Dirty Deeds Done Relatively Expensively

In 2014, Republican Thom Tillis beat Democratic Sen. Kay Hagan in North Carolina, helped in no small part by a flood of super-PAC commercials championing Tillis's leadership in the NC state Senate.  Now we find out that one single super-PAC donor gave $4.7 million dollars to help buy Tillis his seat, and we'll never know who that wealthy donor is who used that PAC to get around campaign finance limits.

A recent tax filing by Carolina Rising, a 501(c)(4) social welfare organization, shows that in 2014 the group spent $4.7 million on ads that had one thing in common: touting the legislative accomplishments of Thom Tillis, who was then North Carolina’s speaker of the House. That year, Mr. Tillis also happened to be trying to unseat Kay Hagan, the incumbent Democratic senator. 

Carolina Rising spent the money in a three-month blitz leading up to Election Day, but we may never learn where these millions came from. The partial disclosure required of 501(c)(4) outfits means that while we do know that 98.7 percent of the group’s revenue came from a single donor and that virtually every penny of it was used to further the cause of Mr. Tillis’s campaign, we don’t know who Carolina Rising’s secret benefactor was. 

John Koskinen, the I.R.S. commissioner, is scheduled to testify today before the Senate Finance Committee at yet another hearing on the agency’s heightened scrutiny of certain politically active 501(c)(4) groups in 2010-12. But what we should really be paying attention to is the increasing use of dark money to influence our elections, and the rising number of groups that devote themselves to a single candidate (including several, already, in this cycle’s presidential campaign). Before the 2014 campaign, nonprofits like that didn’t exist.

This is what a post-Citizens United America means: a single donor can give unlimited money anonymously in order to influence elections, and we have to call it Constitutionally-protected free speech.

Still, groups like these are obliged to follow some basic rules: 501(c)(4) organizations are not supposed to spend a majority of their resources on political activity, a requirement that leads to impressive accounting and definitional acrobatics. More important, these groups are not supposed to function for the private benefit of an individual or a select group. 

Carolina Rising appears to have broken both rules. Within five months of being formed, and just three months before the general election, Carolina Rising kicked off an onslaught of television ads applauding Mr. Tillis for his work on education and health care in North Carolina. The ads never asked viewers to vote for Mr. Tillis. 

Perhaps this framing was meant to allow the group to claim that it was talking about issues, rather than supporting the candidate outright. But the firm buying the ads on behalf of Carolina Rising, Crossroads Media, repeatedly described the “issue” in its ads as some variation of being pro-Thom Tillis. In at least one contract, the stated issue was “supporting Thom Tillis, senatorial candidate for N.C. (R) - election on 11/4/14.” 

Dallas Woodhouse, the Republican consultant who ran Carolina Rising, did away with any further pretense when he was interviewed live by a local news channel at the Tillis campaign’s election-night victory celebration. Sporting a Thom Tillis hat, Mr. Woodhouse, who was named executive director of the state’s Republican Party last month, was asked about his group’s spending “a whole lot of money to get this man elected.” 

Mr. Woodhouse responded, “$4.7 million. We did it.” 

Yet less than a year later, when it came time for Carolina Rising to report its activities to the I.R.S., it said it had not engaged in “direct or indirect political campaign activities on behalf of or in opposition to candidates for public office.”

And this is why I have little hope about winning the House back anytime soon, and I'm very worried about retaking the Senate.  Republicans have billions to spend on congressional and state elections next year through these dark money groups that Democrats simply can't compete with, and the GOP will certainly continue to attack the IRS for doing its job to try to prevent these abuses.

Once the primaries for the states are settled, you can bet we'll see the full onslaught of the billions in dark money on the airwaves heading for November 2016, and I'm not at all sure if the Dems can weather the tide, or if we'll be drowned by it.

Should the GOP get full control of our government, it's over.

Stopped Clock Is Right Alert

Hey look, even Chuckles Krauthammer can be correct once in a century or so.

Fox News contributor Charles Krauthammer on Tuesday dismissed House Republicans resolution to begin impeachment proceedings for IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, noting that none of the Republican investigations into the Obama administration have been successful. 

"This is not going to end well," he said on Fox's "Special Report." "Republicans in the Congress have shown that they have no ability to conduct successful investigations of this administration. Everything they have touched has failed or backfired, even Benghazi."

Krauthammer said that even though he thinks that House Republicans found "prima facie evidence" showing that Hillary Clinton made misleading statements about what sparked the attack on the U.S. compound in Benghazi, the latest House hearing with Clinton was unsuccessful. 

"If you can't score on that, you're not going to score on this," he said. "This is a waste of energy."

I have to agree with Chuck on both points:  House Republicans have failed time and time again to score any real damage on the Democrats since 2010, because they're a bunch of morons. (We keep electing them though, so what does that say about us?)

Still, unless Koskinen is even more incompetent than the House GOP, he'll be fine, and after Benghazi, and with Planned Parenthood hearings coming next year, it's impossible for the House GOP to shake charges of political witch hunts heading into the 2016 elections.

Hell's bells, they actually might make a hero out of the damned IRS chief.  Imagine that.

StupidiNews!

• As expected, the GOP-led House has easily approved a budget and debt ceiling bill that now goes to the Senate, where GOP candidates for president have vowed to try to stop it.
• Health care advocates in California are trying to get a referendum on the state negotiating prescription drug prices on the November 2016 ballot.
• A NORAD surveillance blimp escaped its moorings in Maryland and drifted into Pennsylvania, dragging a mile of cable in its wake that damaged power lines for thousands of people.
• Germany's Deutsche Bank is cutting 26,000 jobs over the next two years and will pull operations out of ten countries entirely, including Mexico and Norway, as the bank restructures.
• California delivery drivers for Amazon's Prime Now service are the latest group in the state to sue a tech company over being illegally classified under state laws as independent contractors.

Last Call For The First Meets The Second Meets The Tenth

Religious freedom meets the right to bear arms in a Pennsylvania case that could have big unintended consequences for states with religious freedom laws and states with background checks for firearms.

Lately, Americans have argued both about their right to bear arms and whether the free exercise of religion allows businesses and state officials to claim exemptions from requirements that conflict with their religious beliefs. It’s not everyday, however, that the two issues, guns and religion, wind up together in a single case.

In a suit that brings together the Second Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), an Amish man filed a federal lawsuit in Pennsylvania last week because he wants to buy a gun without the required photo ID — and because getting that photo ID would violate his religious beliefs.

Andrew Hertzler, according to the suit, is from Lancaster County, Pa., and is an “active and practicing” member of the community; his “parents, grandparents, and siblings are all active and practicing Amish”; and he “has a sincerely held religious belief that prevents him from knowingly and willingly having his photograph taken and stored.”

“The Amish faith prohibits an individual from having his/her photograph taken,” the suit read. “This belief stems from the Biblical passage Exodus 20:4, which mandates that ‘You shall not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth,’ as well as the Christian belief in humility.”

But Hertzler’s humility caused a problem when, in June, he tried to buy a gun from a Pennsylvania dealer “using a non-photo, state-issued identification.” This wasn’t enough, according to the dealer — Hertzler was told he needed a picture ID.

This case would almost have to go to the Supreme Court, and what the Roberts Court could decide may have very big consequences for states that require photo IDs for firearms background checks (and voting), the limits of religious freedoms, and states being able to set their own laws and which one takes precedence.

The First vs the Second vs the Tenth?  Yeah, this one's heading for SCOTUS for sure over the next several years.

Worst Kasich Scenario, Con't

John Kasich's clock is almost up on his presidential aspirations, so he's trying to break through ahead of tonight's debate by playing the angry dad in the room full of children.

"Do you know how crazy this election is?" he shouted during a pre-debate rally in Ohio on Tuesday. "Let me tell you something. I've about had it with these people. Let me tell you why. We got one candidate that says we ought to abolish Medicaid and Medicare. You ever heard anything so crazy as that, telling our people in this country who are seniors or about to be seniors that we're going to abolish Medicaid or Medicare," Kasich continued, referencing Ben Carson who has changed his opinion on the matter seemingly overnight.

"We got one guy that says we ought to take 10 or 11 million people and pick them up, where the—I don't know where, we're going to go in their homes, their apartments. We're going to pick them up and we're going to take them to the border and scream at them to get out of our country," Kasich said in an obvious dig at frontrunner Donald Trump. "Well that's just crazy. That is just crazy." 

"We got one candidate that claimed, one candidate that actually said that the reason why we signed an agreement with Ford to bring jobs back from Mexico is because he's been yelling for the last week ok," Kasich said again referencing Trump to uproarious laughter. "That was like something out of a Back to the Future movie."

Kasich's communications director Chris Schrimpf told The Daily Beast "Part of being President is speaking the truth to the American people. That's what Governor Kasich did today."

Kasich is trying to play to the sane Republicans, and while there are sane voters left in the GOP ranks, let's not be fooled for a second by Kasich pretending to be a nice guy here.  Maybe he doesn't want to get rid of Medicare or Medicaid like Carson, and he doesn't want to forcibly deport 11 million like Trump, but he does want to end abortion (and has already closed two-thirds of Ohio abortion clinics with TRAP laws) and is still gunning for a federal balanced budget amendment, which would require massive austerity cuts across the board.

Let's not forget either that Kasich was the guy behind the Contract With America budget, as Digby points out.

In April 1995, Budget Committee chairman John Kasich (R-Ohio) muscled through the House of Representatives the Contract with America budget plan. It was a towering achievement by Washington standards. Three cabinet departments--Commerce, Education, and Energy--were to be eliminated. Hundreds of small government programs and several large ones--from the National Endowment for the Arts, to mass transit grants, to the federal helium reserve, to the peanut subsidy program--were to be canceled. In short, it would have dramatically halted the government's fiscal expansion of the past 40 years.

The only difference between Kasich and the Trump/Carson wing of the GOP is that Kasich has the benefit of experience and is hiding his massive austerity cuts under the "balanced budget amendment" farce.

In a lot of way, he'd be worse than Carson or Trump ever would be as President, because unlike those two, Kasich knows how the game is played.

Marco Thinks You're A Rube-io, Con't

The Orlando Sun-Sentinel editorial board did not take kindly to this week's story on GOP Sen. Marco Rubio hating his job and is now openly calling for Rubio's resignation from the Senate.

Rubio has missed more votes than any other senator this year. His seat is regularly empty for floor votes, committee meetings and intelligence briefings. He says he's MIA from his J-O-B because he finds it frustrating and wants to be president, instead. 

"I'm not missing votes because I'm on vacation," he told CNN on Sunday. "I'm running for president so that the votes they take in the Senate are actually meaningful again." 

Sorry, senator, but Floridians sent you to Washington to do a job. We've got serious problems with clogged highways, eroding beaches, flat Social Security checks and people who want to shut down the government.

If you hate your job, senator, follow the honorable lead of House Speaker John Boehner and resign it. 

Let us elect someone who wants to be there and earn an honest dollar for an honest day's work. Don't leave us without one of our two representatives in the Senate for the next 15 months or so. 

You are paid $174,000 per year to represent us, to fight for us, to solve our problems. Plus you take a $10,000 federal subsidy — declined by some in the Senate — to participate in one of the Obamacare health plans, though you are a big critic of Obamacare. 

You are ripping us off, senator.

Ouch.

Doesn't get much worse for Rubio at this point, does it?

Well, except when he drops out of the race and fades into obscurity.  I'm sure he'll be back at some point to plague the state again as Governor or something, but man, his 2016 presidential aspirations are kinda done.

StupidiNews!

• A South Carolina school resource officer who was recorded throwing a female black student to the floor has been suspended without pay and could face other consequences.
• Los Angeles will now require firearm owners to keep handguns under lock and key when not in use or being cleaned, joining similar ordinances in San Francisco and other California cities.
• Pentagon chief Ash Carter says that the US is considering special operations troops in Syria and helicopters in Iraq as options to deal with ISIS.
• Defense contractor Northrup Grumman has received an $80 billion contract to build the Air Force's next superplane, the Long Range Strike Bomber.
• A commercial drone knocked out power to hundreds in Hollywood when it crashed into power lines, LA County Sheriffs are looking for a suspect.

Last Call For It's About Game Journalism

Reminder: you are not allowed to publicly discuss harassment culture in the gaming community.  At all.  Ever. The consequences are brutal.

SXSW Interactive, the annual technology event in Austin, Tex., decided on Monday to cancel two panel discussions on game culture that prompted threats of violence against the conference. 

In a blog post, Hugh Forrest, director of SXSW Interactive, said that the event organizers made the decision to cancel the two sessions after receiving “numerous threats of on-site violence related to this programming” in the week since the panels were announced. 

The panels that were scheduled for the conference, which is being held next March, were titled “SavePoint: A Discussion on the Gaming Community” and “Level Up: Overcoming Harassment in Games.” Both appear to have been dedicated to exploring different sides of an issue that has polarized the gaming community since last year, when an online movement known by the Twitter hashtag #GamerGate first formed. 

GamerGate supporters have railed against what they view as politically correct critics of games and their allies in the press. Some people who have attacked games for sexism, including Anita Sarkeesian, a feminist culture critic, have been the targets of online harassment and have had to cancel speaking engagements because of threats at the events. 

Neither of the listings for the panels at SXSW explicitly mention GamerGate. The description for the “Level Up” panel said that it would include “experts on online harassment in gaming and geek culture, how to combat it, how to design against it, and how to create online communities that are moving away from harassment.” 

The “SavePoint” panel, meanwhile, was to “focus heavily on discussions regarding the current social/political landscape in the gaming community, the journalistic integrity of gaming’s journalists, and the ever-changing gaming community, video game development, and their future.”

Seems like a great time to mention that BuzzFeed has pulled out of SXSW in response to the event giving in to GamerGate.  But that's the point, of course, to make ever questioning the supremacy of male gamers on the internet so unendingly toxic that anyone who deviates from the "hot games, hot guns and hot girls" script gets crushed.

Close Your Eyes, Marion!

Well, as if I needed yet another reason never to set foot in a Hobby Lobby store, there's this story from the Daily Beast.

In 2011, a shipment of somewhere between 200 to 300 small clay tablets on their way to Oklahoma City from Israel was seized by U.S. Customs agents in Memphis. The tablets were inscribed in cuneiform—the script of ancient Assyria and Babylonia, present-day Iraq—and were thousands of years old. Their destination was the compound of the Hobby Lobby corporation, which became famous last year for winning a landmark Supreme Court case on religious freedom and government mandates. A senior law enforcement source with extensive knowledge of antiquities smuggling confirmed that these ancient artifacts had been purchased and were being imported by the deeply-religious owners of the crafting giant, the Green family of Oklahoma City. For the last four years, law enforcement sources tell The Daily Beast, the Greens have been under federal investigation for the illicit importation of cultural heritage from Iraq. 

These tablets, like the other 40,000 or so ancient artifacts owned by the Green family, were destined for the Museum of the Bible, the giant new museum funded by the Greens, slated to open in Washington, D.C., in 2017. Both the seizure of the cuneiform tablets and the subsequent federal investigation were confirmed to us by Cary Summers, the president of the Museum of the Bible. 

From its founding in 1970, the Greens’ Hobby Lobby chain has been more than simply a suite of craft stores. The Greens have used it as a model of a business run on Christian values. Stores are closed on Sundays in order to give employees time to attend church. The company employs four chaplains, and offered a free health clinic to staff at its headquarters long before free health care came into political vogue. The Greens have also used the Hobby Lobby platform to spread their Christian message far and wide: The company annually places full-page ads celebrating—in their words— “the real meaning of Christmas, Easter, and Independence Day” in newspapers across the country. 

But the Greens went from evangelical players to bona fide Christian celebrities in June of 2014 when they won a Supreme Court case, Burwell v. Hobby Lobby. It granted them exemption from the Obamacare mandate to provide certain forms of contraception to their employees; forcing the company to do so, the Supreme Court ruled, would have violated the Greens’ deeply-held Christian beliefs. 

If the investigation ends with a decision to prosecute, on either criminal or civil charges, the Greens may be forced to forfeit the tablets to the government. There may also be a fine involved. The Green family, who successfully forced the federal government to legally recognize their personal moral standards, now find themselves on the other side of the docket, under suspicion of having attempted to contravene U.S. laws.

The abhorrent practice of looting antiquities aside (and all the Raiders of the Lost Ark jokes too) should the FBI actually go after the Green family, the Republican party will go absolutely bonkers over this.  The outrage may in fact melt through the floor and destroy the inner core of the Earth. Drudge will have "Obama's jackbooted thugs persecute Christians over Obamacare" headlines daily through the November 2016 election.  I actually expect the GOP Congress to convene hearings in order to interfere with an ongoing FBI case.

So yeah, close your eyes on this one, or you might end up like the bad guys in Raiders.

Orange Julius Plays Let's Make A Deal

The Tea Party loses again when it comes to the tentative budget deal worked out over the weekend, and it looks like Orange Julius is giving President Obama everything he wanted as he exists, stage left.

GOP leaders from both ends of the Capitol met privately with their rank-and-file Monday evening to outline the general contours of the emerging agreement between Congress and the White House. It would boost defense and domestic spending over the next two years, and lift the nation’s debt limit through March 2017 — thereby eliminating the twin threats of a government shutdown and a debt default until after the November 2016 elections.

But conservative lawmakers, eager to keep the strict spending caps from a 2011 budget agreement intact, were very skeptical of the deal after they emerged from close-door briefings with their leaders on Monday night.

Asked about the tentative agreement after the briefing, Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions replied: “My knees quiver at the sound.”

In an interview, Sessions expressed frustration that outgoing Speaker John Boehner was hammering out the deal just days before he plans to give up the gavel for good. “What does Boehner got to do with it?” said an exasperated Sessions, the former top Republican on the Senate Budget Committee. “I’m worried about how fast it’s moving. I see no reason for that. Based on what I know now, it appears the president got whatever he wanted.”

Suckers.  You lose again.  And you always will...and it prevents major cuts to Social Security in the future.

Not only will the increased spending levels make for heartburn with conservatives, but many of the offsets touch on political hot buttons.

Those pay-fors include a repeal of a piece of Obamacare, according to congressional sources. It would repeal Obamacare’s requirement that large employers automatically enroll employees in their health plans. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that a different bill to repeal that provision would save the federal government $7.9 billion over a decade.

The plan would also prevent a 20 percent across-the-board benefit cut to the Social Security Disability Insurance program, resulting in $168 billion in long-term savings. The tentative deal would also be paid for by extending the Medicare sequester that was approved in the Budget Control Act for another year and setting up additional cuts to hospitals.

The tentative agreement would also impose policy changes to disability insurance, tax compliance, crop insurance, spectrum and the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Lawmakers and aides cautioned that the negotiations were not completed, and some details could change before details are made public — likely by later Monday night.

Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn of Texas dryly acknowledged: “I don’t think you’ll hear anybody popping any champagne corks.”

Indeed, conservatives across the country have been watching for months to see how GOP leaders handle the spending caps that many on the right view as a major victory. Many conservatives are likely to interpret the budget deal, even with some new spending paid for with cuts and new revenues, as a retreat from the blunt spending restrictions of the Budget Control Act that was enacted into law in 2011.

So yes, a big reversal of sequestration cuts that have been hurting the economy for years now.  No wonder the Republicans are furious.

Will the deal pass?  We'll find out.

StupidiNews!

• A viral video showing a white school resource officer in South Carolina pulling a black student out of her chair and throwing her several feet has sparked outrage on social media.
• A yearly conference of police chiefs from around the country has called for universal background checks for firearms purchases, citing overwhelming public support.
• Leaders in Congress have reached a tentative two-year budget agreement with the White House, but GOP rank-and-file members are already denouncing the deal as unacceptable.
• China is warning that a US destroyer sailing within 12 nautical miles of disputed islands that it claims is a "threat to regional peace", Beijing will take "all necessary measures" to stop it.
• US regulators have issued the first nuclear plant operating license in nearly 20 years as the Tennessee Valley Authority has finished the Watts Bar 2 reactor after restarting in 2007.

Last Call For Marco Thinks You're A Rube-io

You guys, GOP Sen. Marco Rubio is in fact really, really tired of being a Senator and wants America to hurry up and make him President already.

Marco Rubio is a U.S. senator. And he just can’t stand it anymore. 

“I don’t know that ‘hate’ is the right word,” Rubio said in an interview. “I’m frustrated.” 

This year, as Rubio runs for president, he has cast the Senate — the very place that cemented him as a national politician — as a place he’s given up on, after less than one term. It’s too slow. Too rule-bound. So Rubio, 44, has decided not to run for his seat again. It’s the White House or bust. 

“That’s why I’m missing votes. Because I am leaving the Senate. I am not running for reelection,” Rubio said in the last Republican debate, after Donald Trump had mocked him for his unusual number of absences during Senate votes.

They keep telling me the smart money is on the Republican Savior(tm).

Five years ago, Rubio arrived with a potential that thrilled Republicans. He was young, ambitious, charismatic, fluent in English and Spanish, and beloved by the establishment and the tea party.

But Rubio had arrived at one of the least ambitious moments in Senate history and saw many of his ideas fizzle. Democrats killed his debt-cutting plans. Republicans killed his immigration reform. The two parties actually came together to kill his AGREE Act, a small-bore, hands-across-the-aisle bill that Rubio had designed just to get a win on something. 

Now, he’s done. “He hates it,” a longtime friend from Florida said, speaking anonymously to say what Rubio would not. 

Which makes for an odd campaign message.

Nothing odd about it.  Given the number of times Republicans have described Obama as "petulant" and/or "arrogant" you would think it was a required presidential trait.  Rubio's just getting there early. See, presidential material!

Besides, since when do Florida Tea Party types actually want Rubio to be doing anything in Senate? I thought the whole deal was to make sure nothing got done. He's done a super job of that.

Don't worry, Rubio will just spin his missing huge numbers of votes as  "I gave up on Washington!" and run as an outsider.  It'll fool some of the GOP, too.

The Carson Show, Con't

Of course Ben Carson wants to eliminate abortion nationwide.  What kind of candidate did you think he was going to be?

Republican presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson said he would "love" to see Roe vs. Wade overturned, making abortion illegal nationwide, with almost no exemptions.

"I'm a reasonable person and if people can come up with a reasonable explanation of why they would like to kill a baby, I'll listen," Carson said on NBC's "Meet the Press."

While the Republican candidate said he opposes abortions for unwanted pregnancies and in cases of rape and incest, the retired neurosurgeon told moderator Chuck Todd he might be open to allowing abortions to preserve the life and health of the mother.

"That's an extraordinarily rare situation," Carson said. "But if in that very rare situation it occurred, I believe there's room to discuss that."

On "Meet the Press," the soft-spoken candidate said his past controversial comments have become flash points because they resonate with "people who aren't really thinking deeply."

Carson was asked how he would respond if he became the GOP nominee and those contentions remarks are used to attack him. His response: "As people get to know me, they know that I'm not a hateful, pathological person like some people try to make me out to be. And that will be self-evident. So I don't really worry about that."

So, we know Carson is anti-gay, anti-Muslim, and his "reasonable" stance on abortion is maybe, maybe allowing discussion of having the procedure if and only if the health of the mother is at risk.  Oh, and if you think that's controversial, it's because you're not a "very deep" thinker.  That's "self-evident".  But at least he "probably" would raise the debt ceiling rather than default!

Of course, there's no difference between him and Clinton/Sanders, say the people who convinced you not to vote in 2014, leaving a ready GOP Congress to eliminate the filibuster and pass laws like this.

And should he end up the candidate, well, he'll get 60 million votes in the general, easily.  Even Romney got that, and the Republicans hated him.  They hated Obama more though, and they will be out to vote.

If we don't, like Tom Hilton said, All dark. Forever.

The Master Debaters, Kentucky Edition

The second-to-last debate before next week's Kentucky gubernatorial election took place Sunday night, and it's very clear that Democratic AG Jack Conway and Republican Matt Bevin really, really hate each other.

The first question the candidates tackled was what to do with the expansion of Medicaid. The candidates were asked what adjustments they would make, and asked specifically how many people would be enrolled next year when they take office. 

Conway said he would continue Kentucky's expanded Medicaid program. He said the more than 400,000 people who "are enrolled now, will be enrolled in the future." 

He said we can actually make it work, adding that Kynect, which has received praise on the national level, is a "a shinning example" for others. Conway also said that people will get off medicaid when they have better jobs and he won’t "kick people off" like Bevin.
“To kick them off now would be callus,” Conway said. 

Bevin immediately defended his campaign's position and said "these things are lies."
"I’ve never said I’d kick people off," he said. 

Bevin said there is a need for healthcare, but it was "faulty" to make a promise to somebody when "we we don’t have the ability to pay for it." 

Bevin said he would scale back the expansion of the state's Medicaid program because the state cannot afford to continue paying for the health insurance of a quarter of the state's population. 

Conway said Bevin was caught on camera saying he would reverse Governor Steve Beshear's actions to expand Medicaid. 

"That videocamera caught you at the start of your campaign," he said. "When asked about Steve Beshear's executive order to expand Medicaid. You said 'absolutely, no question about it, I would reverse that immediately.' Now you owe the people an explanation how's that not going to kick nearly half a million people off their healthcare?"

Bevin of course didn't have an answer, which is why he's losing.  Kentucky is one of the few states where, with a 92% white population and Bevin complaining about "a quarter" of the state on Medicaid, blaming those people doesn't exactly work very well.  Bevin really did say he wanted to reverse the Medicaid expansion flat-out, and just about everyone here in Kentucky knows somebody who has been helped by Kynect.

If he had began his argument with the usual "well, some people who are on Medicaid don't deserve it" fraud/drug testing dog whistle he would have been in much better shape, frankly.  But speaking of drugs, Bevin turned around and said he'd leagalize medical marijuana, where Jack Conway said he wouldn't because gateway drug (sigh, 1984's DARE program called Jack, they want their jargon back.)

But where both candidates had little difference?  King Coal.

Bevin said he would fight for coal. He said Kentucky needs to be more involved in efforts everywhere to mine coal. As governor, he said, that he would be a champion for coal. 

Conway noted that he worked under Kentucky Governor Paul E. Patton, who operated coal mines for decades, and also noted that he was among those who sued the EPA, vowing to "continue fighting against EPA rulemaking that harms Kentucky coal production and electricity rates." 

"Of the two candidates standing on stage tonight, I am the only one who has ever done anything for coal," Conway said.

Indeed, as Attorney General, Jack Conway is helping Mitch the Turtle by suing the EPA along with 23 other states to stop the Obama administration's Clean Power Plan.  He's real proud of that, and you'd better believe neither candidate will cooperate with the EPA directives on coal for any reason: it's immediate political suicide here.

Still voting for Conway, however.  Either way it's going to be a close race, and a lot of it depends on who independent candidate and Fark creator Drew Curtis can hurt more.  Curtis is hovering around 6-8% in the polls and his support seems to be coming from Bevin.  If that holds true next week, Conway can pull out a narrow victory.

Somebody's going to win 48-44% with Curtis getting 7% or so, I just couldn't tell you if it's going to be Conway or Bevin on top.

The final debate is on KET's Kentucky Tonight program at 8, so if you get a chance, watch it.  I'll be live-tweeting it tonight and I'll have a wrap-up tomorrow.

StupidiNews!

• A major magnitude 7.7 earthquake has rocked northeastern Afghanistan near the border with Pakistan, shaking the capital Kabul and felt as far away as northern India.
• Democrat John Bel Edwards will face off against GOP Sen. David Vitter November 21 as this weekend's open primary Louisiana Governor's election did not produce a majority winner.
• In Guatemala, former TV comedian Jimmy Morales picked up more than two-thirds of the vote to be elected president amid a corruption scandal that sunk former president Otto Perez/
• Poland's conservative Law & Justice party has won a slim parliamentary majority, defeating the current Civic Platform coalition on promises to sharply reduce incoming Muslim refugees.
• Kentucky and West Virginia are leading a group of 22 other states suing the EPA to block the Obama administration's Clean Power Plan reducing power plant emissions.