The Blue Wave Rises, Con't

Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent takes a look at the Trump regime "strategy" to hold the House and keep damage to a minimum, which apparently involves crafting different groups of lies to different blocs of Trump supporters that manage to contradict each other and could bring the whole GOP House firewall crashing down under a blue wave.

Republicans are mostly on defense in districts that are both economically prosperous and are filled with voters who are badly alienated by Trump. Why this disconnect?

One likely answer is that the story Trump has told about the economy — and the country — just isn’t resonating in many of these districts. That narrative is that immigration and globalization pose major threats to the well-being of Americans, and Trump is now acting on those threats, via stepped-up deportations from the interior, efforts to slash legal immigration and refugee flows, and trade wars. That, plus his tax cut, has created the supposed “Trump boom,” in stark contrast with the economy under Barack Obama, which is uniformly depicted as a pre-Trumpian hellscape.

At the same time, Trump and Republicans have distilled down Trumpism’s core narratives into a series of ludicrous and menacing cartoons for the GOP base’s consumption. Why? Brownstein’s analysis provides an answer: Because the bulwark against truly large GOP losses in the House is made up of many districts that are competitive but are also heavily populated with blue-collar, rural, small-town, exurban and evangelical whites. Hold off Democrats in all those districts, and if they win the majority, it will be a limited one.

And so, to galvanize those voters, Trump has directed bread-and-circuses belligerence at euro-weenie elites and China. He has employed endless lies and hate-mongering to hype the migrant “caravan” into a national emergency, and will send in troops as props to dramatize the point. Republicans are running ads absurdly depicting immigrants as criminals and invaders alongside many other ones that indulge in naked race-baiting. Trump is vowing an end to birthright citizenship, confirming the ethno-nationalist underpinnings of Trumpism and further fanning the xenophobic flames.

But Trump’s political team recognizes that all this risks a backlash among more-educated white voters. So this is the $6 million ad campaign that his team is running right now, that appears to be targeting those voters.

The split in GOP messaging is notable. While Republicans employ garish race-baiting to galvanize the hard-core white GOP base, this ad’s soft-focus messaging directed at white suburban women features none of that imagery. The spot’s iconic white suburban woman is obviously conflicted over her vote — we aren’t told why, but we know full well why — but finally checks the “Republican” box out of concern over her child’s economic future.

Yet the ad’s core narrative — the contrast of the Obama hellscape with the Trump boom — is an invention, and as the first study noted above suggests, it might not even resonate in these districts. What’s more, the Trump/GOP economic agenda is being dramatically falsified as well: Trump is promising a huge middle-class tax cut that isn’t going to happen, to obscure the truly regressive nature of the actual Trump/GOP tax cut, which lavished a huge windfall on the wealthy and corporations and as such is deeply unpopular.

Republicans are also running ads vowing to protect people with preexisting conditions, yet they have also locked themselves into opposition to Obamacare, which Democrats are now campaigning on protecting. As Ezra Klein explains, this has left Republicans with no alternative but to lie relentlessly to obscure the real GOP health-care agenda, which is to deregulate insurance markets and regressively strip protections and economic assistance from millions. This, too, is deeply unpopular.

Trump and Republicans are closing by lying about health care and taxes to limit losses among suburban and well-educated white voters, and lying about immigration while race-baiting against individual Democratic candidates to keep the downscale white GOP base energized. This probably won’t be enough for Republicans to keep the House. But whatever is to be on this front, the need to lie so relentlessly about all these matters itself constitutes an admission of failure. The public has seen Trump’s fusion of ethno-nationalism and orthodox GOP plutocracy put into governing practice, and is rejecting it.

So there you have it:  In order to keep the House, the GOP has to appeal to white college graduate women to keep the house (44% voted GOP in 2016) and to white women without degrees (61% voted GOP in 2016).  Together, they made up 37% of the electorate.  You have two different campaigns, based on two separate sets of lies.  They're getting crossed up, and it's not working.

In the final week we'll see how it goes, but should the blue wave become a blue tsunami, you'll know why.
 

It's Mueller Time, Con't

Once again, I guarantee that GOP operative Roger Stone is going to be indicted after the midterms by the Mueller probe, and it's going to get very ugly, very quickly.  There's a reason that the bizarre and ultimately fruitless right-wing hatchet job that emerged this week of paying former associates of Mueller to fabricate sexual assault allegations, and it was a last-ditch effort to save Roger Stone from the dock as Mueller's trap jaws close in.

The special counsel investigation is pressing witnesses about longtime Trump ally Roger Stone’s private interactions with senior campaign officials and whether he had knowledge of politically explosive Democratic emails that were released in October 2016, according to people familiar with the probe.

As part of his investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 campaign, special counsel Robert S. Mueller III appears to be focused on the question of whether WikiLeaks coordinated its activities with Stone and the campaign, including the group’s timing, the people said. Stone and WikiLeaks have adamantly denied being in contact.

On Friday, Mueller’s team questioned Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump’s former chief strategist, about claims Stone is said to have made privately about WikiLeaks before the group released emails that prosecutors say were hacked by Russian operatives, according to people familiar with the session.

In recent weeks, Mueller’s team has also interviewed several Stone associates, including New York comedian Randy Credico and conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi. Both testified before the grand jury.

Investigators have questioned witnesses about events surrounding Oct. 7, 2016, the day The Washington Post published a recording of Trump bragging about his ability to grab women by their genitals, the people said.

Less than an hour after The Post published its story about Trump’s crude comments during a taping of “Access Hollywood,” WikiLeaks delivered a competing blow to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton by releasing a trove of emails hacked from the account of her campaign chairman John Podesta.

The group trickled out new batches of Podesta’s private messages nearly daily through the campaign’s final weeks, ensuring the stolen documents would vex Clinton’s campaign until Election Day.

Investigators have been scrutinizing phone and email records from the fall of 2016, looking for evidence of what triggered WikiLeaks to drop the Podesta emails right after the “Access Hollywood” tape story broke, according to people with knowledge of the probe.

In an interview this week, Stone vehemently denied any prior knowledge of the Podesta emails. He said he did not play any role in determining the timing of their release by WikiLeaks or suggest they be used to blunt the impact of the “Access Hollywood” tape.

It is unclear whether the special prosecutor has evidence connecting Stone to WikiLeaks’s activities. Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, could have concluded on his own that releasing the emails on that day would benefit Trump.

The results of Mueller’s inquiry could answer the central question of his probe: whether there was coordination between Trump’s campaign and Russian activities. Trump has repeatedly declared there was “no collusion.”

Again, if Steve Bannon is being questioned about Stone, and if you somehow don't believe Bannon will give up Stone to save his own slovenly hide, November is going to be a fun education for a lot of people.  There's always the chance Trump will pull the trigger sometime next week and make his move trying to get rid of Mueller, but I don't think he'll beat Mueller to the punch when it comes to saving Stone.

Still, anything's possible once the midterms are done with.  We'll see.

 

StupidiNews!

• Notorious Boston mob boss James "Whitey" Bulger was killed in prison Tuesday, one day after the 89-year-old was transferred to a West Virginia federal facility while serving a life sentence.
• Donald Trump's motorcade faced thousands of protesters in Pittsburgh as they blocked the route to Trump's planned visit of the site of Saturday's deadly synagogue shooting.
• Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called on both Iranian-backed Houthi rebels and Saudi coalition forces to cease fire in Yemen ahead of UN negotiations to end the four-year civil war.
• The Justice Department is charging several Chinese spies after a five-year attempt to steal US aviation industry secrets and technology for use by China's military.
• After nearly a decade in operation, the Kepler Space Telescope has run out of fuel and NASA will shut the spacecraft down and process the remaining data on nearly 3,000 exoplanets.

Last Call For It's Mueller Time, Con't

Apparently a couple of right-wing smear job artists had a little October Surprise in store for Special Counsel Robert Mueller, but he was wise to it last week and informed the FBI so that they could have a look.

A company that appears to be run by a pro-Trump conspiracy theorist offered to pay women to make false claims against Special Counsel Robert Mueller in the days leading up to the midterm elections—and the special counsel’s office has asked the FBI to weigh in. “When we learned last week of allegations that women were offered money to make false claims about the Special Counsel, we immediately referred the matter to the FBI for investigation,” the Mueller spokesman Peter Carr told me in an email on Tuesday.

The special-counsel office’s attention to this scheme and its decision to release a rare statement about it indicates the seriousness with which the team is taking the purported plot to discredit Mueller in the middle of an ongoing investigation. Carr confirmed that the allegations were brought to the office’s attention by several journalists, who were contacted by a woman who identified herself as Lorraine Parsons. Another woman, Jennifer Taub, contacted Mueller's office earlier this month with similar information.

The woman identifying herself as Parsons told journalists in an email, a copy of which I obtained, that she had been offered roughly $20,000 by a man claiming to work for a firm called Surefire Intelligence—which had been hired by a GOP activist named Jack Burkman—“to make accusations of sexual misconduct and workplace harassment against Robert Mueller.”

Parsons wrote in her letter that she had worked for Mueller as a paralegal at the Pillsbury, Madison, and Sutro law firm in 1974, but that she “didn’t see” him much. “When I did see him, he was always very polite to me, and was never inappropriate,” she said. The law firm told me on late Tuesday afternoon, however, that it has “no record of this individual working for our firm.” 

Parsons explained that she was contacted by a man “with a British accent” who wanted to ask her “a couple questions about Robert Mueller, whom I worked with when I was a paralegal for Pillsbury, Madison, and Sutro in 1974. I asked him who he was working for, and he told me his boss was some sort of politics guy in Washington named Jack Burkman. I reluctantly told [him] that I had only worked with Mr. Mueller for a short period of time, before leaving that firm to have my first son.”

She continued: “In more of an effort to get him to go away than anything else, I asked him what in the hell he wanted me to do. He said that we could not talk about it on the phone, and he asked me to download an app on my phone called Signal, which he said was more secure. Reluctantly, I downloaded the app and he called me on that app a few minutes later. He said (and I will never forget exactly what it was) ‘I want you to make accusations of sexual misconduct and workplace harassment against Robert Mueller, and I want you to sign a sworn affidavit to that effect.’” The man “offered to pay off all of my credit card debt, plus bring me a check for $20,000 if I would do” it, she wrote. “He knew exactly how much credit card debt I had, right down to the dollar, which sort of freaked me out.” 

So who are the clowns behind this conspiracy of dunces?  Let's take a look.

Surefire Intelligence describes itself as “a private intel agency that designs and executes bespoke solutions for businesses and individuals who face complex business and litigation challenges.” Surefire’s domain records list an email for another pro-Trump conspiracy theorist, Jacob Wohl, who began hyping a “scandalous” Mueller story on Tuesday morning. Wohl told The Daily Beast that Burkman had hired Surefire to assist with his investigation into Mueller’s past, but denied knowing anything about the firm’s involvement in an alleged plot to fabricate allegations against Mueller when asked why his email address appeared in the domain records. He did not respond when asked by NBC why a telephone number listed on Surefire’s website referred callers to another number that’s listed in public records as belonging to Wohl’s mother. 

Parsons was not willing to speak to the reporters by phone, according to Scott Stedman, one of the reporters who received the letter. So portions of her story have gone uncorroborated, and her identity has not been independently confirmed.

Jack Burkman is the right-wing operative and radio host who opened his "own investigation" into the Seth Rich murder case and then tried to stiff his investigator, a former military man who did not take kindly to Burkman trying to blame him when things went wrong.  For his trouble, Burkman was shot and ran over.

Jacob Wohl is the Wall Street "whiz kid" who managed to get himself banned from the financial industry for good last year at the age of 19 for massive hedge fund fraud. And Wohl currently works for...you guessed it...the only man on earth stupid enough to hire him: Jim Hoft, the Gateway Pundit, aka the Stupidiest Man On The Internet, who dropped this conspiracy story on his site only to retract things when it turned out that Wohl and Burkman are almost certainly headed for some time with the FBI.

And yes, Mueller has an alibi for the date that Burkman and Wohl claim he was in NYC...because he was in DC serving jury duty.

In other words, this is going to make a great comedy movie in a couple of years.

The Blue Wave Rises, Con't

With a week to go until midterm elections, Republicans are in full and total panic mode as they move to try to hold increasingly vulnerable House districts in Southern states. Paul Ryan is headed here to try to save Republican Andy Barr's Lexington House seat from Democratic retired Marine pilot Amy McGrath, and if Republicans are relegated to defending states like Kentucky in the final week of the campaign, all bets are off as to how many dozens of seats they now expect to lose.

Ryan will be in Kentucky on Tuesday to campaign for Rep. Garland “Andy” Barr, whose 6th District stretches from Lexington to more rural areas. Former fighter pilot Amy McGrath has given Democrats hope of flipping the seat, despite the district’s naturally conservative tilt.

Meanwhile, the NRCC plans to launch ads Tuesday in South Carolina’s 1st District, an area along the coast including Charleston that has leaned conservative in recent federal elections. But Republican nominee Katie Arrington has had trouble putting away her Democratic opponent, Joe Cunningham.

Arrington, who defeated Rep. Mark Sanford in a primary defined by her support for Trump and the incumbent’s criticism of the president, has lost some GOP support to Cunningham, whose slogan is “Lowcountry over party” and who casts himself as a moderate.

C'mon, Republicans are now on defense in Kentucky and South Carolina?  It's going to be a bloodbath when we're done.

In Virginia’s 7th District, which Trump also carried, a new poll released Monday showed more possible trouble. The survey from the Wason Center for Public Policy at Christopher Newport University showed 46 percent of likely voters picking Democrat Abigail Spanberger and 45 percent choosing Republican Rep. Dave Brat.

The NRCC also hit the airwaves for the first time last week in Georgia’s 6th District in the Atlanta suburbs, where Democrat Lucy McBath has received help from well-funded gun control groups. Trump narrowly won the district.

“We’re not trying to cover the spread,” said NRCC communications director Matt Gorman. “We’re looking at victories.” He added: “The name of the game is volatility. And we’ve seen it on both sides.” 

Democrats have raised huge sums of money, prompting Republicans to warn about a “green wave” of Democratic dollars, even in districts where the GOP has established a strong presence.

McBath started the final weeks of the campaign with $565,000 in her account; her Republican opponent, Rep. Karen Handel, had $402,000 left to spend.

The NRCC hit the airwaves for the first time last week in Washington’s 3rd District in the southwest corner of the state. Trump won there by seven points. Democrat Carolyn Long capitalized on a strong primary vote by outraising Republican Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler by nearly $1 million.

Even in Florida’s 18th District, where Trump won by nine points and Rep. Brian Mast outraised his Democratic challenger, former diplomat Lauren Baer, Republicans are not taking any chances. The NRCC went up with an ad in the district that stretches north from Palm Beach County last week.

KY-6 and VA-7 are knife-edge toss-ups and have contested for months.  But if Republicans are only now worried about SC-1, GA-6, FL-18, and WA-3 (and you can add Utah's 4th to this list as GOP Rep. Mia Love is now behind to Democratic Salt Lake City Mayor Ben McAdams) enough to commit an 11th hour defense to these districts, the GOP is now reduced to trying to stop a blue wave from becoming a total 2010-style wipeout.

I don't think they'll succeed.  With a week to go, we're still seeing the smart money on 35-45 Dem House pickups as an average and 55-60 if they overperform.

Five Thirty Eight now has Dems at 216 of the 218 they need to gain a House majority with more than 20 toss-ups left to fight over, another 16 "Lean R" seats in play and a whopping 49 "Likely R" seats that could fall, and it's these seats that the GOP is now moving to defend.  If the Dems get 80% of the toss-ups breaking their way, half the leaners and a quarter of the likely seats, that's 62 seats.  That's 2010 in reverse.

Guess who'a s also in trouble now?  GOP Rep. Steve King in IA-4.  Cook Political report has now shifted his race from "Likely R" to "Lean R".  King won in 2016 over Kim Weaver by 22 points, Trump won this district by 27 points two years ago.

Let's overperform.  Get out there and vote if you haven't already, and get somebody besides yourself to the polls while you're at it.

Deportation Nation, Con't

As I mentioned on Friday, Donald Trump is indeed going all in on militarizing America's southern border with Mexico.  Trump is putting more than 5,000 troops on the border this week, and these aren't National Guard call-ups either, these are military combat battalions.

Senior U.S. officials said Monday that some 5,200 additional U.S. troops will deploy to the border with Mexico by the end of the week, as President Trump likened a caravan of Central American migrants who are heading north to “an invasion.” 

The deployments, occurring under an operation known as Faithful Patriot, already are underway, said Air Force Gen. Terrence O’Shaughnessy, the chief of U.S. Northern Command. He said the military, working alongside U.S. Customs and Border Protection, will focus first on hardening the border in Texas, followed by Arizona and California. 

The deployments will include three combat engineer battalions, members of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and troops who specialize in aviation, medical treatment and logistics, O’Shaughnessy said. He highlighted the deployment of helicopters, which will have night-vision capabilities and sensors.

“We’ll be able to spot and identify groups and rapidly deploy CBP personnel where they are needed,” he said. 

O’Shaughnessy said the Pentagon also will deploy military police units and cargo aircraft, including three C-130s and one C-17. Combined command posts will be established to integrate U.S. military and CBP efforts. 

“As we sit right here today, we have about 800 soldiers who are on their way to Texas right now,” the general said. “They’re coming from Fort Campbell. They’re coming from Fort Knox. They’re moving closer to the border. They’re going to continue their training, and they’re ready to deploy to actually be employed on the border.”

Ahh, but we're only beginning this mess.  Last week I figured Trump would pick a legal fight for the last week of the midterm campaign by bypassing the Refugee Act and international law by sealing the border and refusing all refugees.  What he's actually planning is far, far worse.

President Trump said he was preparing an executive order to end birthright citizenship in the United States, his latest attention-grabbing maneuver days before midterm congressional elections, during which he has sought to activate his base by vowing to clamp down on immigrants and immigration.

“We’re the only country in the world where a person comes in and has a baby, and the baby is essentially a citizen of the United States for 85 years, with all of those benefits,” Mr. Trump told Axios during an interview that was released in part on Tuesday. “It’s ridiculous. It’s ridiculous. And it has to end.”

In fact, dozens of other countries, including Canada, Mexico and many others in the Western Hemisphere, grant automatic birthright citizenship, according to a study by the Center for Immigration Studies, an organization that supports restricting immigration and whose work Mr. Trump’s advisers often cite.

Doing away with birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants was an idea Mr. Trump pitched as a presidential candidate, but there is no clear indication that he would be able to do so unilaterally, and attempting to would be certain to prompt legal challenges.

It is likewise unknown how serious Mr. Trump is about taking the action. In recent days, with the approach of the midterm balloting in which Republican control of Congress is at risk, he has sought to appeal to voters by making other dramatic claims that appear to have no chance of materializing, such as imminent action to grant a 10 percent tax cut for the middle class.

To accomplish the idea he floated on Tuesday, Mr. Trump would have to find a way around the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which states, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

Maybe he tries it, maybe not, but the message sent to his white supremacist base with a week to go before elections is 100% clear.  Remember that both MAGAbomber Cesar Sayoc and synagogue shooter Robert Bowers thought Trump wasn't sufficiently racist enough (especially Bowers, who railed against Trump being a "globalist").  This little hate-filled trial balloon is something white nationalists have wanted for years and they're cheering in the streets right now.  If there was any wavering from the purity slimebags about how maybe Trump was too soft on "illegals" or "globalists" all that just got put to rest with this stunt.

Red meat by the tractor-trailer load.

StupidiNews!

• Indonesian officials believe all 189 souls aboard Lion Air flight JT 610 were lost after the passenger plane crashed Monday north of Jakarta shortly after takeoff.
• The US Supreme Court declined to take up a Republican challenge to Pennsylvania's redrawn congressional map with elections only a week away.
• New Zealand's parliament was suspended for a short time as a magnitude 6.1 earthquake struck the country's north island Tuesday near Wellington.
• The Trump regime is planning new Chinese tariffs on another quarter-trillion in imports early next year if talks between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping fail at next month's G20 summit.
• Archaeologists in Saudi Arabia's Nefud Desert have found evidence of early stone tools that are at least 300,000 years old, predating previously found tools by a hundred millennia.

Last Call For The GOP's Race To The Bottom, Con't

Iowa Republican Rep. Steve King doesn't apologize for his white nationalist views because he's simply reflecting the will of his white nationalist constituents.

Across the 4th District — a highly conservative swath of Iowa nearly 200 miles wide, mile upon mile of fertile farmland dotted with towns the length of a two-block Main Street — King has widespread support. 

“Steve’s Steve. He’s a local guy. He graduated from high school here. He comes in for breakfast on Sundays,” says Crawford County Supervisor Eric Skoog, who with his wife, Terri, owns what they believe to be the oldest continuously operating restaurant in Iowa. 

At the counter of Cronk’s, which has been open since 1929, Skoog says he disagrees with King on immigration and hasn’t been afraid to share his conflicting views. Skoog has worked hard to help local schools adjust to the influx of immigrant children in Denison, one place in the heavily white district where a major meatpacking plant has drawn a sizable Hispanic community. 

Still, Skoog said, “I don’t see him as racist. I don’t know. He’s just Steve.” Come November, he said, he’ll probably vote for him. 

Some in the district welcome King’s blunt talk. 

“We’re getting pretty happy in this country about kicking the white guy. Only one group of people haven’t achieved minority status, and it’s white men,” says Steve Sorensen, a former truck driver, watching the World Series in a Hampton bar. “You can fire a white man every time you want. He’s got no recourse. Try that with anybody else.” 

Mindy Rainer also believes that others get government benefits more easily than she does, as a white woman. “There are people out there that are desperate as hell, and I’m one of them,” she says, sliding up to the bar at the restaurant in the town of Cherokee where she works. 

Rainer’s husband was injured on a job site 25 years ago, she said, and denied disability benefits because of bureaucratic hurdles. She has supported them both, but now her kidneys are failing and she fears that she won’t be able to work for the eight years until her husband can collect Social Security. 

Rainer recalled lining up to try to get help with her utility bills when she lived in South Carolina and becoming suspicious of the others in line, almost all of them African American. 

“What upset me more than anything was all them black babies were dressed up in the best clothes,” she said. “When their kids are wearing $150 tennis shoes, what do you think?” 

She sides with King when he talks about immigration. “Why should we feed others when we can’t feed ourselves?” she asked.

Steve King is just representing the views of rural Iowans who want a political party that puts white people first, particularly white men, because that's how it should be in America.  The difference is thanks to Donald Trump, it's perfectly okay to say that you want to vote for the guy running on the platform of "white advocacy", and not a single one of them thinks it's racist because there's a generation of white folk in America who believe they have been discriminated against since birth.

This is America, the party of whites versus the party of those people and Steve King is happily running as a proud member of the former.

The Blue Wave Rises, Con't

With eight days to go, new CBS polling finds that three Senate toss-up races are still very much toss-ups.

Tight contests dominate the Senate landscape: In Florida, incumbent Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson and Republican Gov. Rick Scott are tied among likely voters, 46 percent to 46 percent including those who have cast ballots already. Scott, the sitting governor, gets positive marks from voters on his handling of the recent hurricane and benefits from Republicans reporting that they're more likely to vote than the Democrats who haven't already.

Nelson's support, meanwhile, is underpinned by voters who place health care atop their issues list. The Republicans have a favorable map in their effort to hold their Senate majority, and winning two or three of these states would probably put them in strong position to hold it. Democrats would probably need wins in all three to have a good shot at taking the Senate. 

Health care concerns have helped Democrat Kyrsten Sinema to a slight three-point advantage over Republican Martha McSally, 47 percent to 44 percent. Sinema does well with voters who say health care is a very important concern and is also helped by nine percent of Republicans who say they're backing her — it's hardly an overwhelming number, but it could be essential for a Democrat in a Republican-leaning state like Arizona. 

But Republican chances of holding on to their Senate majority – or even adding to it – are helped by the prospect of picking up a seat in Indiana, where Republican Mike Braun leads incumbent Democrat Joe Donnelly, 46 percent to 43 percent. In Indiana, where many voters say that agriculture plays a role in their economy, three-quarters of Republicans feel that new tariffs will ultimately lead to better trade deals for the U.S. 

President Trump appears to be a large factor in these states. In all of them, large majorities say their vote for Senate will be either to support or oppose the president.

All three of these races are within the margin of error, so effectively they are all tied, at least using CBS's likely polling model.  Of course, it depends on how accurate that likely polling model is compared to who actually turns out in both early voting and next Tuesday.

CBS is right however that Democrats need to win all three of these races, plus Nevada, to have any chance of taking the Senate.  I continue to have a bad feeling about Heitkamp in North Dakota, but Dems can still get to 51 if they run the rest of the table and Phil Breseden and/or Beto O'Rourke come through.

I will admit however that the odds of that are not exactly favoring the Dems. A 50-50 split may be the best we can hope for, but if we reach that point there could be some horse trading in the lame duck session.  That would give any one single senator a tremendous amount of power. It's happened before, and it ended up a minor disaster for the Dems when it did.

We'll see.

Trumpsona Non Grata, Or Steeling For A Fight

Thousands have signed on to a letter from a group of Jewish leaders in Pittsburgh to Donald Trump saying that he is no longer welcome by the city's Jewish community until he denounces white nationalism.

More than 16,000 people have signed an open letter to President Trump from the leaders of a Pittsburgh-based Jewish group who say the president will not be welcome in the city unless he denounces white nationalism and stops “targeting” minorities after a mass shooting Saturday at a local synagogue left 11 dead.

The letter, which was published and shared on Sunday, was written by 11 members of the Pittsburgh affiliate of Bend the Arc, a national organization for progressive Jews focused on social justice, following what is being called the deadliest attackon Jews in U.S. history. The shooting at Tree of Life synagogue also left several people injured, including law enforcement. As of early Monday morning, the letter had 16,533 signatures.

“For the past three years your words and your policies have emboldened a growing white nationalist movement,” the Jewish leaders wrote. “You yourself called the murderer evil, but yesterday’s violence is the direct culmination of your influence."

The letter continued: “Our Jewish community is not the only group you have targeted. You have also deliberately undermined the safety of people of color, Muslims, LGBTQ people, and people with disabilities. Yesterday’s massacre is not the first act of terror you incited against a minority group in our country.”

The White House did not respond to multiple requests for comment late Sunday night.

On Saturday, Trump strongly condemned the shooting as “pure evil,” adding that the “vile, hate-filled poison of anti-Semitism” and all other forms of prejudice must be rejected, The Washington Post reported. The president also announced he would be making a visit to Pittsburgh.

The news of the president’s possible travel plans did not sit well with Josh Friedman, who is one of the leaders of Bend the Arc’s Pittsburgh chapter.

“My immediate reaction was he is not welcome here,” Friedman, who does not attend services at Tree of Life, told The Post in a Sunday phone interview. “I immediately wrote to the rest of our steering committee that he is not welcome, we have to make that clear.”

That's a pretty hefty condemnation of Trump, I can't think of a time where the person in the Oval Office was flat out told they were not welcome by a group representing a community that suffered a deadly tragedy like this.  There's no question that Saturday's slaughter at Tree of Life was an atni-Semitic hate crime of the most awful level.

Good for Bend The Arc for saying this:

Four boldfaced lines stand out from the rest of the letter’s 338 words.

“President Trump, you are not welcome in Pittsburgh until you fully denounce white nationalism.”

“President Trump, you are not welcome in Pittsburgh until you stop targeting and endangering all minorities.”

“President Trump, you are not welcome in Pittsburgh until you cease your assault on immigrants and refugees.”

“President Trump, you are not welcome in Pittsburgh until you commit yourself to compassionate, democratic policies that recognize the dignity of all of us.”

I absolutely guarantee you though that Bend The Arc is going to be immediately attacked by Trump's anti-Semitic trolls and dismissed by the White House for having a political action PAC being funded in part by George Soros and that PAC being chaired by Soros's son, Alexander, and there's extremely good odds that Trump is not only going to visit Pittsburgh, but that the visit is going to be followed by (or be morphed into) a pro-Trump rally for Pennsylvania Republicans ahead of midterms next week.

It's going to be horrid, just like everything else the man does.  It's possible that somebody talks sense into Trump and he stays away, but given his narcissism, the state's importance to the GOP keeping the House, and his screaming inchoate base howling "How dare those people tell my President that he's not welcome" I give it an 80% of a Trump visit to Pittsburgh this week and 50% chance of that visit being part of a ghoulish rally, Halloween or no. Once again last night, Trump called the media the "true enemy of America" so it's going to be a bad week no matter where Trump goes.

StupidiNews!

• The Boston Red Sox downed the Los Angeles Dodgers 5-1 in Game 5 of the World Series to take their fourth title in 15 seasons.
• Typhoon Yutu is headed for the Philippines with an expected early Tuesday landfall as the Category 3 storm takes aim at the main island of Luzon.
• Five people, including the owner of Premier League soccer club Leicester City, were killed in a helicopter crash over the weekend near the team's stadium after a Saturday match.
• IBM is moving into the cloud services market to directly compete with Amazon and Google with a proposed $33 billion buyout of Linux-based software maker Red Hat.
• General Motors is proposing an alternative to the Trump regime's plan cancellation of Obama-era fuel efficiency standards with a 7% national zero-emissions vehicle program by 2021 and 25% in 2030.

Last Call For Brazil Nuts

Brazil has elected its Trump today in Jair Bolsonaro, and the number of democracies in the West falls by one as the country's new president has made it abundantly clear that his word is now the only law.

Brazil on Sunday became the latest country to drift toward the far right, electing a strident populist as president in the nation’s most radical political change since democracy was restored more than 30 years ago. 

The new president, Jair Bolsonaro, has exalted the country’s military dictatorship, advocated torture and threatened to destroy, jail or drive into exile his political opponents. 

He won by tapping into a deep well of resentment at the status quo in Brazil — a country whiplashed by rising crime and two years of political and economic turmoil — and by presenting himself as the alternative. 

“We have everything need to become a great nation,” Mr. Bolsonaro said Sunday night shortly after the race was called in a video broadcast on his Facebook account. “Together we will change the destiny of Brazil.”

If all these seems depressingly familiar, it's because it's 100% Trump's playbook.

Mr. Bolsonaro’s victory caps a bitter contest that divided families, tore friendships apart and ignited concerns about the resilience of Brazil’s young democracy. 

Many Brazilians see authoritarian tendencies in Mr. Bolsonaro, who plans to appoint military leaders to top posts and said he would not accept the result if he were to lose. He has threatened to stack the Supreme Court by increasing the number of judges to 21 from 11 and to deal with political foes by giving them the choice of extermination or exile. 

Mr. Bolsonaro, 63, a former Army captain who has been a member of Congress for nearly three decades, beat a crowded field of presidential contenders, several of whom entered the race with bigger war chests, less baggage, and the backing of powerful political parties. 

Part of the reason for his victory was the collapse of the left. Many cried foul after former President Luiz Inácio da Silva, the longtime front-runner in the race, was ruled ineligible to run after he was imprisoned in April to start serving a 12-year sentence for corruption and money laundering.

Bolsonaro's battle cry was "lock them up" and he did.  Now, the bloody purge of his enemies will soon begin.  There's no question how we got here, Bolsonaro's takeover is just one more domino in the end of democracy 

It's only going to get exponentially worse over the coming years unless we begin the turn back to sanity in 9 days.

Meat The Press, Con't

NY Times reporter Jim Rutenberg admits that after three years, the American media still has no idea how to handle Donald Trump, and that Trump continues to use the media as targets to beat up on a near-daily basis and will basically always get away with it.

The question is, is it working?

The short answer is yes. Increasingly, the president’s almost daily attacks seem to be delivering the desired effect, despite the many examples of powerful reporting on his presidency. By one measure, a CBS News poll over the summer, 91 percent of “strong Trump supporters” trust him to provide accurate information; 11 percent said the same about the news media.

Mr. Trump was open about the tactic in a 2016 conversation with Lesley Stahl of CBS News, which she shared earlier this year: “I do it to discredit you all and demean you all, so when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you,” she quoted him as saying.

And with the president settling on “Fear and Falsehoods” as an election strategy, as The Washington Post put it last week, the political information system is awash in more misleading or flatly wrong assertions than reporters can keep up with. It’s as if President Trump has hit the journalism industry with a denial-of-service attack.

We have seen gross distortions aplenty during political low moments in this country. But something like the “Swift Boat” campaign against the Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry in 2004 — with its accusations that the candidate had faked his war record — seems almost quaint in retrospect. That attempt drew scrutiny from major media organizations, and eventually led to broad condemnation, even from the candidate it was intended to benefit, President George W. Bush.

Now, partisan smears are a staple of every single news cycle. As crude pipe bombs were discovered at CNN headquarters and in mailboxes across the country, Mr. Trump’s supporters like the Fox Business anchor Lou Dobbs, Rush Limbaugh and the conservative writer Ann Coulter asserted that the crime was a frame job by Democrats.

Before pipe bombs and the Pittsburgh synagogue shootings dominated the news, the main story was the migrant caravan — and it was accompanied by wild speculation on talk radio, social media and from opinionated personalities on Fox News. A myth went viral: the thousands of desperate Hondurans making their slow way toward the American border were players in a drama hatched by Democrats and funded by the right’s all-purpose villain, Mr. Soros, a notion Mr. Trump seemed to nod to at a rally in Montana.

Reporters respond by pointing out that these assertions have no basis in fact, just as they attempt to knock back Mr. Trump’s manufactured content by producing running tallies of his false statements — more than 5,000, says The Washington Post’s Fact Checker column.

Now and then journalists will resort to the L-word, “lie,” as The New York Times has done on occasion. Other frequent targets of the president’s disdain, CNN and MSNBC, have debunked his claims with onscreen headlines and endless panel discussions.

Such good-faith efforts, however, seem increasingly ineffectual. The president has succeeded in casting journalists as the prime foils on his never-ending reality show, much to the delight of those who cheer him on at rallies.

“He has succeeded in creating a daily narrative in which he is the central figure,” Steve Coll, the dean of the Columbia University School of Journalism and a staff writer at The New Yorker, told me. “And he uses props and invented opposition — whether they are migrants hundreds of miles from the U.S. border or the press right in front of him — to pursue this kind of idea he has about how his populism works.”

Again, the media has allowed themselves to be maneuvered into a position where 90% of Trump supporters don't believe a word they say, and more than half of everybody doesn't either. There are many reasons for this, the rise of online media that more easily manipulates people and that can be easily manipulated by people, increasingly corporate control of news outlets by a handful of companies, the consolidation of local newspapers and local TV news, and the massive layoffs in the news business over the last 15 years.  And all those actions were conscious choices.

In other words, everything the American media could have done in order to make themselves vulnerable to a proto-fascist demagogue like Trump, they did.  Trust in the media is in shambles means that not only are Americans being massively misinformed, it means there are Americans who know they are being fed lies, but the lies are convenient enough to allow them to hate who they want to, as Steve M tells us.

I want to know what percentage of the American public -- and, specifically, what percentage of the Republican electorate -- believes what's been reported about Cesar Sayoc. I assume that Democrats and independents will overwhelmingly say they believe what we've been told about him: that he's a Trump supporter who decided on his own to build and mail pipe bombs to people on the president's enemies list.

But what percentage of Republicans believe that? Is it even a majority?

A polling firm should lay out law enforcement's allegations and the conspiracy nuts' scenarios -- that Democrats or a certain billionaire Democratic donor paid the guy, or that the recipients sent the bombs to themselves -- and ask what respondents believe. Or the poll could ask whether law enforcement's story is true and then give doubters an open-ended chance to tell us their pet theories.

I think most Republicans will be doubters, or at least the number of doubters and "not sure" respondents will outnumber those who believe what law enforcement has told us.

That's exactly right.  Trump's lies are all the excuse bigots need to be bigots.

There is no longer shame in being a racist hatemonger in America when the elected leader of the country is arguably the most vocal example of one, and now that the trust in the news media has been lost, most likely irrevocably, there's little the media can now do to stop him.

You guys had your chance.  You blew it.  The time to ask these questions was in Summer, 2016.

Instead it became "But her emails."

The game's over, and we all lost.

Sunday Long Read: Kit Kat Crazy

A part of this week's New York Times Magazine "Candy Issue", here's the story of how Kit Kat bars became Japan's most beloved snack food in the 21st century, with flavors ranging from red bean bun to wasabi and everything in between.

The seven-story Don Quijote megastore in the Shibuya district of Tokyo is open 24 hours a day, but it’s hard to say when it’s rush hour, because there’s always a rush. A labyrinth of aisles leads to one soaring, psychedelic display after another presided over by cartoon mascots, including the mascot of Don Quijote itself: an enthusiastic blue penguin named Donpen who points shoppers toward toy sushi kits and face masks soaked with snail excretions and rainbow gel pens and split-toe socks. The candy section is vast, with cookies and cakes printed with Gudetama, Sanrio’s lazy egg character, and shiny packages of dehydrated, caramelized squid. It’s one of the few places where an extensive array of Japan’s many Kit Kat flavors are for sale. Though the chocolate bar is sold in more than 100 countries, including China, Thailand, India, Russia and the United States, it’s one of Japan’s best-selling chocolate brands and has achieved such a distinctive place in the market that several people in Tokyo told me they thought the Kit Kat was a Japanese product.

A Kit Kat is composed of three layers of wafer and two layers of flavored cream filling, enrobed in chocolate to look like a long, skinny ingot. It connects to identical skinny ingots, and you can snap these apart from one another intact, using very little pressure, making practically no crumbs. The Kit Kat is a sweet, cheap, delicately crunchy artifact of the 20th century’s industrial chocolate conglomerate. In the United States, where it has been distributed by Hershey since 1970, it is drugstore candy. In Japan, you might find the Kit Kat at a drugstore, but here the Kit Kat has levels. The Kit Kat has range. It’s found in department stores and luxurious Kit Kat-devoted boutiques that resemble high-end shoe stores, a single ingot to a silky peel-away sheath, stacked in slim boxes and tucked inside ultrasmooth-opening drawers, which a well-dressed, multilingual sales clerk slides open for you as you browse. The Kit Kat, in Japan, pushes at every limit of its form: It is multicolored and multiflavored and sometimes as hard to find as a golden ticket in your foil wrapper. Flavors change constantly, with many appearing as limited-edition runs. They can be esoteric and so carefully tailored for a Japanese audience as to seem untranslatable to a global mass market, but the bars have fans all over the world. Kit Kat fixers buy up boxes and carry them back to devotees in the United States and Europe. All this helps the Kit Kat maintain a singular, cultlike status.

The Kit Kat first came to Japan in 1973, but the first 100 percent, truly on-brand Japanese Kit Kat arrived at the turn of the millennium, when the marketing department of Nestlé Japan, the manufacturer of Kit Kats in the country, decided to experiment with new flavors, sweetness levels and types of packaging in an effort to increase sales. Strawberry! A pinkish, fruity Kit Kat would have been a gamble almost anywhere else in the world, but in Japan, strawberry-flavored sweets were established beyond the status of novelties. The strawberry Kit Kat was covered in milk chocolate tinted by the addition of a finely ground powder of dehydrated strawberry juice. It was first introduced in Hokkaido — coincidentally and serendipitously — at the start of strawberry season. Since then, the company has released almost 400 more flavors, some of them available only in particular regions of the country, which tends to encourage a sense of rareness and collectibility. Bars flavored like Okinawan sweet potatoes, the starchy, deep purple Japanese tubers, are available in Kyushu and Okinawa. The adzuki bean-sandwich bars are associated with the city of Nagoya, where the sweet, toasted snack originated in a tea shop at the turn of the 20th century and slowly made its way to cafe menus in the area. Shizuoka, where gnarly rhizomes with heart-shaped leaves have been cultivated for centuries on the Pacific Ocean, is known for its wasabi-flavored bars.

The most popular kind of Kit Kat in Japan is the mini — a bite-size package of two ingots — and Nestlé estimates that it sells about four million of these each day. In any given year, there are about 40 flavors available, including the core flavors — plain milk chocolate, strawberry, sake, wasabi, matcha, Tokyo Banana and a dark-chocolate variety called “sweetness for adults” — plus 20 to 30 rotating new ones. In August, Nestlé was preparing to release a shingen mochi Kit Kat, based on a traditional sweet made by the Japanese company Kikyouya, which involves three bite-size pieces of soft, squishy mochi packed with roasted soybean powder and a bottle of brown-sugar syrup, all assembled to taste. It seemed almost presumptuous for Nestlé to flavor a chocolate bar like shingen mochi, which is rooted in traditional Japanese confectionary, then stamp its brand on it and produce it en masse.

A sales clerk was restocking the Kit Kat display in Don Quijote when I asked her which were the most popular flavors. She shook her head. “They’re all popular,” she said. She gestured at the empty tunnels of matcha-, grape- and strawberry-flavored Kit Kats that she was filling as a small group of Chinese tourists carried armloads of glossy snack bags and boxes back to their shopping carts, undoing her work. An Australian father and son rushed by in a panic, their cart heaped with gifts to take back home. “Which one, Dad? Which one?” the child asked desperately, pointing to all the varieties. “It doesn’t matter,” the father shouted, as if the timer on a bomb were running out. “Just take one!”

Japanese Kit Kat bars are different.  Really different.  Not gonna lie.

But some of them are surprisingly good, so if you ever see these in your local Japanese food store or anime hangout give them a try.

Gabba Gabba Nope

I've said many times that social media networks have to get their stuff together before people get killed, but they're too lazy to self-police.  Now that eleven are dead in Pittsburgh, maybe people will start paying attention to people announcing they are going to hurt people on services like Gab, a social media platform for people kicked off other social platforms for being too bigoted.

Before Robert D. Bowers opened fire on the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh Saturday morning, he posted a threat to the Jewish community online.

“HIAS [a Jewish non-profit organization] likes to bring invaders in that kill our people. I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in,” he wrote. Just hours later, he killed at least 10 people and wounded others in what the Anti-Defamation League declared the deadliest against the Jewish community in the history of the United States.

Bowers didn’t make his anti-semitic statements on Twitter or Facebook or even Reddit, but rather on a small social network called Gab. It was founded in 2016 as an alternative to Twitter and other large social platforms, and indeed looks and operates similarly to Twitter, allowing users to follow and reply to each other, and to reshare short status updates.

But while Twitter, Facebook, and other mainstream social networks abide by ever-evolving sets of community standards, Gab allows users to say pretty much anything they want. Andrew Torba, the Silicon Valley Trump supporter who created it, said that he wanted to offer an alternative to mainstream social networks which he and others feel are biased against conservatives.

“What makes the entirely left-leaning Big Social monopoly qualified to tell us what is ‘news’ and what is ‘trending’ and to define what ‘harassment’ means?” he told to BuzzFeed News in 2016 explaining his decision to create the company. “It didn’t feel right to me, and I wanted to change it, and give people something that would be fair and just.”

Since then, Gab’s maximalist approach to free speech has made the network the de-facto home to extremist figures who have been booted off mainstream social networks for threats, inciting violence, or promoting racist, sexist, and anti-semitic ideas. While Twitter has banned extremist figures like Milo Yiannopoulos, Richard Spencer, Alex Jones, and Andrew Anglin, Gab continues to welcome them and their followers with open arms. It has been called a “hate-filled echo chamber of racism and conspiracy theories” and “Twitter for racists.”

This has led to tension with some of the platforms hosting Gab amid increasing pressure for web companies to “deplatform” extremist groups and individuals. In 2017, the Gab app was banned from the Google Play Store for violating its policy against hate speech and in August of this year Microsoft threatened to stop hosting the platform on its servers over similar concerns. (Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday afternoon.) Shortly after Saturday’s shooting, Gab tweeted what appeared to be a notice from PayPal, saying that the payment-processing platform would be terminating its relationship with Gab “pursuant to PayPal’s user agreement.” Opponents of deplatforming argue that censoring extremist speech, actors, and platforms doesn’t stop, and in fact might incite, violence. “Free speech is crucial for the prevention of violence,” the Gab account tweeted Saturday. “If people can not express themselves through words, they will do so through violence. No one wants that. No one.”

That's the argument that Gab makes, that if Gab's not allowed to not only exist but to prosper, then crazies like Bowers will go straight to the violence part rather than just post anti-Semitic Pepe the Frog memes online, therefore you should want Gab around as a social media lightning rod, and also you should give the platform and guys like Andrew Torba lots of money, because they're effectively babysitting America's lunatics.

It's a fantastically cynical argument, and of course it insulates Gab from any possible culpability as an aside.  Pure glibertarian nonsense of the highest order.

Only of course, this time eleven people died.

I'm not stupid enough to think the Trump regime will lift a finger against Gab, but "monetizing hate speech" is nothing new, and the beast can be starved if all the sponsors and advertisers refuse to do business with them.

We'll see.