Last Call For That Second Civil War

The Power Line boys can't wait for the brave heroes of right-wing Jesus to start filling liberals full of bullets.

What we are seeing today is mob action by Democratic Party activists: harassing Republicans when they go out to dinner or walk through airports; busing activists to Republicans’ homes to harass them and frighten their children; invading Republican Congressional offices with threatening mobs; and, in some cases, shooting or violently assaulting Republican office-holders. I wrote yesterday about Kellie Paul’s appeal to Cory Booker to withdraw his incitements to violence. Maxine Waters is another prominent Democrat who has endorsed immoral and potentially illegal harassment of Republicans.

Why are Democrats confident that political violence is a one-way street? Conservatives are, on average, better armed than liberals and–I think it is safe to say–more personally formidable. Yet liberals clearly have no fear that conservatives will respond to their violence and mob intimidation in kind. I think that is because they assume we are better than they are. We care about our country, we value its institutions, and we try to maintain the basic presumption of good faith that underlies our democratic system.

The Democrats are right to think that we are better than they are, but conservatives’ patience is not infinite. The potential for significant political violence is higher today than it has been at any time since the Great Depression, and perhaps since the Civil War. The Democrats are sowing the wind, and they may reap the whirlwind.

They cannot wait for that Second Civil War to start, where they can use the full power of the Trump state to crush the necks of liberals.  They know what Kavanaugh means in the long run.  They can't help themselves, their dreams of righteous soldiers exterminating the sub-human vermin in their otherwise pristine country, their hunger for martial rule is cavernous.

This is who the GOP is, aging Boomers wanting to go back to the days of the Kent State Massacre and church burnings and public lynchings and the younger crowd who have heard the stories, but their black hearts achs for the bloodshed of the bad old days.  They dream of the era when they can crack skulls and smash heads and get away with it, because it will be the right thing to do.

They've been training all their lives.

We're one Reichstag Fire away...

Russian To Judgment, Con't

Peter Smith, the GOP operative who went deep into the Russian weeds to buy the "incriminating missing Clinton emails" and who committed suicide last year after his plan went public, was much further along in his scheme than anyone realized.  

Well. not anyone...Special Counsel Robert Mueller knew.

A veteran Republican operative and opposition researcher solicited and raised at least $100,000 from donors as part of an effort to obtain what he believed to be emails stolen from Hillary Clinton, activities that remain of intense interest to federal investigators working for special counsel Robert Mueller’s office and on Capitol Hill.

Peter W. Smith, an Illinois businessman with a long history of involvement in GOP politics, sought and collected the funds from at least four wealthy donors as part of the plan to obtain Mrs. Clinton’s stolen emails from hackers just weeks before election day in 2016, according to people familiar with the matter and documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

Mr. Smith’s effort to find what he believed were some 33,000 deleted emails Mrs. Clinton said were personal was first reported by the Journal in a 2017 story, but the extent of his planning went far beyond what was previously known. Mr. Smith died 10 days after describing his efforts to a reporter for the Journal newspaper.

The documents and people familiar with the matter depict a veteran political operative with access to wealthy donors and deep connections in Republican politics on a single-minded quest to find incriminating information about Mrs. Clinton even after government officials warned of Russian involvement in U.S. politics. People familiar with the investigations described Mr. Smith’s activities as an area of expanding interest.

Mr. Smith went to extraordinary lengths to ensure the privacy and secrecy of his projects, according to emails and court records reviewed by the Journal and a person familiar with the matter.

One email showed the anti-Clinton funds referenced as donations that were to be sent to a Washington, D.C.-based scholarship fund for Russian students.

Mr. Smith often communicated with associates using a Gmail account under the name “Robert Tyler” that both he and several others had access to, according to emails and a person familiar with the matter. He sometimes asked associates to communicate with him by writing a note and saving it the draft folder of the account, according to correspondence reviewed by the Journal.

He also had one phone number that he used for sensitive matters and a commercially available encrypted email account. Hard drives that Mr. Smith’s estate turned over to federal investigators were also encrypted, according to people familiar with the matter.

According to an email in the “Robert Tyler” account reviewed by the Journal, Mr. Smith obtained $100,000 from at least four financiers as well as a $50,000 contribution from Mr. Smith himself. People familiar with Mr. Smith’s financial transactions confirm there were donations.

The email, dated Oct. 11, 2016, in the “Robert Tyler” account, included the subject line “Wire Instructions—Clinton Email Reconnaissance Initiative” and was addressed to Mr. Smith. The writer, who identified himself as “ROB, ” said: “This $100k total with the $50k received from you will allow us to fund the Washington Scholarship Fund for the Russian students for the promised $150K.” The Journal couldn’t determine if such a fund actually exists.

“The students are very pleased with the email releases they have seen, and are thrilled with their educational advancement opportunities,” the email read. Because multiple people had access to the “Robert Tyler” email account, it couldn’t be determined who sent the email to Mr. Smith.

The email about obtaining the pledges came just days after WikiLeaks and the website DCLeaks began releasing emails damaging to Mrs. Clinton’s campaign and four days after the U.S. government publicly warned that Russia was attempting to interfere in the U.S. election through the hacking and release of stolen emails and doing so at the direction of the Kremlin’s “senior-most officials.” Russia denies interfering in the election.

So yes, Peter Smith was neck deep in the GOP effort to get the dirt on Clinton from the Russian hacks, and he took his own life rather than face the music.

Mueller knows all of the notes in this tune, however, and when the diva Lady Justice sings this opera, it's going to be curtains for a lot of Republicans.

Sunday Long Read: Art Of (Post) War

Claudia Roth Pierpoint at The New Yorker gives us this week's Sunday Long Read, the story of the post-WWII NYC art scene that gave us the rise of Jackson Pollock.  Of course, as the story goes, behind every great man is a woman putting up with all his bullshit but loving him anyway, and in our case, that woman is Lee Krasner, one of several woman featured in Mary Gabriel's book, "Ninth Street Women".

The photograph of Jackson Pollock that appeared in Life in August, 1949, didn’t look like anyone’s idea of an artist. Although he stood in front of an enormous painting, a fantastic tracery of loops and swirls that most readers would have found perplexing or ridiculous, the man himself was something else: rugged, intense, with paint-splattered dungarees and a cigarette dangling, with a touch of insolence, from the corner of his mouth. A rival painter, Willem de Kooning, said that he looked like “some guy who works at a service station pumping gas.” But the image was sexy, too—notably similar in type to the working-class stud made famous by Marlon Brando on Broadway the previous year. The subtitle of the accompanying article read, “Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?” The answer was presumably affirmative: why else was a little-known artist being featured in the biggest mass-circulation magazine in the country? The editors, however, were too skittish to render judgment on his mysterious new art. Instead, they offered the phenomenon of Pollock himself: a conspicuously modern artist without a trace of European la-di-da, an artist born in Wyoming, no less, who did his painting in a barn, using not a palette but cans of aluminum paint, into which he occasionally mixed (how much more macho could it get?) nails and screws. The big news was that it was safe, at last, in America, for a real man to be an artist.

Allowing Life to do the article, despite Pollock’s hesitation, was Lee Krasner’s idea. Otherwise known as Mrs. Jackson Pollock, Krasner was a fervent booster of her husband’s work, outspoken in her conviction that he was, as she liked to say, numero uno. She claimed to have believed in his genius from her first visit to his studio, in 1941, and she’d seen him through years of alcoholic turbulence, when he was selling so little that he couldn’t afford to heat their ramshackle house, on the outer reaches of Long Island. Krasner had worn long johns and heavy sweaters to work in the freezing room that served as her own studio—for she, too, was a fiercely serious artist. She had trained at Cooper Union, in a section of the school reserved for women, and at the National Academy of Design, where she learned to draw and paint in a rigorously traditional style. After discovering modernism, she had gone on to become a star pupil of the revered teacher Hans Hofmann, who praised her work as good enough to pass for a man’s. In the late thirties, working for the W.P.A.’s Federal Art Project, a government program that promoted strictly nondiscriminatory policies, she had led a crew of ten men working on a giant mural, now lost, on the subject of navigation. As was true for many women artists of the time, the program gave her a professional start, hands-on experience, and enough confidence to think that she might make it as a painter, even after the war effort brought the W.P.A. to an end, along with all vestiges of an art world that viewed women as equal players.

It’s impossible to know how she might have developed on her own. By the early forties, she was committed to an upbeat style of geometric abstraction, brightly colored, that gave Cubism a rhythmic swing. But meeting Pollock, moving in with him (in 1942), and marrying him (in 1945) radically reset her course. Beginning in 1943—the year of Pollock’s first solo gallery show—she painted almost nothing but “gray slabs,” as she put it, for three despairing years, while she struggled toward his kind of deeply personal abstraction, attempting to paint not what she devised but what she felt and, even more psychologically daunting, who she was. The answer would once have been clear: she was an escapee from an Orthodox Jewish family in Brooklyn, an Artists Union protest organizer, a gutsy woman who took no guff, an ambitious artist. Now, though, she seemed to have been transformed, as in some cruel fairy tale, into a lowly creature known as an artist’s wife. She got past the gray slabs in 1946, and for the next few years kept trying out new approaches, working mostly on a modest scale—she called her best work the “Little Image” paintings—and pushing on with quiet resolve. In 1949, however, just a couple of months after Pollock’s appearance in Life, she decided to stop exhibiting, following a series of dismissive she’s-no-Pollock reviews of a gallery show titled “Artists: Man and Wife.” At the age of forty, she was a scarred veteran who stood for everything that younger women artists feared and rejected. She was even known to cook.

Krasner ventured to exhibit again two years later, in the historic Ninth Street Show. Held in an empty storefront just off Broadway, rented by the artists themselves, the show was a boisterous call for attention by a new generation, artists for whom Pollock and de Kooning (both of whom took part) had the status almost of Old Masters. Since few of them had ever received any significant notice, the rush to participate was so intense that everyone was limited to a single piece. Even in this renegade atmosphere, there was some initial discussion of whether including women in the exhibition would diminish its chance of being taken seriously. Eventually, the jury selected eleven women, and sixty-one men, to represent the creatively rich (if otherwise impoverished) new downtown art world, with its cheap industrial lofts, high communal spirits, and almost universal devotion to abstraction. Five of the women went on to have international careers, their work collected by major museums and subject to ever-expanding bibliographies: Grace Hartigan, Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, Elaine de Kooning (who was married to Willem), and Krasner—the oldest of them but the last to bloom, coming into her own only after Pollock’s death, in 1956, a painful loss yet the start of a remarkably productive twenty-eight years of widowhood.

Mary Gabriel’s timely and ambitious new book, “Ninth Street Women,” provides a multifaceted account of the five odds-defying female artists who travelled from Ninth Street to the Museum of Modern Art and beyond. Gabriel warns at the start that her seven-hundred-page text lacks “traditional biographical detail”; instead, it is a widely roving group portrait, evoking an entire era and aspiring to explain it. She dwells on broad social and political events, which she believes were not merely a context for the artists’ work but the raison d’être for their allegiance to abstraction. Declaring her opposition to theorists who claim that painters respond primarily to other painters, she begins by proposing that the larger New York group of artists “stripped their work of all life except their own internal meanderings because they existed in a world destroyed by war, dehumanized by the death camps, and denied a future by the atomic bomb.”

One can see the appeal of this idea: it makes the art seem bigger, braver. And Gabriel is deft at weaving an artist into a piece of political history. Still, it’s difficult to demonstrate the weight of a world that remains invisible on the painters’ canvases. Even Krasner, who was politically active, said, “I, for one, didn’t feel that my art had to reflect my political point of view.” Judging by Gabriel’s own account, references to contemporary horrors by any New York artists are rare, and learning of an occasion when Willem de Kooning voiced concern about the atomic bomb does not necessarily convince one that his world view was expansive. (Furthermore, he departed from abstraction when the spirit moved him, as did Elaine de Kooning and Grace Hartigan; had they given up worrying about the bomb?) In fact, much as one might expect, Gabriel’s subjects displayed the all-too-human tendency to respond to world events in ambiguous ways, including keeping their heads down—particularly easy when the rent is overdue—and responding in no apparent way at all.

Fortunately, Gabriel lets the political thesis fade as events take over and the immediacy of these lives becomes all-engrossing. There was so much happening at close range: making art, selling art, not selling art, falling in love with genius, attempting to be a genius, the unforeseen rise of a movement fuelled by creative energy, oil paint, and alcohol. The development of a culture is deeply consequential, and its story—even a very specialized piece of its story—requires no apologies or augmentation. And this piece of the art-world story happens to be very exciting, as brought to life in the balance of Gabriel’s rich, serious-minded, and (in a good way) sometimes gossipy book. It was Elaine de Kooning, after all, who characterized the era under consideration, roughly 1949 through 1959, as a “ten-year party.” 

A very dear friend of mine who loves art history would think me remiss if I didn't include this piece this week, so this one is for her, and for all the women who do the work and get a fraction of the credit.  Do give it a read, I learned quite a bit about these artists who I did not know about...which is of course, the point.

Lat Call For Institutes Of Destruction

As Steve M. reminds us, Republicans won on Kavanaugh because there is nothing they wouldn't have destroyed in order to win, and winning is all that matters now.

No, there won't be hell to pay. Republicans have demonstrated that they see public confidence in institutions as an expendable luxury. Americans will now lose confidence in the Supreme Court as they've lost confidence in Congress, the presidency, and our electoral system. Republicans don't care. They control all these institutions, which do what they want done. That's all that matters to them.

What's the approval rating of Congress? It's 19%, according to Gallup.Gallup polls this question monthly, and the number has been 20% or less every month since Republicans took over the House in January 2011.

And that's working out just fine for them. They got their tax cut this year. The Republican Senate has put dozens of far-right judges on the courts, including two on the Supreme Court. Obamacare repeal could happen in the lame-duck session. Who needs public respect for the institution?

Republicans have persuaded much of the country that our electoral system is corrupted by massive amounts of voter fraud, even as they do nothing to prevent Russian interference in elections -- but elections have been going Republicans' way for years, so it's all good. (If elections don't go Republicans' way this year, they can yell and scream about a corrupted system.)

Republicans elected a president who dishonors the presidency at every opportunity. So what? He's signing the bills they want and appointing the judges they want.

So we should all stop saying that institutions are being damaged as if we expect anyone in power to care. The people who run the government have calculated that respected institutions simply aren't necessary.

The only thing that matters is winning, and they have won.  We have a chance to win in November.  If we don't, well, your prepper friends are probably right that there will be a nasty little war in our future.  Hell, even if we do win the House back, it's going to be a street brawl until Trump is gone.

Everything is a fight now that must be won, and they are willing to sacrifice everything to win.

Our side is not.

It won't be pretty.

The Plan From Here

The Senate confirmed Brett Kavanaugh as Supreme Court Justice 50-48 (Manchin's vote wouldn't have made a difference either way) and while we're basically in the full nightmare scenario of 2016-2018, things are just getting started.

Mitch McConnell isn’t done with his “project” to revamp the nation’s courts.

Hours before the Senate was set to approve Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, the Senate majority leader said in an interview Saturday that he plans confirmations of more lifetime justices before the November election. The Kentucky Republican plans to meet with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) about a package of nominees — and Schumer's response could determine when or whether Schumer’s vulnerable members will be able to go home and campaign for their seats.

“There are still tools that I have available, that’s why I canceled the August recess. And that’s something I’ll discuss with Sen. Schumer before we leave for the election,” McConnell said in a telephone interview, as he began an extended victory lap on Kavanaugh’s confirmation. He said “of course” more judges will be confirmed before Nov. 6, though Democrats may now be under enormous pressure to block as many judges as they can after the deflating loss on Kavanaugh.

Kavanaugh's ascension to the high court marks the 69th judicial confirmation of Donald Trump’s presidency under McConnell stewardship of the Senate. There are more than 30 lifetime District and Circuit court nominees ready for floor action in the Senate that McConnell could try to confirm before the election, though under Senate rules Democrats could delay them and would likely be able to narrow that list if the two parties try to strike a confirmation deal.

McConnell can tie up Senate Democrats through the rest of October if he wants to, and probably will.  They'll get no chance to campaign at home for the last month before the Midterms, and that's exactly how he wants it.

The goal at this point is whether Democratic anger materializes at the polls or not.

Democrats doubt the GOP can sustain the energy and ride it to a decisive election win. They say after the furor over Kavanaugh dies down, the election will still turn on issues like health care premiums and protections for preexisting conditions, and McConnell may actually suffer blowback to his hardball confirmation tactics.

“Undermining the integrity of the Supreme Court and undermining the integrity of the Senate is never a good idea. And I think the American public will see that,” said Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, who heads the Senate Democrats’ campaign arm. “What you’re going to see are people that think this is travesty and a sham are going to be very fired up.”

Regardless of the electoral consequences, the payoff of Kavanaugh’s confirmation for conservatives will be enormous. After taking the majority in 2015, McConnell blocked many of President Barack Obama’s judicial nominees, including Merrick Garland for the Supreme Court — before confirming Neil Gorsuch in 2017 and now Kavanaugh.

McConnell declined to say whether he anticipated another Supreme Court vacancy as majority leader. But his work to cement a conservative majority on the court will resonate long past McConnell’s tenure as majority leader and the senior senator from Kentucky.

“This project ... is the most important thing that the Senate and an administration of like mind — which we ended up having — could do for the country,” McConnell said. “Putting strict constructionists, relatively young, on the courts for lifetime appointments is the best way to have a long-term positive impact on America. And today is a seminal moment in that effort.”

Clawing back our democracy will be the work of the rest of my lifetime.  Trump judges will be taking civil rights and ruling in favor of Christian and corporate ownership for decades.  They will be dismantling classic liberalism all the back to the New Deal, if not Reconstruction.

The next several decades will be of darkness.

It's up to us to light the way through it.

Supreme Misgivings, Con't

The "Democrats have failed us!" people are outside on Kavanaugh, and they'd like to speak with you.

Let’s be clear: Republicans are to blame for the fact that Brett Kavanaugh is about to become the next justice of the Supreme Court. But that doesn’t mean that Democrats don’t have anything to apologize for.

Kavanaugh has been accused of sexual assault by a string of women. The evidence of his excessive drinking, his temper, his elitism and snobbery, and his sheer personal repulsiveness grows by the day. He also displayed most of these tendencies on television, in front of the entire world, in a hearing in which he demonstrably lied, repeatedly. And, oh yes, he is an extremist, obviously partisan person who is about to pull the Supreme Court far to the right, possibly for decades to come. What I’m saying is, there’s a lot to work with here if you want to make a strong case against him.

Instead, Democrats put all their chips on an investigation by the FBI—an inherently evil organization which they have no control over. They could have gone right after Kavanaugh during his hearing. They could have questioned him, over and over again, about his drinking. They could have questioned him, over and over again, about the many allegations against him, or the many dubious characters swirling around him. They could have forcefully campaigned against him in public. But they decided to spend what felt like an eternity asking him why he didn’t want the FBI to investigate his case.

Well, they got what they wanted—and now Kavanaugh is going to the Supreme Court.

Or.

Or, hear me out now, Jack, a smarter individual would have surmised that two years ago, millions of us failed the Democrats by voting for two third-party clowns who were specifically in the race to siphon Clinton votes away in battleground states and put Trump in office.

Kavanaugh should have never been nominated, because Trump never should have won.  You can scream at all the Democrats you want to, but giving Donald Trump a GOP Congress, and specifically a GOP Senate, because we couldn't be arsed enough to vote, is precisely why this happened.

Period.

Black Lives Still Matter, Con't

Against all odds, a Chicago police officer has been convicted of second-degree murder in the shooting death of unarmed black teenager Laquan McDonald.

Van Dyke is the first Chicago police officer in half a century to be found guilty of murder for an on-duty shooting. He faces a minimum of 6 years in prison when he’s sentenced by Judge Vincent Gaughan.

The jury deliberated for about 7 ½ hours before finding Van Dyke guilty of second-degree murder instead of the first-degree charges for which he was indicted.

The veteran officer was also convicted of all 16 counts of aggravated battery for each shot he fired at McDonald. The jury, however, acquitted him of a single count of official misconduct.
The verdict comes after a landmark trial that featured testimony over 10 days by 44 witnesses, 24 called by the prosecution and 20 by the defense.

The three-week trial flipped the script of most murder cases at the Leighton Criminal Court Building with prosecutors questioning the credibility of police officers who typically serve as their most trusted witnesses.

Van Dyke himself broke from normal protocol for police officers facing charges of wrongdoing, opting to have a jury decide his fate instead of asking the judge to weigh the evidence in a bench trial. His decision to testify in his own defense was also rare for a building where most criminal defendants — especially those charged with murder — invoke their right to remain silent.

The charges against Van Dyke centered on the dashcam video depicting the moments leading up to the shooting on Oct. 20, 2014 — footage that has been played around the world for nearly three years. The graphic images sparked protests and political upheaval and led to a sprawling federal civil rights probe into the systemic mistreatment of citizens by Chicago police, particularly in the city's minority communities.

It's a start.  Nothing will truly qualify as justice here, but it's a start.

Black Lives Still Matter.

Supreme Misgivings, Con't

The procedural vote this morning for Brett Kavanaugh will be in about a half-hour from this post, so by lunchtime we ought to know where things are going.  The one thing I do know is as of this morning, Mitch still doesn't have the votes.  Three Republicans and Democrat Joe Manchin are still in play.  Mitch needs two of the four.

Murkowski: Murkowski was scheduled to go back in to review the FBI report late Thursday evening. While she wasn't spotted by CNN, two senators she is friendly with were -- Sens. Jim Risch of Idaho and John Hoeven of North Dakota. Murkowski reviewed the report multiple times on Thursday and largely avoided reporters. 

Collins: Collins gave GOP leaders an early boost when she said the FBI report appears to be "very thorough." But she declined to weigh in on the nomination itself through the day, and went back to review materials multiple times. She completed her review of the materials Thursday night. In past votes of this magnitude, she will put out a lengthy statement and give a floor speech laying out her decision before the vote. 

Flake: Flake gave another boost to GOP leaders saying he didn't hear "additional corroboration" of the Kavanaugh allegations in the first staff briefing. But he too largely went silent and avoided reporters the rest of the day. Sources with knowledge of how he approached the day tell me he is not as skittish as some were reporting about his final decision. But he did want to make sure he went thoroughly through the report he was essentially responsible for existing. 

Manchin: "Heidi made her decision. I'll make mine." That's what Manchin said when asked about the decision by Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, another red state Democrat who voted for Justice Neil Gorsuch, to oppose Kavanaugh. The cross-current pressures are intense between his party, his state, and the nominee himself. He will review the material again this morning before making a final decision, he told reporters.

My gut says we will not be saved by these Republicans.  Even if Manchin votes no, if the others vote yes it's meaningless.  I in fact suspect all four will vote for cloture this morning to proceed with Kavanaugh's confirmation after a "lengthy and difficult process" or whatever.

The same votes will be made to confirm on Saturday afternoon, and then that's it. 52-48 to confirm.

The consequences to America will be dire.  Our only hope after that is to vote out Republicans across the board starting in November.

StupidiNews!

• A 22-pound rock that a Michigan man was using as a doorstop turned out to be a meteorite worth $100,000, confirmed by both Central Michigan University and the Smithsonian.
• The 2018 Nobel Prize for Chemistry has gone to team of American and British scientists for molecular evolution, speeding up the process in generations of organisms.
• The Trump regime is expected to win concessions from the World Trade Organization to shut down the WTO's appeals court by blocking all appointments to the panel.
• Trump regime Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh gets a procedural vote in the Senate today that will determine if he has the votes to proceed to a full Senate confirmation.
• A horror film based on a Twitter thread by authors Chuck Wendig and Sam Sykes premieres this weekend on Syfy, You Might Be The Killer riffs on summer camp slashers in the digital age.

Last Call For Supreme Misgivings, Con't

Martin "BooMan" Longman argues that confirming Kavanaugh after all this, the accusations, the wrenching testimony, the sham FBI investigation and all of it, will rend the country.  He's not wrong.

To be sure, there would be costs on the other side if he were to be denied confirmation, and I don’t dispute that this has been one of the nastiest and no holds barred spectacles in the history of the country. But another Justice would eventually take this place on the Court and the wounds would slowly heal over time. That’s not going to happen with Kavanaugh sitting on the bench after he promised payback to the Clinton conspiracists he falsely claims have been behind the allegations against him.

I suppose it’s possible that Kavanaugh may one day be impeached, but that would be a rending national debacle all on its own, and absent that remedy this is a sore that is going to weep without end. It’s a mistake to confirm this man because his rulings will not be accepted and his mere presence will destroy the credibility of the Court.

The Republicans are thinking very short term right now, looking at a temporary uptick in the Senate race polls and thinking they’re on the right track. But I can tell, just by observing the women in my life, that this has set off a determined revolt and activated formerly apathetic people into a lifetime of activism and an absolutely unshakable thirst for payback.

Sen. Grassley says we’re at “rock bottom” and he wants “a future of mending things,” but if he actually interacted with the people he’s bullying he’d find out that he hasn’t seen rock bottom and their idea of mending things will not be to his liking.

Trump's election was a storm.  Kvanaugh's confirmation is a hurricane.  I know that history tells us that for all the anger and rage on our side, our side will not choose to vote.  We failed in 2010, we failed in 2014.  The other side has waited for this moment, where they cut out throats and leave liberalism to bleed out one Kavanaugh decision at a time, for decades.  Nothing will stop them.  Nothing can stop them.

Nothing can stop them, except us voting in numbers too big for them to ignore.  Because the next stage past that, history tells us, is where the metaphorical war becomes very, very real.

Hack The Planet, China Edition

Bloomberg Businessweek blows the lid off a massive Chinese intel operation to attach microchips to the data centers of basically every major US company (and more than a few government agencies) giving them 100% complete access to every network that machine can get to.

In 2015, Amazon.com Inc. began quietly evaluating a startup called Elemental Technologies, a potential acquisition to help with a major expansion of its streaming video service, known today as Amazon Prime Video. Based in Portland, Ore., Elemental made software for compressing massive video files and formatting them for different devices. Its technology had helped stream the Olympic Games online, communicate with the International Space Station, and funnel drone footage to the Central Intelligence Agency. Elemental’s national security contracts weren’t the main reason for the proposed acquisition, but they fit nicely with Amazon’s government businesses, such as the highly secure cloud that Amazon Web Services (AWS) was building for the CIA.

To help with due diligence, AWS, which was overseeing the prospective acquisition, hired a third-party company to scrutinize Elemental’s security, according to one person familiar with the process. The first pass uncovered troubling issues, prompting AWS to take a closer look at Elemental’s main product: the expensive servers that customers installed in their networks to handle the video compression. These servers were assembled for Elemental by Super Micro Computer Inc., a San Jose-based company (commonly known as Supermicro) that’s also one of the world’s biggest suppliers of server motherboards, the fiberglass-mounted clusters of chips and capacitors that act as the neurons of data centers large and small. In late spring of 2015, Elemental’s staff boxed up several servers and sent them to Ontario, Canada, for the third-party security company to test, the person says. 

Nested on the servers’ motherboards, the testers found a tiny microchip, not much bigger than a grain of rice, that wasn’t part of the boards’ original design. Amazon reported the discovery to U.S. authorities, sending a shudder through the intelligence community. Elemental’s servers could be found in Department of Defense data centers, the CIA’s drone operations, and the onboard networks of Navy warships. And Elemental was just one of hundreds of Supermicro customers.
During the ensuing top-secret probe, which remains open more than three years later, investigators determined that the chips allowed the attackers to create a stealth doorway into any network that included the altered machines. Multiple people familiar with the matter say investigators found that the chips had been inserted at factories run by manufacturing subcontractors in China.

This attack was something graver than the software-based incidents the world has grown accustomed to seeing. Hardware hacks are more difficult to pull off and potentially more devastating, promising the kind of long-term, stealth access that spy agencies are willing to invest millions of dollars and many years to get.

There are two ways for spies to alter the guts of computer equipment. One, known as interdiction, consists of manipulating devices as they’re in transit from manufacturer to customer. This approach is favored by U.S. spy agencies, according to documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. The other method involves seeding changes from the very beginning. 

One country in particular has an advantage executing this kind of attack: China, which by some estimates makes 75 percent of the world’s mobile phones and 90 percent of its PCs. Still, to actually accomplish a seeding attack would mean developing a deep understanding of a product’s design, manipulating components at the factory, and ensuring that the doctored devices made it through the global logistics chain to the desired location—a feat akin to throwing a stick in the Yangtze River upstream from Shanghai and ensuring that it washes ashore in Seattle. “Having a well-done, nation-state-level hardware implant surface would be like witnessing a unicorn jumping over a rainbow,” says Joe Grand, a hardware hacker and the founder of Grand Idea Studio Inc. “Hardware is just so far off the radar, it’s almost treated like black magic.” 

But that’s just what U.S. investigators found: The chips had been inserted during the manufacturing process, two officials say, by operatives from a unit of the People’s Liberation Army. In Supermicro, China’s spies appear to have found a perfect conduit for what U.S. officials now describe as the most significant supply chain attack known to have been carried out against American companies. 

One official says investigators found that it eventually affected almost 30 companies, including a major bank, government contractors, and the world’s most valuable company, Apple Inc. Apple was an important Supermicro customer and had planned to order more than 30,000 of its servers in two years for a new global network of data centers. Three senior insiders at Apple say that in the summer of 2015, it, too, found malicious chips on Supermicro motherboards. Apple severed ties with Supermicro the following year, for what it described as unrelated reasons.

So, yeah.  Massive, massive data breach on the nation-state level, for years, with China having complete access to American corporate networks as well as government ones.

But remember, we don't need to be worried about cybersecurity, according to the Trump regime.

The Blue Wave Rises, Con't

Five weeks out and while Republicans are expecting white anger over the Kavanaugh confirmation to save, if not increase their Senate majority, the House is looking more and more like a bloodbath for the GOP as the latest Cook Political Report House chart finds multiple GOP toss-up races moving into the Democratic column.

Five weeks out, several personally popular Republicans who appeared to be defying the "blue wave" in Clinton-won districts are beginning to see their leads erode. GOP Reps. Carlos Curbelo (FL-26), John Katko (NY-24) and Brian Fitzpatrick (PA-01) led most surveys over the summer but are now prime targets as their well-funded Democratic challengers become better-known and the Kavanaugh debate further polarizes voters into red and blue corners. 

It's becoming harder and harder to see Republicans' path to holding the majority. In the past few days, multiple Democrats challengers have announced staggering fundraising totals of more than $3 million during the third quarter of the year, exceeding what many predecessors have raised for an entire cycle. One high-ranking Republican worries his party could be "buried under an avalanche" of Democratic money that GOP outside groups can't match. 

After today's ratings changes, there are 15 GOP-held seats in Lean or Likely Democratic (including seven incumbents) and Democrats would only need to win 11 of the 31 races in the Toss Up column to flip the majority. There's still time for political conditions to change, but today the likeliest outcome appears to be a Democratic gain of between 25 and 40 seats (they need 23 for House control).

And you'll never guess who appears to be in real trouble but our old friend, Ron Paul Junior (Junior) himself, Michigan's favorite Glibertarian con man, Justin Amash.

West central: Grand Rapids, Battle Creek
Likely Republican. Amash, a Freedom Caucus member and heir to Ron Paul's libertarian mantle in the House, has been presumed to be safe thanks to his vocal criticism of President Trump (Amash cited Trump's "dazzling display of pettiness and insecurity" at one point in June). But Democrat Gretchen Whitmer appears to be running away with the governor's race and is giving several Michigan Republicans down-ballot jitters. 

This increasingly professional Grand Rapids seat is a Democratic recruitment failure: Cathy Albro, a pro-single-payer former teacher who won the August primary with 68 percent, had raised just $61,000 at the end of July. However, Amash had just $277,000 on hand and doesn't appear to be running a vigorous campaign either. There's also no guarantee his Trump criticism will earn him as many votes from Democrats as he loses from Trump supporters. 

Despite the parties' utter lack of activity here, the potential for a horrible night for Michigan Republicans makes overlooked districts like this one watching. Trump only won this seat 52 percent to 42 percent, in line with plenty of other districts that are competitive.

See if we can't help out Cathy Albro, eh?

In addition to Amash, Mia Love is in trouble in Utah again, and so is Keith Yoder in KC.  These are seats that could very well fall if the national mood is as bad as it seems to be for the GOP.

Stay tuned.

StupidiNews!

• One sheriff's deputy is dead and seven other people were wounded in a shootout in Florence, SC yesterday when deputies tried to serve a warrant, the suspect is in custody.
• The US Ambassador to Estonia, James Melville, has stepped down because of Donald Trump's "America First" policy, the three-decade diplomatic veteran says he can no longer do his job.
• The Trump White House has received the FBI report on Supreme Court nominee Brett Kvanaugh's alleged sexual assaults and is "fully confident" the Senate will confirm him.
• The Pentagon is drafting plans for a global show of US military force to deter Chinese aggression as the Trump regime prepares accusations against Beijing of election interference in 2018.
• Multiple broadband lobbyist groups are suing California over the state's new net neutrality law, the joint lawsuit contends California has no authority to regulate broadband at all under federal law.

Last Call For Supreme Misgivings, Con't

The FBI investigation of the sexual assault claims against Trump regime Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh is a gigantic scam, and everyone at this point knows it.

The FBI hasn’t interviewed Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh or Christine Blasey Ford because it doesn’t have clear authority from the White House to do so, according to two people with knowledge of the matter.

Instead, the White House has indicated to the FBI that testimony from Kavanaugh and Ford, who has accused him of attempting to rape her when they were in high school, before the Senate Judiciary Committee last week is sufficient, said the people, who asked to not be identified discussing the sensitive matter.

The new evidence of constraints on the FBI probe came as Republican Senator Bob Corker told reporters the FBI is likely to give senators a stack of interview reports, probably later on Wednesday. He said senators were told in a GOP meeting that a vote on cutting off debate is likely on Friday to move toward a confirmation vote on Kavanaugh. 

It wasn’t immediately clear whether the Federal Bureau of Investigation is trying to force the issue and seek explicit approval from the White House to interview Ford and Kavanaugh. And it wasn’t clear why the FBI hasn’t yet talked to other people who have been recommended by lawyers or who have voluntarily come forward -- or if the bureau would need explicit approval to talk with them as well.

Confusion has now beset the investigation, fed by conflicting signals over what constraints have been placed on the bureau despite President Donald Trump’s comment Monday that “the FBI should interview anybody that they want, within reason.” 

The FBI declined to comment on the investigation or its timing.

The cloture vote is happening Friday regardless of the investigation, and it will have 50 votes.  Mitch still doesn't have enough for the final vote however, and that's the only known thing.   Why risk it?  Why the dog and pony show?  Why draw it out?

Republicans want as much outrage as possible to close the gender gap, and they are counting on white women to once again side with Trump as they did in 2016.

When many conservative women around the country watched Christine Blasey Ford appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee last week, they didn’t find her testimony compelling or convincing, as many liberals did.

They saw a political farce. 

“Honestly, I don’t think I have ever been so angry in all of my adult life,” says Ginger Howard, a Republican national committeewoman from Georgia. “It brings me to the point of tears, it makes me so angry.”

In interviews with roughly a dozen female conservative leaders from as many states, this was the overwhelming sentiment: These women are infuriated with the way the sexual-assault allegations against the Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh have been handled. They are not convinced by Ford or any other woman who has come forward. They resent the implication that all women should support the accusers. And they believe that this scandal will ultimately hurt the cause of women who have been sexually assaulted. 

Above all, these women, and the women they know, are ready to lash out against Democrats in the upcoming midterm elections. 

Nearly all the women I spoke with are plugged into state- and local-level conservative politics. Their collective, overwhelming sense is that, like Howard, women voters are angry about what’s happening to Kavanaugh. “I’ve got women in my church who were not politically active at all who were incensed with this,” says Melody Potter, the chairwoman of the West Virginia Republican Party—the first woman to hold that position, she made sure to point out. In her state, the stakes of the Kavanaugh scandal are immense: Democratic Senator Joe Manchin is fighting for his seat in a place where more than two-thirds of voters supported Donald Trump in 2016. With voters “energized” to elect people “who are going to support President Trump,” Potter says, West Virginians are closely watching how Manchin acts on Kavanaugh—especially now that the situation has become so politicized.

Organizers in other states say they’ve been hearing the same thing. “People in Indiana are angry. They are mad. They are changing their mind,” says Jodi Smith, the Indianapolis-based state director for the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony List. When Senator Joe Donnelly, another vulnerable Democrat who is up for reelection in November, declared late last week that he would vote against Kavanaugh, it “started a firestorm of epic proportions,” Smith says. From her perspective on the ground in a highly contested swing state, “this is one of the best things that could happen to us.”
It’s not yet clear whether the Kavanaugh affair will work to the GOP’s advantage; recent polling has not conclusively shown what women, for example, think about these allegations. “If the Republicans don’t get it together and make sure that he gets in there, that’s not going to help us,” says Howard, the Georgia RNC official. “What makes me mad at times about our party is we don’t stand up enough and say, ‘Enough of your shenanigans! We’re not putting up with this!’” And with the full Senate vote delayed and a supplemental FBI investigation under way, it’s not certain that Kavanaugh’s nomination will ultimately be successful.

But if Kavanaugh is confirmed, Howard says, “that will fire up the base even more to say, ‘Look at what a fight we had on our hands.’”

This is what they want.  They want white women to forget about losing their health care, to forget about kids in interment camps, to forget that they were wavering on support.for the GOP, to forget that women overall supported Democrats by more than 20 points.

They want angry white women to vote to protect their white men and white boys against those evil liberals, because our white boys don't assault anyone, they are noble and pure and good.  Their savage animals of men assault us.

It's working.  All of the "concessions" and "concerns" and "uncertainty" over Kavanaugh is there for a reason.  Mitch could have had this vote wrapped up by mid-September if he wanted to.  Instead, he wanted outrage just in time for the Midterms.

And once again, white women are going to come out in favor of the GOP.  All those stories about white women in suburban districts looking like shaky support at best?  This fight was engineered to put that to rest.  They will sign their reproductive freedom away because it will hurt those women more.

Democrats better treat the last month as the fight of their lives.

Because it is.

The Blue Wave Rises, Con't

Republicans, angered by the Kavanaugh confirmation process, are starting to narrow the gap in the polls, according to NPR at least.

Just over a month away from critical elections across the country, the wide Democratic enthusiasm advantage that has defined the 2018 campaign up to this point has disappeared, according to a new NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll. 

In July, there was a 10-point gap between the number of Democrats and Republicans saying the November elections were "very important." Now, that is down to 2 points, a statistical tie. 

Democrats' advantage on which party Americans want to control Congress has also been cut in half since last month. Democrats still retain a 6-point edge on that question, but it was 12 points after a Marist poll conducted in mid-September. 

The results come amid the pitched and hotly partisan confirmation battle over Brett Kavanaugh's nomination to the Supreme Court. Multiple women have accused Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct when he was in high school and college. He categorically denies all the allegations. The FBI is conducting a supplemental investigation into the accusations that is expected to be wrapped up by the end of this week. 

With Democrats already up fired up for this election, the Kavanaugh confirmation fight has apparently had the effect of rousing a dormant GOP base. 

"The result of hearings, at least in short run, is the Republican base was awakened," noted Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion, which conducted the poll. 

While Democrats and Republicans are now equally enthusiastic about the midterms, the story is very different for key Democratic base groups and independents. While 82 percent of Democrats say the midterms are very important, that's true of just 60 percent of people under 30, 61 percent of Latinos and 65 percent of independents. 

Democrats need to net 23 seats to take back control of the House, but if those groups stay home in large numbers, it would blunt potential Democratic gains. With 34 days to go until Election Day, it all points to another election dominated by party activists.

Once again, Democrats need to act like they are losing by ten and get out there every day to make the case as to why they need to win.

Republicans will absolutely show up in the midterms, regardless.

The only question is Democratic turnout.  If it's 2010 or 2014 levels again, the country is finished.