That's Real White Of You, Con't

The now officially endorsed candidate of the Ku Klux Klan seemingly has no problem taking support from the violent right-wing fringe of the white nationalist movement, and they plan to be out in force in an effort to stop those people from voting on Tuesday.

Neo-Nazi leader Andrew Anglin plans to muster thousands of poll-watchers across all 50 states. His partners at the alt-right website “the Right Stuff” are touting plans to set up hidden cameras at polling places in Philadelphia and hand out liquor and marijuana in the city’s “ghetto” on Election Day to induce residents to stay home. The National Socialist Movement, various factions of the Ku Klux Klan and the white nationalist American Freedom Party all are deploying members to watch polls, either “informally” or, they say, through the Trump campaign. 

The Oath Keepers, a group of former law enforcement and military members that often shows up in public heavily armed, is advising members to go undercover and conduct “intelligence-gathering” at polling places, and Donald Trump ally Roger Stone is organizing his own exit polling, aiming to monitor thousands of precincts across the country.

Energized by Trump’s candidacy and alarmed by his warnings of a “rigged election,” white nationalist, alt-right and militia movement groups are planning to come out in full force on Tuesday, creating the potential for conflict at the close of an already turbulent campaign season. 

“The possibility of violence on or around Election Day is very real,” said Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center. “Donald Trump has been telling his supporters for weeks and weeks and weeks now that they are about to have the election stolen from them by evil forces on behalf of the elites.”

Of course we've seen these threats before, and if anything, they only helped to increase turnout for Democrats in 2008 and 2012.  But the threats themselves are very clear and have been for decades.

It is difficult to know at what scale these plans will materialize because Anglin and his fringe-right ilk are serial exaggerators, according to Potok. And rather than successfully uncover widespread voter fraud — for which there is a lack of compelling evidence — or successfully suppress minority turnout, Potok said the efforts are most likely to backfire.

“If on the morning of Election Day it turns out that we have white supremacists standing around looking threatening at polling places, I think it would arouse anger,” he said. “People would vote just to prove they’re not being intimidated by these radical racists.”

Despite Trump’s claims that American democracy is compromised by massive voter fraud, so far in this election only one person — a Trump supporter in Iowa who attempted to vote twice — has been arrested for it. That has not stopped fringe groups already inclined to believe that minorities are stealing the election from heeding Trump’s call to monitor voting in “certain areas.”

This time around the fear is that it will be different.  So far these idiots haven't been able to cause too much trouble in polling places, but that was before the GOP made voter suppression of black and Latino voters a top priority and nominated a presidential candidate endorsed by the actual KKK.

Of course, the real problem is all the people voting for Trump who are looking the other way on this. They're just as likely to look the other way should violence break out at polling precincts too.

A Split Decision That Splits America

I know we've talked about "2016 Election As..." other presidential election years around here, 1968, 1992, 1976, 1980, 2012 and 2008, but Nate Silver is raising the less-than-zero possibility this turns into the dreaded 2000 where the Republican wins the electoral college but loses the popular vote.

We’ve written about this before, but I wanted to call your attention to it again because the possibility of an Electoral College-popular vote split keeps widening in our forecast. While there’s an outside chance that such a split could benefit Clinton if she wins the exact set of states that form her “firewall,” it’s far more likely to benefit Donald Trump, according to our forecast. Thus, as of early Monday evening, our polls-only model gave Hillary Clinton an 85 percent chance of winning the popular vote but just a 75 percent chance of winning the Electoral College. There’s roughly a 10 percent chance of Trump’s winning the White House while losing the popular vote, in other words.

As an illustration of this, we can compare Clinton’s current margins in our polls-only forecast against President Obama’s performance in 2012. Clinton — despite Trump’s recent improvement in the polls — leads by 4.7 percentage points in the national popular vote, a wider margin than Obama’s 3.9-point victory over Mitt Romney in 2012.

But Clinton is performing worse than Obama in 10 of the 12 states that were generally considered swing states in 2012. In some cases, such as Floridaand Pennsylvania, the difference is negligible. She’s underperforming Obama substantially, however, in Iowa, Michigan, Ohio and Nevada and to a somewhat lesser extent in Wisconsin and Minnesota. She’s considerably outperforming Obama in Virginia and North Carolina, conversely, but that’s not enough to make up for her losses elsewhere.

So how is Clinton doing better in the popular vote overall, despite failing to match Obama’s performance in most of these swing states? A lot of it is her strong performance in red states, or at least red states where a significant number of Romney voters were whites with college degrees. Thus, Clinton is putting states such as Arizona into play and — although she’s unlikely to win them — states such as Texas, Georgia and even Utah are liable to be much closer than we’re used to. Texas, in particular, can cause a potential Electoral College-popular vote skew because of its large and growing population. If the Democrat goes from losing Texas by 15 percentage points to losing it by 5 points instead, that produces a net gain of about 0.6 or 0.7 percentage points of the popular vote — larger than the margin by which Al Gore beat George W. Bush in the popular vote in 2000 — without changing the tally in the Electoral College. 

In other words there's a chance that Clinton will do better in red states like Texas and Georgia this year than Obama did, but still lose those states, and then lose close battles in the Upper Midwest and Rust Belt, on top of losing squeakers in big swing states like NC and Arizona.

That map would basically be the "Trump narrow win" scenario where she loses NC, FL, OH, NV, IA, and CO all by very close margins, and comes tolerably close in TX, GA, MO, AZ and SC, giving Trump an electoral college win, but a popular vote loss.  It's happened at least 4 times before, including 2000. 

The issue then becomes possible automatic recounts if those states are close enough, which is basically the nightmare scenario of this election times ten.

I don't think that's going to happen.  I think Clinton has banked enough early voting lead to prevail and again, Silver's numbers show her with a stronger lead than President Obama had in 2012. I still think she'll win both Florida and North Carolina early on Tuesday night, plus Pennsylvania and Virginia, and this race will essentially be over before 10 PM, Trump will be done.  Without FL and NC, he has no path at all to 270, even if he wins every Midwest and Rocky Mountain state other than Illinois and New Mexico.

Of course I went to bed that night in November 2000 thinking Al Gore had put away the Sunshine State, too.

We'll see.

StupidiNews!

• The Chicago Cubs have overcome a three games to one deficit against the Cleveland Indians to force an historic Game 7 showdown tonight in Cleveland.
• The Standing Rock tribe of Sioux will continue to protest against the construction of an oil pipeline across their land into the cold North Dakota winter, according to the tribe's chairman.
• Donald Trump's hotel in Rio de Janeiro is under investigation by Brazilian prosecutors for possible criminal involvement in state pension fund investments.
• The Pentagon says it will need another half a billion dollars to finish the development of the overrun-plagued F-35 Joint Strike Fighter jet.
• The White House is making plans for a peaceful transition of the President's official social media accounts and to archive posts, tweets, and more after the election.

Last Call For The Grim Darkness Of The Middle Of Next Week

Just to cheer you up, Greg Sargent reminds us that Trump still hasn't said he's going to accept the results of the election next week, and should things actually be close, well...

I feel like America is gonna have a bad time.

The new Washington Post/ABC News national tracking pollfinds Donald Trump leading Clinton by one point in the four-way match-up, 46-45, while Clinton leads in the head-to-head by 48-47. You shouldn’t overreact to individual polls — instead, keep focused on the national and state polling averages. 

But plainly, the race is tightening, and it’s increasingly possible we’ll see a very close finish. Which means that it’s time to start pondering an Election Day nightmare scenario that is made up of two parts. First, the tight finish produces an outcome that is contested well beyond Election Day, with Trump (should he lose) claiming the results are rigged. Second, Trump supplements his claim about the rigged outcome by continuing to point to the FBI’s latest discovery of emails as proof of an ongoing cover-up of Hillary Clinton’s criminality. 

This morning, election rules expert Michael McDonald arguesthat if the outcome is close, the election could very well “go into overtime,” adding that “in this environment,” this could “rip this country apart.” McDonald posits that in a very close finish, Trump could be favored on election night, but over subsequent days, as the vote counting continues afterwards, Clinton might then edge into the lead:

A Democratic shift from election night to the final tally of votes is predictable. All states count some ballots late, and those tend to break towards Democrats. Nothing nefarious occurs: the casting and counting follow procedures laid out in state law. Some of the states that count more late ballots are key battlegrounds, magnifying the suspense on Election Night. 

Mail ballots are one of two types that can shift election results. Many states require mail ballots to be receivedby election officials on Election Day. Others continue to accept ballots postmarked on Election Day, up to two weeks following the election. Among these states are Iowa, North Carolina, Ohio, and Wisconsin. 

These late ballots may break towards the Democrats. My analysis shows more Democrats than Republicans in Iowa and North Carolina have yet to return their mail ballots. Why? These voters tend to be younger people who tend to return their ballots later. If Trump is slightly ahead in a late mail-ballot return state, he could fall behind after all the mail ballots are counted. 

Then there are provisional ballots. States are required under federal law to provide them to anyone with a problem at the polls — a voter who doesn’t have the required form of ID, for instance, or whose name is missing from the voter registration rolls. Election officials review provisional ballots and allow voters to clarify their eligibility after Election Day. In the four states that report separate results for provisional ballots, the voters who cast them broke strongly for the Democrats. So if the presidential race is particularly close, provisional ballots could tilt it. 

There’s still more in the link, but you get the idea. Meanwhile, Bloomberg Politics reports that both sides are now gearing up in a serious way for the possibility of a legally contested outcome.

In other words, if you think this election will finally be over next week, well, I have some bad news.

That's the nightmare scenario, yes.  The good news is that I still believe we'll be looking at an Obama 2012-level win, if not an Obama 2008-level win for Clinton next week, an election that Trump will be forced to accept as a loss.

The bad news is the GOP is probably going for total scorched earth staring November 9th no matter what Clinton's winning margin is.  Hopefully we can wrest control of the Senate away from them and get something done, but until that happens, the Republicans plan to punish as much of the country as possible for daring to vote for the Democrats.

Hopefully we'll punish them back.

The Clinton Prime Directive

Matthew Yglesias has a thoughtful piece on Clinton Derangement Syndrome over the last 25 years, and where we are a week from the election.

The latest Hillary Clinton email revelations arose out of an unrelated investigation into Anthony Weiner’s sexting. 

The best way to understand this odd hopscotch is through the Prime Directive of Clinton investigations: We know the Clintons are guilty, the only question is what are they guilty of and when will we find the evidence? 

So somehow an investigation that once upon a time was about a terrorist attack on an American consulate becomes an inquiry into FOIA compliance which shifts into a question about handling of classified material. A probe of sexting by the husband of a woman who works for Clinton morphs into a quest for new emails, and if the emails turn out not to be new at all (which seems likely) it will morph into some new questions about Huma Abedin’s choice of which computers to use to check her email. 

Clinton has been very thoroughly investigated, and none of the earlier investigations came up with any crimes. So now the Prime Directive compels her adversaries to look under a new rock and likewise compels cable television and many major newspapers to treat the barest hint of the possibility of new evidence that might be damning as a major development. 

It’s the same drive that led to Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial on the grounds that he had perjured himself to try to cover up an affair that was uncovered in an investigation that was originally supposed to be looking into a years-old Arkansas land deal on which the Clintons had lost money. The Whitewater investigation did not reveal any crimes. So rather than wrap things up and consider the Clintons exonerated, the investigators went looking under other rocks and came up with Monica Lewinsky. 

There are several rules that govern media coverage of the Clintons, but this year the Prime Directive has dominated them all. Network news has devoted more minutes of coverage to Clinton’s emails than to all policy issues combined even as email investigations have not uncovered any wrongdoing. It’s inexplicable news judgment, unless you simply assume there’s a crime out there.

And Yggy does a great job of nailing the how, who, what and where, but not so much the why.

In Prime Directive terms, the Weiner laptop is a major break. After all, the evidence of guilt must be out there somewhere. So why not Anthony Weiner’s laptop? 

It’s only when you step outside the circle of madness that you can see how ridiculous this is. If nobody had ever seen a Hillary Clinton email before, uncovering a trove of them on the laptop of the estranged husband of one of her key aides might be a big deal. But Hillary’s email has already been exhaustively investigated from multiple different angles and it shows no wrongdoing whatsoever. If you assume there is wrongdoing then, yes, maybe all evidence of the wrongdoing was suppressed from what was turned over and Weiner’s computer contains secret new damning emails. 

But what if all previous investigations have shown no wrongdoing because there was no wrongdoing? And what if the client-side copies of emails on Weiner’s computer are just client-side copies of emails, just like the emails in the inbox of everyone else who downloads email to a computer? What if Benghazi was just a tragedy and an example of how bad things happen in war zones? What if Whitewater was just a land deal on which some people lost money because real estate speculation is risky? What if Clinton has been getting away with it for all these years because she hasn’t done anything wrong?

The answer is actually pretty simple: it means that the last quarter-century of cable news's holy grail, the Story That Brings Down The Clintons, never existed.  It's Melville's tale of the white whale written across an entire industry, from Chris Matthews to Rush Limbaugh to Andrea Mitchell to Matt Drudge.  Being the ones to destroy the Clintons would instantly make you as mythical as Bob Woodward overnight, and everyone in the news industry since 1993 has been looking to nail Bill and Hillary on something.

Imagine that being your entire career goal and never finding it.  What reason did you go into the news business if you can't pin the story of the century on the Clintons?

They simply have to be guilty.  It's a madness that has infected the media and the country like a virus for more than two decades now.  And if they're not, what it means is that the Clintons have played the game better than anyone in Washington since the start and beat them all.

Including all the Village.

And that is the "why" to this story.

Getting Taken For A Ride

The problem with the "gig economy" where we all magically get to choose our own customers and work schedules and then use the power of technology to leverage that is that 1) bad choices are still made by people and 2) the tech has no ability to fix those bad choices.  Take ride-sharing apps, for example.

The National Bureau of Economic Research, a respected non-profit and non-partisan research organization, has released the findings of a two-year study that tracked discrimination of riders using Uber, Lyft, and Flywheel in Seattle and Boston. The study was done by researchers at MIT, Stanford and the University of Washington.

The study involved nearly 1,500 rides across the two cities, with work beginning in Seattle late last year to this March. Undergrads from the University of Washington were given identical phones with the three ride-sharing apps pre-loaded, instructed to take a handful of prescribed routes, and then noting when the ride was requested, when it was accepted by the driver, when they were picked up, and finally when they got to their destination.

In the Seattle experiment, trip requests from black riders took between 16 to 28 percent longer to be accepted by both UberX and Lyft, and breaking UberX out showed a wait time of 29 to 35 percent longer than their white counterparts. 

Those figures are based on UberX usage, primarily because of the different ways a new ride is displayed to the driver through the Uber or Lyft app. 

For Uber, drivers don’t see the name of the person they’re picking up until they accept the fare, at which point they can cancel. But for Lyft, which displays the rider’s name and picture (if they included it) before they accept the fare, means trying to quantize discriminatory practices through Lyft is largely impossible—a model Uber could conceivably adopt. 

For the Boston experiment, the team turned to a previous study by NBER that sent identical resumes to potential employers, with one set having what’s described as an “African America-sounding” first name and another with a “white-sounding” first name. The results showed that callbacks for the former happened about one-third less.

The researchers for the ride-sharing study took a similar tack, using names from the 2003 survey to set up two different Uber and Lyft accounts for each rider—one with an “African American-sounding” name and another with a “white-sounding” name. The team also made another change from its Seattle methodology; rather than picking an equal number of black and white and male and female riders, they recruited students with a range of ethnicities “whose appearance allowed them to plausibly travel as a passenger of either race,” the study states.

For the men involved in the study, those that used the profile and appeared to be black riders had a cancellation rate more than twice as high as a profile of a rider who appeared to be white (11.2 percent vs. 4.5 percent). 

Women didn’t fare much better, with a cancellation rate of 8.4 percent when using the African American-sounding name and 5.4 percent when using the white-sounding first name. 

Worse, in low population density areas where getting a ride can be challenging, users with African American-sounding names were cancelled at a rate of 15.7 percent—triple that of white males.

And frankly, until Uber gets the bejesus sued out of it, they're not going to do a damn thing.  Yes, I know I pick on Uber a lot and that systemic racism in America was a problem long before Silicon Valley ever got the idea to let people turn their cars into cabs for cash, but the problem with Uber and a lot of other social tech is that the "freedom to choose your customers" and the "selectivity aspect" of who you want to deal with in a business relationship starts to look a whole lot like a pattern of systemic racism and sexism when put out in the real world.

Worse, it's looking more and more like that setup is one of the main selling points as working as a contractor for the gig economy.  It's not a bug, kids,

It's a feature.  And they don't want to "fix" it.

StupidiNews!

• Philadelphia transit workers went on strike this morning to protest wages, health care and pension system reforms, the strike could affect as many as 800,000 people daily.
• A federal judge has rejected the NYPD's settlement offer with Muslim groups over years of illegal post-9/11 surveillance, saying proposed civil liberties protections did not go far enough.
• Russia's defense minister is blaming the US coalition for "attacking civilians" in Aleppo, Syria and says that any US-Russian peace talks over Syria will be suspended indefinitely as a result.
• A construction accident at a gasoline pipeline in Alabama killed one and injured five yesterday, the Colonial Pipeline being out of commission has caused gas price spikes on the East Coast.
• A new leak from hacker group Shadow Brokers purports that hundreds of organizations on the internet were targeted by the NSA over the last decade.

Last Cal For Working The Ref

As Steve M. points out, the notion that Trump will lose because he doesn't have a ground game is garbage: the GOP Right Wing Noise Machine *is* the Republican "get out the vote" ground game, and they're doing everything they can to win this election.

I know all the smart folks -- the Sam Wangs, the Ed Kilgores -- are sanguine about the effect of all this on the outcome of the election. We're too polarized for this to change many votes, they tell us. Clinton has a big lead and a firewall of several states, and, unlike Trump, she has a get-out-the-vote effort. 

Well, this is Trump's get-out-the-vote effort, however little his campaign may be involved in it. It's going to bring Republicans home to a nominee a lot of them have been reluctant to support, and even if it suppresses a tiny percentage of the Clinton vote, the loss of her least enthusiastic voters could tip the election. 

Nate Silver is already pondering scenarios in which an election that seemed likely to be an Obama-sized victory for Clinton now comes down to one state, possibly Pennsylvania, assuming Trump takes a lot of the toss-up states. I think Clinton will win Pennsylvania -- she's up nearly 6 points there according to Real Clear Politics. She has a cushion. 

But I think if Trump doesn't win, Republicans not named Trump are certain to try to litigate her victory. Oh, she won because of Pennsylvania? Lotta fishy stuff happens in Philadelphia at the polls, doesn't it, especially in certain neighborhoods? 

It's been said that Vladimir Putin doesn't actually want Trump to win -- he assumes Clinton's victory is inevitable and just wants to weaken her as much as he can. I don't know if that's really what Putin is thinking, but it's more or less what the GOP is thinking. I seriously believe you'll see Mitch McConnell or Jason Chaffetz or, who knows, maybe even John McCain seriously suggesting that electors withhold their votes for Clinton because the race was close and because all those FBI investigations seriously call into question whether she should serve as president. 

In other words: Either Trump's going to win or we really might have a ginned-up constitutional crisis. I'll be pleasantly surprised if we avoid both of these outcomes.

I think we'll avoid the first.  But the second, well...Congressional Republicans were already promising endless investigations and obstruction of Clinton appointments and executive branch actions, and that was before Comey crapped in the punchbowl.

The Republican platform is clear: they're going to make those people pay for every second she's in office, and when that subset of people includes 95% of America, well it'll be all her fault.  The Age of Trump means that if the GOP can't win, they'll make the country completely ungovernable. At this point I would take their word on that threat.  And somehow America mired in a constitutional crisis for the next several months or longer will be Clinton's fault.  Watch.

Happy Halloween!  Our long national nightmare is just beginning.

A Load Of Crap In Warren County

Meanwhile, across the river in Ohio, Warren County Republicans are up to their old Halloween tricks again.

A load of manure was dumped outside the Democratic Party headquarters in Warren County.

"What reasonable person thinks this is OK????" party chair Bethe Goldenfield said in a post in the Greater Cincinnati Politics Facebook Group. "I won't be responding to anyone who thinks this is acceptable behavior. It is ILLEGAL!"

The same thing happened in 2012, Goldenfield noted. The suburban Cincinnati county is overwhelmingly Republican; Mitt Romney got 69 percent of the vote four years ago. It's been almost 40 years since a Democrat was elected to countywide office.

Goldenfield told The Enquirer the Warren County Sheriff's Office called her around 7:45 a.m. Saturday alerting her to the manure pile outside the Lebanon building. Deputies met party officials later to review video.

"Hopefully the perps will be held accountable for their actions," she said.

Jeff Monroe, chairman of the Warren County Republican Party, said the GOP had nothing to do with the manure "and has offered to help clean things up."

The Warren County Sheriff's office had no additional information. Goldenfield said the party hired a contractor to remove the pile.

Somebody sure thought it was funny, enough to repeat the action from four years ago.  I don't expect anyone to be caught, either.  But like I've been saying, the GOP has been broken in their souls long before Trump was the nominee for president.

Trump's Pence-ive Decision

So here's a blood-curdling Halloween tale for you: it turns out Donald Trump really, really wanted New Jersey GOP Gov. Chris Christie as his running mate and even offered him the job, but was then talked out of it by his family and campaign manager Paul Manafort in a weird story involving lying to Trump about plane trouble in order to get him to stay and talk to Mike Pence.  Trump and Christie developed a fast friendship, and Trump wanted to offer Christie the VP slot out of loyalty.  And basically everyone around Trump realized this was a horrible decision because Christie was going to go down in flames over Bridgegate.

“Trump cares about who’s the most loyal and who kisses his a– the most, not who’s the most qualified and what’s the best political decision,” said a source close to the campaign. “If it was up to him, it would have been Christie.”

The two men had developed a close relationship. Whenever Christie visited Trump’s campaign headquarters, he’d spend most of his time in onetime Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski’s office, ignoring Manafort and other top aides, a source said.

Christie contacted Trump and made his final, impassioned ­appeal on July 12.

“Christie said he thinks he deserves it and he earned it,” a second Trump source said. Convinced, Trump made the ­offer.

Christie “said all the BS that Trump likes to hear, and Trump said, ‘Yeah, sure I’m giving it to you.’ ”

That didn’t sit well with Manafort, who had arranged for Trump to meet Pence in Indianapolis on July 13, and fly back together to New York the next day for a formal announcement.

After Trump tentatively decided on Christie, Manafort told Trump his plane had a mechanical problem, campaign sources said, forcing Trump to spend another night in the Hoosier State. Pence then made his case to be Trump’s No. 2 over dinner as Trump’s advisers argued that Christie’s Bridgegate troubles would sink the campaign.

“Trump had wanted Christie but Bridgegate would have been the biggest national story,” a third Trump source said. “He’d lose the advantage of not being corrupt.”

Trump agreed to name Pence the next day and broke the news to Christie, saying it would “tear my family apart if I gave you VP,” a source said.

A Trump/Christie ticket would be down by 15 points right now.  Really is a shame that he didn't pick the governor, considering how much trouble Christie is in over the Bridgegate trial ongoing right now.

Five witnesses – including three who remain steadfast allies – refuted his claim that he was "blindsided" and knew nothing about his staff's involvement in the lane closures before the rest of us did.

Among those who contradicted the governor under oath are Michael DuHaime, his chief strategist for the last decade; Mike Drewniak, his press secretary during that entire stretch, and Deborah Gramiccioni, his deputy chief of staff at the time. You can read excerpts from their testimony here.

The governor is not charged. Prosecutors say that he knew about the lane closures as they occurred, but knowledge of the plot is not a crime in itself. And no one in this trial has suggested that Christie ordered the lane closures.

But the rules of the courtroom are one thing, and the rules of politics are quite another. It's tough to govern after absorbing a blow like this.

"It's been incredibly damaging to hear one person after another directly contradict him," says Julian Zelizer, a professor at Princeton University. "And if the national election goes as poorly for him as some think, that will add to the damage. Because he is forever connected to Donald Trump."

Indeed, the combination of Trump and Christie's problems would have most likely resulted in the biggest GOP presidential loss in generations. If Paul Manafort hadn't pulled a dirty trick to save Trump from his own terrible judgment, this race would actually be more lopsided in Clinton's favor than it is now.

What could have been, eh Republican party?

StupidiNews!

• Oklahoma police say fugitive Michael Vance was shot and killed by US Marshals on Sunday, Vance was wanted for the deaths of two relatives and two Oklahoma police officers last week.
• Jury selection will begin today in the trial of former North Charleston, SC police officer Michael Slager, charged with the April 2015 shooting death of Walter Scott, a black motorist.
• New data finds American women are obtaining abortions through medication as often as by surgery for the first time since the drugs were approved 16 years ago.
• Iceland's ruling Independence Party has survived national elections and a challenge from the upstart Pirate Party as a new coalition will need to be formed in parliament.
• Trials of male birth control injections proved effective in preventing pregnancy, but side effects included acne and mood swings as researchers look to find the right balance.

Laboratories Of Democracy

Meanwhile next door in Ohio, it seems that one of the state's chief forensic experts had her thumb on the evidence scale in favor of Ohio cops for, oh, about 30 plus years.

Dozens, if not hundreds, of criminal convictions in Ohio could be in jeopardy because a longtime forensic scientist at the state crime lab now stands accused of slanting evidence to help cops and prosecutors build their cases.

The credibility of G. Michele Yezzo, who worked at the Ohio attorney general’s Bureau of Criminal Investigation for more than three decades, has been challenged in two cases in which men were convicted of aggravated murder. One has been freed from prison because of her now-suspect work.

A review of her personnel records by The Dispatch shows that colleagues and supervisors raised questions about Yezzo time and again while she tested evidence and testified in an uncounted number of murder, rape and other criminal cases in the state.

Their concerns included that she presented evidence in the best light for prosecutors instead of objectively, used suspect methods while examining trace evidence from some crime scenes, and made mistakes that, as one former attorney general put it, “could lead to a substantial miscarriage of justice.”

Yezzo, 63, of West Jefferson, told The Dispatch that the accusations about her work being biased are wrong and that she approached her work objectively.

“I have never done anything to overstate analysis of evidence, nor have I done anything, for lack of better a word, to taint the evidence,” Yezzo said. “No, I didn’t appease prosecutors and law enforcement. I bent over backwards to try and find out whatever evidence was there, and that’s the best I can tell you.”

But two former attorneys general, defense attorneys, a judge, a former BCI superintendent and a nationally renowned forensic expert from the FBI all say that Yezzo has credibility issues that may have poisoned cases she touched.

Lee Fisher, who served as attorney general from 1991 to 1995, and Jim Petro, who served as attorney general from 2003 to 2007, both said they didn’t know of Yezzo when they were in office, but they now have concerns about her work.

“I would call for an investigation into every case where her findings and conclusions were instrumental in the final result of a case,” Fisher said. “We have an obligation to the integrity of the criminal-justice system to investigate every case. We have to determine whether her findings or conclusions were suspect.”

So Ohio BCI knew Yezzo was crooked and let her continue to work anyway for 32 years. And if you think the Kasich administration is going to even think about touching this mess with a 100-foot pole, you don't know Ohio politics very well at all.

Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine said Friday that his office was alerted to the concerns about Yezzo in 2015 and has since conducted two separate reviews of her work. One involved examining 100 criminal cases where Yezzo’s evidence analysis played a role in a conviction.

DeWine said they found no issues with her work.

Moving forward, DeWine, who did not serve as attorney general during Yezzo’s tenure, said he has no plans for an internal investigation into Yezzo’s history, but he will have open discussions with defense attorneys on a case-by-case basis if they raise questions.

He said the BCI, which handles about 37,000 cases a year, has a “long history of doing good work” and has received the highest level of accreditation.

AG DeWine of course is running for governor in 2018, so you can expect this entire Yezzo issue to magically vanish.  Ohio BCI certainly isn't going to do anything.

Maybe the courts will do something about it.

But we should trust law enforcement because they are just and fair, right?

Fouling Up The Rigging

As Think Progress reminds us, two thirds of US states have elections controlled by the GOP, so if the election is "rigged" to keep Trump out of the White House (and it's not) then GOP Secretaries of State would have to somehow be in on it (which they aren't.)




So can we please stop this stupid notion that the election is rigged?

Because that's covering up what Republicans really are doing to stop Democrats from voting.

Sunday Long Read: Demon In A Bottle

Deadspin's Dave McKenna takes a look at the messy, tumultuous life of Washington Post sportswriter Jennifer Frey, whose talent burned brightly enough that it consumed herself in the process as she died earlier this year from a two-decade long fight with alcoholism.

Jennifer Frey drank herself to death.

Frey’s obituary in the Washington Post, her last full-time employer, merely gave “multiple organ failure” as the cause of her March 26 death. But alcohol killed her as surely as a bullet killed Lincoln.

She died abusing a drug that kills millions of people every year. But the life of Jennifer Frey was not a common one.

Frey was a can’t miss kid in sportswriting in the early 1990s. Just months out of Harvard, she was subjected to a high-profile episode of sexual harassment on the job. In response, Frey spoke forcibly and with righteousness for her gender and her profession in print and on national television as the controversy over women in locker rooms crested.

“There is a lot of talk about the players’ indignation at being forced to allow women into their dressing room,” Frey wrote while still an intern at the Miami Herald. “Few people are aware of the indignities felt by women beat reporters who are frequently harassed by athletes who do not understand that the women are there to do a job, not enjoy a peep show.

“It is not fun for a woman to go into a male locker room. It is not exciting. It did not ‘turn me on’ when a major-league baseball player dropped his pants and asked me to evaluate his anatomy.”

Soon after, she was wowing her elders at the Philadelphia Daily News and New York Times, and, in an era before the internet, writing reported stories at a blogger’s pace. Frey was also living like someone ready to take Manhattan and then the world. Everybody who knew her through the 1990s remembers Frey as both the organizer and the life of every party, and a party could be found in every town Frey filed copy from.

“Along with everything else she had, she was so much fun,” says Chuck Culpepper, a writer at the Lexington Herald Leader when he met Frey at a 1991 NCAA tournament game. “My God, was she fun.”

Mike Wise, who first worked with her at the New York Times in the early 1990s, vouches for the good times that awaited anybody lucky enough to be near vintage Jennifer Frey. “Being around her, you were just in awe,” he says. “If friends are going out for dinner, she would find the best place, and it didn’t feel like you were meeting her for dinner, it felt like you were in a parade going down Broadway and she was leading it.”

Frey was recruited from the Times by the Washington Post in 1995, at a time when the sports section was as stacked with big names as at any time in the history of the newspaper. Frey was set to become as big a deal as anybody on the masthead.

That never happened.

“She was incredible, a shooting star,” says Jeff Bradley, an assistant athletic director at Harvard when she was sports editor at the school paper. “And then she just fell off the face of the earth.”

It turns out that Frey’s hard living outlasted her usefulness as a journalist. ThePost’s obit contained glowing quotes about Frey from a 1997 column by David Carr, the future New York Times icon, who back then was editor and media columnist for for Washington City Paper: “Frey is a certified prodigy who can do it all: X’s and O’s, empathetic profiles, and hard takedowns when the situation requires it,” Carr wrote.

Yet other parts of that same Carr column, unreferenced in the Post’s obit, foreshadowed Frey’s fall, hinting all those years ago that her admirers were so blinded by her talents that they were ignoring the closeness of her relationship with booze.

Jody Goldstein, a former Houston Chronicle reporter who became a running buddy of Frey’s in the 1990s, was among a few friends from journalism who stuck with Frey after her bylines stopped. She says Frey’s alcoholism never loosened its grip.

“I asked Jennifer once, ‘What made you drink today?’” says Goldstein. “And she said, ‘That’s just what I do. I get up. I drink.’ That was her life.”

And Frey kept drinking even after it cost her a career, custody of her child, her house, and most of her friendships. Whenever doctors told her she’d die if she didn’t give up alcohol, she tried to call their bluff—until earlier this year, when she was told her liver was beyond repair.

Frey hoped to get a new organ through donation, but her application was rejected. Being kept off the transplant list was a death sentence. Lots of people who considered themselves close to Frey during the early, enthralling portions of her career were brought up to speed by an internet posting from Goldstein earlier this year explaining that the end was near and asking for money for Frey’s only child. Jaundiced but booze-free, Frey hosted visitors in her hospital room to talk about the good old days. Her final audiences reminded longtime friends what they’d lost years earlier.

No appreciation of her life appeared in the Washington Post, as noted by acommenter on its website who rhetorically asked if one was coming. (“If not, shame on you ALL,” the reader posted). Perhaps nobody at the paper wanted to write it. Intellectually, her former colleagues know they weren’t equipped to fight the alcoholism and mental illness that took Frey down; many nonetheless have guilt that she was allowed to slide so silently.

“I still can’t wrap my arms around her quiet exit and decline,” says Vinnie Perrone, a longtime Washington Post writer who was close to Frey before and during her time at the paper. “She was brilliant, she was a worker, she lit up any room she was in. She knew everybody and was liked by everybody in the business. We were all moths to her porchlight. There was a time when all these people would be glad to see her and be around her. But when the need arose, when she needed people, where were they? Where were we?”

Having lost a grandparent to alcoholism 20 years ago, this story hit me kind of hard.  There but for the grace of God go I.

Here We Go Again

Here's a truly depressing thought from Politico's Mike Allen: what if Republicans, already showing a complete propensity to fail miserably at learning from their mistakes in 2008 and 2012, nominate Trump again in 2020?

Newt Gingrich, one of Donald Trump’s closest confidants and most visible boosters, on Friday raised the novel possibility of a Trump-Clinton rematch in 2020 — a spooky Halloween-weekend notion for the many voters who just want the ugly race to stop.

“The challenge for everybody’s going to be, 'What if he gets 48 or 49 percent?’” Gingrich said in a video interview for POLITICO’s “Open Mike” series. “And what if he says: ‘You know, I like this campaign and stuff. I ain’t leaving’? There will then be a Trump Party.”

Speaking a few hours before the FBI’s email review became public, Gingrich declared that “odds are better than even” that Trump will win.

But the former House speaker added that if not, Trump might form “a Trump Party inside the Republican Party, just the way William Jennings Bryan brought populism into the Democratic Party.”

Gingrich floated the notion when he was asked if Trump TV — a new media empire that might emerge from the campaign’s aftermath — would be a good idea.

“It’d be silly,” Gingrich said at his office in Arlington, Va. “He’s bigger than that. … It’s an irrelevancy. I mean, I know what it takes to run CNN or Fox. These are big operations, and he could do that if he wants to get out of politics, but he doesn’t need it.”

And so you think he might run again in 2020?

"I think that’s very possible,” Gingrich responded. "I think he likes being part of a movement — he likes thinking of it as a movement. … I was thinking about this, [and] he said to me the other morning, … ‘I sent out one tweet and 15,000 people showed up.’”

POLITICO asked: So you’re predicting a Trump-Clinton rematch?

Gingrich: “Could be, assuming she survives.”

What do you mean “survives”?

“That she’s not impeached and convicted,” Gingrich replied. “Look … when people have time to actually digest WikiLeaks and some brave person puts together a book and goes, 'This, this, this, this, this,' it’s very hard to imagine how there’s not going to be some serious effort in the first year of her presidency.”

Newt is usually full of crap, but at this point you can't discount the notion that the GOP will be so broken that they'll just nominate Trump again in four years.

Having said that, I think it's much more likely we see Rubio, Kasich, or Cruz than Trump again.

But I would have said the same thing if you had asked me who the GOP was going to nominate back in 2015, too.