The Master Debaters, Con't

The second presidential debate this year was a town hall forum in St. Louis, and given the weekend's previous events, fireworks flew from the get-go.

Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton got straight to the point after taking the presidential debate stage Sunday night -- the Republican calling her a "devil" and the Democrat saying her opponent owes all Americans an apology for a campaign driven by insulting, degrading comments about women, African-Americans and others. 

The debate, coming little more than 48 hours after the release of a recording in which Trump boasted about sexually assaulting women, caps off a weekend that saw senior Republican elected officials, including Sens. John McCain, Kelly Ayotte and John Thune, rescind their support for Trump. Republican leaders, including House Speaker Paul Ryan and Trump’s own running mate, Mike Pence, condemned the remarks. 

But Trump remained defiant. After stating he will never drop out of the race, and slamming Republican defectors, he has sought to focus on accusations of sexual assault levied at Bill Clinton, who is not running for president. 

The town hall style debate is moderated by ABC’s Martha Raddatz and CNN’s Anderson Cooper.

Clinton did get in a couple body blows on Trump's video, but Trump went completely off the rails near the end.

If Trump is elected, he said, he will appoint a special prosecutor with the aim of putting Clinton in prison for her actions related to keeping a private email server during her time as secretary of state. The use of the server was investigated by the FBI, which decided not to press charges. 

“I didn't know I would say this, but I'm going to and I hate to say it,” Trump said. “If I win, I am going to instruct my Attorney General to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation. There has never been so many lies, so much exception. There has never been anything like it. We will have a special prosecutor.” 

“You should be ashamed,” Trump repeated. 

Clinton called Trump’s accusations “absolutely false.” 

“It's just awfully good that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law in our country,” Clinton said. 

Trump fired back: "Because you would be in jail.”

I mean openly threatening to jail your political opponent at a town hall debate is the stuff of nightmares if you're Trump's handlers.  If he hadn't somehow lost the campaign with the video of him happily describing how good he is at sexual assault, this finished him in the long run.

In the short run, it actually serves the purpose of keeping him in the race by serving as red meat to vacillating supporters.  The calls for him to drop out will almost certainly stop.  And that's what Democrats should be salivating over.

I don't want Trump to drop out on his terms.  I want him to get smashed flat by the enraged giant of the body politic and take GOP control of Congress with him.

29 days to go and the odds of a landslide are better than ever.  And Trump has another debate and four more weeks of reminding people how petty, awful, abusive, bellicose and intemperate he is. Trump, as BuzzFeed's Rosie Gray finds, has gone the Full Breitbart.

On Sunday night, Trump signaled that his objective now is to fight to the end as the champion of the populist nationalist movement he has spearheaded and which propelled him to the Republican nomination. Trump’s revanchist positioning is a sign he’s retreated to pleasing the hard core of his base, despite the fact that they cannot deliver him the White House; a performance like this won’t bring on board the voters Trump must persuade in order to win.

I like Clinton's chances here.  Trump's going to lose, the question is by how much, and how many downticket races he can wreck before it's all said and done. He did a good job of starting that process this weekend and continued in the debate and made it very clear his goal is now to try to punish anyone in America who doesn't support him, and to try to bully the rest of us into doing that.

Not only will that fail, it's going to crack the GOP like an egg fired from a railgun.  When that goes splat all over his face, it will most likely take the GOP with it, because now they are stuck between supporting him and losing swing voters, and not supporting him and losing the base.  It's not going to hold anymore.

And it's going to be amazing when this detonates in four weeks. All Trump did was trade in his support floor for a support ceiling.

StupidiNews!

• Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton clashed at a town hall debate last night in St. Louis, where Trump at one point promised to put Clinton in jail if he was elected.
• Major flooding in southeastern North Carolina from Hurricane Matthew will continue this week as waters continue to rise along the Cape Fear and Lumber Rivers, several dams have been breached.
• The 2016 Nobel Prize in Economics has been awarded to Brit Oliver Hart and Finn Bengt Holmstrom for their work on contract theory affecting everything from CEO pay to public-private partnerships.
• The US Navy says two missiles were fired by Yemeni rebels in the Persian Gulf at a US destroyer, the warheads missed and nobody was injured in the failed attempt.
• Drug company Mylan, maker of EpiPens, will pay the Obama administration $465 million to settle allegations of Medicare fraud over rebates, something the company has been tagged for since 2007.

Last Call For Orange, Crushed Con't

As you watch tonight's debate fireworks, keep in mind that Donald Trump is most likely finished outside of the biggest comeback in US political history. He was going to lose anyway, but the GOP was going to definitely keep the House and the Senate would be at worst case a 51-49 Democratic party lead (with that 51st Democrat being Evan F'ckin Bayh).

That was before this weekend, as Ezra Klein explains.

Since Trump won the GOP primary, his party has been working to normalize an abnormal, unpopular, and frankly bizarre candidate. Trump has always had the support of his hardcore fans — but he needed more than that. He needed the mainstream Republicans who didn’t vote in the GOP primaries, or voted for someone else; he needed the independents who didn’t like Clinton, but didn’t trust Trump; he needed the movement conservatives who had entered politics to ban abortion and shrink the government, and who saw little of their crusade reflected in Trump’s history.

And so the party began to coalesce. Mitch McConnell endorsed Donald Trump, and so, eventually, did Paul Ryan. Fox News ended its brief feud with the Republican nominee and closed ranks around his campaign. Reince Priebus dispatched top RNC staffers to work for Trump’s campaign. Marco Rubio offered his support. The messaging was simple, and sober: better Trump than Hillary, better the lunatic who will nominate our judges and sign our tax bills than the liberal who won’t, and even if you don’t believe in any of that, better to support Trump and keep the House then to abandon him and witness the return of Speaker Pelosi.

The process took on its own momentum. To be a Republican in good standing, in recent months, has meant accepting Trump as the party’s nominee, and working to see him elected. As more Republicans backed Trump, the rest had to follow suit. John McCain endorsed Trump, even though Trump had mocked his war heroism. Ted Cruz endorsed Trump, even though Trump tied his father to JFK’s assassination and mocked his wife’s looks.

The effect of all this has been to build a floor under Trump’s vote share, and his media coverage. He might lose the election, but so long as Republicans were able to signal that he’s the guy you vote for if you don’t want Hillary Clinton, he couldn’t lose it that badly — and a three-or-four point loss would probably mean Republicans kept the House and Senate. By the same token, Trump gets plenty of bad press, but so long as the Republican Party stood behind him, he had to be covered as a basically normal candidate, not as a dangerous virus that had somehow infected American politics.

Trump’s army of validators protected him from feeling the force of his own abnormality, of his bizarre comments, of his frequent gaffes, of his erratic behavior. It was a permission structure for voters who didn’t like Trump to vote for him anyway, and it worked. Polls routinely showed that the number of people supporting Trump was larger than the number of people who thought him qualified for the presidency. Voting for Trump, in this context, became what you did if you were a Republican, or if you didn’t like Hillary Clinton. Why? Well, that’s what everyone else like you was doing, too.

And now that’s crumbling. The wave of Republican defections from Trump’s side is the same process that normalized him, but in reverse. Just as Republicans felt more and more pressure to support his candidacy as other Republicans signed on, Republicans — and everyone else — will feel more and more pressure to abandon his candidacy as their co-partisans defect.

We're now at the point where major Republicans are saying "I do not support Trump anymore".  It's a no-win situation for them, as his base still plans to vote for the guy in droves.  But not quite as many people will vote for Trump now when he was already losing by about five points, and not quite as many people will vote for his party down ballot either.

In other words, a three or four point shift against you when you're up five points (which is what happened to Clinton over the course of September) is a problem.  She stopped the bleeding and pushed Trump's gains back.  But a swing like then when you're down five points turns a solid but not party-wide loss into an avalanche. (See the Republicans in 2006 and 2008, Democrats, 2010 and 2014.)

That's where we are with Trump.  It's John McCain's "The fundamentals of our economy are strong" moment in Florida in September 2008 with the Dow falling 300 points during the course of his speech, the moment everyone realized that the entire Republican party was done eight years ago, and they got stomped for it.

The polls were already bad for Trump.  That was before Trump's floor was demolished. His campaign and the entire GOP are in freefall now, and it's only a matter of time before they go splat.

Dispatching The Donald

Joining a long line of conservative newspapers across the country, the Columbus Dispatch has for the first time in a century endorsed a Democrat in this year's White House race, entirely because the Republican is one orange piece of garbage.

For us, the choice between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump is not pleasant, but it isn’t difficult. Republican candidate Donald Trump is unfit to be president of the United States. Democrat Hillary Clinton, despite her flaws, is well-equipped for the job.

The Dispatch traditionally has endorsed Republican presidential candidates, but Trump does not espouse or support traditional Republican values, such as fiscal prudence, limited government and free trade, not to mention civility and decency. We are disappointed that so many Republican leaders have accommodated a narcissistic, morally bankrupt candidate who is so clearly out of step with those values.

While third parties offer a tempting way out of the dilemma, votes cast for the Libertarian or Green Party tickets could have the effect of helping Trump win the White House.

Clinton has spent a career spanning decades in politics as First Lady, U.S. senator and U.S. secretary of state, and has a long record of service to families, women and children.

The art of compromise, which once was respected by Republicans and Democrats in Congress, and which allowed for progress rather than gridlock, is one that Clinton understands and practices. She demonstrated that not only in the Senate, but as the nation’s chief diplomat.

She is well-known to foreign leaders and understands that world order depends upon a U.S. foreign policy that is committed to its international obligations. The United States is the most stabilizing force in a world prone to chaos, and she knows that role is not something to be trifled with on a whim, as Trump’s reckless pronouncements would do.

Yes, Clinton has faced controversy: These include allegations of corruption; convenient memory lapses, particularly while being questioned during investigations; lies such as the one about coming under sniper fire in Bosnia; and difficulty in admitting when she is wrong. Her use of a private email server that exposed secret State Department communications to interception was reckless, and her attempts to minimize and cover up the scandal damaged her further.

Preferring Clinton to Trump does not mean the Dispatch embraces all elements of her platform. Her calls for higher taxes, unsustainable spending and the likelihood that she will try to stack the U.S. Supreme Court with a left-leaning majority are unwelcome.

But her negatives pale when measured against the dangers posed by Trump.

This is straight up the nicest thing I can recall the Dispatch saying about a Clinton in the last decade or so. "We're not in love with her but Jesus Jumped-Up Christ on a pogo stick have you seen the other guy?"

That's as good as it's going to get for these guys.  I hope Ohioans listen.

Sunday Long Read: The Democrats' Nevada Gambit

Fusion's Ester Wang visits Nevada and talks to the voters that will most likely decide the swing state next month and in elections to come: the state's large Asian voting-eligible population.  But will they finally turn out?

2016 was supposed to be the Year of the Asian American Voter, the year that a swelling electorate finally turned out in massive numbers in November’s presidential election and provides the margin of victory not just in Hawaii or California but in swing states as disparate as Virginia, North Carolina, and Nevada. Asian Americans are the fastest-growing racial group in the country, and the size of this voting bloc has doubled since George W. Bush entered the White House. Already, one of every four Congressional districts has a population that’s more than 5% Asian American, numbers high enough where these voters can be the decisive force in tight races that are sometimes won by mere decimal points.

It’s not just changing demographics. Asian Americans, advocates say, care more about this election than the last—more than half, according to a recent national survey. In the same survey, a full 85% of Asian American and Pacific Islander voters reported they plan on turning out in November.

This all paints a rosy picture. Silent, docile and passive no more, in 2016, Asian Americans are, in the words of one advocate’s op-ed, “ready to be heard!”

Not so fast. Asian Americans are also traditionally the most disengaged racial group in America, with only 56% of eligible Asian Americans even registered to vote, the lowest percentage out of all racial groups. Of those, less than half tend to come out on election day, lagging far behind black and white voters.

This leaves Asian Americans like Michelle Chen in a curious position: a fattening slice of the electoral pie, widely seen as crucial to victory, yet also the voting bloc with the least interest in political participation. As Election Day nears, the question remains: Will a record number of Asian Americans actually vote, or will the majority, as in previous years, stay home?

I know we've talked about the black and Latino vote around here at length, but by 2020 Nevada will join Hawaii, California and New Mexico as majority-minority states and that will be largely due to the state's major Asian population growth.

The Democrats aren't stupid here.  They know they will have to have these votes and these voters and are working to get them, but there's a LOT of work that has to be done.

It’s easy to understand why, despite voting for Obama twice, Michelle Chen is going to sit this election out. Their lives haven’t improved as much as she would have hoped. Her husband, who works for a car service as a driver and used to be able to make $3,000 a month, now faces stiff competition from Uber and Lyft drivers and his income has dropped sharply. A self-described member of the working poor (she makes $1,300 a month at her job), it was largely Obamacare, which she says she and her husband can’t really afford, that turned her off of politics.

In a different world, one where the Bernie Sanders campaign had prioritized reaching out to immigrant voters, she might have been a Bernie fan. I asked if she’d heard of him, using the Chinese transliteration of his name and describing him as the “old white guy with the messy hair.”

“Who? Do you mean Trump?” Nevermind.

Of the presidential election, she repeated firmly: “It has nothing to do with my life.” She then went back to work, hawking steamed pork buns to a steady stream of customers.

Chen clearly feels no loyalty to the Democratic Party, and she’s not alone; 46% of Asian American registered voters are independents. Despite the general tilt towards Democratic candidates—in 1992, Bill Clinton only captured about a third of Asian American voters, yet by 2012, 73% of all Asian American voters cast a ballot for Barack Obama—voters remain stubbornly unaffiliated, due largely to the fact that two out of every three AAPI voters are immigrants. (Without a family history of voting for one party or the other—one of the greatest predictors of party affiliation—immigrants tend to register as independents.)

To build any sort of majority in the future, Democrats need to make the case to Asian voters that America's politics actually do matter to people.  So far that has been a lukewarm case at best.  Donald Trump's awful politics can only go so far.

The Orange Martyrs Brigade

Republicans are now in full and complete crisis mode as a result of the Washington Post/NBC story on Trump's awful misogynist 2005 interview.  Several Republicans have withdrawn their endorsements in the wake of the revelations, including GOP Sens. Mike Crapo, Kelly Ayotte, and Lisa Murkowski.  Others are now calling for Trump to drop out of the race entirely and let Mike Pence be the nominee.

The party's past nominees were unflinching in their condemnation.

“Hitting on married women? Condoning assault? Such vile degradations demean our wives and daughters and corrupt America's face to the world,” Mitt Romney, the party’s last GOP presidential nominee, wrote on Twitter. And Arizona Sen. John McCain, the 2008 nominee, said Trump could have no excuse: "No woman should ever be victimized by this kind of inappropriate behavior. He alone bears the burden of his conduct and alone should suffer the consequences.”

Even within Trump’s own campaign, there was an overriding sense of doom. One aide expressed doubt that the GOP nominee, who has successfully weathered a number of scandals, would be able to ride the current firestorm.

There's "absolutely no excuse to ever talk about women in such a crude and demeaning way," Trump’s Texas chair, Dan Patrick, was quoted as saying.

As the hours passed, some Republicans began to call for Trump to step aside, leaving the presidential race to vice presidential nominee Mike Pence. Rob Engstrom, the Chamber of Commerce’s national political director, was the first to call for Trump to quit, followed by Rep. Mike Coffman, former N.Y. Gov. George Pataki, Virginia Rep. Barbara Comstock and Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse.

Utah Sen. Mike Lee said: “You are the distraction... I respectfully ask you, with all due respect, to step aside.”

Trump of course has no plans to drop out and is meeting this afternoon with his "brain trust" to decide a course of action.

Meanwhile Reince Preibus and the RNC are apparently cutting Trump off.

The Republican National Committee on Saturday appeared to at least temporarily halt the operations of some of the “Victory” program that is devoted to electing Donald Trump.

The move comes as the GOP nominee is under mounting pressure from elected Republicans to step aside after he was caught on tape bragging about sexually assaulting women.

In an email from the RNC to a victory program mail vendor, with the subject line “Hold on all projects,” the committee asked the vendor to “put a hold” on mail production.

“Please put a hold/stop on all mail projects right now. If something is in production or print it needs to stop. Will update you when to proceed,” Lauren Toomey, a staffer in the RNC’s political department, wrote in an email that was obtained by POLITICO.

The email was sent to at least one RNC victory program vendor. Rick Wiley, a top RNC official, was cc’d on the email.

At this point the Trump campaign is in total and complete freefall.  And please note all the people who were cool with Trump through his racism, misogyny, bigotry and white supremacist garbage, what actually pissed them off was realizing he was going to most likely lose a ton of working-class white women over this.  It didn't affect any of these newly-minted converts to women's rights until it was Trump offending people that were going to vote GOP and looked like them.

So no, zero sympathy.

When these same Republicans looked the other way and allowed Trump to be the nominee, they did nothing.

They did nothing for months when the target was "Mexican rapists" or "The blacks living in hell" or "China" or Clinton herself.

Now that Trump blew it so badly that they are going to be hurt by it, only now is it a problem to them.  Only now is Trump unacceptable.  Only now do they care.

They can burn along with him and the party in the dumpster fire they made.

Tell 'Em Bobby D Sent You To Vote

Robert De Niro takes a minute out of his busy schedule of being awesome to read Donald Trump like a book and slams it shut in his face.

Robert De Niro on Donald Trump: 'He's a punk, he's a dog, he's a pig ...' pic.twitter.com/avaZOB4vW9

— David Lewis (@davidclewis) October 8, 2016

I think we're done here.

Orange, Crushed

Donald Trump continues to be an awful human being in every sense of the word, and he's been that way for decades, folks. No wonder then that somebody did enough actual opposition research to catch this gem of an interview with the man in 2005 where he basically admits to sexually assaulting a woman.

Donald Trump bragged in vulgar terms about kissing, groping and trying to have sex with women during a 2005 conversation caught on a hot microphone, saying that “when you’re a star, they let you do it,” according to a video obtained by The Washington Post.

The video captures Trump talking with Billy Bush, then of “Access Hollywood,” on a bus with the show’s name written across the side. They were arriving on the set of “Days of Our Lives” to tape a segment about Trump’s cameo on the soap opera.

The tape includes audio of Bush and Trump talking inside the bus, as well as audio and video once they emerge from it to begin shooting the segment.

In that audio, Trump discusses a failed attempt to seduce a woman, whose full name is not given in the video.

“I moved on her, and I failed. I’ll admit it,” Trump is heard saying. It was unclear when the events he was describing took place. The tape was recorded several months after he married his third wife, Melania.

“Whoa,” another voice said.

“I did try and f--- her. She was married,” Trump says.

Trump continues: “And I moved on her very heavily. In fact, I took her out furniture shopping. She wanted to get some furniture. I said, ‘I’ll show you where they have some nice furniture.’”

“I moved on her like a bitch, but I couldn’t get there. And she was married,” Trump says. “Then all of a sudden I see her, she’s now got the big phony tits and everything. She’s totally changed her look.”

At that point in the audio, Trump and Bush appear to notice Arianne Zucker, the actress who is waiting to escort them into the soap-opera set.

“Your girl’s hot as s---, in the purple,” says Bush, who’s now a co-host of NBC’s “Today” show.

“Whoa!” Trump says. “Whoa!”

“I’ve got to use some Tic Tacs, just in case I start kissing her,” Trump says. “You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait.”

“And when you’re a star, they let you do it,” Trump says. “You can do anything.”

“Whatever you want,” says another voice, apparently Bush’s.

“Grab them by the p---y,” Trump says. “You can do anything.”

And America, about sixty million of you are gonna vote for this guy for president. What the hell is wrong with you?  Oh, and just so you know, Billy Bush?  Dubya's cousin. Billy's dad is Jonathan Bush, Poppy Bush's younger brother. Isn't that just perfect?

Seriously though, if this isn't the end of Trump's run, then there's no hope for the country.  We're done.  There are some indications that this may be the event Republicans needed to jettison the man, but as I have said countless times, Trump is merely the symptom of a diseased and debased Republican party that is frankly headed for the dumpster fire of their own making.

Racism, bigotry, misogyny were all problems with the party and with its supporters long before Trump, and the ugly truth is that the real problem has long been the "moderate Republicans" who looked the other way and allowed that hatred to take root in order to gain ephemeral political power, especially in the last eight years.

Your white sheets were showing long before Trump was your candidate, guys.  I have no sympathy for you now that you finally disagree with your standard-bearer. You voted for him in the primaries, you still plan to vote for him for president, and the rest of your party still looks the other way as your elderly frat boy pig of a candidate hoots and hollers because you still want to "Trump That Bitch".

No.  Take the loss.  Take the Goldwater/Dukakis level loss in November and rebuild into a party that Lincoln founded and America needs in order to keep the Democrats honest.  People are already voting and there's no way you can get him off the ballot now.  Frankly, most Republicans don't care anyway, because Trump That Bitch, right?

And the best part is that Republicans are wishing Mike Pence was at the top of the ticket, himself a vile, bigoted misogynist who signed into law making LGBTQ folks into second-class citizens and forcing women to pay for funerary services for their own aborted fetuses just to shame them for having an abortion.

Finally, how did Trump's primary opponents, ONE OF WHOM WAS THE COUSIN OF THE MAN TRUMP WAS TALKING TO IN THIS INTERVIEW miss this as a possible way to stop him from becoming the nominee?

Take the L, GOP.

Do that or stay in the trash where you belong.

Last Call For Putin On The Fritz

In what has to be a pointed response to Putin's latest nonsense in Syria as Russia has now deployed its top anti-air missiles to stop any US or EU interference with Moscow's plans to help the Assad regime, the US intelligence community is no longer playing nice and is flat out accusing Russia of trying to influence US elections through cyberwarfare.

The denunciation, made by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security, came as pressure was growing from within the administration and some lawmakers to hold Moscow accountable for a set of actions apparently aimed at sowing discord around the election.

“The U.S. intelligence community is confident that the Russian government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from U.S. persons and institutions, including from U.S. political organizations,” said a joint statement from the two agencies. “These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process.”

The DNC publicly disclosed the intrusions in June, saying its investigation determined that Russian government hackers were behind the breach. That was followed shortly after by a major leak of DNC emails, some so embarrassing that they forced the resignation of the DNC chairwoman, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (Fla.), on the eve of the Democratic National Convention.

The administration also blamed Moscow for the hack of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the subsequent leak of private email addresses and cellphone numbers of Democratic lawmakers.

So yeah, things just got serious (and about time).  There's no doubt in my mind that Putin and his boys are trying to help Trump win for a number of reasons.  If Assange and his crew wasn't going to drop their little October surprise before, they are certainly going to do so after this.

Stay tuned.

The Truth Hits Like A Hurricane

We now live in a world where the Republican party has so pervasively spread mistrust and hatred towards the idea of any government body controlled by the Democrats (and in particular the nation's first black president) that we have idiots like Matt Drudge screaming that the Obama administration is lying about Hurricane Matthew in order to keep up the "myth of global warming".

Hours ahead of Hurricane Matthews’ landfall on Florida’s Atlantic coast, some climate change skeptics downplayed the danger of what meteorologists say could be the worst such storm since Hurricane Katrina.

Public officials and meteorologists have repeatedly stressed the strength of the storm, especially to those living in the evacuation zones on Florida’s Atlantic coast.

“This storm will kill you. Time is running out,” Gov. Rick Scott (R) said in a press conference Thursday. “There are no excuses. You need to leave. Evacuate, evacuate, evacuate. Are you willing to take a change to risk your life? Are you willing to take a gamble? That’s what you’re doing.”

Yet in the face of those pleas conservative aggregator Matt Drudge, who has a house in Florida, tweeted that “The deplorables are starting to wonder if govt has been lying to them about Hurricane Matthew intensity to make exaggerated point on climate,” and“Hurricane Center has monopoly on data. No way of verifying claims. Nassau ground observations DID NOT match statements! 165mph gusts? WHERE?”

Drudge later posted the web address of a NOAA buoy and encouraged readers to monitor the storm on their own, to see if “observations match the Hurricane Center’s claimed 140 mph sustained winds."

That's right.  Obama Derangement Syndrome has gotten so bad that we now have friggin hurricane truthers who believe the National Hurricane Center is in on a massive plot to lie to America about global warming, and that somehow data on Hurricane Matthew is being manipulated in order to play up the "hoax" of climate change.

That's where we are in America in 2016.  One party is systematically dismantling the integrity of government itself and has been for decades in order to convince America that they are the only ones who should be legally allowed to run that government, and that the very concept of the other party ever being in charge should be automatically considered an invalid, corrupt, and illegal administration, to the point where Americans should consider armed revolution if that happens.

Unfortunately, a major hurricane one month before the election could very well lead to chaos if Florida is close.

Meanwhile the government is lying to you about hurricanes, Matt Drudge says, so you should ignore them on safety. They're totally illegitimate you know.

That's Donald Trump's America, folks.  I'm not going to be a part of it.

Jobapalooza

The September jobs numbers are in and things are still looking pretty good, just not quite as good as this time last year.

U.S. employment growth unexpectedly slowed for the third straight month in September, which could make the Federal Reserve more cautious about raising interest rates. 

Nonfarm payrolls rose 156,000, down from a revised gain of 167,000 jobs in August, the Labor Department said on Friday. 

Economists polled by Reuters had expected employers to add 175,000 jobs last month.
Fed Chair Janet Yellen has said the economy needs to create less than 100,000 jobs a month to keep up with population growth.Average monthly job gains have been about 180,000 this year, which Yellen has described as "unsustainable." 

The unemployment rate ticked up a tenth of a percentage point to 5.0 percent last month, though the increase was driven by Americans rejoining the labor force. 

Friday's employment report will be the last before the Fed's Nov. 1-2 policy meeting. Investors see almost no chance of a rate increase at that meeting given how close it is to the Nov. 8 presidential election. 

Yellen said last month that the Fed will likely raise rates once this year, but prices on fed funds futures suggest just above even odds the hike will come at the Fed's last policy meeting for the year in December.

Hourly wages for private sector workers rose 2.6 percent in September from the same month a year earlier, in line with economists' expectations. The annual growth rate has shown signs of accelerating over the last year although it remains slower than before the 2007-2009 recession.

So people are coming back to the labor force, wages are increasing, but new job growth is slowing a bit.  Again, you would have to wonder what kind of recovery we'd be having if Republicans hadn't killed the American Jobs Act five years ago.  And despite the GOP doing everything it could to sabotage the economy, it has still managed to create 11 million jobs compared to Dubya's 1.3 million.

But we need Trump to fix it?  OK, sure.

Here's the reality: this now means we're in a 72-month private sector job growth streak.

Six straight years.  Best in US history.

But Obama disappointed you?

Yeah. Sure he did.

StupidiNews!

• As Hurricane Matthew rips up Florida's east coast today with 1.5 million evacuated, GOP Gov. Rick Scott says voter registration that ends Tuesday will not be extended due to the storm.
• Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte is daring the EU and US to withdraw foreign aid to his country if they are unhappy with his brutal and bloody crackdown on drug sellers and users.
• Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos is the recipient of this year's Nobel Peace Prize for trying to end the country's 50-year civil war with FARC rebels, despite the deal being rejected by voters.
• US airlines are asking the the Obama administration for a one-year exemption from anti-trust and collusion rules in order to try to recover money from Venezuela's crashing economy.
• Chinese PC giant Lenovo is in talks to purchase Fujitsu's ailing PC and laptop business, a move that would give the combined company 40% of Japan's PC market.

Our Dark Orange Future, Con't

Should Donald Trump win and Republicans retain Congress in November, GOP House Speaker Paul Ryan is promising massive, draconian austerity cuts across the board and plans to make sure the Democrats have no power to stop him.

Typically, party leaders offer at least the pretense of seeking bipartisanship when discussing their policy plans. But Ryan is saying frankly that Republicans would use budget reconciliation — a powerful procedural tool — to bypass Democrats entirely. It’s the same tool Republicans slammed Democrats for using to pass the 2010 health care law over their objections.

While GOP leaders have made empty threats to use reconciliation to repeal Obamacare in the past, Ryan is making it clear that this time he plans to use it when it counts. And he would likely have support from a Trump White House. Larry Kudlow, an economic adviser to the GOP presidential nominee, said he is also strongly urging Trump to embrace reconciliation in order to pass sweeping tax cuts. 

Ryan peeled back the curtain on his strategy at a news conference after a reporter suggested he would struggle to implement his ambitious agenda next year. After all, it was noted, Republicans are certain to lack the 60 votes needed in the Senate to break Democratic filibusters on legislation. So Ryan gave a minitutorial on congressional rules and the bazooka in his pocket for the assembled reporters. 

“This is our plan for 2017,” Ryan said, waving a copy of his “Better Way” policy agenda. “Much of this you can do through budget reconciliation.” He explained that key pieces are “fiscal in nature,” meaning they can be moved quickly through a budget maneuver that requires a simple majority in the Senate and House. “This is our game plan for 2017,” Ryan said again to the seemingly unconvinced press.

Now granted, Ryan has made promises before and he's fallen on his face.  But a Trump administration would remove the final obstacle to a Ryan budget, and you can kiss Obamacare, Medicare and Social Security goodbye if that happens.

I suggest we don't find out if Ryan's telling the truth or not.

That's Real White Of You, Con't

Five Thirty Eight's Harry Enten breaks the bad news to Trump fans: he just doesn't have the numbers with white voters in order to win in November.

Four years ago, Romney beat President Obama among white voters by 17 percentage points, according to pre-election polls. That was the largest winning margin among white voters for any losing presidential candidate since at least 1948. Of course, even if Trump did just as well as Romney did, it would help him less, given that the 2016 electorate will probably be more diverse that 2012’s. And to win — even if the electorate remained as white as it was four years ago — Trump would need a margin of 22 percentage points or more among white voters.

But Trump isn’t even doing as well as Romney. Trump is winning white voters by just 13 percentage points, according to an average of the last five live-interviewer national surveys.1 He doesn’t reach the magic 22 percentage point margin in a single one of these polls.

So if he's doing worse than Romney, why is Clinton still only predicted to have a modest win?  Third party support from Millennials.

Trump’s less-than-overwhelming margins among white voters in the polls listed above are a big reason why all five surveys showed him trailing Hillary Clinton overall. In fact, Trump would be losing by a larger margin, but third-party candidates are getting support from younger and minority voters, so that Clinton is slightly underperforming Obama among these groups. But the magnitude of Clinton’s struggles with young and nonwhite voters isn’t anywhere big enough to cancel out Trump’s relatively poor showing among white voters.

In other words, Clinton winning by four or five points would be something like eight or nine if Johnson and Stein were out of the picture and those voters made a Clinton v. Trump choice in November instead.  Not saying that will happen, but that's why this race isn't a blowout.

To be more specific, Trump is trading one type of white voter for another. Even as he piles up support among white men without a college degree, he’s on track for a record poor performance for a Republican among white voters with a degree. And right now, that tradeoff is a net negative for Trump, compared with Romney. If a ton of new white voters without a degree flooded into the electorate, that could change the math for Trump. But such a surge doesn’t look like it’s in the offing. 

So yes, at this point you can expect a Clinton win.  It's looking more and more likely every day as Trump continues to lose more voters than he gains with his racist rhetoric.

StupidiNews!

• As many as two million in Florida, South Carolina and Georgia have been asked to evacuate out of the path of Hurricane Matthew as the storm is expected to gouge the southern coast this weekend.
• A Maryland government contractor has been arrested and charged with stealing classified material from the NSA in what could be a second Edward Snowden style document theft.
• Poland's parliament rejected legislation that would have all but outlawed abortions after tens of thousands of women demonstrated against the measure in rallies around the country.
• Embattled medical testing startup Theranos will close its testing labs and fire 340 as CEO Liz Holmes restructures to focus on testing devices.
• Cable giant Charter is joining AT&T to sue the city of Louisville over blocking access to utility poles to prevent competition from Google Fiber in what could be a battle with national implications.