Russian To Judgment (Day)

Newsweek's Kurt Eichenwald has been the go-to reporter on Trump's Russian connections, and delivers a staggering election eve case against the Republican candidate in his latest piece this week. The bottom line is our NATO allies in Europe firmly believe that a Trump administration would abandon Europe to Vladimir Putin's machinations.

In phone calls, meetings and cables, America’s European allies have expressed alarm to one another about Donald Trump’s public statements denying Moscow’s role in cyberattacks designed to interfere with the U.S. election. They fear the Republican nominee for presidenthas emboldened the Kremlin in its unprecedented cybercampaign to disrupt elections in multiple countries in hopes of weakening Western alliances, according to intelligence, law enforcement and other government officials in the United States and Europe. 

While American intelligence officers have privately briefed Trump about Russia’s attempts to influence the U.S. election, he has publicly dismissed that information as unreliable, instead saying this hacking of incredible sophistication and technical complexity could have been done by some 400-pound “guy sitting on their bed” or even a child. 

Officials from two European countries tell Newsweek that Trump’s comments about Russia’s hacking have alarmed several NATO partners because it suggests he either does not believe the information he receives in intelligence briefings, does not pay attention to it, does not understand it or is misleading the American public for unknown reasons. One British official says members of that government who are aware of the scope of Russia’s cyberattacks both in Western Europe and America found Trump’s comments “quite disturbing” because they fear that, if elected, the Republican presidential nominee would continue to ignore information gathered by intelligence services in the formulation of U.S. foreign policy. 

Trump’s behavior, however, has at times concerned the Russians, leading them to revise their hacking and disinformation strategy. For example, when Trump launched into an inexplicable attack on the parents of a Muslim-American soldier who died in combat, the Kremlin assumed the Republican nominee was showing himself psychologically unfit to be president and would be forced by his party to withdraw from the race. As a result, Moscow put its hacking campaign temporarily on hold, ending the distribution of documents until Trump stabilized, both personally and in the polls, according to reports provided to Western intelligence.

America’s European partners are also troubled by the actions of several people close to Trump’s campaign and company. Trump has been surrounded by advisers and associates with economic and familial links to Russia. The publicized connections and contacts between former campaign manager Paul Manafort with Ukraine have raised concerns. Former Trump adviser Carter Page is being probed by American and European intelligence on allegations that he engaged in back-channel discussions with Russian government officials over the summer. Page did travel to Moscow, but he denies any inappropriate contact with Russian officials. The allies are also uneasy about retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, a Trump adviser who was reportedly considered a possible running mate for the GOP nominee. Last December, Flynn attended a dinner at the Metropol Hotel in honor of the 10th anniversary of RT, a Russian news agency that has been publicly identified by American intelligence as a primary outlet for Moscow’s disinformation campaigns. Flynn, who was two seats away from Russian President Vladimir Putin at the dinner, has frequently appeared on RT, despite public warnings by American intelligence that the news agency is used for Russian propaganda. 

Western intelligence has also obtained reports that a Trump associate met with a pro-Putin member of Russian parliament at a building in Eastern Europe maintained by Rossotrudnichestvo, an agency under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that is charged with administering language, education and support programs for civilians. While the purpose of that meeting is unclear, and there is no evidence that Trump was aware it took place, it has become another fact that has alarmed officials from at least one NATO ally. Finally, Trump’s repeated glowing statements about Putin throughout the campaign—and his shocking comment that the Russians were not in Crimea—have perplexed some foreign officials, who fear that under a Trump presidency, the United States would no longer stand with Western Europe in regard to Moscow.

There's a ridiculous amount of circumstantial evidence that strongly suggests Putin has a pretty thick dossier on Trump based on his business dealings in Moscow over the last decade or two.  The Russian term for such intel service blackmail files is a fitting one borrowed from English: kompromat.  And pretty much everything I've read on Trump-Putin screams to me that Putin has the goods on Trump.

Of course, it could be that Trump just really likes the guy and sees the Russians as natural allies. Certainly if Putin does have something bad on Trump, he doesn't have to lord it over the guy for him to want to work with Moscow.

What makes me believe that there's an alliance is the fact that conservatives (and the useful idiot Double G section of the "left") are both saying that these accusations are nothing more than red-baiting "neo-McCarthyism", arguably the dumbest thing I've heard this campaign given Putin's background in intelligence services.

Hit dogs holler the loudest, and these dogs are barking so loudly that it's deafening.

BridgeGate Over Troubled Water, Con't

NJ GOP Gov. Chris Christie, former presidential candidate, Trump's first choice for running mate, and current Trump transition team head, just got the November Surprise of his life.

Two former Chris Christie allies were convicted Friday on all counts in the lane-closure plot known as "Bridgegate."

The New Jersey governor's former deputy chief of staff, Bridget Kelly, and his former top Port Authority official Bill Baroni were found guilty in the plot, a use of George Washington Bridge traffic as a means of political retribution. They are convicted of working with David Wildstein, a former Christie ally who has already pleaded guilty, to get retribution on the Democratic mayor of Fort Lee, who did not endorse Christie in his re-election.

The verdict comes after more than a month of proceedings and an attempt by the defense to declare a mistrial. Sentencing is set for Feb. 21, 2017. 

Christie has denied having any knowledge of the 2013 incident, in which some of the George Washington Bridge was blocked, until after it happened. But some of the testimony in the case implied Christie was aware of the plan before it took place.
Wildstein served as a star witness for the prosecution. 

Christie, who previously had presidential ambitions, heads Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump's transition team. He plans to campaign for Trump in New Hampshire and Pennsylvania this weekend.

So by using Clinton email coverage rules, how doomed is Donald Trump's campaign now by association?  And he's still planning on hitting the campaign trail?

For who, Hillary?

Bye Chris.  Enjoy your impending impeachment trial.

The Most Important Jobs Report In Four Years

...and it may not actually matter one bit to voters in 2016.  Needless to say, it's a good report: October saw 161K new jobs and the unemployment rate down to 4.9%, but voters really don't seem to care at all about jobs (despite saying they do.)

U.S. jobs continued to gain at a steady pace in October and wage gains accelerated, signs that the labor market and economy made steady progress at the start of the fourth quarter. 

Payrolls climbed by 161,000 last month following a 191,000 gain in September that was larger than previously estimated, a Labor Department report showed Friday. The median forecast in a Bloomberg survey called for 173,000. The jobless rate fell to 4.9 percent, while wages rose from a year earlier by the most since 2009.

The figures are likely to keep the Federal Reserve on track to raise borrowing costs next month for the first time in 2016. Underlying the steady gains in employment is a balance between hiring managers’ need to keep up with stable domestic demand and the struggle to match more limited labor to skilled-job vacancies. 

“As it continues to tighten up, firms are going to have to resort more and more to more attractive pay to draw people in,” Stephen Stanley, chief economist at Amherst Pierpont Securities LLC in New York, said before the report. “We’re pretty close to full employment.” 

Workers have been in short supply for 13 straight months, according to the Institute for Supply Management survey of service-industry companies, which make up almost 90 percent of the economy. 

The median forecast in a Bloomberg survey called for a 173,000 advance in payrolls. Estimates in the Bloomberg survey ranged from gains of 105,000 to 208,000 after a previously reported 156,000 September increase. 

Revisions added a total of 44,000 jobs to payrolls in the previous two months.

So 205K total new jobs with the upward revisions, but we're still in real danger of giving the country away to a walking orange bankruptcy (both moral and financial) because Obama failed us with 80 straight months of job growth and Clinton's a real bitch or something.

God we're going to miss the man.

StupidiNews!

• Thousands of protestors took to the street in Jakarta, Indonesia to demand the resignation of the city's governor after charges of blasphemy against Islam in a political speech.
• A new CBS/NY Times poll finds more than 80% of voters are disgusted with the state of American politics in 2016, majorities find both major presidential candidates to be dishonest.
• Iraqi military forces have taken control at least six districts of the embattled city of Mosul from Islamic State militants as coalition forces seek to reach the Tigris River.
• A new study finds that despite the number of uninsured Americans at a record low, two in five adults on Obamacare plans say they still cannot afford to use their insurance.
• Wearable health tracker company Fitbit saw a third of its stock value vanish Thursday as the company announced a major miss on third quarter profits due to increased competition.

Last Call For Endless Blockheads

But please, tell me again how Republicans are bluffing when they talk about never allowing another Democratic Supreme Court nominee ever again when it's now the stated position of conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation?

The conservative group Heritage Action is pushing Republican senators to keep the Supreme Court at eight justices if Democrat Hillary Clinton is elected president.

In a Thursday morning briefing at the Heritage Foundation’s Washington headquarters on Capitol Hill, the group said Republicans should embrace the idea of leaving the Supreme Court without its ninth justice, perhaps for as long as five years. 

Dan Holler, Heritage Action’s vice president of communications and government relations, signaled that this year’s Republican blockade of President Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, is just the beginning of a fight that could last the entire first term of a Clinton presidency.

“You’ve seen John McCain and others talk about the need to not confirm any liberal nominated to the Supreme Court,” Holler said. “That’s exactly the right position to have.”

It’s “unacceptable,” he added, for moderate Republican senators to roll over and allow a President Clinton to shift the court radically to the left.

Holler said the obstruction of any Clinton Supreme Court appointee is going to require “an immense amount of willpower” from Senate Republicans.

Republicans have normalized racism, misogyny, religious bigotry, anti-LGBT hatred and violent persecution of political opponents.  What's the normalization of a eight-person Supreme Court among friends, right?

Pressed on whether he was comfortable going five years without a ninth Supreme Court justice, Holler said there’s “nothing sacrosanct about the number of nine justices.”

“The system that we have set up is one of checks and balances,” he said on Thursday. “The president can certainly nominate somebody, but it’s incumbent upon the Senate to say ‘yes, this person is suitable for that role.’"

“And it’s perfectly within the realm of Republican senators’ rights and prerogatives and with the Constitution and what they campaigned on,” he added, “to say ‘this person will not uphold the Constitution and therefore they don’t deserve to be appointed to the bench.’”

What all this means for Clinton, should she win the presidency, rides to a large extent on which party controls the Senate.

If Democrats win control over the Senate, the likely new majority leader, Charles Schumer (N.Y.), could deploy the so-called nuclear option for a Supreme Court nomination. That would mean changing Senate rules to allow nominees to be confirmed with a simple majority of 51 votes instead of the 60 required to break a Republican filibuster. It’s an extreme move, but not unimaginable given the stakes.

If Republicans hang on to the Senate, however, they can cause huge headaches for Clinton if enough of them buy into the Cruz-Heritage approach.

Holler wouldn’t discuss his private conversations and planning, but it seems clear that Heritage Action, the activist arm of the group, is going to aggressively take up this Supreme Court fight if Clinton wins.

He said he doesn’t accept the view — advanced by Democrats and the media — that obstructing Supreme Court justices is an electoral killer for Republicans. 

He's right.  Republicans control the majority of the Senate, have the largest margin of control in the House since the Great Depression, control a majority of governor's mansions and a majority of state legislatures.  Literally the only thing they don't control in American politics is the White House, and they can happily neuter the presidency all they want to until frustrated Dems simply give up.

If Republicans still control the Senate in January, there will be at least two years of a blockade on everything, and they'll just blame Clinton for doing nothing and get away with it.

In a lot of ways control of the Senate is just as important as the White House, and this is why.

Istanbul Not Constanti-No-Coup, Con't

More than three months after the abortive military coup against Turkish President Erdogan failed miserably, my prediction that "It's going to get nasty in Turkey" has panned out in very unfortunate ways.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has taken advantage of the failed coup attempt in July to carry out a coup of his own.

In the past three months, more than 110,000 people have been purged and nearly 40,000 have been imprisoned in Turkey, a NATO member and close Western ally. The increasingly authoritarian President Erdogan is implementing a slow-motion coup, restructuring the government and civil society through a mass purge of the political opposition.

People from all sectors of society have been targeted — those working in the government, military, courts, media and academia. Over the weekend, more than 10,000 civil servants were fired en masse. Among the purged were health workers and at least 1,200 academics. New government decrees granted Erdogan the power to appoint university officials, while simultaneously stripping lawyer-client confidentiality rights from those detained.

Opposition figures like Sezgin Tanrikulu, a member of parliament from the left-leaning, secular Republican People’s Party, are alarmed. “What the government and Erdogan are doing right now is a direct coup against the rule of law and democracy,” Tanrikulu warned on a Periscope broadcast.

Independent, critical journalism is on the verge of extinction. Outlets that oppose Erdogan’s right-wing, Islamist and neoliberal Justice and Development Party, known by the acronym AKP, have faced raids and arrests.

Erdogan is rolling up anyone suspected of helping the coup attempt, and that includes pretty much everyone who isn't Erdogan. The press, opposition leaders, public intellectuals, lawyers, university professors, civil servants, all are under attack.

But nobody is suffering more than Turkey's Kurdish minority.

Elected mayors and local councils have been fired and replaced with unelected administrators in 27 municipalities in the largely Kurdish southeast, according to Human Rights Watch.

At least 30 elected Turkish mayors are being held in pretrial detention, Human Rights Watch reported. Even more are under criminal investigation on suspicion of supposed terrorism offenses.

On Sunday, the government detained the two elected co-mayors of the predominately Kurdish city of Diyarbakir. Human Rights Watch said they were jailed on “trumped up terrorism charges.”

Two days later, authorities appointed an unelected administrator to run the city. Police also separately detained 30 officials from the left-wing opposition Democratic Regions Party in the area.

In the month of October , the Turkish government jailed 98 officials from the leftist Democratic Regions’ Party, an allied organization of the Peoples’ Democratic Party, a leftist, feminist, pro-Kurdish party that has become the third largest faction in parliament.

The permanent "state of emergency" play is pretty standard in the MENA dictator book, and Erdogan is having a grand time of it. And please remember this is a full-fledged NATO ally here doing this while the EU and US are decidedly busy with larger issues like Syria, Brexit, the US presidential election and Yemen, and Erdogan knows he can pretty much get away with anything right now.

And he is, and he will continue to do so. 

StupidiNews!

• So the Chicago Cubs won Game 7 of the World Series in extra innings, after a rain delay, after blowing a three-run lead, after coming back from being down three games to one.
• A Colorado man has been indicted on federal weapon of mass destruction charges after allegedly leaving an improvised explosive device outside a small-town police station.
• England's High Court has ruled that the British government must win the approval of Parliament to exit the European Union, the May government is expected to appeal.
• President Obama took aim at Donald Trump and GOP lawmakers in North Carolina yesterday in a campaign stop for Hillary Clinton in Chapel Hill.
• Internet backbone provider Level 3 Communications is investigating another large-scale US internet outage on Wednesday morning, the second such outage in two weeks.

Last Call For Mississippi Burning, 2016 Edition

I'm getting bone weary of events like this happening, like's it's something right out of 1968.

Authorities investigating a historically black church burned Tuesday night in Greenville also found "Vote Trump" spraypainted on the side. 

The FBI has been notified of the burning of the Hopewell Missionary Baptist Church. 

“The FBI Jackson Division is aware of the situation in Greenville, and we are working with our local, state and federal law enforcement partners to determine if any civil rights crimes were committed,” said spokesman Brett Carr. 

Fire Chief Ruben Brown tells The Associated Press that firefighters found flames and smoke pouring from the sanctuary of the Hopewell M.B Church just after 9 p.m. Tuesday. 

Brown says there was also a political message spray-painted on the side of the church, but would not say what the message said. 

An online fund has been established to raise money for the church, telling readers, “Can we help show the world, the country, and most importantly, the churchgoers of Hopewell Baptist that we, as a society, are better than this? Please give.”

I'd like to think America is a "better society".  Clearly if Donald Trump has a non-zero chance of being president, we're not, and the above is why.

Yes, these racist events have certainly happened under President Obama's watch. An America without racism is simply not going to happen in my lifetime.  But if we're going to follow Obama up with a guy cheering this on, well...yeah, it was nice knowing all of you.

That's Real White Of You, Con't

The now officially endorsed candidate of the Ku Klux Klan seemingly has no problem taking support from the violent right-wing fringe of the white nationalist movement, and they plan to be out in force in an effort to stop those people from voting on Tuesday.

Neo-Nazi leader Andrew Anglin plans to muster thousands of poll-watchers across all 50 states. His partners at the alt-right website “the Right Stuff” are touting plans to set up hidden cameras at polling places in Philadelphia and hand out liquor and marijuana in the city’s “ghetto” on Election Day to induce residents to stay home. The National Socialist Movement, various factions of the Ku Klux Klan and the white nationalist American Freedom Party all are deploying members to watch polls, either “informally” or, they say, through the Trump campaign. 

The Oath Keepers, a group of former law enforcement and military members that often shows up in public heavily armed, is advising members to go undercover and conduct “intelligence-gathering” at polling places, and Donald Trump ally Roger Stone is organizing his own exit polling, aiming to monitor thousands of precincts across the country.

Energized by Trump’s candidacy and alarmed by his warnings of a “rigged election,” white nationalist, alt-right and militia movement groups are planning to come out in full force on Tuesday, creating the potential for conflict at the close of an already turbulent campaign season. 

“The possibility of violence on or around Election Day is very real,” said Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center. “Donald Trump has been telling his supporters for weeks and weeks and weeks now that they are about to have the election stolen from them by evil forces on behalf of the elites.”

Of course we've seen these threats before, and if anything, they only helped to increase turnout for Democrats in 2008 and 2012.  But the threats themselves are very clear and have been for decades.

It is difficult to know at what scale these plans will materialize because Anglin and his fringe-right ilk are serial exaggerators, according to Potok. And rather than successfully uncover widespread voter fraud — for which there is a lack of compelling evidence — or successfully suppress minority turnout, Potok said the efforts are most likely to backfire.

“If on the morning of Election Day it turns out that we have white supremacists standing around looking threatening at polling places, I think it would arouse anger,” he said. “People would vote just to prove they’re not being intimidated by these radical racists.”

Despite Trump’s claims that American democracy is compromised by massive voter fraud, so far in this election only one person — a Trump supporter in Iowa who attempted to vote twice — has been arrested for it. That has not stopped fringe groups already inclined to believe that minorities are stealing the election from heeding Trump’s call to monitor voting in “certain areas.”

This time around the fear is that it will be different.  So far these idiots haven't been able to cause too much trouble in polling places, but that was before the GOP made voter suppression of black and Latino voters a top priority and nominated a presidential candidate endorsed by the actual KKK.

Of course, the real problem is all the people voting for Trump who are looking the other way on this. They're just as likely to look the other way should violence break out at polling precincts too.

A Split Decision That Splits America

I know we've talked about "2016 Election As..." other presidential election years around here, 1968, 1992, 1976, 1980, 2012 and 2008, but Nate Silver is raising the less-than-zero possibility this turns into the dreaded 2000 where the Republican wins the electoral college but loses the popular vote.

We’ve written about this before, but I wanted to call your attention to it again because the possibility of an Electoral College-popular vote split keeps widening in our forecast. While there’s an outside chance that such a split could benefit Clinton if she wins the exact set of states that form her “firewall,” it’s far more likely to benefit Donald Trump, according to our forecast. Thus, as of early Monday evening, our polls-only model gave Hillary Clinton an 85 percent chance of winning the popular vote but just a 75 percent chance of winning the Electoral College. There’s roughly a 10 percent chance of Trump’s winning the White House while losing the popular vote, in other words.

As an illustration of this, we can compare Clinton’s current margins in our polls-only forecast against President Obama’s performance in 2012. Clinton — despite Trump’s recent improvement in the polls — leads by 4.7 percentage points in the national popular vote, a wider margin than Obama’s 3.9-point victory over Mitt Romney in 2012.

But Clinton is performing worse than Obama in 10 of the 12 states that were generally considered swing states in 2012. In some cases, such as Floridaand Pennsylvania, the difference is negligible. She’s underperforming Obama substantially, however, in Iowa, Michigan, Ohio and Nevada and to a somewhat lesser extent in Wisconsin and Minnesota. She’s considerably outperforming Obama in Virginia and North Carolina, conversely, but that’s not enough to make up for her losses elsewhere.

So how is Clinton doing better in the popular vote overall, despite failing to match Obama’s performance in most of these swing states? A lot of it is her strong performance in red states, or at least red states where a significant number of Romney voters were whites with college degrees. Thus, Clinton is putting states such as Arizona into play and — although she’s unlikely to win them — states such as Texas, Georgia and even Utah are liable to be much closer than we’re used to. Texas, in particular, can cause a potential Electoral College-popular vote skew because of its large and growing population. If the Democrat goes from losing Texas by 15 percentage points to losing it by 5 points instead, that produces a net gain of about 0.6 or 0.7 percentage points of the popular vote — larger than the margin by which Al Gore beat George W. Bush in the popular vote in 2000 — without changing the tally in the Electoral College. 

In other words there's a chance that Clinton will do better in red states like Texas and Georgia this year than Obama did, but still lose those states, and then lose close battles in the Upper Midwest and Rust Belt, on top of losing squeakers in big swing states like NC and Arizona.

That map would basically be the "Trump narrow win" scenario where she loses NC, FL, OH, NV, IA, and CO all by very close margins, and comes tolerably close in TX, GA, MO, AZ and SC, giving Trump an electoral college win, but a popular vote loss.  It's happened at least 4 times before, including 2000. 

The issue then becomes possible automatic recounts if those states are close enough, which is basically the nightmare scenario of this election times ten.

I don't think that's going to happen.  I think Clinton has banked enough early voting lead to prevail and again, Silver's numbers show her with a stronger lead than President Obama had in 2012. I still think she'll win both Florida and North Carolina early on Tuesday night, plus Pennsylvania and Virginia, and this race will essentially be over before 10 PM, Trump will be done.  Without FL and NC, he has no path at all to 270, even if he wins every Midwest and Rocky Mountain state other than Illinois and New Mexico.

Of course I went to bed that night in November 2000 thinking Al Gore had put away the Sunshine State, too.

We'll see.

StupidiNews!

• The Chicago Cubs have overcome a three games to one deficit against the Cleveland Indians to force an historic Game 7 showdown tonight in Cleveland.
• The Standing Rock tribe of Sioux will continue to protest against the construction of an oil pipeline across their land into the cold North Dakota winter, according to the tribe's chairman.
• Donald Trump's hotel in Rio de Janeiro is under investigation by Brazilian prosecutors for possible criminal involvement in state pension fund investments.
• The Pentagon says it will need another half a billion dollars to finish the development of the overrun-plagued F-35 Joint Strike Fighter jet.
• The White House is making plans for a peaceful transition of the President's official social media accounts and to archive posts, tweets, and more after the election.

Last Call For The Grim Darkness Of The Middle Of Next Week

Just to cheer you up, Greg Sargent reminds us that Trump still hasn't said he's going to accept the results of the election next week, and should things actually be close, well...

I feel like America is gonna have a bad time.

The new Washington Post/ABC News national tracking pollfinds Donald Trump leading Clinton by one point in the four-way match-up, 46-45, while Clinton leads in the head-to-head by 48-47. You shouldn’t overreact to individual polls — instead, keep focused on the national and state polling averages. 

But plainly, the race is tightening, and it’s increasingly possible we’ll see a very close finish. Which means that it’s time to start pondering an Election Day nightmare scenario that is made up of two parts. First, the tight finish produces an outcome that is contested well beyond Election Day, with Trump (should he lose) claiming the results are rigged. Second, Trump supplements his claim about the rigged outcome by continuing to point to the FBI’s latest discovery of emails as proof of an ongoing cover-up of Hillary Clinton’s criminality. 

This morning, election rules expert Michael McDonald arguesthat if the outcome is close, the election could very well “go into overtime,” adding that “in this environment,” this could “rip this country apart.” McDonald posits that in a very close finish, Trump could be favored on election night, but over subsequent days, as the vote counting continues afterwards, Clinton might then edge into the lead:

A Democratic shift from election night to the final tally of votes is predictable. All states count some ballots late, and those tend to break towards Democrats. Nothing nefarious occurs: the casting and counting follow procedures laid out in state law. Some of the states that count more late ballots are key battlegrounds, magnifying the suspense on Election Night. 

Mail ballots are one of two types that can shift election results. Many states require mail ballots to be receivedby election officials on Election Day. Others continue to accept ballots postmarked on Election Day, up to two weeks following the election. Among these states are Iowa, North Carolina, Ohio, and Wisconsin. 

These late ballots may break towards the Democrats. My analysis shows more Democrats than Republicans in Iowa and North Carolina have yet to return their mail ballots. Why? These voters tend to be younger people who tend to return their ballots later. If Trump is slightly ahead in a late mail-ballot return state, he could fall behind after all the mail ballots are counted. 

Then there are provisional ballots. States are required under federal law to provide them to anyone with a problem at the polls — a voter who doesn’t have the required form of ID, for instance, or whose name is missing from the voter registration rolls. Election officials review provisional ballots and allow voters to clarify their eligibility after Election Day. In the four states that report separate results for provisional ballots, the voters who cast them broke strongly for the Democrats. So if the presidential race is particularly close, provisional ballots could tilt it. 

There’s still more in the link, but you get the idea. Meanwhile, Bloomberg Politics reports that both sides are now gearing up in a serious way for the possibility of a legally contested outcome.

In other words, if you think this election will finally be over next week, well, I have some bad news.

That's the nightmare scenario, yes.  The good news is that I still believe we'll be looking at an Obama 2012-level win, if not an Obama 2008-level win for Clinton next week, an election that Trump will be forced to accept as a loss.

The bad news is the GOP is probably going for total scorched earth staring November 9th no matter what Clinton's winning margin is.  Hopefully we can wrest control of the Senate away from them and get something done, but until that happens, the Republicans plan to punish as much of the country as possible for daring to vote for the Democrats.

Hopefully we'll punish them back.

The Clinton Prime Directive

Matthew Yglesias has a thoughtful piece on Clinton Derangement Syndrome over the last 25 years, and where we are a week from the election.

The latest Hillary Clinton email revelations arose out of an unrelated investigation into Anthony Weiner’s sexting. 

The best way to understand this odd hopscotch is through the Prime Directive of Clinton investigations: We know the Clintons are guilty, the only question is what are they guilty of and when will we find the evidence? 

So somehow an investigation that once upon a time was about a terrorist attack on an American consulate becomes an inquiry into FOIA compliance which shifts into a question about handling of classified material. A probe of sexting by the husband of a woman who works for Clinton morphs into a quest for new emails, and if the emails turn out not to be new at all (which seems likely) it will morph into some new questions about Huma Abedin’s choice of which computers to use to check her email. 

Clinton has been very thoroughly investigated, and none of the earlier investigations came up with any crimes. So now the Prime Directive compels her adversaries to look under a new rock and likewise compels cable television and many major newspapers to treat the barest hint of the possibility of new evidence that might be damning as a major development. 

It’s the same drive that led to Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial on the grounds that he had perjured himself to try to cover up an affair that was uncovered in an investigation that was originally supposed to be looking into a years-old Arkansas land deal on which the Clintons had lost money. The Whitewater investigation did not reveal any crimes. So rather than wrap things up and consider the Clintons exonerated, the investigators went looking under other rocks and came up with Monica Lewinsky. 

There are several rules that govern media coverage of the Clintons, but this year the Prime Directive has dominated them all. Network news has devoted more minutes of coverage to Clinton’s emails than to all policy issues combined even as email investigations have not uncovered any wrongdoing. It’s inexplicable news judgment, unless you simply assume there’s a crime out there.

And Yggy does a great job of nailing the how, who, what and where, but not so much the why.

In Prime Directive terms, the Weiner laptop is a major break. After all, the evidence of guilt must be out there somewhere. So why not Anthony Weiner’s laptop? 

It’s only when you step outside the circle of madness that you can see how ridiculous this is. If nobody had ever seen a Hillary Clinton email before, uncovering a trove of them on the laptop of the estranged husband of one of her key aides might be a big deal. But Hillary’s email has already been exhaustively investigated from multiple different angles and it shows no wrongdoing whatsoever. If you assume there is wrongdoing then, yes, maybe all evidence of the wrongdoing was suppressed from what was turned over and Weiner’s computer contains secret new damning emails. 

But what if all previous investigations have shown no wrongdoing because there was no wrongdoing? And what if the client-side copies of emails on Weiner’s computer are just client-side copies of emails, just like the emails in the inbox of everyone else who downloads email to a computer? What if Benghazi was just a tragedy and an example of how bad things happen in war zones? What if Whitewater was just a land deal on which some people lost money because real estate speculation is risky? What if Clinton has been getting away with it for all these years because she hasn’t done anything wrong?

The answer is actually pretty simple: it means that the last quarter-century of cable news's holy grail, the Story That Brings Down The Clintons, never existed.  It's Melville's tale of the white whale written across an entire industry, from Chris Matthews to Rush Limbaugh to Andrea Mitchell to Matt Drudge.  Being the ones to destroy the Clintons would instantly make you as mythical as Bob Woodward overnight, and everyone in the news industry since 1993 has been looking to nail Bill and Hillary on something.

Imagine that being your entire career goal and never finding it.  What reason did you go into the news business if you can't pin the story of the century on the Clintons?

They simply have to be guilty.  It's a madness that has infected the media and the country like a virus for more than two decades now.  And if they're not, what it means is that the Clintons have played the game better than anyone in Washington since the start and beat them all.

Including all the Village.

And that is the "why" to this story.

Getting Taken For A Ride

The problem with the "gig economy" where we all magically get to choose our own customers and work schedules and then use the power of technology to leverage that is that 1) bad choices are still made by people and 2) the tech has no ability to fix those bad choices.  Take ride-sharing apps, for example.

The National Bureau of Economic Research, a respected non-profit and non-partisan research organization, has released the findings of a two-year study that tracked discrimination of riders using Uber, Lyft, and Flywheel in Seattle and Boston. The study was done by researchers at MIT, Stanford and the University of Washington.

The study involved nearly 1,500 rides across the two cities, with work beginning in Seattle late last year to this March. Undergrads from the University of Washington were given identical phones with the three ride-sharing apps pre-loaded, instructed to take a handful of prescribed routes, and then noting when the ride was requested, when it was accepted by the driver, when they were picked up, and finally when they got to their destination.

In the Seattle experiment, trip requests from black riders took between 16 to 28 percent longer to be accepted by both UberX and Lyft, and breaking UberX out showed a wait time of 29 to 35 percent longer than their white counterparts. 

Those figures are based on UberX usage, primarily because of the different ways a new ride is displayed to the driver through the Uber or Lyft app. 

For Uber, drivers don’t see the name of the person they’re picking up until they accept the fare, at which point they can cancel. But for Lyft, which displays the rider’s name and picture (if they included it) before they accept the fare, means trying to quantize discriminatory practices through Lyft is largely impossible—a model Uber could conceivably adopt. 

For the Boston experiment, the team turned to a previous study by NBER that sent identical resumes to potential employers, with one set having what’s described as an “African America-sounding” first name and another with a “white-sounding” first name. The results showed that callbacks for the former happened about one-third less.

The researchers for the ride-sharing study took a similar tack, using names from the 2003 survey to set up two different Uber and Lyft accounts for each rider—one with an “African American-sounding” name and another with a “white-sounding” name. The team also made another change from its Seattle methodology; rather than picking an equal number of black and white and male and female riders, they recruited students with a range of ethnicities “whose appearance allowed them to plausibly travel as a passenger of either race,” the study states.

For the men involved in the study, those that used the profile and appeared to be black riders had a cancellation rate more than twice as high as a profile of a rider who appeared to be white (11.2 percent vs. 4.5 percent). 

Women didn’t fare much better, with a cancellation rate of 8.4 percent when using the African American-sounding name and 5.4 percent when using the white-sounding first name. 

Worse, in low population density areas where getting a ride can be challenging, users with African American-sounding names were cancelled at a rate of 15.7 percent—triple that of white males.

And frankly, until Uber gets the bejesus sued out of it, they're not going to do a damn thing.  Yes, I know I pick on Uber a lot and that systemic racism in America was a problem long before Silicon Valley ever got the idea to let people turn their cars into cabs for cash, but the problem with Uber and a lot of other social tech is that the "freedom to choose your customers" and the "selectivity aspect" of who you want to deal with in a business relationship starts to look a whole lot like a pattern of systemic racism and sexism when put out in the real world.

Worse, it's looking more and more like that setup is one of the main selling points as working as a contractor for the gig economy.  It's not a bug, kids,

It's a feature.  And they don't want to "fix" it.

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