Last Call For Iran It Into The Ground

I think we have our October Surprise candidate for the midterms.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has evacuated diplomats from the U.S. consulate in Basra after what he called “increasing and specific threats and incitement to attack” U.S. personnel in Iraq emanating from Iran.

Basra has been the scene of violent protests this month, including rocket attacks on the consulate that occurred as recently as today. While the Basra consulate is shuttered, a statement from Pompeo indicated that the risk to U.S. diplomats exists in Baghdad as well, where he said forces loyal to Iran had launched indirect fire attacks.

He said any harm to U.S. personnel will lead to Iran being held “directly responsible,” and conveyed that message through the Iraqi government, over which Iranian influence is growing. Iran’s escalating threats in Iraq cap a week that has seen the Trump administration launch a diplomatic broadside against Tehran in the United Nations and insist that 2,000 U.S. troops will remain in Syria until Iran withdraws its own.

A blanket preliminary blaming of Iran for anything that happens to US personnel in Iraq, 40 days out from midterm elections, is a recipe for making the Kavanaugh debacle and the Mueller probe vanish off the front page for weeks.

This definitely feels like a "Wag the Dog" scenario, coming just hours after Israel once again accused Iran of having a secret WMD stockpile.

Clandestine nuclear dumping. Concealing atomic material near a rug-cleaning plant. Lying to international partners.

Accusing Iran of all of the above, Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu fired a new salvo Thursday in his campaign to prove that Tehran can’t be trusted and poses a massive threat to international security.

In response, Iran shrugged.

Netanyahu’s presentation at the U.N. General Assembly — brandishing props and exhibiting his trademark showmanship — marked the latest in a run of revelations or accusations about Iran’s nuclear program, as he ratchets up his campaign against the 2015 global accord that’s meant to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.

He challenged U.N. nuclear inspectors to examine a new “secret atomic warehouse” near Tehran — but it’s unclear whether the announcement sheds new light on what inspectors already knew, or proves that Iran is violating the 2015 deal.

The warehouse announcement showcased Netanyahu’s unyielding views on Iran and anger at Europeans he accuses of appeasing Israel’s enemies.

Showing a map and photo of the site on oversize boards, he said Iran concealed “massive amounts of equipment and material” in a facility near a rug-cleaning plant in the Turquzabad district. He said Iranian officials cleared out some radioactive material in recent weeks and secretly released it around Tehran.

“You have to ask yourself a question: Why did Iran keep a secret atomic archive and a secret atomic warehouse?” he asked. “What Iran hides, Israel will find.”

Both Trump and Netanyahu are in deep political trouble, both of them mired in scandal that could lead to impeachment.  Both of them now pushing a need for potentially immediate military action against Tehran.

This is raising all sorts of alarm bells taken together.  Pretending that Trump would never try this is insane.  Democrats need to be raising holy hell over this now that our intelligence services are suddenly believable again to the Trump regime.

Stay tuned.  Things just got very, very serious.

Supreme Misgivings, Con't

So as expected, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted 11-10 along party lines to advance Trump's Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, to a full Senate vote.  Those are the facts.  That's not the news.  The news is Sen. Jeff Flake absolutely living up to his name.

Sen. Jeff Flake said he will vote to advance Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court with the understanding that the sexual assault accusation against him will be investigated by the FBI.

“I think it would be proper to delay the floor vote for up to but not more than one week in order to let the FBI do an investigation limited in time and scope,” Flake said on Friday afternoon, just hours after announcing he would support Kavanaugh.

Of course, that means Mitch McConnell has to delay the vote, and Donald Trump has to get the FBI to open the investigation, neither of which happened nor will happen.

But something might have happened, and that something is Donald Trump may have reached his limit.

Per pool: Pres Trump called Ford's testimony both "compelling" and "credible." He was very pleased with Kavanaugh's testimony. He said he refused to twist any arms of undecided senators saying he had "no message" for them and they have to do what makes them comfortable.

— Yamiche Alcindor (@Yamiche) September 28, 2018

Now, the most likely outcome is that Mitch knows he has 50 votes without Flake and wrenches enough arms out of sockets to get his procedural vote tomorrow and full vote on Monday.

But just maybe that's not how this plays out.  Maybe Mitch doesn't have the 50 votes without Flake.  Maybe he does with Joe Manchin and Heidi Heitkamp defecting from the Democrats, and he can let Flake, Collins, and Murkowski go.

Maybe this isn't over yet.

We'll see tomorrow.

Climate Of Destruction

The Trump regime is more than happy to let the rich strip-mine the country for every last dollar of profit and let the poors kill each other over food and water while they stay in gated enclaves protected by armies of police with military surplus weapons, you see.  They no longer deny climate change will be a global catastrophe.  They just don't give a damn anymore, and never did.

Last month, deep in a 500-page environmental impact statement, the Trump administration made a startling assumption: On its current course, the planet will warm a disastrous 7 degrees by the end of this century.

A rise of 7 degrees Fahrenheit, or about 4 degrees Celsius, compared with preindustrial levels would be catastrophic, according to scientists. Many coral reefs would dissolve in increasingly acidic oceans. Parts of Manhattan and Miami would be underwater without costly coastal defenses. Extreme heat waves would routinely smother large parts of the globe.

But the administration did not offer this dire forecast, premised on the idea that the world will fail to cut its greenhouse gas emissions, as part of an argument to combat climate change. Just the opposite: The analysis assumes the planet’s fate is already sealed.

The draft statement, issued by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), was written to justify President Trump’s decision to freeze federal fuel efficiency standards for cars and light trucks built after 2020. While the proposal would increase greenhouse gas emissions, the impact statement says, that policy would add just a very small drop to a very big, hot bucket.

“The amazing thing they’re saying is human activities are going to lead to this rise of carbon dioxide that is disastrous for the environment and society,” said Michael MacCracken, who served as a senior scientist at the U.S. Global Change Research Program from 1993 to 2002. “And then they’re saying they’re not going to do anything about it.”

The document projects that global temperature would rise by nearly 3.5 degrees Celsius from what it averaged between 1986 and 2005 regardless of whether Obama-era tailpipe standards take effect or are frozen for six years, as the Trump administration has proposed. The global average temperature rose more than 0.5 degrees Celsius between 1880, the start of industrialization, and 1986, which means the analysis assumes a roughly 4 degree Celsius or 7 degree Fahrenheit rise from preindustrial levels.

The world would have to make deep carbon cuts to avoid the kind of drastic warming envisioned in this 2100 scenario, the analysis states, which “would require substantial increases in technology innovation and adoption compared to today’s levels and would require the economy and the vehicle fleet to move away from the use of fossil fuels, which is not currently technologically feasible or economically feasible.”

The White House did not respond to requests for comment.

The regime has declared that the problem of climate change is real, but it is too costly to fix, so America will no longer try to do so.

One has to wonder that since we apparently just declared war on the rest of the planet's population, how long the earth's other 7.5 billion people will choose to tolerate that situation.

My guess is not much longer.

StupidiNews!

• All passengers and crew aboard Air Niugini Flight 72 are safe after the Boeing 737 missed the runway and crashed into the ocean at Weno Airport in Micronesia.
• The House Intelligence Committee is expected to vote Friday on releasing transcripts of interviews with Trump regime staff about Russian election interference.
• Boeing has won the contract to make the Air Force's next-generation training jets and simulators, the contract is worth nearly $10 billion starting in 2023.
• Senate Republicans are expected to move forward on Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation with a committee vote as early as today, and a full Senate vote by Monday.
• The CDC says last year's flu season killed 80,000 Americans, the worst in over a decade, but vaccination was more effective than usual this year, preventing flu 40% of the time.

Last Call For Russian To Judgment

What happens when increasingly unprotected and already vulnerable US voting systemss meet Putin's latest spyware weapon?  A recipe for a blue wave that vanishes before it's ever recorded.

Russia’s GRU has secretly developed and deployed new malware that’s virtually impossible to eradicate, capable of surviving a complete wipe of a target computer’s hard drive, and allows the Kremlin’s hackers to return again and again.

The malware, uncovered by the European security company ESET, works by rewriting the code flashed into a computer’s UEFI chip, a small slab of silicon on the motherboard that controls the boot and reboot process. Its apparent purpose is to maintain access to a high-value target in the event the operating system gets reinstalled or the hard drive replaced—changes that would normally kick out an intruder.

It’s proof that the hackers known as Fancy Bear “may be even more dangerous than previously thought,” company researchers wrote in a blog post. They’re set to present a paper on the malware at the Blue Hat security conference Thursday.

U.S. intelligence agencies have identified Fancy Bear as two units within Russia’s military intelligence directorate, the GRU, and last July Robert Mueller indicted 12 GRU officers for Fancy Bear’s U.S. election interference hacking.

The advanced malware shows the Kremlin’s continued investment in the hacking operation that staged some of the era’s most notorious intrusions, including the 2016 Democratic National Committee hack. The GRU’s hackers have been active for at least 12 years, breaching NATO, Obama’s White House, a French television station, the World Anti-Doping Agency, countless NGOs, and military and civilian agencies in Europe, Central Asia, and the Caucasus. Last year, they targeted targeted Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill, who’s facing a hotly contested 2018 re-election race.

“There’s been no deterrence to Russian hacking,” said former FBI counterterrorism agent Clint Watts, a research fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. “And as long as there’s no deterrence, they’re not going to stop, and they’re going to get more and more sophisticated.”

As sophisticated as it is, Russia’s new malware works only on PCs with security weaknesses in the existing UEFI configuration. It also isn’t the first code to hide in the UEFI chip. Security researchers have demonstrated the vulnerability with proof-of-concept code in the past, and a 2015 leak showed that commercial spyware manufacturer Hacking Team offered UEFI persistence as an option in one of their products. There’s even evidence that Fancy Bear borrowed snippets of Hacking Team’s code, ESET said.

Malware that invades the motherboard and is impossible to get rid of?  Sounds like the perfect weapon to wreck America on, say, an important election.

Not saying it's going to happen of course, but then again, there's no reason to believe that the Trump regime is going to do anything should Russia decide to make a move using this little surprise, either...

Supreme Misgivings, Con't

The Senate confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh today were a complete and utter disaster for the GOP in every conceivable way.

“It looks like she’s crying,” Hilda Darkins said, as several retirees around her dabbed their own eyes. “Who can blame her?”

At the Mid-County Senior Center in Lake Worth, Fla., two dozen people sat around circular tables, facing the television. They watched Christine Blasey Ford, who was watching in silence as Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) read lengthy opening statements.

Then Ford herself began to speak.

“She looks scared, and she looks nervous. But I think she’s telling the truth,” said Myrtle Facey, 78, a retired cashier. “She may have waited a long time to talk about it, but this is something that will never leave you, no matter what happens. You always remember it. You may not think of it every day, but it will always be with you, just like learning the ABCs. You never forget.”

On Thursday morning, Ford’s testimony — about an alleged sexual assault in the early 1980s by Brett M. Kavanaugh, now a nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court — transfixed Americans in coffee shops, subway cars and Capitol hallways. It was a moment with tremendous political stakes: Kavanaugh’s nomination itself seemed in doubt, and with it a firmer conservative majority on the nation’s highest court.

Dr. Ford gave a heartfelt, emotional testimony and it destroyed any doubt that she was assaulted by Brett Kavanaugh some 30 years ago. It became a national event of importance.

The power of the moment — the reason that people cried in airplane seats and called into C-SPAN to tell their own stories of sexual assault — was in seeing Ford tell a story of private pain before a massive public audience.

It was to see her speak, without knowing yet who would believe her.

“16A: Crying. 14B: Crying. 17C: Weeping,” Ron Lieber, a New York Times columnist, wrote on Twitter from a flight headed from New York to Salt Lake City, listing the reactions as passengers watched the hearing on seat-back televisions. “I am one of the criers.”

As the hearings began, some of the busiest places in the country fell quiet. At the New York Stock Exchange, Brad Smith — an anchor for the news site Cheddar — said normally frenetic traders were all watching the TVs. Phones rang in the background, unanswered.

In the Capitol building itself, the halls were quiet, as senators not on the Senate Judiciary Committee bunkered in their offices to watch TV.

At the Department of Housing and Urban Development, so many employees watched the hearings on their computers that the I.T. department warned they would overwhelm the network.

In one therapist’s office in Washington, two women sat in the waiting room, listening to the hearing on tiny cellphone speakers. One reached for the other’s hand.

And then later this afternoon, America met the real Brett Kavanaugh, and the real Senate GOP.

After riveting testimony from Dr. Blasey, Judge Kavanaugh took his turn before the Senate Judiciary Committee to proclaim his innocence — and outrage.

He opened the second half of the high-stakes hearing with a scorched-earth defense, denying he had ever sexually assaulted someone and denouncing a “frenzy” bent on destroying his nomination.

“This confirmation process has become a national disgrace,” he said in an opening statement that he said he wrote himself on Wednesday. “The Constitution gives the Senate an important role in the confirmation process, but you have replaced ‘advice and consent’ with ‘search and destroy.’”

He condemned Democrats who he said had searched for reasons to sink him weeks before, only to turn to dark accusations. He pointed back at deep-seated liberal grudges, going back to the presidency of Bill Clinton and the victory of Mr. Trump as evidence of the animus. And he warned of dire consequences for the federal judiciary in decades ahead if nominees face a path like his.

And when he recounted his daughters praying last night for Dr. Blasey, he broke down in tears.

“My family and my name have been totally and permanently destroyed by vicious and false additional allegations,” he told the committee. But he vowed never to withdraw.

“You may defeat me in the final vote, but you will never get me to quit,” he said. “Never.”

Dr. Ford was filled with fear and trepadation as she laid herself bare before America.  Judge Kavanaugh was incandescently incensed that he had be inconvenienced by this mere woman on the way to his Supreme Court appointment for life.

The Judiciary Committee will vote tomorrow on Kavanaugh's confirmation, the entire Senate on Saturday, and nothing makes me think that Brett Kavanaugh won't be sworn in by Monday to start destroying 80 years of classic liberalism, civil rights, and equality.

But America won't soon forget this hearing, this day.

And they will speak in November at the ballot box.

The Blue Wave Rises, Con't

Yesterday I talked about how Republicans were cutting campaign funds to seats they had given up on as indefensible as America gets closer to midterm elections in less than six weeks. Now, Republicans have a bigger problem as they are finding out that there's basically no such thing as a safe House district anymore as more and more GOP-held seats that were out of the picture as recently as last month are now completely in play, and Republicans are scrambling to defend them.

Internal Democratic polling conducted in August and September revealed the party's candidate leading or trailing by small margins in a dozen seats on the outer edges of the battlefield. And outside money is already starting to flow beyond the 50 or so districts that initially drew major TV ad reservations.

The GOP's top House super PAC, the Congressional Leadership Fund, funneled nearly $3 million into a few sleeper races that had previously received little national attention. And the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee booked more than $100,000 of airtime in Republican Rep. Mike Kelly’s northwestern Pennsylvania district, which President Trump carried by 20 points.

“For Republicans, this is a game of Whac-A-Mole,” said John Lapp, a Democratic strategist who served as the DCCC’s executive director in 2006. “With a battleground map this big, they simply can’t be everywhere. There are competitive races in blue, purple, and ruby-red districts popping up every day.“

The CLF launched ad buys last week in seats held by Reps. George Holding of North Carolina, Fred Upton of Michigan, and Rodney Davis of Illinois, where private Democratic polling has found tight contests.

Two or more internal Democratic surveys conducted in the past two months found single-digit races in seats held by Republican Reps. Jaime Herrera Beutler of Washington, Rob Woodall of Georgia, Vern Buchanan of Florida, Ted Budd of North Carolina, Ann Wagner of Missouri, Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, and John Carter of Texas, and in Florida's open 15th District.

And multiple Democratic polls have found a single-digit race in Montana, where former state Rep. Kathleen Williams is challenging Republican Rep. Greg Gianforte.

Several of these seats are in costly media markets, which can complicate the ability of outside groups from either side to make a serious investment. But nearly all are districts Trump carried by margins ranging from 5 points to 13 points, and the polling is a sign of increasingly unfavorable atmospherics for Republicans after a turbulent summer.

"Almost nobody should assume that they’re cruising," Republican pollster Glen Bolger said. "If the president won by 10 points or less, it's a competitive race."

Most federal election years there's maybe 20 competitive House races.  Even with all 435 House seats up for grab every two years, most elections see maybe 5% of those seats ever in any danger of changing hands, and maybe half that as truly competitive, counting both parties.

2018 is massively different.  Republicans face defending more than 70 seats, that's nearly a third of their caucus, and 50-60 of those seats are legitimately in play, with 25 or so true tossups.

Now we're seeing 8 more seats shift from in play to competitive.

Cook Political Report's House ratings find a similar shift.  Democrats have 4 open seats to defend that are competitive and 9 more that are in play (a normal election cycle total) but Republicans now have 68 seats that are competitive and have to defend another 25 on top of that.

The losses for the GOP could be catastrophic, on the level of 2010 for the Democrats, just from the number of seats in play.  Yes, Dems could gain 60 seats.  It's that bad for the GOP right now.

It's only going to get worse if we provide the finishing blow.

StupidiNews!

• A man was arrested at Dublin airport in Ireland after breaking onto the tarmac to catch his missed Ryanair flight to Amsterdam, the man was detained for questioning by police.
• Donald Trump has rejected Canadian PM Justin Trudeau's offer to meet personally over NAFTA talks, Trump is threatening new auto tariffs on Canada and NAFTA talks have stalled. 
• The 5th Circuit has upheld Louisiana's law requiring abortion clinic doctors must have hospital admitting privileges, in a 2-1 decision the court ruled the law was not undue burden on women.
• Donald Trump is unhappy with the Fed raising interest rates to 2.25% yesterday, saying he doesn't agree with Fed Chairman Jerome Powell's decision to do so six weeks before midterms.
• Japanese space exploration company ispace says it will purchase two SpaceX Falcon rockets and go to the moon by 2030, company founder Takeshi Hakamada sees lunar tourism by 2040.

Last Call For Russian To Judgment, Con't

A sobering warning from Natasha Betrand in The Atlantic that there's a definite reason why Donald Trump wants Brett Kavanaugh confirmed on the Supreme Court as the new term begins October 1: he would almost certainly be the deciding vote in an upcoming SCOTUS 5-4 case decision that could give Trump pardon power over state crimes as well as federal ones.

A key Republican senator has quietly weighed in on an upcoming Supreme Court case that could have important consequences for Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.

The Utah lawmaker Orrin Hatch, who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee, filed a 44-page amicus brief earlier this month in Gamble v. United States, a case that will consider whether the dual-sovereignty doctrine should be put to rest. The 150-year-old exception to the Fifth Amendment’s double-jeopardy clause allows state and federal courts to prosecute the same person for the same criminal offense. According to the brief he filed on September 11, Hatch believes the doctrine should be overturned. “The extensive federalization of criminal law has rendered ineffective the federalist underpinnings of the dual sovereignty doctrine,” his brief reads. “And its persistence impairs full realization of the Double Jeopardy Clause’s liberty protections.”

Within the context of the Mueller probe, legal observers have seen the dual-sovereignty doctrine as a check on President Donald Trump’s power: It could discourage him from trying to shut down the Mueller investigation or pardon anyone caught up in the probe, because the pardon wouldn’t be applied to state charges. Under settled law, if Trump were to pardon his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, for example—he was convicted last month in federal court on eight counts of tax and bank fraud—both New York and Virginia state prosecutors could still charge him for any crimes that violated their respective laws. (Both states have a double-jeopardy law that bars secondary state prosecutions for committing “the same act,” but there are important exceptions, as the Fordham University School of Law professor Jed Shugerman has noted.) If the dual-sovereignty doctrine were tossed, as Hatch wants, then Trump’s pardon could theoretically protect Manafort from state action.

If Trump were to shut down the investigation or pardon his associates, “the escape hatch, then, is for cases to be farmed out or picked up by state-level attorneys general, who cannot be shut down by Trump and who generally—but with some existing limits—can charge state crimes even after a federal pardon,” explained Elie Honig, a former assistant U.S. attorney in New Jersey. “If Hatch gets his way, however, a federal pardon would essentially block a subsequent state-level prosecution.”

A spokesman for the senator denied that his brief was inspired by the Mueller investigation, noting that Hatch has “worked for years to address the problem of overcriminalization in our federal code” and wants the Court “to reconsider the rationale” for the doctrine “in light of the rapid expansion of both the scope and substance of modern federal criminal law.”

But while Hatch has earned his bona fides in the arena of criminal-justice reform, the timing of his filing is nevertheless significant. For months, the Gamble case has been analyzed through the lens of the Mueller investigation, and Brett Kavanaugh, Trump’s nominee to replace the retired Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, could be on the bench by the time the Court reconvenes this fall. The justices decided to hear the case one day after Kennedy announced his retirement.

In other words, this case was hand-selected to send to the Supreme Court, and Kennedy's retirement the last obstacle Trump needed gone in order to install the SCOTUS vote that would assure his federal pardons would mean that state charges could not be brought on the same crimes.

Trump could then pardon everyone involved, including himself, and then be insulated from state charges.  All of it would go away, investigation, charges, or not.

This is what Kavanaugh has to be on the court to do.  This was the plan all along.  Mueller may lower the boom on Trump, but the means are in place for him to escape completely from any sort of justice, along with all his co-conspirators.

A Republic, if you can keep it...

The Blue Wave Rises, Con't

Across the river in Ohio, things are looking a lot better for Democrats then they were two years ago when Trump won the state by 8 points, as Dem Sen. Sherrod Brown looks to be on the path to easy reelection and in better news, Dem Richard Cordray has tied up the Governor's race with Mike DeWine.

"Two years have made a big difference in the outlook of Ohio voters," Dr. Lee M. Miringoff, the director of the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion.

"Donald Trump won the state by more than eight points. But, now, a majority want more Democrats in Congress as a check on his agenda."

Both Cordray and DeWine get support from 47 percent of likely voters; six percent say they're undecided.

Among registered voters, it's the same tie at 47 percent each. That's a tightening from NBC/Marist's last poll in June, which showed DeWine up with registered voters, 46 percent to 42 percent.

When candidates from the Green Party and Libertarian Party added to ballot, Cordray and DeWine both pull 44 percent.

The two gubernatorial hopefuls have similar favorability ratings among likely voters, with Cordray having lower negatives. Forty-four percent of likely voters view him favorably, compared to 28 percent who view him unfavorably (+16) .For Dewine, he's viewed favorably by 47 percent of likely voters and negatively by 36 percent (+11). Twenty-eight percent of likely voters aren't sure how to rate Cordray, while 17 percent are unsure about DeWine.

In the Senate race, Brown holds a 13-point lead over Renacci among both likely and registered voters, 52 percent to 39 percent, unchanged from June's NBC/Marist poll.

Brown's lead comes thanks to a 29-point advantage with likely independent voters and a 49-point lead among likely moderates. Renacci trails with every demographic breakdown — income bracket, education level, race, and age group — except for his 4-point advantage with likely male voters. Brown holds a 29-point lead with likely female voters.

These results sit against the backdrop of relatively stable approval numbers for Trump among all Ohio adults. Forty-three percent approve of Trump's job as president, compared to 49 percent who disapprove. In June, 40 percent approved and 48 percent disapproved of his job performance.

What a difference two years of Trump makes.  In early 2017, Brown was considered among the most vulnerable Democrats in the midterms, and Mike DeWine was considered a shoo-in to continue John Kasich's GOP policies.

Now Brown has a double-digit lead, and Cordray has tied the race up with six weeks to go. Suddenly, Trump isn't so hot in a state getting pummeled by tariffs on farmers and automotive parts makers.

And in the House, Republicans are already starting to pull the plug on losing campaigns in order to try to save the competitive races they can.

Republicans are performing critical triage to their midterm spending strategy as they seek to hold on to their House majority in a difficult midterm year.

The House GOP’s campaign arm pulled the plug on its remaining ad buys last week for the Pittsburgh media market, where Rep. Keith Rothfus (R-Pa.) is desperately fighting to hang on to his seat in a race against Rep. Conor Lamb (D-Pa.).

It’s grim news for Rothfus, who has largely been seen as a dead man walking since redistricting left him with a Democratic-leaning district and a difficult opponent in Lamb.

For the GOP, it’s likely a sign of things to come as the party seeks to target its money toward the races most likely to save its majority. Democrats need 23 seats to take back control of the House, and the GOP is defending dozens of seats that are seen as vulnerable.

“It’s a giant chessboard,” said one longtime GOP operative. “There’s obviously limited resources, and you need to make tough decisions. This is sort of an art form as opposed to a science.”

It's a giant chessboard, but with Trump tied around their necks, the game is now sink or swim, and they're drowning.

The Whole Saturday Night Massacre Thing, Con't

The Village media is desperately trying to redeem themselves after Monday's Rod Rosenstein "is he fired or isn't he" fiasco, and frankly they're not doing a very good job of it if this is the best they can do.

Rod J. Rosenstein’s departure seemed so certain this week that his boss’s chief of staff told colleagues that he had been tapped by the White House to take over as second-in-command of the Justice Department, while another official would supervise the special counsel probe into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, people familiar with the matter said.

But by Monday afternoon, the succession plan had been scrapped. Rosenstein, who told the White House he was willing to quit if President Trump wouldn’t disparage him, would remain the deputy attorney general in advance of a high-stakes meeting on Thursday to discuss the future of his employment. The other officials, too, would go back to work, facing the prospect that in just days they could be leading the department through a historic crisis.

Inside the Justice Department on Tuesday, officials still struggled to understand the events that nearly produced a seismic upheaval in their leadership ranks — until it didn’t — and they braced for a potential repeat of that chaos later in the week.

Some officials said that Matt Whitaker, Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s chief of staff, had told people he would be taking over for Rosenstein — an indication that the deputy attorney general’s departure was all but certain — and were surprised when it was announced that Rosenstein would remain in his job. Sessions began telling people on Sunday that Rosenstein might be in trouble, according to people familiar with the matter. Others said they learned all the developments from news reports that evolved throughout the day.

The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to reporters.

While it remained possible that Rosenstein could still resign or be fired imminently, people inside and outside the department said it seemed increasingly more likely that Rosenstein would stay in the job until after November’s elections and then depart, probably along with the attorney general. Two White House officials said Tuesday that Trump is unlikely to fire Rosenstein until after the midterms.

Forcing out the deputy attorney general in the next month could motivate Trump’s detractors to turn out for elections in which dozens of congressional seats are in play and Republicans are fearful they are at risk of losing control of the House. And those who have observed Trump and Rosenstein together or have been told of their interactions said the president seemed to hold Rosenstein in somewhat higher regard than he did Sessions.

“For all of the president’s bluster, I’m not sure he doesn’t have at least some grudging respect for Rod,” said James M. Trusty, a friend of Rosenstein and former Justice Department official who works in private practice at Ifrah Law.

 Breaking all this down,this is where the Washington Post is on Rosenstein:

1) We're just telling you what our sources told us, so it's not our fault if they burned us.

2) We're still carrying water for them because we need access to the White House.

3) Somebody talked Trump out of firing Rosenstein at the last minute, but we're not telling you who.

4) We don't know when Rosenstein is going to be fired, or who will replace him overseeing the Mueller investigation.

5) He's probably going to survive until after the election, but then all bets are off.

We'll see what happens on Thursday, but Rosenstein's days seem as numbered as Jeff Sessions's are, and that doesn't bode well for the Mueller investigation to ever be allowed to be completed.

StupidiNews!

• China has denied access to a US naval ship scheduled for shore leave in Hong Kong next month in protest of US sanctions on Chinese purchases of Russian military equipment.
• Flooding continues in South Carolina as areas largely spared by Hurricane Florence's direct wrath are now facing swollen rivers, record flooding, and evacuation orders.
• Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan says that Turkish courts will decide the fate of a US pastor held on charges of terrorism as relations between Ankara and Washington continue to deteriorate.
• Donald Trump faced laughter at his UN address after mentioning his administration was the best in American history, but the rest of his speech was a list of grievances against the world.
• Ride-share giant Uber has been handed a major win, with the 9th Circuit agreeing that driver disputes should be handled by arbitration and not class-action lawsuits.

Trump Cards, Con't

The Trump White House is clearly losing on both the Brett Kavanaugh and Rod Rosenstein fronts, because they're about to pick yet another culture war fight in order to "rally the base".

Federal health officials canceled an FDA contract for human fetal tissue research Monday night and announced a review of all such research projects.

The announcement, citing “serious regulatory, moral, and ethical considerations,” revives a political issue that last flared in 2015 and led to congressional hearings. That fight came over anti-abortion political activists who covertly videotaped Planned Parenthood doctors and employees of Advanced Bioscience Resources (ABR), a cell tissue firm based in Alameda, California, that provides such cells to researchers.

The canceled contract would have paid $15,900 to ABR for human tissue that would make a laboratory mouse’s immune system more similar to a human’s. (ABR did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

“Mice with human immune systems are incredibly valuable for research of terrible diseases, and there really is no alternative,” Lawrence Goldstein of the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine told BuzzFeed News. Such cells have figured prominently in the development of vaccines against diseases such as rubella, rabies, polio, measles, chickenpox, and shingles.

The bottom line is that such cells would be otherwise discarded, he noted, and bioethics reviews going back to the Reagan administration have approved of their use to benefit human health.
The move to audit fetal tissue research was applauded, however, by David Daleiden of the Center for Medical Progress, the anti-abortion activist who ran the covert videotaping project.

“HHS’s newly-announced review of fetal tissue procurement and experimentation must be exacting, and it must terminate all other agreements for baby body parts,” he said in a statement.

That this is happening six week before midterm elections is not an accident in the least.  Neither is the fact this is happening to distract from how badly the Kavanaugh nomination fight is going, or from the Rosenstein firing trial balloon.

Still the results will almost certainly be decades of research lost, because DEAD BABY PARTS FACTORIES or something stupid, because this is America now.

Trump Trades Blows, Con't

The "October Surprise" for midterm voters may already be here: Trump's 10% tariffs on $200 billion in Chinese imports that went into effect this week means higher prices are already starting to hit voters at the register.

The latest impact will begin to hit Monday as new 10 percent tariffs Trump slapped on over $200 billion in imports from China are scheduled to go into effect. That tariff rate is set to rise to 25 percent on Jan. 1 if the Chinese don’t capitulate to White House demands. Trump has also threatened to bump the total up to more than $500 billion in imports, which would hit nearly every product China exported to the U.S. last year.

Economists expect that to translate into higher prices for consumers across the country and special pain for low- to middle-income voters who make up much of Trump’s base — and are least able to absorb increased costs for consumer goods such as air conditioners, clothing and furniture. Republicans are counting on getting Trump supporters to the polls in November to hold off projected Democratic gains in the House and potentially the Senate. Forcing consumers to pay higher prices could make that harder.

“If you are kind of in the middle- or lower-income groups, you are buying a lot of what economists call tradable goods and you’ll be hit a lot harder,” said Kyle Handley, assistant professor of business economics and public policy at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business. “This is basically the Trump voter who is going to see the biggest hit to their total spending.”

Evidence is piling up that consumers and businesses are growing increasingly nervous about Trump’s trade policy.

Consumer sentiment measured by the University of Michigan dropped last month to its lowest point in nearly a year, with the decline centered in lower-income households most sensitive to higher prices. The sentiment index ticked up again in preliminary results for September. But nearly a third of those surveyed cited concern over tariffs when assessing the economy. 

A survey of chief financial officers unveiled last week by Deloitte found that 42 percent said business conditions would improve next year, the lowest in two years, with executives “overwhelmingly worried” about trade policy and tariffs.

Walmart recently warned it will need to raise prices on a huge swath of products imported from China. Other large consumer-product companies including Procter & Gamble, Nestle and Coca-Cola announced price increases over the summer, partly because of tariffs, and warned of more to come.

The only two things thing Republicans really have going for them are Trump's Supreme Court picks, and the fact they've not managed to completely crash the Obama economy yet.   Both of those are in serious jeopardy before midterm elections, it seems.

Throw in rising oil prices from Iranian sanctions and I think voters are going to start changing their mind about the GOP very, very quickly. And let's not forget that these corporations with "no choice" but to pass tariff price hikes on to consumers are banking record profits right now thanks to the trillions in Trump tax cuts they are getting.  They could afford to swallow these price increases if they wanted to.  They won't, because profit is all that matters.

Maybe even quickly enough to affect voting in November.

StupidiNews!

• Florida Democratic congressional candidate April Freeman died unexpectedly Monday, Freeman was running to fill the 17th House District seat vacated by GOP Rep. Tom Rooney.
• Attorney Michael Avenatti is promising that yet another accuser of Trump Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh will come forward in "the next 48 hours".
• Oil prices have risen to four-year highs after Donald Trump promised to crack down on Iranian oil sales at the UN as part of increased economic sanctions against Tehran.
• The defamation lawsuit against Donald Trump by adult film star Stormy Daniels looks to be facing dismissal after a federal judge commented that Trump was "engaging in free speech".
• Satellite radio company SiriusXM will buy internet streaming music service Pandora for a reported $3.5 billion, with the deal expected to close in early 2019.