StupidiNews!

• At least 18 are dead from Hurricane Florence as flooding in the Carolinas and Virginia have left thousands trapped by impassible roads and millions without power.
• Egyptian archaeologists have discovered a sandstone sphinx that may date back 2,000 years to the pre-Roman Ptolemaic Era, after draining water from a temple near the city of Aswan.
• Southern China is bracing for more flooding as Typhoon Mangkhut rips westward from Hong Kong into Chongqing Province, millions have already been evacuated from the storm's path.
• As the Trump Regime prepares imminent 10% tariffs on over $200 billion in Chinese imports, further trade talks with Beijing are in limbo as China considers retaliation.
• Bipartisan nuclear power bills are working their way through both the House and Senate to build a "fast neutron reactor" power plant for research purposes.

Last Call For Supreme Misgivings, Con't

The Borking of Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court nomination by whatever means necessary has now become a moral imperative for Democrats.

Earlier this summer, Christine Blasey Ford wrote a confidential letter to a senior Democratic lawmaker alleging that Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her more than three decades ago, when they were high school students in suburban Maryland. Since Wednesday, she has watched as that bare-bones version of her story became public without her name or her consent, drawing a blanket denial from Kavanaugh and roiling a nomination that just days ago seemed all but certain to succeed.

Now, Ford has decided that if her story is going to be told, she wants to be the one to tell it. 

Speaking publicly for the first time, Ford said that one summer in the early 1980s, Kavanaugh and a friend — both “stumbling drunk,” Ford alleges — corralled her into a bedroom during a gathering of teenagers at a house in Montgomery County. 

While his friend watched, she said, Kavanaugh pinned her to a bed on her back and groped her over her clothes, grinding his body against hers and clumsily attempting to pull off her one-piece bathing suit and the clothing she wore over it. When she tried to scream, she said, he put his hand over her mouth. 

“I thought he might inadvertently kill me,” said Ford, now a 51-year-old research psychologist in northern California. “He was trying to attack me and remove my clothing.” 

Ford said she was able to escape when Kavanaugh’s friend and classmate at Georgetown Preparatory School, Mark Judge, jumped on top of them, sending all three tumbling. She said she ran from the room, briefly locked herself in a bathroom and then fled the house. 

Ford said she told no one of the incident in any detail until 2012, when she was in couples therapy with her husband. The therapist’s notes, portions of which were provided by Ford and reviewed by The Washington Post, do not mention Kavanaugh’s name but say she reported that she was attacked by students “from an elitist boys’ school” who went on to become “highly respected and high-ranking members of society in Washington.” The notes say four boys were involved, a discrepancy Ford says was an error on the therapist’s part. Ford said there were four boys at the party but only two in the room.

Notes from an individual therapy session the following year, when she was being treated for what she says have been long-term effects of the incident, show Ford described a “rape attempt” in her late teens.

The White House is denying everything, the Senate Judiciary says the Thursday vote on Kavanaugh's confirmation will proceed without delay or without investigating Ford's claim, and most likely we will have a rapist on the Supreme Court who will be the fifth and deciding vote to end legalized abortion, end legalized birth control, and end women's control of their own reproductive health, their bodies, their freedom and their lives.

Republicans will do nothing.

A lawyer close to the White House said the nomination will not be withdrawn. 

“No way, not even a hint of it,” the lawyer said. “If anything, it’s the opposite. If somebody can be brought down by accusations like this, then you, me, every man certainly should be worried. We can all be accused of something.”

"We" meaning white, male, straight Republicans.  "We can all be accused of something."  Racism. Sexual assault.  White privilege.

Brett Kavanaugh is being put on the Supreme Court to end that.

He will be appointed to the court by a man currently under investigation for criminal malfeasance both before and during his term in the Oval Office.

He will be confirmed by a Senate where Republican women will be the deciding votes to sentence America's women to a life of servitude and punishment for daring to have sex while fertile (and otherwise).

Senate Democrats have to find a way to stop him.

Period.

Trump Trading Blows, Con't

The Trump Trade War with China will finally hit US consumers starting next week as Donald Trump is expected to officially announce 10% tariffs on $200 billion of Chinese imports as soon as Monday.

President Trump has decided to impose tariffs on $200 billion in Chinese goods, two people briefed on the decision said, one of the most severe economic restrictions ever imposed by a U.S. president.

An announcement is expected to come within days, the people said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss internal plans.

The new tariffs would apply to more than 1,000 products, including refrigerators, air conditioners, furniture, televisions and toys. These penalties could drive up the cost of a range of products ahead of the holiday shopping season, though it’s unclear how much.

Apple said recently its Apple Watch, AirPods, MacMini and a variety of chargers and adapters would be caught in the tariff war. “Our concern with these tariffs is that the U.S. will be hardest hit, and that will result in lower U.S. growth and competitiveness and higher prices for U.S. consumers,” the company said in a letter to the U. S. Trade representative. “The burden of the proposed tariffs will fall much more heavily on the United States than on China.”

Trump has ordered aides to set the tariffs at 10 percent, likely leading to higher prices for American consumers. These tariffs are paid by U.S. companies that import the products, though they often pass the costs along to U.S. consumers in the form of higher prices.

The U.S. imports roughly $500 billion in Chinese goods each year, and — combined with existing tariffs — these new penalties would cover half of all goods sent to the U.S. from China each year.

The 10 percent tariff is scaled back from Trump’s initial plan to impose 25 percent penalties on all of these imports. But the impact will still likely be felt by millions of American consumers.

A White House spokesman didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday afternoon.

On Friday, White House spokeswoman Lindsay Walters said: “The President has been clear that he and his administration will continue to take action to address China’s unfair trade practices. We encourage China to address the long standing concerns raised by the United States. ”

Gosh, I can't think of a better way for Republicans to run on the strength of the "Trump economy" than by jacking up prices by 10% or more for American voters just before midterm elections, can you?

No wonder Republicans are already in full panic mode about November.

As Democrats enter the fall midterm campaign with palpable confidence about reclaiming the House and perhaps even the Senate, tensions are rising between the White House and congressional Republicans over who is to blame for political difficulties facing the party, with President Trump’s advisers pointing to the high number of G.O.P. retirements and lawmakers placing the blame squarely on the president’s divisive style.

Yet Republican leaders do agree on one surprising element in the battle for Congress: They cannot rely on the booming economy to win over undecided voters.

And when Trump's trade war starts costing jobs and the economy stops booming, what will they rely on?  Fear? Racism? War?

All three?

Sunday Long Read: Desert Of The Real

This week's Sunday Long Read is a look at the future of the American Desert Southwest by LitHub's

Saritha Ramakrishna.  What future can cities like Phoenix have in a world where climate change makes this metro area of nearly 5 million less and less sustainable -- and survivable -- every year, especially for those who can't afford to relocate?

My father once showed me an 8 ½” x 11” photo of a McDonald’s drive-through sign, set against a landscape of red dust. There was nothing around for miles; yellow arches were the only humanizing marker in an endless plain. He asked me where I thought the picture was taken. I had no idea. He later showed the picture to our neighborhood friends at a party and explained that it was land he was considering purchasing south of our home in Chandler, AZ. They nodded, asking about prices and contracts with polite interest. Once this had gone on long enough, he revealed he had actually edited those golden arches onto a stock image of Mars. I cringed, all the adults laughed. It was a summer day. The sun burned with its typical intensity, insistent on my skin. The cracked concrete around the pool tessellated outward like the Martian ground. I let my feet dangle in the water, watched them become silhouettes, ghostly in the unnatural blue. All seemed well.

Years later, on July 20, 2017, temperatures in the City of Phoenix reached 119 degrees, the fourth hottest day the city had ever experienced. The city’s national weather service branch represented the highest temperatures in a shade of brilliant magenta. These areas were designated as “rare, dangerous, and possibly life threatening.” All of Phoenix and its surrounding suburbs glowed pink.

People retreated into their homes and let the air conditioning circulate. They dove underwater, and hoped for the best. Days like these are stagnant, the air immobilizing. It presses against the body and asphalt, radiating through a network of suburban homes in Gilbert, Chandler, Tempe, the Encanto, and elsewhere in the Valley of the Sun. Cul-de-sacs turn ghostly; the sidewalks catch the light, shimmer like water. For those waiting at the light rail or bus stops, shade provides temporary relief, though it’s a landscape not meant for continuous exposure. In order to save on air-conditioning bills, towels are soaked in ice water, dripped across overheated skin. Elsewhere, water falls from restaurant misters, flows cyclically around the waterpark rivers of Sunsplash and Big Surf.

The city of Phoenix sweltered under these impossibly hot skies, as temperatures climbed in a historic upward trajectory. Every year the city experiences an average of three months of temperatures over 100 degrees, or “triple-digit days” as local weathermen describe them. By 2060, it’s expected that three months will turn into four-and-a-half months.

I grew up in Chandler, AZ, one of many linked suburbs in greater Phoenix. Chandler is composed of networks of pools and round-edged subdivisions. Summers brought the acridity of settling chlorine in sinuses, sweat drying in artificially cooled air. In the Valley of the Sun, heat, wealth, and water move together and apart, repelling and attracting each other, shaping housing markets and their occupants’ bodies and livelihoods.

In friends’ backyards and community pools, the better-off among us gossiped and played Truth-or-Dare, fought over outcomes of Sharks-and-Minnows and Marco Polo. We spent our time hiding from each other amongst the greenery of neighborhood parks, or remained captive indoors, tethered to desktop monitors. On such July days, we lived half-online, half-underwater.

I was in Cambridge, Massachusetts during last year’s heat wave. I sat in my work cubicle refreshing social media feeds every few minutes, clicking through the photos and articles that materialized. In pixelated appreciation I scrolled past videos and photos of recycling bins melted into trickling blue goo, kids frying eggs on sidewalks and on the dashboards of cars. I had been admitted to MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning a few months prior, intending to study climate change. That day, I imagined the entire city melting, congealing into indistinguishability. 

Not long after, I spoke with Dr. Nancy Selover, Arizona’s State Climatologist about this heat wave and the increasing temperatures in the state. She told me that the difficulty of extreme temperatures is that they “typically come in a heat wave” which puts residents at greater health risk. (In 2016, Maricopa County, which includes the Phoenix-Metropolitan area, reported 130 heat deaths, the highest count of the past 15 years.) The city’s record high was an impossible 122 degrees in 1990, which has yet to be broken, though she warned that “we’re edging towards probably matching that in the next couple years.” Without adaptive or mitigating measures, by the end of the century the city could be six to eight degrees warmer. Its infrastructure contributes to variations in heat exposure, via Phoenix’s well-acknowledged urban heat-island effect, a phenomenon where paved surfaces trap heat that is slowly released overnight.

“The impact of the heat island in terms of warming the City of Phoenix is almost an order of magnitude greater than climate change, greater than global or regional warming,” Dr. Selover said. Though she does not expect that this will remain the case, this notion is counter to narratives that frame climate-related issues as matters of individual choice, as opposed to summative infrastructural ones. All of Phoenix’s development and its storied overlays play a role in these hazards—developers, sellers, and homebuyers alike.

The city government has acknowledged the heat island, and the importance of canopy coverage to mitigate it. It disproportionately affects the poor, whose neighborhoods do not have the tree and shade coverage of richer areas, where air conditioning bills are an undue financial burden. Dr. Selover pointed out, “We have some older neighborhoods that have been here for years and years and years and they have a lot of turf grass, and they have a lot of big leaf trees, and they have a lot of shade, a lot of cooling,” while “the poorer communities, a lot of the minority communities don’t have the benefit of that shade.”

What I've seen time and time again is that when it comes to the effects of climate change, it's those with the fewest resources who will be made to suffer the most.

Always.

Borderline Psychopaths

The death of Mollie Tibbetts last month allegedly at the hands of an undocumented immigrant was all the rage on the right in August, primary evidence that America's most precious natural resource of college-aged white girls were going to be snuffed out by the savage brown horde. We need walls, we need more border agents, we need border agents made out of walls!

Fast-forward to September, where a US Border Patrol employee has been accused of being a serial killer of women, and radio silence from the right.

A U.S. Border Patrol supervisor was charged Saturday with murder in the deaths of four female sex workers following what authorities called a two-week killing spree that ended when a fifth woman escaped from him at a Texas gas station and found help.

Webb County District Attorney Isidro Alaniz said in a tweet that Juan David Ortiz, 35, an intel supervisor for the Border Patrol, had been charged with four counts of murder as well as aggravated assault and unlawful restraint.

Ortiz, a 10-year Border Patrol veteran, was arrested early Saturday after the fifth woman escaped and found a state trooper. Ortiz fled and was found hiding in a truck in a hotel parking lot in Laredo, about 145 miles (235 kilometers) southwest of San Antonio.

“We do consider this to be a serial killer,” Alaniz said.

Alaniz told The Texas Tribune that after Ortiz picked up the fifth woman she quickly realized that she was in danger.

“When she tried to escape from him at a gas station that’s when she ran into a (state) trooper,” Alaniz said.

He said that authorities believe Ortiz had killed all four women since Sept. 3. The names of the victims were not immediately released. Alaniz said two of them were U.S. citizens but the nationalities of the other two were not yet known.

“The manner in which they were killed is similar in all the cases from the evidence,” said Alaniz. He declined to say how they were killed.

Alaniz said investigators are still trying to determine a motive for the killings. Authorities believe he acted alone.

“It’s interesting that he would be observing and watching as law enforcement was looking for the killer, that he would be reporting to work every day like normal,” Alaniz said.

Maybe the problem is violent men abuse and kill women, and that a whole lot of violent men who do abuse and kill women seem to gravitate towards jobs in the military and in law enforcement.

Just sayin'.

A Complete Cop Out

Black lives still matter.

Botham Shem Jean analyzed risk for a living at a global auditing firm. For someone in his line of work, the evening was shaping up to be as risk-free as it gets: Alone, in his one-bedroom apartment one block from the Dallas Police Department headquarters. 

Fresh from work, he had texted his sister his evening plans: Watching a football game on TV, the Eagles versus the Falcons. He texted a friend, apologizing for not going out with her the weekend before. Mr. Jean, 26, was from the island-nation of St. Lucia. He had a big smile, and was a big eater, winning a meat-lovers’ contest at Big Chef Steak House back in the Caribbean. He still had his ticket for a free meal on his next visit, his prize after eating a two-pound steak in one sitting. 

Unit 1478 on the fourth floor of the South Side Flats apartment complex was an 800-square-foot bachelor pad: dishes piled up in the sink, with pancake syrup, dish soap and other belongings adding to the clutter on the kitchen island. It was the evening of September 6. His 27th birthday was three weeks away. 

In a matter of hours, Mr. Jean would be dead. A white off-duty police officer who lived in Unit 1378 — directly below Mr. Jean — claimed that she mistakenly entered the wrong apartment after returning home from her 14-hour shift and believed Mr. Jean, who is black, was an intruder. Officer Amber R. Guyger, 30, fired her service weapon twice, striking him once in the torso.

He was later pronounced dead at a hospital, his death now the center of a mystery that has angered and puzzled Dallas and beyond.

The racial profiling of black men and women by white police officers put new phrases into the American vocabulary — driving while black, walking while black, shopping while black. The shooting of Mr. Jean seemed to demand its own, even more disturbing version: being at home while black. 

The fatal shooting has become the latest, and most bizarre, confrontation between an unarmed black man and a white officer, angering many who say they simply do not believe the officer’s account. In a city with a decades-old history of racial divisions, the case has again heightened tensions. Protesters chanted and disrupted a City Council meeting on Wednesday, and threats against the police have poured in. Officers have said they believe Officer Guyger’s version of events, while many in the black community — and many white residents as well — do not. City officials and other leaders have been caught in the middle. 

“This is the worst sort of situation, because we all expect to be safe in our own homes,” Michael S. Rawlings, the mayor of Dallas, said in an interview. “Everybody is heartbroken. Everybody wants the same thing — let’s get the answers. This is what the mother said to me. I was sitting there talking to her Saturday morning. And she said, ‘I’m not angry, but I just want to know why this lady shot my son.’”

Existing while black is a fatal offense in America.

There's no way this was justified, despite the Dallas police leaking a story that marijuana was found in Botham Jean's apartment after the shooting, because of course we have to have a "he's no angel" defense of the cold-blooded murder of a black man who lived alone minding his own business because maybe the cop who lived in the apartment below him thought his TV was too loud.

If you are black in America, every day is a risk.

Erasing Women From History, Texas Edition

The Texas Board of Education is about to erase Hillary Clinton and Helen Keller from the school curriculum to replace them with the most important figure in recent American history, the Reverend Billy Graham.

History curriculum in Texas remembers the Alamo but could soon forget Hillary Clinton and Helen Keller.

As part of an effort to "streamline" the social studies curriculum in public schools, the State Board of Education voted Friday to adjust what students in every grade are required to learn in the classroom. Among the changes, board members approved the removal of several historical figures, including Clinton and Keller, from the curriculum.

The board also voted to keep in the curriculum a reference to the "heroism" of the defenders of the Alamo, which had been recommended for elimination, as well as Moses' influence on the writing of the nation's founding documents, multiple references to "Judeo-Christian" values and a requirement that students explain how the "Arab rejection of the State of Israel has led to ongoing conflict" in the Middle East.

The vote Friday was preliminary. The board can amend the curriculum changes further before taking a final vote in November.

Barbara Cargill, a Republican board member from Houston and former chairwoman, said work groups recommended removing Clinton and Keller, and the board agreed.

"In speaking to teachers and testifiers, they did not mention these specific deletions," she said.

The first woman to win the popular vote for President of the United States isn't noteworthy enough.

The Dallas Morning News spoke with two teachers from the group of board-nominated volunteers that made the recommendations. Both said the state required students to learn about so many historical figures that it resulted in rote memorization of dates and names instead of real learning.

The 15-member work group came up with a rubric for grading every historical figure to rank who is "essential" to learn and who isn't. The formula asked questions like, "Did the person trigger a watershed change"; "Was the person from an underrepresented group"; and "Will their impact stand the test of time?"

Out of 20 points, Keller scored a 7 and Clinton scored a 5. Eliminating Clinton from the requirements will save teachers 30 minutes of instructional time, the work group estimated, and eliminating Keller will save 40 minutes.

History's hard.  We have to teach "Judeo-Christian values" in schools instead.

It's Definitely Mueller Time

Your Friday Mueller News Dump this week is a huge one: former Trump Campaign chairman Paul Manafort has cut a plea deal to avoid his second trial in exchange for cooperating with the Mueller probe into Russian collusion.

President Donald Trump's former campaign chairman Paul Manafort has agreed to plead guilty in a foreign-lobbying and money laundering case brought by special counsel Robert Mueller. 

Manafort appeared in a Washington, D.C., courtroom Friday morning, looking relaxed in a suit and purple tie, to formally announce the deal.

The deal dismisses deadlocked charges against Manafort from an earlier trial, but only after "successful cooperation” with Mueller’s probe into Russian election interference and whether the Trump campaign coordinated with Moscow on its efforts. Mueller prosecutor Andrew Weissmann did not immediately expand on what cooperation is required under the deal. 

The agreement also calls for a 10-year cap on how long Manafort will be sent to prison, and for Manafort to serve time from his separate Virginia and Washington cases concurrently. But it will not release Manafort from jail, where he has been held since Mueller's team added witness tampering charges during the run-up to the longtime lobbyist's trial. 

Manafort addressed U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson in a soft voice, saying “I do” and “I understand” as she asked him whether he understood what rights he’s giving up. A deputy marshal stood directly behind Manafort, a reminder that he remains in custody. 

Legal experts quickly spun the deal as a win for all the parties involved. Manafort gets a potentially shorter sentence and lessens his legal bills. Trump avoids several weeks of bad headlines ahead of the midterm elections about his corrupt former campaign aide. And Mueller — faced with Trump's constant claims that his probe is a witch hunt — gets to show yet again that his charges are not fabricated and can now divert resources to other elements of his Russia probe. 

But the prospect of Manafort's cooperation with Mueller throws into doubt how much of a win the deal could be for Trump. In addition to running Trump's campaign for several months, Manafort attended the infamous Trump Tower meeting where Trump aides through they might get dirt on Hillary Clinton from a Kremlin-linked lawyer.

It's hard to overstate the importance of this deal.  Mueller wouldn't take this deal (and the judge overseeing Manafort's case wouldn't) unless it served a greater purpose.  And Manafort is still going to get up to ten years tacked on to what he already has from the Virginia trial and he has to forfeit tens of millions in assets, properties, and cash.  He might not actually die in prison.

Donald Trump, on the other hand...well the odds of that being his fate just went up somewhat.  Even a Trump pardon now won't save Manafort...or Trump.  Marcy Wheeler sums it up.

Here’s why this deal is pardon proof: 

1. Mueller spent the hour and a half delay in arraignment doing … something. It’s possible Manafort even presented the key parts of testimony Mueller needs from him to the grand jury this morning.
2. The forfeiture in this plea is both criminal and civil, meaning DOJ will be able to get Manafort’s $46 million even with a pardon.
3. Some of the dismissed charges are financial ones that can be charged in various states.

Remember, back in January, Trump told friends and aides that Manafort could incriminate him (the implication was that only Manafort could). I believe Mueller needed Manafort to describe what happened in a June 7, 2016 meeting between the men, in advance of the June 9 meeting. I have long suspected there was another meeting at which Manafort may be the only other Trump aide attendee.

And Manafort has probably already provided evidence on whatever Mueller needed.

So here’s what Robert Mueller just did: He sewed up the key witness to implicate the President, and he paid for the entire investigation. And it’s only now lunch time.

Robert Mueller just gained the most powerful weapon yet in his arsenal to bring down Trump.  When that weapon is brought to bear, I imagine it will be devastating.

At the very beginning of his time working in Ukraine in 2003, Paul Manafort was in the employ of one Russia’s richest men, an aluminum magnate called Oleg Deripaska. We lazily describe many Russian oligarchs as residing in Vladimir Putin’s inner circle. But in the case of Oleg Deripaska, that closeness is a documented fact.

Between 2003 and 2008, Manafort and his firm worked for Deripaska across Europe—in Montenegro, Georgia, and Ukraine. Over that time, the consultant and client also became business partners. Deripaska invested millions in a private equity fund that Manafort established, with the intent of buying assets across the former Soviet Union. Based on various court filings and lawsuits, we know that the relationship went very badly. In these documents, Deripaska suggests that Manafort might have stolen his money. And based on the Special Prosecutors filings, we also know that Manafort owed Deripaska even more money in the form of unpaid loans. Instead of making an effort to settle these large debts, Deripaska says that Manafort simply stopped returning his messages.

Manafort finally reached out to Deripaska, just after he joined Donald Trump’s campaign. In emails obtained by The Atlantic that Paul Manafort traded with an aide, Manafort proposed giving Deripaska special access to the campaign, with the apparent hope of making his debts disappear. We don’t know what became of Manafort’s outreach to Deripaska. Perhaps, it yielded nothing. Deripaska claims that he never received messages from Manafort in 2016. But it’s also worth watching hidden video footage of Deripaska, sitting on his yacht with a top Putin official, procured by the Russian opposition politicians Alexey Navalny. The video captured a meeting held in August 2016, two weeks before Manafort resigned as campaign chair. According to Navalny, the video lends credibility to theory that Deripaska might have been a crucial intermediary between Manafort and the Kremlin.

This is just part of the answers to burning questions that Mueller could get from Manafort.  That's just the start.

And Trump knows it.

If you thought Trump was freaked out before...

But Trump’s anger over Woodward’s book is dwarfed by his continuing fixation on the anonymous New York Times op-ed. Sources told me Trump is “obsessed,” “lathered,” and “freaked out” that the leaker is still in his midst. His son Don Jr. has told people he’s worried Trump isn’t sleeping because of it, a source said. Meetings have been derailed by Trump’s suspicion. “If you look at him the wrong way, he’ll spend the next hour thinking you wrote it,” a Republican close to the White House said. Much of what’s fueling Trump’s paranoia is that he has no clear way to identify the author. One adviser said Trump has instructed aides to call the anonymous author a “coward” in public to shame him or her. “He’s going to continue to shame this person,” a person close to Trump said. “The author will break under pressure or will eventually say, ‘fuck it, it’s me.’” Plans to administer polygraph tests to staff have seemingly died. “Nobody knows who it is,” a former official said.

Oh, and a final thought on why Manafort cooperated from Josh Marshall.

The two words “remain safe” in Manafort lawyer Kevin Downing’s comment on his client’s decision this morning says quite a lot. “He wanted to make sure that his family was able to remain safe and live a good life.”

The kind of people that Manafort is giving up here are the kind of people that make sure chatty people's families end up in mysteriously fatal accidents, if you catch my drift.

Stay tuned.

In A New York (Primary) Minute

Matthew Yglesias comes not to praise NY Dem Gov. Andrew Cuomo's 30-point plus win in last night's Democratic primary over Cynthia Nixon, but to bury his 2020 chances for having to fight this battle at all.

Somewhat ironically, it was actually Cuomo’s presidential aspirations that, in retrospect, have ended up dooming his presidential aspirations.

His father was a liberal icon in his day, and with New York a considerably bluer-than-average state, one natural role for Cuomo to have taken early in his term would have been that of progressive champion. Cuomo was first elected in 2010, the exact same year that national Democrats lost their majorities in Congress, and his New York could have been the proving ground for the next great progressive policy agenda. But he actually had the opposite fear — that governing as a progressive in such a heavily Democratic state would push him to adopt policies that would make him unelectable in a national contest.

Consequently, Cuomo has consistently worked behind the scenes to keep the New York state Senate in Republican hands via the machinations of a small group of state senators who, despite winning election as Democrats, caucus with the GOP. That kept the most ambitious progressive ideas off the legislative agenda, allowing Cuomo to avoid both having overt fights with his base and endorsing policies that pushed the state substantially to the left.

It was a subtle, well-executed game — subtle enough to not be understood by most voters in New York’s Democratic primaries — but in retrospect, it was too clever by half. The mood among national Democrats has swung substantially to the left over the past five years, with Barack Obama recently endorsing ideas like Medicare-for-all and employee representation on corporate boards.

Had Cuomo simply done the normal thing and supported Democratic state Senate candidates and gotten the chance he feared to sign ambitious progressive bills, he’d be perfectly positioned for the circumstances of 2020. Instead, as it stands, he’s left relying on a powerful state party machine and the loyalty of less attentive voters to secure what should have been a total cakewalk of a renomination.

And speaking of that "small group of state senators", the Independent Democratic Caucus as they call themselves were upstate Dems caucusing with the GOP in order to keep Cuomo from having to sign progressive legislation.  They voted to install a Republican state senate leader (Dean Skelos, who got busted by Preet Bharara, then John Flanagan who shared the job along with IDC leader Jeffrey Klein) despite the fact the Democrats had the numbers to control both chambers of the state legislature, and got plum leadership committee assignments from the GOP in Albany as a reward.

They broke up in April when they realized they were going to have a bloody fight on their hands and they wanted to pretend they were Dems again. Cuomo gave them cover.

They got rightfully obliterated last night by those "regulars".

Years of anger at a group of Democratic state senators who had collaborated with Republicans boiled over on Thursday, as primary voters ousted most of them in favor of challengers who had called them traitors and sham progressives.

The losses were a resounding upset for the members of the Independent Democratic Conference, who outspent their challengers several times over, but also a sign that the impatient progressive fervor sweeping national politics had hobbled New York’s once-mighty Democratic machine, at least on a local level.

The most high-profile casualty was Senator Jeffrey D. Klein of the Bronx, the former head of the I.D.C. In that position, he was for years one of Albany’s most powerful players, sharing leadership of the chamber with his counterparts in the Republican conference and participating in the state’s secretive budget negotiations.

But on Thursday, he was defeated by Alessandra Biaggi, a lawyer and former aide to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, after a campaign in which Ms. Biaggi cornered Mr. Klein into spending nearly $2 million — more than 10 times what she spent — since January, an astonishing sum for a state legislative race. (Cynthia Nixon, in her bid against Mr. Cuomo, spent less.)

In addition to Mr. Klein, at least four other former I.D.C. members had lost their races: Senator Tony Avella in Queens; Senator Jose Peralta in Queens; Senator Jesse Hamilton in Brooklyn; Senator Marisol Alcántara in Manhattan.

At my count this morning six of the eight IDC members are gone now, but that still leaves a 31-31 tie with Democratic one-man roadblock Simcha Felder siding with the GOP and giving them 32.  Dems will have to win in upstate NY, and frankly, after last night's massive turnout, I'm betting they can.

That's going to leave Cuomo in a nasty spot where he may have to, you know, sign progressive legislation next year.

Meanwhile in the NY AG Dem primary to replace Eric Schniederman, NYC Public Advocate Letitia James pretty handily won her primary race over Zephyr Teachout.

New York City Public Advocate Letitia James won a four-way Democratic primary for attorney general in New York on Thursday in a race that was a competition over who could best use the office to antagonize President Donald Trump.

James, 59, would become the first black woman to hold a statewide elected office in New York if she prevails in the general election, where she will be heavily favored. Trump nemesis Eric Schneiderman, a Democrat, abruptly resigned from the post in May amid allegations he physically abused women he dated.

James defeated a deep field of fellow Democrats: U.S. Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, Fordham law professor Zephyr Teachout and former Hillary Clinton adviser Leecia Eve.

New York's attorney general has long had an unusual role as a regulator of Wall Street and an occasional prosecutor of the rich and powerful. The office also recently opened an investigation of sexual abuse within the Roman Catholic Church. But in this contest, Trump emerged as the common foe among all the candidates.

This is the office that will have to continue the criminal investigation of the Trump Organization should Mueller and company get Saturday Night Massacred.

Onward to November.

StupidiNews!

• Flooding in North and South Carolina is already underway as Hurricane Florence's storm surge and heavy rains swamp coastal areas, hundreds of thousands are without power. 
• Multiple explosions were reported in Lawrence, Massachusetts as an over-pressurized residential natural gas pipeline caused fires in dozens of homes.
• The Trump regime is leveling new sanctions against a Chinese tech firm and its Russian subsidiary for evading funding sanctions on North Korea.
• Sen. Elizabeth Warren is taking aim at Wall Street banking giants and major tech companies, saying the federal government needs to step in and break up "too big to fail" corporations.
• The yearly 2018 Ig Nobel Prizes are out and honor the science of roller coasters affecting kidney stones, how well human saliva cleans dirt, and just how healthy a human cannibalism diet can be.

Last Call For Supreme Misgivings, Con't

Things just took a wild turn in Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation process for the Supreme Court.  Republicans are rushing to get a full Senate vote before the court begins its term on October 1 and until today it looked like all Democrats could do is just stall for a while as Mitch McConnell and the GOP have the 51 votes no matter what the Democrats do, but now things just got a whole lot more iffy as the FBI just got involved.

The senior Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee referred information involving Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh, President Trump’s nominee to the Supreme Court, to federal investigators on Thursday, but the senator declined to make public what the matter involved.

Two officials familiar with the matter say the incident involved possible sexual misconduct between Judge Kavanaugh and a woman when they were both in high school. They spoke anonymously because they were not authorized to discuss the matter.

The statement by Senator Dianne Feinstein of California came a week before the Judiciary Committee is to vote on his nomination. “I have received information from an individual concerning the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court,” Ms. Feinstein said in a statement. “That individual strongly requested confidentiality, declined to come forward or press the matter further, and I have honored that decision. I have, however, referred the matter to federal investigative authorities.”

The information came in July in a letter, which was first sent to the office of Representative Anna Eshoo, Democrat of California, and accuses the judge of sexual misconduct toward the letter’s author, a person familiar with the letter confirmed.

Ms. Feinstein, who received the letter from Ms. Eshoo’s office, informed fellow Democrats on the Judiciary Committee about its existence and its contents on Wednesday evening but did not share the letter itself. Several Democrats advised her to take its claims to the F.B.I., and others pressed for it to become public.

In addition to criminal investigations, the F.B.I. conducts background checks on all major government appointees, including Supreme Court nominees. The F.B.I. said in a statement on Thursday that it had received Ms. Feinstein’s referral and included it in Judge Kavanaugh’s background file. A bureau official also said that no criminal investigation had been opened related to the matter.

Needless to say, this is pretty big.  The reason is that during the background check process, the FBI runs a no-holds-barred, nothing-off-limits scouring of a nominee's history.  If the FBI asked Kavanaugh about the sexual misconduct incident and he denied it, and the information Sen. Feinstein got from Rep. Eshoo's office that says otherwise, Kavanaugh could get rung up on providing false information (that "lying to the FBI" charge that seems to be so common these days among Republicans).

We'll see what comes from it.

That Economic Anxiety In Elkhart Again, Con't

Democratic Sen. Joe Donnelly is trying to hold on in Indiana, and his chances of keeping his Senate seat may very well hinge on how Trump's trade war with China (and the devastating hundreds of billions of dollars in tariffs it brings) plays out with voters in the RV capital of the world, Elkhart.

The impact of the president’s tariffs on everything from steel to soybeans is playing out against the backdrop of the midterm elections, with some Republicans trying to make a robust economy central to their case for maintaining control of Congress. In Indiana, Missouri, North Dakota and other states, the president’s policies are starting to be felt, especially in industries that have large trading relationships with China.

“I think there’s serious concern about the effects of tariffs on the R.V. industry,” said Senator Joe Donnelly, Democrat of Indiana and one of the Senate’s most vulnerable incumbents this year. His home is nearby. “So many of the components that go into R.V.s are directly affected by these tariffs.”

“It is something that we watch very, very closely having gone through the other side of this when unemployment was 22 percent,” Mr. Donnelly said, referring to the unemployment rate in Elkhart at the peak of the Great Recession.

In Elkhart, a field of R.V.s is as common as corn. An RV Hall of Fame lionizes the industry and its progress from small aluminum trailers to luxury vehicles with the amenities of expensive condominiums. “We like to say we build fun in Elkhart County,” said Mike Yoder, a Republican and an Elkhart County commissioner.

But Mr. Yoder is among those who think the fun could be ebbing. “Everybody in the industry is aware of the negative significance of that,” he said of the tariffs. “We are experiencing a bit of a slowdown in R.V. production, and a number of companies are working four days instead of five to clean up inventory.”

“My personal opinion is this is horrific for the community,” he continued. “This is a really big deal for us. We export a lot of product and import a lot of product. If this whole trade dispute expands much more, it has serious implications, and we will once again lead the country into a recession, without a doubt.”

It's getting bad in Elkhart again.  Really bad.

The R.V. industry is forecasting sales of about 500,000 vehicles this year, about the same as in 2017 after several years of strong, sometimes double-digit, growth. The tariffs are adding as much as 50 percent to the price of some materials, and the companies in turn are raising prices.

If the name sounds familiar, it should be.  I've been talking about Elkhart since President Obama visited it in 2009 to kick off his stimulus program push. Unemployment skyrocketed here, and then President Obama's policies pushed that unemployment down to 4%.

Elkhart County decided Barack Obama took credit for something he had nothing to do with, and promptly voted for Trump.  Now of course, they have second thoughts.  They have actual economic anxiety, not just the grudging anger of having to give the nation's first black president credit.

But let's remember what they said in December 2016 here in Elkhart.

“He didn’t help us here, but he took credit for what happened,” Chris Corbin, 47, who works for a dispatch company in Elkhart, told me. Corbin thinks it will be Trump who improves the economy. “It’s going to take two terms, but he’ll fix things,” he said.

Trump'll fix things.  Right into another recession.

Brandon Stanley owns a bar in Elkhart. He says he’s optimistic that the economy is improving now that Republicans have regained power, but emphasizes that there are still a host of economic problems that haven’t been solved in Elkhart. As for the shrinking unemployment rate in Elkhart, “they changed how they report unemployment numbers,” he told me, so they’re not believable.

But the coming recession sure is believable.  I bet they'll blame the tariffs on Obama too.

Andi Ermes, 39, offered a number of reasons for disliking Obama. She said Obama didn’t attend the Army-Navy football game, even though other presidents had. Obama has actually attended more Army-Navy games than George H.W. Bush. She said that he had taken too many vacations. He has taken fewer vacation days that George W. Bush. She also said that he refused to wear a flag pin on his lapel. While it is true that Obama did not wear a flag on his lapel at points during the 2007 campaign, it was back on his suit by 2008. Ermes told me the news sources she consumes most are Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and a local conservative radio show hosted by Casey Hendrickson.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Ermes sees the biggest signs for hope in the economy in Carrier deal struck by Donald Trump, which will keep 1,000 jobs in the U.S. “He’s not even president yet and already he’s helping the economy,” she said. 

Yeah, about that Carrier plant over in Indy, as Nelson Schwartz of the NY Times took a look just last month at it...

Twenty months ago, a freshly elected Donald J. Trump came to Carrier to claim credit for disrupting management’s plans to shut the factory and shift its jobs to Mexico. The plant stayed open, and more than 700 workers kept their positions. The deal dominated the news and became a political Rorschach test: Mr. Trump’s critics saw a minuscule victory, bought with tax credits, but for many of his supporters, the episode was proof that the incoming president would revive Rust Belt fortunes by sheer force of personality.

After three earlier visits, I wanted to know what Carrier workers themselves thought of the outcome, long after Mr. Trump and his media hurricane had moved on. From afar, one might assume the picture is rosy: Indiana has an unemployment rate of just 3.3 percent, and for people without a college degree, few employers offer the kind of salary and benefits that Carrier does. But when I got to Indianapolis in July, I found that the factory Mr. Trump is often credited with saving is plagued by rising absenteeism and low morale.

“People aren’t coming to work, which is sad because we really need these jobs,” said Ms. Hargrove, who has worked at Carrier for 15 years. “They had a chance to prove that staying was good, but this is ruining it for everybody. It’s killing us. It’s pushing us out the door that much sooner.”

What’s ailing Carrier isn’t weak demand. Furnace sales are strong, and managers have increased overtime and even recalled 150 previously laid-off workers. Instead, employees share a looming sense that a factory shutdown is inevitable — that Carrier has merely postponed the closing until a more politically opportune moment.

In some ways, the situation is a metaphor for blue-collar work and life in the United States today. Paychecks are a tad fatter and the economic picture has brightened slightly, but no one feels particularly secure or hopeful.

You know, economic anxiety.

Heck Of A Job, Trumpie

Dear Carolinas:

Having grown up in Western NC and having went through Hurricane Hugo in '89 (real surprise to find a tropical storm 350 miles inland, lemme tell ya) I know what's about to happen to you this weekend.  It's not going to be pretty, and if you're in the path of the storm, get out.

Having said that, I never had any doubt that federal disaster relief was going to be there when my family needed it.  Thirty years later, my family is being threatened again by a massive storm, and the jackasses in charge aren't exactly filling me with confidence.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) said this week that millions of water bottles meant for victims of Hurricane Maria have been left undistributed at an airport in Puerto Rico for more than a year.

CBS News journalist David Begnaud reported on Wednesday that FEMA acknowledged that loads of water bottles were brought to the island in 2017 in the wake of the hurricane and that it turned them over to the "central government."

However, a photographer working for a Puerto Rican police agency, Abdiel Santana, noticed that the water was still sitting at the airport runway one year later, according to Begnaud.

"FEMA says the water, and we’re talking what could be millions of bottles of water, were brought to the island by FEMA last year. FEMA tells me the water was turned over to the central government," Begnaud said in a video posted on Twitter Wednesday night.

"The question is what happened after that. Where was the breakdown?" Begnaud asked.

He added that “the water was kept in an area that was pretty hard-hit during the storm and could have used all the water they could have gotten."

The finding comes as the Trump administration continues to face scrutiny over its response to the hurricane, which ravaged Puerto Rico.

According to an independent study conducted by George Washington University, nearly 3,000 people died as a result of the hurricane — a number that represents a sharp increase from the initial estimate of 64.

To recap, a runway tarmac's worth of pallets of bottled water rotted for a year and nobody admitted they knew about it until CBS spotted it from the sky.

More Details pic.twitter.com/jyPGRqiIy3

— David Begnaud (@DavidBegnaud) September 12, 2018

Almost 3,000 people in Puerto Rico died because the Trump regime dropped the ball, and there's more than a little evidence they did so out of political spite by a truly evil orange man.  So when they say the Carolinas and Virginia and Maryland are going to be OK, and that my family is going to be OK, well you'll excuse me if I don't take that at face value.

StupidiNews!

• Although the intensity of Hurricane Florence has slipped to Category 2, the size of the storm has massively increased as the Carolina coast now faces one of the largest named storms in history.
• A gunman in Bakersfield, California killed his wife at the trucking company where she worked and four other people last night before turning the gun on himself as police closed in.
• Recently-minted US Open women's tennis champion Naomi Osaka has signed a major three-year endorsement deal with Nissan to be the new face of the automaker in Japan and worldwide.
• The Trump regime has lost a lawsuit brought by 19 states over Education Secretary Betsy DeVos's delaying of Obama-era regulations to protect student loan borrowers from predatory practices.
• Apple's latest tech offerings announced at yesterday's yearly event includes the iPhone XS at $999, the iPhone XS Max at $1,099, and the iPhone XR at $749.

Last Call For Keeping Kids in Camps

The Trump regime is still refusing to reunite stolen migrant kids with their parents, and if anything, they're planning to separate more kids and put them in even bigger camps because frankly, nobody's going to stop them.

A tent camp for migrant children in the desert outside El Paso will expand to accommodate a growing number of Central American children crossing the border, the Department of Health and Human Services said Tuesday.

HHS, the federal agency tasked with caring for migrant children and teenagers in U.S. custody, said it would more than triple the size of its camp at the Tornillo-Guadalupe Land Port of Entry from 1,200 beds to as many as 3,800.

The Trump administration established the camp in June as a temporary shelter because its facilities elsewhere were running out of space. That occurred at the height of President Trump’s “zero tolerance” prosecution initiative, a crackdown that separated about 2,500 migrant children from their parents.

Widespread condemnation forced Trump to reverse course and stop the separations, but since then, HHS has taken in greater numbers of underage migrants. The number of families illegally crossing the border jumped again in recent weeks, according to border agents and administration officials. U.S. Customs and Border Protection is scheduled to release its latest arrest totals Wednesday.

Kenneth Wolfe, a spokesman for HHS’s Administration for Children and Families, said the need for emergency capacity was the result of the latest surge at the border, not the administration’s decision to separate families during the crackdown this spring.

“ ‘Family separations’ resulting from the zero tolerance policy ended on June 20, 2018 and are not driving this need,” Wolfe said in a statement.

HHS officials have “worked round the clock to add beds or add shelters to avoid any backup” at the border,” Wolfe added. He said the agency has 12,800 minors in its custody, the highest number ever. Minors spend an average of 59 days in HHS custody, up from 51 days in 2017.

HHS has used the Tornillo site primarily to house older teens, channeling younger children in its custody to more “permanent” sites among the approximately 100 shelters where migrant children are housed.

So more kids will separated from their parents, thousands more, and kept in hell camps in the hot Texas sun, because the Trump regime needs not only a deterrent for people crossing into America, they need a deterrent for Americans themselves.  After all, we already have people fleeing federal food programs because they know ICE will use information to target them, and finding out banks are freezing accounts of suspected non-citizens while the regime is openly calling citizenship of Hispanics into question.

Pretty soon, they won't wait for an answer.

Here's the best part.  With Hurricane Florence on the way, it turns out Trump took $10 million in FEMA funding to pay for the new camps.

President Donald Trump’s administration cut nearly $10 million out of FEMA’s budget in order to fund ICE’s immigration detention centers, according a budget document obtained by Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR) and disclosed on Tuesday night’s edition of MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show.

As Maddow reported, Merkley’s staff believes these Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) transfers were made earlier this summer, right before the start of hurricane season.

Merkley, a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, acquired the previously undisclosed document, which shows $9.8 million was diverted from FEMA to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to pay for more “detention beds” and “ICE’s transportation and removal program.”

Maddow said a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson did not dispute the authenticity of the document when contacted about it, but said the money had not come from the agency’s “disaster and recovery response efforts.”

Merkley disputed that claim in an appearance with Maddow on Tuesday, noting the budget document he obtained shows $9.8 million was transferred to ICE from FEMA’s response and recovery budget.

That's $9.8 million that won't go to people in the Carolinas, who will need that response and recovery effort from FEMA by this time next week.

Oh well.

Papers, please.

First they came for the undocumented immigrants...