Last Call For Meat The Press, Con't

You know things have gotten bad when the NY Times fully admits in the headline that the Saudis are trial ballooning the naming of a Saudi intelligence official to take the fall for the state-sanctioned murder of Washington Post journalist and Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi.

The rulers of Saudi Arabia are considering blaming a top intelligence official close to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman for the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, three people with knowledge of the Saudi plans said Thursday.

The plan to assign blame to Maj. Gen. Ahmed al-Assiri, a high-ranking adviser to the crown prince, would be an extraordinary recognition of the magnitude of international backlash to hit the kingdom since the death of Mr. Khashoggi, a prominent Saudi dissident. A resident of Virginia and contributor to The Washington Post, Mr. Khashoggi was last seen entering the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2.

Blaming General Assiri could also provide a plausible explanation for the killing and help deflect blame from the crown prince, who American intelligence agencies are increasingly convinced was behind Mr. Khashoggi’s disappearance.

Turkish officials have said they possess evidence showing that 15 Saudi agents assassinated and dismembered Mr. Khashoggi in the consulate.

After two weeks of blanket denials and mounting pressure from Turkey and Washington, Saudi Arabia said it would conduct its own investigation to determine who was responsible. 

But even with the investigation still ostensibly underway, the Saudis are already pointing to General Assiri as the culprit, according to the three people familiar with the Saudi plans. People close to the White House have already been briefed and given General Assiri’s name.

Whether that move will be enough to calm the international crisis and what it may mean for Prince Mohammed, the kingdom’s day-to-day ruler, remain to be seen.

It's not going to be, not with coverage like this in full view.  And let's not forget that four of the members of the team that allegedly killed Khashoggi are part of the Crown Prince's security detail.  Of course, the real issue is why Trump is helping cover up the murder, and the answer is that his son-in-law Jared Kushner is neck deep in the mess.

Jared Kushner reportedly told President Donald Trump to stand by Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman — despite mounting evidence that the royal was involved in the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi two weeks ago.

Kushner’s reasoning? International outrage over other incidents, like Saudi Arabia’s bombing of innocent children in Yemen and kidnapping of Lebanon’s prime minister, decreased with time. The scandal over the disappearance of Khashoggi, a US resident and Washington Post writer, would similarly go away, he argued.

Nice guy, huh.  Again, Kushner is convinced that Trump can make this blow over.  Why does he want that so badly?

To a certain extent, Kushner is correct — public attention did shift from the recent Yemen tragedy and Saad Hariri’s kidnapping, although they have since informed the realization that Mohammed bin Salman, also known as MBS, is a reckless autocrat. But what’s notable here is that Kushner doesn’t want the US to respond to Khashoggi’s alleged murder in any way. He simply wants America to forget the incident ever happened.

That’s perhaps not so surprising. Kushner has cultivated a personal relationship with MBS while serving as senior White House adviser for Middle East affairs. He and the crown prince even text on WhatsApp, an encrypted messaging app. Because of his close ties to the Saudi royal, Kushner has purposely stayed out of the spotlight during the scandal.

But for MBS, the news is another reason to stay in close contact with Trump’s son-in-law. The royal once bragged that Kushner was “in his pocket,” and the New York Times story will likely only add to that perception.

Not a good look for either one of them.  The other person who has a lot of exposure here to the Crown Prince is another Prince...in this case, our old merc friend, Erik, whose plans to privatize the Afghanistan permawar were sunk by the Afghans themselves right after Khashoggi's disappearance.

It's almost like they knew a man best known for running one of the biggest private merc outfits on earth had done something wrong that ended any hope of negotiations, when we later find out a team of Saudi mercs magically appeared in Turkey to mulch a journalist.

So no, Trump was never going to lay a finger on the Saudis over this, and they'll get the green light to murder more dissidents, because America is ruled by an autocrat.

The Swift-Planing Of Amy McGrath

Whenever a Democratic military veteran runs for federal public office, odds are very good their service record is going to be attacked by Republican liars, especially if the GOP candidate hasn't even done so much as to own a Swiss Army knife.  

It cost John Kerry the White House, and Republicans know it works, so it should come as no surprise that here in Kentucky, retired Marine fighter pilot Amy McGrath, trying to unseat Republican Rep. Andy Barr, is running into attacks that outright lie about her time in the military. 

Democratic congressional candidate Amy McGrath’s military background has been one of her greatest assets in her campaign to represent Kentucky’s Sixth Congressional District.

It was a major feature in her campaign announcement video, which went viral and caught the attention of national donors. It has helped her connect with conservative Democrats in the district. And it’s an attribute she frequently highlights to hammer home her pledge to put country over political party.

But as Election Day nears in her nationally-watched race against U.S. Rep. Andy Barr, R-Lexington, some veterans in the 19-county district are accusing McGrath of misrepresenting her role in combat missions as she speaks to voters.

Jim Lucas, an Army veteran from Berea, said he and a group of about six veterans plan to petition the Kentucky Aviation Hall of Fame to have her removed for allegedly misrepresenting her military record in campaign commercials. In particular, Lucas accused McGrath of “stolen valor” for creating the false impression that she piloted F-18 fighter jets into combat.

“We’re not doing this as a political thing,” said Lucas, a registered Republican. “We’re going to continue whether she gets elected or not.”

McGrath, though, has been consistent about her role in the military and careful to say she was the first woman Marine to fly in an F-18 into combat. She served as the back-seat weapons system operator during her 89 combat missions, not as the front-seat pilot. She did later become a front-seat pilot, but never steered an F-18 during a combat mission.

A Herald-Leader review of McGrath’s commercials and many of her public comments found no evidence that she has ever claimed to have piloted an F-18 during combat, though some political groups supporting her and some media reports have gotten it wrong.

“I just think it’s part of this climate where you have to try to tear somebody down and make them seem like someone you can’t trust,” McGrath said Thursday when asked about Lucas’ claims. “I’ve never tried to embellish my record, ever.”

Michael Estorer, who served with McGrath and now lives in Lexington, said everything the McGrath campaign has said about her military service is accurate.

“It is a little bit of a smear campaign,” Estorer said. “People are taking little facts and attacking them to misrepresent her service.”

Perhaps it's because McGrath and Barr are running a dead heat here in the Bluegrass State that would explain this sudden "stolen valor" idiocy, while Barr can claim plausible deniability and say he has nothing to do with the false attacks.

And let's remember, these assholes don't just want to McGrath to lose next month, they want to drive her out of politics for good, they want her erased from the Kentucky Aviation Hall of Fame, and they want to charge her and imprison her under stolen valor laws.

They want her gone, permanently, for daring to challenge Andy Barr.  They want to use her as a warning shot against Democratic military veterans in 2020: if we can do this to the first female Marine fighter pilot, we can do this to anyone.

The Revenge Of The Son Of Austerity Hysteria, Con't

As I predicted time and again, after it became clear that the 2017 GOP tax cut scam was going to skyrocket the deficit and add trillions of the national debt over ten years to give tax breaks to corporations and the wealthiest one percent, Republicans were going to insist Democrats had to cut Social Security and Medicare, and Medicaid and make them take 100% of the blame for it.

We've reached that stage of the con now.

Republicans have removed all doubt: When it comes to the federal deficit, the problem is Medicare and Social Security — not their own tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy.

Fresh off the news that the deficit is increasing under President Donald Trump, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told Bloomberg News that Congress should target Social Security and Medicare for cuts to address the growing federal debt.

The federal deficit grew by nearly $800 billion over the first fiscal year of Trump’s presidency, during which the Republican Congress passed a tax cut targeted mostly to corporations and the wealthy, which is projected to add more than $1 trillion to the deficit over the next 10 years.

The White House and GOP leaders promised that despite all projections to the contrary, the tax cuts would pay for themselves. That hasn’t materialized so far.

But, of course, a growing federal deficit hasn’t caused Republican leaders to reconsider their tax policy. Instead, they argue that entitlement reform — Republican-speak for cuts to popular social safety net programs — is what’s really needed to address the federal deficit.

From McConnell’s interview with Bloomberg this week:

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blamed rising federal deficits and debt on a bipartisan unwillingness to contain spending on Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, and said he sees little chance of a major deficit reduction deal while Republicans control Congress and the White House.

“It’s disappointing, but it’s not a Republican problem,” McConnell said Tuesday in an interview with Bloomberg News when asked about the rising deficits and debt. “It’s a bipartisan problem: unwillingness to address the real drivers of the debt by doing anything to adjust those programs to the demographics of America in the future.”

Republicans were actually signaling during the tax debate, before the bill ever passed, that this was their strategy: pass a deficit-exploding tax cut and then argue that the real problem is federal spending on health and retirement benefits.

Massive, massive cuts are coming, and Republicans are going to blame Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and the Democrats when they come. The fact that the GOP tax scam bill exploded the deficit?  Irrelevant, it only serves as proof that Democrats aren't serious about budgets when they refuse to cut spending, and our media will play dumb like they always do.

Even worse, Republicans will simply say "Democrats will raise taxes on tens of millions of middle-class Americans" unless they go along, setting up Trump for his key issue in 2020.  And should the Dems be dumb enough to capitulate, they'll take 100% of the blame, and the Myth of the Fiscally Responsible GOP will continue to be the truth for the majority of voters and pundits.

We've seen this game before, we saw it coming for over a year, and Dems still don't know how to counter it.

Last Call For It's Mueller Time, Con't

It is indeed, finally, after 18 months, almost Mueller Time.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller is expected to issue findings on core aspects of his Russia probe soon after the November midterm elections as he faces intensifying pressure to produce more indictments or shut down his investigation, according to two U.S. officials.

Specifically, Mueller is close to rendering judgment on two of the most explosive aspects of his inquiry: whether there were clear incidents of collusion between Russia and Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, and whether the president took any actions that constitute obstruction of justice, according to one of the officials, who asked not to be identified speaking about the investigation.

That doesn’t necessarily mean Mueller’s findings would be made public if he doesn’t secure unsealed indictments. The regulations governing Mueller’s probe stipulate that he can present his findings only to his boss, who is currently Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. The regulations give a special counsel’s supervisor some discretion in deciding what is relayed to Congress and what is publicly released.

The question of timing is critical. Mueller’s work won’t be concluded ahead of the Nov. 6 midterm elections, when Democrats hope to take control of the House and end Trump’s one-party hold on Washington.

But this timeline also raises questions about the future of the probe itself. Trump has signaled he may replace Attorney General Jeff Sessions after the election, a move that could bring in a new boss for Mueller. Rosenstein also might resign or be fired by Trump after the election.

Rosenstein has made it clear that he wants Mueller to wrap up the investigation as expeditiously as possible, another U.S. official said. The officials gave no indications about the details of Mueller’s conclusions. Mueller’s office declined to comment for this story.

Here's what I expect to happen between midterm elections and January, and very little of it depends on whether or not Democrats prevail in those elections in less than 3 weeks:

• The Trump regime "leaks" that the Mueller report completely exonerates Trump before the report is even delivered to Rosenstein. 
• Rosenstein determines that the report will not be released publicly, otherwise Trump immediately has the excuse to fire him OR Sessions quits and his replacement orders Rosenstein not to release the report.
• Either way the report is leaked immediately and Trump/Sessions's replacement fires Rosenstein as a result.  Mueller is also "done" because his report has been delivered.
• Trump rolls out the pardon train to fix any issues resulting from possible indictments by Mueller.
• Kavanaugh is the fifth vote on SCOTUS to let him get away with it. 

All this has to happen before Democrats take control of the House in January.   Remember, SCOTUS stepped in on Bush v Gore on December 12, 2000, only five weeks after the 2000 election, and just five days after the second Florida recount, so they can move relatively quickly on such a vital Constitutional question if necessary.

After that, well, that's the real question now, isn't it?

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

When I say Republicans are the party of white supremacists, don't just take my word for it, it's the actual white supremacists happily admitting that's exactly what the goal is.

Patrick Casey blended in easily with the buttoned-up crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference held outside Washington D.C. earlier this year.

His boyish face was clean-shaven. His brown hair was close-cropped. And he shuffled between the networking breakfasts and panel discussions wearing a maroon sweater, matching collared shirt and crisp khaki pants.

But despite all outward appearances, Casey, 29, wasn’t like all of the other Republicans at CPAC, the largest annual gathering of conservative activists in the U.S.

He wasn’t there only to champion conservative causes. Casey had ulterior motives: to covertly spread the message of the white nationalist group he leads.

As the executive director of Identity Evropa, Casey is on a bold mission. “To take over the GOP as much as possible,” he told NBC News.

Casey and his roughly 800 fellow members believe ethnic diversity damages the country. Emboldened by President Donald Trump’s rhetoric on race and immigration, they advocate for allowing only Caucasians to immigrate to the U.S. in order to maintain a “white supermajority.”
In Casey’s perfect world, whites would live among whites in North America, Western Europe, Australia, and South Africa, blacks would live among blacks in Africa, Asians in Asia, and Hispanics in Latin America. “Ethnic diversity has been proven time and time again in many studies to be very detrimental for social cohesion, social capital, and it's just not a good model for society,” he said.

Identity Evropa gained notoriety last year when it helped organize the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va. The gathering of white supremacists ended with a white nationalist plowing his car into a group of counter protesters, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer.

Casey now sees politics rather than protests as the prime vehicle to carry his brand of white identity politics into the mainstream.

Casey wants Identity Evropa candidates to get elected on the GOP ticket so they can implement these policies.  There are millions, if not tens of millions of Republican voters out there that would like to see that happen.

And frankly, let's not forget that there's plenty of other Republicans, both candidates and those actively in Congress and in state legislatures...and the White House...who want to "maintain a white supermajority" as well.  That's where the GOP is in 2018: the party of white identity.

That's been the goal since Atwater and well before, and there's no reason to think they'll stop playing that game now.  In fact, that's pretty much all they have left.  The only difference now is that they feel safe enough to have people like Casey boldly proclaim that this is the plan.

Unfortunately, as with so many times in America's past, it's working.  They've got the culture part down, they're working on the psuedo-science part of the takeover now as advances in genetic testing are leading to a new era of science being co-opted for eugenics, and the political part is coming along nicely for them.

We're already facing the imminent end of the civil rights era.  After that, history tells us, comes the cleansing.

I Dunno, Alaska If I Get The Chance

Something really weird is going on in Alaska politics has Lt. Gov. Byron Mallot as abruptly resigned his post three weeks before the state's gubernatorial election, where Independent Gov. Bill Walker is up against former Dem Sen. Mark Begich and Republican Mike Dunleavy in a three-way race.

Lt. Gov. Byron Mallott abruptly resigned from office Tuesday following disclosure of recent "inappropriate comments," complicating what was already a difficult re-election for Gov. Bill Walker. Details about what Mallott said or to whom were not immediately clear.

A new lieutenant governor, Alaska Health and Social Services Commissioner Valerie Nurr'araaluk Davidson, was immediately sworn in. In a brief statement, she said she was "profoundly disappointed" by Mallott's conduct, adding "respect for women, and the dignity of all Alaskans, is our responsibility."

Walker, in a written statement that he later read in a brief news conference in Anchorage, said, "Byron recently made inappropriate comments that do not reflect the sterling level of behavior required in his role as lieutenant governor. I learned of the incident last night. Byron has taken full responsibility for his actions and has resigned."

Mallott's resignation comes three weeks before Election Day. Walker, elected as an independent, faces Democrat Mark Begich and Republican Mike Dunleavy.

Walker campaign manager, John-Henry Heckendorn, told the Associated Press that the campaign has been in conversations with Begich's campaign for several days about a "path forward for Alaska." He declined to go into details, but he said the conversations were prompted by concerns about Dunleavy and the dynamics of a three-way race. The talks so far have been "inconclusive" but will continue, Heckendorn said.

The heck is going on here?

Mallott's resignation is odd is hell, but this talk of Begich in talks with Walker about the "dynamics of a three-way race" with 3 weeks before the election is hinky as hell.

More as we find out, I guess, but this is just bonkers.

StupidiNews!

• The death toll from Hurricane Michael has risen to 29 overall, 19 in Florida alone as search and recovery teams continue combing through housing and building debris.
• Maine GOP Sen. Susan Collins received a letter at her home that included a note saying the envelope contained the poison ricin, FBI officials say they are testing the letter.
• Former California GOP Rep. Mary Bono has resigned as interim USA Gymnastics head after tweeting criticism of former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick's Nike campaign.
• Netflix added nearly seven million new subscribers in Q3, two million more than predicted, as the streaming giant recovered from a sluggish first half of 2018.
• Humans and AI drivers will work together in a proposed Formula E Roborace motorsports series, a successful test race in Berlin means the racing cars will have the green light for a 2019 season.

Last Call For Yemen To Do That

Even I'm getting tired of the descriptions of the "scandal-free" Obama administration, because they screwed up badly in the foreign policy arena multiple times, and while you can definitely make the case that Syria was Obama playing the garbage hand of cards dealt by Assad, Iran, and Russia, the entirely of the disaster in Yemen is 100% his fault.

The number of people facing starvation in Yemen could rise to nearly 12 million as conflict intensifies around the port of Hodeidah, a vital aid delivery link, the World Food Programme told CNN Monday. 

A collapsing currency and deteriorating economic situation in the Middle East's poorest country are also aggravating the situation, the UN agency said. 

The WFP said 18 million people in Yemen already do not know where their next meal is coming from and eight million of those are "considered on the brink of famine." 

"Since June, some 570,000 people have had to flee their homes from fighting in Hodeidah, while the Yemeni riyal has undergone an alarming depreciation, and the cost of basic food items has gone up by a third since this time last year," WFP Yemen country director Stephen Anderson told CNN. 

"If this situation persists, we could see an additional 3.5 million severely insecure Yemenis, or nearly 12 million in total, who urgently require regular food assistance to prevent them from slipping into famine-like conditions," he said.

No, Trump has done everything possible to make the situation in Yemen worse by the day, with tacit permission for the Saudis to bomb the crap out of the place while selling Riyadh the weapons to do it with, but let's not forget that the disaster started on Obama's watch, like the December 2015 assassination attempt on anti-Emirati dissident Anssaf Ali Mayo, which now turns out to be a joint UAE/Saudi operation with US cooperation.

The operation against Mayo — which was reported at the time but until now was not known to have been carried out by American mercenaries — marked a pivot point in the war in Yemen, a brutal conflict that has seen children starved, villages bombed, and epidemics of cholera roll through the civilian population. The bombing was the first salvo in a string of unsolved assassinations that killed more than two dozen of the group’s leaders.

The company that hired the soldiers and carried out the attack is Spear Operations Group, incorporated in Delaware and founded by Abraham Golan, a charismatic Hungarian Israeli security contractor who lives outside of Pittsburgh. He led the team’s strike against Mayo.

“There was a targeted assassination program in Yemen,” he told BuzzFeed News. “I was running it. We did it. It was sanctioned by the UAE within the coalition.”

The UAE and Saudi Arabia lead an alliance of nine countries in Yemen, fighting what is largely a proxy war against Iran. The US is helping the Saudi-UAE side by providing weapons, intelligence, and other support.

The press office of the UAE’s US Embassy, as well as its US public affairs company, Harbour Group, did not respond to multiple phone calls and emails.

The revelations that a Middle East monarchy hired Americans to carry out assassinations comes at a moment when the world is focused on the alleged murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi Arabia, an autocratic regime that has close ties to both the US and the UAE. (The Saudi Embassy in the US did not respond to a request for comment. Riyadh has denied it killed Khashoggi, though news reports suggest it is considering blaming his death on a botched interrogation.)

Golan said that during his company’s months-long engagement in Yemen, his team was responsible for a number of the war’s high-profile assassinations, though he declined to specify which ones. He argued that the US needs an assassination program similar to the model he deployed. “I just want there to be a debate,” he said. “Maybe I’m a monster. Maybe I should be in jail. Maybe I’m a bad guy. But I’m right.”

And yes, I realize the timing on this revelation is absolutely dogpiling on the Saudis when they're already in trouble for assassinating people, but it doesn't change the fact that it happened, the Obama administration knew about it, and the US was happily helping the UAE and the Saudis destabilize Yemen to the point where now the place is a humanitarian disaster that may actually eclipse Syria in scope.

I fully understand the Republicans are going to be worse in every aspect given any chance and I'm sure when the dark history of the Trump regime's operations in Yemen become public, it will be far more gory...but I'm also getting bone weary of defending, you know, targeted assassinations by paid mercs, which is pretty much the legal definition of war crime and should be investigated as such.

Sigh.  I know, the Trump regime isn't going to open so much as a can of beer over this, let alone a DoJ investigation, not unless they can use it to lock up Obama, Kerry, and Clinton over it, but it doesn't make it right.

Of course, it's a moot point, because Republicans will think big manly Trump is sending US mercs to kill those people and that's "awesome".

Meat The Press, Con't

The Trump regime sure isn't going to do a damn thing to Riyadh and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman about the obvious murder of dissident Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, but don't expect Democrats to lift a finger either.  The Saudis may be able to wreck the GOP's corporate energy giant contributors with a massive oil spike as I pointed out the other day, but Saudi royals also own a healthy chunk of Silicon Valley and the Dems too.

As international backlash grows over Saudi Arabia’s alleged involvement in the possible murder of a journalist, Silicon Valley faces a potentially unsettling fact: The kingdom is now the largest single funding source for U.S. startups.

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has directed at least $11 billion of Saudi money into U.S. startups since mid-2016, either directly or through SoftBank Group Corp.’s $92 billion tech-focused Vision Fund, to which the Saudis committed $45 billion, according to a Wall Street Journal estimate of data from research firm PitchBook. The total invested by the kingdom so far in U.S. startups is far bigger than the total raised by any single venture-capital fund.

Some of tech’s most prominent young companies have welcomed Saudi money, including Uber Technologies Inc., office-sharing company WeWork Cos. and augmented-reality device maker Magic Leap Inc. For Uber, the situation could be particularly dicey: A prominent Saudi official sits on its board.

For now, the companies are preferring to keep quiet about the escalating controversy. Of the 22 startups in which the Vision Fund or the Saudis have invested, all but one declined to comment or didn’t respond to requests. Uber pointed to a recent statement from CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, who said he planned to pull out of a Saudi-sponsored business conference and that he was troubled by the reports about the journalist, Jamal Khashoggi.

For the startup community, “there are incidents where you have to look and decide which side of history you want to be on, and if this is true, this is one of those,” said Venky Ganesan, former chairman of the National Venture Capital Association and an investor at Menlo Ventures, which has invested in Uber. “It’s more than about startups and money—it’s fundamentally about what you think about human rights.”

Tech companies are in a particularly conflicted spot given the idealistic missions espoused by many leaders in Silicon Valley, where employees routinely rebel over contracts they find unprincipled. WeWork, for instance, has banned meat over concerns about its environmental impact.

“Silicon Valley has been incredibly hypocritical in accepting investments from an anti-Semitic country, [which] criminally punishes gays and de jure discriminates against women,” said Keith Rabois, a venture capitalist at prominent firm Khosla Ventures, in an email.

So should the Saudi choose to pull the plug on tens of billions in startup funding, the already shaky tech sector is going to take a gigantic nosedive, along with California's economy.  Of course, sanctions against Riyadh may make that choice an involuntary one.

Just remember that it's not only the GOP fossil fuel business that could get wrecked over the Khashoggi backlash (although there's the theory that this is a bluff).  Both parties are deep into Saudi pockets, and this is something where the Democrats should have divested themselves from this mess and from Silicon Valley years ago.

Even if the Saudis can't command the oil market like they used to, they can certainly hurt Silicon Valley, no question.  Oh, and who benefits the most from higher oil prices and Saudi oil production cuts in the meantime as the backlash builds?

Any other questions as to what's really going on here?

Weathering The Storm, Con't

Citing Donald Trump's First Amendment rights, a California federal judge completely tossed Stormy Daniels's defamation lawsuit against Trump on Monday, in a move the Trump regime is calling "total victory" for Tang the Conqueror, but the story is far from over.

U.S. District Judge S. James Otero in Los Angeles ruled that Trump’s speech was protected by the First Amendment as the kind of “rhetorical hyperbole” normally associated with politics and public discourse in the United States.” He ordered Daniels, whose given name is Stephanie Clifford, to pay Trump’s legal fees.

Trump attorney Charles Harder cheered Otero’s decision.

“No amount of spin or commentary by Stormy Daniels or her lawyer, Mr. Avenatti, can truthfully characterize today’s ruling in any way other than total victory for President Trump and total defeat for Stormy Daniels,” Harder said in an emailed statement.

The ruling is a blow for Daniels and her lawyer, Michael Avenatti, who has raised a national profile from his legal battles against the president and is contemplating a presidential bid in 2020.

Avenatti called the ruling “limited” on Twitter and said it did not affect Daniels’s primary case against Trump and his former attorney Michael Cohen, which seeks to invalidate her 2016 nondisclosure agreement.

“Daniels’ other claims against Trump and Cohen proceed unaffected,” Avenatti wrote in a tweet he later appeared to have deleted.

He said in a second tweet that any fees Trump might be awarded from the defamation case would “be dwarfed by the fees he and Cohen will be required to pay in connection with the NDA case.”

Later, Avenatti tweeted that he had appealed Otero’s ruling to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit.

The now-dismissed suit has received less attention than two other cases pending against Trump — Daniels’s lawsuit seeking to void the nondisclosure agreement and a separate defamation claim by former “Apprentice” contestant Summer Zervos, who alleges that Trump sexually assaulted her in 2007 and argues that he defamed her when he suggested she was lying.

Trump was ordered last month to provide written answers under oath in that case, which is proceeding in New York State Supreme Court.

Again, the Daniels defamation lawsuit was the least of Trump's legal worries, and the least likely to succeed given how difficult it is to prove defamation in court, least of all against a sitting federal politician, least of all the occupant of the Oval Office.

The othr Daniels lawsuit involving former Trump lawyer Michal Cohen and the legality of the NDA Trump slapped on Daniels over her alleged affair with Trump, well, that one is far more likely to succeed, and for the same reason: First Amendment rights.

We'll see how this particular storm blows.

StupidiNews!

• Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen has died at age 65 from complications from non-Hodgkins lymphoma, the billionaire philanthropist's cancer was in remission until last month.
• The Trump regime wants drug companies to list prices in their advertising, a move to put pressure on pharmaceutical giants to lower prices for Medicare and Medicaid patients.
• Secretary of State Mike Pompeo met with Saudi King Salman on Tuesday as international condemnation roils over the disappearance of Saudi dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi. 
• As the bankruptcy of Sears gets under way this week, the retailer's real estate spinoff company could lose half its income over shuttered stores as 68,000 Sears jobs could be eliminated.
• Chinese smartphone company TCL is bringing back Palm to the smartphone world with a tiny 3.3-inch mini smartphone through Verizon.

Last Call For The Blue Wave Rises, Con't

In the Midwest, Republicans are counting on Senate wins in Missouri, Indiana, and in nearby West Virginia to keep the Senate.  But nobody's talking about Trump's collapse in the states that proved decisive to his Electoral College win two years ago: Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa are states Trump won, all with GOP state legislatures and all but Pennsylvania have GOP governors.  

That is expected to change drastically next month as Midwest Democrats are openly running against Trump and winning.

A number of Republicans running for governor or senator in Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania, including several who hitched their wagon to Trump’s political movement, are behind in polls by double digits, a remarkable turnabout in swing states that were key to the president’s 2016 victory.

If current polling averages hold, Democrats will maintain all their Senate seats in those states, pick up a handful of House seats and, in some cases, retake the governors’ mansions. In nearby Iowa, a state Trump won by nearly 10 points, the Democratic candidate for governor was running about even with the Republican governor in a Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll. Polling this week found Gov. Scott Walker (R-Wis.) trailing his Democratic opponent, Tony Evers.

The dramatic shift has forced political strategists to reevaluate their post-mortem lessons from the 2016 election, while raising new questions about Trump’s staying power in 2020. Democratic strategists, who worried that Iowa and Ohio were slipping away from them in presidential years, are now heartened and have begun to return their attention to the traditional bellwethers.

“One false assumption that was made was that a Trump voter from the 2016 election was necessarily a Republican voter,” said John Brabender, a GOP consultant who is working with Barletta. “We forget about the power of Hillary Clinton being on the ballot in 2016. If Hillary was on the ballot, Republicans would probably be doing better in all of these states.”

But Hillary's not on the ballot.  Donald Trump's failures are.  And they're killing the GOP.

There is a clear historical precedent for such a shift. Then-candidate Barack Obama swept the industrial Midwest in the 2008 elections, only to find his party battered in his first midterm contest two years later, when Republicans retook governorships in Ohio, Michigan, Iowa and Wisconsin, along with Senate seats in Indiana and Wisconsin. Obama was nonetheless able to come back and win those same states, with the exception of Indiana, in his 2012 reelection.

Pollsters do not rule out Trump repeating that success in 2020, especially if the economy remains strong. “He could certainly do what Obama did,” said Berwood Yost, the polling director at Franklin and Marshall College, which tracks Pennsylvania voters. “Trump’s approval rating in our state is about the same place Obama’s was in 2010.”

Still, the short-term impact is dire for Republicans. After surprising the nation in 2016, Trump appears to be driving turnout this year that will largely benefit Democrats, as moderate voters, and college-educated women in particular, seek an outlet for their frustration with his policies and behavior. Trump’s aggressive campaign schedule for Republicans in these states has so far failed to turn the tide.

Republicans were talking about taking 60 Senate seats a year ago, that Debbie Stabenow in Michigan, Sherrod Brown in Ohio, Bob Casey in Pennsylvania and Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin were all vulnerable and ripe to be picked off.  They're all well ahead, and Republicans are also in real trouble in Governor's races in Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan and even Iowa.

There are going to be a lot of surprised Republicans in three weeks, but we have to vote.

Deportation Nation, Con't

Yesterday I talked about how Latinx voters are staying home, convinced that Republicans hate them, but that Democrats are indifferent.  That's not stopping Republicans from continuing Trump's hateful rhetoric towards immigrants, and the fact of the matter is in red state races, portraying virtuous white voters as under siege from those people is a tried and true tactic to tighten up races and whittle down both Democratic turnout and the generic ballot lead.

Not long ago, as heart-rending images of migrant children separated from their parents at the border filled the airwaves, the issue of immigration seemed to be losing some of its potency as a weapon for Republicans with the midterm elections approaching. 

But Republican candidates across the country, leaning on the scorched-earth campaign playbook employed by President Trump, saw an opening nonetheless, painting Democrats as the ones pursuing an extreme immigration agenda that would fill the country with “sanctuary cities” where violent criminals roam free. 

The strategy, in play in a growing number of races, may be working. As a tight battle for control of Congress enters its closing weeks, Democrats have found that in politically competitive states, particularly ones that Mr. Trump carried in 2016, the attacks can easily turn crucial voting blocs against Democrats. 

“Sanctuary attacks pack a punch,” says a four-page memorandum, prepared by the liberal Center for American Progress and the centrist think tank Third Way, that has been shared at about a dozen briefings for Democrats in recent weeks. The New York Times obtained a copy of the memo, whose findings are based on interviews and surveys conducted over the summer.

Many of the Republican attacks use misleading language and employ overblown claims about the dangers of immigrants. But the fear-based appeal demonstrates how Mr. Trump has overcome months of negative headlines about his hard-edge immigration policies to make the issue a potentially profitable one as Republicans try to preserve their slim Senate majority and defy projections that they will lose the House. 

Democrats, the strategists who prepared the memo advised, could neutralize the attacks if they responded head-on. But they should spend “as little time as possible” talking about immigration itself, and instead pivot to more fruitful issues for Democrats like health care and taxation.
The strategists worry that Republicans’ foreboding immigration message is far more personal to most voters than the more modulated position of Democrats, whose push to protect the young immigrants known as Dreamers and to ensure humane treatment of undocumented people does not, in many cases, affect voters themselves. 

“It is very difficult to win on immigration with vulnerable voters in the states Trump carried in 2016,” the strategy memo said, arguing that “even the most draconian of Republican policies,” such as family separation and threats to deport the Dreamers — undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children — failed to sway most of them. 

But where Democrats see caution signs, Republicans see opportunities. Matt Gorman, the communications director of the National Republican Congressional Committee, the party’s House campaign arm, said immigration themes — “sanctuary cities” in particular, as well as liberal calls to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement — were among voters’ top concerns in some places where Hillary Clinton won in 2016 and where Republicans are now battling to hang on to competitive seats.

So yes, Republicans are absolutely playing the fear card, and it's working.  But Democrats are stupidly playing right into GOP hands with the idiocy that ICE will ever be abolished, and while sanctuary cities work for NYC and LA and Chicago, it doesn't play well in Kansas City or Fargo or here in Cincinnati.

Democrats are, as usual, finding a way to blow it here in the Midwest, and they have nobody to blame but themselves.

The Eye Of The Storm

Florida went easy on housing contractors in the panhandle area and the state didn't require tougher building codes inland from the shore after Hurricane Andrew until 2007.  That definitely contributed to the devastation from Hurricane Michael as the storm ripped through the state last week, and we're still trying to categorize the damage there.

It was once argued that the trees would help save Florida’s Panhandle from the fury of a hurricane, as the acres of forests in the region would provide a natural barrier to savage winds that accompany the deadly storms.

It’s part of the reason that tighter building codes — mandatory in places such as South Florida — were not put in place for most of this region until just 11 years ago.

And it may be a painful lesson for area residents now that Hurricane Michael has ravaged the region, leaving sustained damage from the coast inland all the way to the Georgia border.

“We’re learning painfully that we shouldn’t be doing those kinds of exemptions,” said Don Brown, a former legislator from the Panhandle who now sits on the Florida Building Commission. “We are vulnerable as any other part of the state. There was this whole notion that the trees were going to help us, take the wind out of the storm. Those trees become projectiles and flying objects.”

Hurricane Andrew a generation ago razed Florida’s most-populated areas with winds up to 165 mph (265 kph), damaging or blowing apart over 125,000 homes and obliterating almost all mobile homes in its path.

The acres of flattened homes showed how contractors cut corners amid the patchwork of codes Florida had at the time. For example, flimsy particle board was used under roofs instead of sturdier plywood, and staples were used instead of roofing nails.

Since 2001, structures statewide must be built to withstand winds of 111 mph (178 kph) and up; the Miami area is considered a “high velocity hurricane zone” with much higher standards, requiring many structures to withstand hurricane winds in excess of 170 mph (273 kph).

Though Michael was packing winds as high as 155 mph, any boost in the level of safety requirements for builders helps a home avoid disintegrating in a hurricane.

Tom Lee, a homebuilder and legislator, says past hurricanes have shown time and time again that the stricter codes help. He said during past hurricanes he looked at the damage by plane and could tell if a home was built before the new code.

“The structural integrity of our housing stock is leaps and bounds beyond what it was,” said Lee.

The codes call for shatterproof windows, fortified roofs and reinforced concrete pillars, among other specifications. But it wasn’t until 2007 that homes built in the Panhandle more than one mile from shore were required to follow the higher standards. And Hurricane Michael pummeled the region with devastating winds from the sea all the way into Georgia, destroying buildings more than 70 miles from the shoreline.

Gov. Rick Scott said it may be time for Florida to boost its standards — considered the toughest in the nation— even further.

“After every event, you always go back and look what you can do better,” Scott said. “After Andrew, the codes changed dramatically in our state. Every time something like this happens, you have to say to yourself, ‘Is there something we can do better?’”

Other coastal states should be paying attention, especially Virginia up into New England.  Hurricanes are only going to get more powerful as the Atlantic heats up, and it won't be long until a Michael-force hurricane takes aim at states without storm-resistant building codes and a lot of old buildings.

I loathe Rick Scott, but Florida does have the state's toughest storm building codes, and it's time that everyone else on the Atlantic Seaboard catches up.

StupidiNews!

• A transit bus crash in Los Angeles injured more than two dozen as the bus jumped the median on the 405 into oncoming traffic.
• New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood is pushing for a major investigation into a Friday incident involving right-wing group "Proud Boys" assaulting multiple people in NYC.
• Ford and JP Morgan are just two US companies now pulling out of a Saudi Arabian investor event next week after the disappearance of Saudi dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
• Donald Trump is threatening yet another round of Chinese tariffs among other subjects in a "60 Minutes" interview with Leslie Stahl that aired Sunday night.
• New Jersey is suing the Trump regime over Florida's exemption from proposed offshore drilling, the state wants to know why Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke is giving only the Sunshine State a pass.