Last Call For The Chief Executives

It's not just the Senate that is in danger for the GOP, but several governor's mansions are up for grabs this year and the Republican brand is suffering across the board, so much so that Democrats now have a serious shot of picking up several governor's mansions.

Democrats were initially uncertain about their chances to make strides at the gubernatorial level, given the number of conservative states — Missouri, West Virginia and Montana among them — the party had to defend. But the recent polls have given them a reason to be more optimistic.

“We’re in a map right now where we’re pleased, on a race-by-race basis, at how this looks,” said Jared Leopold, a spokesman for the Democratic Governors Association. “Everyone expected that 2016 would be a difficult cycle for Democrats because we were defending more.”

A Ball State University poll released Wednesday, conducted for WISH-TV in Indianapolis, shows former Indiana House Speaker John Gregg (D) leading Lt. Gov. Eric Holcomb (R) by a 48 percent to 43 percent margin in the race to replace Republican Gov. Mike Pence, Donald Trump’s running mate.In North Carolina, another Republican-led state, three surveys released this week show Attorney General Roy Cooper (D) locked in a tight race with Gov. Pat McCrory (R), who has faced nationwide backlash over the state’s law on public bathroom use for transgender people. Polls conducted by CNN and Survey USA showed Cooper with a narrow lead, while a survey conducted by the conservative Civitas Institute showed McCrory slightly ahead.

Surveys in two states led by Democrats, Oregon and New Hampshire, show Democrats up by significant margins in gubernatorial races.

A University of New Hampshire poll conducted for WMUR showed Executive Councilor Colin Van Ostern (D) leading fellow Executive Councilor Chris Sununu (R) 44 percent to 38 percent. A MassInc poll conducted for WBUR released last week showed Van Ostern up 47 percent to 44 percent. Current Gov. Maggie Hassan (D) is running for Senate, hoping to boot the vulnerable GOP Sen. Kelly Ayotte.

In Oregon, polls conducted for The Oregonian and Oregon Public Broadcasting show Gov. Kate Brown (D) leading her opponent, little-known physician Bud Pierce (R), by double digits. Republicans had hoped Oregon voters might punish Brown for supporting a ballot measure that would raise corporate tax rates, though the opportunity never materialized.

The one pickup Republicans are looking for?  Vermont.  Go figure.

With two weeks remaining before November’s elections, Republicans’ best opportunity to pick off a Democratic-held seat appears to be in Vermont, where unpopular Gov. Peter Shumlin (D) decided not to seek a fourth two-year term. A Castleton Institute poll conducted for Vermont Public Radio this week, the first poll of the race, showed Lt. Gov. Phil Scott (R) and former state Transportation chief Sue Minter (D) in a statistical tie, with Scott up 39 to 38 percent.

Minter will campaign this weekend with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I), who is wildly popular in his home state. Democrats believe Minter can ride a favorable wave to the governor’s mansion, while Democrats have sought to portray Scott as a New England Republican divorced from the national party’s conservative reputation.

Sure hope Bernie has enough juice left to save his own state from the GOP.

All In All He's Just An Orange Prick With A Wall

If there's any state where Donald Trump's lofty promises of a giant wall to keep out those people should play well, it's Arizona.  But with two weeks and two days before the election, giant walls aren't playing well in Arizona.  Not at all.

Donald Trump rode to the top of the Republican ticket promising a "big, beautiful, powerful" border wall with Mexico to stop the flow of undocumented immigrants. Along that border, however, Americans are more likely to call the wall a "waste of money", according to a Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll.

The results show that while the New York businessman may have expected his tough stance on immigration to fire up support nationally, it seems to be falling short in a state heavily affected by illegal immigration, and where he is now facing a surprising challenge from his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.

Asked if a wall would be “an effective barrier or a waste of money,” 47 percent of Arizona residents picked “waste of money” and 34 percent picked “effective barrier”, with the rest picking neither, according to the poll. Among Republicans, 21 percent picked "waste of money” and 57 percent picked “effective barrier."

Most Arizonans also believed it is not realistic to expect Mexico to pay for the wall, something Trump has vowed would happen if he’s elected president on Nov. 8, according to the poll.

The results lined up closely with nationwide opinions of Trump’s immigration policy: 49 percent of American adults say the wall would be a “waste of money” and 31 percent say it would be an “effective barrier.”

Uh-oh.  It seems like all Trump is doing is making sure Latino voters do just that this year: vote.

Florida is another closely-fought state that has seen large levels of illegal immigration, though by sea rather than by land. Some 41 percent of voters there said they believed Trump’s wall would be a “waste of money”, while 36 percent thought it would be an “effective barrier”.

Progressive activist groups in both Florida and Arizona have been using Trump’s hard line on immigration against him to mobilize Latinos for Clinton, who advocates a path to citizenship for some undocumented immigrants. Mi Familia Vota, for example, says they registered more than 15,000 people in Arizona this year.

We'll see what happens.  Trump may be the best thing to come along for the Latino vote ever.

For Democrats, that is.

Sunday Long Read: No Class Twits

I'm on Twitter as a social media platform and it's pretty useful and even fun from time to time, but the reality is the company has had a decade-long problem with harassment of women and the folks behind Twitter still haven't bothered to take the kind of steps needed to address more than cosmetic damage.

On May 22, 2008, Ariel Waldman ran out of options. Waldman, then a community manager and blogger, had signed up for Twitter in March 2007 and in months had become one of the platform’s 100 most followed accounts. She was, by her own account, “addicted” to the service.

But soon after, the abuse began — for no reason other than that Waldman was a woman writing articles that occasionally touched on sex and technology. In June 2007, a stalker posted some of her private information in a string of threatening tweets. Waldman contacted Twitter, which banned the user in question from the public timeline. But over the next eight months, the targeted abuse and stalking intensified. By March 2008, exhausted and disillusioned by a torrent of tweets calling her a “cunt” and a “whore” and publicizing personal information like her email address, Waldman reached out to Twitter again, this time to the company’s CEO, Jack Dorsey. After a series of phone calls to the company went nowhere, Dorsey and Twitter went silent. So in May, Waldman went public, detailing her ordeal in a blog post, which caught fire in media circles.

Twitter, then still a startup, was fresh off a buzzy SXSW debut, and Waldman’s post was an unfamiliar bit of bad press, depicting Dorsey in particular as an unsympathetic, even cowardly, chief executive. “Jack explained that they’re scared to ban someone because they’re scared if it turned into a lawsuit that they are too small of a company to handle it,” Waldman wrote. While Twitter founder Biz Stone issued a formal acknowledgment of the problem, arguing that “Twitter is a communication utility, not a mediator of content,” Dorsey was silent. Co-founder Ev Williams was more critical, posting tweets that cast doubt on Waldman’s claims and halfheartedly apologizing with a simple “our bad.” Waldman was crushed. “Prior to my coming out, I had great relationships with them and considered some of them my friends,” Waldman told BuzzFeed News this month of the fallout. “I took it very personally. It sucked.”

More than eight years after Waldman’s ordeal, harassment on Twitter is rampant — so much so that it has become a primary destination for trolls and hate groups. So much so that its CEO declared, “We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we’ve sucked at it for years.” So much so that numerous high-profile users have quit the service, citing it as an unsafe space. Today, Twitter is a well-known hunting ground for women and people of color, who are targeted by neo-Nazis, racists, misogynists, and trolls, often just for showing up. Just this summer, actor Leslie Jones was driven off Twitter after a barrage of racist comments and death threats, only to return after a personal reassurance from Dorsey himself. Last week, Normani Kordei of the pop group Fifth Harmony also stepped away from the service after suffering years of “horrific and racially charged” tweets. Despite its integral role in popular culture and in social justice initiatives from the Arab Spring to Black Lives Matter, Twitter is as infamous today for being as toxic as it is famous for being revolutionary. And unless you’re a celebrity — or, as it turns out, the president of the United States of America — good luck getting help.

According to 10 high-level former employees, the social network’s long history with abuse has been fraught with inaction and organizational disarray. Taken together, these interviews tell the story of a company that’s been ill-equipped to handle harassment since its beginnings. Fenced in by an abiding commitment to free speech above all else and a unique product that makes moderation difficult and trolling almost effortless, Twitter has, over a chaotic first decade marked by shifting business priorities and institutional confusion, allowed abuse and harassment to continue to grow as a chronic problem and perpetual secondary internal priority. On Twitter, abuse is not just a bug, but — to use the Silicon Valley term of art — a fundamental feature.

Twitter does have a lot to offer.  Unfortunately part of that offering is nearly guaranteed harassment and racist attacks (and the era of Trumpism sure as hell hasn't made the issue any better.)  I've had to fight off racist clowns on a regular basis, but I know the harassment can be orders of magnitude worse. I've been downright lucky by comparison to some friends of mine.

And the fact of the matter is people are leaving Twitter for that reason.  The company is scrambling to find a buyer and potential suitors are walking away at this point because of the harassment issue.  I'm finding I'm spending more time on Tumblr and other platforms these days, and even Facebook is better at curbing assholes. Whatever the next step in social media is, I hope the lessons of Twitter's 10-year campaign of failure are learned.

Down The Ballot, Down The Hole

The Trump Effect is blasting its way through the ranks of the GOP House and Senate candidates, and what were largely considered safe seats, like Sen. Marco Rubio's in Florida, are now toss-ups as Trump's collapse spread through the rest of the party like the disease he is.

Just months ago, Senator Marco Rubio was seen by the Republican establishment as one of its best hopes for taking back the White House. Now, Representative Patrick Murphy, a second-term congressman, iswithin striking distance of defeating Mr. Rubio in the senator’s race to keep his seat.

The race is the most consequential among several in Florida in which Republican incumbents find themselves in unexpectedly tough fights. The plight of Florida Republicans — who seem largely resigned to a Clinton victory, given Hillary Clinton’s four percentage point lead in the polls — is in large measure a result of the name at the top of the ballot. But Donald Trump’s candidacy has only accelerated trends that have changed Florida’s political landscape in ways that Democrats have been more adept at seizing.

Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the dean of Florida’s congressional delegation, is fighting more vigorously than she ever has to fend off a Democratic challenger, Scott Fuhrman, a businessman who has little name recognition and is campaigning against Ms. Ros-Lehtinen’s rigid defense of the Cuban embargo. President Obama won the district by a tiny margin in 2008 and by nearly seven percentage points in 2012. This year, Mrs. Clinton is leading Mr. Trump by 17 to 23 percentage points in the district, according to polling commissioned by Mr. Fuhrman.

The changing Latino electorate is the key factor, with Cuban-Americans, who once swung reliably Republican, increasingly up for grabs, particularly younger voters who are more socially liberal than their parents and less dogmatic about the Cuban embargo. Some 58 percent of Latino voters in Florida back Mrs. Clinton, while 28 percent support Mr. Trump, according to a recent poll commissioned by Univision.

This pains Rudy Fernández, one of the architects of the Republican Party’s efforts to earn Latino votes during the 2000 and 2004 campaigns, which were instrumental in George W. Bush’s Florida victories. “It was a very inclusive message, a positive message, Reaganesque,” Mr. Fernández said. In November, he said, he will unenthusiastically vote for Mrs. Clinton and hope that Mr. Trump’s defeat forces a reckoning that reboots the party’s approach toward Latinos.

What this has meant for Mr. Rubio is that he can no longer rely on Cuban-Americans as a stalwart base in a state where many voters have become alienated by his hard-line conservative positions on issues such as gay rights, reproductive rights, gun control and the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, and by his shifting stance on immigration reform. Of course, the Trump factor is substantial, too. Mr. Rubio, who once called Mr. Trump a “con artist” wholly unfit to be president, now backs him. Many former Rubio supporters find that galling and indefensible.

For these reasons, Florida voters should support Mr. Murphy. But defeating Mr. Rubio, who earned a reputation on Capitol Hill as a disengaged lawmaker who skipped scores of key votes and hearings, shouldn’t be the only motive.

Mr. Murphy’s positions on climate change — an issue that Mr. Rubio seems deeply ignorant about — gay rights, gun control and comprehensive immigration reform make him by far a superior representative for Floridians. Mr. Murphy has also challenged Mr. Rubio’s obstinate support for the failed embargo on Cuba, which puts him on the right side of history and, increasingly, public opinion in Florida.

So the question is will the Latino turnout be high enough to send Little Marco packing? We'll find out in a couple of weeks.  I certainly hope so.  And he'll have Donald Trump to thank.

Last Call For Rigger Mortis

Donald Trump's dangerous rhetoric is now openly threatening to ignite a crisis in confidence among the American voter weeks before the election even happens.

Donald Trump has repeatedly called this year's presidential election rigged and has coyly said "I will keep you in suspense” on whether he would accept a Hillary Clinton victory, but many Republicans are less circumspect, according to a new poll.

Only half of Republicans would accept Clinton, the Democratic nominee, as their president. And if she wins, nearly 70 percent said it would be because of illegal voting or vote rigging, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Friday.

Conversely, seven out of 10 Democrats said they would accept a Trump victory and less than 50 percent would attribute it to illegal voting or vote rigging, the poll showed.

The findings come after repeated statements by Trump that the media and the political establishment have rigged the election against him. He also has made a number of statements encouraging his supporters to fan out on Election Day to stop ineligible voters from casting ballots.

The U.S. government has accused Russia of a campaign of cyber attacks against Democratic Party organizations and state election systems.

Clinton has said she will accept the results of the election no matter the outcome.

The poll showed there is broad concern across the political spectrum about voting issues such as ineligible voters casting ballots, voter suppression, and the actual vote count, but Republicans feel that concern more acutely.

For example, nearly eight out of 10 Republicans are concerned about the accuracy of the final vote count. And though generally they believe they will be able to cast their ballot, only six out of 10 are confident their vote will be counted accurately.

Among Democrats, about six out of 10 are concerned about the vote count. They, too, believe they wi1l be able to cast their ballot, but eight out of 10 are confident their vote will be counted accurately.

The problem with this idiotic "both-siderism" is that there's very real evidence that Democratic voter suppression is happening in red states and the fact that this will be the first presidential election since the Roberts Supreme Court neutered the Voting Rights Act, and the latter especially will have serious consequences.

This year's presidential election will be the first in a half-century without the significant presence of federal observers at polling places. That's because in 2013 the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, and when the court wiped out that section, the statute that provided for election observers went, too.

The landmark decision in Shelby County v. Holder doesn't mean civil rights officials are totally disarmed. The Justice Department will still send out "hundreds" of "monitors" to oversee Election Day compliance. But the number is smaller than it was before, and monitors can only enter the polling place if local officials agree. Observers, by contrast, had a statutory right to be inside polling places. They were trained specifically for the task. There also were many more of them, and they had far more authority than monitors.

"We can't deny the costs of Shelby County" in terms of enforcement powers, says Vanita Gupta, assistant attorney general for civil rights.

"The hope is that just by having the presence of the federal government at polling sites, even if we may be slightly more diminished or spread thinner, that our sheer presence has sufficient deterrent effect and gives voters the confidence that they need to feel like the process is fair," she adds.

Gupta says she expects federal monitors to fan out over half the states on Election Day.

None of these monitors, however, will have the automatic legal clout that observers did. Unlike monitors, observers typically were stationed inside polling places to watch partisan poll watchers and to make sure rights were enforced. They would also verify that the number of voters jibed with final vote tallies. Indeed, they could even go inside the polling booth to make sure assistors were accurately recording the votes of people who needed help casting their ballots.

Gerry Hebert, who served in the voting section of the Justice Department for 21 years, says the presence of federal monitors is "good as far as it goes, but it doesn't really replace that kind of on-site complete oversight within the polling place."

So yeah, that's what the real issue is, Donald.

Scion Of The Times

Donald Trump, a man who managed to go bankrupt running casinos and probably couldn't figure out how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich without burning down three neighborhoods in the process, is finding out the hard way that being an orange racist snack product is in fact bad for branding.

Amidst reports that occupancy rates at Trump Hotels have slipped this election season, the company has announced that new brand hotels will no longer bear the Trump name.

The newest line of luxury hotels, geared towards millennials, will be called Scion, the company said.

“We wanted a name that would be a nod to the Trump family and to the tremendous success it has had with its businesses, including Trump Hotels, while allowing for a clear distinction between our luxury and lifestyle brands,” Trump Hotels CEO Eric Danziger said in a statement.

Although Trump Hotels has said the new name has nothing to do with the eponymous businessman’s presidential campaign, empty rooms at the hotels have caused officials “to reduce rates during the peak season," according to New York Magazine.

Nightly rates at the newly-opened Trump International Hotel in D.C. plummeted below $500 while practically every other five-star property was sold out for the International Monetary Fund conference two weeks ago. And after his remarks about Mexican immigrants, two celebrity chefs backed out of their contracts to open a restaurant in the hotel.

According to Hipmunk, bookings at Trump Hotels plummeted 59 percent during the first half of 2016 and data from Foursquare shows a 17 percent drop in foot traffic at Trump properties since June 2015, when the reality TV star announced his presidential bid.

Trump Hotels, however, refutes the analysis.

“Our business at Trump Hotels is stronger than ever and we are incredibly excited about the future of Scion, the newest brand in our hotel portfolio,” Ivanka Trump, who is the executive vice president of development and acquisitions for the brand, said in a statement.

“The data reported by both Hipmunk and Foursquare is manipulated to appear meaningful, when, in reality, the information is inconsequential and does not provide an accurate representation of our performance,” a Trump Hotels spokesperson told Travel + Leisure.

The hotel occupancy data is also rigged, apparently.  Who knew. What you do know is which hotels to avoid in the future, right?

A Series Of (Clogged) Tubes

If you're like me, you had to deal with serious problem getting on some of your favorite internet sites on Friday because of a massive attack on the net's ability to handle and route web site requests.  It would be like if all the East Coast's traffic lights went from green to red and back to green every couple of seconds, because they all got conflicting commands to change the lights.  Nobody would be able to get anywhere, and that's what happened with Dyn's DNS servers and internet traffic 24 hours ago.

Dyn offers Domain Name System (DNS) services, essentially acting as an address book for the Internet. DNS is a system that resolves the web addresses we see every day, like https://www.WIRED.com, into the IP addresses needed to find and connect with the right servers so browsers can deliver requested content, like the story you’re reading right now. A DDoS attack overwhelms a DNS server with lookup requests, rendering it incapable of completing any. That’s what makes attacking DNS so effective; rather than targeting individual sites, an attacker can take out the entire Internet for any end user whose DNS requests route through a given server.

“DNS registrars typically provide authoritative DNS services for thousands or tens of thousands of domain names, and so if there is a service-impacting event the collateral damage footprint can be very large,” says Roland Dobbins, a principal engineer at Arbor Networks, a security firm that specializes in DDoS attacks. 

DDoS is a particularly effective type of attack on DNS services because in addition to overwhelming servers with malicious traffic, those same servers also have to deal with automatic re-requests, and even just well-meaning users hitting refresh over and over to summon up an uncooperative page.

Now, Internet backbone companies like Dyn deal with these attacks all the time.  But this was an attack of such incredible scale that it took even them by surprise.

The overall picture is still somewhat hazy, but more information has become available as the day has progressed. Initial reports indicate that the attack was part of a genre of DDoS that infects Internet of Things devices (think webcams, DVRs, routers, etc.) all over the world with malware. Once infected, those Internet-connected devices become part of a botnet army, driving malicious traffic toward a given target. The source code for one of these types of botnets, called Mirai, was recently released to the public, leading to speculation that more Mirai-based DDoS attacks might crop up. Dyn said on Friday evening that the security firms Flashpoint and cloud services provider Akamai detected Mirai bots driving much, but not necessarily all, of the traffic in the attacks. Similarly, Dale Drew, the chief security officer of Internet backbone company Level 3, says that his company sees evidence of their involvement.

So America's internet-enabled devices, from cameras to DVRs to baby monitors to thermostats and lighting, are all small computers able to serve as unwilling hosts in an army of devices that can send these requests to flood the internet's traffic cops, and America just hasn't been thinking about how many of these devices there are, or how to secure them from malware that recruits them as a massive network of attackers.  The problem of course is that this scenario shouldn't have taken Dyn by surprise at all:

There’s also a potential motive to use a Mirai hack against Dyn, or at least a certain irony in it. The company’s principal data analyst, Chris Baker, wrote about these types of IoT-based attacks just yesterday in a blog post titled“What Is the Impact On Managed DNS Operators?”. It appears he has his answer. And that all DNS services, and their customers, should be on notice.

And the notice is "We failed.  Do better.  The next attacks will be coming."  The reality is that expecting American consumers to upgrade the firmware on their internet-enabled toasters is exactly what led to Friday's event, because the companies selling "the Internet of Things" aren't selling them with any protections.  And we're going to be dealing with cleaning that up for quite some time.

Pants On Fire Time Again

It's actually kind of refreshing to see an awful political analogy from the Village these days that doesn't involve Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, but this one from the WSJ's James Taranto may be one of the all-time duds ever misfired as he compares Obamacare to...exploding cell phones?

Outside of politics, perhaps the worst new-product launch of 2016 was the Samsung Galaxy Note 7. Released in August, it was recalled twice and finally withdrawn from the market last week, all because the device has a tendency to catch fire or explode.

It’s an apt analogy for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, known colloquially as ObamaCare—and that’s not our opinion but that of President Obama himself. Here’s the president in a speech yesterday at Miami Dade College in Florida: 

The point is, now is not the time to move backwards on health care reform. Now is the time to move forward. The problems that may have arisen from the Affordable Care Act is [sic] not because government is too involved in the process. The problem is, is that we have not reached everybody and pulled them in. And think about it. When one of these companies comes out with a new smartphone and it had a few bugs, what do they do? They fix it. They upgrade—unless it catches fire, and they just—then they pull it off the market. But you don’t go back to using a rotary phone. You don’t say, well, we’re repealing smartphones—we’re just going to do the dial-up thing. That’s not what you do.

It turns out ObamaCare compares unfavorably even by that analogy. Several years ago this columnist switched our TV and internet service to Verizon Fios, the fiber-optic service offered by the company whose local operation was long ago known as New York Telephone. Signing up for Fios, it turned out, also entailed giving up traditional copper-wire analog phone service in favor of the newfangled digital kind.

We hadn’t used a rotary phone since childhood, but we happen to own an antique one. This morning we plugged it into the wall and attempted to dial a number. It took a long time, as you have to dial 11 digits now even for a local call—but it worked. If you like your phone, you can keep your phone (save for the Note 7). Verizon 1, ObamaCare 0. 

Well, if you think a national health care exchange is like making a phone call, sure, Taranto has a point.  He goes on to cherry-pick and complain about the parts of Obamacare that haven't come to pass yet, mainly because individual GOP governors have done everything they can to make sure the system fails, with the stated goal being that enough broken, badly running GOP spit and bailing wire nightmares will cause the whole health care system to collapse.

They don't really have a plan B.

That would be the correct analogy to the Samsung Note 7.

But we could instead talk about the tens of millions who have insurance now and the fact that despite Republican sabotage, the plan is still covering more than 90% of Americans.

But sure, let's keep making lazy, silly, and ignorantly cutesy analogies about a guy the GOP has chosen to replace with an orange racist snack product covered in cat hair.  We should really trust the judgment of the folks who thought Donald Trump should be president, right?

Tell me another one.  Pants on fire.

Time Is On My Side

If you thought the Comcast-NBC/Universal deal was bad for the American media consumer and the landscape of competition in a wolrd where information comes from fewer and ewer sources, wait until you see the new AT&T Time Warner merger.

AT&T Inc is in advanced talks to acquire media conglomerate Time Warner Inc, and a deal could come as early as this weekend, the Wall Street Journal reported. 

The talks around the cash-and-stock deal have come together quickly, the Journal reported on Friday, citing people familiar with the matter. 

Time Warner's shares were up 8.2 percent at $89.77 in late morning trading. AT&T was down 2 percent at $37.87. 

Time Warner, which has a market value of about $65 billion, is an attractive target because of its premium cable channel HBO, the CNN news network, film studio Warner Bros and other media assets. 

AT&T, which has a market capitalization of about $238 billion, has already made moves to turn itself into a media powerhouse, buying satellite TV provider DirecTV last year for $48.5 billion. 

Time Warner Chief Executive Jeff Bewkes has not been willing to sell in the past. The company rejected an $80 billion offer from Twenty-First Century Fox Inc in 2014.

AT&T and Time Warner were not immediately available for comment.

So a short list of what AT&T would control after this merger:

• CNN
• HBO
• The CW Network (well, half of it, the other half belongs to CBS turns out)
• DirecTV
• AT&T Mobile
• BellSouth
• Southwestern Bell
• New Line Pictures
• Warner Bros. Pictures
• Cricket Wireless
• Bleacher Report
• Nascar.com
• NBA.com
• DC Comics

All under one company's control.  Yeah, this seems like a great idea.  Sign me up, right?  What if the new company decides to tell Comcast and Charter "Hey, we're only going to carry HBO on DirecTV from here on out."  Maybe that won't happen.  Maybe it will.  But these guys would control a gigantic pile of movies, sports websites, two mobile phone companies, a whole crapload of baby bells, a TV network, a ton of cable networks and DC Comics on top of all that.  Who needs cable when you have mobile, satellite, and a whole lot of "last mile" utility poles?

Now you tell me that's a good idea.

And You Can Call Me Al

The annual Al Smith dinner in NYC, a fundraiser for Catholic charities, usually sees both candidates take the stage in a presidential election year to take some shots across each other's respective bows a few weeks before Election Day, all in good fun. Of course this year one of those candidates is Donald Trump, and things went, well, exactly as you would expect them to have gone considering Trump's history.

Donald Trump said Thursday he was in a room full of wonderful people at the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner in New York.

“Or as Hillary calls it, her largest crowd of her season,” he said with a chuckle, as Democratic rival Hillary Clinton laughed, too. “This is corny stuff.”

But as his remarks progressed, Trump’s speech turned more biting.

“Here she is tonight, pretending not to hate Catholics,” he said. Several in the crowd booed.

Trump went on: “Everyone knows of course Hillary’s belief that it takes a village, as in Haiti where she’s taken a number of them.” That was met with more jeering from the crowd. Clinton’s smile was still on her face, but she didn’t laugh.

Both candidates were, for the most part, good-natured yet tough on each other, but Trump apparently misread this particular audience gathered in his heavily Democratic hometown. Still, despite the booing spells, Trump got strong laughter from throughout the room at his best jokes. The loudest roar of approval came at the expense of his wife.

“The media is even more biased against me than ever before," Trump said. "You want the proof? Michelle Obama gives a speech and everyone loves it. It’s fantastic. They think she’s absolutely great. My wife Melania gives the exact same speech! And people get on her case! And I don’t get it! I don’t know why!”

At another point, Trump made light of his assertion that Clinton's use of a private e-mail server while secretary of state constitutes a punishable crime.

"We've proven that we can actually be civil to each other," Trump said. "In fact just before taking the dais Hillary accidentally bumped into me and she very civilly said 'Pardon me.'"

Yeah, the guy got the biggest laughs when he went after his wife and the woman he's running against.  I think I'm noticing a pattern here.  Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton may not have Barack Obama's natural comedic delivery gifts, but she does have 25 years of DC fighting experience in arenas such as these. She got some shots in too at the Waldorf Astoria ballroom last night.

Clinton, who spoke second, began with the self-deprecatory remarks and gracious gestures that have been the hallmarks of previous dinners.

She got big laughs when she told the audience: “I just want to put you all in a basket of adorables.”

She told Trump that if he didn’t like what she was saying, “Feel free to stand up and shout ‘wrong!’ while I’m talking.” That was a reference to Trump’s habit of interrupting her comments during the three presidential debates.

Clinton also shifted to more biting tone as her speech progressed, and added that after Trump’s speech that she’ll “enjoy listening to Mike Pence deny that you ever gave it.”

Trump, with his arms folded, laughed.

Still, Joy Reid summed it up best this morning:

Trump was in a room with precisely the kind of people he has spent his life yearning to be accepted and respected by, and they booed him.

— Joy Reid (@JoyAnnReid) October 21, 2016

For Trump it was being made to look like a national laughing stock all over again like Obama did to him five years ago at that now infamous 2011 White House correspondents dinner.  If you thought his meltdown was bad before...

...stay tuned.  I think the final two weeks and change of this campaign are going to be amazing.

StupidiNews!

• A magnitude 6.2 earthquake rocked Japan early Friday with the epicenter west of Osaka, tens of thousands lost power but officials are working to restore it.
• The US Department of Education is looking into Baylor University's response to sexual violence on campus, the school has been accused of undermining prevention efforts.
• The head of the UN's Human Rights Council has all but accused Russia and Syria of war crimes for the siege of Aleppo, saying civilians and hospitals are being specifically targeted. 
• British American Tobacco will buy the remaining 58% of Reynolds American that it doesn't already own to create the world's largest tobacco company in a $47 billion deal.
• Several automakers testing self-driving automobiles in California are upset about the state's new proposed rules that would require at least a year's worth of testing data for approval.

Last Call For Spies Like Us

So if you recall the news that yet another NSA contractor was busted for stealing classified data back in August, well it turns out that there's a whole new level of problematic with what the FBI found when they looked deeper into this rabbit hole.

Government lawyers on Thursday said they would prosecute a former National Security Agency contractor accused of stealing classified information under an espionage law, a move carrying far more severe penalties than previously announced charges.

Harold Thomas Martin spent over two decades pilfering classified information from multiple government agencies, federal prosecutors said in a new filing made in a U.S. District Court in Baltimore. They expected to bring charges that included violations of the Espionage Act, the filing said.

The amount of stolen data is estimated to be at least fifty terabytes, enough to fill dozens of hard drives, prosecutors said, adding that the alleged criminal conduct "is breathtaking in its longevity and scale." Some officials have said the trove may amount to the largest heist of classified government information in history.

An attorney representing Martin was not immediately available for comment.

Among the material allegedly stolen by Martin included a top secret document that contained "specific operational plans against a known enemy of the United States and its allies," the prosecutors said.

U.S. officials announced in a criminal complaint earlier this month that Martin, 51, was taken into custody in Maryland in August and charged with felony theft of classified government material. It did not allege a motive.

The FBI is investigating possible links between Martin and the leak online this summer of secret NSA hacking tools used to break into the computers of adversaries such as Russia and China, U.S. officials said.

In other words, this guy was most likely one of the most successful Russian moles in history.  He stole classified data over more than twenty years and did untold damage to the US intelligence community.

I'm glad this guy got caught but I think we're going to be spending a long time cleaning up after this guy.  I'm old enough to remember Aldrich Ames, and Martin here makes Ames look like a cub scout.

What Actually Rigging An Election Looks Like

Ohio is arguably the key state for Donald Trump, he simply can't win the presidency without it (no Republican has won the White House without it) but the efforts by the Kasich administration and Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted to throw one million mostly black and low-income voters Ohio voters off the rolls has now been deemed illegal, and those voters will now be able to vote on provisional ballots.

A federal judge in Ohio laid out a plan on Wednesday for the state to restore voting privileges for people who were illegally removed from the state's voter rolls over the past five years.

The ruling stems from a case in which the ACLU and other plaintiffs sued, saying Ohio's process for removing people who had died or moved away from voter rolls was illegal because it purged people simply for not voting and not responding to a letter from the state.

Voting rights cases have become pivotal battlegrounds ahead of the Nov. 8 election between Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump.

The American Civil Liberties Union and others have challenged laws in Wisconsin, Michigan and North Carolina over voting rights issues.

In the Ohio case, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati said Ohio's process for removing inactive voters was illegal, reversing an earlier ruling by U.S. District Judge George C. Smith.

In response, Smith on Wednesday ordered the state to allow people who had been removed from the rolls to cast provisional ballots on election day.

Those ballots will be checked against voter rolls, and if people were purged in the years 2011, 2013 or 2015, their votes will be counted and their registration restored.

Again, Husted tried to purge more than one million Ohio voters off the rolls over six years for the crime of not voting and not immediately responding to a letter that was often sent to an old address.  That will now be reversed.  How many provisional ballots will be cast, I don't know, but the plan was absolutely to lower turnout and give the state's elections to Republicans.

I'm glad the courts stopped this idiocy.

Something Something Accept What You Cannot Change

If there was somehow any doubt that Hillary Clinton will be the next president (with a commanding six point lead in the RCP average and an 85% chance of winning at Five Thirty Eight) last night's debate all but slammed the door in Trump's orange face.

It’s over. There will be no more presidential debates between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. (Hopefully.)

The final debate looked, at first, like it could have been pretty normal. At the start, there were some Trumpy moments — but for the most part, it appeared like both candidates, thanks to Trump’s slightly better behavior, were going to mostly stick to the issues.

Then Trump happened. By the end of the debate, Trump had insulted Latino immigrants in Spanish, continued to say that he would not concede the election if he lost, and called Clinton “such a nasty woman.”

In many ways, it was a fitting end to what’s been a very odd election season. But it also offered yet another reminder that we are living in very strange times.

But the real signal as to what Trump will do with all that anger when he loses big in November is as obvious as it comes.

Thirty minutes before the debate, Trump’s Facebook page went live with a video. It ran with the message: “If you’re tired of biased, mainstream media reporting (otherwise known as Crooked Hillary’s super PAC), tune into my Facebook Live broadcast. Starts at 8:30 EST/5:30 PST -- you won't want to miss it. Enjoy!” The ensuing show had its own anchors and guests.

For any other candidate, this may come off as unremarkable. But Trump’s wording, the original anchors and guests, and ongoing rumors suggest this is a tease of “Trump TV” — a business venture Trump might launch after his failed presidential bid.

Matt Yglesias explained for Vox:

While Trump and his team do not appear capable of winning a general election in the United States, they certainly have the right mix of skills and experience to operate a successful media company, folding the existing Breitbart and Hannity franchises together with the Trump brand to form Trump TV or Trump Media.

Trump’s people, for their part, haven’t done much to dispel the rumors. Here’s what Trump campaign CEO Steve Bannon said recently, according to CNN anchor Brian Stelter’s newsletter:

Bannon did not deny talk about a potential "Trump TV" network or streaming service. When asked if there is anything to the rumors, Bannon responded with a smile and said, "Trump is an entrepreneur." He repeated the answer again later. "Trump is an entrepreneur." He also pointed out Trump's social media prowess on Facebook and Twitter. "Look at the engagement. It's incredible..."

The Facebook Live video, however, suggests that Trump’s team isn’t even bothering to wait until after the election to pull this off.

Donald Trump: red meat salesman in the New Clinton Age.  It's about the only job he's actually qualified for, frankly.  But he'll ride that tornado through the American psyche doing as much damage as he can and will most likely profit from it.

Then again, this is a man that went bankrupt running casinos, a business model absolutely designed to part suckers from their money.  If he can't even get that right, maybe Trump TV won't be long for this world.

I hope.

StupidiNews!

• The first new US nuclear reactor in 20 years went online this morning as the TVA's Watts Bar 2 reactor was switched on after decades of cost overruns and safety concerns.
• The trial of Ammon Bundy and seven fellow accused conspirators goes to a jury today after their armed takeover of an Oregon wildlife center in January.
• British PM Theresa May says Britain will play a "full role" in the EU up until Brexit is official, and will remain a "strong and dependable partner" after.
• Philippine President Rodrigo Dueterte says the island nation will say "goodbye" to America and improve foreign policy ties with China as he visits Beijing for a summit this weekend.
• The newest weapon in fighting antibiotic-resistant infections may be the bacteria in our own digestive systems as researchers are looking into creating new drugs based on gut microbes.