In Which Zandar Answers Your Burning Questions

"So," people ask me. "Zandar, you live in Kentucky. Trump will probably win here by 10-12 points.  Clinton can't possibly win, so why aren't you voting for Jill Stein and the Green party?"

Well, let me think about it...

Jill Stein VP Ajamu Baraka says he stands by calling Barack Obama an "Uncle Tom president."

— Alex Seitz-Wald (@aseitzwald) August 18, 2016

I'm going to go with "no."

The Coming Av-Hill-Lanche, Con't

At this point, even the relatively careful Sabato's Crystal Ball political forecast maintains a Hillary Clinton win in November, the question now being what her margin of victory will be.

What about the overall picture? As our regular readers know, we’ve been the Rock of Gibraltar when it comes to a Clinton victory. Our first electoral map, issued at the end of March, showed Clinton at 347 EVs to 191 EVs for Trump, and all subsequent maps have maintained those totals — until now. After looking carefully at Nebraska’s 2nd District — Nebraska being, along with Maine, a state that awards one electoral vote to the winner of each congressional district — we’ve decided that NE-2 is leaning toward Clinton. It isn’t much of a lean, and it’s possible that if Trump can tighten up the contest, this one will wobble back to the Republicans. But for the moment, adding NE-2 to the Democrats makes Clinton’s total 348 EVs and Trump’s total 190 EVs. As you’ll recall, Obama carried this district in 2008 but lost it in 2012, so it’s on the margins — yet it also ranks 49th out of 435 congressional districts for percentage of non-Hispanic whites with a bachelor’s degree or higher. Moreover, not only is Clinton investing ad money in Omaha, which also bleeds into the western parts of swing state Iowa, she is also spending actual campaign time in the city, a sign that her campaign believes it can win this extra electoral vote. And did we mention Warren Buffett, a huge Hillary fan, dominates the economic landscape there?

We’ve heard from many of you asking why we haven’t switched Arizona and Georgia to Clinton. The answer is simple: There’s not enough evidence yet to justify doing so. The polling averages are basically tied in both, so we’ll keep watching. Probably these states would be the next on our map to change color if a blue tide is in the Nov. 8 forecast. On the other hand, if Trump manages a modest recovery, Arizona and Georgia would remain in his column.

By the way, we’re lowering Kansas and South Carolina from Safe Republican to Likely Republican after recent closer-than-expected surveys surfaced. In the former, the latest statewide poll from SurveyUSA had Trump ahead by just five points, 44%-39%, and notably it showed Clinton ahead 45%-35% in the Kansas City region. Echoing that finding, an internal survey for Rep. Kevin Yoder (R, KS-3) showed Clinton up 44%-38% over Trump in a district that is mostly in the Kansas City area. In addition, KS-3 was a 54%-44% Mitt Romney district in 2012, further confirming our views of NE-2, which voted for Romney by 53%-46%. Meanwhile, a Public Policy Polling survey found Trump up only 41%-39% in South Carolina, and it is a state with a high Democratic floor (but a low ceiling) because of a large black population and the Palmetto State’s racially polarized voting. We certainly don’t expect either Kansas or South Carolina to vote Democratic. Still, we have noticed that many deep red states may be preparing to produce lower-than-usual pluralities for Trump. It won’t matter in the Electoral College, of course, but it will be reflected in the national popular vote total.

Sabato's map is pretty much exactly what my map would look like if I made a forecast for November today, with the exception of Missouri moving into only Likely territory for Trump, and sliding the upper Midwest Great Lake states from Likely Clinton to Safe (or at least Minnesota.)

Trump again is heading for a beatdown, this is the Obama 2008 drubbing of McCain minus Missouri and Indiana, and both are definitely in play for Clinton.  But how cool would that be if Clinton picked up Arizona and Georgia as well?  That's the direction we're heading right now.

We'll see.  Word at this hour is that Trump's former campaign manager Paul Manafort is now out.

StupidiNews!

• The Red Cross says this month's flooding in Louisiana is the worst US natural disaster since Superstorm Sandy four years ago, the death toll has now risen to 13.
• A federal judge has blocked ride-sharing giant Uber's attempt to settle a class action suit, saying the proposed $84 million was not adequate for the 385,000 drivers suing the company.
• German Chancellor Angela Merkel says there is no reason for the EU to lift economic sanctions against Russia as Moscow has failed to meet its commitments to peace.
• Former Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan says that US interest rates will need to begin to rise soon if not with a "degree of rapidity" to stave off inflation.
• After a lawsuit and buyout, website Gawker.com will cease operations at the end of next week, however the group's other websites will continue.

Last Call For The Upper Chamber Going Down

Time to check in with the Senate election forecast for November with Nate Silver, and as you can imagine, the odds of the GOP holding their 54-46 control of the chamber is running directly into the orange buzzsaw that is Donald Trump.  Democrats are taking aim at picking up eight GOP seats or more this year, and they are well on their way.

Democrats need to gain a net of four or five seats to win control of the Senate, depending on whether Hillary Clinton or Trump wins the presidency.¹ Before the conventions, polling in the 10 states whose Senate seats were most likely to flip between parties this November showed a pretty close race. Democratic candidates led in Illinois and Wisconsin, both of which would be pickups for their party. The Republican candidate was leading in Nevada (a seat that Democrats currently control). I didn’t include Indiana in my pre-convention analysis because of Democrat Evan Bayh’s late entrance into the race — we had just one partisan poll that included Bayh — but Democratic chances seemed good there (it would be another Democratic pickup). And Republicans led in the other competitive Senate races, all seats the GOP currently holds, so Democrats looked like they could pick up a net of two seats if everything stayed as it was and the polling leader in each state went on to win. 

Since the conventions, however, Trump’s polling has worsened — overall and in states with key Senate races. In the eight states with competitive Senate races and both pre- and post-conventions polling,² Trump had previously been down an average of about 6 percentage points; he’s now down an average of 9 points.³ And while Republican Senate candidates had been up by an average of a little more than 1 percentage point before the conventions in these eight states, they are now down by a little more than 1 point. That is, Republican Senate candidates in key states are still running ahead of Trump, but that cushion may no longer be enough to win now that Trump’s fortunes have worsened.

Just how bad is it for the Senate GOP?  This bad.

Six of the eight Republican candidates for Senate are polling worse than they were before the conventions. Nothing has changed in Florida, according to the polls. And Sen. Rob Portman in Ohio is the only Republican whose fortunes have improved. (That may be partially because he has a massive fundraising edge over his Democratic opponent, Ted Strickland.) The biggest shifts have been in Illinois, New Hampshire and Pennsylvania, and in the latter two, the leader flipped. 

Among the eight states, the most precipitous drop for both Trump and the GOP Senate candidate happened in New Hampshire, where Republican Sen. Kelly Ayotte had led in most polls before the conventions. Since then, she has trailed in all four polls of the state that have been released. MassINC pollster Steve Koczela, who conducted one of the surveys in the New Hampshire average, had told me that Ayotte’s troubles are at least partially because of “how closely tied the Ayotte and Trump vote are” and that he saw that “as evidence that Trump is hurting her.” 

Republicans have also seen their prospects worsen in Pennsylvania. Trump is now down 10 percentage points in the state, a headwind that may be too much for Republican Sen. Pat Toomey to overcome. Toomey, like Ayotte, had been leading in most polls before the conventions. But he has trailed in four of the five polls conducted since the conventions. Toomey’s slide, in particular, should worry Republicans. He has made it clear that he is not a Trump fan and has avoided appearing with Trump when he visits the Keystone State. And yet, their fates still seem tied. It may be that down-ballot Republicans can only do so much to keep themselves from getting swept up in an anti-Trump tide. 

Democrats now lead in enough states to take back the Senate — so long as Clinton holds on to her large lead. If the favorites in the polls win, the Democrats would flip and pick up the seats in Illinois, Indiana, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Republicans would pick up Nevada and hold onto Florida, North Carolina and Ohio. Of course, many of these races are close, and there’s plenty of time before Election Day. The fight for the Senate isn’t over by a long shot. Republicans and Trump — or Republicans without Trump — could rebound.

So, right now, the Dems pick up 5 seats, and the GOP picks up Harry Reid's seat in Nevada, giving the Dems a 50-50 tie, where a Clinton White House win would mean Tim Kaine would serve as VP and Senate tiebreaker.

North Carolina, Ohio, and Florida aren't out of reach, either.  Marco Rubio, Rob Portman, and Richard Burr are all in real trouble at this point, and this was before Trump went the full Breitbart this week.

It would be nice to see the Dems have a decent cushion in the Senate, but right now I'll take the 50-50 tie if it means kicking Mitch the Turtle's ass out of the Senate majority leader's office.

Prison Industrial Complexities

In a major move for prison reform, the Obama Administration announced today that it will no longer be renewing contracts with private prison companies for federal correctional facilities.

The Justice Department plans to end its use of private prisons after officials concluded the facilities are both less safe and less effective at providing correctional services than those run by the government. 

Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates announced the decision on Thursday in a memo that instructs officials to either decline to renew the contracts for private prison operators when they expire or “substantially reduce” the contracts’ scope. The goal, Yates wrote, is “reducing — and ultimately ending — our use of privately operated prisons.” 

“They simply do not provide the same level of correctional services, programs, and resources; they do not save substantially on costs; and as noted in a recent report by the Department’s Office of Inspector General, they do not maintain the same level of safety and security,” Yates wrote. 

The Justice Department’s Inspector General last week released a critical report concluding that privately operated facilities incurred more safety and security incidents than those run by the federal Bureau of Prisons. The private facilities, for example, had higher rates of assaults — both by inmates on other inmates and by inmates on staff — and saw eight times as many contraband cellphones confiscated each year on average, according to the report. 

Disturbances in the facilities, the report said, led in recent years to “extensive property damage, bodily injury, and the death of a Correctional Officer.” The report listed several examples of mayhem at private facilities, including a May 2012 riot at the Adams County Correctional Center in Mississippi in which 20 people were injured and a correctional officer killed. That incident, according to the report, involved 250 inmates who were upset about low-quality food and medical care. 

“The fact of the matter is that private prisons don’t compare favorably to Bureau of Prisons facilities in terms of safety or security or services, and now with the decline in the federal prison population, we have both the opportunity and the responsibility to do something about that,” Yates said in an interview.

So 13 federal private prisons will hopefully be going away in the next five years or so.  Unfortunately that leaves two big questions: where to put the existing federal prisoners (many of whom are non-US citizens held as part of the deportation process) and what to do about the dozens of state prisons that are run by private contractors.  Both are still massive, massive problems that the next President will have to deal with.

Of course, if Trump wins, you can bet this directive will go away on January 21, 2017, so the first order of business is making sure Hillary Clinton wins.

On the gripping hand, private prison stocks CRATERED today.  I'm good with that too.

Trump Cards, Con't

So we're now on the third Trump campaign head in three months, Corey Lewandowski has been demoted to CNN, now Paul "Crimea River" Manafort has been kicked upstairs to Liar Emeritus status, and the new guy?  Well, the new guy is something else, alright.

The campaign’s new chief executive, Stephen Bannon, joins from Breitbart News—where he helped mainstream the ideas of white nationalists and resuscitate the reputations of anti-immigrant fear-mongers.

White nationalists today invest a lot of energy worrying about growing Hispanic and Muslim populations in the U.S. Turns out, Breitbart News spends a lot of time worrying about those things, too. And in Bannon, they see a media-friendly, ethno-nationalist fellow traveler.

“Latterly, Breitbart emerged as a nationalist site and done great stuff on immigration in particular,” VDARE.com editor Peter Brimelow told The Daily Beast.

VDare is a white supremacist site. It’s named after Virginia Dare, the first white child born to British colonists in North America. Brimelow said he and Bannon met briefly last month and exchanged pleasantries about each other’s work.

“It’s irritating because VDARE.com is not used to competition,” Brimelow added. “I presume that is due to Bannon, so his appointment is great news.”

Brimelow isn’t the only prominent white nationalist to praise the Bannon hire. Richard Spencer, who heads the white supremacist think tank National Policy Institute, said he was also pleased. Under Bannon’s leadership, Breitbart has given favorable coverage to the white supremacist Alt Right movement. And Spencer loves it.

If your plan is the lead a resurgent white supremacist movement, you couldn't ask for a better point man than Steve Bannon, which brings me to the point I've made several times around here: when Trump loses in November, his followers aren't going to quietly vanish.

Bannon's specialty is virulent white supremacist dog whistle politics, after all Breitbart has been attacking President Obama and his family, Black Lives Matter, and any Democratic black or Latino politician they can find for years now, from Cory Booker to Joaquin Castro to Shirley Sherrod (remember her?)

And hey, let's not forget the problem we have now with Trump's White Power campaign goes directly down the line drawn by Andrew Breitbart and the media monster he created before his death in March 2012.

For tomorrow, the fresh hell of the news cycle begins anew, and Breitbart's pervasive taint will be all over it and the many, many news cycles to come after. The dead racist guy gets the last laugh in this America. His replacement will invariably be worse.

His replacement was Steve Bannon.  We can go straight from that point to here over the last 55 months.

So if avowed white supremacists are happy to see Steve Bannon in charge of Trump's campaign, that's something that we should all be worried about, along with the merger of Breitbart and Trump. Things are going to get a lot uglier, if that's even possible. As Charles Blow points out, it's a funny strategy to take for a guy so obviously trying to pander to black voters as he tried to do Tuesday in Wisconsin.

The speech was tone deaf, facile and nonsensical, much like the man who delivered it. 

Then within hours of making that speech, Trump shook up his campaign in part by naming Stephen Bannon, the executive chairman of Breitbart News LLC, the campaign’s chief executive. 

This is the same Breitbart that the Southern Poverty Law Center referred to in an April “Hatewatch” report: 

“Over the past year however, the outlet has undergone a noticeable shift toward embracing ideas on the extremist fringe of the conservative right. Racist ideas. Anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant ideas — all key tenets making up an emerging racist ideology known as the ‘Alt-Right.’” 

The report continued: 

“The Alt-Right is a loose set of far-right ideologies at the core of which is a belief that “white identity” is under attack through policies prioritizing multiculturalism, political correctness and social justice and must be preserved, usually through white-identified online communities and physical ethno-states.” 

How are you reaching out to the black community when you step on your own message with such an insulting hire? 

All of black America is looking askance at Donald Trump. He has no credibility with black people, other than the handful of black staffers and surrogates who routinely embarrass themselves in their blind obsequiousness.

I mean on one hand I can see why Trump did this, you can't get worse with black voters than "fewer than one percent" so he doesn't have many other people to reach, and if you haven't been driven off your support of Trump by now, you're probably really jazzed by Bannon's hire.

On the other hand, I'm a human being with a soul and morals, so this is all awful nonsense to me that needs to be crushed brutally at the polls in November when Democrats run up the scoreboard.

We'll see.  It's going to be a long 80-some days.

StupidiNews!

• The fourth case this year of a deadly infection caused by an amoeba has been reported in Florida, contracted by swimming in unsanitary water on private property.
• The first of 26 people on trial for taking over a federal wildlife refuge in Oregon in January has been sentenced to 30 months in federal prison.
• Brazilian police have detained two US swimmers in connection with swimmer Ryan Lochte's claim that the athletes were held up at gunpoint last weekend at the Rio games.
• Uber's fleet of custom self-driving Volvos will launch in Pittsburgh this month with human minders in the front seat to take over if needed.
• Embattled online entertainment group Gawker Media will be bought out by Spanish language television giant Univision for $135 million.

Last Call For Brewering Up Trouble

Republicans know they are in serious trouble in November with Trump turning into an anchor that will most likely sink the GOP, and the problem is only compounded by the fact that scared Republicans say and do idiotic things even more than usual.

Former Arizona Governor Jan Brewer says she suffered a “stumble of the tongue” on Tuesday when she seemed to call Hillary Clinton a “lying killer” during a radio interview.

“People want a fighter. They’re tired of the lying killer, uh, Hillary Clinton and Bill Clintons of the world,” Brewer told Mac & Gaydos on KTAR News, the audio of which was first reported by Mediaite.

When reached by phone by BuzzFeed News on Wednesday, Brewer said she just mispronounced Clinton’s name.

“I was trying to say Hillary Clinton,” Brewer said. “It was a stumble of the tongue.”

“Good grief,” she added.

The parth of "personal responsibility" sure has this problem with actually owning up to it.  I mean if you're going to essentially accuse the Democratic nominee of murder, embrace your hatred of the woman. At least that's an honest emotion, no doubt fomented by 25 years of blind rage.

Trump at least owns up to the fact he'll never change.

Aetna Tu, Brute? Con't

Yesterday I speculated that the obvious timing of health insurance company Aetna pulling out of Obamacare exchanges in 11 states indicated the move was political revenge for the Justice Department suing to block Aetna's planned buyout of Humana last month.  One of the places Aetna is pulling out is here in NKY, meaning less competition and higher premiums, so I've got skin in this game too. It stank from the beginning, especially given Aetna's plans in May to expand coverage.

Today we find out that political revenge theory is exactly what happened as Jonathan Cohn over at HuffPo drops this story on Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini.

Publicly, Aetna representatives this week framed their about-face as a reaction to losses the company was taking on Obamacare customers, and in particular figures from the second quarter of 2016 that the company had just analyzed, showing them to be sicker and costlier than predicted. 

When reporters on Monday asked whether Aetna was also reacting to the administration’s attempt to thwart its merger with Humana, company officials brushed off the questions, according to accounts in the Hartford Courant, Politico, and USA Today. 

But just last month, in a letter to the Department of Justice, Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini said the two issues were closely linked. In fact, he made a clear threat: If President Barack Obama’s administration refused to allow the merger to proceed, he wrote, Aetna would be in worse financial position and would have to withdraw from most of its Obamacare markets, and quite likely all of them. 

Bertolini penned the letter, which The Huffington Post obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, on July 5 ― 16 days before the Justice Department announced it would fight the Humana deal. The department had asked Aetna how, if at all, a decision on the proposed merger would affect Aetna’s willingness to offer insurance through the exchanges. 

Bertolini responded bluntly. Aetna supported the law’s goal to expand coverage and planned to increase its exchange offerings next year, in the hopes that the exchanges would stabilize as enrollment grew, he wrote. 

But if the Justice Department were to block the merger, Bertolini warned, Aetna could no longer sustain the losses from its exchange business, forcing it sharply change direction:


[I]f the deal were challenged and/or blocked we would need to take immediate actions to mitigate public exchange and ACA small group losses. Specifically, if the DOJ sues to enjoin the transaction, we will immediately take action to reduce our 2017 exchange footprint .... [I]nstead of expanding to 20 states next year, we would reduce our presence to no more than 10 states .… [I]t is very likely that we would need to leave the public exchange business entirely and plan for additional business efficiencies should our deal ultimately be blocked. By contrast, if the deal proceeds without the diverted time and energy associated with litigation, we would explore how to devote a portion of the additional synergies ... to supporting even more public exchange coverage over the next few years.

So yes, Bertolini has made good on his threat, and he's put the health insurance coverage for millions of people in possible jeopardy as a direct result. Aetna still expects to make billions in profit in 2016, so the notion that the exchanges were hurting the company was always nonsense.

Richard Mayhew over at Balloon Juice calls BS on Aetna as well, using Pennsylvania as an example. Aetna says it has to pull out of the state because it's losing money on the individual market, including Obamacare exchange plans.  Filings to the state's insurance regulators prove otherwise:

Aetna was profitable in 2015 in the individual market in Pennsylvania. It is projecting to be profitable in 2017. The filing memo was drafted in late May and submitted to the Pennsylvania regulators in early June. Conditions have not changed enough to make Pennsylvania a money loser in under two months. 

My wee bit of cynicism bears fruit. Aetna is trying to logroll an anti-competetive merger with on-Exchange political consequences. If it works for Aetna/Humana it burns a bridge to get the merger, and if it fails, it puts Aetna on the shitlist of any Democratic administration. That is a very interesting strategy when it is highly likely that there will be another Democratic administration.

But the strategy makes sense if the goal is to not have another Democratic administration, you see.

So now we have evidence that health insurance companies are actively trying to sabotage Obamacare anyway and maybe even trying to hurt the Democrats as punishment.

So what will the Obama administration do about it?

We're about to find out.

That's Real White Of You, Con't

I think I may have found the problem with our political system as a whole, guys. As Justin Gest reminds us (and as I've been saying for months now) Donald Trump's followers are not going to suddenly all come to their senses on November 9th and start hugging everyone after they (hopefully) get stomped at the polls. If you think Trumpies are just going to vanish...

For people who feel that way, I have some discouraging news. As part of a broad study of white working class politics, I solicited white Americans’ support for Donald Trump, but also for a hypothetical third party dedicated to “stopping mass immigration, providing American jobs to American workers, preserving America’s Christian heritage, and stopping the threat of Islam”—essentially the platform of the UK’s right-wing British National Party, adapted to the United States. How many white Americans do you think would consider voting for this type of protectionist, xenophobic party? 

65 percent. 

Clearly, Trump’s allure is bigger than Trump himself. 

Who would the new party’s supporters be? What I found in the study is that much like those who support the Trump campaign, those who would consider voting for this third party are more likely to be male, of lower socioeconomic status, without a university education and ideologically conservative—in other words, the Republican Party’s longtime base. They are also more likely to be young (under 40 years old)—so this is not a phenomenon likely to pass quickly. 

This is most immediately important to the Republican Party: If Trump were the whole story, and his message didn’t matter, then Republicans could dismiss this election as an anomaly. However, if Trump has stumbled upon a policy agenda that has been latent in the Republican base, then the party is faced with a choice: adopt it in the future, or stick with its longstanding principles and risk alienating its voters. That would either usher in a radical turn in the party’s trajectory or open up space for a third party, the likes of which are growing rapidly in Europe. 

It is worth putting the results into perspective. This kind of theoretical question, untethered to any specific party or political figure, may well be a useful test of deep support for such policy platforms. But it’s also an imaginary third party right now, free of the media checks and public scrutiny that would accompany it were it to exist in a competitive party landscape. In Britain, for example, UKIP and its precursor, the British National Party, are both stained by allegations of racism and incompetence, while this hypothetical American counterpart is unexposed. 

But neither the BNP nor UKIP has ever garnered anywhere close to a majority of the white British electorate, let alone a general majority. 65 percent is a whopping number—in fact, it’s significantly more than those who expressed support for Trump’s candidacy in my research.

The problem was never Donald Trump, but somebody who could run on Donald Trump's white nationalist platform and not be a self-destructive idiot while doing it.  Trump's not the guy you have to be careful of.  It's the guy after Trump, who knows how to play this game and win, who is the real danger.

Trump himself meanwhile can't take the fact that 99% of black voters like myself despise him, so in his speech in Wisconsin last night he made a pitch to African-Americans in general.

Donald Trump made a new and explicit plea for the support of black voters on Tuesday, saying the Democratic Party had “failed and betrayed” them and accusing Hillary Clinton of “bigotry” in the pursuit of minority voters.

“We reject the bigotry of Hillary Clinton which panders to and talks down to communities of color and sees them only as votes — that’s all they care about — not as individual human beings worthy of a better future,” Trump said at a rally in Wisconsin.

After Republican Party leaders have urged Trump for months to rein in unpredictable tangents on the stump that have gotten him in repeated political trouble, Trump used a teleprompter at a campaign rally for the first time on Tuesday to deliver a speech that waded into the thorny topics of race and politics.

“The Democratic Party has failed and betrayed the African-American community,” Trump declared.

“The Democratic Party has taken the votes of African-Americans for granted. They’ve just assumed they’ll get your support and done nothing in return for it. They’ve taken advantage of the African-American citizen,” he added. “It’s time to give the Democrats some competition for these votes.”

Now, the Republican pitch to black voters has been exactly this for years, it's nothing new, that everything ailing the black community would magically vanish if we just started to vote for the Republicans.

Only, the reality is that in 2016, black voters are the Democratic party.  We're the most loyal base and we haven't forgotten the way Trump and Republicans have treated us, have treated President Obama and his family, and the Black Lives Matter movement, so Donald Trump can kindly go screw himself with a rusty pickax. We certainly haven't forgotten how the Republican party has worked over the last 60 years to stop us from voting at all.  It's comical how bad this man is at running for President.

But remember this: so far we've had McCain, Romney, and Trump, three guys who made massive unforced errors and completely blew their elections in the final stretch (and Trump is doing an even better job of self-destructing now.)  But when we get somebody both smart and dangerous, that's when America gets screwed, big time.

Imagine Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio running on Trump's platform from the start, the whole “stopping mass immigration, providing American jobs to American workers, preserving America’s Christian heritage, and stopping the threat of Islam” thing Gest mentions in his article.

Now imagine them running in 2020.

That's why I want to run up the score this year, guys.  I want these guys done.

StupidiNews!

• Donald Trump is shaking up his campaign staff by adding Breitbart News chairman Steve Bannon and pollster Kellyanne Conway as chief executive and campaign manager respectively.
• The death toll in Louisiana's record flooding has reached 11 as at least 40,000 homes have been affected by torrential rains and rising waters since last week.
• North Korea's deputy ambassador in London has defected along with his family and is now in Seoul, South Korea according to news sources.
• Networking equipment giant Cisco Systems says it plans to cut 14,000 jobs worldwide as the company shifts focus from hardware to software.
• Ford say it plans to produce a completely self-driving car for the ride-sharing industry by the end of 2021, joining the race with BMW and Google.

Last Call For Voting Rights And Wrongs

As expected, NC GOP Gov. Pat McCrory is demanding that the Supreme Court immediately reinstate the unconstitutional "voting reform" law passed by Republicans to disenfranchise black and Latino voters.

North Carolina officials asked the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday to keep a voter identification requirement and 10 days of early voting for the November election, even after a lower appeals court ruled these changes illegally restricted voting by blacks.

Republican Gov. Pat McCrory said his lawyers and those for other officials, including some hired by GOP legislative leaders who championed the 2013 law, asked the court to delay enforcement of last month's ruling by the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The delay would occur while attorneys draft an appeal for the justices to consider the inherent issues in the case more deeply. 

The ruling struck down the photo ID mandate and returned early voting to 17 days.
The attorneys wrote that altering the voter laws would create voter confusion weeks before the election inNorth Carolina, a presidential battleground state with races for governor and U.S. Senate also on the ballot. The voter ID requirement already was used in this year's primary elections. 

"North Carolina should not be forced to scramble mere months before the general election to rejigger settled election plans at the 4th Circuit's command," the state's attorneys wrote to Chief Justice John Roberts. Roberts receives such appeals for North Carolina matters. 

A three-judge panel of the 4th Circuit already refused to delay their July 29 ruling, which found the Republican-led General Assembly enacted the law with intentional discrimination in mind. The court ruled the changes targeted black voters more likely to support Democrats. 

McCrory has said the ruling is factually wrong and maligned the state, adding that requiring photo ID makes common sense and protects the integrity of elections at a time when people must show IDs all the time. 

"The 4th Circuit's ruling is just plain wrong and we cannot allow it to stand," McCrory said in a release.

So we'll see what the Supreme Court does.  Given the 4th Circuit's pretty substantial findings, especially given that the state's Republican party went out of their way to target black NC voters in particular with practices that would specifically limit their ability to vote, I can't see the Supreme Court saying "Hey, yeah, we need to keep those practices going until we can decide this."

Then again, all Chief Justice Roberts would need to do is say "It's too close to the election in order to make any changes" and punt, which is why McCrory waited several weeks in order to petition the court for an injunction.

How the court will proceed, I don't know.  We'll find out soon, I suspect.

Picking Up Where They Left Off

If you think House Republicans are going to accept a Clinton landslide as a mandate or even as a legitimate election result, you really haven't been paying attention to the last 20 years.

A pair of leading House Republicans on Monday laid out detailed instructions for the Justice Department to file perjury charges against Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. 

More than a month after first requesting the department open a criminal probe into Clinton for alleged misstatements she made under oath, the GOP heads of the House Judiciary and Oversight committees told a federal prosecutor specifically where they believed Clinton had lied to Congress about her email setup at the Department of State.

In at least four separate occasions during a marathon appearance before the House Select Committee on Benghazi, the lawmakers alleged, the former secretary's claims were at odds with what the FBI has now discovered to be the truth about her private server. 

"Although there may be other aspects of Secretary Clinton’s sworn testimony that are at odds with the FBI’s findings, her testimony in those four areas bears specific scrutiny in light of the facts and evidence” provided by FBI Director James Comey, Reps. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) and Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) told the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, Channing Phillips. Goodlatte leads the Judiciary Committee and Chaffetz runs the Oversight Committee. 

Monday’s letter is a sign that Republicans are committed to pressuring the Justice Department to act against Clinton, even after it notably declined to prosecute her for mishandling classified information. 

The GOP chairmen also appear to be making a public case for an indictment, perhaps building off widespread unease with the decision not to prosecute the former first lady. In addition to their letter on Monday, the Oversight Committee also released a 2.5-minute video detailing apparent inaccuracies in Clinton’s testimony.

I'm not at all surprised to see Jason "Benghazi" Chaffetz behind this particular mess, and this little gambit doesn't depend on the increasingly volatile and desperate Donald Trump, either.   It does however depend on our press to actually take this farce seriously, and they probably will, at least until Trump blows up again.

This obnoxiously political move to win the election they're destined to lose by trying to indict their opposition's nominee is the kind of nonsense you'd expect from the Banana Republicans.  But it seems like it's the last card they have to play right now.

They must really, really be worried about losing the House as well as the Senate to try this stupidity.

Aetna Tu, Brute?

I mentioned last month that the Justice Department sued to block the massive health care mergers between Anthem and Cigna, and another between Aetna and Humana, which would have dropped the number of major health insurance providers in the country from five to just three (the other player being United Health).  The mergers would have been a disaster for consumers and competition and in areas of several states would have left Americans facing a monopoly in health insurance coverage.

Now we see Aetna's counterstroke: the insurer is suddenly planning to drop out of Obamacare health exchanges across the country.

Health insurer Aetna Inc. will stop selling individual Obamacare plans next year in 11 of the 15 states where it had been participating in the program, joining other major insurers who’ve pulled out of the government-run markets in the face of mounting losses.

It will exit markets including North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Florida, and keep selling plans in Iowa, Delaware, Nebraska and Virginia, Aetna said in a statement Monday. In most areas it’s exiting, Aetna will offer individual coverage outside of the program’s exchanges.

The decision by Aetna is the latest blow to President Barack Obama’s signature domestic policy law. While it has brought coverage to millions, the new markets have proven volatile for some of the largest for-profit insurers, and UnitedHealth Group Inc. and Humana Inc. are also pulling out, after posting hundreds of millions of dollars of their own losses. Aetna said earlier this year that it expects to lose $300 million on the plans.

Next year will be the law’s fourth of providing coverage under the new markets. Aetna’s decision doesn’t affect people covered by the company this year, but when they look for 2017 coverage, they’ll need to pick a new insurer. The decision raises the prospect that some consumers will only have one insurer to choose from when they buy 2017 coverage.

Aetna’s about-face on the ACA comes less than a month after the U.S. Justice Department sued to block the company’s $37 billion purchase of Humana. The DOJ says the combination would harm competition for private Medicare plans and for ACA health plans. Aetna has said its revised stance on the ACA wasn’t prompted by the suit.

“The vast majority of payers have experienced continued financial stress within their individual public exchange business,” Aetna Chief Executive Officer Mark Bertolini said in the statement. “Providing affordable, high-quality health care options to consumers is not possible without a balanced risk pool.”

Sure, the DoJ lawsuit had nothing to do with Aetna's decision to pull out. And if you believe that, I've got some insurance to sell you.  After all, the Bloomberg article does note that this is an about face for the company, because just three months ago, Aetna was salivating over stepping in to pick up new Obamacare customers and even wanting to expand its markets.

Health Insurer Aetna Inc on Wednesday said it plans to continue its Obamacare health insurance business next year in the 15 states where it now participates, and may expand to a few additional states.

"We have submitted rates in all 15 states where we are participating and have no plans at this point to withdraw from any of them," said company spokesman Walt Cherniak. But he noted that a final determination would hinge on binding agreements being signed with the states in September.

Again, this was May and Aetna was full steam ahead.  Then the DoJ antitrust lawsuit was filed in July, and now suddenly in August Aetna can't possibly continue in 11 of those 15 states because of "hundreds of millions in losses."

Oh, and by the way, three of the states Aetna is pulling out of?  Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.

You do the math.  Charles Gaba has a lot more at his place.

StupidiNews!

• Airstrikes by Saudi coalition forces have hit a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Yemen, killing 11 and damaging the facility.
• Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett has imposed a curfew in the city to try to quell protests over the police shooting of a black robbery suspect over the weekend.
• The Pentagon has announced the transfer of fifteen inmates from Guantanamo prison to the UAE, the largest single transfer of prisoners from the facility so far.
• Pennsylvania Democratic AG Kathleen Kane has been found guilty on multiple counts related to leaking legal information in order to harm her predecessor, and then trying to cover it up.
• Federal prosecutors say automaker Volkswagen could now face criminal charges for its diesel emissions scandal and could be seeking a settlement.