Last Call For Echoes Of A Dark Past

Trump's "closing argument" ad out today is awful, and as Josh Marshall notes, it's a direct appeal to America's anti-Semites to vote for Trump.

From a technical and thematic perspective it's a well made ad. It's also packed with anti-Semitic dog whistles, anti-Semitic tropes and anti-Semitic vocabulary. I'm not even sure whether it makes sense to call them dog whistles. The four readily identifiable American bad guys in the ad are Hillary Clinton, George Soros (Jewish financier), Janet Yellen (Jewish Fed Chair) and Lloyd Blankfein (Jewish Goldman Sachs CEO).

The Trump narration immediately preceding Soros and Yellin proceeds as follows: "The establishment has trillions of dollars at stake in this election. For those who control the levers of power in Washington [start Soros] and for the global [start Yellen] special interests [stop Yellen]. They partner with these people [start Clinton] who don't have your good in mind."

For Blankfein: "It's a global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth and put that money into the [start Blankein] pockets of a handful of large corporations [stop Blankfein] and political entities."

These are standard anti-Semitic themes and storylines, using established anti-Semitic vocabulary lined up with high profile Jews as the only Americans other than Clinton who are apparently relevant to the story. As you can see by my transcription, the Jews come up to punctuate specific key phrases. Soros: "those who control the levers of power in Washington"; Yellen "global special interests"; Blankfein "put money into the pockets of handful of large corporations."

This is an anti-Semitic ad every bit as much as the infamous Jesse Helms 'white hands' ad or the Willie Horton ad were anti-African-American racist ads. Which is to say, really anti-Semitic. You could even argue that it's more so, given certain linguistic similarities with anti-Semitic propaganda from the 1930s. But it's not a contest. This is an ad intended to appeal to anti-Semites and spread anti-Semitic ideas. That's the only standard that really matters.

Nobody, I repeat, nobody should be at all surprised by this.  This is who Trump is, this is who his supporters are, and always have been.

This is intentional and by design. It is no accident.

Trump has electrified anti-Semites and racist groups across the country. His own campaign has repeatedly found itself speaking to anti-Semites, tweeting their anti-Semitic memes, retweeting anti-Semites. His campaign manager, Steven Bannon, is an anti-Semite. The Breitbart News site he ran and will continue running after the campaign has become increasingly open in the last year with anti-Semitic attacks and politics.

Beyond that, this shouldn't surprise us for a broader reason. Authoritarian, xenophobic political movements, which the Trump campaign unquestionably is, are driven by tribalism and 'us vs them' exclusion of outsiders. This may begin with other groups - Mexican immigrants, African-Americans, Muslims. It almost always comes around to Jews.

You can add women and LGBTQ Americans to that list too.  We have a white nationalist running for president, and he's going to get 40% of the vote minimum.

Just another reminder that Wednesday morning these assholes are still going to be here.

The Late, Great, Early Voting Movement

In states that are controlled by Republicans in 2017, I fully expect to see efforts to completely end early voting altogether, and Nevada is going to be the reason why.

Michael McDonald, the chair of the Nevada Republican Party, complained at a rally on Saturday that “certain people” had the opportunity to vote. According to CNN, McDonald “was referring to a polling location in Clark County, which is 30% Hispanic and the county in which Las Vegas is located.”

Video of McDonald’s remarks were captured by Correct the Record, a group which supports Hillary Clinton’s presidential candidacy.

In the video, McDonald complains that “in Clark County, they kept a poll open ’til 10 o’clock at night so a certain group could vote,” even though “the polls are supposed to close at 7.” It is, indeed, true that polling places were kept open past the stated 7pm closing time, but not for the nefarious reason that McDonald suggests.

It is a standard practice during elections to allow anyone who was in line prior to closing time to cast a ballot, so that no one is disenfranchised because they failed to anticipate their neighbors’ interest in the election. In Nevada, Latino turnout is unusually high — an ominous sign for Republican candidate Donald Trump, who has campaigned on his overt racism towards people of Mexican descent. This has led to long lines at some polling places with large numbers of Latino voters.

On Friday night, for example, hundreds of voters were still in line at 9pm at a Mexican grocery store which served as a polling place in Las Vegas. So long as these voters took their spot in line before 7pm, however, they were allowed to vote.

Mr. Trump, for his part, attributed the later closing times to some kind of conspiracy during a rally in Reno. “It’s being reported that certain key Democratic polling locations in Clark County,” the Republican candidate claimed, “were kept for hours and hour beyond closing time to bus and bring and [SIC] Democratic voters in.”

Whether Clinton wins Nevada on Tuesday (and I think she'll win handily) expect Republicans to stop with the subtle dog whistles and get out the Trump bullhorns starting Wednesday to equate early voting with voting fraud.  Hell, don't be surprised by a push for federal legislation to set "common sense national voting standards" either.  National voter ID/end early voting laws will be the new rallying point in 2018 midterms.

Watch. When it becomes clear that Republicans were done in for the third presidential election in a row by early voting, they will seek to eliminate it completely as "saving an undue burden on taxpayers", especially when it becomes clear that the Latino voters the GOP were courting have utterly turned against them.

It will be time to punish Clinton supporters, just as the last eight years have been a concerted GOP effort to punish Obama supporters.

Spooked A Man In Reno Just To See Him Flee

Things got ugly at a Trump rally last night in Nevada as somebody yelled "He's got a gun" in the crowd, a fist fight broke out, and Donald Trump was rushed off stage all over a man with a "Republicans against Trump" sign.

During Trump's speech, scenes of chaos broke out near the front of the stage after a scuffle involving a protester, when an unidentified individual yelled "gun," the Secret Service said in a statement.

A man was escorted out of the crowd by agents, but, "upon a thorough search of the subject and the surrounding area, no weapon was found," the Secret Service said. "A thorough investigation is ongoing at this time by the U.S. Secret Service and the Reno Police Department."

Two Nevada Republican sources who spoke with multiple attendees who witnessed the incident at the Reno-Sparks Convention Center said a scuffle broke out when a man appeared to raise a sign in protest of Trump.

Moments before, the Republican presidential nominee had predicted he would have “tremendous” support from Hispanic voters on Election Day when he spotted the protester.

“We have one of those guys from the Hillary Clinton campaign,” Trump said. “How much are you being paid? $1500? Out. Take him out,” Trump continued, as the crowed roared.

Less than 30 seconds later, Trump was stopped mid-sentence when two Secret Service agents rushed him off stage to safety behind a curtain. An announcer alerted the crowd that Trump would return soon.

The Republican nominee appeared unharmed back on stage several minutes later, finishing his speech.

"Nobody said it was going to be easy for us, but we will never be stopped. I wanna thank the Secret Service. They don't get enough credit. They're amazing. So let's get back," Trump said on his return to the stage.

More than anyone I respect the US Secret Service for keeping President Obama safe for these last eight years, a Herculean task.  Yes, they've had problems but they've done the job.  Having said that, the Donald Trump fear and paranoia playbook has real consequences, and we saw that last night.

We have to vote on Tuesday.  We have to stop this madness, and then continue to fight against it starting Wednesday morning.

Sunday Long Read: Coming (Back) To America

New York Times Magazine writer Jim Yardley has spent more than a dozen years as a foreign correspondent and editor, living in and covering Beijing, New Delhi, and Rome.  This summer he came back to the United States to cover the 2016 election as one of America's wayward sons, a man who decidedly no longer recognized the country or the people he left more than a decade ago.

I had forgotten how big the people are, how big the cars are, how much fried food can be stacked onto a single plate. Everything seemed larger than I remembered, even the night sky. Driving along the 610 Loop in Houston, I saw a cigar shop named SERIOUS CIGARS that was easily triple the size of my grocery in Rome.

“This country is huge,” Tomás said one day. “It is like 50 countries all together.”

Tomás, a Chilean, has traveled the world, but this was his first long tour across the United States. On seeing one rural road sign, he asked what it meant to “adopt a highway.” Another day, another road sign: “Hitchhikers May Be Escaping Inmates.” Tomás was startled by how thoroughly so many American cities emptied out at night. In Colorado Springs, we attended a rodeo where the announcer made a long soliloquy praising our military for defending our freedom at home. Tomás had embedded many times with American forces in Afghanistan. He liked the soldiers, but he didn’t understand how sending troops to other countries, particularly Iraq, kept Americans free at home.

Before the rodeo, I met two ranchers, Rob Alexander and Bill Craig. The air smelled faintly of horse manure as we sat on a plastic cooler drinking Coors. Alexander, 53, explained that the rodeo was a fund-raiser for ranch hands, who often lacked health insurance or a safety net to help out in emergencies. Ranching families had taken a hit in the past two decades, in part because trade agreements led to the consolidation of many cattle operations and an increase in imported beef from South America. Craig, 35, is a fourth-generation rancher, but he said land is now so expensive and profit so meager that he could never afford to start a ranch from scratch today. They talked like men whose lifestyles and values were endangered.

“Something is wrong,” Craig said. “Watch the TV. The moral compass is so far out of whack in our country right now.”

At the University of Texas at Austin, I met Lisa Moore, a professor of English and women’s studies who is one of three plaintiffs suing to overturn a new state law allowing students to carry concealed handguns on campus. Born in Canada but a resident of Texas for 27 years, Moore is a naturalized American citizen who is still a bit baffled by her new country. “That is the weirdness of the United States to me: Everybody is always talking about their rights,” she said, while identity in Canada derives from the idea of the social compact.

Moore is a gay, married mother of two children who teaches courses on L.G.B.T. literature. “Campus carry” infringes on free speech, she argues, by inhibiting her ability to provide a safe learning environment. What if a student becomes enraged by the subject matter and pulls out a Glock?

American gun manufacturers produced 3.3 million guns the year I left for China, according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. By 2014, the number was nine million (supplemented by 3.6 million guns imported into the country). According to some recent estimates, there are now roughly as many guns as people in the United States, maybe even more. To many foreigners, the American infatuation with guns is an inexplicable, if defining, national trait. On a taxi ride in Beijing once, the driver, upon discovering I was American, shaped his hand like a pistol and began shooting imaginary bullets.

At a firing range outside Austin, I met six guys shooting semiautomatic rifles. Several of them worked for Defense Distributed, the open-source organization in Austin that came up with a plastic handgun whose design can be downloaded from the web and produced with a 3-D printer. The State Department ordered the company to remove the design code, but the company is challenging that order in court. For Benjamin Denio, at the time a 36-year-old who worked in desktop support and did product testing at Defense Distributed, being able to produce your own plastic gun is a safeguard against the tyranny of the state. “The term I would use to describe the level of vitriol in the country,” Denio said, “is that it is the ‘cold civil war.’ ”

A "cold civil war" seems about right.  America is broken, having been largely rendered ungovernable and unmanageable by political forces on the right that decided an America they could no longer fully control was going to slowly burn to the ground instead.  History says we've gotten repeatedly lucky to avoid the fascist moment, although even a cursory glance at our history shows many such moments and systems that took decades and centuries to be dismantled, and some that very much remain.

We're at one of those nexus points now, where we choose whether or not we're going to continue down the road of this country's decidedly darker and awful days, or the brighter ones where we work to correct our many mistakes.

Only 150 years ago these states were disunited.  We're closer to that moment again now than we've been in some time. Maybe we just need a little perspective from somebody who has been away for a while.

Kathmandu Has Really Great Wi-Fi If You Know Where To Look

Time for another Marvel movie review, true believers, and this time we've got Doctor Strange on deck starring Benedict Cumberbatch as the titular Sorcerer Supreme.



Marvel Studios being willing to take a chance on its lesser-known heroes paid off in spades with both Guardians of the Galaxy and Ant-Man doing well enough to get high-profile sequels, and I think Doc is no different here. We'll definitely see more of him.

The story starts off with world renowned NYC neurosurgeon Dr. Stephen Strange showing off that his skills can indeed pay the bills, even impressing his former lover Dr. Christine Palmer (Rachel McAdams) with a casual display of medical brilliance, on top the world and about to receive yet another prestigious award when a rainy night car accident changes everything in an instant.

Strange comes to with the lifeblood of his trade, his hands, irreparable, knowing full well that the only scalpel slinger gifted enough to have saved him was himself. Becoming increasingly desperate, he turns to a former spinal injury victim who was saved by Nepalese mystics, and thus begins one amazing adventure as he meets The Ancient One (a bald Tilda Swinton) and her students Mordo (Chiwetel Eijofor) and Wong (Benedict Wong) and learns that science can't explain everything.

The bad guy is the scene-chewing Kaecilius (the marvelous Mads Mikkelsen) and when I say the scenery chews in this film I mean it quite literally, apparently mystical arts fights involve a mirror dimension that makes the visual tricks in Inception look like a low budget student film as space folds in on itself in a kaleidoscope of gears and moving parts.

Visually this is Marvel's most striking film to date, even putting the effects in Guardians to shame. It's worth the price of admission just for the fight scenes alone but everything about this film and ILM's outstanding effects work stands out. See this film on the biggest screen you can.

I really enjoyed this one, as with most Marvel films the plot is bit threadbare but the acting and writing come through, Cumberbatch is as good of a Stephen Strange (both before and after his accident) as Robert Downey Jr. is Tony Stark or more recently, Chadwick Boseman is as T'Challa in the Marvel cinematic universe.

As always, stick around for the end credit scenes and enjoy the continuity to previous MCU films, as I'm looking forward to Guardians 2 in May, Spidey in July, and Thor: Ragnarok this time next year. It's a good flick to take your mind off the You Know What on Tuesday.

Hopefully we'll make some magic in a few days.

It's About Turnout Now

There's now enough evidence in the early voting numbers to suggest that Republican efforts to suppress voters of color in a post Voting Rights Act-era are working exactly as intended.

In the figure below, we present each group’s share of the early vote compared to their size of the overall CVAP. This tells us whether a group is “overperforming” or “underperforming” in early voting relative to their presence in a state’s population. For instance, if Latinos make up 15 percent of eligible voters but only 10 percent of the early voting population, they are underperforming in the early vote by 5 points.

Using this perspective, there is only marginal evidence that the surge in Latino turnout in 2016 is resulting in an outsize Latino electorate. Florida is the only state where Latino early voting is outpacing both population growth and growth in the early vote for non-Latinos.

Even there, the growth in participation is relatively small, and Latinos still make up a smaller proportion of early voters than they do of the eligible electorate. So far in 2016, the Latino share of early vote in Florida is 5.1 percentage points lower than the Latino share of the eligible electorate.

In two other states with large Hispanic populations — Texas and Nevada — Latinos are underperforming relative to population growth and steady or increasing early voting by whites. Although many of these white voters may be Democrats, this suggests a more nuanced story about the likelihood that high Latino early voting alone will reshape the electoral landscape.

At the same time, early voting among African Americans is lagging behind their share of the eligible electorate, often in dramatic ways.

In 2012, African Americans overperformed in states such as North Carolina and Texas. But this year, black voting rates are trailing other groups relative to their size of the electorate, with some swings on the order of 5 to 10 percentage points.

Even in North Carolina, where the black share of the early vote is on par with their share of the eligible electorate (and similar to white voters), the pattern is a departure from 2012, when African Americans made up 5.8 points more of the early vote than their population share.

Meanwhile, white voters constitute a larger share of the early vote than in the past two election cycles. For example, in North Carolina and Florida, whites were underperforming in the early vote a week before the 2012 election. But they are now overperforming — and substantially so in Florida.

Of course, it is not entirely clear what this suggests for Tuesday’s outcome.

It does suggest that overall turnout in early voting states is up.  That's a good sign for Democrats.  But in all six of the above states, it's white voters who are turning out at a higher percentage.  That's better news for the GOP.  If these white voters are college-educated voters that Clinton would be winning for the first time in decades, then it's good news for her.  If these are disaffected white Trump voters driven to the polls by anger, who never really bothered to vote before, then it's big for him.

Either way these are the votes that the polling models and turnout scenarios have missed in the past.

We'll see what happens here in the final week.

Not The Best Comparison

Kentucky is at this point considered a pretty reliable state for Trump, polls have shown him with a more than 20-point lead earlier this year, and this week a poll from Western Kentucky University had him up by 17 points, 54-37% (and Rand Paul, also expected to win easily in that same poll 55-39%). GOP Gov. Matt Bevin is comfortable enough with those numbers to openly brag that Trump is following his path to victory in Kentucky and will win on Tuesday.

In early October, Gov. Matt Bevin stood in the Capitol Rotunda, a few short steps from his office, and recorded a video because he had caught wind of a Democratic press conference that would call his record on education funding into question. 

“They’re going to come in here and hypocritically lie to you about the focus of education and that of this administration for education,” Bevin said, staring unflinchingly at the camera. 

Earlier, Attorney General Andy Beshear released a text that Bevin had sent him, calling Besear’s office “an embarrassment to the commonwealth.” 

It was a wild day by Frankfort standards, but in the grand scheme of 2016, it was nothing out of the ordinary. For more than a year, the national press had been following another unorthodox politician vowing to shake up the system: Donald Trump. 

“These guys are not in the system and they don’t care about what the political rules are about,” said Les Fugate, a Republican lobbyist and senior vice president of RunSwitch Public Relations. “They will forge their own path.” 

For Bevin and Trump, that path has been similar in many ways. 

Both were educated in the private school system before becoming wealthy businessmen. Both ran for office as political outsiders promising to disrupt the establishment and rallying the support of those who felt left behind by their government. Both overcame long odds in a vicious primary full of personal attacks to become the major nominee of their party. 

Bevin was elected despite trailing in pre-election polls. Now, as the presidential race grows tighter in swing states, the question lingers: can Trump pull a Bevin-like upset on Tuesday? 

“I think he’s going to win,” Bevin told WHAS radio in Louisville on Tuesday. “I think he’s losing in the same way I was supposedly losing a year ago at this time.”

The problem with Bevin's theory is that most American voters are smarter than the ones in Kentucky. I know that's not saying much, after all I live here and get to witness just what a populace that elected Matt Bevin is capable of in the first place, but if there's one state where it's totally cool to say that not only that you think Trump will win but is following your game plan, it's here.

Sadly, here in coal country, the growing economy isn't growing very much in the Appalachian counties, and there's a whole hell of a lot of "economic anxiety".  The folks here blame the Clintons the way most people blame broken mirrors or black cats crossing their path.  They have been taught to hate pretty effectively, and Clinton has about as much chance of winning here as I do breaking a four-minute mile running backwards.

Bevin thinks he's Trump before Trump was cool?  Sure man, keep that up.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/news/politics-government/article112599918.html#storylink=cpy

Russian To Judgment (Day)

Newsweek's Kurt Eichenwald has been the go-to reporter on Trump's Russian connections, and delivers a staggering election eve case against the Republican candidate in his latest piece this week. The bottom line is our NATO allies in Europe firmly believe that a Trump administration would abandon Europe to Vladimir Putin's machinations.

In phone calls, meetings and cables, America’s European allies have expressed alarm to one another about Donald Trump’s public statements denying Moscow’s role in cyberattacks designed to interfere with the U.S. election. They fear the Republican nominee for presidenthas emboldened the Kremlin in its unprecedented cybercampaign to disrupt elections in multiple countries in hopes of weakening Western alliances, according to intelligence, law enforcement and other government officials in the United States and Europe. 

While American intelligence officers have privately briefed Trump about Russia’s attempts to influence the U.S. election, he has publicly dismissed that information as unreliable, instead saying this hacking of incredible sophistication and technical complexity could have been done by some 400-pound “guy sitting on their bed” or even a child. 

Officials from two European countries tell Newsweek that Trump’s comments about Russia’s hacking have alarmed several NATO partners because it suggests he either does not believe the information he receives in intelligence briefings, does not pay attention to it, does not understand it or is misleading the American public for unknown reasons. One British official says members of that government who are aware of the scope of Russia’s cyberattacks both in Western Europe and America found Trump’s comments “quite disturbing” because they fear that, if elected, the Republican presidential nominee would continue to ignore information gathered by intelligence services in the formulation of U.S. foreign policy. 

Trump’s behavior, however, has at times concerned the Russians, leading them to revise their hacking and disinformation strategy. For example, when Trump launched into an inexplicable attack on the parents of a Muslim-American soldier who died in combat, the Kremlin assumed the Republican nominee was showing himself psychologically unfit to be president and would be forced by his party to withdraw from the race. As a result, Moscow put its hacking campaign temporarily on hold, ending the distribution of documents until Trump stabilized, both personally and in the polls, according to reports provided to Western intelligence.

America’s European partners are also troubled by the actions of several people close to Trump’s campaign and company. Trump has been surrounded by advisers and associates with economic and familial links to Russia. The publicized connections and contacts between former campaign manager Paul Manafort with Ukraine have raised concerns. Former Trump adviser Carter Page is being probed by American and European intelligence on allegations that he engaged in back-channel discussions with Russian government officials over the summer. Page did travel to Moscow, but he denies any inappropriate contact with Russian officials. The allies are also uneasy about retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, a Trump adviser who was reportedly considered a possible running mate for the GOP nominee. Last December, Flynn attended a dinner at the Metropol Hotel in honor of the 10th anniversary of RT, a Russian news agency that has been publicly identified by American intelligence as a primary outlet for Moscow’s disinformation campaigns. Flynn, who was two seats away from Russian President Vladimir Putin at the dinner, has frequently appeared on RT, despite public warnings by American intelligence that the news agency is used for Russian propaganda. 

Western intelligence has also obtained reports that a Trump associate met with a pro-Putin member of Russian parliament at a building in Eastern Europe maintained by Rossotrudnichestvo, an agency under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that is charged with administering language, education and support programs for civilians. While the purpose of that meeting is unclear, and there is no evidence that Trump was aware it took place, it has become another fact that has alarmed officials from at least one NATO ally. Finally, Trump’s repeated glowing statements about Putin throughout the campaign—and his shocking comment that the Russians were not in Crimea—have perplexed some foreign officials, who fear that under a Trump presidency, the United States would no longer stand with Western Europe in regard to Moscow.

There's a ridiculous amount of circumstantial evidence that strongly suggests Putin has a pretty thick dossier on Trump based on his business dealings in Moscow over the last decade or two.  The Russian term for such intel service blackmail files is a fitting one borrowed from English: kompromat.  And pretty much everything I've read on Trump-Putin screams to me that Putin has the goods on Trump.

Of course, it could be that Trump just really likes the guy and sees the Russians as natural allies. Certainly if Putin does have something bad on Trump, he doesn't have to lord it over the guy for him to want to work with Moscow.

What makes me believe that there's an alliance is the fact that conservatives (and the useful idiot Double G section of the "left") are both saying that these accusations are nothing more than red-baiting "neo-McCarthyism", arguably the dumbest thing I've heard this campaign given Putin's background in intelligence services.

Hit dogs holler the loudest, and these dogs are barking so loudly that it's deafening.

BridgeGate Over Troubled Water, Con't

NJ GOP Gov. Chris Christie, former presidential candidate, Trump's first choice for running mate, and current Trump transition team head, just got the November Surprise of his life.

Two former Chris Christie allies were convicted Friday on all counts in the lane-closure plot known as "Bridgegate."

The New Jersey governor's former deputy chief of staff, Bridget Kelly, and his former top Port Authority official Bill Baroni were found guilty in the plot, a use of George Washington Bridge traffic as a means of political retribution. They are convicted of working with David Wildstein, a former Christie ally who has already pleaded guilty, to get retribution on the Democratic mayor of Fort Lee, who did not endorse Christie in his re-election.

The verdict comes after more than a month of proceedings and an attempt by the defense to declare a mistrial. Sentencing is set for Feb. 21, 2017. 

Christie has denied having any knowledge of the 2013 incident, in which some of the George Washington Bridge was blocked, until after it happened. But some of the testimony in the case implied Christie was aware of the plan before it took place.
Wildstein served as a star witness for the prosecution. 

Christie, who previously had presidential ambitions, heads Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump's transition team. He plans to campaign for Trump in New Hampshire and Pennsylvania this weekend.

So by using Clinton email coverage rules, how doomed is Donald Trump's campaign now by association?  And he's still planning on hitting the campaign trail?

For who, Hillary?

Bye Chris.  Enjoy your impending impeachment trial.

The Most Important Jobs Report In Four Years

...and it may not actually matter one bit to voters in 2016.  Needless to say, it's a good report: October saw 161K new jobs and the unemployment rate down to 4.9%, but voters really don't seem to care at all about jobs (despite saying they do.)

U.S. jobs continued to gain at a steady pace in October and wage gains accelerated, signs that the labor market and economy made steady progress at the start of the fourth quarter. 

Payrolls climbed by 161,000 last month following a 191,000 gain in September that was larger than previously estimated, a Labor Department report showed Friday. The median forecast in a Bloomberg survey called for 173,000. The jobless rate fell to 4.9 percent, while wages rose from a year earlier by the most since 2009.

The figures are likely to keep the Federal Reserve on track to raise borrowing costs next month for the first time in 2016. Underlying the steady gains in employment is a balance between hiring managers’ need to keep up with stable domestic demand and the struggle to match more limited labor to skilled-job vacancies. 

“As it continues to tighten up, firms are going to have to resort more and more to more attractive pay to draw people in,” Stephen Stanley, chief economist at Amherst Pierpont Securities LLC in New York, said before the report. “We’re pretty close to full employment.” 

Workers have been in short supply for 13 straight months, according to the Institute for Supply Management survey of service-industry companies, which make up almost 90 percent of the economy. 

The median forecast in a Bloomberg survey called for a 173,000 advance in payrolls. Estimates in the Bloomberg survey ranged from gains of 105,000 to 208,000 after a previously reported 156,000 September increase. 

Revisions added a total of 44,000 jobs to payrolls in the previous two months.

So 205K total new jobs with the upward revisions, but we're still in real danger of giving the country away to a walking orange bankruptcy (both moral and financial) because Obama failed us with 80 straight months of job growth and Clinton's a real bitch or something.

God we're going to miss the man.

StupidiNews!

• Thousands of protestors took to the street in Jakarta, Indonesia to demand the resignation of the city's governor after charges of blasphemy against Islam in a political speech.
• A new CBS/NY Times poll finds more than 80% of voters are disgusted with the state of American politics in 2016, majorities find both major presidential candidates to be dishonest.
• Iraqi military forces have taken control at least six districts of the embattled city of Mosul from Islamic State militants as coalition forces seek to reach the Tigris River.
• A new study finds that despite the number of uninsured Americans at a record low, two in five adults on Obamacare plans say they still cannot afford to use their insurance.
• Wearable health tracker company Fitbit saw a third of its stock value vanish Thursday as the company announced a major miss on third quarter profits due to increased competition.

Last Call For Endless Blockheads

But please, tell me again how Republicans are bluffing when they talk about never allowing another Democratic Supreme Court nominee ever again when it's now the stated position of conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation?

The conservative group Heritage Action is pushing Republican senators to keep the Supreme Court at eight justices if Democrat Hillary Clinton is elected president.

In a Thursday morning briefing at the Heritage Foundation’s Washington headquarters on Capitol Hill, the group said Republicans should embrace the idea of leaving the Supreme Court without its ninth justice, perhaps for as long as five years. 

Dan Holler, Heritage Action’s vice president of communications and government relations, signaled that this year’s Republican blockade of President Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, is just the beginning of a fight that could last the entire first term of a Clinton presidency.

“You’ve seen John McCain and others talk about the need to not confirm any liberal nominated to the Supreme Court,” Holler said. “That’s exactly the right position to have.”

It’s “unacceptable,” he added, for moderate Republican senators to roll over and allow a President Clinton to shift the court radically to the left.

Holler said the obstruction of any Clinton Supreme Court appointee is going to require “an immense amount of willpower” from Senate Republicans.

Republicans have normalized racism, misogyny, religious bigotry, anti-LGBT hatred and violent persecution of political opponents.  What's the normalization of a eight-person Supreme Court among friends, right?

Pressed on whether he was comfortable going five years without a ninth Supreme Court justice, Holler said there’s “nothing sacrosanct about the number of nine justices.”

“The system that we have set up is one of checks and balances,” he said on Thursday. “The president can certainly nominate somebody, but it’s incumbent upon the Senate to say ‘yes, this person is suitable for that role.’"

“And it’s perfectly within the realm of Republican senators’ rights and prerogatives and with the Constitution and what they campaigned on,” he added, “to say ‘this person will not uphold the Constitution and therefore they don’t deserve to be appointed to the bench.’”

What all this means for Clinton, should she win the presidency, rides to a large extent on which party controls the Senate.

If Democrats win control over the Senate, the likely new majority leader, Charles Schumer (N.Y.), could deploy the so-called nuclear option for a Supreme Court nomination. That would mean changing Senate rules to allow nominees to be confirmed with a simple majority of 51 votes instead of the 60 required to break a Republican filibuster. It’s an extreme move, but not unimaginable given the stakes.

If Republicans hang on to the Senate, however, they can cause huge headaches for Clinton if enough of them buy into the Cruz-Heritage approach.

Holler wouldn’t discuss his private conversations and planning, but it seems clear that Heritage Action, the activist arm of the group, is going to aggressively take up this Supreme Court fight if Clinton wins.

He said he doesn’t accept the view — advanced by Democrats and the media — that obstructing Supreme Court justices is an electoral killer for Republicans. 

He's right.  Republicans control the majority of the Senate, have the largest margin of control in the House since the Great Depression, control a majority of governor's mansions and a majority of state legislatures.  Literally the only thing they don't control in American politics is the White House, and they can happily neuter the presidency all they want to until frustrated Dems simply give up.

If Republicans still control the Senate in January, there will be at least two years of a blockade on everything, and they'll just blame Clinton for doing nothing and get away with it.

In a lot of ways control of the Senate is just as important as the White House, and this is why.

Istanbul Not Constanti-No-Coup, Con't

More than three months after the abortive military coup against Turkish President Erdogan failed miserably, my prediction that "It's going to get nasty in Turkey" has panned out in very unfortunate ways.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has taken advantage of the failed coup attempt in July to carry out a coup of his own.

In the past three months, more than 110,000 people have been purged and nearly 40,000 have been imprisoned in Turkey, a NATO member and close Western ally. The increasingly authoritarian President Erdogan is implementing a slow-motion coup, restructuring the government and civil society through a mass purge of the political opposition.

People from all sectors of society have been targeted — those working in the government, military, courts, media and academia. Over the weekend, more than 10,000 civil servants were fired en masse. Among the purged were health workers and at least 1,200 academics. New government decrees granted Erdogan the power to appoint university officials, while simultaneously stripping lawyer-client confidentiality rights from those detained.

Opposition figures like Sezgin Tanrikulu, a member of parliament from the left-leaning, secular Republican People’s Party, are alarmed. “What the government and Erdogan are doing right now is a direct coup against the rule of law and democracy,” Tanrikulu warned on a Periscope broadcast.

Independent, critical journalism is on the verge of extinction. Outlets that oppose Erdogan’s right-wing, Islamist and neoliberal Justice and Development Party, known by the acronym AKP, have faced raids and arrests.

Erdogan is rolling up anyone suspected of helping the coup attempt, and that includes pretty much everyone who isn't Erdogan. The press, opposition leaders, public intellectuals, lawyers, university professors, civil servants, all are under attack.

But nobody is suffering more than Turkey's Kurdish minority.

Elected mayors and local councils have been fired and replaced with unelected administrators in 27 municipalities in the largely Kurdish southeast, according to Human Rights Watch.

At least 30 elected Turkish mayors are being held in pretrial detention, Human Rights Watch reported. Even more are under criminal investigation on suspicion of supposed terrorism offenses.

On Sunday, the government detained the two elected co-mayors of the predominately Kurdish city of Diyarbakir. Human Rights Watch said they were jailed on “trumped up terrorism charges.”

Two days later, authorities appointed an unelected administrator to run the city. Police also separately detained 30 officials from the left-wing opposition Democratic Regions Party in the area.

In the month of October , the Turkish government jailed 98 officials from the leftist Democratic Regions’ Party, an allied organization of the Peoples’ Democratic Party, a leftist, feminist, pro-Kurdish party that has become the third largest faction in parliament.

The permanent "state of emergency" play is pretty standard in the MENA dictator book, and Erdogan is having a grand time of it. And please remember this is a full-fledged NATO ally here doing this while the EU and US are decidedly busy with larger issues like Syria, Brexit, the US presidential election and Yemen, and Erdogan knows he can pretty much get away with anything right now.

And he is, and he will continue to do so. 

StupidiNews!

• So the Chicago Cubs won Game 7 of the World Series in extra innings, after a rain delay, after blowing a three-run lead, after coming back from being down three games to one.
• A Colorado man has been indicted on federal weapon of mass destruction charges after allegedly leaving an improvised explosive device outside a small-town police station.
• England's High Court has ruled that the British government must win the approval of Parliament to exit the European Union, the May government is expected to appeal.
• President Obama took aim at Donald Trump and GOP lawmakers in North Carolina yesterday in a campaign stop for Hillary Clinton in Chapel Hill.
• Internet backbone provider Level 3 Communications is investigating another large-scale US internet outage on Wednesday morning, the second such outage in two weeks.

Last Call For Mississippi Burning, 2016 Edition

I'm getting bone weary of events like this happening, like's it's something right out of 1968.

Authorities investigating a historically black church burned Tuesday night in Greenville also found "Vote Trump" spraypainted on the side. 

The FBI has been notified of the burning of the Hopewell Missionary Baptist Church. 

“The FBI Jackson Division is aware of the situation in Greenville, and we are working with our local, state and federal law enforcement partners to determine if any civil rights crimes were committed,” said spokesman Brett Carr. 

Fire Chief Ruben Brown tells The Associated Press that firefighters found flames and smoke pouring from the sanctuary of the Hopewell M.B Church just after 9 p.m. Tuesday. 

Brown says there was also a political message spray-painted on the side of the church, but would not say what the message said. 

An online fund has been established to raise money for the church, telling readers, “Can we help show the world, the country, and most importantly, the churchgoers of Hopewell Baptist that we, as a society, are better than this? Please give.”

I'd like to think America is a "better society".  Clearly if Donald Trump has a non-zero chance of being president, we're not, and the above is why.

Yes, these racist events have certainly happened under President Obama's watch. An America without racism is simply not going to happen in my lifetime.  But if we're going to follow Obama up with a guy cheering this on, well...yeah, it was nice knowing all of you.

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.