Last Call For The Blue Wave Rises, Con't

In the Midwest, Republicans are counting on Senate wins in Missouri, Indiana, and in nearby West Virginia to keep the Senate.  But nobody's talking about Trump's collapse in the states that proved decisive to his Electoral College win two years ago: Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa are states Trump won, all with GOP state legislatures and all but Pennsylvania have GOP governors.  

That is expected to change drastically next month as Midwest Democrats are openly running against Trump and winning.

A number of Republicans running for governor or senator in Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania, including several who hitched their wagon to Trump’s political movement, are behind in polls by double digits, a remarkable turnabout in swing states that were key to the president’s 2016 victory.

If current polling averages hold, Democrats will maintain all their Senate seats in those states, pick up a handful of House seats and, in some cases, retake the governors’ mansions. In nearby Iowa, a state Trump won by nearly 10 points, the Democratic candidate for governor was running about even with the Republican governor in a Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll. Polling this week found Gov. Scott Walker (R-Wis.) trailing his Democratic opponent, Tony Evers.

The dramatic shift has forced political strategists to reevaluate their post-mortem lessons from the 2016 election, while raising new questions about Trump’s staying power in 2020. Democratic strategists, who worried that Iowa and Ohio were slipping away from them in presidential years, are now heartened and have begun to return their attention to the traditional bellwethers.

“One false assumption that was made was that a Trump voter from the 2016 election was necessarily a Republican voter,” said John Brabender, a GOP consultant who is working with Barletta. “We forget about the power of Hillary Clinton being on the ballot in 2016. If Hillary was on the ballot, Republicans would probably be doing better in all of these states.”

But Hillary's not on the ballot.  Donald Trump's failures are.  And they're killing the GOP.

There is a clear historical precedent for such a shift. Then-candidate Barack Obama swept the industrial Midwest in the 2008 elections, only to find his party battered in his first midterm contest two years later, when Republicans retook governorships in Ohio, Michigan, Iowa and Wisconsin, along with Senate seats in Indiana and Wisconsin. Obama was nonetheless able to come back and win those same states, with the exception of Indiana, in his 2012 reelection.

Pollsters do not rule out Trump repeating that success in 2020, especially if the economy remains strong. “He could certainly do what Obama did,” said Berwood Yost, the polling director at Franklin and Marshall College, which tracks Pennsylvania voters. “Trump’s approval rating in our state is about the same place Obama’s was in 2010.”

Still, the short-term impact is dire for Republicans. After surprising the nation in 2016, Trump appears to be driving turnout this year that will largely benefit Democrats, as moderate voters, and college-educated women in particular, seek an outlet for their frustration with his policies and behavior. Trump’s aggressive campaign schedule for Republicans in these states has so far failed to turn the tide.

Republicans were talking about taking 60 Senate seats a year ago, that Debbie Stabenow in Michigan, Sherrod Brown in Ohio, Bob Casey in Pennsylvania and Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin were all vulnerable and ripe to be picked off.  They're all well ahead, and Republicans are also in real trouble in Governor's races in Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan and even Iowa.

There are going to be a lot of surprised Republicans in three weeks, but we have to vote.

Deportation Nation, Con't

Yesterday I talked about how Latinx voters are staying home, convinced that Republicans hate them, but that Democrats are indifferent.  That's not stopping Republicans from continuing Trump's hateful rhetoric towards immigrants, and the fact of the matter is in red state races, portraying virtuous white voters as under siege from those people is a tried and true tactic to tighten up races and whittle down both Democratic turnout and the generic ballot lead.

Not long ago, as heart-rending images of migrant children separated from their parents at the border filled the airwaves, the issue of immigration seemed to be losing some of its potency as a weapon for Republicans with the midterm elections approaching. 

But Republican candidates across the country, leaning on the scorched-earth campaign playbook employed by President Trump, saw an opening nonetheless, painting Democrats as the ones pursuing an extreme immigration agenda that would fill the country with “sanctuary cities” where violent criminals roam free. 

The strategy, in play in a growing number of races, may be working. As a tight battle for control of Congress enters its closing weeks, Democrats have found that in politically competitive states, particularly ones that Mr. Trump carried in 2016, the attacks can easily turn crucial voting blocs against Democrats. 

“Sanctuary attacks pack a punch,” says a four-page memorandum, prepared by the liberal Center for American Progress and the centrist think tank Third Way, that has been shared at about a dozen briefings for Democrats in recent weeks. The New York Times obtained a copy of the memo, whose findings are based on interviews and surveys conducted over the summer.

Many of the Republican attacks use misleading language and employ overblown claims about the dangers of immigrants. But the fear-based appeal demonstrates how Mr. Trump has overcome months of negative headlines about his hard-edge immigration policies to make the issue a potentially profitable one as Republicans try to preserve their slim Senate majority and defy projections that they will lose the House. 

Democrats, the strategists who prepared the memo advised, could neutralize the attacks if they responded head-on. But they should spend “as little time as possible” talking about immigration itself, and instead pivot to more fruitful issues for Democrats like health care and taxation.
The strategists worry that Republicans’ foreboding immigration message is far more personal to most voters than the more modulated position of Democrats, whose push to protect the young immigrants known as Dreamers and to ensure humane treatment of undocumented people does not, in many cases, affect voters themselves. 

“It is very difficult to win on immigration with vulnerable voters in the states Trump carried in 2016,” the strategy memo said, arguing that “even the most draconian of Republican policies,” such as family separation and threats to deport the Dreamers — undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children — failed to sway most of them. 

But where Democrats see caution signs, Republicans see opportunities. Matt Gorman, the communications director of the National Republican Congressional Committee, the party’s House campaign arm, said immigration themes — “sanctuary cities” in particular, as well as liberal calls to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement — were among voters’ top concerns in some places where Hillary Clinton won in 2016 and where Republicans are now battling to hang on to competitive seats.

So yes, Republicans are absolutely playing the fear card, and it's working.  But Democrats are stupidly playing right into GOP hands with the idiocy that ICE will ever be abolished, and while sanctuary cities work for NYC and LA and Chicago, it doesn't play well in Kansas City or Fargo or here in Cincinnati.

Democrats are, as usual, finding a way to blow it here in the Midwest, and they have nobody to blame but themselves.

The Eye Of The Storm

Florida went easy on housing contractors in the panhandle area and the state didn't require tougher building codes inland from the shore after Hurricane Andrew until 2007.  That definitely contributed to the devastation from Hurricane Michael as the storm ripped through the state last week, and we're still trying to categorize the damage there.

It was once argued that the trees would help save Florida’s Panhandle from the fury of a hurricane, as the acres of forests in the region would provide a natural barrier to savage winds that accompany the deadly storms.

It’s part of the reason that tighter building codes — mandatory in places such as South Florida — were not put in place for most of this region until just 11 years ago.

And it may be a painful lesson for area residents now that Hurricane Michael has ravaged the region, leaving sustained damage from the coast inland all the way to the Georgia border.

“We’re learning painfully that we shouldn’t be doing those kinds of exemptions,” said Don Brown, a former legislator from the Panhandle who now sits on the Florida Building Commission. “We are vulnerable as any other part of the state. There was this whole notion that the trees were going to help us, take the wind out of the storm. Those trees become projectiles and flying objects.”

Hurricane Andrew a generation ago razed Florida’s most-populated areas with winds up to 165 mph (265 kph), damaging or blowing apart over 125,000 homes and obliterating almost all mobile homes in its path.

The acres of flattened homes showed how contractors cut corners amid the patchwork of codes Florida had at the time. For example, flimsy particle board was used under roofs instead of sturdier plywood, and staples were used instead of roofing nails.

Since 2001, structures statewide must be built to withstand winds of 111 mph (178 kph) and up; the Miami area is considered a “high velocity hurricane zone” with much higher standards, requiring many structures to withstand hurricane winds in excess of 170 mph (273 kph).

Though Michael was packing winds as high as 155 mph, any boost in the level of safety requirements for builders helps a home avoid disintegrating in a hurricane.

Tom Lee, a homebuilder and legislator, says past hurricanes have shown time and time again that the stricter codes help. He said during past hurricanes he looked at the damage by plane and could tell if a home was built before the new code.

“The structural integrity of our housing stock is leaps and bounds beyond what it was,” said Lee.

The codes call for shatterproof windows, fortified roofs and reinforced concrete pillars, among other specifications. But it wasn’t until 2007 that homes built in the Panhandle more than one mile from shore were required to follow the higher standards. And Hurricane Michael pummeled the region with devastating winds from the sea all the way into Georgia, destroying buildings more than 70 miles from the shoreline.

Gov. Rick Scott said it may be time for Florida to boost its standards — considered the toughest in the nation— even further.

“After every event, you always go back and look what you can do better,” Scott said. “After Andrew, the codes changed dramatically in our state. Every time something like this happens, you have to say to yourself, ‘Is there something we can do better?’”

Other coastal states should be paying attention, especially Virginia up into New England.  Hurricanes are only going to get more powerful as the Atlantic heats up, and it won't be long until a Michael-force hurricane takes aim at states without storm-resistant building codes and a lot of old buildings.

I loathe Rick Scott, but Florida does have the state's toughest storm building codes, and it's time that everyone else on the Atlantic Seaboard catches up.

StupidiNews!

• A transit bus crash in Los Angeles injured more than two dozen as the bus jumped the median on the 405 into oncoming traffic.
• New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood is pushing for a major investigation into a Friday incident involving right-wing group "Proud Boys" assaulting multiple people in NYC.
• Ford and JP Morgan are just two US companies now pulling out of a Saudi Arabian investor event next week after the disappearance of Saudi dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
• Donald Trump is threatening yet another round of Chinese tariffs among other subjects in a "60 Minutes" interview with Leslie Stahl that aired Sunday night.
• New Jersey is suing the Trump regime over Florida's exemption from proposed offshore drilling, the state wants to know why Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke is giving only the Sunshine State a pass.

Last Call For Meat The Press, Con't

The case of missing Virginia resident and Saudi journalist dissident Jamal Khashoggi is only getting worse, as the Turks insist they have boatloads of physical evidence that he was lured into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul and executed, while US intelligence swears the Saudi royals wanted to "rendition" him out of the country.   Since the Trump regime is covering for the Saudis, and all eyes are firmly on Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the supposed reformist prince now faces international condemnation starting with Europe.

Britain, France and Germany have issued a joint statement telling Saudi Arabia they were treating the case of the missing journalist Jamal Khashoggi with “the utmost seriousness”.

The foreign ministers of the three countries demanded an investigation into Mr Khashoggi’s disappearance and called for a “detailed response” from Saudi Arabia.

“There needs to be a credible investigation to establish the truth about what happened, and – if relevant – to identify those bearing responsibility for the disappearance of Jamal Khashoggi, and ensure that they are held to account,” the foreign ministers said in the joint statement.

“We encourage joint Saudi-Turkish efforts in that regard, and expect the Saudi government to provide a complete and detailed response. We have conveyed this message directly to the Saudi authorities.”

Either way, nobody seems to know where he is, and with heavy bipartisan efforts to pressure Donald Trump into sanctions on Riyadh, the Saudis are already warning that they could easily drive the price of oil through the roof right before US midterm elections.

The Saudi stock market lost $33 billion of its value on Sunday amid investor worries about deteriorating international relations, one of the first signs of the economic pain that Riyadh could suffer over the affair.

In a column published just after the SPA statement, Saudi-owned Al Arabiya channel’s General Manager Turki Aldakhil warned that imposing sanctions on the world’s largest oil exporter could spark global economic disaster.

“It would lead to Saudi Arabia’s failure to commit to producing 7.5 million barrels. If the price of oil reaching $80 angered President Trump, no one should rule out the price jumping to $100, or $200, or even double that figure,” he wrote.

U.S. senators have triggered a provision of the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act requiring the president to determine whether a foreign person is responsible for a gross human rights violation. The act has in the past imposed visa bans and asset freezes on Russian officials.

Anti-Saudi sentiment in the U.S. Congress could conceivably raise pressure to pass the so-called No Oil Producing and Exporting Cartels Act, which would end sovereign immunity shielding OPEC members from U.S. legal action.

Needless to say, oil at $200 a barrel would decimate the US economy overnight, and the Trump regime knows it.  Don't expect them to do anything about Khashoggi's disappearance.  If anything, expect them to continue to help cover the crime up.

Deportation Nation, Con't

Latinx voters despise the GOP, but Democrats have failed miserably to make the case that they can fix the problems facing communities in Arizona, Nevada, Florida and Texas, all home to the Senate races that will decide control of upper chamber in January. In a country where Donald Trump can end up in the Oval Office and any information you give the government can and will be used by ICE against your family, many Latinx voters are just tuning out politics altogether and will stay home in November.

Democrats and activists working to turn out Latino voters say they face several obstacles, some of them created by the party itself.

And they worry that anger toward Trump, rather than driving votes, is turning people off of politics altogether.

"The more noise there is in Washington, D.C., oftentimes it can be confusing and it can be intimidating to voters," said Dan Sena, who is overseeing an estimated $30 million outreach effort to young and minority voters as executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. "I think there's been an intentional strategy from the White House to do that to communities of color."

Party organizers see potential in messages that emphasize bread-and-butter issues and community empowerment, but getting that to voters and registering new ones requires time, money and attention, all of which are in high demand to court other key voters.

About 55 percent of Latino voters reported that they had not yet been contacted by a campaign or party about registering to vote this year, according to a Latino Decisions survey for the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials last week.

Hispanic turnout traditionally lags behind other demographic groups, especially in midterm elections, where it dropped to a record low of 27 percent nationally in 2014, compared with 45 percent among whites, according to the Pew Research Center. And recent polls show Latinos less enthused about November than other minorities.

The issue is compounded by the fact that the Latino voting population skews younger than the overall one.

"Age by itself is the single biggest predictor of turnout and no other variable comes close," said Matt Barreto, co-founder of the polling firm Latino Decisions. "But overlaid on that, the reason young people don't vote is because they don't feel the system is responsive to them."

Some Democrats worry this dynamic has created a dangerous cycle of futility: The party needs to engage millions of young Hispanic voters to win tomorrow, but pursuing them means less time spent on voters who are likely to show up and decide elections today.

Young voters don't vote.  Latinx voters don't vote.  And young Latinx voters?  Forget about it.  If they did vote,  all those states would be solid blue.  But right now, they don't have a reason to care.

Sunday Long Read: The Walmart Of Heroin

Everything old is new again as Jennifer Percy's piece in NYT Magazine tells us, as Philly's Kensington neighborhood has become America's one-stop shop for heroin, serving the East Coast as America continues to lose the War on Drugs.

In the summer of 2017, when I first toured the area with Patrick Trainor, a special agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration, he called Kensington the largest open-air narcotics market for heroin on the East Coast. It’s known for having both the cheapest and purest heroin in the region and is a major supplier for dealers in Delaware, New Jersey and Maryland. For years, the heroin being sold in Kensington was pure enough to snort, but that summer, it was mixed with unpredictable amounts of fentanyl. In Philadelphia, deaths related to fentanyl had increased by 95 percent in the past year.

Philadelphia County has the highest overdose rate of any of the 10 most populous counties in America. The city’s Department of Health estimates that 75,000 residents are addicted to heroin and other opioids, and each day, many of them commute to Kensington to buy drugs. The neighborhood is part of the largest cluster of overdose deaths in the city. In 2017, 236 people fatally overdosed there.

“We have not only people from other parts of the state,” Trainor said, “we have people from other parts of the country who come here.” Every year, “drug tourists” from all over the United States visit Kensington for the heroin. Eunice Sanchez, a local pastor, put it more succinctly: the area, she said, was the “Walmart of heroin.”

Once a blue-collar factory neighborhood, Kensington was especially devastated when deindustrialization swept through the area in the 1950s. (Philadelphia neighborhoods don’t have officially designated boundaries, and the northeast section of the city, including West Kensington, East Kensington, Fairhill, Port Richmond and Olde Richmond, is often referred to as “Kensington.”) As the white population fled for the suburbs, Hispanic and African-American people moved in, and with few investments from the city, the drug market filled the economic vacuum. Houses transformed into drug dens, factories into spaces to shoot up, rail yards into homeless encampments. Most residents, many of them immigrant families who had come to Kensington for a better life, did not have the means to move.

In the early 2000s, Dominican gangs started bringing in Colombian heroin that was not only purer but much cheaper than heroin imported from Asia, which historically predominated. Kensington’s decentralized market kept competition high and prices low. Most corners were run by small, unaffiliated groups of dealers, making the area difficult to police; if a dealer was arrested, there was always someone there to replace him. The Philadelphia prison system has become the largest provider of drug treatment in the city. The police have realized that they can’t arrest the problem away, and they spend many of their calls reviving drug addicts with Narcan, an overdose-reversal spray. The D.E.A. focused on the high-level drug traffickers, not the guys working the streets, but the arrests did little to curb the growing demand.

“They call this the Badlands,” Elvis Campos, 47, said about Kensington. “Good people are held hostage in their homes.” Campos, who moved to the neighborhood 22 years ago, lives on a small, crumbling block next to a demolished crack house. “I didn’t know about the drugs when I came,” he said. “I found the house, and it was cheap.” No one on his block used or sold drugs, he said, and his neighbors worked hard to keep it clean. But dealers were always around their homes trying to sell. “I tell them to leave,” Campos said. “I served in Iraq, and I think that’s why I’m good at telling drug dealers to get off the block.”

Like Campos, many residents had come to Kensington simply because they couldn’t afford housing anywhere else, and though many expressed empathy for the users, they also wanted them to leave. People cleared needles off their lawns, their front steps and the sidewalks where their children played. Some wouldn’t go anywhere unless they were in a car, but a lot of families were too poor to afford a car. They organized cleanups, lobbied City Council members and state representatives and asked for help from church groups, but the problem seemed insurmountable. The drug market, institutional racism, joblessness and the ravages of the war on drugs in the ’80s left the community struggling. “You see everything here,” one female resident told me. “Overdoses, shootings, killings. We are exposed to trauma every day just living here. It’s constant.”

Dealers fought for territory and intimidated police informants. The area has one of the highest rates of shootings and murders in the city. Less than two-thirds of the residents have a high school diploma, and only a fraction have a bachelor’s degree. Nearly half the residents live below the poverty line. And yet parts of the neighborhood were solidly working-class, and the edges of the neighborhood were gentrifying. “The narrative of the opioid crisis is focused on big-pharma greed,” Zoë Van Orsdol, a public-health specialist, told me, “but in Kensington the reality is far more complicated.”

The residents are fighting back, but there's nowhere they can go.  They're trapped because nobody will buy their homes, so they can't move out.  Kensington never recovered from the bad ol' days of the 80's.   Both the city and the state are starting to remove encampments of homeless drug users, but treatment funding cuts from the Trump regime means that there's no extra money for getting users sober, so they just change locations.  And all the while, new addicts to big pharma painkillers know they can always go to Kensington if they need to take the edge off.

It's a human disaster and there's no end in sight.

Failing Egregious Meatheads, Again

72 hours after Hurricane Michael ripped into the Florida Panhandle, southern Georgia and the Carolinas, once again Brock Long and FEMA are nowhere to be found as residents are without food, water, shelter, and power for the foreseeable future.

Hurricane Michael’s sudden transformation into a storm that is unprecedented for the Florida Panhandle haunts everyone who lived through it. “It was raw power,” says Panama City resident Walter McAlster, “you felt you were in it, not outside and didn’t know if you would live through it. You knew that everything was going to change the landscape forever.”

And it did, in the span of three hours.

The destruction is everywhere, at every corner for as far as the eye can see. Mexico Beach, where the hurricane’s eyewall slammed into Florida with 140 mph winds, is flattened. Panama City, gem of the Emerald Coast, looks like a bomb had been dropped on it. Is now a desolate landscape of countless toppled power poles, transformers, electical lines, severed trees, and metal roofings, twisted and tangled into a sea of debris covering every road. Nearly all homes, businesses, stores, banks, schools are severely damaged or destroyed, skeletal remains with blown out windows or crushed facades. To residents, it is unrecognizable.

There is so much rubble that the official death toll of 14 is expected to rise as search-and-rescue teams inspect thousands of buildings, looking for the the missing. On Friday, a team from the Miami Fire Department found a body in a Mexico Beach home.

The flood of debris has rendered most roads and streets virtually impassible for evacuees and first responders. Electric poles bent at 90 degrees and power lines strewn like spaghetti cover most lanes. Nearly all transformers were destroyed. Vehicles dodge trees that look like they were split like toothpicks or pulled up from the ground as if by giants.

Driving across the Apalachicola National Forest reserve that borders the coast was like touring a cemetery: endless rows of decapitated trees, leaning perfectly aligned like fallen prisoners who had been executed. Thirty-foot tall electrical poles split in half, their power lines strewn across the macadam. It went on like this for 60 miles.

Since the storm, there’s been no electricity and no water in Panama City. Emergency disaster relief was yet to be seen in strength as of Saturday morning and residents are growing more frustrated and desperate by the day.

Chantell Goolspy sat in her car making phone calls to get help. Goolspy and many of her neighbors live in a public housing area in downtown Panama City that was badly devastated.

“We’re in need of food, water, anything, we’re not getting any help. The whole street needs help,” Goolspy told the Red Cross. “FEMA referred me to you. That person told me to call 211.”
Down the street, Barbara Sanders stood outside her daughter’s unit where she had come to stay during the hurricane.

“We’re not getting any help,” she said. “We need food. It’s just crazy.”

Sanders said not a single relief agency had come by to check on them. Only the police had come and it was to tell everyone to leave. “They told us there’s nothing they can do and it’s gonna take a long time to rebuild,” Sanders said.

The greatest country in the world got caught flatfooted on the response to yet another hurricane, and people are somehow surprised.  Meanwhile, Donald Trump continues to stump for Republicans in the Midwest, telling everyone how great he is, while hundreds of thousands are suffering across the Southeast.

Just another reminder that Trump and the GOP don't particularly care, and never did.  You're on your own, Florida.

 

Last Call For It's The Trumpconomy, Stupid

The NY Times notes that while college-educated suburban white women are bailing on the Republicans in huge numbers, college-educated white suburban men are sticking with Trump, and the reason is Trump's tax cuts have been very, very good for them.

White men without a college degree were Mr. Trump’s most reliable supporters, but they made up only 33 percent of his total vote. College-educated white men were also essential to putting him over the top.

One reason for their continued support now: White college-educated men have benefited unequally in the Trump economy. While the president’s favorite barometer of success, the stock market, is up 26 percent since he took office, individual stock ownership is concentrated among people in the upper income brackets, who are far more likely to be white. The Republican tax cut also delivered higher benefits to whites than to blacks or Latinos, according to a recent study.

These men, largely Trump voters whose support for him has solidified since his election, are business owners and sales executives, veterinarians and lawyers — men who largely wouldn’t be caught dead at a Trump rally chanting “Lock her up!”

They may cringe at a president who humiliates cabinet secretaries and foreign allies, and who utters a stream of easily disproved falsehoods.

But many have quietly struck a bargain with Mr. Trump: They will overlook his trampling of presidential norms because he is delivering just what they want on the economy, deregulation, immigration and foreign affairs.

“He’s tough, he’s a bully, but boy things are getting done,” said JD Kaplan, who runs a graphics business from his home on a neatly landscaped block in Dublin, an affluent suburb of Columbus. Mr. Kaplan, 63, who is a Republican activist, moved years ago from northeast Ohio’s struggling Rust Belt, where a younger brother still runs Kaplan Furniture, a store their grandfather founded.

“Whether it was Obama who started it or not, the economy’s better,” he said. “I see my brother’s businesses are doing better, my graphics business is doing better, my wife’s got a better job.’’

Dublin is in Ohio’s 12th Congressional District, where Troy Balderson, a Republican, squeaked out a 1-point victory in a special election in August.

Mr. Balderson is on the ballot again on Nov. 6 against the same Democratic opponent, Danny O’Connor. The race has dropped out of the national spotlight it held during the summer, but the same dynamics are at work: whether Mr. O’Connor, an official in Franklin County, which includes most of Dublin, can attract enough votes in the suburbs to offset rural conservatives who favor Mr. Balderson.

Here, as elsewhere around the country, the vote has become largely a referendum on the president.

Interviews in August and on a recent return visit showed that while Mr. Trump is losing droves of white women with college degrees, many of their male counterparts now strongly support him.

They are country-club Republicans who long voted for business-friendly politicians like Gov. John Kasich, who represented the 12th District in the House and is the national face of never-Trump Republicans.

Trump has given country-club male Republicans basically everything they could have wanted from a GOP government, especially economically, and no matter how much of an autocrat he is, they will never vote for Democrats as long as the economy remains in the non "crashing and on fire" state it was in 2008. 

That's the big reason why Obama won, because the economy was so bad, even the country-club Republicans didn't think the GOP could fix it.  Once the bleeding stopped and Obama tried to regulate Wall Street even a little, these same Republicans turned on him, and Democrats got repeatedly crushed.

Like it or not, white Republican men still run the country and have since forever, and that's not going to change anytime soon.

It doesn't mean however that we can't vote their proxies out.

Just don't depend on them to look out for anything more than their own interests.

The Real Housing Crisis

The availability of affordable housing in America's cities is only getting worse.  It's easy to blame NIMBY gentrification in a country where 90% of your wealth is tied up in your home (and the rest of us are just stuck being 10% as wealthy at max) and while local zoning regulations and homeowners voting to make housing as expensive as possible in order to raise home prices are both serious issues, let's not forget landlords and homebuilders looking to make as much money as possible on rents and scarcity.

One morning last year, Michele Carter woke up to find an eviction notice slipped under her apartment door. She had to move, she was later told, to make way for the renovation of her high-rise and the higher-paying tenants it would bring.

Ms. Carter, 66, an Air Force veteran who lives on a small monthly disability check, did not panic, at least not at first. She considered herself one of the lucky handful of her building’s tenants who had what they called a “golden lottery ticket” — a voucher from the federal government’s Section 8 housing program that would allow them to move anywhere in Philadelphia with a guaranteed subsidy paying 70 percent of the rent.

But she quickly discovered that her Section 8 voucher, for decades an essential way of providing low-income people with affordable housing, had diminishing value.

“I saw this flier for an apartment up on the wall in the building. It looked perfect. Then I get to the bottom, and in big black letters was written, ‘No Vouchers,’” said Ms. Carter, who ended up moving in with relatives for 13 months before being placed in a senior supportive living complex earlier this year. “That kind of thing happened over and over. I wore my eyes out looking at ads.”

For most of its existence, the main shortcoming of the Section 8 program, created in 1974 as an alternative to ghettoizing public housing projects, was its inability to keep up with demand. But the recent economic boom in Philadelphia, long one of the most affordable big cities in the Washington-to-Boston corridor, has led to rent increases even in poor and working-class neighborhoods, and many landlords are now refusing to accept the vouchers when they can get higher rents, without the bureaucratic red tape that plagues the program, on the open market.

A survey by the nonpartisan Urban Institute, commissioned by the Department of Housing and Urban Development and released in August, documented the problem in stark terms. It found that 67 percent of Philadelphia’s landlords refused to even consider voucher holders, some candidly citing the low subsidies and their desire to cash in on a hot market. The rejection rates were even higher in Fort Worth and Los Angeles, where three-quarters of landlords turned away Section 8 tenants.

Put at risk by these market forces is the future of a core federal housing program that now serves 2.2 million low-income families and was started with a simple goal: to enable those families to escape neighborhoods increasingly segregated along racial and economic lines for a place with decent housing and better schools, stores and transportation.

“It is a crisis,” said Rasheedah Phillips, managing attorney at Community Legal Services of Philadelphia’s housing unit, which defends tenants in court. “It used to be that Section 8 was basically a guarantee of shelter for families, for the elderly, for disabled people, but now it’s becoming much harder for tenants to get landlords to take the vouchers. And it’s only getting worse as the market heats up.”

Remember, under the Trump regime and HUD Secretary Ben Carson, Section 8 housing has already taken a big funding hit.  With the coming economic recession caused by Trump's trade war, we're going to see homelessness explode exponentially across the country.  It's going to be bad.

Remember the reasons why.

 

I'm At WTRUMP In Cincinnati

Tang the Conqueror did a victory lap here in the Cincinnati area last night, up at the Warren County Fairgrounds, once again snarling Friday traffic as he stumped for several Ohio candidates who have been quietly trying to run away from the orange albatross around their necks.

"We are more energized as Republicans than ever before," Trump told the crowd bundled against the chill on the outskirts of the Cincinnati region. "Did he get treated badly or unfairly or what? Horrible."

Returning to a recent incendiary talking point, Trump deemed the Democrats who opposed Kavanaugh "a mob," but said they would not stop him from potentially, he guessed, appointing up to four more justices to the court throughout his time in office -- for a total of six, or two-thirds of the court's nine justices.

"Republicans believe in the rule of law, not the rule of the mob," Trump said. "These are bad people. We can't let his happen to our country."

And he invoked Thursday's bizarre Oval Office appearance by hip hop megastar Kanye West, who held court across from Trump to call for prison reform, reveal his own struggles with mental illness, tout the need for an improved Air Force One and become likely the first person to utter the phrase "crazy motherf---er" -- at least in front of the press -- in that storied room.

"It was pretty amazing, wasn't it?" Trump asked with a smile before highlighting low minority unemployment numbers as a reason for black voters to switch to the GOP.

"We are asking all African-American voters to honor us with their support," Trump said. "Get away from the Democrats!"

Following along the teleprompter, Trump spent a few minutes extolling a slate of Republican candidates, including Rep. Jim Renacci, who is challenging Democratic U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, as well as Rep. Steve Chabot, who is in a hotly contested fight with Aftab Pureval.

"A vote for a Republican Congress is a vote for more jobs, more wealth, more products made right here in the USA, which is what we're all about," Trump said. "And a vote for a Republican is a vote to reject the Democratic politics of hatred, anger and division. You've seen that."

But most of the night resembled a greatest hits show, as Trump touted the growing economy, stressed the need for his proposed Space Force to defend the heavens, suggested the nation needed to build "bigger arenas" to hold his rally crowds and danced along the edge of offending two ethnic groups by exaggerating the threat posed by Latino MS-13 gang members by suggesting they be hauled off in "paddy wagons."

He also deemed many of his predecessors as "normal" before going on a rambling recollection of historical Ohioans, which included a salute to Ulysses S. Grant for overcoming Robert E. Lee if not his own alcoholism and suggesting that President William McKinley was a wildly underrated president.

Trump also managed to tie the controversy over NFL players kneeling for the national anthem to the moon landing, recalling Neil Armstrong's first moments on the lunar surface.

"There was no kneeling, there was no nothing," Trump said. "There was no games. BOOM. BOOM. Right, fellas?"

To recap, Trump spent an hour last night taking credit for the 1969 moon landing, for winning a national war against gangs that isn't national, the entire civil rights era (because Democrats did nothing for black folk) and for all of Ohio's presidents.

Oh, and something about Jim Renacci and Steve Chabot.  Mike DeWine was there, but he cut out early, literally running away from Trump in a state he won by eight points in 2016.  They all know the guy's poison, but they are stuck with him.

Good luck, Ohio Republicans...

Last Call For The Most Uncivil War

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trump Cards, Con't

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's Mueller Time, Con't

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stay tuned.

StupidiNews!

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