trump's "grab them by the p*ssy" tape didn't stop the GOP, this won't either.  Midterm turnout is still going to be dismal because for all the shouting and hashtags and articles and blog posts, Americans have to go vote, and they won't.

Especially Americans younger than myself.

It's been too late to stop Kavanaugh since November 7, 2016.

StupidiNews!

• The Trump regime's 10% tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese imports goes into effect today, with Wal-Mart, Target, and Proctor & Gamble already warning of price hikes for consumers.
• Iranian President Hassan Rouhani says Tehran is ready to confront the US and its allies after an attack on an Iranian military parade over the weekend killed 25.
• Donald Trump will gavel the UN Security Council to order as the 15-member group's rotating monthly leadership passes to the US and coincides with this year's meeting of UN heads of state.
• After a seven-hour auction process, US cable giant Comcast has emerged as the winner in purchasing UK cable network Sky for $39.3 billion.
• Two Japanese rovers have safely landed on asteroid Ryugu as the Japanese Space Agency's MINERVA mission will explore the kilometer-wide near-Earth object for the next year.

Last Call For Carolina Fish Fried

As floodwaters from Hurricane Florence begin to slowly recede in eastern NC, the combination of unprecedented flooding, toxic coal ash reservoirs being breached, and hog lagoons being swamped indicates a long-term environmental nightmare in the state, the first signs of which are massive fish kills across huge stretches of flooded highways.

Thousands of dead fish strewn along Interstate 40 have created an unnerving sight and smell for motorists as Hurricane Florence flood waters recede in eastern North Carolina.

Images of the piles of fish began appearing on social media over the weekend, including video of members of the Penderlea Fire Department washing the fish off the road with a fire hose.

“We can add ‘washing fish off of the interstate’ to the long list of interesting things firefighters get to experience!” said the post.

Department officials said the fish were found on a stretch of Interstate 40 in Pender County, near Wallace.

“Hurricane Florence caused massive flooding in our area and allowed the fish to travel far from their natural habitat, stranding them on the interstate when waters receded,” said the post.

Wilmington resident Dan George also posted a video that showed the roadway peppered with fish, including one that died caught in a roadside fence when the flood waters rose and fell. His video, posted Friday, has been viewed more 540,000 times on Facebook.

North Carolina Department of Transportation maintenance supervisor Jeff Garrett posted multiple photos showing a wide variety of fish that died, including one that was in the midst of eating smaller fish, which is seen hanging from its mouth.

Garrett’s post has been shared 32,000 times since Saturday.

Residents of the area are already starting to complain of the smell as fish begin to rot en masse on the side of the interstate.

Facebook commenter Aleksandr Gruzinskaya described the odor as a “horrible decaying flesh smell” and noted the situation is adding “insult to injury” as the region recovers from record-setting rainfall and flooding.

Sections of Interstate 40 were closed for days due to aftermath of Hurricane Florence. Vast sections of the interstate had water deep enough to allow boaters to travel the interstate, according to NCDOT drone footage.

The Myrtle Beach Sun News reported Saturday that marine fatalities of the storm also included a 20-foot-long whale that washed up on Caswell Beach. It was later buried by the town behind a dune, the newspaper reported.

The clean-up is beginning, but the environmental damage will take years, if not decades to fix, and that's not counting the very real possibility that a region that has drowned twice now under two 1000-year floods in two years doesn't get a third in the coming months or years ahead.  Or a fourth.  Or a fifth...

Trump Trades Blows, Con't

Trump's trade war with China, if fully implemented, could cost more than 700,000 automotive jobs in the US and add thousands to the price of new vehicles.

The impact of President Donald Trump's escalating tit-for-tat over tariffs is already being felt, say auto industry experts. New car prices are beginning to rise, and auto exports are dropping. But a new report warns that sales could plunge by as much as 2 million vehicles a year, resulting in the loss of up to 715,000 American jobs and a hit of as much as $62 billion to the U.S. GDP.

The Center for Automotive Research cites the biggest concern as the threatened use of trade rules known as Section 232 that would declare foreign-made cars and car parts a threat to national security. That could trigger a “downward cycle” in an auto industry already showing signs of decline after rebounding from the Great Recession, said Kristin Dziczek, a vice president and senior economist at the Center for Automotive Research, or CAR, in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

CAR’s new study is echoed by a variety of other studies looking at the potential impact of the Trump administration’s escalating trade war.

Already enacted tariffs on imported aluminum and steel have added about $240 to the cost of producing a new car, truck, or crossover in the U.S., noted Peter Nagle, a senior economist with research firm IHS Markit. And the first round of tariffs with China is adding still more to the price that manufacturers have to pay for a variety of parts used on American assembly lines.

The impact will grow as a result of the second round of China tariffs, Nagle added, cautioning that a “dizzying” series of trade moves will “exacerbate” the problems the auto industry faces as it struggles to head off the first downturn in sales since emerging from the depths of the last recession. Activating tariffs using Section 232 rules would likely prove devastating, he warned.

Nagel estimated consumers would be “looking at price increases of $1,300 for a typical mass market product, up to $5,800 for a luxury vehicle.” Those increases would not be limited to just imported vehicles. Toyota, for example, has forecast the price of a U.S.-made Camry would rise about $1,600.

In line with the new CAR study, IHS forecasts U.S. new vehicle sales would plunge by around 2 million vehicles annually, to 16.5 million a year from 2019 to 2025.

Add the possible tear-up of the North American Free Trade Agreement and the impact could be devastating. Under NAFTA, automakers have established a continent-wide network of parts and vehicle assembly operations. That’s backed up by a global production system that has been finely tuned, with little room for disruption. But industry experts warn that the Trump administration’s trade moves threaten to fracture that grid.

The impact could mean more than just higher costs. A number of medium-sized and smaller parts suppliers could be forced out of business, unable to afford the cost of relocating their operations back to the U.S. That could result in disruptions at assembly plants, said Nagle, possibly meaning shortages of some products, and a big hit to automakers’ profits.

So yes, in the short-term, it would be good for parts plants and suppliers already in the US.  But for anyone who gets parts from China, it would be devastating.  And 700,000 lost jobs coupled with the far-reaching effects of a NAFTA collapse would almost assure another brutal recession next year.

I'm not sure what Trump is thinking, but enough MAGA-hat good 'ol boys out of work at the parts plants in the Midwest and he's going to be congratulating a Democratic president in 2020.

The Blue Wave Rises, Con't

With just over six weeks until November midterms, the good news is that Democrats continue to hold a double-digit generic ballot lead in the latest NBC/WSJ poll.  The bad news is that gerrymandering and the Senate structural map mean it still may not be enough to take back control of the House and Senate.

The pollsters' so-called "generic ballot" pitting the two parties for the House illustrates the GOP predicament most broadly. In 1994, before seizing control of both the House and Senate from Democrats, Republicans led on that question by four percentage points; in 2006, before Democrats seized them back, they led by 10 points.

Their 12-point national lead today includes a margin of 30 points in House districts Democrats already hold. That means some of those anti-Trump votes will merely translate into larger victories for Democratic incumbents without producing any of the 23 additional seats the party needs to make Nancy Pelosi speaker again.

But the best evidence of vulnerability for Trump and his party lies in the seats Republicans already hold. The survey shows Republicans leading by only a single percentage point in those districts.

Overall, a 42 percent plurality of voters say they want to place a check on President Trump, compared to 31 percent who aim to help him achieve his objectives. Even in Republican-held districts, 38 percent want a check on their party's president.

Moreover, Democrats have generated wide advantages among key swing groups within the electorate. The poll shows them leading by 31 percentage points among independents, 33 points among moderates and 12 points among white women.

Among white college graduates, a group Republicans carried by nine points in 2014 mid-term elections, Republicans now trail by 15 points. Among white women without college degrees, a group Republicans carried by 10 points in 2014, Republicans now trail by five points.

"The Republican coalition is, at the moment, unhinged," said McInturff, the Republican pollster. The party's erosion among women voters heightens the potential risk for Republicans in the ongoing furor over sexual assault allegations against Trump's Supreme Court pick Brett Kavanaugh.

If these numbers hold true, Democrats are going to make gains, and possibly big gains.  But that one point GOP lead in red districts makes me think that voter suppression could sharply limit those gains.  Yes, it means that the average Republican House seat is in real trouble.  But it also means that it would only take a point or two shaved off in turnout through voter suppression for a lot of these endangered Republicans in toss-up races to hold on.

What we need in November is presidential election-level turnout.

If turnout is a dismal 32% like it was in 2014, the GOP is not only going to keep the House, they will have 57 or 58 Senate seats by the time the dust settles.

We have to vote in numbers that Republicans cannot suppress. We need record midterm turnout, and that's just not going to happen.  I will be shocked if all this "enthusiasm" translates into total turnout being over 35%.  We know we'll be lucky if turnout among Millennials is even 20%.  In 2014 it was 17%.

I'm just not seeing the turnout numbers in polls that we have to have, guys.  That has to change or we're done as a country.

Sunday Long Read: A Fat Lot Of Good That Will Do

This week's Sunday Long Read comes from HuffPost Highline's Michael Hobbes as he breaks one of the final taboo medical barriers in America: the diagnosis and treatment of obesity.  Everything we know about obesity and everything we prescribe for it are at such staggering odds that the cures are literally making millions of us less healthy every year, and it's time for a sea change.

About 40 years ago, Americans started getting much larger. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly 80 percent of adults and about one-third of children now meet the clinical definition of overweight or obese. More Americans live with “extreme obesity“ than with breast cancer, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and HIV put together.

And the medical community’s primary response to this shift has been to blame fat people for being fat. Obesity, we are told, is a personal failing that strains our health care system, shrinks our GDP and saps our military strength. It is also an excuse to bully fat people in one sentence and then inform them in the next that you are doing it for their own good. That’s why the fear of becoming fat, or staying that way, drives Americans to spend more on dieting every year than we spend on video games or movies. Forty-five percent of adults say they’re preoccupied with their weight some or all of the time—an 11-point rise since 1990. Nearly half of 3- to 6- year old girls say they worry about being fat. 

The emotional costs are incalculable. I have never written a story where so many of my sources cried during interviews, where they double- and triple-checked that I would not reveal their names, where they shook with anger describing their interactions with doctors and strangers and their own families. One remembered kids singing “Baby Beluga” as she boarded the school bus, another said she has tried diets so extreme she has passed out and yet another described the elaborate measures he takes to keep his spouse from seeing him naked in the light. A medical technician I’ll call Sam (he asked me to change his name so his wife wouldn’t find out he spoke to me) said that one glimpse of himself in a mirror can destroy his mood for days. “I have this sense I’m fat and I shouldn’t be,” he says. “It feels like the worst kind of weakness.”

My interest in this issue is slightly more than journalistic. Growing up, my mother’s weight was the uncredited co-star of every family drama, the obvious, unspoken reason why she never got out of the car when she picked me up from school, why she disappeared from the family photo album for years at a time, why she spent hours making meatloaf then sat beside us eating a bowl of carrots. Last year, for the first time, we talked about her weight in detail. When I asked if she was ever bullied, she recalled some guy calling her a “fat slob” as she biked past him years ago. “But that was rare,” she says. “The bigger way my weight affected my life was that I waited to do things because I thought fat people couldn’t do them.” She got her master’s degree at 38, her Ph.D. at 55. “I avoided so many activities where I thought my weight would discredit me.”

But my mother’s story, like Sam’s, like everyone’s, didn’t have to turn out like this. For 60 years, doctors and researchers have known two things that could have improved, or even saved, millions of lives. The first is that diets do not work. Not just paleo or Atkins or Weight Watchers or Goop, but all diets. Since 1959, research has shown that 95 to 98 percent of attempts to lose weight fail and that two-thirds of dieters gain back more than they lost. The reasons are biological and irreversible. As early as 1969, research showed that losing just 3 percent of your body weight resulted in a 17 percent slowdown in your metabolism—a body-wide starvation response that blasts you with hunger hormones and drops your internal temperature until you rise back to your highest weight. Keeping weight off means fighting your body’s energy-regulation system and battling hunger all day, every day, for the rest of your life.

The second big lesson the medical establishment has learned and rejected over and over again is that weight and health are not perfect synonyms. Yes, nearly every population-level study finds that fat people have worse cardiovascular health than thin people. But individuals are not averages: Studies have found that anywhere from one-third to three-quarters of people classified as obese are metabolically healthy. They show no signs of elevated blood pressure, insulin resistance or high cholesterol. Meanwhile, about a quarter of non-overweight people are what epidemiologists call “the lean unhealthy.” A 2016 study that followed participants for an average of 19 years found that unfit skinny people were twice as likely to get diabetes as fit fat people. Habits, no matter your size, are what really matter. Dozens of indicators, from vegetable consumption to regular exercise to grip strength, provide a better snapshot of someone’s health than looking at her from across a room.

The terrible irony is that for 60 years, we’ve approached the obesity epidemic like a fad dieter: If we just try the exact same thing one more time, we'll get a different result. And so it’s time for a paradigm shift. We’re not going to become a skinnier country. But we still have a chance to become a healthier one.

Having struggled with my weight all my life, I constantly get reminded of my size and people's disgust with it.  It's affected me professionally, personally, and in every relationship I have.  Diets never worked for me.  Having a job where I walk a couple miles a day around a manufacturing campus has helped make me fit, but it hasn't helped me lose weight in four-plus years.

My blood pressure and blood sugar levels are fine as of my last checkup.  My heart rate is not horrible.  I don't smoke, don't do drugs, barely drink socially, and that's when on the rare occasion I'm in a social situation.

It's not fun.  It's been a problem all my life.  The rest of my family is in pretty good shape. I weigh more than any two of them put together, and inevitably I get how they are "concerned".

So am I, but there has to be a better approach.

Last Call For Deportation Nation, Con't

Earlier this month I warned that the Trump regime was driving immigrants away (both documented and those with undocumented family members) away from government food programs with the twin threats of both using registration information to give to ICE, and by the threat of denying green cards to those immigrants who use public food programs.

The result was that hundreds of thousands, if not millions of immigrants were abandoning food assistance programs like SNAP and WIC and housing programs like Section 8, even those with US citizen children.

As of Saturday, that threat of denial of citizenship and deportation as a consequence of using any government food or housing program is now a harsh Trump regime reality.

Trump administration officials announced Saturday that immigrants who legally use public benefits like food assistance and Section 8 housing vouchers could be denied green cards under new rules aimed at keeping out people the administration deems a drain on the country.

The move could force millions of poor immigrants who rely on public assistance for food and shelter to make a difficult choice between accepting financial help and seeking a green card to live and work legally in the United States.

Older immigrants, many of whom get low-cost prescription drugs through the Medicare Part D program, could also be forced to stop participating in the popular benefits program or risk being deemed a “public charge” who is ineligible for legal resident status.

The move is not intended to affect most immigrants who have already been granted green cards, but advocates have said they fear that those with legal resident status will stop using public benefits to protect their status. The regulation, which the administration said would affect about 382,000 people a year, is the latest in a series of aggressive crackdowns by President Trump and his hard-line aides on legal and illegal immigration.

Federal law has always required those seeking green cards to prove they will not be a burden and has taken into consideration the acceptance of cash benefits. But the government has never before considered the use of other public benefits, like assistance for food.

Now, the new regulation — announced on the Department of Homeland Security website — will require that immigration caseworkers consider the use of public benefits to be “heavily weighed negative factors” for those who are applying to remain legally in the country on a permanent basis. Those who are deemed likely to become dependent on government assistance will probably be denied.

Denied and deported.  And what becomes of their US citizen children?  Well, who cares?  That's the state's problem, not Trump's, right?  If they can't be placed with relatives (who will also get careful scrutiny) then into the foster care system they go.

Or worse.  Our government keeps kids in cages, you know.  Hell, who's going to advocate if a toddler can prove his citizenship?  Not this regime.  Maybe we "keep the families together" and everybody gets a one-way trip out of the country.  It's humane, see?

And so it goes.

Deportation Nation.