Trump Cards, Con't

The Trump White House is clearly losing on both the Brett Kavanaugh and Rod Rosenstein fronts, because they're about to pick yet another culture war fight in order to "rally the base".

Federal health officials canceled an FDA contract for human fetal tissue research Monday night and announced a review of all such research projects.

The announcement, citing “serious regulatory, moral, and ethical considerations,” revives a political issue that last flared in 2015 and led to congressional hearings. That fight came over anti-abortion political activists who covertly videotaped Planned Parenthood doctors and employees of Advanced Bioscience Resources (ABR), a cell tissue firm based in Alameda, California, that provides such cells to researchers.

The canceled contract would have paid $15,900 to ABR for human tissue that would make a laboratory mouse’s immune system more similar to a human’s. (ABR did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

“Mice with human immune systems are incredibly valuable for research of terrible diseases, and there really is no alternative,” Lawrence Goldstein of the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine told BuzzFeed News. Such cells have figured prominently in the development of vaccines against diseases such as rubella, rabies, polio, measles, chickenpox, and shingles.

The bottom line is that such cells would be otherwise discarded, he noted, and bioethics reviews going back to the Reagan administration have approved of their use to benefit human health.
The move to audit fetal tissue research was applauded, however, by David Daleiden of the Center for Medical Progress, the anti-abortion activist who ran the covert videotaping project.

“HHS’s newly-announced review of fetal tissue procurement and experimentation must be exacting, and it must terminate all other agreements for baby body parts,” he said in a statement.

That this is happening six week before midterm elections is not an accident in the least.  Neither is the fact this is happening to distract from how badly the Kavanaugh nomination fight is going, or from the Rosenstein firing trial balloon.

Still the results will almost certainly be decades of research lost, because DEAD BABY PARTS FACTORIES or something stupid, because this is America now.

Trump Trades Blows, Con't

The "October Surprise" for midterm voters may already be here: Trump's 10% tariffs on $200 billion in Chinese imports that went into effect this week means higher prices are already starting to hit voters at the register.

The latest impact will begin to hit Monday as new 10 percent tariffs Trump slapped on over $200 billion in imports from China are scheduled to go into effect. That tariff rate is set to rise to 25 percent on Jan. 1 if the Chinese don’t capitulate to White House demands. Trump has also threatened to bump the total up to more than $500 billion in imports, which would hit nearly every product China exported to the U.S. last year.

Economists expect that to translate into higher prices for consumers across the country and special pain for low- to middle-income voters who make up much of Trump’s base — and are least able to absorb increased costs for consumer goods such as air conditioners, clothing and furniture. Republicans are counting on getting Trump supporters to the polls in November to hold off projected Democratic gains in the House and potentially the Senate. Forcing consumers to pay higher prices could make that harder.

“If you are kind of in the middle- or lower-income groups, you are buying a lot of what economists call tradable goods and you’ll be hit a lot harder,” said Kyle Handley, assistant professor of business economics and public policy at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business. “This is basically the Trump voter who is going to see the biggest hit to their total spending.”

Evidence is piling up that consumers and businesses are growing increasingly nervous about Trump’s trade policy.

Consumer sentiment measured by the University of Michigan dropped last month to its lowest point in nearly a year, with the decline centered in lower-income households most sensitive to higher prices. The sentiment index ticked up again in preliminary results for September. But nearly a third of those surveyed cited concern over tariffs when assessing the economy. 

A survey of chief financial officers unveiled last week by Deloitte found that 42 percent said business conditions would improve next year, the lowest in two years, with executives “overwhelmingly worried” about trade policy and tariffs.

Walmart recently warned it will need to raise prices on a huge swath of products imported from China. Other large consumer-product companies including Procter & Gamble, Nestle and Coca-Cola announced price increases over the summer, partly because of tariffs, and warned of more to come.

The only two things thing Republicans really have going for them are Trump's Supreme Court picks, and the fact they've not managed to completely crash the Obama economy yet.   Both of those are in serious jeopardy before midterm elections, it seems.

Throw in rising oil prices from Iranian sanctions and I think voters are going to start changing their mind about the GOP very, very quickly. And let's not forget that these corporations with "no choice" but to pass tariff price hikes on to consumers are banking record profits right now thanks to the trillions in Trump tax cuts they are getting.  They could afford to swallow these price increases if they wanted to.  They won't, because profit is all that matters.

Maybe even quickly enough to affect voting in November.

StupidiNews!

• Florida Democratic congressional candidate April Freeman died unexpectedly Monday, Freeman was running to fill the 17th House District seat vacated by GOP Rep. Tom Rooney.
• Attorney Michael Avenatti is promising that yet another accuser of Trump Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh will come forward in "the next 48 hours".
• Oil prices have risen to four-year highs after Donald Trump promised to crack down on Iranian oil sales at the UN as part of increased economic sanctions against Tehran.
• The defamation lawsuit against Donald Trump by adult film star Stormy Daniels looks to be facing dismissal after a federal judge commented that Trump was "engaging in free speech".
• Satellite radio company SiriusXM will buy internet streaming music service Pandora for a reported $3.5 billion, with the deal expected to close in early 2019.

Last Call For Russian To Judgment, Con't

The New Yorker's Jane Mayer examines the case that Russian interference in the 2016 elections not only helped Donald Trump, but helped him in a decisive manner, as laid out in a new book out this week called Cyberwar.

Politicians may be too timid to explore the subject, but a new book from, of all places, Oxford University Press promises to be incendiary. “Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President—What We Don’t, Can’t, and Do Know,” by Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor of communications at the University of Pennsylvania, dares to ask—and even attempts to answer—whether Russian meddling had a decisive impact in 2016. Jamieson offers a forensic analysis of the available evidence and concludes that Russia very likely delivered Trump’s victory.

The book, which is coming out less than two months before the midterm elections, at a moment when polls suggest that some sixty per cent of voters disapprove of Trump, may well reignite the question of Trump’s electoral legitimacy. The President’s supporters will likely characterize the study as an act of partisan warfare. But in person Jamieson, who wears her gray hair in a pixie cut and favors silk scarves and matronly tweeds, looks more likely to suspend a troublemaker than to be one. She is seventy-one, and has spent forty years studying political speeches, ads, and debates. Since 1993, she has directed the Annenberg Public Policy Center, at Penn, and in 2003 she co-founded FactCheck.org, a nonpartisan watchdog group. She is widely respected by political experts in both parties, though her predominantly male peers have occasionally mocked her scholarly intensity, calling her the Drill Sergeant. As Steven Livingston, a professor of political communication at George Washington University, puts it, “She is the epitome of a humorless, no-nonsense social scientist driven by the numbers. She doesn’t bullshit. She calls it straight.”

Indeed, when I met recently with Jamieson, in a book-lined conference room at the Annenberg Center, in Philadelphia, and asked her point-blank if she thought that Trump would be President without the aid of Russians, she didn’t equivocate. “No,” she said, her face unsmiling. Clearly cognizant of the gravity of her statement, she clarified, “If everything else is a constant? No, I do not.”

Jamieson said that, as an academic, she hoped that the public would challenge her arguments. Yet she expressed confidence that unbiased readers would accept her conclusion that it is not just plausible that Russia changed the outcome of the 2016 election—it is “likely that it did.”

An airtight case, she acknowledges, may never be possible. In the introduction to her new book, she writes that any case for influence will likely be similar to that in a civil legal trial, “in which the verdict is rendered not with the certainty that e=mc2 but rather based on the preponderance of evidence.” But, she points out, “we do make most of life’s decisions based on less-than-rock-solid, incontrovertible evidence.” In Philadelphia, she noted to me that “we convict people on probabilities rather than absolute certainty, and we’ve executed people based on inferences from available evidence.” She argued that “the standard of proof being demanded” by people claiming it’s impossible to know whether Russia delivered the White House to Trump is “substantially higher than the standard of proof we ordinarily use in our lives.”

Her case is based on a growing body of knowledge about the electronic warfare waged by Russian trolls and hackers—whom she terms “discourse saboteurs”—and on five decades’ worth of academic studies about what kinds of persuasion can influence voters, and under what circumstances. Democracies around the world, she told me, have begun to realize that subverting an election doesn’t require tampering with voting machines. Extensive studies of past campaigns, Jamieson said, have demonstrated that “you can affect people, who then change their decision, and that alters the outcome.” She continued, “I’m not arguing that Russians pulled the voting levers. I’m arguing that they persuaded enough people to either vote a certain way or not vote at all.”

The effect of such manipulations could be momentous in an election as close as the 2016 race, in which Clinton got nearly 2.9 million more votes than Trump, and Trump won the Electoral College only because some eighty thousand votes went his way in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. In two hundred and twenty-four pages of extremely dry prose, with four appendixes of charts and graphs and fifty-four pages of footnotes, Jamieson makes a strong case that, in 2016, “Russian masterminds” pulled off a technological and political coup. Moreover, she concludes, the American media “inadvertently helped them achieve their goals.”

Jamieson stops short of saying Trump was elected illegitimately, but does posit that without the Russian social media blitz and the American media that amplified the messages of chaos and doubt, Trump would have come up short in the electoral college.  80,000 votes out of 130 million is six-tenths of one percent, and yet that influence was decisive in those three states.

But the conclusion is clear: Without Russia, Donald Trump would have lost.  What we as Americans choose to do with that information in the months and years ahead is up to us.

That Whole Saturday Night Massacre Thing, Con't

As I mentioned on Friday, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, the DoJ official overseeing the Mueller investigation, was targeted with an NYT hit piece late last week with the intent of cover for his firing.

Understand that this story was leaked to set up Rosenstein as the "Deep State" mastermind behind the "coup" against Trump, with the time period of course suggesting that the Mueller probe was part of Rosenstein's "plot".  They are not trying to just undermine the Mueller probe, they are trying to end it.

Today, the Trump regime tried to "stealth fire" Rosenstein with an Axios story.

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein has verbally “offered to resign” in discussions with White House Chief of Staff Kelly, according to a source close to Rosenstein, but as of now, it’s unclear whether his resignation has been accepted. The source said it’s possible nothing happens today.

Background: Rosenstein talked last year about invoking the 25th Amendment and wearing a wire during Trump meetings, the N.Y. Times' Adam Goldman and Michael S. Schmidt reported last week. He denied both allegations.

Clarification: This article and headline have been updated to add that it's unclear whether the resignation offer has been accepted.

But apparently nothing did happen today other than Rosenstein going to the White House for a previously scheduled National Security Council meeting to fill in for Jeff Sessions while Donald Trump and several cabinet members are in New York for three days for UN meetings.  Bloomberg fell for the Axios story, as did all the other major news outlets.  Now, it's a Thursday meeting between Trump and Rosenstein once Trump gets back from New York.

The one person who didn't get fooled in the press?  NBC Justice correspondent Pete Williams.

BREAKING / MORE: Pete Williams reports that Rosenstein doesn't want to resign and will likely force the White House to fire him. https://t.co/Wgxu5A5LWE

— Tom Winter (@Tom_Winter) September 24, 2018

So once again, it seems like the Trump regime had a plan to fire Rosenstein today by Village executioner, only Rosenstein called their bluff.  Why?  Because it matters whether Rosenstein is fired, or if he resigns instead.

If Rosenstein were to depart, it was also unclear whether he would be fired, or he would resign. In Rosenstein's case, this could make a big difference as to whom Trump can select to replace him as deputy attorney general.

The question of who would oversee the Russia probe is slightly different, however, because Rosenstein has been effectively wearing two hats since Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself last year from any role overseeing Robert Mueller's investigation. One hat is that of deputy attorney general. The other is that of acting attorney general for the Russia probe, because Rosenstein was acting as a stand-in for Sessions.

Any replacement of Rosenstein by Trump, therefore, would be a replacement of his deputy attorney general position, not a replacement of the other role, acting attorney general for the Russia probe. That responsibility would go to Solicitor General Noel Francisco, and experts agree that the law gives Trump little control over that aspect of the succession.

Still, the question of how much control Trump would have in who replaces Rosenstein could have far-reaching implications. A Rosenstein replacement could take steps to protect the president from investigation, to seal records, withhold funding from Mueller, and otherwise slow the work of the special counsel to a crawl.

And if Trump appoints yes-man Brian Benczkowski as I have surmised for some time now, the plan is to kill the Mueller probe through neglect while Noel Francisco bravely provides the cover of "objectivity".

It's still entirely possible that Rosenstein is fired on Thursday.  We'll see.  But this really, honestly looks like a poorly attempted distraction from the Kavanaugh nomination going down in flames, and our Media Betters bought it hook, line, and stinker.

Meanwhile, let's not forget what the real goal is here.

“If in fact Rod Rosenstein does end up resigning today,” Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow said on his radio show Monday, “I think it clearly becomes necessary and appropriate, for whoever the person who is put in charge of this … I think it’s really important that there be a step back taken here, and a review, a review that has to be thorough and complete.”

He called for a”time out” on the inquiry, and said that the person who takes over oversight of Mueller’s inquiry needs to look at “all of these allegations that are both surrounding this inquiry and that initiated this inquiry,” including the Trump-Russia dossier that was compiled by an ex-British spy, as well as the appointment of Mueller.

The question isn't if Trump ends to Mueller probe, but how ham-fisted it will be when he does.

Supreme Misgivings, Con't

With new allegations of sexual harassment during his college years, Trump's Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, may have just met his match in the slayer of sexual harassers, The New Yorker's Jane Mayer and Ronan Farrow.

As Senate Republicans press for a swift vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh, President Trump’s nominee to the Supreme Court, Senate Democrats are investigating a new allegation of sexual misconduct against Kavanaugh. The claim dates to the 1983-84 academic school year, when Kavanaugh was a freshman at Yale University. The offices of at least four Democratic senators have received information about the allegation, and at least two have begun investigating it. Senior Republican staffers also learned of the allegation last week and, in conversations with The New Yorker, expressed concern about its potential impact on Kavanaugh’s nomination. Soon after, Senate Republicans issued renewed calls to accelerate the timing of a committee vote. The Democratic Senate offices reviewing the allegations believe that they merit further investigation. “This is another serious, credible, and disturbing allegation against Brett Kavanaugh. It should be fully investigated,” Senator Mazie Hirono, of Hawaii, said. An aide in one of the other Senate offices added, “These allegations seem credible, and we’re taking them very seriously. If established, they’re clearly disqualifying.”

The woman at the center of the story, Deborah Ramirez, who is fifty-three, attended Yale with Kavanaugh, where she studied sociology and psychology. Later, she spent years working for an organization that supports victims of domestic violence. The New Yorker contacted Ramirez after learning of her possible involvement in an incident involving Kavanaugh. The allegation was conveyed to Democratic senators by a civil-rights lawyer. For Ramirez, the sudden attention has been unwelcome, and prompted difficult choices. She was at first hesitant to speak publicly, partly because her memories contained gaps because she had been drinking at the time of the alleged incident. In her initial conversations with The New Yorker, she was reluctant to characterize Kavanaugh’s role in the alleged incident with certainty. After six days of carefully assessing her memories and consulting with her attorney, Ramirez said that she felt confident enough of her recollections to say that she remembers Kavanaugh had exposed himself at a drunken dormitory party, thrust his penis in her face, and caused her to touch it without her consent as she pushed him away. Ramirez is now calling for the F.B.I. to investigate Kavanaugh’s role in the incident. “I would think an F.B.I. investigation would be warranted,” she said.

In a statement, Kavanaugh wrote, “This alleged event from 35 years ago did not happen. The people who knew me then know that this did not happen, and have said so. This is a smear, plain and simple. I look forward to testifying on Thursday about the truth, and defending my good name--and the reputation for character and integrity I have spent a lifetime building--against these last-minute allegations.”

The White House spokesperson Kerri Kupec said the Administration stood by Kavanaugh. “This 35-year-old, uncorroborated claim is the latest in a coordinated smear campaign by the Democrats designed to tear down a good man. This claim is denied by all who were said to be present and is wholly inconsistent with what many women and men who knew Judge Kavanaugh at the time in college say. The White House stands firmly behind Judge Kavanaugh.”

Ramirez said that, when both she and Kavanaugh were freshmen at Yale, she was invited by a friend on the women’s soccer team to a dorm-room party. She recalled that the party took place in a suite at Lawrance Hall, in the part of Yale known as Old Campus, and that a small group of students decided to play a drinking game together. “We were sitting in a circle,” she said. “People would pick who drank.” Ramirez was chosen repeatedly, she said, and quickly became inebriated. At one point, she said, a male student pointed a gag plastic penis in her direction. Later, she said, she was on the floor, foggy and slurring her words, as that male student and another stood nearby. (Ramirez identified the two male onlookers, but, at her request, The New Yorker is not naming them.)

A third male student then exposed himself to her. “I remember a penis being in front of my face,” she said. “I knew that’s not what I wanted, even in that state of mind.” She recalled remarking, “That’s not a real penis,” and the other students laughing at her confusion and taunting her, one encouraging her to “kiss it.” She said that she pushed the person away, touching it in the process. Ramirez, who was raised a devout Catholic in Connecticut, said that she was shaken. “I wasn’t going to touch a penis until I was married,” she said. “I was embarrassed and ashamed and humiliated.” She remembers Kavanaugh standing to her right and laughing, pulling up his pants. “Brett was laughing,” she said. “I can still see his face, and his hips coming forward, like when you pull up your pants.” She recalled another male student shouting about the incident. “Somebody yelled down the hall, ‘Brett Kavanaugh just put his penis in Debbie’s face,’ ” she said. “It was his full name. I don’t think it was just ‘Brett.’ And I remember hearing and being mortified that this was out there.”

Ramirez acknowledged that there are significant gaps in her memories of the evening, and that, if she ever presents her story to the F.B.I. or members of the Senate, she will inevitably be pressed on her motivation for coming forward after so many years, and questioned about her memory, given her drinking at the party.

And yet, after several days of considering the matter carefully, she said, “I’m confident about the pants coming up, and I’m confident about Brett being there.” Ramirez said that what has stayed with her most forcefully is the memory of laughter at her expense from Kavanaugh and the other students. “It was kind of a joke,” she recalled. “And now it’s clear to me it wasn’t a joke.”

If things were somehow not devastatingly bad for Kavanaugh's nomination chances before, they just took a cannonball to the gut in the last 24 hours.  Deborah Ramirez has put her entire existence on the line.  She will be crucified, the way Dr. Christine Blasey Ford is being crucified, the way Anita Hill was crucified 20 years ago.

Let's not forget either that Senate Republicans knew about the Ramirez allegations last week, and quickly demanded a vote for Monday before those allegations could be investigated, or before either Ramirez or Ford could testify.  Only when America made that politically impossible did that schedule change.

I predict, I hope, that this breaks GOP Senators Collins and Murkowski, and that it ends this farce...and you know what?  Somehow, I don't think that Dr. Ford and Ms. Ramirez are the only ones. But I agree with Steve M. that the cold hard reality is that Kavanaugh will be confirmed.

The GOP seems dug in; the message from the right is, in effect, "pics or it didn't happen" (pics or at least documentation). Republicans will hang tough and refuse a further delay or an FBI investigation of any of the charges; they won't call Ramirez as a witness (assuming she'd be willing), and they'll declare Kavanaugh exonerated no matter how persuasive Christine Blasey Ford is in Thursday's hearing, or how evasive Kavanaugh is.

They need base voters to be fired up in November, and that won't happen, as I've said in recent days, unless they own the libs. So unless Kavanaugh himself gets cold feet, or unless Avenatti somehow produces credible witnesses to a gang rape, this process won't be derailed.

The key will be winning the spin war. They have to dominate the media with the message that Democrats and Blasey Ford didn't lay a glove on Kavanaugh. If he doesn't blurt out out a Perry Mason-style confession, they'll claim vindication no matter what happens.

They could ask Kavanaugh to withdraw, then run on a stab-in-the-back message in November -- we have to defeat every possible Democrat because they're evil liars who fabricate stories in order to destroy their enemies. But they believe that failure at lib-owning will be fatal to them in November. So they're going to press on, and in the end I still think they'll win.

If Trump's "grab them by the p*ssy" tape didn't stop the GOP, this won't either.  Midterm turnout is still going to be dismal because for all the shouting and hashtags and articles and blog posts, Americans have to go vote, and they won't.

Especially Americans younger than myself.

It's been too late to stop Kavanaugh since November 7, 2016.

StupidiNews!

• The Trump regime's 10% tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese imports goes into effect today, with Wal-Mart, Target, and Proctor & Gamble already warning of price hikes for consumers.
• Iranian President Hassan Rouhani says Tehran is ready to confront the US and its allies after an attack on an Iranian military parade over the weekend killed 25.
• Donald Trump will gavel the UN Security Council to order as the 15-member group's rotating monthly leadership passes to the US and coincides with this year's meeting of UN heads of state.
• After a seven-hour auction process, US cable giant Comcast has emerged as the winner in purchasing UK cable network Sky for $39.3 billion.
• Two Japanese rovers have safely landed on asteroid Ryugu as the Japanese Space Agency's MINERVA mission will explore the kilometer-wide near-Earth object for the next year.

Last Call For Carolina Fish Fried

As floodwaters from Hurricane Florence begin to slowly recede in eastern NC, the combination of unprecedented flooding, toxic coal ash reservoirs being breached, and hog lagoons being swamped indicates a long-term environmental nightmare in the state, the first signs of which are massive fish kills across huge stretches of flooded highways.

Thousands of dead fish strewn along Interstate 40 have created an unnerving sight and smell for motorists as Hurricane Florence flood waters recede in eastern North Carolina.

Images of the piles of fish began appearing on social media over the weekend, including video of members of the Penderlea Fire Department washing the fish off the road with a fire hose.

“We can add ‘washing fish off of the interstate’ to the long list of interesting things firefighters get to experience!” said the post.

Department officials said the fish were found on a stretch of Interstate 40 in Pender County, near Wallace.

“Hurricane Florence caused massive flooding in our area and allowed the fish to travel far from their natural habitat, stranding them on the interstate when waters receded,” said the post.

Wilmington resident Dan George also posted a video that showed the roadway peppered with fish, including one that died caught in a roadside fence when the flood waters rose and fell. His video, posted Friday, has been viewed more 540,000 times on Facebook.

North Carolina Department of Transportation maintenance supervisor Jeff Garrett posted multiple photos showing a wide variety of fish that died, including one that was in the midst of eating smaller fish, which is seen hanging from its mouth.

Garrett’s post has been shared 32,000 times since Saturday.

Residents of the area are already starting to complain of the smell as fish begin to rot en masse on the side of the interstate.

Facebook commenter Aleksandr Gruzinskaya described the odor as a “horrible decaying flesh smell” and noted the situation is adding “insult to injury” as the region recovers from record-setting rainfall and flooding.

Sections of Interstate 40 were closed for days due to aftermath of Hurricane Florence. Vast sections of the interstate had water deep enough to allow boaters to travel the interstate, according to NCDOT drone footage.

The Myrtle Beach Sun News reported Saturday that marine fatalities of the storm also included a 20-foot-long whale that washed up on Caswell Beach. It was later buried by the town behind a dune, the newspaper reported.

The clean-up is beginning, but the environmental damage will take years, if not decades to fix, and that's not counting the very real possibility that a region that has drowned twice now under two 1000-year floods in two years doesn't get a third in the coming months or years ahead.  Or a fourth.  Or a fifth...

Trump Trades Blows, Con't

Trump's trade war with China, if fully implemented, could cost more than 700,000 automotive jobs in the US and add thousands to the price of new vehicles.

The impact of President Donald Trump's escalating tit-for-tat over tariffs is already being felt, say auto industry experts. New car prices are beginning to rise, and auto exports are dropping. But a new report warns that sales could plunge by as much as 2 million vehicles a year, resulting in the loss of up to 715,000 American jobs and a hit of as much as $62 billion to the U.S. GDP.

The Center for Automotive Research cites the biggest concern as the threatened use of trade rules known as Section 232 that would declare foreign-made cars and car parts a threat to national security. That could trigger a “downward cycle” in an auto industry already showing signs of decline after rebounding from the Great Recession, said Kristin Dziczek, a vice president and senior economist at the Center for Automotive Research, or CAR, in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

CAR’s new study is echoed by a variety of other studies looking at the potential impact of the Trump administration’s escalating trade war.

Already enacted tariffs on imported aluminum and steel have added about $240 to the cost of producing a new car, truck, or crossover in the U.S., noted Peter Nagle, a senior economist with research firm IHS Markit. And the first round of tariffs with China is adding still more to the price that manufacturers have to pay for a variety of parts used on American assembly lines.

The impact will grow as a result of the second round of China tariffs, Nagle added, cautioning that a “dizzying” series of trade moves will “exacerbate” the problems the auto industry faces as it struggles to head off the first downturn in sales since emerging from the depths of the last recession. Activating tariffs using Section 232 rules would likely prove devastating, he warned.

Nagel estimated consumers would be “looking at price increases of $1,300 for a typical mass market product, up to $5,800 for a luxury vehicle.” Those increases would not be limited to just imported vehicles. Toyota, for example, has forecast the price of a U.S.-made Camry would rise about $1,600.

In line with the new CAR study, IHS forecasts U.S. new vehicle sales would plunge by around 2 million vehicles annually, to 16.5 million a year from 2019 to 2025.

Add the possible tear-up of the North American Free Trade Agreement and the impact could be devastating. Under NAFTA, automakers have established a continent-wide network of parts and vehicle assembly operations. That’s backed up by a global production system that has been finely tuned, with little room for disruption. But industry experts warn that the Trump administration’s trade moves threaten to fracture that grid.

The impact could mean more than just higher costs. A number of medium-sized and smaller parts suppliers could be forced out of business, unable to afford the cost of relocating their operations back to the U.S. That could result in disruptions at assembly plants, said Nagle, possibly meaning shortages of some products, and a big hit to automakers’ profits.

So yes, in the short-term, it would be good for parts plants and suppliers already in the US.  But for anyone who gets parts from China, it would be devastating.  And 700,000 lost jobs coupled with the far-reaching effects of a NAFTA collapse would almost assure another brutal recession next year.

I'm not sure what Trump is thinking, but enough MAGA-hat good 'ol boys out of work at the parts plants in the Midwest and he's going to be congratulating a Democratic president in 2020.

The Blue Wave Rises, Con't

With just over six weeks until November midterms, the good news is that Democrats continue to hold a double-digit generic ballot lead in the latest NBC/WSJ poll.  The bad news is that gerrymandering and the Senate structural map mean it still may not be enough to take back control of the House and Senate.

The pollsters' so-called "generic ballot" pitting the two parties for the House illustrates the GOP predicament most broadly. In 1994, before seizing control of both the House and Senate from Democrats, Republicans led on that question by four percentage points; in 2006, before Democrats seized them back, they led by 10 points.

Their 12-point national lead today includes a margin of 30 points in House districts Democrats already hold. That means some of those anti-Trump votes will merely translate into larger victories for Democratic incumbents without producing any of the 23 additional seats the party needs to make Nancy Pelosi speaker again.

But the best evidence of vulnerability for Trump and his party lies in the seats Republicans already hold. The survey shows Republicans leading by only a single percentage point in those districts.

Overall, a 42 percent plurality of voters say they want to place a check on President Trump, compared to 31 percent who aim to help him achieve his objectives. Even in Republican-held districts, 38 percent want a check on their party's president.

Moreover, Democrats have generated wide advantages among key swing groups within the electorate. The poll shows them leading by 31 percentage points among independents, 33 points among moderates and 12 points among white women.

Among white college graduates, a group Republicans carried by nine points in 2014 mid-term elections, Republicans now trail by 15 points. Among white women without college degrees, a group Republicans carried by 10 points in 2014, Republicans now trail by five points.

"The Republican coalition is, at the moment, unhinged," said McInturff, the Republican pollster. The party's erosion among women voters heightens the potential risk for Republicans in the ongoing furor over sexual assault allegations against Trump's Supreme Court pick Brett Kavanaugh.

If these numbers hold true, Democrats are going to make gains, and possibly big gains.  But that one point GOP lead in red districts makes me think that voter suppression could sharply limit those gains.  Yes, it means that the average Republican House seat is in real trouble.  But it also means that it would only take a point or two shaved off in turnout through voter suppression for a lot of these endangered Republicans in toss-up races to hold on.

What we need in November is presidential election-level turnout.

If turnout is a dismal 32% like it was in 2014, the GOP is not only going to keep the House, they will have 57 or 58 Senate seats by the time the dust settles.

We have to vote in numbers that Republicans cannot suppress. We need record midterm turnout, and that's just not going to happen.  I will be shocked if all this "enthusiasm" translates into total turnout being over 35%.  We know we'll be lucky if turnout among Millennials is even 20%.  In 2014 it was 17%.

I'm just not seeing the turnout numbers in polls that we have to have, guys.  That has to change or we're done as a country.

Sunday Long Read: A Fat Lot Of Good That Will Do

This week's Sunday Long Read comes from HuffPost Highline's Michael Hobbes as he breaks one of the final taboo medical barriers in America: the diagnosis and treatment of obesity.  Everything we know about obesity and everything we prescribe for it are at such staggering odds that the cures are literally making millions of us less healthy every year, and it's time for a sea change.

About 40 years ago, Americans started getting much larger. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly 80 percent of adults and about one-third of children now meet the clinical definition of overweight or obese. More Americans live with “extreme obesity“ than with breast cancer, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and HIV put together.

And the medical community’s primary response to this shift has been to blame fat people for being fat. Obesity, we are told, is a personal failing that strains our health care system, shrinks our GDP and saps our military strength. It is also an excuse to bully fat people in one sentence and then inform them in the next that you are doing it for their own good. That’s why the fear of becoming fat, or staying that way, drives Americans to spend more on dieting every year than we spend on video games or movies. Forty-five percent of adults say they’re preoccupied with their weight some or all of the time—an 11-point rise since 1990. Nearly half of 3- to 6- year old girls say they worry about being fat. 

The emotional costs are incalculable. I have never written a story where so many of my sources cried during interviews, where they double- and triple-checked that I would not reveal their names, where they shook with anger describing their interactions with doctors and strangers and their own families. One remembered kids singing “Baby Beluga” as she boarded the school bus, another said she has tried diets so extreme she has passed out and yet another described the elaborate measures he takes to keep his spouse from seeing him naked in the light. A medical technician I’ll call Sam (he asked me to change his name so his wife wouldn’t find out he spoke to me) said that one glimpse of himself in a mirror can destroy his mood for days. “I have this sense I’m fat and I shouldn’t be,” he says. “It feels like the worst kind of weakness.”

My interest in this issue is slightly more than journalistic. Growing up, my mother’s weight was the uncredited co-star of every family drama, the obvious, unspoken reason why she never got out of the car when she picked me up from school, why she disappeared from the family photo album for years at a time, why she spent hours making meatloaf then sat beside us eating a bowl of carrots. Last year, for the first time, we talked about her weight in detail. When I asked if she was ever bullied, she recalled some guy calling her a “fat slob” as she biked past him years ago. “But that was rare,” she says. “The bigger way my weight affected my life was that I waited to do things because I thought fat people couldn’t do them.” She got her master’s degree at 38, her Ph.D. at 55. “I avoided so many activities where I thought my weight would discredit me.”

But my mother’s story, like Sam’s, like everyone’s, didn’t have to turn out like this. For 60 years, doctors and researchers have known two things that could have improved, or even saved, millions of lives. The first is that diets do not work. Not just paleo or Atkins or Weight Watchers or Goop, but all diets. Since 1959, research has shown that 95 to 98 percent of attempts to lose weight fail and that two-thirds of dieters gain back more than they lost. The reasons are biological and irreversible. As early as 1969, research showed that losing just 3 percent of your body weight resulted in a 17 percent slowdown in your metabolism—a body-wide starvation response that blasts you with hunger hormones and drops your internal temperature until you rise back to your highest weight. Keeping weight off means fighting your body’s energy-regulation system and battling hunger all day, every day, for the rest of your life.

The second big lesson the medical establishment has learned and rejected over and over again is that weight and health are not perfect synonyms. Yes, nearly every population-level study finds that fat people have worse cardiovascular health than thin people. But individuals are not averages: Studies have found that anywhere from one-third to three-quarters of people classified as obese are metabolically healthy. They show no signs of elevated blood pressure, insulin resistance or high cholesterol. Meanwhile, about a quarter of non-overweight people are what epidemiologists call “the lean unhealthy.” A 2016 study that followed participants for an average of 19 years found that unfit skinny people were twice as likely to get diabetes as fit fat people. Habits, no matter your size, are what really matter. Dozens of indicators, from vegetable consumption to regular exercise to grip strength, provide a better snapshot of someone’s health than looking at her from across a room.

The terrible irony is that for 60 years, we’ve approached the obesity epidemic like a fad dieter: If we just try the exact same thing one more time, we'll get a different result. And so it’s time for a paradigm shift. We’re not going to become a skinnier country. But we still have a chance to become a healthier one.

Having struggled with my weight all my life, I constantly get reminded of my size and people's disgust with it.  It's affected me professionally, personally, and in every relationship I have.  Diets never worked for me.  Having a job where I walk a couple miles a day around a manufacturing campus has helped make me fit, but it hasn't helped me lose weight in four-plus years.

My blood pressure and blood sugar levels are fine as of my last checkup.  My heart rate is not horrible.  I don't smoke, don't do drugs, barely drink socially, and that's when on the rare occasion I'm in a social situation.

It's not fun.  It's been a problem all my life.  The rest of my family is in pretty good shape. I weigh more than any two of them put together, and inevitably I get how they are "concerned".

So am I, but there has to be a better approach.

Last Call For Deportation Nation, Con't

Earlier this month I warned that the Trump regime was driving immigrants away (both documented and those with undocumented family members) away from government food programs with the twin threats of both using registration information to give to ICE, and by the threat of denying green cards to those immigrants who use public food programs.

The result was that hundreds of thousands, if not millions of immigrants were abandoning food assistance programs like SNAP and WIC and housing programs like Section 8, even those with US citizen children.

As of Saturday, that threat of denial of citizenship and deportation as a consequence of using any government food or housing program is now a harsh Trump regime reality.

Trump administration officials announced Saturday that immigrants who legally use public benefits like food assistance and Section 8 housing vouchers could be denied green cards under new rules aimed at keeping out people the administration deems a drain on the country.

The move could force millions of poor immigrants who rely on public assistance for food and shelter to make a difficult choice between accepting financial help and seeking a green card to live and work legally in the United States.

Older immigrants, many of whom get low-cost prescription drugs through the Medicare Part D program, could also be forced to stop participating in the popular benefits program or risk being deemed a “public charge” who is ineligible for legal resident status.

The move is not intended to affect most immigrants who have already been granted green cards, but advocates have said they fear that those with legal resident status will stop using public benefits to protect their status. The regulation, which the administration said would affect about 382,000 people a year, is the latest in a series of aggressive crackdowns by President Trump and his hard-line aides on legal and illegal immigration.

Federal law has always required those seeking green cards to prove they will not be a burden and has taken into consideration the acceptance of cash benefits. But the government has never before considered the use of other public benefits, like assistance for food.

Now, the new regulation — announced on the Department of Homeland Security website — will require that immigration caseworkers consider the use of public benefits to be “heavily weighed negative factors” for those who are applying to remain legally in the country on a permanent basis. Those who are deemed likely to become dependent on government assistance will probably be denied.

Denied and deported.  And what becomes of their US citizen children?  Well, who cares?  That's the state's problem, not Trump's, right?  If they can't be placed with relatives (who will also get careful scrutiny) then into the foster care system they go.

Or worse.  Our government keeps kids in cages, you know.  Hell, who's going to advocate if a toddler can prove his citizenship?  Not this regime.  Maybe we "keep the families together" and everybody gets a one-way trip out of the country.  It's humane, see?

And so it goes.

Deportation Nation.

The Endless Search For Enemies

The White House is preparing orders for antitrust investigations to bring down Google, Facebook, Twitter, and other "enemies of the state" because they allow criticism of Dear Leader, as we grow one step closer to authoritarian control of the internet.

The White House has drafted an executive order for President Donald Trump’s signature that would instruct federal antitrust and law enforcement agencies to open probes into the practices of Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Facebook Inc., and other social media companies.

The order is in its preliminary stages and hasn’t yet been run past other government agencies, said a White House official. Bloomberg News obtained a draft of the order.

The document instructs U.S. antitrust authorities to “thoroughly investigate whether any online platform has acted in violation of the antitrust laws.” It instructs other government agencies to recommend within a month after it’s signed, actions that could potentially “protect competition among online platforms and address online platform bias.”

The document doesn’t name any companies. If signed, the order would represent a significant escalation of Trump’s aversion to Google, Facebook, Twitter and other social media companies, whom he’s publicly accused of silencing conservative voices and news sources online.

The press offices of Google, Facebook and Twitter didn’t respond Saturday to emails and telephone calls requesting comment.

No, the document hasn't named any companies, but it doesn't have to in order to intimidate Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon's parent companies and their other businesses, including the Washington Post, to suddenly make sure that their coverage of Trump is a whole lot nicer.

The draft order directs that any actions federal agencies take should be “consistent with other laws” -- an apparent nod to concerns that it could threaten the traditional independence of U.S. law enforcement or conflict with the First Amendment, which protects political views from government regulation.

“Because of their critical role in American society, it is essential that American citizens are protected from anticompetitive acts by dominant online platforms,” the order says. It adds that consumer harm -- a key measure in antitrust investigations -- could come “through the exercise of bias.”

The order’s preliminary status is reflected in the text of the draft, which includes a note in red that the first section could be expanded “if necessary, to provide more detail on role of platforms and the importance of competition.”

Drowning Big Tech in antitrust investigations sure is a good way to crash stock prices.  Whether or not you believe the government should be paying attention to the outsized market share of these companies -- and it should, frankly -- going after them because of political revenge isn't the way to do it.

Keep an eye on this one.  Expect it to go places, especially should the GOP lose control of the House and/or Senate in November.

Trump always needs an enemy to blame...

Supreme Misgivings, Con't

The wheels are now officially coming off the Brett Kavanaugh nomination.

A press adviser helping lead the Senate Judiciary Committee’s response to a sexual assault allegation against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh has stepped down amid evidence he was fired from a previous political job in part because of a sexual harassment allegation against him.

Garrett Ventry, 29, who served as a communications aide to the committee chaired by Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, had been helping coordinate the majority party's messaging in the wake of Christine Blasey Ford’s claim that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her 36 years ago at a high school party. In a response to NBC News, Ventry denied any past "allegations of misconduct."

After NBC News raised questions about Ventry's employment history and the sexual harassment allegation against him, Judiciary Committee Spokesman Taylor Foy replied in a statement: "While (Ventry) strongly denies allegations of wrongdoing, he decided to resign to avoid causing any distraction from the work of the committee."

Republicans familiar with the situation had been concerned that Ventry, because of his history, could not lead an effective communications response.

Ventry worked as a social media adviser in 2017 in the office of North Carolina House Majority Leader John Bell, who fired Ventry after several months.

“Mr. Ventry did work in my office and he’s no longer there, he moved on,” Bell told NBC News. He refused to discuss the precise nature of the firing.

Ventry did not answer questions about the circumstances of his departure but said, "I deny allegations of misconduct." He also forwarded a letter of resignation he said he sent to Bell, giving two weeks notice. "Thank you for the opportunity to serve on the staff of the North Carolina House Majority leader at the North Carolina General Assembly," it read.

Sources familiar with the situation said Ventry was let go from Bell’s office after parts of his résumé were found to have been embellished, and because he faced an accusation of sexual harassment from a female employee of the North Carolina General Assembly's Republican staff.

Ventry’s termination was described to NBC News as unusually swift for an office with little overall turnover.

Hard to defend the Supreme Court nominee accused of sexual harassment when your media response team is led by a guy accused of sexual harassment.  Or hey, maybe he has relevant experience!

Of course, the main issue is now it's blinding obvious that the GOP is leading a coordinated effort to destroy Dr. Christine Blasey-Ford's life, and right-wing noisemaker Ed Whelen has all but given the game away.

Yesterday, Whelan, the president of the Ethics and & Public Policy Center, a conservative think tank, and an assertive supporter of Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court, took to Twitter to lay out a Hardy Boys-inspired scenario, suggesting that Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who accused Kavanaugh of attempted rape in high school, might have been mistaken about the identity of her alleged sexual assaulter. Using a mash-up of yearbook photos, Zillow information, Google Maps and Facebook, Whelan laid out a “case” that another man, a former classmate of Kavanaugh’s at Georgetown Prep—whom he named and provided a current photograph of—might have been the person Ford has in mind. After his wild theory received widespread criticism, Whelan deleted the tweets, and tried to walk back the accusation this morning.

But, if it’s false, it’s already too late to protect him against a possible defamation claim.

The common law of defamation isn’t that complicated. To be liable, the defendant must make an intentionally or negligently false statement about the plaintiff that tends to cause reputational harm, and harm must actually ensue.

The requirement that the statements Whelan made about the “mystery man” (whom we’ll not re-identify here) be false might be the most difficult requirement to satisfy. The first question courts ask is whether a reasonable person would think that the defendant was saying something that would be taken as the truth—because a statement can only be “false” if compared to a true one. Generally, opinions are not actionable, if the defendant sets forth the basis for them and doesn’t claim them to be true. Whelan might argue that he himself was publishing an opinion, as one of the last tweets in the storm has this disclaimer: “I have no idea what, if anything, did or did not happen in that bedroom at the top of the stairs.”

But that may not be enough to insulate Whelan, given that he also wrote of “compelling reasons to believe” Kavanaugh’s denial, and then launched into a Twitterstorm examination of what he clearly presents as evidence in support of his “theory.” A reasonable person might well think he was making a claim about what “really” happened. The case he builds reads much more like a series of factual, evidence-based claims than an opinion. The mystery man, though, will have the burden of proving that the statement Whelan made was false, and would be reasonably taken that way.

Whelan retracted everything, but it turns out he was pushed by a GOP PR firm into running with the accusations, the same group behind the now infamous Swift Boat accusations against John Kerry.

The larger problem for Kavanaugh though is that it's looking more and more like both the nominee and the White House knew full well what Whelan was up to, meaning they were in on the smear from the start.  If that's the case, then I don't see how Kavanaugh survives.

Hell, it's getting so bad for the GOP that they can't help themselves and have already created this year's Todd Akin moment.

Rep. Kevin Cramer (R-ND), the GOP Senate nominee, said Friday that giving credence to allegations that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted a young woman when they were teenagers is “absurd.”

Cramer sounded off on professor Christine Blasey Ford’s claim that Brett Kavanaugh drunkenly sexually assaulted her when she was 15 and he was 17 during a radio interview, describing them as “even more absurd” than Anita Hill’s accusations that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her because of Kavanaugh’s age at the time and because it was “an attempt or something that never went anywhere.”

“This case is even more absurd because these people were teenagers when this supposed, alleged incident took place. Teenagers. Not a boss, supervisor-subordinate situation as the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill situation was claimed to be,” he said during an appearance on KNOX. “These are teenagers who evidently were drunk according to her own, her own statements. They were drunk when it evidently happened… even by her own accusation. Again, it was supposedly an attempt or something that never went anywhere. So you just have to wonder.”

Congratulations to Heidi Heitkamp for having this dirt clod as an opponent, because she just won re-election.

Everything that the GOP could possibly be doing to drive the massive gender gap higher and to lose women for a generation is happening.

Another #MeToo Moment, Con't

Another woman comes forward, another politician ends their reelection campaign, but the circumstances surrounding Minnesota Republican state Rep. Jim Knoblach here are far more serious.

Republican state Rep. Jim Knoblach abruptly ended his re-election campaign Friday as MPR News prepared to publish detailed accusations from his daughter of inappropriate behavior toward her since childhood.

The announcement came hours after an attorney for Knoblach denied the allegations in an interview.

Knoblach, who chairs the House Ways and Means Committee, declined to be interviewed after being approached more than a week ago.

In a written statement, Knoblach called the allegations "indescribably hurtful" and said he would work toward healing his family.

"I love my children more than anything, and would never do anything to hurt them. Her allegations are false," Knoblach wrote. "I and other family members have made repeated attempts to reconcile with her in recent years, but she has refused."

The timing of his exit could make his St. Cloud-area seat, already a top target for Democrats, impossible for Republicans to hold, barring some kind of court intervention or a write-in campaign by a substitute candidate. Knoblach was seeking a ninth term and was being challenged by Democratic candidate Dan Wolgamott, also of St. Cloud. Knoblach plans to serve out his term.

Yes America, fathers abuse their daughters (and their sons.)  It happens far more often than you think, because it is kept silent for years, for decades, for lifetimes.

Knoblach's daughter, Laura, alleges that the prominent legislator inappropriately touched her for most of her life, behavior she confided to close friends, family and authority figures at her school and church for more than a decade.

She said she decided to tell her story to MPR News after exhausting other means to hold her father accountable, including a 2017 investigation by local law enforcement. No charges resulted. She provided MPR News with extensive documentation about her attempts to get help.

Laura Knoblach, 23, said she first remembers her father, an eight-term state representative, touching her when she was 9 years old. He came into her room after she'd gone to bed and climbed in and laid down behind her.

"He would put his arm around me and not let me get up or get away and he would lick my neck or bite my ear," she said in an interview with MPR News.

You will never convince me that coming forward like this isn't the definition of bravery, because of this.

Susan Gaertner, Jim Knoblach's attorney, said while her client denied the allegations, he "does not want to drag his family through six weeks of hell."

Gaertner suggested Laura Knoblach disagrees with her father's political beliefs and her actions are politically motivated.

"There have been family conflicts, as is true of any family, some of them have been quite difficult," Gaertner told MPR News. "You add a layer of family conflicts to politics, and that makes the situation even more difficult."

And so it goes.  A woman who has exhausted all other options to make the abuse stop is accused of purposely wrecking her father's political career by another woman, made out to be the villain for daring to come forward now.  I'm sure Laura is already receiving death threats and hate mail, phone calls and shouted insults.

She may have to move from where she lives in Boulder, Colorado, but it won't matter because this will be used to define her for the rest of her life, "Aren't you the woman who turned in her dad in Minnesota for abuse and ended his political career?"

Men reading this, I guarantee you that your wife, your girlfriend, your best friend, your sister, your niece, your female co-worker, your kid's teacher, your friend's wife, your aunt, your mother, your daughter, all have stories that they never told a soul.  They carry it with them every day and you would never, ever know. If you ask, they may not be ready to tell you, even though they trust and love you, even though they've known you for decades.

But that story is there.