Last Call For The Most Uncivil War

Republicans, screaming about Democrats "inciting violence" and "threatening people" really should stop with the crocodile tears, because when they're obviously losing to the point of say, Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Scott Wagner's double-digit deficit to Dem Gov. Tom Wolf, nothing moves Republicans to violent, eliminationist rhetoric faster in an effort to rally their hateful, inchoate base.

Scott Wagner, the Republican candidate for governor in Pennsylvania, threatened his opponent, incumbent Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, in a Facebook Live video criticizing the negative ads against him.

"Governor Wolf, let me tell you, between now and November 6th you'd better put a catcher's mask on your face, because I'm going to stomp all over your face with golf spikes," Wagner said in the two-minute video, jabbing his index finger towards the camera. "I'm going to win this for the state of Pennsylvania, and we're throwing you out of office." In the video, Wagner is standing in front of the billboard.

Wagner posted a video in response to a billboard in York, Pennsylvania, which claimed that Wagner's trash hauling company had strong-armed 6,979 customers into paying their bills. The billboard was not placed by Wolf's campaign, but by PA Spotlight, a left-leaning advocacy group.

Wagner defended his lawsuits against customers who did not pay their bills, saying that "if you have a company and you render a service, you want to get paid for it." He said that the billboard was discouraging for small businesses that want to collect their money from customers. And he held up stacks of paychecks -- 600 -- for his payroll this week, to demonstrate his small business prowess.

A spokesman for Wagner told PennLive that his "golf spikes" comment was "not meant to be taken literally."

Also, "stomp all over your face with golf spikes" is about the most white male Republican physical threat I can think of.

But let's remember, these guys want a fight so badly they can taste it.

Trump Cards, Con't

The theory is that Trump wouldn't actually do anything to Hillary Clinton or any of the Democrats, despite the constant "Lock her up!" chants at his rallies for two years, because 1) he would have actually done it by now, 2) he needs Clinton as a constant Enemy™ to attack the way Republicans have done with those people™ for decades now, and 3) actually locking Clinton up would make her a martyr for the Left like never before.

But the bottom line is that it's a show, red meat to rally his raging base, feeding the beast, it's just retail politics in the Trump era.  Susan B. Glasser of The New Yorker disagrees with that theory, and she makes a very good case that Trump's political rallies are The Donald at his most dangerous.

The headlines from these events are by now familiar: Trump’s celebration of his victimized but ultimately confirmed Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh; Trump’s mocking of Kavanaugh’s female accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, after he initially called her “very credible”; Trump’s escalating rhetoric about “wacko” Democrats as an “angry mob” that would destroy due process, even as the angry mob listening to him chanted “lock her up” at the mere mention of Dianne Feinstein, a senator not accused of any crime.

That leaves a lot of what would be considered news in any other moment. Among the things I heard the President of the United States do: make fun of a female candidate in Iowa by giving her a derogatory nickname. Accuse a U.S. senator of being a “drunk.” Claim that Hillary Clinton engaged in a conspiracy with Russia to rig the election (which she lost). He called the European Union a “brutal” alliance “formed to take advantage of us.” He attacked American libel laws and the World Trade Organization.

Many of the statements are not only untrue but are repeated from event to event, despite the industry of real-time Trump fact-checking and truth-squadding that now exists. This summer, the Washington Post’sFact Checker looked at all the statements in one rally and determined that seventy-six per cent of the ninety-eight factual assertions Trump made were untrue, misleading, or baseless. Since then, Trump seems not only undeterred but to be stepping up his pace. He claimed that Justice Kavanaugh was No. 1 in his class at Yale and Yale Law School in at least three of his events over the past week, despite Yale not even calculating class rankings. On Wednesday, Trump repeated several of his greatest-hits fallacies, such as asserting that fifty-two per cent of women supported him in 2016 (that number was forty-two per cent), and that numerous new steel-manufacturing plants are being opened (none are), and that “clean, beautiful coal” is coming back (it isn’t).

Still, fact-checking is far too narrow a lens through which to view the rallies. Certainly, Trump pours out untruths and whoppers at these events; the more defensive he is, the more he seems to unleash them. But I found myself reeling most at the end of my rally-watching marathon not from the lying but from the bleak and threatening world view offered by a President who is claiming credit for making America great, strong, and respected again, while terrifying his fans with the grim spectre of the scary enemies he is fending off. Even more than they did in 2016, these threats come accompanied by an increasingly grandiose rewriting of history. What’s happened since his election, Trump said in Pennsylvania, “has been the greatest revolution ever to take place in our country,” or maybe even anywhere in the world. His victory “superseded even Andrew Jackson.” “America,” he said, “is winning like never before.”

The biggest difference between Trump and any other American President, however, is not the bragging. It’s the cult of personality he has built around himself and which he insists upon at his rallies. Political leaders are called onstage to praise the President in terms that would make a feudal courtier blush, and they’re not empty words. These are the kinds of tributes I have heard in places like Uzbekistan, but never before in America. “Is he not the best President we have ever had?” the Mississippi senator Cindy Hyde-Smith enthused. (Trump then praised her for voting “with me one hundred per cent of the time.”) In Erie on Wednesday, a Republican congressman, Michael Kelly, gave the most sycophantic speech of the ones I listened to this month. Trump, he yelled to the crowd, is “the strongest President we have seen in our lifetime.” Addressing Trump, he said, “You are the best! You are the best!” Trump did not need to leave his “luxurious” life behind for the indignities of political combat, but he did. “I am so grateful,” Kelly concluded, “that an American citizen came out of nowhere to take the reins and reform and retake this nation.”

No wonder his followers think this way. In Trump’s telling at these rallies, he is the hero of every story. All ideas, big or small, flow through him now that he is President. He personally ordered the Ambassador in Israel to renovate a building for the new American Embassy there using “beautiful Jerusalem stone.” (Never mind that all buildings in the city are required to be faced with it.) He had “the greatest idea” to get veterans better medical care by allowing them to go to private doctors, confounding the experts who told him, “Sir, we’ve been working on this for forty-four years,” and couldn’t fix the problem. Same with an N.F.L. dispute with Canada. “Nobody could get it done,” Trump said. “I did it in two minutes.”

Trump is gaslighting the country, one rally at a time.  His people look the other way on kids in cages, on stealing elections, on killings of journalists.  They just care about winning.

The problem is, they are winning.  And we care even less about stopping them.

That has to change now, or we're lost.

It's Mueller Time, Con't

The Trump regime still refuses to let Donald Trump perjure himself in front of Mueller (the inevitable consequence of Trump opening his mouth under oath) so they're planning to have Trump's lawyers handle all of the testimony with written questions only.

President Donald Trump's legal team is preparing answers to written questions provided by special counsel Robert Mueller, according to sources familiar with the matter. 

The move represents a major development after months of negotiations and signals that the Mueller investigation could be entering a final phase with regard to the President. 

The questions are focused on matters related to the investigation of possible collusion between Trump associates and Russians seeking to meddle in the 2016 election, the sources said. Trump's lawyers are preparing written responses, in part relying on documents previously provided to the special counsel, the sources said. 

"We are in continuing discussions with the special counsel and we do not comment on those discussions," said Trump attorney Jay Sekulow. 

There may be more rounds of questions after the first answers are returned. The special counsel had insisted that there be a chance for follow-up questions as well. But after a prolonged back-and-forth over months, the two sides agreed to start with a first round of questions. 

Additionally, the two sides have still not come to agreement on whether the President will be interviewed in person by investigators who are also probing whether Trump obstructed justice by firing FBI Director James Comey. 

Asked on Thursday about answering Mueller's questions, Trump again signaled his willingness to sit down for an interview with Mueller or provide written responses -- the option much preferred by his attorneys. 

The one thing going for Mueller is Trump's ego can't have him sitting by while his lawyers tell "his" side of the story, and I still expect Trump to sit for an interview simply based on his own narcissism.  Especially after the questions are leaked to the press (and possible the answers) Trump will throw a fit and declare he's not afraid of Mueller.

The problem of course is that he should be pissing himself in abject fear of an interview with Mueller, because as I said at the outset, the odds of Trump perjuring himself, lying to the FBI, or revealing startling new evidence is about 3,267,098%.

We'll see what happens, but Trump is definitely going to want this done before a new Democratic-controlled House is sworn in next January., one way or the other.

Stay tuned.

StupidiNews!

• At least six are dead after Hurricane Michael ripped through the Florida panhandle, Georgia, and the Carolinas before heading out to sea Friday, damage is estimates in the tens of billions.
• Canada is expected to impose new steel quotas and tariffs in order to protect its industries as overseas steelmakers are looking to flood new markets.
• A landslide triggered by tectonic activity on Uganda's Mt. Elgon has killed at least 31, the area is prone to landslides and accidents like this have been recorded several times in recent years.
• Stocks appear to be taking a breather after the worst two-day loss since February, the Dow lost nearly 1350 points in two days as tech stocks and earning are in a major slump.
• The Justice Department has signed off on the proposed $69 billion merger between Aetna insurance and CVS Pharmacy, the two will combine for health clinics in pharmacies serving 97 million.

Last Call For The Blue Wave Rises, Con't

In the House at least, things continue to get worse for the GOP as Republicans are scrambling to save their most important districts (like Pete Sessions in Texas) from surprise Democratic wins and abandoning more and more of the races they feel they've already lost.

As they brace for losses in the House of Representatives, Republican Party leaders are racing to reinforce their candidates in about two-dozen districts, trying to create a barricade around their imperiled majority. They are pouring money and effort mainly into moderate suburban areas, like Mr. Sessions’s seat, that they see as critical to holding the chamber by even a one-seat margin. And they have begun to pull millions of dollars away from Republican candidates who have fallen substantially behind in once-competitive races.

Republicans steering the House effort, who insisted on anonymity to discuss party strategy, believe that by intensifying their efforts in a smaller number of districts, they can limit Democratic gains to perhaps 20 seats on Nov. 6 — just short of the 23 seats Democrats need to take over the House. Party leaders are counting on a surge of energy from conservative voters to repel Democrats in many of the redder districts on the House map, so that they can concentrate their advertising on teetering purple seats.

Republicans in Congress and the White House see a Democratic takeover in the House as a mortal threat, potentially allowing the opposition party to bring the Republican agenda to a halt and launch far-reaching investigations that could put the Trump administration under siege.

The Republicans know that if the Democrats get the House back, the game is over.  They will sacrifice whoever it takes in order to save that crumbling majority.

Party strategists said several other incumbents must recover quickly or risk losing funding, including Representatives Peter Roskam of Illinois and Mimi Walters of California, who represent white-collar suburbs near Chicago and Los Angeles, respectively.

Former Representative Thomas M. Davis III of Virginia, a former chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, said the G.O.P. might be helped by the renewed energy of its base following the battle over Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court, but he added that independent voters remained a challenge.

“You want to hold your losses to 20 or 22,” Mr. Davis said, underscoring Republicans’ vanishingly thin margin for error. “This is the kind of year where Republican are going to have to give up on some races and they’re going to have to make some hard choices.”

Matt Gorman, a spokesman for the Republican committee, said the party is continually “evaluating the best way to use our resources and the best paths forward” to defending the House.

“Our number-one goal, above all, is keeping the majority,” Mr. Gorman said.

In a memo circulated to Republican donors this week, Corry Bliss, who helms the Congressional Leadership Fund, a powerful super PAC supporting House Republicans, laid out the party’s precarious position. Mr. Bliss said the Supreme Court fight had boosted Republican enthusiasm and a few vulnerable incumbents were looking stronger in polling, including Representatives Will Hurd of Texas and Andy Barr of Kentucky.

But Mr. Bliss said Republicans were facing a “green wave” of Democratic money, as Democratic challengers raise enormous sums online and donors like Michael R. Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor, pour millions into anti-Republican ads.

Democrats have the money to play both offense and defense,  Republicans are reduced to defense, and in smaller and smaller numbers. They can give away 22 seats at most, and they are looking to stack those unfortunates as a wall of bodies to protect the rest.

We'll see if it works.  If the Democrats can break through that wall, the Republicans could lose it all.

 

Meat The Press, Con't

It's looking more and more like Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman ordered the disappearance of Washington Post columnist and Saudi dissident Jamal Kashoggi, who is by all accounts, extremely not among the living anymore.

The crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, ordered an operation to lure Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi back to Saudi Arabia from his home in Virginia and then detain him, according to U.S. intelligence intercepts of Saudi officials discussing the plan.

The intelligence, described by U.S. officials familiar with it, is another piece of evidence implicating the Saudi regime in Khashoggi’s disappearance last week after he entered the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul. Turkish officials say that a Saudi security team lay in wait for the journalist and killed him.

Khashoggi was a prominent critic of the Saudi government and Mohammed in particular. Several of Khashoggi’s friends said that over the past four months, senior Saudi officials close to the crown prince had called Khashoggi to offer him protection, and even a high-level job working for the government, if he returned to his home country.

Khashoggi, however, was skeptical of the offers. He told one friend that the Saudi government would never make good on its promises not to harm him.

“He said: ‘Are you kidding? I don’t trust them one bit,’ ” said Khaled Saffuri, an Arab American political activist, recounting a conversation he had with Khashoggi in May, moments after Khashoggi had received a call from Saud al-Qahtani, an adviser to the royal court.

The intelligence pointing to a plan to detain Khashoggi in Saudi Arabia has fueled speculation by officials and analysts in multiple countries that what transpired at the consulate was a backup plan to capture Khashoggi that may have gone wrong.

A former U.S. intelligence official — who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive matter — noted that the details of the operation, which involved sending two teams totaling 15 men, in two private aircraft arriving and departing Turkey at different times, bore the hallmarks of a “rendition,” in which someone is extra­legally removed from one country and deposited for interrogation in another.

In other words, the Saudis used the US rendition playbook and black-bagged a very vocal critic of the Saudi regime.  The Trump regime is desperately trying to make it look like the Saudi Crown Prince was a "reasonable guy" instead of, you know, ordering and carrying out the assassination of a US citizen, because thanks to the Magnitsky Act, Trump now has to find a way to either clear the Crown Prince's name or impose sanctions on Saudi Arabia, something that would kind of wreck his son-in-law Jared Kushner's arms deal.

A man who spends his time demonizing journalists is tacitly giving the green light to his authoritarian allies to deal with journalists in whatever way they want to, and Trump will absolutely look the other way on this. Regardless of the motive to silence Khashoggi, we now have three oppressive, anti-press regimes responsible for his disappearance and most likely his murder: the Saudis, the Turks, and the Americans.

It's About Suppression, Con't

Heidi Heitkamp is finished.

Not because of her courageous vote against Brett Kavanaugh, but because thousands of Native American voters in North Dakota just became ineligible to vote thanks to...the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld a lower-court order requiring voters in North Dakota to present certain forms of identification and proof of their residential address in order to cast a ballot in next month’s elections. A case challenging this requirement on behalf of the state’s sizable Native American populations alleged that the requirement would disenfranchise tribal residents, many of whom lack the proper identification and do not have residential addresses on their identification cards.

The Supreme Court’s order will likely make it harder for Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, considered the most vulnerable Democrat in the Senate, to retain her seat in November. Heitkamp won her seat by less than 3,000 votes in 2012 with strong backing from Native Americans, and she is the only statewide elected Democrat. North Dakota Republicans began changing voting rules to make it harder to cast a ballot months after Heitkamp’s victory six years ago. Republicans have claimed the changes to voter ID requirements are intended to stop voter fraud, even though in-person fraud is exceedingly rare.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who was sworn in on Monday, did not partake in the decision, and Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan dissented.

North Dakota’s 2017 voter law ID was challenged by Native residents who alleged that the law disproportionately blocked Native Americans from voting. In April, a federal district court judge blocked large portions of the law as discriminatory against Native voters. “The State has acknowledged that Native American communities often lack residential street addresses,” Judge Daniel Hovland wrote. “Nevertheless, under current State law an individual who does not have a ‘current residential street address’ will never be qualified to vote.” According to the website of the Native American Rights Fund, which represents the plaintiffs, many native residents lack residential street addresses because “the U.S. postal service does not provide residential delivery in these rural Indian communities.”As a result, tribal IDs use P.O. boxes, which are not sufficient under North Dakota’s new law—a specification that seems designed to disenfranchise native voters. Hovland’s ruling was in place during the primaries this spring.

But in September, the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals allowed the law to go into effect. The Supreme Court upheld that ruling Tuesday. In her dissent, Ginsburg argued that the Supreme Court’s order was at odds with one of the top court’s most frequently invoked doctrines on election law: not to change the rules right before an election. By allowing a different set of ID rules in the general election from in the primary, Ginsburg warned, the court was risking widespread confusion and disenfranchisement.

“The risk of voter confusion appears severe here because the injunction against requiring residential-address identification was in force during the primary election and because the Secretary of State’s website announced for months the ID requirements as they existed under that injunction,” Ginsburg wrote. “Reasonable voters may well assume that the IDs allowing them to vote in the primary election would remain valid in the general election. If the Eighth Circuit’s stay is not vacated, the risk of disfranchisement is large.”

Ginsburg noted that according to the factual record of the case, about 20 percent of voters likely to try to cast a ballot in the midterms will lack the required identification. Another “approximately18,000 North Dakota residents also lack supplemental documentation sufficient to permit them to vote without a qualifying ID,” she noted.

A great many of those voters who will lose their right to vote, one month before the election, will be Native Americans who backed Heitkamp.  She's done.  She will lose by double digits now, because tens of thousands lost their vote in North Dakota.

Meanwhile in Georgia, GOP Secretary of State Brian Kemp, running for Governor against Democrat Stacey Abrams, is in the middle of stealing that election by also disenfranchising tens of thousands of Democratic voters.

Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp’s (R) office is blocking 53,000 people from registering to vote, according to records obtained by the Associated Press, a huge number that could sway his gubernatorial race against Democrat Stacey Abrams.

As TPM laid out this morning, Kemp has used a controversial “exact match” program to approve or block voter registrations that disproportionately impacts minority voters.

Now we know exactly how many people that might affect this election. According to the AP, fully 70 percent of the voter applications that are being held up by Kemp’s office are from black people.

It’s unclear how many of these voters will be able to get on the rolls by Election Day, though if past is prologue Kemp will manage to keep many if not most of them from voting.

The secretary of state has waged a years-long battle against voting rights groups in the state, regularly going after minority voter registration efforts, while purging voting rolls and making it harder for many people to vote.

This figure shows how much impact that could have. Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal’s (R) 8-point reelection margin in 2014 was just 200,000 votes total. Abrams and Kemp have been statistically tied in most public and private polls. Whether or not these voters get on the rolls could determine who wins the election.

Republicans will keep making it harder and harder to vote until only rich, old, retired white people can.  Do we not get this?

StupidiNews!

• The strongest hurricane to hit the US in 14 years, Hurricane Michael leveled Mexico Beach, Florida and the surrounding panhandle and continues to rip through Georgia.
• With 40% of Gulf of Mexico oil production shut down, gas prices are expected to rise sharply in the South and Midwest due to Hurricane Michael.
• US stock markets plunged Wednesday, losing 4% as investors consider the market could be reaching a correction phase as fourth quarter guidance is expected from several major companies.
• At least three are dead after a strong 6.0 earthquake rocked Bali, Indonesia early Thursday, an aftershock from last month's monster quake that killed more than 2,000.
• AT&T plans to launch its own streaming service, combining HBO, Turner, and Warner Bros. TV and movies and channels to compete with Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, and now Google.

Last Call For Supreme Misgivings, Con't

They're not even pretending anymore that Kavanaugh wasn't put on the bench to serve as Trump's proxy on the Supreme Court, and they don't have to care anymore now that he's there for life.

The Roger Stone aide who is mounting a constitutional challenge to special counsel Robert Mueller wants to take his case to the Supreme Court and feels "great" that Justice Brett Kavanaugh will be on the bench to, hopefully, deal a major blow to the Russia investigation. 

Andrew Miller previously worked as an aide to Stone, a longtime Trump ally who is under scrutiny in the Russia investigation. Miller was subpoenaed earlier this year to testify before the special counsel's grand jury. Instead of complying, he waged a legal battle to invalidate Mueller's authority to act as a prosecutor. A federal judge ruled against him, holding him in contempt of court for failing to testify, and he has appealed to the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. 

Asked how he feels about Kavanaugh's presence on the court, as someone who might be sympathetic to his case, Miller said, "I feel nothing but great. I'm cool as a cucumber now." 

Miller made the comments on a radio show Tuesday morning, when Kavanaugh heard his first oral arguments as a newly minted justice. The program on WBEN in Buffalo, New York, was hosted by former Trump campaign aide Michael Caputo, a staunch Mueller critic who has been questioned as part of the investigation and is partially funding Miller's legal team. 

Earlier in the show, Miller's attorney said he hoped to take the case to the Supreme Court and predicted that a majority of the justices would support his argument against Mueller's authority, if they decided to take the case. The probability that Kavanaugh and his colleagues on the court would get to hear Miller's challenge of Mueller anytime soon is a stretch.

For the case to reach the Supreme Court, Miller would have to lose at the appellate court first. His case is scheduled to be heard by three appellate judges on November 8, and a decision would come later. 

Kavanaugh would be "very good on this issue," Miller's attorney Paul Kamenar said on WBEN. 

"He would be a good ally," Kamenar said of Kavanaugh, "because he has talked about these cases before in terms of presidential power and limiting the power of the government and has written about this very issue of the constitutionality of the independent counsel."

They're publicly doing victory laps.  They know exactly why he was appointed, and they know exactly why Justice Kennedy retired.

The fix is in.  We have to start undoing the damage in November, and while it will take the rest of my lifetime, if we don't start next month with the House and the Senate, we may never get the chance at all.

A Higher AI-er That Hires, Expired

Judging from Amazon's latest experiment in machine learning in removing the bias in HR from hiring for technical positions, AIs are only as intelligent as the data you feed them to learn and grow from.

Amazon.com Inc’s machine-learning specialists uncovered a big problem: their new recruiting engine did not like women.

The team had been building computer programs since 2014 to review job applicants’ resumes with the aim of mechanizing the search for top talent, five people familiar with the effort told Reuters.

Automation has been key to Amazon’s e-commerce dominance, be it inside warehouses or driving pricing decisions. The company’s experimental hiring tool used artificial intelligence to give job candidates scores ranging from one to five stars - much like shoppers rate products on Amazon, some of the people said.

“Everyone wanted this holy grail,” one of the people said. “They literally wanted it to be an engine where I’m going to give you 100 resumes, it will spit out the top five, and we’ll hire those.”

But by 2015, the company realized its new system was not rating candidates for software developer jobs and other technical posts in a gender-neutral way.

That is because Amazon’s computer models were trained to vet applicants by observing patterns in resumes submitted to the company over a 10-year period. Most came from men, a reflection of male dominance across the tech industry.

In effect, Amazon’s system taught itself that male candidates were preferable. It penalized resumes that included the word “women’s,” as in “women’s chess club captain.” And it downgraded graduates of two all-women’s colleges, according to people familiar with the matter. They did not specify the names of the schools.

Amazon edited the programs to make them neutral to these particular terms. But that was no guarantee that the machines would not devise other ways of sorting candidates that could prove discriminatory, the people said.

The Seattle company ultimately disbanded the team by the start of last year because executives lost hope for the project, according to the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Amazon’s recruiters looked at the recommendations generated by the tool when searching for new hires, but never relied solely on those rankings, they said.

Amazon declined to comment on the recruiting engine or its challenges, but the company says it is committed to workplace diversity and equality.

The irony here is that when it comes to technical positions, Amazon, like most American corporations, wants cheap H1-B labor from overseas, and the massive majority of H1-B workers are male.  The bias in STEM has been towards men for decades, so when Amazon put in ten years of hiring 75-80% men for technical positions into the hopper, the program "learned" that bias too and spat out the same results.

The problem with AI, like any computer program, isn't the program.  It's the people who program it.

You don't have to be a genius super-coder to pick that up.

Tramp Trades Blows, Con't

Trump tariffs are now starting to bite on automakers and the first of many to announce major layoffs is Ford, announcing that some 24,000 American auto jobs are going away.

Ford will be making cuts to its 70,000-strong white-collar workforce in a move it calls a "redesign" of its staff to be leaner, have fewer layers, and offer more decision-making power to employees, the company announced.

The number of jobs that will be axed is unknown at this point.

“A lot of the (reorganization) is about making different choices about strategy,” Chief Financial Officer Bob Shanks told NBC News, adding that the goal isn’t just to slash spending but to improve the “fitness” of the company.

However, a recent report by Morgan Stanley estimates "a global headcount reduction of approximately 12 percent,” or 24,000 of Ford's 202,000 workers worldwide. "Such a magnitude of reduction is not without precedent in the auto industry,” analysts wrote in the investment note.

The decision is part of Ford's $25.5 billion reorganization plan, which includes slashing $6 billion in improved capital efficiencies. Ford CEO Jim Hackett, who cut more than 12,000 jobs as head of office furniture maker Steelcase, had been expected to make cutbacks even sooner, according to some observers. Hackett took over from Ford veteran Mark Fields when he was ousted from the company in May 2017.

Ford is lagging behind the competition, selling an anemic 32.8 vehicles per employee. Long-time rival GM puts out 52.7 vehicles per employee. But it's unclear exactly how improved efficiencies will impact potential job cuts.

Ford has already warned that President Donald Trump's auto tariffs have impacted the company to the tune of $1 billion, and the president’s trade policies threaten to play havoc with Ford’s ongoing reorganization, Shanks told NBC News.

Trump and Ford have been squaring off since well before the 2016 election, when then-presidential candidate originally threatened to impose hefty tariffs on vehicles Ford intended to start importing from a factory in Mexico. The carmaker eventually scrubbed that plan, but rather than return production to the U.S. it decided to move it to China.

Earlier this year, Ford said it would all but pull out of the U.S. passenger car market, citing the rapid shift in demand from sedans, coupes, and wagons to SUVs, CUVs and pickups. It was going to eliminate the conventional Focus models in favor of a crossover version, the Active. Now, with that model dropped, the still-popular Mustang will be the only remaining passenger car model in its line-up, with Ford relying in the future almost entirely on light trucks — such as the F-Series pickups that last year generated nearly all of its profits.

Ironically, Ford actually may have to cut production of the Mustang and some other models — in the process, potentially reducing U.S. jobs — as a result of the tariffs China has enacted on American-made vehicles in a tit-for-tat trade war. The Mustang had been one of the most popular U.S. vehicles sold in that country. 

Expect more "reorganizations" from automakers in the months ahead.  The way the housing and financial markets are right now, it won't take much to push them over the edge into another 2008-style collapse and another deep recession.

And this time we won't be getting out of it nearly as well.

StupidiNews!

• Hurricane Michael is now a Category 4 storm heading for the Florida panhandle, with heavy rain and storm surge already affecting the Gulf Coast from New Orleans to Miami.
• Outgoing UN Ambassador Nikki Haley may have owed more than a million dollars according to federal ethics disclosures at the time of her resignation on Monday.
• A federal judge has blocked parts of Missouri's photo ID requirement law for voting, ruling that the state failed to tell voters what other forms of ID are acceptable at the polls.
• A major US telecom firm discovered hacked hardware from a Chinese supplier and removed it after a report last week that China inserted chips into servers to hack into US businesses.
• A major class-action suit against Google has been filed in California after Monday's news that the tech giant exposed the private details of a half-million users.

Last Call For The Blue Wave Rises, Con't

The "Kavanaugh Crush" that Republicans have been crowing about for the last week isn't materializing and if anything, Republicans have lost serious ground in the last several weeks with women according to the latest CNN poll.

Four weeks out from Election Day, Democrats remain well ahead of Republicans in a generic ballot matchup, with 54% of likely voters saying they support the Democrat in their district and 41% backing a Republican, according to a CNN poll conducted by SSRS. 

This is the widest margin of support for Democrats in a midterm cycle since 2006, when at this point, the party held a whopping 21-point lead over Republicans among likely voters. That's also when Democrats seized control of the House from Republicans, making Nancy Pelosi speaker until 2011. 

This year, Democrats' enthusiasm about their congressional vote has increased and 62% now say they're extremely or very enthusiastic to vote, up seven points since September among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents. Among Republicans and Republican leaning independents, enthusiasm has remained relatively steady, going from 50% in September to 52% in the most recent poll. 

Democratic enthusiasm this year is more intense than it has been in previous midterm cycles, which typically engage voters less than presidential years. The 40% who call themselves "extremely enthusiastic" is the highest share to say so in a midterm election cycle since CNN first asked the question in 2009. 

In fact, Democrats' enthusiasm today more closely resembles the 2008 presidential election. Just before President Barack Obama was elected, 45% of Democrats and Democratic-leaners said they were extremely enthusiastic about voting that November. In 2008, Democrats won eight seats in the Senate and 21 in the House, as well as a victory in the presidency. 

The real issue though is now the gender gap is a gender chasm.

Women's support for Democratic candidates remains extremely strong; 63% of women say they'll vote for the Democrat and only a third say they'll vote for the Republican. Men are more closely divided, but tilt in the opposite direction, with half backing the Republican and 45% behind the Democrat.

Republicans up five points with men.  Democrats up thirty points with women.

Tell me again how Kavanaugh helped?

A Haley Bail-y Tale-y

The latest departure from the Trump regime is UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, who apparently blindsided everyone in the White House when she submitted her resignation last week, effective at the end of the year.

Haley discussed her resignation with Trump last week when she visited him at the White House, these sources said. Her news shocked a number of senior foreign policy officials in the Trump administration.

Background: Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, was easily confirmed four days after President Trump's inauguration in 2017.

She has overseen Trump's shift in dealing with the UN, including the U.S. exit from the UN Human Rights Council, which Haley called the organization's "greatest failure."

Worth noting: Haley wrote a public op-ed in September challenging the N.Y. Times' anonymous op-ed:

• "I don’t agree with the president on everything. When there is disagreement, there is a right way and a wrong way to address it. I pick up the phone and call him or meet with him in person."
• "Like my colleagues in the Cabinet and on the National Security Council, I have very open access to the president. He does not shut out his advisers, and he does not demand that everyone agree with him. I can talk to him most any time, and I frequently do."
• "If I disagree with something and believe it is important enough to raise with the president, I do it. And he listens."

Not anymore, he does.   And why would Haley up and leave?  Like most Trump regime officials, if you're not actually Trump, being openly corrupt still gets you busted.

Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley should be investigated to determine if she complied with ethics regulations when she accepted seven free flights for herself and her husband on luxury private aircraft from three South Carolina businessmen, according to a request filed by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) with the State Department’s Inspector General.

Ambassador Haley’s 2017 public financial disclosure report listed her acceptance of gifts of seven free flights on private aircraft from three South Carolina businessmen for herself and her husband. Those flights were between New York, Washington, DC, and three cities in her home state of South Carolina, and appear to have been worth tens of thousands of dollars to her. In her financial disclosure report, Ambassador Haley asserted that each gifted flight qualified for an exception based on a personal relationship with the giver. The report, however, does not provide enough information to demonstrate that this exception was applicable to the flights. Whether the exception applies depends partly on whether the three businessmen were the only sources of the gifts; if business entities were sources of the gifts, the exception was inapplicable.

Federal ethics regulations prohibit employees from soliciting or accepting gifts given because of the employee’s official position. They also direct employees to consider declining otherwise permissible gifts if they believe a reasonable person would question their integrity or impartiality as a result of accepting the gifts. At a minimum, Ambassador Haley should have been conscious of the appearance concerns surrounding her acceptance of gifts of private luxury air travel at a time when her colleagues in the administration were making news with their own lavish air travel.

“By accepting gifts of luxury private flights, Ambassador Haley seems to be falling in line with other Trump administration officials who are reaping personal benefits from their public positions,” said CREW Executive Director Noah Bookbinder. “Our ethics laws are clearly written to prevent even the appearance of corruption and improper influence. We’re calling on the State Department’s inspector general to further investigate the nature of these gifts, determine whether they are in line with ethics rules, and ensure that employees like Ambassador Haley are fully trained on the application and importance of ethical standards.”

This CREW legal request came today, the same day Haley's resignation was announced, so there's about a 99% chance that we actually found the one person in the regime who still is capable of shame when it comes to ethics violations.

And if you believe that, well...

Haley joins a long list of corrupt Trump regime officials who overstayed their welcome by grifting on the public dime, of course the biggest violator is Trump himself, and he could not care less about that.

Here's my gut feeling:  Jeff Sessions is done as AG as soon as the midterms are over.  Trump will need a new AG.  My money is on Lindsey Graham.  Which means Graham's Senate seat will be open.  Both Haley and Graham are from SC.

It's not hard to be this cynical, but that's what is coming.  Graham becomes Trump's hatchet man, the Saturday Night Massacre happens, and Haley gets appointed to fill out Graham's term.

I hope I'm wrong, but to me, Haley's sudden resignation screams that this is in the works.

We'll know soon enough.

It's Mueller TIme, Con't

The Trump regime has installed its Potemkin court and believes they have won, and will coast to an easy victory in November followed by the end of the Mueller probe and with it, American democracy.  Unfortunately for them, reality is a harsh mistress.

A top Trump campaign official requested proposals in 2016 from an Israeli company to create fake online identities, to use social media manipulation and to gather intelligence to help defeat Republican primary race opponents and Hillary Clinton, according to interviews and copies of the proposals.

The Trump campaign’s interest in the work began as Russians were escalating their effort to aid Donald J. Trump. Though the Israeli company’s pitches were narrower than Moscow’s interference campaign and appear unconnected, the documents show that a senior Trump aide saw the promise of a disruption effort to swing voters in Mr. Trump’s favor.

The campaign official, Rick Gates, sought one proposal to use bogus personas to target and sway 5,000 delegates to the 2016 Republican National Convention by attacking Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, Mr. Trump’s main opponent at the time. Another proposal describes opposition research and “complementary intelligence activities” about Mrs. Clinton and people close to her, according to copies of the proposals obtained by The New York Times and interviews with four people involved in creating the documents.

A third proposal by the company, Psy-Group, which is staffed by former Israeli intelligence operatives, sketched out a monthslong plan to help Mr. Trump by using social media to help expose or amplify division among rival campaigns and factions. The proposals, part of what Psy-Group called “Project Rome,” used code names to identify the players — Mr. Trump was “Lion” and Mrs. Clinton was “Forest.” Mr. Cruz, who Trump campaign officials feared might lead a revolt over the Republican presidential nomination, was “Bear.”

There is no evidence that the Trump campaign acted on the proposals, and Mr. Gates ultimately was uninterested in Psy-Group’s work, a person with knowledge of the discussions said, in part because other campaign aides were developing a social media strategy. Psy-Group’s owner, Joel Zamel, did meet in August 2016 with Donald Trump Jr., Mr. Trump’s eldest son.

Investigators working for Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel investigating Russia’s campaign to disrupt the 2016 election and whether any Trump associates conspired, have obtained copies of the proposals and questioned Psy-Group employees, according to people familiar with those interviews.

The scope of the social media campaigns, essentially a broad effort to sow disinformation among Republican delegates and general election voters, was more extensive than the work typically done by campaign operatives to spread the candidate’s message on digital platforms. The proposal to gather information about Mrs. Clinton and her aides has elements of traditional opposition research, but it also contains cryptic language that suggests using clandestine means to build “intelligence dossiers.”

We know now that ultimately instead of going with Psy-Group that Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, and Steve Bannon went with Cambridge Analytica for their social media manipulation tactics to be used on American voters in 2016.  But the real story here is that this ties Rick Gates to Zamel, and Zamel to Donald Trump Jr. as linked in the article above, and we know Zamel's Psy-Group and Bannon's Cambridge Analytica announced a partnership just after Election Day 2016.

This was the May 2018 NYT article that found Zamel met with Trump, Jr. and Erik Prince in the Seychelles, along with Saudi, Emirati, and Russian nationals to discuss a larger plan involving the 2016 election.  As I said in May:

So this brings up an excellent point.  It wasn't just Putin who wanted to see Trump win.  The Trump campaign was open for business, and Israel, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Russia, and possibly more foreign influences knew that Trump was open to the highest bidder.  And they took them up on the offer.

So now we have the timeline more clearly:  Kushner turned Zamel down officially, but then Trump's son met with Zamel after, off the books, with Erik Prince facilitating.  Kushner couldn't be caught with this meeting on record, so Junior did the dirty work.

Zamel gets a fat partnership contract with CA.  Erik Prince's sister Betsy DeVos becomes Education Secretary, while Erik Prince himself gets to pitch privatizing Trump's war in Afghanistan (and still is.)  The Saudis, Emiratis, and Russians get the access they want to the White House.

And Mueller knows it all.

Clock's ticking...