Sunday Long Read: That Little Domestic Terrorism Problem of Ours

NY Times reporter Janet Reitman takes a look at the failure of American law enforcement to stop white supremacist terrorists in America, because in far too many cases, American law enforcement is hunting their own, and any new powers to tackle domestic terrorists would almost certainly be used by Trump to target his political enemies.

White supremacists and other far-right extremists have killed far more people since Sept. 11, 2001, than any other category of domestic extremist. The Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism has reported that 71 percent of the extremist-related fatalities in the United States between 2008 and 2017 were committed by members of the far right or white-supremacist movements. Islamic extremists were responsible for just 26 percent. Data compiled by the University of Maryland’s Global Terrorism Database shows that the number of terror-related incidents has more than tripled in the United States since 2013, and the number of those killed has quadrupled. In 2017, there were 65 incidents totaling 95 deaths. In a recent analysis of the data by the news site Quartz, roughly 60 percent of those incidents were driven by racist, anti-Muslim, anti-Semitic, antigovernment or other right-wing ideologies. Left-wing ideologies, like radical environmentalism, were responsible for 11 attacks. Muslim extremists committed just seven attacks.

These statistics belie the strident rhetoric around “foreign-born” terrorists that the Trump administration has used to drive its anti-immigration agenda. They also raise questions about the United States’ counterterrorism strategy, which for nearly two decades has been focused almost exclusively on American and foreign-born jihadists, overshadowing right-wing extremism as a legitimate national-security threat. According to a recent report by the nonpartisan Stimson Center, between 2002 and 2017, the United States spent $2.8 trillion — 16 percent of the overall federal budget — on counterterrorism. Terrorist attacks by Muslim extremists killed 100 people in the United States during that time. Between 2008 and 2017, domestic extremists killed 387 in the United States, according to the 2018 Anti-Defamation League report.

“We’re actually seeing all the same phenomena of what was happening with groups like ISIS, same tactics, but no one talks about it because it’s far-right extremism,” says the national-security strategist P. W. Singer, a senior fellow at the New America think tank. During the first year of the Trump administration, Singer and several other analysts met with a group of senior administration officials about building a counterterrorism strategy that encompassed a wider range of threats. “They only wanted to talk about Muslim extremism,” he says. But even before the Trump administration, he says, “we willingly turned the other way on white supremacy because there were real political costs to talking about white supremacy.”

In March 2018, a 20-year-old white evangelical Christian named Mark Anthony Conditt laid a series of homemade I.E.D.s around Austin, Tex., in largely minority communities. The bombs killed two African-Americans and injured at least four others over the course of several weeks, terrorizing the city, yet the local authorities preferred to describe Conditt, who committed suicide, as a “very challenged young man.” Also last spring, another white man, 28-year-old Benjamin Morrow, blew himself up in his apartment in Beaver Dam, Wis., while apparently constructing a bomb. Federal investigators said Morrow’s apartment doubled as a “homemade explosives laboratory.” There was a trove of white-supremacist literature in Morrow’s home, according to the F.B.I. But local cops, citing Morrow’s clean-cut demeanor and standout record as a quality-control manager at a local food-processing plant, made sure to note that just because he had this material didn’t mean he was a white supremacist. “He could have been an individual that was doing research,” the local police chief said.

In this atmosphere of apparent indifference on the part of government officials and law enforcement, a virulent, and violent, far-right movement has grown and metastasized. To combat it, some officials have suggested prosecuting related crimes through expansion of the government’s counterterrorism powers — creating a special “domestic terrorism” statute, for instance, which currently doesn’t exist. But a report released on Oct. 31 by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School argues that the creation of such a statute could easily be abused to target “protesters and political dissidents instead of terrorists,” and that law enforcement already has ample authority to prosecute domestic terrorism: “Congress must require that counterterrorism resource decisions be based on objective evaluations of the physical harm different groups pose to human life, rather than on political considerations that prioritize the safety of some communities over others.”

The report also calls out the Justice Department for its “blind spot” when it comes to domestic terrorism and hate crimes, which Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein conceded earlier in the week. During a conference on Oct. 29, Rosenstein said that according to the latest F.B.I. crime report, “88 percent of agencies that provide hate-crimes data to the F.B.I. reported zero hate crimes in 2016.” The Justice Department was reviewing the accuracy of the reports, he noted. “Simply because hate crimes are not reported does not mean they are not happening.”

In 2016, the latest full year of data available from the F.B.I., more than 6,100 hate-crime incidents were reported, 4,270 of them crimes against people (as opposed to, say, defacing property). And yet only 27 federal hate-crime defendants were prosecuted that year. “The F.B.I. knows how many bank robberies there were last year,” says Michael German, an author of the Brennan Center report and a former F.B.I. agent, “but it doesn’t know how many white supremacists attacked people, how many they injured or killed.”

More concerning to German, though, is that law enforcement seems uninterested in policing the violent far right. During the first year after Donald Trump’s election, protests and riots erupted across the country, often involving men with criminal histories who, by definition, were on the law-enforcement radar. During the so-called Battle of Berkeley in March 2017, for instance, a far-right agitator named Kyle Chapman became a hero to the alt-right after he reportedly pummeled an anti-fascist counterprotester with a billy club. Chapman was a 41-year-old who had two previous felony convictions. He proceeded to travel around the country, engaging in violence at other protests, now under the online moniker Based Stickman — a cheerful reference to the Berkeley attacks.

Chapman was one of a number of known white supremacists to align with the Proud Boys, a nationalist men’s movement founded in 2016 by the anti-immigrant “Western chauvinist” Gavin McInnes, a founder of Vice Media. There was also the Rise Above Movement (RAM), an alt-right group composed largely of ex-cons, many with ties to Southern California’s racist skinhead movement. Over the past two years, each group engaged in violent confrontations with their ideological enemies — a lengthy list including African-Americans, Jews, Muslims, nonwhite immigrants, members of the L.G.B.T. community and the progressive left — and generally escaped punishment. This changed to a degree over the past few weeks when, after a yearlong campaign by journalists at ProPublica and other media outlets, federal prosecutors filed charges against eight members of RAM, including two of its leaders. Similarly, after a pressure campaign on social media, the New York Police Department arrested and charged six members of the Proud Boys in connection with an assault after a speech by McInnes at a Republican club in Manhattan on Oct. 12. On his podcast, McInnes noted that he has “a lot of support” in the N.Y.P.D. (The police commissioner denies this.)

In at least one instance, the police have in fact coordinated with far-right groups. In 2017, a law-enforcement official stationed at a rally in downtown Portland, Ore., turned to a member of a far-right militia group and asked for his assistance in cuffing a left-wing counterprotester, who had been tackled by a Proud Boy.

“This is what public demonstration looks like in an era when white nationalism isn’t on the fringes, but on the inside of the political mainstream,” says Brian Levin, a former New York City police officer who now leads the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University-San Bernardino. During the run-up to some of last year’s major events in places like Charlottesville or Berkeley, he notes, “there was an unending stream of violent themed chatter and an almost choreographed exchange of web threats between antagonists across wide geographic expanses” that earned barely a nod from law enforcement.

So there are two major issues: white supremacist terrorists are very often former military and/or law enforcement, and giving law enforcement any new powers to deal with domestic terrorists will be abused by the Trump regime with near absolute certainty.

The combination of the two, having both a wide community of people on the ground that sympathize and want to protect these terrorists for ideological reasons, and having a regime in place that prioritizes protecting those same people for political reasons, makes for a climate that perpetuates these attacks for the foreseeable future.

It will only get worse.

It's About Suppression, Con't

Once again, Republicans know full well that they win when as few people as possible vote, especially in midterm elections.  But we've seen a host of judicial rulings where the courts have stepped in and called the GOP out on their racist voter suppression, and that has happened now in Georgia as Secretary of State Brian Kemp, himself the GOP candidate for governor, now must answer for his efforts to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of voters.

Georgia must change its procedures to make it easier for some people flagged under the state’s restrictive “exact match” law to vote, a federal judge ruled Friday, dealing a blow to Republican gubernatorial candidate and Secretary of State Brian Kemp.

The “exact match” law flags voter registrations that are found to have discrepancies, such as a dropped hyphen, with other official identifications. Potential voters are allowed to settle the discrepancy by providing proof of identity.

But the state’s procedures under Kemp, whose office oversees elections, stipulated that those who had been flagged as potential noncitizens be cleared first by a deputy registrar when seeking to vote. In October, a coalition of civil rights groups sued him.

U.S. District Judge Eleanor L. Ross ruled Friday that the procedures were likely to result in the violation of voting rights for a large group of people and needed to be halted immediately. She said Kemp’s restrictions raised “grave concerns for the Court about the differential treatment inflicted on a group of individuals who are predominantly minorities."

The preliminary injunction she issued required the state to change its procedures immediately to allow those flagged, some 3,100 individuals, to prove their citizenship more easily, with a U.S. passport or similar documentation, and only to a poll manager. It also signaled that the coalition of civil rights groups that brought the case against Kemp would probably succeed should the lawsuit continue.

“With respect to Tuesday’s election, we deem this a total victory in our fight against Secretary of State Brian Kemp’s exact match scheme,” said Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “Our goal in filing this lawsuit was to ensure that no eligible voter was unfairly denied the right to vote because of this discriminatory voter suppression effort."

And it worked, at least this time.  But with a Roberts Court now including  Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh as justices, expect a GOP voter suppression case to go before SCOTUS before the 2020 contest, with an outcome that will almost certainly mean that millions, if not tens of millions, will lose their right to vote.

Last Call For That Little Domestic Terrorism Problem Of Ours, Con't

The suspect in Friday's deadly shooting at a yoga studio in Tallahassee, Florida was a right-wing nutjob incel loser who hated women, black folk, and immigrants and of course he loved him some Donald friggin Trump.

The man who shot dead two women at a yoga studio in Tallahassee, Florida, on Friday before killing himself was a far-right extremist and self-proclaimed misogynist who railed against women, black people, and immigrants in a series of online videos and songs.

Scott Beierle, 40, was named by Tallahassee Police as the shooter who opened fire inside the Hot Yoga Tallahassee studio, killing two and injuring four other women and a man.

Those killed were named as Dr. Nancy Van Vessem, 61, who worked at Florida State University’s College of Medicine, and FSU student Maura Binkley, 21.

On a YouTube channel in 2014, Beierle filmed several videos of himself offering extremely racist and misogynistic opinions, in which he called women “sluts” and “whores,” and lamented “the collective treachery” of girls he went to high school with.

“There are whores in — not only every city, not only every town, but every village,” he said, referring to women in interracial relationships, whom he said had betrayed “their blood.”

Officer Damon Miller of the Tallahassee Police Department said he could not tell BuzzFeed News whether women were specifically targeted in the attack or whether these online posts were the subject of detectives’ inquiries.

“Everything that he has a connection to we’re investigating right now,” Miller said.

Police said they were still investigating a motive, but noted Beierle had previously been investigated for harassing women.

In one video called “Plight of the Adolescent Male,” he named Elliot Rodger, who killed six people and injured 14 and is often seen as a hero for so-called incels, or those who consider themselves “involuntarily celibate.”

“I’d like to send a message now to the adolescent males ... that are in the position, the situation, the disposition of Elliot Rodger, of not getting any, no love, no nothing. This endless wasteland that breeds this longing and this frustration. That was me, certainly, as an adolescent,” he said.
This is the second deadly attack this year in which Rodger has been mentioned by the suspected assailant. A man who wrote anti-women references on his Facebook account allegedly killed 10 people in Toronto in April when he drove his van into a crowd. “The Incel Rebellion has already begun!” Alek Minassian wrote on Facebook prior to the attack in a post that also mentioned “the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!”

Nothing like a 40-year-old white guy who believes he's entitled to sex from women, and so frustrated with the fact he's not getting it that he opens fire in a yoga studio to kill a few of them on the way to checking out himself on the suicide express.

The fact is we make it, well, criminally easy for this to happen.  We're the only country in the world to see something like this happen and say "Oh well, price o' freedom" and go back to playing video games.

I'm tired of this.  We need to decide as a country that this needs to stop, and that means voting in people who will make it far harder to happen.

Seeing Some Sobering Senate Surprises

In Texas here in the final weekend of the 2018 midterms, Democratic Rep. Beto O'Rourke is throwing everything he has at GOP Sen. Ted Cruz, and Cruz is in a lot more trouble than Republicans are willing to admit.

Early Friday afternoon, on the last day of early voting, Jacque Callanen strutted out of the Bexar County Elections Department with a noticeable pep in her step and a smile on her face, her red, white and blue American flag slip-on shoes pounding against the pavement and her “Bexar County Elections” lanyard swinging freely back and forth.

“If you got to see the people behind the scenes right now, you would see them high-fiving,” said Callenen, who is the elections administrator of Bexar County.

That’s because her county, the fourth largest in Texas, saw what she said was record-breaking turnout during early voting this year. By the time the polls closed Thursday, 33.7 percent of registered voters in Bexar County had voted, well past the 17.3 percent turnout at the same point in 2014, the last midterm, and close to the presidential-year turnout recorded at the same point in 2012 and 2016.

And Bexar County’s election officials are not alone in having a lot to high-five each other about. Turnout during early voting in the state’s 30 largest counties easily surpassed the entire turnout – during the early voting period and on Election Day – of the 2014 midterm and continues to race toward the turnout seen in presidential election years.

In Harris County, the state’s largest county, 32.3 percent of registered voters had voted by the end of Thursday, compared to 15.5 percent at the same point in 2014. In Dallas County, the number was 35.1 percent, compared to 15.2 percent at the same point in 2014. Early voting turnout in Travis County had already surpassed total early voter turnout in both the 2014 midterm and the 2012 presidential election by the end of Thursday.

“We’ve got a lot of unhappy and activist voters out there who have been wanting to vote for a long time,” said Dana DeBeauvoir, the Travis County clerk. She attributed the bump in the number of voters to President Donald Trump.

Texas isn't a purple state or even a red state.  It's a non-voting state.  As I said earlier today, if turnout numbers really are as high as people are predicting, then all bets are off come Wednesday morning. Yes, the generation low turnout of 2014 was quite literally the lowest bar to overcome.  If early voting turnout in Texas hadn't easily eclipsed the total from four years ago, I wouldn't just be worried, I'd be despondent. But it has crushed those numbers, and Ted Cruz is fighting for his political life right now.

Unfortunately for Dems, the most vulnerable Senate seat they are in danger of losing is one many people are overlooking. Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota is in trouble, but so is Bob Menendez in New Jersey.

New Jersey Democrats are growing increasingly worried that Sen. Bob Menendez could lose his seat next week in an outcome that would undercut the party’s effort to take back the Senate.

Democratic strategists working on races across the state said in interviews that they have seen a remarkable decline in support for Menendez as his Republican opponent — former pharmaceutical executive Bob Hugin — poured $36 million of his own wealth into his campaign. Hugin has used much of the money to run a seemingly endless stream of negative campaign ads. Even as public opinion polls show the senator up by double digits, some insiders say a post-summer boost, hoped for by team Menendez, never arrived.

Hugin’s relentless attacks, which took a dark turn the last three weeks, have chipped away at the scandal-scarred senator’s standing with suburban voters and women, some strategists said. Menendez, running in a state that has 900,000 more registered Democrats than Republicans, is now struggling to hold on to areas where he should have massive support, some said. In several competitive congressional districts, internal polls show votes for Menendez running far behind support for a generic Democrat, one strategist said.

As Menendez’s aides insists they’re “confident” he’ll win, some allies are openly admitting things may not turn out as planned, saying the massive advertising campaign on the other side has been difficult to overcome.

“I think the race is a toss-up,” Loretta Weinberg, the Democratic majority leader of the state Senate, said in an interview. “I think it’s a fight, and we’re all in to continue fighting up until 8 p.m. on Election Day.”

Now, with three days until the election, Menendez is swinging wildly at his opponent, linking him to President Donald Trump, former Republican Gov. Chris Christie and even suggesting — falsely and without evidence — that Hugin was fired under questionable circumstances by investment bank JPMorgan nearly two decades ago. He’s furiously working to get out his base, cranking up the urban turnout machine with the help of Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and others.

All of that is playing out as national Democrats are dumping some $7 million into a state that hasn’t elected a Republican to the Senate since 1972.

I hope New Jersey comes to their senses and finds a way to reelect Menendez, but I have a feeling that when we find ourselves in "all bets are off" territory on Tuesday, there are going to be several surprises in the Senate.

There's no way Ted Cruz should lose in Texas.  There's no way Bob Menendez should lose in New Jersey either.  But I wouldn't bet any money on both of them winning.

We're going to see some major surprises in the House on Wednesday.  Some long-time House Republicans are most likely going to find themselves out of a job in a couple months, hopefully Steve King and maybe even Don Young in Alaska. There's also a lot of reason to believe that Democrat Phil Bresden can pull off a major upset in Tennessee and win back Al Gore's old Senate seat.

But when it comes to Cruz and Menendez, one of the two is going to get an unwelcome surprise.  Maybe both.

The Blue Wave Rises, Con't

Banal proclamation about midterms on Tuesday like "It's about turnout!" aside, as I've told readers, we're largely in uncharted territory when it comes to polling for this year's elections and that's because we really don't have any idea what "likely voter models" really represent in 2018, because we're so far outside the norm.  

Turnout in 2010 was decent, 41%, but Republicans destroyed the Democrats and picked up 63 House seats. Turnout in 2014 was dismal, 36%, but as a result Republicans regained the Senate and took the largest House margin they've had in generations by picking up 13 more seats.  And midterm turnout since I've been alive has largely been hovering around that 40% mark.  Back in the sixties and in 1970, midterm turnout was much higher, 47 or 48%, and Democrats had huge House margins, unthinkable in today's era of gerrymandering down to city blocks.

So what does all that mean in 2018?  As Vanity Fair's Peter Hamby reminds us, if Virginia in 2017 is anything to go by, the polls break down completely if midterm turnout is as high as it was 50 years ago.

In the final week before Election Day last November in Virginia, where the commonwealth was electing a new governor, the polls were tightening. Republican Ed Gillespie, was, like Donald Trump before him, tapping into immigration fears by running campaign ads about the threat of the violent MS-13 gang and sanctuary cities. Polls showed Gillespie was suddenly within 3 points of the Democratic front-runner, Ralph Northam, who had held a sturdier lead for much of the year. Were Democrats about to blow another big race in a battleground state? Were last minute Republican efforts to exploit racial fears actually working? Could Northam lose even with an unpopular president in the White House? That scenario would defy the logic of every previous off-year election in modern times, but never mind. The punditry machine, huffing Twitter fumes, gassed itself up. The day before the election, three out of four panelists on MSNBC’s Morning Joe solemnly predicted a Northam loss.

The fourth, Harold Ford Jr., predicted a toss-up, but not without pre-writing an obituary. “Democrats are going to look back and wonder, if he does not win, did we lose on the crime issue, did we lose on the public-safety issue?,” Ford offered. Meanwhile, Mika Brzezinski wondered whether the governor’s race in a state populated by 8.5 million people might hinge on “the Donna Brazile stuff,” a niche beltway Twitter scandal so forgettable that I had to Google it to recall what it was about, despite the fact that I cover politics for a living and grew up in central Virginia. Turns out Brazile wrote a book trashing Hillary Clinton’s campaign, which surely weighed heavily on the minds of voters in Roanoke.

Not only did Northam win the Virginia race, he won by 9 points, a polling error more substantial than anything we saw in 2016. Gillespie, it turns out, actually won more votes than any previous statewide Republican candidate; he had enthusiasm at his back. It’s just that Democrats had more—and they blew the doors off on Election Day. The whole spectacle was yet another blow to polling and to punditry, two industries sullied by Trump’s victory in 2016. 

The Virginia result went mostly unexamined after the results came in, as everyone in politics quickly moved on to the latest Trump thing. But the question of why Northam outperformed the polls, and why polls continue to wield such mystical power over the political press, is worth keeping in mind as America prepares to head to the polls next Tuesday. Every piece of evidence we have about voting behavior during the Trump presidency—special elections in various corners of the country, public and internal polls, early voting data in key states—indicates that we are heading for a midterm election with explosively high turnout. University of Florida professor Michael McDonald, who studies voting patterns, estimated recently that almost 50 percent of eligible voters could cast ballots this year, a turnout level not seen in a midterm election in 50 years. Trump, in his way, is loudly trying to juice Republican turnout in red-leaning Senate races by demagoguing the threat of illegal border crossings, which happen to be at their lowest point in decades.

Enthusiasm in this election, though, is mostly fueled by Democrats. Aside from college-educated white women, much of the Democratic coalition in 2018 is comprised of voters—young people, African-Americans, and Hispanics—who don’t typically show up in midterm elections. And the main thing to remember about high-turnout elections, especially ones that bring non-traditional voters into the mix, is that strange things can happen. House seats once thought to be safe are suddenly in jeopardy, like Republican Steve King’ssolidly red seat in Iowa now appears to be.

Still, in the press, it seems written in stone that Democrats will take back the House but fail to take the Senate, thanks to an unfavorable map that has too many Democratic incumbents running in Trump-friendly states like Missouri, North Dakota, West Virginia, Indiana, and Montana. The prospect of a House-Senate split is the most likely outcome according to the polls and veteran handicappers, and that probability has already started congealing into conventional wisdom. New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, writing last weekend, said this scenario is “the sensible thing to root for,” the best way to constrain Trump’s impulses but also an unchecked liberalism.

Polls remain our best tool for reading the electorate and discerning important trends, which is why journalists, handicappers, and campaign managers depend on them so much. Entire media companies are devoted to explaining them. But polls are not predictive. They are wobbly around the margins. Pollsters, the honest ones at least, know this and repeat the warning over and over again. Yet even the shock of 2016 hasn’t stopped people in the media from making predictions about next Tuesday. Journalists, at least on their Twitter accounts, have started to write off certain Senate races. Tennessee is one, North Dakota another. Joe Donnelly was left for dead last week, until a new NBC/Marist poll came out this week, showing him ahead by 2 points. In Nevada, a recent Emerson pollshowed incumbent Republican Dean Heller ahead of challenger Jacky Rosen by 7 points, prompting a chorus of worried groans from Democrats. People who know better urged caution.

“Consistently, the public polling here is garbage,” Nevada political journalist Jon Ralston told me. He pointed out that public polling in Nevada underestimated Democratic performance in every one of the last six competitive statewide elections. In 2010, Harry Reidwas losing to Republican Sharron Angle by 3 points heading into election day. He won by 5.7. “Polls here under-represent Democratic turnout in general. They under-represent Hispanics,” Ralston said. “I don’t know why no one has learned.” Funny stuff happens when people who don’t mainline CNN for a living actually vote.

Then there’s Texas, where Democrat Beto O’Rourke appears to have reclaimed some late momentum against Republican Ted Cruz,who expanded his lead in the race after the Brett Kavanaughhearings energized G.O.P. voters. Right-leaning analysts have fallen all over themselves to mock the endless stream of Texas polling and the glowing coverage O’Rourke has received from the national press. Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini tweeted that “Beto is and has always been fanfic.” The Weekly Standard published an otherwise sensible piece about the race on Wednesday under the headline “Beto-Mania Is a Joke (Probably).” Yeah, O’Rourke might lose. That’s the most likely outcome and the best bet. But here’s a wild concept: he also might win.

So yes, the blue wave scenario is actually really simple: Democrats turn out in numbers that utterly overwhelm Republican voter suppression efforts.  If this is another year where turnout is 38-42%, the polls are probably pretty accurate, because that's what the likely voter models are based on.  That's still pretty decent news for the Dems as we've seen, at least for the House.

But if turnout is closer to 50%, the likely voter models come apart instantly.  Odds are those additional voters are going to be pulling the levers for the Democrats.  At that point, all bets are off as to where things go, but the possibility of not just a blue wave but a surprise blue tsunami does exist.  I remain extremely skeptical, precisely because of those wildly successful GOP voter suppression efforts in states where Dems are trying to defend those Senate seats.

But let's remember that even in "high" turnout years, the vast majority of eligible voters still don't show up in midterms, and that only helps the GOP.

We need to make 50%+ turnout midterms and 75%+ turnout presidential election years the norm.

Period.

Expanding The Map In Georgia

Going into the final days of the 2018 campaign, Democrat Stacey Abrams is in a neck-and-neck race with Republican Brian Kemp for the Georgia governor's race.  Kemp, who has not recused himself as Secretary of State and will remain in charge of counting the votes in his own race, has done everything he can to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of Georgia Democratic voters in a race that will probably be decided by just tens of thousands of votes.  But if Abrams wins, it will be because of black women turning out at presidential election levels in order to expand Medicaid in the wake of a Republican-created public health crisis.

Money, lives, and change. Those three words could roughly summarize any political race, but seem especially important in the state today. The issues facing much of the Georgia electorate are fairly simple: The state is the fifth-poorest in the nation. Its median wages and minimum wages are both below the national average. Across all races, the poor are underserved, often lack insurance, and face remarkably high rates of mortality and morbidity from preventable diseases. The state has huge swaths of rural land whose communities often lack basic services. Outside the urban oasis of the Atlanta metropolitan area, Georgia faces as many challenges to the health and welfare of its citizens as any state in the country. The most important policy issues in the governor’s race boil down to each candidate’s ability to fill those gaps.

But there’s a special dimension in Georgia that could very well mean the difference next week. The state is in the grip of a crisis, one that affects, in particular, the lives of black women like Abrams and like those who form the foundation of her coalition and organizing base. Across the country, black women’s health—particularly the fate of mothers and their newborns—is in peril, and mortality rates have spiked. Nowhere is this truer than in Georgia: The issue has been front and center in mobilizing black women, and it’s central to the policy platform of the candidate seeking to be the first black woman governor in U.S. history. To black women in Georgia, the stakes of the debate over health-care access are no less than life or death.

Perhaps no one is more aware of those stakes than Joy Baker. Baker is an ob-gyn in Thomaston, a little more than an hour south of Atlanta. Thomaston is the picture of a small southern town. It has a Main Street and a Church Street. The town was built around a mill that’s long gone, but it’s still a hub for basic services for people living in the deeply rural surrounding areas. For hundreds of poor, rural women, Baker’s practice in the Upson Regional Medical Center is the sole lifeline. Half of the rural areas in Georgia don’t have any doctors’ offices, hospitals, or clinics where women can seek obstetric care. That means Baker is responsible not just for the care of people in and around Thomaston, but also for women from an average of 40 miles away.

“Twenty-five percent of my patient population lives below the poverty line, on less than $17,000 per year,” Baker told me. Her patients are disproportionately African American. The vast majority of them are on Medicaid, which by federal mandate covers pregnancy and perinatal services for women under or near the poverty line. They often have to rely on booking Medicaid vans three days in advance to get to doctor visits because they can’t afford gas or don’t have cars. “Some of my patients can’t even afford a prescription at Walmart for $4,” Baker says.

Baker told me that at least 60 percent of her patients qualify as having “high-risk” pregnancies, often because of obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes, and other comorbidities common among poor and rural populations. For most of those women, the nine-plus months of pre- and postnatal care they are guaranteed under federal law are the only regular primary and preventive care they’ll receive in a given year.

“I see an average of 30 to 40 patients per day in my clinic,” Baker says. “That’s way more than I’d like to be seeing, but I have to be able to accommodate.” Her average week includes two 24-hour shifts in a row, during which she alternates between working in the maternity ward, in the emergency room, and in the operating rooms of her hospital, as well as in her clinic across the street. For her and the one other doctor in her practice, it’s a Herculean task just to provide an adequate standard of care—often squeezed into 10-minute visits.

Baker’s patients often have chronic conditions that her office can address only while they’re there for pregnancy-related care. That includes the mental-health problems that have come to characterize rural American life. Most often, the mental-health dangers associated with pregnancy and childbirth involve postpartum depression, but Baker sees women who are already depressed, suffering from undiagnosed disorders, or having suicidal ideations before and during pregnancy. She’s also obtained a special license to treat opioid addiction among women who want to rehabilitate themselves during pregnancy. “We don’t have any mental-health services and supports,” Baker told me.

Her office tries to confront those challenges head on, counseling patients and finding psychiatric services for them. And Baker utilizes group prenatal care—an attempt to alleviate patients’ potential isolation and to provide women with support networks that can help their pregnancy outcomes.

But there are mounting structural issues that even Baker’s ingenuity and willpower can’t fix. Dozens of labor-and-delivery units across the state have faced closures in the past two decades. Eight rural hospitals in Georgia have shuttered in the past eight years. And that’s amid other stresses on rural and maternal health in Georgia, like the opioid crisis.

The biggest challenge is still insurance. Even though poor pregnant women are entitled to Medicaid coverage, that coverage is difficult to navigate, and under state law it comes with a firm expiration date. “Medicaid usually ends about six to eight weeks after the delivery,” Baker says. “But the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has come out with a strong suggestion that we follow those patients for the entire year.” Baker estimates that after those six to eight weeks, she won’t see 90 percent of her patients until they’re pregnant again. In the dangerous medical crucible that is the first few weeks after childbirth, she estimates that some 30 percent of her patients won’t even make it to their first postpartum visit.

For Baker, the only solution is the one that’s at the center of the Georgia governor’s race: Medicaid expansion. “I feel like I’m kind of piecing things together here, and I would love to have the resources to do the things we need to do,” she told me. Because Medicaid expansion would offer health insurance to more low-income adults than the state’s current program, it would provide many residents of Thomaston with the first steady guarantee of coverage in decades. That would give them access to more regular care and reduce their own health-care costs. And it would give Baker’s patients year-round access to her services.

The Medicaid expansion would also signal that the state is serious about assisting Baker on the front lines of the crisis—and that it cares about her, too. “As a black woman, it is just really unacceptable to me that black women are more likely to die” than white women, Baker says. “I take it personally because I am a black woman and I would like to live if I should decide to have a baby.”

Nearly five million Georgians live outside the Atlanta metro, effectively the entire population of Alabama.   A lot of Georgia outside Atlanta is rural and poor and a full third of Georgia's population is black.  You can imagine then why Kemp is so eager to disenfranchise as many black voters as he can, and why Abrams appealing to black women -- one-sixth of the state's population -- to help her tackle the health care crisis is such an existential threat to the GOP there.

If black women showed up to vote at 2012 levels, Kemp would be obliterated.

That's how Abrams wins.

Last Call for Meanwhile In Gunmerica...

Another mass shooting, this time in Tallahassee as five were shot at a yoga studio, killing at least one and putting several more in the hospital.  Andrew Gillum, Democratic candidate for Florida governor and current mayor of Tallahassee, is taking time off the campaign trail in the final days to oversee the city's response.

Tallahasee Mayor and Florida Democratic gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum said Friday he will return to the state’s capitol city after of a shooting there at a yoga studio.

“I’m deeply appreciative of law enforcement's quick response to the shooting at the yoga facility in Tallahassee today. No act of gun violence is acceptable. I'm in close communication with law enforcement officials and will be returning to Tallahassee tonight,” Gillum tweeted Friday evening.

A lone shooter entered a yoga studio in Tallahassee and shot five people, killing one and injuring four, who remain in critical condition. The shooter is dead from what appears to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound, a Tallahassee police spokesperson told The Hill.

Police said they do not believe there is any further threat to the public and do not yet know the identity of the shooter.

The shooting Friday comes four days ahead The Sunshine State’s gubernatorial election between Gillum and former Rep. Ron DeSantis (R) to replace Gov. Rick Scott (R). The race has been one of the nation’s tightest contests, with The Cook Political Report rating it a “toss up,” and an average of polls calculated by RealClearPolitics showing Gillum up 2.7 points.

It is unclear if and how the shooting and Gillum’s absence from the campaign trail will impact the race.

The race continues to be extremely close heading into the home stretch, but good for Gillum to continue his duties as mayor.  It's the right thing to do both morally and politically.

Spies Like Us, Con't

Yahoo News is reporting a major story today on how in 2009 the CIA got so complacent with their online system used to secretly recruit foreign assets in Iran, China, North Korea and elsewhere that they had no idea how easy it was to compromise.  That led directly to the deaths of dozens of CIA assets worldwide during Obama's first term, and culminated in Edward Snowden's 2012 defection to Russia with the crown jewels of US intelligence operations.

One of the largest intelligence failures of the past decade started in Iran in 2009, when the Obama administration announced the discovery of a secret Iranian underground enrichment facility — part of Iran’s headlong drive for nuclear weapons. Angered about the breach, the Iranians went on a mole hunt, looking for foreign spies, said one former senior intelligence official.

The mole hunt wasn’t hard, in large part, because the communications system the CIA was using to communicate with agents was flawed. Former U.S. officials said the internet-based platform, which was first used in war zones in the Middle East, was not built to withstand the sophisticated counterintelligence efforts of a state actor like China or Iran. “It was never meant to be used long term for people to talk to sources,” said one former official. “The issue was that it was working well for too long, with too many people. But it was an elementary system.”

“Everyone was using it far beyond its intention,” said another former official.

The risks posed by the system appeared to have been overlooked in part because of it was easy to use, said the former intelligence officials. There is no foolproof way to communicate — especially with expediency and urgency — with sources in hostile environments like Iran and China, noted the former officials. But a sense of confidence in the system kept it in operation far longer than was safe or advisable, said former officials. The CIA’s directorate of science and technology, which is responsible for the secure communications system, “says, ‘our s***’s impregnable,’ but it’s obviously not,” said one former official.

By 2010, however, it appears that Iran had begun to identify CIA agents. And by 2011, Iranian authorities dismantled a CIA spy network in that country, said seven former U.S. intelligence officials. (Indeed, in May 2011, Iranian intelligence officials announced publicly that they had broken up a ring of 30 CIA spies; U.S. officials later confirmed the breach to ABC News, which also reported on a potential compromise to the communications system.)

Iran executed some of the CIA informants and imprisoned others in an intelligence setback that one of the former officials described as “incredibly damaging.” The CIA successfully exfiltrated some of its Iranian sources, said former officials.

The Iranian compromise led to significantly fewer CIA agents being killed than in China, according to former officials. Still, the events there hampered the CIA’s capacity to collect intelligence in Iran at a critical time, just as Tehran was forging ahead with its nuclear program.

U.S. authorities believe Iran probably unwound the CIA’s asset network analytically — meaning they deduced what Washington knew about Tehran’s own operations, then identified Iranians who held that information, and eventually zeroed in on possible sources. This hunt for CIA sources eventually bore fruit — including the identification of the covert communications system.

A 2011 Iranian television broadcast that touted the government’s destruction of the CIA network said U.S. intelligence operatives had created websites for fake companies to recruit agents in Iran by promising them jobs, visas and education abroad. Iranians who initially thought they were responding to legitimate opportunities would end up meeting with CIA officers in places like Dubai or Istanbul for recruitment, according to the broadcast.

Though the Iranians didn’t say precisely how they infiltrated the network, two former U.S. intelligence officials said that the Iranians cultivated a double agent who led them to the secret CIA communications system. This online system allowed CIA officers and their sources to communicate remotely in difficult operational environments like China and Iran, where in-person meetings are often dangerous.

A lack of proper vetting of sources may have led to the CIA inadvertently running a double agent, said one former senior official — a consequence of the CIA’s pressing need at the time to develop highly placed agents inside the Islamic Republic. After this betrayal, Israeli intelligence tipped off the CIA that Iran had likely identified some of its assets, said the same former official.

The losses could have stopped there. But U.S. officials believe Iranian intelligence was then able to compromise the covert communications system. At the CIA, there was “shock and awe” about the simplicity of the technique the Iranians used to successfully compromise the system, said one former official.

In fact, the Iranians used Google to identify the website the CIA was were using to communicate with agents. Because Google is continuously scraping the internet for information about all the world’s websites, it can function as a tremendous investigative tool — even for counter-espionage purposes. And Google’s search functions allow users to employ advanced operators — like “AND,” “OR,” and other, much more sophisticated ones — that weed out and isolate websites and online data with extreme specificity.

According to the former intelligence official, once the Iranian double agent showed Iranian intelligence the website used to communicate with his or her CIA handlers, they began to scour the internet for websites with similar digital signifiers or components — eventually hitting on the right string of advanced search terms to locate other secret CIA websites. From there, Iranian intelligence tracked who was visiting these sites, and from where, and began to unravel the wider CIA network.

And while the Iranians and Chinese cleaned house, the Russians, led by Putin, ran with it and cooked up an even more dastardly counter-intelligence plot that eventually led to Edward Snowden's defection with the keys to the NSA's kingdom and from there, the ability to freely compromise the US government at will, along with an operation to put one of their key enablers in the White House.

All because we decided Gulf War internet security technology and sloppy spycraft were still "probably" good enough ten years later.

Jesus wept.

Trump's Race To The Bottom, Con't

Apparently Trump's open white nationalism in the final days of the 2018 midterm campaign is finally a bridge too far for suburban GOP voters, who are now looking for the exits in suburban purple House districts.

Two years ago, the presidential election hinged in large part on a rightward shift among working-class whites who deserted Democrats.

Tuesday’s House election may turn on an equally significant and opposite force: a generational break with the Republican Party among educated, wealthier whites — especially women — who like the party’s pro-business policies but recoil from President Trump’s divisive language on race and gender.

Rather than seeking to coax voters like these back into the Republican coalition, Mr. Trump appears to have all but written them off, spending the final days of the campaign delivering a scorching message about preoccupations like birthright citizenship and a migrant “invasion” from Mexico that these voters see through as alarmist.

In Republican-leaning districts that include diverse populations or abut cities that do — from bulwarks of Sunbelt conservatism like Houston and Orange County, Calif., to the well-manicured bedroom communities outside Philadelphia and Minneapolis — the party is in danger of losing its House majority next week because Mr. Trump’s racially-tinged nationalism has alienated these voters who once made up a dependable constituency.

One of those disenchanted voters is J. Mark Metts, a 60-year-old partner at one of this city’s prestigious law firms. Mr. Metts had never voted for a Democratic presidential candidate until 2016. Now he and some of his neighbors in the moneyed River Oaks enclave of Houston are about to oppose a Republican once again, to register their disapproval of President Trump.

“With Congress not really standing up to Trump, this election is becoming a referendum,” Mr. Metts said, explaining why he would no longer support the re-election of Representative John Culberson, an eight-term Republican.

Mr. Culberson is now running roughly even with the Democratic candidate, Lizzie Pannill Fletcher, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll last week — an extraordinary development in a district that has not elected a Democrat since before an oilman named George H.W. Bush won here in 1966, and one that illustrates how difficult Mr. Trump has made it for his party to retain control of the House.

The president amplified his fear-peddling Wednesday night with an online video that is being widely condemned as racist, showing a Mexican man convicted of killing two California deputies with a voice-over saying “Democrats let him into the country.”

Trump knows as long as he keeps 50 Republican senators, he gets all the federal judges, Supreme Court justices, and treaty agreements he wants.  Another two years of the Mitch McConnell federal judge factory, and god forbid another Supreme Court justice, means it doesn't matter what Democrats do in the House in the short run.

Sure, it means investigations and oversight.  But on the big issues, Trump can turn to the courts, and grind down the civil rights era one decision at a time until we're back to the 1950's...or the 1850's.  There's nothing that makes me believe that Trump won't finish out his term and be a clear favorite for re-election unless he crashes the economy, a legitimate concern.  And even then, Trump can blame House Democrats.

And remember, all these Republicans who hate Trump would come back to the party in a heartbeat if Mike Pence was running.  We'd be right back to 2016, only without Trump.

The Republicans will be fine without the House.  If anything, it gives Trump what he loves the most: an "enemy of the people" to scream at on Twitter every day for the next two years.

StupidiNews!

• Tennessee becomes the first state to execute a death row inmate by electric chair since 2013 as convicted double murderer Edmund Zagorski was put to death for a pair of 1984 murders.
• For the 27th year in a row, the United Nations has passed a resolution calling on the US to end its embargo on Cuba, UN Ambassador Nikki Haley called the vote a poke "in the eye" of the US.
• The Pittsburgh synagogue massacre suspect has plead not guilty to multiple counts of murder, federal hate crimes, and firearms possession charges as funerals for the victims continue. 
• Donald Trump is turning to his cabinet to draft a trade deal resolution in time for his meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the G20 summit in Buenos Aires later this month.
• AT&T-owned HBO and Cinemax have been blacked out on rival Dish Network until further notice as the cable mega-giant leverages its own DirecTV satellite service. 

Last Call For Both Sides Forever

There is no level of perfidy or autocratic power abuse that Trump can commit that won't have a majority of the country blaming the media for everything wrong in America.

A new POLITICO/Morning Consult poll conducted over the past fractious, violent week shows a majority of voters think that President Donald Trump has done more to divide the country than unite it since he took office last year — but that the national news media are even worse.

Just 3 in 10 voters, 30 percent, said Trump has done more to unite the country, compared with 56 percent who said he’s done more to divide it. Even more voters, 64 percent, said the media have done more to divide the country, while only 17 percent say they have done more to unite it.

Majorities of Democrats (88 percent) and independents (54 percent) said Trump has done more to divide the U.S., while 55 percent of Republicans said Trump has done more to unite the country instead.

But few voters in either party — 28 percent of Democrats, 9 percent of Republicans and 14 percent of independents — said the national news media have done more to unite the country.

The poll was conducted Oct. 25-30, a tumultuous week that included the Oct. 26 arrest of a Florida man on charges of sending pipe bombs to prominent Democrats and other Trump critics, and the Oct. 27 murder of 11 Jewish worshipers at a Pittsburgh synagogue.

A majority of voters, 58 percent, said they consider political violence to be widespread, including 63 percent of Democrats, 55 percent of Republicans and 55 percent of independents.

Asked who’s more to blame for political violence, 36 percent said Trump, while 9 percent pinned the blame on congressional Republicans. Fewer than a third, 31 percent, hold Democrats in Congress more responsible. Nearly a quarter, 24 percent, had no opinion.

“Voters across the political spectrum agree that political violence is widespread, but have different viewpoints on who’s responsible for the growing wave of unrest,” said Tyler Sinclair, Morning Consult’s vice president. “Notably, 58 percent of voters say political violence is widespread — including 63 percent of Democrats and 55 percent of Republicans. However, while 77 percent of Democrats say President Trump and the GOP are responsible for political violence, just 14 percent of Republican voters say the same.”

And the media plays into Trump's hands time and time again, as they have been for more than three years now.  The best thing they could do is stop covering him altogether, for the White House press to walk out in disgust.  We all know however that a choice like that will never be made, and so the media will continue to feed Trump's ego and increase his followers.

Whether or not our democracy will survive another two years of this remains to be seen, but even if the Democrats win the House (for the Senate is at best long odds) the media will turn on them in order to placate Trump.  We'll see what happens when Trump makes his move to bury or end the Mueller probe after the Midterms, and the media's role in that.

Trump's Race To The Bottom, Con't

CNN doesn't pull any punches for once, calling Donald Trump's new GOP campaign ad days before the midterm election what it is: racist, plain and simple.

In the most racially charged national political ad in 30 years, President Donald Trump and the Republican Party accuse Democrats of plotting to help people they depict as Central American invaders overrun the nation with cop killers. 

The new spot, tweeted by the President five days before the midterm elections, is the most extreme step yet in the most inflammatory closing argument of any campaign in recent memory. 

The Trump campaign ad is the latest example of the President's willingness to lie and fear-monger in order to tear at racial and societal divides; to embrace demagoguery to bolster his own political power and the cause of the Republican midterm campaign. 

The ad -- produced for the Trump campaign -- features Luis Bracamontes, a Mexican man who had previously been deported but returned to the United States and was convicted in February in the slaying of two California deputies. 

"I'm going to kill more cops soon," a grinning Bracamontes is shown saying in court as captions flash across the screen reading "Democrats let him into our country. Democrats let him stay."

It's being done on purpose, and Trump is happy to do it.

The Trump ad also flashes to footage of the migrant caravan of Central American asylum seekers that is currently in Mexico, which Trump says is preparing an invasion of the United States, implying that everyone in the column of people fleeing repression, poverty and economic blight is bent on murder and serious crime on US soil. 

"Who else would Democrats let in?" a caption asks. 

A source close to the White House told CNN's Jim Acosta that the web ad was produced by Jamestown Associates for the Trump campaign for the midterms and was designed to fit into Trump's broader immigration push and to change the argument from "family unification to invasion." 

"It's clearly working. We are all talking about it and not health care," the source said.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the point.  We're talking about what Trump wants to talk about as his national hate rallies continue in key battleground states like Florida.

President Trump introduced the polarizing issue of birthright citizenship as a central plank of his closing argument to voters here Wednesday night as he began his final campaign sprint to Election Day.

Trump said illegal immigration was the driving issue of the midterm elections and vowed that with enlarged Republican congressional majorities he would achieve his immigration priorities, including eliminating the constitutional right to citizenship for those born in the United States to undocumented immigrant parents.

The president spoke at length about birthright citizenship, which he called “this crazy policy” that he said allowed “hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrant children” born on U.S. soil to automatically become U.S. citizens and therefore eligible for every privilege and benefit of citizenship.

“Birthright citizenship — you know all about it — we will keep the criminals, the drug dealers, we will keep them all out of our country,” Trump said. “We will get rid of all of this. We will end, finally, birthright citizenship. It’s costing us so many billions of dollars.” 

This is what the GOP is in 2018.  This is what they stand for.  This is what Republican voters want: permission to hate millions.  And if you think this is all a stunt, well all Trump needs is the five Republicans on the Supreme Court to agree with him.

The Dred Scott decision used to be law of the land too.

That Little Domestic Terrorism Problems Of Ours, Con't

Last week Gregory Bush walked into a Kroger in a Louisville suburb and killed two black people, telling a white bystander that "whites don't shoot whites" before letting that person go unharmed.  This happened an hour from where I live, and if you somehow think Kentucky doesn't have a massive white supremacy terrorist problem, well, I'm here to tell you it's rather pervasive.  Don't take my word for it though, take the word of somebody who knows Bush, his one-time attorney, Tommy Juanso.

I have spoken on social media for five years with the man police have charged in the Kroger killings, and I fully believe race was his primary motive.

Gregory Bush was a UK Wildcat fan. A superfan. A member of Big Blue Nation. I spoke to him on Twitter the same way many of us who affiliate as Cardinals and Wildcats do. In those interactions, the way the alleged killer viewed himself, and how he viewed others — with a surface categorization of their skin color, their race, their team — is significant.

When I learned the identity of the Kroger shooter, a man who is accused of murdering two wonderful people who happened to be black, it was clear to me that he did so because of his real team affiliation. It wasn’t a Wildcat vs. Cards rivalry. It was a deeper, more painful, and evil rivalry — a rivalry between a man who views himself as a member of the white team versus members of the black team.

I know this because he shared his views on race.

Several years ago, Gregory Bush made comments about black men on Twitter that were unforgivable. He saw black men as one homogeneous group and indicated that they were some of the most racist people he'd ever met.

I challenged him, and I told him that people of all races can be racist. This white man, married to a black woman, with a biracial son, hated black men. And he claimed he hated them because of comments black men made about his wife at Thunder over Louisville. He talked about “black dudes were pissed” he was with a black woman. He said they called his wife “a whore.” He said he would never forget those comments.

I explained to him that even if that was true, people in my own family have dealt with it. I tried to reach him, to change his heart, to open his eyes. It was obvious that he hated black men and would always hate them.

And if you think Bush is alone, well, this is the kind of place where black people get killed, and a couple days later you can buy KKK and Nazi memorabilia and merchandise at a gun show.

The Kentucky Expo Center said it will hold an "emergency meeting" to re-evaluate its policies after Nazi and KKK merchandise was sold at a recent event, prompting anger and outrage from Louisville residents.

"In light of the recent event at the Kentucky Exposition Center where Nazi and white supremacy items were discovered to be for sale, the chairman of the Kentucky State Fair Board will propose strengthening existing exhibitor policies at the next board meeting on Nov. 15," said Cody Patterson, a spokesman for Kentucky Venues, which includes the expo center. The fair board was originally scheduled to meet after Thanksgiving.

The merchandise was sold by vendors at the National Gun Day's annual firearm show this past weekend. The items included a white tank top with two red horizontal stripes and a patch on the chest featuring a black swastika; an authentic KKK robe used by the notorious white supremacy group; and holiday ornaments adorned with glittery swastikas. 

Mark Lynn, the chairman of the Kentucky State Fair Board, told the Courier Journal on Tuesday that he pushed for an earlier meeting to address the issue. The board's members are appointed by the governor; Lynn has served as the head of the fair board since 2013.

“Immediately I was horrified, I had no idea that was being sold," Lynn said. "It’s disappointing and frustrating. I’m one to stand up for freedoms, but this is just common sense.”

Lynn said the show contracts are too vague and they should be changed to specifically name items of hate that shouldn't be displayed or sold at future events.

One of the vendors who had Nazi memorabilia on display was Walter Kanzler, of Key Largo, Florida, who sells Nazi Christmas ornaments on his website, kanzlermilitaria.com. On the site, it says, "We specifically stress that this website is for historical interest only and has NO political agenda and/or views whatsoever."

Kanzler defended the collectibles, saying they are part of history.

“I don’t want to suppress history,” Kanzler told the Courier Journal. “They are original, I have no interest in political statements. I’m not into hate or anything like that. These things are a part of history.”

Somebody finally noticed.  Maybe it'll be stopped, but I doubt it.  There's a direct reason people sell Klan and Nazi stuff at gun shows like this all over the country, it's because the people who come to gun shows are buyers of that stuff. It's your one-stop shop for everything you need to purify the races.

Meanwhile in Washington State, turns out the white supremacist "Christian" terrorists there don't just go to gun shows, they get elected to public office as Republicans, too.

Washington state Rep. Matt Shea acknowledged Wednesday he had distributed a four-page manifesto titled “Biblical Basis for War,” which describes the Christian God as a “warrior,” details the composition and strategies of a “Holy Army” and condemns abortion and same-sex marriage.

The document is organized in 14 sections with multiple tiers of bullet points and a smattering of biblical citations. Under one heading, “Rules of War,” it makes a chilling prescription for enemies who flout “biblical law.” It states, “If they do not yield – kill all males.”

After the document was leaked online Tuesday, the Spokane Valley Republican insisted he was not promoting violence and that the message had been taken out of context.

“First of all, it was a summary of a series of sermons on biblical war in the Old Testament as part of a larger discussion on the history of warfare,” Shea said in a Facebook Live video on Wednesday. “This document, in and of itself, was not a secret. I’ve actually talked about portions of this document publicly.”

In the video, Shea also compalains about a recently published Rolling Stone profile that characterizes him as an extremist, argues that the United States is “a Christian nation” and asserts that his detractors are part of a so-called “counter state” made up of “Marxists” and “Islamists.” He dismisses criticism as nothing more than “smears and slander and innuendo and implication.”

He also delves into the philosophy known as “just war theory,” which has been endorsed by many mainstream Christians.

But critics of Shea – who embraces far-right conspiracy theories, associates with a fundamentalist religious group in northern Stevens County and champions a push for a 51st state called Liberty – saw something sinister in the document.

“The document Mr. Shea wrote is not a Sunday school project or an academic study,” Spokane County Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich wrote in an email. “It is a ‘how to’ manual consistent with the ideology and operating philosophy of the Christian Identity/Aryan Nations movement and the Redoubt movement of the 1990s.”

You are infinitely more likely to be killed in America by a racist asshole like this then a "Muslim terrorist" after all.

Now, we've been through the militia movement of the Clinton 90's and the post-9/11 era, but the difference here in the Trump regime is that these nutjobs are getting elected as Republicans and are making laws for the rest of us, putting themselves into positions of power at the local, state, and national level.

These assholes are dreaming of the day they can slaughter those people by the hundreds and they want a government that not only gives them permissions to do so, but helps them accomplish it.  This guy should be serving a lengthy sentence in prison, not another term in the Washington State Legislature.

And as that Rolling Stone profile of Shea alludes to, he definitely wants his own white separatist ethnostate, and he's willing to kill to make that happen.

Shea — a four-term elected official now running for a fifth — rarely sees any blowback for the things he says or for the fact that in his nine years in office he has allied with some of the most high-profile conspiracy theorists and anti-government extremists in the American West: from Cliven Bundy and his sons to a neo-Confederate Idaho preacher to the head of the Oath Keepers, an extremist group that believes “the United States is collaborating with a one-world tyrannical conspiracy called the New World Order.”

“I don’t think that the extent of [Shea’s] connections are widely known,” says Rep. Marcus Riccelli, a three-term Democrat in the state legislature who represents Spokane. “It’s a real statement of the Republican Party that someone with his extreme views has risen in the ranks of leadership.”

Long before President Trump deemed the press the “enemy of the people,” Matt Shea was refusing to speak with the media and airing his concern over conspiracy theories like FEMA camps with InfoWars’ Alex Jones. Shea also organized the Spokane chapter of the anti-Muslim ACT for America, which the Southern Poverty Law Center classifies as a hate group. And for the past few summers, Shea has spoken at a secretive religious community run by a man who was a foundational figure in the Christian Identity movement, which, according to the Anti-Defamation League, believes white Europeans to be the lost tribes of Israel and considers Jews to be the offspring of Eve and Satan.

Then there are the accusations about Shea’s temper. His first wife accused him of abuse, saying in divorce filings that she “belonged to him as a possession,” “could not get out of bed before him,” and that during two arguments “he grabbed me hard enough to leave bruises on my arms.”

She also said Shea believed he would one day be president of the United States, that he would be assassinated and that he “predicts a civil war.”

In 2012, Shea faced a firearms charge after he allegedly pulled a loaded gun from his glove compartment during a road-rage altercation. He was charged for having an expired concealed-weapons permit (it was later dropped; he reportedly made a deal with prosecutors for it to be dismissed if he went a year without breaking the law). Later, when his Democratic opponent reminded voters of the incident in campaign mailers, Shea retaliated by posting pictures of himself to Facebook in front of her home, listing the nearest intersection.

And yet he was re-elected that year with 56 percent of the vote; in 2016, he won with an even bigger margin, 64 percent.

The party of Donald Trump was, and still is, the party of hateful white supremacists like Matt Shea, first and foremost, and they have been for years.  There are no "good" Republicans, just the ones who haven't admitted that they think Shea is right.

Because they sure keep voting for him.

StupidiNews!

• Two Saudi sisters were found dead last week, bound and taped, along the Hudson River near NYC's Riverside Park, and NYPD and FBI investigators are asking for help from the public.
• Donald Trump now says as many as 15,000 US military troops could be sent to the US-Mexico border to stop refugee caravans from reaching America and declaring asylum.
• Peru's highest court has ordered opposition leader Keiko Fujimori back to jail pending her money laundering and corruption trial as protesters clashed with police outside the courtroom.
• General Motors is offering 18,000 senior employees buyout packages as the automaker moves to cut costs due to Trump tariffs on steel and aluminum imports.
• Hawaii's state Supreme Court has ruled that construction may proceed for new telescopes on Mauna Kea, despite criticism from native Hawaiians about the lack of preservation of sacred mountain sites.

Last Call For What's Up With Team Aftab?

Kind of a big local story here in Cincinnati as the House race for OH-1 between GOP Rep. Steve Chabot and Democratic challenger Aftab Pureval has gotten very strange, and definitely not in a good way for the blue side.

A resignation and two firings have cast a pall on the campaign of Democratic congressional Aftab Pureval six days before the election.

His campaign manager Sarah Topy resigned late Tuesday night and two staffers were fired.
Now some see his challenge of Republican Congressman Steve Chabot, R-Westwood, in jeopardy.

Pureval wouldn't say why other than "new information" came to light.

"Yesterday, I learned new information that led me to believe that members of my staff may not have lived up to that standard," Pureval said in a statement "We have dismissed those staff members. I do not want this issue to be a distraction in the final days, and therefore have accepted the resignation of my campaign manager."

In an interview with The Enquirer, Pureval gave little additional information. He wouldn't say what the new information was. He also wouldn't reveal the identity of the two staffers.

The staff shakeup comes on the eve of a hearing Thursday in front of the Ohio Elections Commission about whether Pureval improperly spent money from his local election campaign fund for his federal campaign.

The campaign came under a bigger cloud of suspicion with allegations a worker on Pureval's campaign posed as a Chabot campaign worker and infiltrated his campaign.

"While the actions of a few are inappropriate, we're proud of the campaign we've run," Pureval said yesterday.

Republicans see Pureval's troubles as not only assuring a Chabot victory, but also helping their candidates in the other races, including the close gubernatorial race between Republican Mike DeWine and Democrat Rich Cordray.

"When something like this happens so close to the election, his supporters are probably starting to walk away from him," said Jane Timken, chairwoman of the Ohio Republican Party. "That might mean fewer supporters for the other Democrats on the ticket."

When asked who will manage the campaign in the final week, Pureval said local political consultant Jens Sutmoller will serve as chief of staff.

The latest two NYT polls in the last few weeks show Chabot up by a comfortable nine points after surveys earlier this fall showed Pureval within a couple of points, but if this turns into a campaign finance scandal with days to go, Pureval's done blue wave or not.

If there is a blue wave, there's no sign of it in Cincy.  OH-1 is an R+9 district, and Chabot is leading by that margin.  Unless the NY Times polls are badly overestimating Chabot, he's going to win.

We'll see.  Cincy readers, get out and vote.