StupidiNews!

• Multiple women have come forward to say that Donald Trump made unwanted physical advances towards them in the wake of a NY Times story published yesterday detailing two such incidents.
• The Justice Department is leveling criminal contempt charges against Maricopa County, Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio for violating a federal judge's order in a racial profiling case.
• US cruise missiles were launched at coastal radar sites in Yemen in response to a US naval destroyer in the Persian Gulf being targeted by Houthi forces in two failed missile attack attempts this week.
• Embattled Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf is stepping down in the wake of a massive scandal involving the bank opening thousands of fake accounts in order to charge customers millions in fees.
• Vegan food replacement startup Soylent is halting sales and shipments of its snack bars after reports that the product has made dozens of people violently ill.

Last Call For That Poll-Asked Look

If there's been one truly laughable poll this year as far as presidential prognostication goes, it has been the LA Times daily tracking poll, which seems to be favoring Donald Trump compared to everyone else.  And I'm not talking about by a point or two, I'm talking about five or six points in Trump's favor, a poll so awful that as Nate Cohn points out, it only serves the purpose of showing how awful polls can be.

There is a 19-year-old black man in Illinois who has no idea of the role he is playing in this election. 

He is sure he is going to vote for Donald J. Trump. 

And he has been held up as proof by conservatives — including outlets like Breitbart News and The New York Post — that Mr. Trump is excelling among black voters. He has even played a modest role in shifting entire polling aggregates, like the Real Clear Politics average, toward Mr. Trump. 

How? He’s a panelist on the U.S.C. Dornsife/Los Angeles Times Daybreak poll, which has emerged as the biggest polling outlier of the presidential campaign. Despite falling behind by double digits in some national surveys, Mr. Trump has generally led in the U.S.C./LAT poll. He held the lead for a full month until Wednesday, when Mrs. Clinton took a nominal lead. 

Our Trump-supporting friend in Illinois is a surprisingly big part of the reason. In some polls, he’s weighted as much as 30 times more than the average respondent, and as much as 300 times more than the least-weighted respondent. 

Alone, he has been enough to put Mr. Trump in double digits of support among black voters. He can improve Mr. Trump’s margin by 1 point in the survey, even though he is one of around 3,000 panelists. 

He is also the reason Mrs. Clinton took the lead in the U.S.C./LAT poll for the first time in a month on Wednesday. The poll includes only the last seven days of respondents, and he hasn’t taken the poll since Oct. 4. Mrs. Clinton surged once he was out of the sample for the first time in several weeks. 

How has he made such a difference? And why has the poll been such an outlier? It’s because the U.S.C./LAT poll made a number of unusual decisions in designing and weighting its survey. 

It’s worth noting that this analysis is possible only because the poll is extremely and admirably transparent: It has published a data set and the documentation necessary to replicate the survey. 

Not all of the poll’s choices were bound to help Mr. Trump. But some were, and it all combined with some very bad luck to produce one of the most persistent outliers in recent elections.

And taking a look at the poll it's laughably bad how the data is interpreted by the people running it. The poll is literally designed to favor Trump from the beginning, by bad use of statistical math, and even worse use of common sense.

Still, if Clinton is now ahead in a poll that regularly favors Trump, it means Trump is in serious trouble as of last Friday's events, and I'm betting things will only get worse for him.

The Great American Swap Meet

Nate Silver runs the numbers on the big demographic shift in 2016: non-college educated white voters going to the GOP, college educated white voters, Latino, and Asian voters going to the Democrats.  The results actually go a long way towards explaining recent poll numbers.

Hillary Clinton is favored to win the presidency, perhaps by a lot. Republicans are still favored to hold the House. In other words, after all the madness, the balance of power in Washington post-2016 could look surprisingly similar to that after 2012. Yet beneath the surface, the tectonic plates of the American electorate are shifting. 

By now, it's clear where the fault lines lie: The 2016 election is poised to be among the most polarized elections ever, not only along gender and generational lines, but especially along lines of race and educational attainment. 

In August, Nate Cohn of The New York Times put it well when he wrote: “The simple way to think about Mr. Trump’s strength is in terms of education among white voters. He hopes to do much better than Mitt Romney did in 2012 among white voters without a degree so that he can make up the margin of Mr. Romney’s four-point defeat and overcome the additional losses he’s likely to absorb among well-educated voters and Hispanic voters.” 

There’s evidence that Trump is underperforming Romney among Asians andAfrican-Americans, not just Latinos and college-educated whites. Clinton, on the other hand, has been underperforming President Obama among non-college-educated whites. 

To get a handle on how these shifts could affect the electoral landscape, we modeled how many of Romney’s votes came from college-educated whites and minorities and how many of Obama’s votes came from non-college-educated whites in each state, county and congressional district. The difference between these two vote totals, shown in the map above, can tell us where Clinton and Trump have the most potential to build on 2012. 

Then we went a step further: How would the 2016 map look if one out of every five whites without a college degree who voted for Obama in 2012 defected to Trump and if one out of every five non-whites and college-educated whites who voted for Romney in 2012 switched to Clinton? (Why one out of five? It’s a somewhat arbitrary number but represents a realistic shift of these groups, according to polls released over the past few months.) 

Let's call this scenario the “2016 Vote Swap.” In it, Clinton would win the election, and her share of the two-party vote would be 52.7 percent — 0.7 percentage points higher than Obama’s 2012 showing. However, we also estimate she would win 10 fewer electoral votes than Obama did in the Electoral College. 

The shift for Clinton among college-educated whites and non-whites would allow her to pick up North Carolina (15 electoral votes). But the shift among non-college-educated whites would cost her Ohio (18), Iowa (6) and Maine’s 2nd District (1). That's not far off from what polls and FiveThirtyEight’s forecast models show.

And if you look at the forecast for next month, they very much look like the model Nate describes above:  Clinton wins the Obama 2012 map plus NC, minus Iowa and Ohio and Maine's 2nd.

Of course, that was before Trump imploded over the weekend, and indications are that we're looking at a total breakdown of that model, where Trump not only loses all the 2016 swing states but puts Georgia and Arizona in Clinton's column and maybe even Missouri, SC and Texas in play.

Democrats are moving swiftly to exploit Mr. Trump’s crumbling position in the presidential race, aiming to run up a big margin of victory for Mrs. Clinton and extend their political advantage into the congressional elections next month. 

Mrs. Clinton’s campaign has concluded that at least two traditionally Republican states, Georgia and Arizona, are realistic targets for her campaign to win over. And Republican polling has found that Mr. Trump is at dire risk of losing Georgia, according to people briefed on the polls, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. 

Mrs. Clinton now holds such a strong upper hand that Priorities USA, a “super PAC” backing her campaign, may direct some of its war chest into Senate races, two people said, and may begin broadcasting ads for those contests as soon as next week. Congressional Democrats also hope to persuade Mrs. Clinton to continue pouring money and campaign resources into states like Virginia and Colorado, where they believe her victory is assured, in order to lift other Democratic candidates.

Hell, even Utah is up for grabs now.

Republican Donald Trump appears to have, in his earlier words, "a tremendous problem in Utah" as a new poll shows him slipping into a dead heat with Democrat Hillary Clinton since crude comments he made about women surfaced last weekend. 

And along with the billionaire businessman's sudden fall, independent candidate and BYU graduate Evan McMullin surged into a statistical tie with the two major party presidential nominees, according to survey conducted Monday and Tuesday by Salt Lake City-based Y2 Analytics.

"A third-party candidate could win Utah as Utahns settle on one," said Quin Monson, Y2 Analytics founding partner. 

McMullin may well have caught lightning in a bottle. 

The poll shows Clinton and Trump tied at 26 percent, McMullin with 22 percent and Libertarian Gary Johnson getting 14 percent if the election were held today. Y2 Analytics surveyed 500 likely Utah voters over landlines and cellphones Oct. 10-11 The poll has a plus or minus 4.4 percent margin of error.

If that's even close to true, things are about to get very interesting with 27 days left to go, and by "interesting" I mean a substantial Clinton victory.

The Goracle's Lament

Presidents Obama and Clinton aren't the only big-name Democrats on the campaign trail for Hillary Clinton here in the final stretch, Bill Clinton's former VP Al Gore was in Miami campaigning with Hillary to make the case to younger voters that yeah, every vote in the Sunshine State matters.

Former Vice President Al Gore introduced himself to Florida millennials on Tuesday, telling them that his near miss in the 2000 presidential election is “exhibit A” for why it’s so important to vote.

Campaigning with Hillary Clinton in Miami, Gore highlighted two messages he wanted to share with the former secretary of state’s supporters.

“No. 1, when it comes to the most urgent issue facing our country and the world, the choice in this election is extremely clear. Hillary Clinton will make solving the climate crisis a top national priority,” Gore said. “Very important.”

Donald Trump, whom Gore referred to as “her opponent,” would take America “toward a climate catastrophe,” he said.

“Here’s my second message: Your vote really, really, really counts — a lot. You can consider me as an exhibit A of that group. Now, for those of you who are younger than 25, you might not remember the election of 2000 and what happened here in Florida and across the country,” Gore said, prompting boos from the crowd.

“For those of you older than 25, I heard you murmuring just now. But take it from me, it was a very close election,” Gore said, as supporters began to chant “You won! You won!” 

“Here’s my point: I don’t want you to be in a position years from now where you welcome Hillary Clinton and say: ‘Actually, you did win. It just wasn’t close enough to make sure that all the votes were counted or whatever," Gore added.

Amen to that, Albert.

One of the reasons I started this blog eight years ago was that having voted in 2000 in Minnesota only to see the White House gifted to Shrub and the Nameless One by the now deceased Antonin Scalia, I realized that if I could get even a few hundred people to read my words and choose to vote across the US, I was doing my civic duty to protect this country from another eight years of Republican presidency.

I remember going to bed on Election Day sixteen years ago confident that Gore had won.  I woke up to an eight-year nightmare that we're still cleaning up after, all over a handful of votes.

Never again.

Please, please, please vote in your local, state, and federal elections.  Please register if you still need to in your state. You still have time in a lot of states.

Let's not turn this into another nightmare, this time with Trump in charge.

StupidiNews!

• Police officials in Tulsa say Terence Crutcher, the unarmed black man shot by Tulsa cops last month, had PCP in his system according to toxicology reports.
• The US Supreme Court will hear a case brought by Muslims against former Bush administration officials in the wake of post-9/11 surveillance and profiling of detainees.
• Accused Chelsea bomber Ahmad Rahami will be arraigned in New Jersey on state charges today, he remains hospitalized after being shot by police when apprehended last month.
• Moscow says it will work with China to develop plans to counter US missile-defense systems in Europe and Asia, both countries see US expansion of the defense network as a military threat.
• New evidence suggests embattled bank Wells Fargo may have been creating fake accounts since well before the financial crisis of 2008 and possibly as far back as 2005.

Last Call For The Mask Slips Again...

...And Republicans accidentally tell the truth about what they plan for America.

Maine Gov. Paul LePage, famous for his controversial statements, said Tuesday morning "we need a Donald Trump to show some authoritarian power in our country" — while also criticizing President Obama for being what he described as an "autocrat." 

"Sometimes I wonder that our Constitution is not only broken," LePage told radio station WVOM, "but we need a Donald Trump to show some authoritarian power in our country and bring back the rule of law because we've had eight years of a president — he's an autocrat, he just does it on his own, he ignores Congress and every single day, we're slipping into anarchy." 

LePage has been a staunch support of Trump's bid for months. He has said he and the GOP nominee are "cut from the same cloth."

Autocracy is fine as long as you're working towards your interests, right Paul?

Also, bonus points for bringing back "rule of law" after eight years of the country's first black president, right?  Very telling considering Paul's recent authoritarian, white supremacist leanings.

White Nights, Orange Days

Josh Marshall notes that Putin's agitprop machine is getting sloppy in trying to help The Donald win, and that the cracks are showing in the facade that may indicate that Moscow's caution in operational security laundering leaked emails from the Democrats and Hillary Clinton through WikiLeaks has been completely thrown to the wind, but it turns out that it's probably more like neo-Nazis are terrible at being subtle.

We might speculate that there's some kind of mole in the Trump operation. Less conspiratorially, we might speculate that one of Trump's advisors with extensive ties to Russia is feeding Trump this stuff. The second option at least seems plausible. But there's actually a simpler explanation and it's one not based on speculation at all but things we know to be facts. 

News from Russian propaganda sources are pervasive in the alt-right/neo-Nazi web. As a secondary matter we know from Adrian Chen's work that there are a decent number of faux 'pro-Trump' accounts on Twitter that are actually run from troll farms operated by Russian intelligence services. By whichever path, Russian propaganda is ubiquitous on the alt-right/racist web - particularly on Twitter, Reddit, 4chan and similar sites. 

It happens that we know the Trump world is awash in the alt-right/neo-Nazi web. After all, that's where all the retweeting of #WhiteGenocide accounts and the like comes from. So anything is possible. Perhaps there's a more complex explanation. But the simplest one is that it's organic. Russian propaganda stories from outlets like RT, Sputniknews and other similar sites spread freely on the alt-right/white supremacist web. And that's where the Trump camp lives. So it's entirely plausible that that's why material that appears only on these Russian propaganda sites shows up so frequently in Trump's speeches. 

In other words, don't worry. The Trump campaign isn't infiltrated by Russian intelligence (probably). They're just awash in neo-Nazi and white supremacist propaganda. See my piece from August for more details.

And what's finally happened is that Newsweek's Kurt Eichenwald, who has hammered Trump on his recent stories on The Donald breaking Cuba's embargo in the 90's and selling out US steel workers in favor of China now has discovered just how sloppy Putin is.

The Russians were quoting two sentences from a 10,000-word piece I wrote for Newsweek, which Blumenthal had emailed to Podesta. There was no mistaking that Blumenthal was citing Newsweek—the magazine’s name and citations for photographs appeared throughout the attached article. The Russians had carefully selected the “of course” paragraph, which mentions there were legitimate points of criticism regarding Clinton and Benghazi, all of which had been acknowledged in nine reports about the attack and by the former secretary of state herself. But that was hardly the point of the story, “Benghazi Biopsy: A Comprehensive Guide to One of America’s Worst Political Outrages.” The piece is about the obscene politicization of the assault that killed four Americans, and the article slammed the Republican Benghazi committee, which was engaged in a political show trial disguised as a congressional investigation—the 10th inquiry into the tragedy. 

Here is the real summation of my article, which the Russians failed to quote:

The historical significance of this moment can hardly be overstated, and it seems many Republicans, Democrats and members of the media don’t fully understand the magnitude of what is taking place. The awesome power of government—one that allows officials to pore through almost anything they demand and compel anyone to talk or suffer the shame of taking the Fifth Amendment—has been unleashed for purely political purposes.  

It is impossible to review what the Benghazi committee has done as anything other than taxpayer-funded political research of the opposing party’s leading candidate for president. Comparisons from America’s past are rare. Richard Nixon’s attempts to use the IRS to investigate his perceived enemies come to mind. So does Senator Joseph McCarthy’s red-baiting during the 1950s, with reckless accusations of treason leveled at members of the State Department, military generals and even the secretary of the Army.... 

The consequences, however, are worse than the manipulation of the electoral process. By using Benghazi for political advantage, the Republicans have communicated to global militants that, through even limited attacks involving relatively few casualties, they can potentially influence the direction of American elections. 

Of course, this might be seen as just an opportunity to laugh at the incompetence of the Russian hackers and government press—once they realized their error, Sputnik took the article down. But then things got even more bizarre. 

This false story was reported only by the Russian-controlled agency (a reference appeared in a Turkish publication, but it was nothing but a link to the Sputnik article). So how did Donald Trump end up advancing the same falsehood put out by Putin’s mouthpiece?

Well the answer is that WikiLeaks is a Russian front, or at least more than happy to launder leaks damaging Clinton that are doctored and fed to them by Russian sources.  That these networks cross both the neo-Nazi white supremacist right and the electronic privacy civil libertarian left is not exactly an accident, folks.  The Donald, the alt-right, and Team Snowden all have one common point, and it's our good friend Vladimir.

Not exactly rocket science to see the forest for these trees.

The Conserva-Schism Comes

I'm not RNC chair Reince Priebus but I'm thinking this is not the story he wanted to wake up to this morning four weeks before a presidential election, and that he probably should consider going back to bed.

The Republican Party tumbled toward anarchy Monday over its presidential nominee, as House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (Wis.) cut Donald Trump loose in an emergency maneuver to preserve the party’s endangered congressional majorities.

Ryan’s announcement that he would no longer defend or campaign with Trump prompted biting condemnations from within his caucus and from Trump himself, who publicly lashed out at the speaker.

It was an extraordinary display of personal animus just four weeks before the election, destroying any semblance of party unity behind a nominee who many GOP leaders said they could no longer stomach because of his character traits and tawdry campaign tactics.

New national and battleground-state polls showed Trump sliding since Friday’s publication of a 2005 video of him bragging about sexual assault, putting Clinton in position for a possible electoral landslide. Clinton surged to an 11 percentage point lead nationally in an NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll conducted over the weekend.

“It’s every person for himself or herself right now,” former senator Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) said. “The nominee for president is so destructive to everyday Republicans.”

The situation that I've long predicted has finally arrived.  The dangerously bigoted, ignorant, and vengeful GOP rump that lurked during the Bush years (and destroyed the party's immigration reform plan) has only grown in malignancy during the Obama years, until it metastasized into the Trump Train.  Now the rest of the GOP is bodily hurling themselves from it as the tracks lead off the cliff.

Paul Ryan giving leave to House Republicans to bail on Trump is the climax of our little tragic play, the point where everything collapses and the only question is whose career survives the disaster.

Hillary Clinton is smartly moving to bring mattresses for a softer landing for those jumping off the bandwagon as the rest of the GOP is now in full panic mode.

With Republicans at war amongst themselves, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton moved swiftly Monday to pry away moderate Republican-leaning voters who are turned off by Trump. Her campaign launched an advertising blitz featuring testimonials from ordinary Republicans explaining why they were voting for Clinton.

“She is reaching out to voters that may well have supported Mitt Romney in 2012 and in a normal year might also be inclined to support the Republican nominee but are so troubled by Donald Trump they are open to supporting Hillary Clinton,” Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon said. He added that nasty personal attacks by Trump at Sunday’s second presidential debate in St. Louis “only helped us close the sale.”

Ryan’s move, announced on a contentious conference call with House GOP members, was seen as a concession that Trump could no longer win the presidency and that the party must devote itself to retaining its majorities in the House and Senate.

Unlike Ryan, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) was rendered mute on the subject Monday. He told a business group in Kentucky that if they wanted to hear his thoughts on Trump, they “might as well go ahead and leave,” according to the Associated Press.

Still, there was no wave of defections Monday from Trump, who in an aggressive performance in Sunday night’s debate reassured the conservative base that he would be a relentless aggressor against the party’s shared enemies: Clinton and her husband, former president Bill Clinton. Trump leveled a stream of harsh charges at Hillary Clinton during the event, claiming she attacked women who accused her husband of sexual abuse and promising to send the former secretary of state to jail if he is president.

I'm pretty sure that wave of defections will come pretty soon after we start seeing the polls come in later this week.  Count on every Republican up for re-election in Congress to be looking at their internal polling from after this weekend and at the national numbers, already showing Clinton widening her lead.

As Donald Trump's campaign reels over tapes of the presidential candidate's sexually aggressive comments about women in 2005, the Republican nominee now trails Hillary Clinton by double digits among likely voters, according to a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.

The poll, conducted on Saturday and Sunday but before the second presidential debate, shows Clinton with 46 percent support among likely voters in a four-way matchup, compared to 35 percent for Trump.

The dam is broken, the boil has burst, the volcano has erupted, and everyone is scrambling to get out of the path of devastation.  If a double-digit lead holds for Clinton, this really will be the Av-Hill-Lanche I've been saying was possible all along.  It's not going to be a Goldwater, McGovern or Mondale level beatdown, but it could look a lot like 1980, where Reagan won 51-41 over Carter and John Anderson got 7% of the vote.  That turned into 489 electoral votes for St. Ronaldo.  I don't see Clinton getting that many EVs, but 450 is certainly possible if the state polls follow suit in places like Georgia, Arizona, and South Carolina.  Hell, with a lead like that Clinton could challenge Kansas, Alaska, Montana, and the spine-breaker for the GOP, Texas.

Texas, guys.  An 11-point Clinton lead puts Texas in play.

Four weeks to go.

StupidiNews!

• After corrections to its battery process failed to halt new units from catching fire while charging, tech maker Samsung is permanently shelving production of its troubled Galaxy Note 7 smartphone.
• A Democratic party lawsuit filed in Florida has convinced a judge to extend the state's voter registration through Wednesday as residents return from Hurricane Matthew evacuations.
• At least ten are dead after a suicide bomber struck in a northern Syria village, 20 more have been reported injured in the blast near the city of Manbij, currently controlled by US-backed rebels.
• UK PM Theresa May will go to court this week to make the case that she should be the one to trigger Britain's exit from the EU rather than Parliament.
• German lawmakers have made a non-binding resolution to ban the internal combustion engine in the country by 2030 as a statement against man-made climate change.

Last Call For A Policy Most Foreign

Foreign Policy magazine (not exactly the Obama administration's biggest fans) nevertheless finds itself in a situation they haven't been in before: making a clear endorsement of a presidential candidate because her opponent is so singularly unfit for the office of President of the United States and commander-in-chief of its military and nuclear forces.

In the nearly half century history of Foreign Policy, the editors of this publication have never endorsed a candidate for political office. We cherish and fiercely protect this publication’s independence and its reputation for objectivity, and we deeply value our relationship with all of our readers, regardless of political orientation. 

It is for all these reasons that FP’s editors are now breaking with tradition to endorse Hillary Clinton for the next president of the United States. 

Our readers depend on FP for insight and analysis into issues of national security and foreign policy. We feel that our obligation to our readers thus extends now to making clear the great magnitude of the threat that a Donald Trump presidency would pose to the United States. The dangers Trump presents as president stretch beyond the United States to the international economy, to global security, to America’s allies, as well as to countless innocents everywhere who would be the victims of hisinexperience, his perverse policy views, and the profound unsuitability of his temperament for the office he seeks. 

The litany of reasons Trump poses such a threat is so long that it is, in fact, shocking that he is a major party’s candidate for the presidency. The recent furor over his vile behavior with women illustrates the extraordinary nature of his unsuitability, as does his repudiation by so many members of his own party — who have so many reasons to reflexively support their nominee. 

And that would be a brutal and fair summary judgment of the man.  FP however brings the receipts.

Beyond this, however, in the areas in which we at FP specialize, he has repeatedly demonstrated his ignorance of the most basic facts of international affairs, let alone the nuances so crucial to the responsibilities of diplomacy inherent in the U.S. president’s daily responsibilities. Trump has not only promoted the leadership of a tyrant and menace like Vladimir Putin, but he has welcomed Russian meddling in the current U.S. election. He has alternatively forgiven then defended Russia’s invasion of Crimea and employed advisors with close ties to the Russian president and his cronies. Trump has spoken so cavalierly about the use of nuclear weapons, including a repeated willingness to use them against terrorists, that it has become clear he understands little if anything about America's nuclear policies — not to mention the moral, legal, and human consequences of such actions. He has embraced the use of torture and the violation of international law against it. He has suggested he would ignore America’s treaty obligations and would only conditionally support allies in need. He has repeatedly insulted Mexico and proposed policies that would inflame and damage one of America’s most vital trading relationships with that country. 

Trump has played into the hands of terrorists with his fearmongering, with his sweeping and unwarranted vilification of Muslims, and by sensationalizing the threat they pose. He has promised to take punitive actions against America’s Pacific trading partners that would be devastating to the world economy and in violation of our legal obligations. He has dismissed the science of climate change and denied its looming and dangerous reality. He has promoted a delusional and narcissistic view of the world, one in which he seems to feel that the power of his personality in negotiations could redirect the course of other nations, remake or supplant treaties, and contain those tyrants he does not actually embrace. 

He has repeatedly denigrated the U.S. military — its leadership, service members, veterans, and the families who stand behind them. He has also derided the intelligence community. Many of the most prominent Republican national security and foreign-policy specialists have repudiated him publicly. Indeed, he is not simply seen as a dangerous candidate by members of the Democratic Party, but virtually no single credible GOP foreign-policy advisor has joined his team. This is because Trump either undercuts or has placed himself in opposition to the best foreign-policy traditions of the Republican Party and to the standards and ideals of every GOP administration in modern history.

And yes, FP is definitely a GOP shop.  But they understand that as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton at least has diplomatic experience and isn't likely to say, nuke Cameroon because she misspelled former UK PM David Cameron's last name in a tweet.

Clinton is the sane choice in an insane election.

Dispatches From Bevinstan

I may have given Dinosaur Steve Beshear a lot of crap for his conservative Democrat views as Kentucky governor, but his administration did put an end to private prisons in the state back in 2013 as the state chose not to renew its contract with Corrections Corporation of America and shuttered three prisons as a result.  One of those prisons, Otter Creek, was a women's prison rife with abuses and neglect.  It was the first to be closed in the state and CCA's two other facilities were mothballed soon after.

But that was under Steve Beshear.  Gov. Matt Bevin wants to reopen those facilities and plans to put more taxpayer money in CCA's pockets.

As Kentucky’s prison population rises and county jails become overcrowded, the state may reopen a pair of private prisons to temporarily take in more than 1,600 inmates.

The state stopped housing inmates in private prisons in 2013, but there has been unexpected growth in the number of state prisoners over the last seven months, Justice and Public Safety Cabinet Secretary John Tilley said. State prisons are at capacity, and county jails are housing a record number of state inmates.

Over 11,000 of Kentucky’s roughly 23,600 state inmates are being held in those facilities, and many county jailers say they can’t handle any more, Tilley said. In the short run, only one option seems viable: the temporary use of private prisons.

The state could transfer around 1,642 inmates to the Marion Adjustment Center in St. Mary and the Lee Adjustment Center in Beattyville, which are owned by the Corrections Corp. of America (CCA), Tilley said. Those facilities are closed but still are being maintained.

"This doesn’t represent a change in philosophy," he said. "This is simply a pragmatic approach to a problem of capacity that we have at the moment."

A capacity problem of course cause by Matt Bevin reversing many of the executive orders Steve beshear made on criminal justice reform, including turning thousands of felons back into disenfranchised citizens who cannot vote even after serving their time.   That decision was made back in June.  In August it was all but assured this was going to happen including reopening Otter Creek.

Because of the overcrowding of jails throughout Kentucky, the state is looking toward private facilities to alleviate some of the stress. According to Marion County Jailer Barry Brady, that means the Marion Adjustment Center will open sometime in the near future. 

“The contract with CCA will be resigned for all three private prisons,” Brady told the Marion County Fiscal Court during its regular monthly meeting Aug. 18. “I’m not sure when, but it’s on short order. The communication to me is that it’s a done deal and they are working on the contracts right now.” 

He said that in addition to opening MAC, the state will also work with CCA to open Otter Creek and the Lee Adjustment Center. This will free up 2,327 beds. 

Barry said he wasn’t sure why the DOC and CCA were being so secretive about the jails reopening. 

The state ended its contract with MAC in 2013 based on House Bill 463. The bill introduced policy changes that would allow more inmates to be released and, in turn, allow the DOC to house all of the Kentucky inmates. Overpopulation, however, has forced their hand, and they are now planning to open more private facilities.

Now we find out that the plan is moving ahead as the opioid epidemic in the Midwest is rapidly filling up jails again because of drug-related arrests.

As jails across the commonwealth run out of beds amid a logjam of state prisoners, Kentucky officials are considering a controversial return to private prisons.

"This is not a decision we can make overnight," said Corrections Commissioner Rodney Ballard, who toured Kentucky's vacant private prisons this summer. "All our options are still on the table."

Kentucky is grappling with an 18 percent rise in its prison population since 2013, according to a recent Pew Charitable Trusts presentation, which has helped overwhelm jails around the state, including Jefferson County’s. The state says its roughly 11,700-bed prison system has been coping with around 23,640 prisoners - about half of whom are held in county jails.

State officials see private prisons as a potential, temporary fix, but experts say those institutions entail significant risks even when used only as a short-term solution.

So we're right back to where we were in 2012, about to reopen private prisons that we know were abusive and corrupt .

Welcome to Bevinstan.

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.