Last Call For These Disunited States, Con't

Democrats have finally figured out, after some ten years, that state legislatures are where the real action is as far as what rights Americans in those states are actually afforded. Likewise, they're pouring $20 million into state legislative races in key states like Michigan, Arizona, and Pennsylvania.

With the battle for state legislatures taking on an elevated importance during this midterm cycle, a Democratic super PAC is investing more than $20 million in state legislative races, with about 70 percent of the funds going to support candidates in 25 districts across Michigan, Pennsylvania and Arizona.

The investment is from Forward Majority, the super PAC, as Democrats across the country are pouring significant resources into state legislative races. Last month, the States Project, another Democratic super PAC, pledged to spend $60 million in legislative races in five states. And Tech + Campaigns, another Democratic group, has pledged to spend $8 million on such races.

State legislatures have long been dominated by Republicans, who have excelled at motivating their voters to engage beyond federal races. The party made a concerted effort to win state legislatures ahead of the 2010 redistricting cycle and then proceeded to draw gerrymandered legislative maps to help shore up their control. As a result, Republicans have complete control of 29 state legislatures.

But with the Supreme Court set to rule in a case that could give state legislatures nearly unchecked authority over federal elections, Democratic groups have been aggressively playing catch-up, reaching parity with Republicans in television ad spending this year.

Forward Majority, however, is focusing more of its spending on the detailed aspects of campaigning, like voter registration and a tactic known as “boosted news,” or the practice of paying to promote news articles on social media newsfeeds.

The group has been targeting suburban and exurban districts that are split 50-50 between Republicans and Democrats with a push to register new Democrats, who may be voters who have moved or who haven’t been engaged in a while, and encourage them to vote on the whole ballot instead of just the top of the ticket.

“Even as we see Joe Biden, Mark Kelly, Gretchen Whitmer win at the top of the ticket, we are still losing those races down-ballot,” said Vicky Hausman, a co-founder of Forward Majority. “So we have been obsessed with finding ways to add additional margin and add additional votes in these races.”

Republicans have noticed the increased investments of Democrats in state legislative races and have sounded the alarm to donors.

“We don’t have the luxury of relying on reinforcements to come save us,” Dee Duncan, the president of the Republican State Leadership Committee, wrote to donors last month. “We are the cavalry.”

The path for Democrats in Michigan, Arizona and Pennsylvania is narrow, but Ms. Hausman pointed to the thin margins in recent state legislative battles as an encouraging sign.

“The Virginia House was decided by about 600 votes in 2021,” she said. “The Arizona House came down to about 3,000 votes in two districts in 2020. So it is going to be a dogfight.”

 

I'm glad Democrats are finally playing hardball, but the time for this was in 2010.  Democrats gave away a dozen state legislatures to the GOP to be locked in through permanent gerrymandering in states like Florida, Ohio, and Wisconsin, and if SCOTUS sides on the plenary state legislature theory, you may never see a Democrat win a statewide race or even a House race in those states again, they'll simply be overturned by Republican supermajorities in each state legislature.

We've got one more chance to decide before SCOTUS weighs in.

Vote like your country depends on it.

That Poll-Asked Look, Con't

I'm no polling expert, I just call them how I see them. Having said that, UVA's Kayle Kondik and J. Miles Coleman are such polling experts, and what they are seeing is polls being all over the place, with possible major upsets in a number of sleeper races as polling outfits change from registered voters to likely voters, and likely voter models are favoring the GOP.

With 3 weeks to go until Election Day, there are a few signs that some of the usual midterm dynamics — which push such elections to break against the White House — are reasserting themselves.

President Biden remains unpopular, and House generic ballot polling — probably the best polling catch-all we have for the overall political environment — has gotten a little bit better for Republicans as of late. The headline-grabber was a New York Times/Siena College poll released on Monday that showed Republicans moving into a 49%-45% lead on the generic ballot. As of this writing, the Democratic edge in the FiveThirtyEight generic ballot tracker is down to half a point, and the Republicans are up a couple of points in the RealClearPolitics tracker (the latter uses fewer polls and is also more sensitive to short-term changes).

It would not surprise us if the numbers improve a bit for Republicans down the stretch. Despite Democratic improvements after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision and some candidate and image problems for Republicans, the usual midterm headwinds remain for Democrats. It’s just tough for a party to thrive with an unpopular president and with the public having significant concerns about issues, like the economy and inflation, that the opposition can pin on the party in power. This is why the House remains very likely to flip to the Republicans and why, despite the aforementioned challenges, Republican chances to win the Senate remain no worse than a coin flip.

With that out of the way, we’ll also say this: There are some weird things going on out there. And there probably will be races that upset our expectations. If in fact Republicans end up doing better down the stretch, that’ll involve races where Democrats appear favored flipping to the GOP. But there are also some opportunities for Democrats to potentially play spoiler, or at least come closer than expected in certain places.

Those following the day-to-day churn of the polls could cherry-pick their way to telling very different stories about the election. For instance, some closer-than-expected polls in the New York gubernatorial race, where Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) is trying to win her first full elected term against Rep. Lee Zeldin (R, NY-1), might indicate that we’re in a clear Republican wave environment.

Likewise, a series of polls showing Gov. Kevin Stitt (R) tied or trailing state Superintendent of Education Joy Hofmeister (D) might indicate the opposite.

It may be that these particular gubernatorial races don’t tell us much about the environment. Maybe it’s a classic case of the dominant party in a given state being underestimated in polls for one reason or another. Or maybe there are localized reasons that both races will end up being close in the same election. It’s hard to know.

 

These are all long shots, but if any of them pan out, it could be a sign of not just a wave election, but a tsunami.

Don't be surprised, is the warning.  And hey, we've seen it all in the last couple of cycles.

And The Meek Shall Inherit A Raid

A very bizarre story from Rolling Stone's Tatiana Siegel today, detailing the disappearance of former ABC News national security producer James Meek. The FBI raided his apartment in Virginia in April, and apparently he has dropped off the grid for the last six months as nobody seems to know where he went.

AT A MINUTE before 5 a.m. on April 27, ABC News’ James Gordon Meek fired off a tweet with a single word: “FACTS.”

The network’s national-security investigative producer was responding to former CIA agent Marc Polymeropoulos’ take that the Ukrainian military — with assistance from the U.S. — was thriving against Russian forces. Polymeropoulos’ tweet — filled with acronyms indecipherable to the layperson, like “TTPs,” “UW,” and “EW” — was itself a reply to a missive from Washington Post Pentagon reporter Dan Lamothe, who noted the wealth of information the U.S. military had gathered about Russian ops by observing their combat strategy in real time. The interchange illustrated the interplay between the national-security community and those who cover it. And no one straddled both worlds quite like Meek, an Emmy-winning deep-dive journalist who also was a former senior counterterrorism adviser and investigator for the House Homeland Security Committee. To his detractors within ABC, Meek was something of a “military fanboy.” But his track record of exclusives was undeniable, breaking the news of foiled terrorist plots in New York City and the Army’s coverup of the fratricidal death of Pfc. Dave Sharrett II in Iraq, a bombshell that earned Meek a face-to-face meeting with President Obama. With nine years at ABC under his belt, a buzzy Hulu documentary poised for Emmy attention, and an upcoming book on the military’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, the 52-year-old bear of a man seemed to be at the height of his powers and the pinnacle of his profession.

Outside his Arlington, Virginia, apartment, a surreal scene was unfolding, and his storied career was about to come crashing down. Meek’s tweet marked the last time he’s posted on the social media platform.

The first thing Meek’s neighbor John Antonelli noticed that morning was the black utility vehicle with blacked out windows blocking traffic in both directions on Columbia Pike. It was just before dawn on that brisk April day, and self-described police-vehicle historian Antonelli was about to grab a coffee at a Starbucks before embarking on his daily three-mile walk. He inched closer to get a better vantage, when he saw an olive-green Lenco BearCat G2, an armored tactical vehicle often employed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, among other law-enforcement agencies. A few Arlington County cruisers surrounded the jaw-dropping scene, but all of the other vehicles were unmarked, including the BearCat. Antonelli counted at least 10 heavily armed personnel in the group. None bore anything identifying which agency was conducting the raid. After just 10 minutes, the operation inside the Siena Park apartment complex — a six-story, upscale building for D.C. professionals, with rents fetching about $2,000 to $3,000 a month — was over.

“They didn’t stick around. They took off pretty quickly and headed west on Columbia Pike towards Fairfax County,” Antonelli recalls. “Most people seeing that green vehicle would think it’s some kind of tank. But I knew it was the Lenco BearCat. That vehicle is designed to be jumped out of so they can do a raid in that kind of time. It can return fire if they’re being fired upon.”

Multiple sources familiar with the matter say Meek was the target of an FBI raid at the Siena Park apartments, where he had been living on the top floor for more than a decade. An FBI representative told Rolling Stone its agents were present on the morning of April 27 “at the 2300 block of Columbia Pike, Arlington, Virginia, conducting court-authorized law-enforcement activity. The FBI cannot comment further due to an ongoing investigation.”

Meek has been charged with no crime. But independent observers believe the raid is among the first — and quite possibly, the first — to be carried out on a journalist by the Biden administration. A federal magistrate judge in the Virginia Eastern District Court signed off on the search warrant the day before the raid. If the raid was for Meek’s records, U.S. Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco would have had to give her blessing; a new policy enacted last year prohibits federal prosecutors from seizing journalists’ documents. Any exception requires the deputy AG’s approval. (Gabe Rottman at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press says, “To my knowledge, there hasn’t been a case [since January 2021].”)

In the raid’s aftermath, Meek, who frequently collaborated with ABC World News Tonight anchor David Muir, has made himself scarce. None of his Siena Park neighbors with whom Rolling Stone spoke have seen him since, with his apartment appearing to be vacant. Siena Park management declined to confirm that their longtime tenant was gone, citing “privacy policies.” Similarly, several ABC News colleagues — who are accustomed to unraveling mysteries and cracking investigative stories — tell Rolling Stone that they have no idea what happened to Meek.

“He fell off the face of the Earth,” says one. “And people asked, but no one knew the answer.”

An ABC representative tells Rolling Stone, “He resigned very abruptly and hasn’t worked for us for months.”

Sources familiar with the matter say federal agents allegedly found classified information on Meek’s laptop during their raid. One investigative journalist who worked with Meek says it would be highly unusual for a reporter or producer to keep any classified information on a computer.

“Mr. Meek is unaware of what allegations anonymous sources are making about his possession of classified documents,” his lawyer, Eugene Gorokhov, said in a statement. “If such documents exist, as claimed, this would be within the scope of his long career as an investigative journalist covering government wrongdoing. The allegations in your inquiry are troubling for a different reason: they appear to come from a source inside the government. It is highly inappropriate, and illegal, for individuals in the government to leak information about an ongoing investigation. We hope that the DOJ [Department of Justice] promptly investigates the source of this leak.”

 

This story is extremely weird on its face and it get more strange by the minute. This guy was a well-known national security journalist and producer, he's worked in print, TV, and online. For someone like that to vanish and nobody really saying anything about it for six months, when he had ongoing book and Emmy campaign activities going on?

All of this smells like a head cheese, limburger and durian sandwich.

The other observation is "If you or I had classified documents in our homes" argument about Trump's Mar-a-Lago trove of stolen classified material. Meek apparently did. The FBI showed up as a result.

There's a hell of a lot more to this story, and I'd want to see what it is, but I don't like any of this. All of it sets off my alarm bells, the timing of the story, the disappearance of a national security journalist, the raid, the whole thing just doesn't make much sense without additional context and this story raises more questions than answers.

Keep an eye on this one.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

It took less than 10 hours for a jury in Special Counsel John Durham's case against Steele dossier informant Igor Danchenko to acquit him of all charges, in a final failure of the entire case against the "Russia hoax".

A jury on Tuesday found Igor Danchenko — a private researcher who was a primary source for a 2016 dossier of allegations about former president Donald Trump’s ties to Russia — not guilty of lying to the FBI about where he got his information.

The verdict in federal court in Alexandria, Va., is another blow for special counsel John Durham, who has now lost both cases that have gone to trial as part of his nearly 3½-year investigation. Durham, who was asked by Attorney General William P. Barr in 2019 to review the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign in 2016, is sure to face renewed pressure to wrap up his work following the verdict.

Trump predicted Durham would uncover “the crime of the century” inside the U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies that investigated his campaign’s links to Russia. But so far, no one charged by the special counsel has gone to prison, and only one government employee has pleaded guilty to a criminal offense. In both trials this year, Durham argued that people deceived FBI agents, not that investigators corruptly targeted Trump.

The jury in Danchenko’s case deliberated for about nine hours over two days. Juror Joel Greene said in an interview that there were no holdouts in the deliberations and that the decision was “pretty unanimous.”

“We looked at everything really closely,” said Greene, who declined to comment on the politics of the case. “The conclusion we reached was the conclusion we all were able to reach.”

Durham, a longtime federal prosecutor who was U.S. attorney in Connecticut during the Trump administration, personally argued much of the government’s case against Danchenko. The special counsel alleged that Danchenko misled the FBI officials asking in 2017 about his sources, after the agency determined the researcher was the unnamed person behind some of the most explosive allegations about Trump in reports compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele.

The trial could be Durham’s last. A grand jury that the special counsel had been using in Alexandria is now inactive, people familiar with the matter have told The Washington Post, though the status of a similar panel in D.C. was not immediately clear. A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment when asked whether Durham would continue as special counsel in the wake of the Danchenko acquittal.

Barr, reached by phone Tuesday afternoon after the jury announced its verdict, declined to comment. In a statement released by the Justice Department after the verdict, Durham said, “While we are disappointed in the outcome, we respect the jury’s decision and thank them for their service. I also want to recognize and thank the investigators and the prosecution team for their dedicated efforts in seeking truth and justice in this case.”

A representative for Trump could not immediately be reached for comment.

 

And with that, given four years and endless resources, Durham couldn't find a damn thing. The fabled conspiracy to get Trump was just that, a conspiracy. Meanwhile, Trump now faces multiple cases in multiple jurisdictions and at least one of them will nail him to the wall for good.

 

This was all Bill Barr's idiocy, a convenient smokescreen that petered out because it was bullshit all along. Unlike the Mueller probe, Durham's bag of turds dropped off the Empire State Building landed with a splat and no convictions. 

It should be the end of his career. Of course like Barr, Durham will be fine, having done his job in damaging American democracy for years to come.

Maybe fatally.

 

Vote Like Your Country Depends On It, Con't

More that 70% of all voters in this week's NY Times/Siena College poll agree that American democracy is under threat, but in 2022 that simply means "The other political party".

 

Voters overwhelmingly believe American democracy is under threat, but seem remarkably apathetic about that danger, with few calling it the nation’s most pressing problem, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll.

In fact, more than a third of independent voters and a smaller but noteworthy contingent of Democrats said they were open to supporting candidates who reject the legitimacy of the 2020 election, as they assigned greater urgency to their concerns about the economy than to fears about the fate of the country’s political system.

The doubts about elections that have infected American politics since the 2020 contest show every sign of persisting well into the future, the poll suggested: Twenty-eight percent of all voters, including 41 percent of Republicans, said they had little to no faith in the accuracy of this year’s midterm elections.

Political disagreements appear to be seeping into the fabric of everyday life. Fourteen percent of voters said political views revealed a lot about whether someone is a good person, while 34 percent said it revealed a little. Nearly one in five said political disagreements had hurt relationships with friends or family.

“I do agree that the biggest threat is survival of our democracy, but it’s the divisiveness that is creating this threat,” said Ben Johnson, 33, a filmmaker from New Orleans and a Democrat. “It feels like on both sides, people aren’t agreeing on facts anymore. We can’t meet in the middle if we can’t agree on simple facts. You’re not going to be able to move forward and continue as a country if you can’t agree on facts.”

The poll showed that voters filtered their faith in democracy through a deeply partisan lens. A majority of voters in both parties identified the opposing party as a “major threat to democracy.”

Most Republicans said the dangers included President Biden, the mainstream media, the federal government and voting by mail. Most Democrats named Donald J. Trump, while large shares of the party’s voters also said the Supreme Court and the Electoral College were threats to democracy.

Seventy-one percent of all voters said democracy was at risk — but just 7 percent identified that as the most important problem facing the country.

These ostensibly conflicting views — that voters could be so deeply suspicious of one another and of the bedrock institutions of American democracy, while also expressing little urgency to address those concerns — may in part reflect longstanding frustrations and cynicism toward government.

 

We've spent two generations calling the federal government a threat, and when we get to the point where we're on the knife's edge looking into the abyss, most Americans want to jump. 

I take that back. Most Americans want permission to push the most marginalized among us off the edge in order to "improve" their own lives. A third of a billion bastards, we've become.

I have to hope we can overcome this, but it'll take a miracle.

Image

 

Made In Taiwan, Con't

US Secretary of State Tony Blinken is warning that Chinese plans for invading Taiwan have now become a much higher military priority for Beijing.

China has made a decision to seize Taiwan on a “much faster timeline” than previously thought, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Monday, shortly after China’s leader reiterated his intent to take the island by force if necessary.

“There has been a change in the approach from Beijing toward Taiwan in recent years,” Blinken said in an event at Stanford University in California.

The remarks from America’s top diplomat on Monday come as China holds its twice-a-decade Communist party congress, and shortly after Chinese President Xi Jinping used a widely-watched speech on Sunday to say the “wheels of history are rolling on towards China’s reunification” with Taiwan. While peaceful means were preferable, Xi added, “we reserve the option of taking all measures necessary.”

Blinken said China had made a “fundamental decision that the status quo was no longer acceptable, and that Beijing was determined to pursue reunification on a much faster timeline.” He didn’t elaborate on the timing or provide other details.

Although Biden administration officials have regularly accused China of eroding the balance of power in the Taiwan Strait, comments about Beijing’s intentions with regard to an invasion are less common.

Observers are highly sensitive to any remarks that might provide insights into how senior officials in Beijing or Washington view the potential for war over Taiwan -- an event that would have enormous geopolitical and economic consequences, particularly given President Joe Biden’s repeated pledges that the US would help defend the island.

The State Department didn’t immediately respond to a question on Monday about whether Blinken’s comments reflected any formal assessment that China has moved up its agenda for taking Taiwan. In March of last year, Admiral Philip Davidson, then commander of the US Indo-Pacific Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that China wanted to take Taiwan “during this decade, in fact, in the next six years.”

 

Pretty sure you can change "years" there to "months". 

 

Seems to me that Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin have made a deal, and both are betting that there's no appetite here, especially among the GOP, for US troops in Taiwan at all. Besides, we're busy with Ukraine, is the thinking.

 

We can't handle both.

 

The world may about to be changed dramatically by that assumption, and not in a good way.

Last Call For Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

Why yes, Oath Keepers are white supremacist domestic terrorists, and they spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to stockpile weapons in order to use them to kill politicians on January 6th.

 

Oath Keepers members spent tens of thousands of dollars in January 2021 on firearms, bullets and other equipment, according to prosecutors in Washington, DC, trying to prove members of the far-right extremist group were building an arsenal as it prepared to try to stop the peaceful transfer of presidential power.

In all, prosecutors said Monday in federal court that nearly $200,000 in withdrawals were made from bank accounts connected to the Oath Keepers that month used for a wide variety of purchases, including guns. Prosecutors used evidence of the withdrawals, coupled with shopping receipts and text messages, to show how some members allegedly stockpiled the weapons.

Oath Keepers’ founder Stewart Rhodes, according to text messages showed to the jury, bought several firearms from online sellers in what prosecutors called “parking lot purchases.”

Prosecutors then showed the jury evidence that Rhodes withdrew money from ATMs by a Bass Pro Shop, a Lowe’s and a gas station near where he made the purchases. They also displayed receipts showing purchases of firearm accessories, including 14 magazines, eight sights and one scope leveling kit, at retail shops around the same time.

Prosecutors have not said what they believe Rhodes did with the weapons he amassed on his way to Washington, DC, or whether they were taken to a Virginia hotel where the group’s so-called quick reaction force amassed.

An FBI agent testified Monday that Rhodes does not appear on the hotel’s security footage and that the weapons were ultimately found in a storage unit belonging to Oath Keeper Joshua James, who has pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy.

The extensive withdrawals are part of prosecutors’ efforts to convince a jury that Rhodes and his organization were preparing for more than just a peaceful rally on January 6, 2021, and that they believed a violent conflict was imminent.

According to prosecutors, Rhodes made the purchases both in his home state of Texas the week before the Capitol attack and on his road trip to the DC region. Rhodes embarked on the trip around January 3, 2021, according to cell phone data, traveling with lawyer Kellye SoRelle. SoRelle faces several charges in connection to January 6 and has pleaded not guilty in a separate case.

Attorneys for the defendants have repeatedly argued that SoRelle was the general counsel for the Oath Keepers organization. But, prosecutors suggested Monday, she was not acting in that capacity around the time of January 6 and was even exchanging sexually explicit messages with Rhodes.

“Speaking of f—ing…If you need some come on over,” Rhodes texted SoRelle on January 2. SoRelle declined, according to another text message. She allegedly later texted Rhodes that “You’re too good at what you do. Whole bad boy thing. I am a damn moth to a [fire emoji]. I really am replaying my teenage years.”

Prosecutors have relied heavily on messages and audio recordings so far to make their case against the five defendants and began to show the jury how those recordings captured the defendants actions on January 6 by calling a journalist to the stand Monday afternoon.

 

Besides the fact that Rhodes was schtupping his legal counsel, the guy bought thousands of dollars worth of firearms himself and the feds literally have the receipts for it. A lot of time in a little box awaits our friend Stewart.

Extreme RINO Hunting, Con't

Alex Henderson at AlterNet notes that even the pretend "Good Republicans" are being driven out of the party, like retiring Nebraska GOP Sen. Ben Sasse, and the remainder are all soul-selling simps like Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, or open fascists like Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Although Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska isn’t a full-fledged Never Trumper like the Washington Post’s Max Boot, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, attorney George Conway or former GOP strategist Rick Wilson, the conservative senator has been highly critical of former President Donald Trump at times and voted “guilty” during Trump’s second impeachment trial — a move that has resulted in Sasse being labeled a RINO (Republican In Name Only) by Trump and other far-right MAGA Republicans. Sasse has decided he would rather be in academia than politics, applying for a position as president of the University of Florida.

Sasse is the sole finalist for the position, and his departure from the U.S. Senate is almost certain. GOP strategist and Never Trump conservative Sarah Longwell is sorry to see Sasse leaving politics, although not surprised. In an article published by The Bulwark on October 17, the founder of the Republican Accountability Project (formerly Republican Voters Against Trump) laments that in the GOP of 2022, there is little or no room for those who are not far-right MAGA extremists and total devotees of Trumpism.

“Ben Sasse is retiring from the Senate at the youthful age of 50,” Longwell writes. “We know why. Politicians who thought they could wait out Trump now see the writing on the wall. The party’s over. For years, we watched the GOP defenestrations: Will Hurd, Jeff Flake, George W. Bush, the memory of John McCain, Paul Ryan, Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, and any other Republican who stood up to Donald Trump — or even just opposed Trump’s attempted coup. Some fell on their swords. Some were tossed aside involuntarily. The result was the same.”

Trump continues, “Simultaneously, we watched the progress on the other side of the spectrum as normie Republican moderates such as Lindsey Graham, Kevin McCarthy, Elise Stefanik, Ronna Romney McDaniel, and J.D. Vance became unquestioning Trump maximalists. What these two dynamics proved was a simple fact: In the Republican Party as it is currently constituted, political power emanates completely and totally from Donald Trump…. The end result of this truth is that it has driven the Good Republican — that rare animal who was supposed to be the post-Trump future of the GOP — to near extinction.”

 

I'd argue that the last Good Republican was Eisenhower. The rest of them have been playing various levels of race and fear cards to get a Christian white supremacist nation all my life, and I'm only a few years younger than Ben Sasse, who will now go on to do Ron DeSantis's bidding in ridding the University of Florida system of anyone who is "woke", student and instructor alike. 

 

Not such a good guy, Ben Sasse.

 

Like I've said for years now, anyone who's still a Republican past this point is a fascist white supremacist asshole, or is at the very least OK with the country being run by them.

Vote Like Your Country Depends On It, Con't

Weeks of relentlessly horrible, racist, brutal attack ads from GOP dark money groups have been flooding the airwaves in sewage. Will Bunch:

 

If you live in Philadelphia or thereabouts, the October baseball playoffs have brought almost unbridled joy from a Phillies hot streak, punctuated by an epic bat flip and an inside-the-park home run — and marred only by jarring interruptions from the most shockingly crude and, arguably, racist political ads since Willie Horton hit the small screen in 1988.

Every few innings, the dark, grainy TV spots — with a flood of unsettling images of urban crime and civic unrest, or large migrant caravans streaming toward the U.S. border — broke up the stream of otherwise cheerful spots for iPhones or car insurance. One says “illegal immigration is draining our paychecks, wrecking our schools, ruining our hospitals and threatening your family” — blaming President Biden, and telling Democrats to “stop hurting our children,” against an ominous, empty playground swing. The crime spot blames liberals for a wave of “violence, bloodshed and death” as men with machine guns roam an urban wasteland.

You won’t be shocked to learn that the ads are deliberately dishonest, conflating Democratic immigration policies, for example, with the horrific case of one undocumented immigrant named Christopher Puente accused of raping a toddler at a fast-food restaurant in Chicago (”She was 3 ... years ... old,” the narrator intones, milking the pathos). What’s not said is that the alleged assault occurred in February 2020, more than three years into the presidency of Republican Donald Trump, well before Biden took office.

That’s appalling, but that’s not what’s most upsetting about these ads, which, according to social media, have been broadcast nationally during the baseball telecasts on Fox Sports 1. There is absolutely no filter of jarring and often violent imagery, the racist overtones and the xenophobic innuendo, and the unrelenting darkness of the “American carnage” vibe. No one cares that this is afternoon baseball and little girls and boys are watching. This is America now.

In fact, the comparison to that infamous “Willie” (really William) Horton ad isn’t even fair. That spot — which attempted to stir up racial panic by (misleadingly, of course) linking Democrat Michael Dukakis to a Black inmate who committed a rape and murder after a weekend pass — only aired on TV one time, because just 34 years ago even most Republicans found it too crude, and over the edge. Listen to that 1980s spot and the tone that offended many folks back then seems calm and measured compared to the Natural-Born-Killers-on-acid vibe of the 2022 attack ads. Today, any and all guardrails have been taken down.

One other thing that won’t surprise you about the new attack ads is that the people behind them aren’t eager for you to know exactly who they are.

The required tagline lists the sponsor as a new group calling itself Citizens for Sanity. On one level, thanks to some excellent research by the campaign-finance watchdog Open Secrets, we know a lot about who these Citizens for Sanity are: the very worst, xenophobic remnants of Team Trump, offering America not just a new low for the 2022 midterms but a sneak preview of the nightmare that the 45th president’s 2024 comeback crusade is likely to be.

 

The polls are all showing that these ads are working spectacularly well, as in this latest NY Times/Siena College Upshot poll.

Republicans enter the final weeks of the contest for control of Congress with a narrow but distinctive advantage as the economy and inflation have surged as the dominant concerns, giving the party momentum to take back power from Democrats in next month’s midterm elections, a New York Times/Siena College poll has found.

The poll shows that 49 percent of likely voters said they planned to vote for a Republican to represent them in Congress on Nov. 8, compared with 45 percent who planned to vote for a Democrat. The result represents an improvement for Republicans since September, when Democrats held a one-point edge among likely voters in the last Times/Siena poll. (The October poll’s unrounded margin is closer to three points, not the four points that the rounded figures imply.)

With inflation unrelenting and the stock market steadily on the decline, the share of likely voters who said economic concerns were the most important issues facing America has leaped since July, to 44 percent from 36 percent — far higher than any other issue. And voters most concerned with the economy favored Republicans overwhelmingly, by more than a two-to-one margin.

 

Needless to say, going from D+1 to R+4 now is the difference between Dems barely holding on to the House and the GOP picking up 30-40 seats. The crosstabs of tht NYT/Siena College poll are not promising, either. Republicans have a 2-1 advantage: 63-31, among non-college white voters. In a state like Wisconsin, that's a death knell for Team Blue. Republicans are up by 10% points among Independents, 51-41%. The Democratic lead in the suburbs is down to 1 point, where it was double digits in 2018 and 2020.

Overall, Republicans have a 21-point lead among voters 45-64.

If this holds up, Dems will lose the House AND the Senate.

Folks if there's early voting in your state, do it now. We have 3 weeks.

We're going to give the country to the fascists because gas is $4 again.

Sunday Long Read: The Border Of Gilead

Our Sunday Long Read this week is from Stephania Taladrid at the New Yorker, who gives us the story of how abortion activists young and old are forming networks to get mifepristone and misoprostol from Mexico to women in red states in need of abortions.

 

The handoff was planned for late afternoon on a weekday, at an underused trailhead in a Texas park. The young woman carrying the pills, whom I’ll call Anna, arrived in advance of the designated time, as was her habit, to throw off anyone who might try to use her license plates to trace her identity. She felt slightly absurd in her disguise—sun hat, oversized sunglasses, plain black mask. But the pills in her pocket were used to induce abortions, and in Texas, her home state, their distribution now required such subterfuge, along with burner phones and the encrypted messaging app Signal. Since late June, when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Texas and thirteen other states had effectively banned abortion, and more were sure to follow. In some of the states, laws that originated as far back as the nineteenth century had been restored. Providing the tools for an abortion in Texas had become a felony that could lead to years in prison, and a fellow-citizen could sue Anna and collect upward of ten thousand dollars for every abortion she was found to abet.

Anna wasn’t a fainthearted woman—someone who had recently approached her for pills noted her “cottage-core vibes” and steely calm—but she wasn’t reckless, either. She and other women defying abortion bans had turned to a model developed by Verónica Cruz, a prominent Mexican activist. Until last year, abortion was considered a crime in most of Mexico, the second-biggest Catholic country in the world, and women there had become adept at providing safe abortions in secrecy. (Given the legal exposure, pseudonyms have been used for Anna and other American women who let me into their underground networks.)

By the time the pregnant woman for whom Anna was waiting walked up, the trailhead was quiet enough to make the chirping of birds seem jarring. As Anna pulled a plastic bag of pills from her pocket and settled across from the pregnant woman at a picnic table, she registered the fear on the woman’s face. Her distress, as Anna understood it, was less about a breach of Texas law than about the possibility that her husband, who was violent, might find out what she was doing. Hands shaking, the woman told Anna that she was already raising three children and had been trying to save enough money to remove them from a dangerous home. The prospect of having another child, she said, was like “getting a death sentence.” She couldn’t vanish from her household for a day without explanation, travel to a state where abortion is legal, and pay seven hundred dollars to a doctor for a prescription. Anna’s pills, which were free, were her best option. Taking the baggie and some instructions on how to take the medication, the woman thanked Anna and fled the park, hoping that her husband would never realize she’d been gone.

he town of San Miguel de Allende, in central Mexico, is known as the birthplace of legendary independence leaders. It is just as famous for its charm: cobblestone streets, Baroque churches, bright houses, and lively cantinas once frequented by Mexican muralists and Beat poets. Some Americans visit for a week and decide to stay. Among those expats is Liz, a retired Southern woman in her seventies. On the morning of June 24th, as she was making coffee in a kitchen where photographs of her great-grandchildren covered the fridge, she heard on the radio that the constitutional right to abortion in the United States had ended. She maneuvered her walker to a nearby chair and sank down. She felt as she had as a child, in a house by the sea where she’d once lived, when a hurricane she’d been dreading made landfall. It was awful, yes, but knowing what was coming had given her a chance to gather her courage and make a plan.

Five years earlier, Liz had met Verónica Cruz, who runs a nonprofit called Las Libres—the Free Ones—out of the city of Guanajuato, some fifty miles west of San Miguel. At the time, Cruz was defying Mexican law by helping women—mostly poor women—abort at home. In part because activists like Cruz successfully reduced the stigma of abortion, the Supreme Court of Mexico decriminalized it in September, 2021. That same month, Texas moved in the opposite direction: a state law known as S.B. 8 banned nearly all abortions past the sixth week. Since then, Cruz had widened her remit, supplying free abortion pills to undocumented women in Texas.

Liz figured that, with Roe overturned and states from Arkansas to South Dakota implementing abortion restrictions, the demand for Mexican abortion pills would soar. If she lacked Cruz’s decades of experience working on the cusp between the lawful and the criminal, she was neither too old nor too diminished to take a risk. She picked up the phone to call Cruz and then some friends, to find out which of them would be game to join an underground network.

Locals called expats like Liz “the Old Hippies,” in English. In early July, weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision negated Roe, six of them joined Liz on her terrace for hibiscus tea and a talk with Cruz. Most of the Americans were over sixty and recalled what life was like before the 1973 Roe ruling. One tactic Liz remembered for ending an unwanted pregnancy was to alternate between a tub of ice-cold water and a tub as scalding as you could bear it. Those who tried this method suffered, then usually had a baby anyway. Liz had a baby, too, as a teen-ager. Although she had cheered when the Roe decision was announced, knowing how many lives it would change, it had come too late to change hers.

Cruz, the fifty-one-year-old daughter of farmers, has appraising dark eyes and a booming voice, and is direct by nature. She asked the Old Hippies if they would raise money and buy pills in Mexico that would be distributed across the border. Cruz paused to let an Old Hippie translate for those whose Spanish was weak.

Medication abortion in the United States is typically a two-day process that involves taking mifepristone, which blocks progesterone, and misoprostol, which causes uterine contractions. The Food and Drug Administration approves the use of this two-pill regimen under a doctor’s supervision up until the tenth week of pregnancy. A prescription, which can be obtained in states where abortion is legal, is required. In Mexico, Cruz explained, misoprostol is sold over the counter. Mifepristone still requires a prescription, but Cruz had found suppliers, and when she ran short she relied solely on misoprostol, which can cause an abortion on its own.

Immediately after Dobbs, Cruz said, her existing crew of volunteers had slipped enough medication across the border to help two thousand American women have abortions. If the Old Hippies agreed to aid distributors in abortion-ban states, Cruz told them, Las Libres could help many more women. Each cell in the supply chain would know little about the other cells—safer for everyone that way.

Several Old Hippies wondered aloud about consequences, as the legal terrain was decidedly unsettled. In Louisiana, anyone who “knowingly performs” a medication abortion is subject to a five-year prison sentence and a fifty-­thousand-dollar fine. In Oklahoma, it’s a ten-year sentence and a hundred thousand dollar fine. More such laws were likely to come, although no criminal convictions had yet been reported. If charged, an Old Hippie told Cruz, they might end up at the mercy of a district attorney in, say, Mississippi, facing years of jail time. But Liz was an optimist—“You have to be,” she always said—and by meeting’s end everyone in the room had signed on to her plan.

 

It's a fascinating story, but the real problem is that Republicans made this necessary. And networks like the Old Hippies will become more and more of a necessity in the years ahead unless Republicans are stopped.

Last Call For All Trussed Up, Con't

The most disastrous government in British history may be about to come to a crashing halt.

Senior Conservatives will this week hold talks on a “rescue mission” that would see the swift removal of Liz Truss as leader, after the new chancellor Jeremy Hunt dramatically tore up her economic package and signalled a new era of austerity.

A group of senior MPs will meet on Monday to discuss the prime minister’s future, with some wanting her to resign within days and others saying she is now “in office but not in control”. Some are threatening to publicly call on Truss to stand down after the implosion of her tax-cutting programme.

In a rearguard action to prop up the prime minister, her cabinet allies tonight warned MPs they would precipitate an election and ensure the Tories were “finished as a party” if they toppled a second leader in just a few months.

However, support for Truss is also evaporating inside the cabinet, with members keeping in close touch with her critics. “She is in the departure lounge now and she knows that,” said a former minister. “It is a case now of whether she takes part in the process and goes to some extent on her own terms, or whether she tries to resist and is forced out.”

Another MP said it “would be grotesque” to allow Truss to endure another appearance at prime minister’s questions in the Commons on Wednesday after a series of humiliating U-turns, the sacking of ally Kwasi Kwarteng and the abandonment of her economic prospectus.

Between 15 and 20 former ministers and other senior MPs have been invited to a “dinner of grown-ups”, convened by leading supporters of Rishi Sunak, to plan how and when to remove Truss and install Sunak and fellow leadership contender Penny Mordaunt as a unity pairing.

A source familiar with the conversations said: “They are just going to have to sit down and work things out. It now becomes a rescue mission for the Conservative party and the economy. That’s where we are.”

 

Tories should be used to openly talking about their ridiculously bad governments and their incompetent buffoon MPs by now, and this is still a new low.

 

For their part, Labour is keeping their traps shut and letting Truss torch herself. If elections were held now, I'm pretty sure Dave Lister could get the nod. 

Truss screwed up so badly that Jeremy Hunt is back in play as UK Chancellor. He's now in charge, whether Truss is PM or not.

Stay turned, Truss may not last the month.

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

 I've discussed at length the number of white supremacist domestic terrorist groups involved in January 6th, the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters and more. But given the latest batch of January 6th Committee evidence presented on Thursday, we now have to consider that agents of the US Secret Service may be involved as well.

The House Committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection has asked the Secret Service for records of all communications between the far-right Oath Keepers group and Secret Service agents prior to and on the day of the attack, after a preliminary accounting by the agency indicated multiple contacts in 2020, according to a Secret Service spokesman.

The spokesman said the Congressional request follows a short telephonic briefing from the Secret Service to committee staff, in which the agency said an agent from its protective intelligence division had “numerous” contacts with Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes and other group members prior to Trump rallies in fall 2020, but that they were all part of common practice to inform the group of security protocols to follow.

That initial briefing was prompted by federal trial testimony in which the ex-leader of the North Carolina Oath Keepers said Rhodes was in contact with a member of the Secret Service around the time of a September 2020 rally.

“Following the (Oath Keepers) trial, the committee reached out to the Secret Service and a verbal briefing as provided to staff, which was specific to the comments made at trial,” said Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi. “Today, the committee has followed up with a formal inquiry for records regarding that and January 6, which we will provide.”

The Jan. 6 committee made the request for all records of communications between the Secret Service and the Oath Keepers, including the days surrounding Jan. 6 2021, after an NBC News inquiry about the level of information provided by the Secret Service.

The Washington Post first reported an agent from the protective intelligence division was in communication with the Oath Keepers prior to Jan. 6, 2021.

The Secret Service found that multiple members of the organization, not just Rhodes, spoke to an agent in the protective intelligence division ahead of Trump rallies, the most recent conversation coming before a Dec. 12, 2020, rally, Guglielmi said.

Again, we're looking at a scenario here were Trump detail USSS agents were part of Trump's conspiracy with these January 6th terrorist groups. 

And yet nobody seems to care. We're all mad over french fries prices and really, we should just say screw it and let the GOP win, right?

Russian To Judgment, Con't

At this point we have to consider that the Durham counter-probe into the FBI's Crossfire Hurricane probe of Trump-Russia collusion is actually an op run by the Good Guys and not by Trump's merry band of dipshits, simply because the staggering incompetence of Durham's actual legal maneuvers over the last four years has now resulted in Durham yelling at his own trial witness in public for making his own case far, far worse in the trial of Steele Dossier source Igor Danchenko.

The special counsel opened his case with testimony from Brian Auten, a senior FBI intelligence analyst who oversaw part of the FBI’s early investigation into possible Trump-Russia collusion.

Over two days, Auten helped prosecutors by saying there was information that Danchenko didn’t share with the FBI about his dossier sourcing that would’ve aided the bureau’s investigation. This is a key element of Durham’s case: to secure a conviction, Durham must persuade the jury that Danchenko intentionally lied and that those false statements may have impacted the FBI’s work.

The witness also put a spotlight on some of Danchenko’s inconsistencies in his many FBI interviews, where he was peppered with questions about his ties to Christopher Steele, the dossier, and his own sub-sources.

But the situation shifted when the defense got to cross-examine Auten. Danchenko’s lawyers highlighted Auten’s previous testimony, given years ago to the Justice Department inspector general and to the Senate Judiciary Committee, which contradicted some of Durham’s claims.

Auten previously said Danchenko was “truthful” and “assisted” the Russia probe. He also said securing Danchenko as an FBI source was “one of the best things that came out of” the Russia probe. This undercuts the core of Durham’s indictment, which alleged that Danchenko serially lied to the FBI and impeded the investigators who were scrambling to verify the Steele dossier.

Danchenko’s defense attorney, Danny Onorato, asked Auten in court on Wednesday if that was still his belief today, and Auten answered in the affirmative, adding, “I stand by my testimony.”

The defense also elicited testimony indicating that Durham cherry-picked material from an FBI memo that Auten wrote, when there was exculpatory information on the very next page.

“And Mr. Durham didn’t take any steps to correct your wrong answer, did he?” Onorato asked.

After Onorato finished, Durham returned for a final round of questioning, but the tone completely changed. Durham and Auten sparred for over an hour. Durham sounded angry at times, and many of Auten’s responses were adversarial, clearly not giving Durham the answers that fit his narrative.

Durham brought up the previously unknown fact that Auten was “recommended for suspension” by the FBI’s internal auditors. Auten acknowledged the recommendation, which he said is under appeal. Lawyers often bring up a witness’ past misconduct or punishments as a way to attack their credibility – but in this case, it was the prosecutor seemingly impeaching his own witness.

“You’re going to be suspended,” Durham said in one of his questions, “because you won’t admit your involvement” in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, process.

The special counsel then rebuked Auten for saying earlier that George Papadopoulos was a “high-level adviser” to Trump’s 2016 campaign. Durham accurately noted that Papadopoulos was a low-level aide, just 28 years old at the time, and still included his Model UN experience from college on his resume.

Later, Durham tried to get Auten to agree that the FBI was more alarmed about Papadopoulos’ ties to the Middle East than his ties to Russia. Auten wouldn’t go there and called it a “both/and” situation. The spat had little to do with Danchenko’s alleged false statements about the dossier.

 

Auten punched Durham's case in the nuts and then fought with Durham for an hour. This can't be real, it's too TV drama to be a real federal case. This has to be an op of some sort, or maybe Occam's Razor and Durham is just that much of a dumbass. 

Either way as Marcy Wheeler points out, Durham has sabotaged his own prosecution.

Steele (and therefore Danchenko) was first paid to dig up dirt on Paul Manafort by Oleg Deripaska, someone working to get Trump elected, and in fact one of the most important new details of this exchange is that Danchenko prefaced it by referencing asking someone much earlier, in May — possibly during the time when Deripaska was still paying the tab — for dirt on Manafort. With regards to Manafort, it’s not clear Danchenko would have reason to distinguish between the two projects paying to develop dirt (and he didn’t know precisely who was paying either time). He wanted dirt and the record shows that even someone closely tied to Manafort, Deripaska, was willing to pay for that dirt.

In any case, Durham makes a materiality claim that it was really important for the FBI to know Dolan’s partisan leanings.

Q. But for the FBI’s purposes in evaluating 105, Government’s Exhibit 112, was of significance this reportedly was coming from, quote, an American political figure associated with Donald Trump and his campaign, closed quote?

A. Yes, that was important.

Q. So with respect, then, to that information, that person that was providing the information, was Donald — was Charles Dolan, would that be import to you?

A. Yes, that would be of import.

 

Later, to play up the import of Dolan’s politics, Durham again misreads the dossier and in the process, misstates his entire case. He implies that the FBI, in assessing Report 105 — which was entirely unimportant to any investigative developments but is Durham’s single piece of evidence that the Steele dossier was sourced to Democrats — should have known that a source described as “an American political figure associated with Donald TRUMP and his campaign” was actually a Democrat.

Q. And would it be of import to you that Mr. Dolan was not somebody who was an American political figure associated with Donald Trump and his campaign but, in fact, was a Democratic operative for a long period of time? Would that have been significant to you?

A. Yes, we were interested in all of the —

Q. Right.

A. — sources.

Q. So if you knew that that was the case, it wasn’t some Republican insider or some associate of Donald Trump’s, what, if any, impact did that have on your evaluation of the validity and credibility of the information that’s being conveyed in these dossier reports?

A. Well, it helps — it would have helped to understand kind of accuracy and things of that sort for the dossier reports.

Except that, once again, that’s not what the sourcing indicates. If Durham’s allegations are correct and this came from Dolan, it amounts to Danchenko sourcing something Dolan attributed to a Republican friend of his. If this claim is inaccurate, it’s not because Danchenko lied, it’s because Dolan did.

That is, Durham’s problem isn’t that Dolan is a Democrat. It’s that Dolan — his own witness — is an admitted fabricator.

And John Durham is trying so hard to invent partisanship rather than Russian rat-fuckery, that he doesn’t understand he’s impugning his source, not Danchenko.

 

If I'm right Durham understands completely that he's impugning his source. The question is why.

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Last Call For Under The Weather

Had something of a minor medical issue this week, so sorry for the light posting this close to the midterms and all. I should be back at 100% by the weekend.

I'm still having a better week than Alex Jones however.

Alex Jones was ordered to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in a defamation case for promoting the lie that the 2012 Sandy Hook school massacre was a hoax. The Connecticut jury found Jones liable for $965 million, with amounts reaching as high as $120 million for a single person.

Jones and his company were found liable for damages last year. The six-person jury was tasked with determining how much the Infowars show host should pay to 15 plaintiffs — including the families and an FBI agent — for calling the 2012 massacre a hoax.

The jury was instructed to arrive at two compensatory damages amounts per plaintiff: one sum for defamation damages and another for emotional distress damages.

 

The And Find Out stage of the Fucking Around is alway my favorite part. 

Last Call For Shutdown Countdown, Con't

One thing Jon Chait can tell us about the effects of the House GOP winning in November is that they will almost certainly threaten a debt default crisis in order to force President Biden and the Democrats to make hundreds of billions of cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

Bloomberg’s Jack Fitzpatrick interviewed several Republican contenders to lead the House Budget Committee. They all said, with varying levels of specificity, that they plan to instigate a debt-ceiling standoff to force Biden to accept cuts to retirement and health-care programs. “Our main focus has got to be on nondiscretionary — it’s got to be on entitlements,” said Representative Buddy Carter. Representative Jodey Arrington said he wants “eligibility reforms,” which means raising the eligibility age and imposing a means test for Social Security and Medicare benefits. “We should ensure that we keep the promises that were made to the people who really need it, the people who are relying on it,” said Representative Lloyd Smucker. “So some sort of means-testing potentially would help to ensure that we can do that.”

It might seem strange that Republicans would be pivoting to a more aggressive agenda without holding the White House. But this is actually consistent with the strategy they have followed over the past three decades. Republicans are committed to scaling back the safety net. But they realize this agenda is toxically unpopular — even less popular than defunding the police, a policy Democrats have repudiated en masse.

They could try to accomplish this through compromise — the previous two Democratic presidents showed some willingness to trade social-spending cuts for higher taxes on the rich. But higher taxes on the rich are completely verboten in the GOP. And so their strategy is to force Democratic presidents to sign spending cuts into law against their will.

The 1995–96 Republican Congress instigated a series of government shutdowns in the belief they could force Bill Clinton to accept cuts to taxes and social programs. This crusade blew up in their faces and helped Clinton win reelection. But rather than abandon it, they tried it again under Barack Obama, this time using the debt ceiling as the hostage of choice. That, too, failed.

But the Republican plan is to try it again with Biden. They are already floating their message: The Republicans will insist they won’t raise the debt ceiling unless Biden agrees to Republican-designed spending cuts, and they will blame him for the global meltdown if he refuses their demands. “If Republicans are trying to cut spending, surely he wouldn’t try to default,” said Representative Jason Smith, the prospective chair of the House Ways and Means Committee.

And while this tactic has never worked before, it has the theoretical attraction of evading the public’s deep aversion to the GOP policy agenda by extorting the Democrats into endorsing it.

Last June, the Republican Study Committee, a conservative caucus that includes more than three-quarters of the House Republicans, released a sweeping domestic-budget plan. It received little attention in the mainstream media. The plan, notes Fitzpatrick, would

gradually raise the Medicare age of eligibility to 67 and the Social Security eligibility to 70 before indexing both to life expectancy. It backed withholding payments to those who retired early and had earnings over a certain limit. And it endorsed the consideration of options to reduce payroll taxes that fund Social Security and redirect them to private alternatives. It also urged lawmakers to “phase-in an increase in means testing” for Medicare.

On top of partially cutting Medicare and Social Security and partially privatizing the latter, the RSC plan would implement various regressive tax cuts favored by the GOP.

This House GOP, if they win in November, absolutely will burn the economy down and blame Biden for it, and the right-wing noise machine is already gearing up for the assault.

A House and/pr Senate controlled by Republicans would be an horrific nightmare, but that depends on us voting.

Saud Songs They Sing

With the US average of gas prices headed back for $4 per gallon after OPEC's production cut, both the Biden administration and high-ranking Democratic members of Congress suddenly, finally has a real appetite for cutting the Kingdom loose with potential significant effect.

President Biden is re-evaluating the relationship with Saudi Arabia after it teamed up with Russia to cut oil production in a move that bolstered President Vladimir V. Putin’s government and could raise American gasoline prices just before midterm elections, a White House official said on Tuesday.

“I think the president’s been very clear that this is a relationship that we need to continue to re-evaluate, that we need to be willing to revisit,” the official, John F. Kirby, the strategic communications coordinator for the National Security Council at the White House, said on CNN. “And certainly in light of the OPEC decision, I think that’s where he is.”

Mr. Kirby signaled openness to retaliatory measures proposed by Democratic congressional leaders outraged by the oil production cut announced last week by the international cartel known as OPEC Plus. Among other things, leading Democrats have proposed curbing American security cooperation with Saudi Arabia, including arms sales, and stripping OPEC members of their legal immunity so they can be sued for violations of American antitrust laws.

“The president’s obviously disappointed by the OPEC decision and is going to be willing to work with Congress as we think about what the right relationship with Saudi Arabia needs to be going forward,” Mr. Kirby said. He sounded a note of urgency. “The timeline’s now and I think he’s going to be willing to start to have those conversations right away,” he said. “I don’t think this is anything that’s going to have to wait or should wait quite frankly for much longer.”

The comments came just a day after Senator Bob Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, assailed Saudi Arabia for effectively backing Russia in its brutal invasion of Ukraine and called for an immediate freeze on “all aspects of our cooperation with Saudi Arabia,” vowing to use his power to block any future arms sales.

“There simply is no room to play both sides of this conflict — either you support the rest of the free world in trying to stop a war criminal from violently wiping off an entire country off of the map, or you support him,” Mr. Menendez said. “The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia chose the latter in a terrible decision driven by economic self-interest.”

Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, the second-ranking Democrat in the Senate, said on Tuesday morning that Saudi Arabia clearly wanted Russia to win the war in Ukraine. “Let’s be very candid about this,” he said on CNN. “It’s Putin and Saudi Arabia against the United States.

If long-time Democratic foreign policy hands like Menendez and Durbin, and eve Biden himself, are tossing Prince Bonesaw McGraw and his merry band of sheiks  out of the tent, this is real. The question is how much damage Riyadh has done. It might be the first time I can remember where US foreign policy is about to take major steps back on Saudi Arabia.

Biden can't push them too far though. If Riyadh decides to start pricing oil in rubles instead of greenback, the dollar craters and everyone now it. They've subtly mentioned this earlier this year, not exactly correcting Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov when he said that the Saudis were invited to join the BRICS compact. Such a move really would be siding with Putin against the US.

We'll see, but the OPEC production cut is going to have consequences, and so will the US and European actions that follow.

Big Buckeye Battleground Blitz

Republicans know that with Herschel Walker's campaign in Georgia capsizing and Sen. Raphael Warnock increasing his lead in what was a tight race that f Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan knocks out Hillbilly Racist J.D. Vance next month, they lose any shot at the Senate. The GOP is going all out, dropping tens of millions in Ohio to defend Rob Portman's seat in the final weeks, and that means Ryan is pretty much on his own as he heads into this week's debate with Vance.

Democrats are increasingly fearful that they are squandering a chance to flip a Senate seat in Ohio — a state that once seemed off the map but, according to polls, remains close four weeks from Election Day.

Although the Republican, “Hillbilly Elegy” author J.D. Vance, has struggled to raise money, national groups have propped up his campaign by pouring in more than $30 million worth of advertising.

Rep. Tim Ryan, the Democratic nominee, has been a more prolific fundraiser. But because national Democratic groups have provided comparatively little help on the airwaves, Ryan has had to spend cash as fast as it comes in just to keep up with the GOP onslaught.

The lopsided funding has unnerved Democrats in Ohio and across the country, according to interviews with a dozen party leaders and operatives. Many worry that Democrats will regret not doing more to try to pull Ryan ahead of Vance, a right-wing ally of former President Donald Trump.

“Tim Ryan is running the best Senate race in the country and having to do it all by his lonesome,” said Irene Lin, an Ohio-based Democratic strategist who managed Tom Nelson’s Senate primary campaign in Wisconsin this year. “If we lose this race by a few points, and the Senate majority, blame should squarely fall on the D.C. forces who unfairly wrote off Ohio.”

In an interview with NBC News after a campaign appearance Saturday in Cleveland, Ryan sounded resigned to going it alone.

“The national Democrats … trying to talk them into a working-class candidate, it’s like pulling teeth sometimes,” Ryan said as he tossed a football with his 8-year-old son in a parking lot behind an Irish pub. “We’re in Ohio and we got a candidate running around with a tinfoil hat on. We’re out here fighting on our own. I mean, it’s David against Goliath.”

Ryan and Vance are running to succeed Sen. Rob Portman, a Republican who is not seeking re-election. Independent polls suggest the race is a toss-up, with slim leads by either candidate falling within the margin of error. The candidates will meet Monday night in Cleveland for the first of two televised debates.

After losing two presidential campaigns and a race for governor in the state since 2016, national Democrats are wary about spending in Ohio, once a quintessential battleground. Republicans are treating it as a state they can't afford to lose.

Trump’s super PAC was the latest group to jump into the race, reserving more than $1 million in ads last week. The barrage includes a spot attacking Ryan, who has portrayed himself as a moderate, as a party-line voter beholden to Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer. But even the Schumer-aligned Senate Majority PAC, a major presence in other states key to determining partisan control of the chamber, has been largely absent from Ohio.

Through Monday, Republicans had spent or reserved at least $37.9 million worth of advertising on the general election, according to AdImpact, an ad tracking firm. Only $3.7 million of that had come directly from Vance’s campaign, with another $1.6 million split between the campaign and the National Republican Senatorial Committee through coordinated advertising.

I'm a bit baffled that anyone is surprised that Ryan is being cut off at the knees here in the eleventh hour. How quickly people forget that Ryan declared war on Nancy Pelosi after the 2018 midterms.

 

Ryan, who hails from post-industrial Youngstown, was blunt in his assessment of the Democratic Party this week: “We need a brand change.” He tells Rolling Stone that he wants a less coastal Democratic Party, pointing out the lack of House leaders from the middle of the country. “It’s a pretty large swath of the country to completely ignore,” he says. “How in God’s name do we expect to win the House, have a significant majority, hold it, have a party brand that’s connecting to people, and have nobody in the Midwest at all?”

In past interviews, Ryan has lamented his party’s turn toward political correctness. “We can’t have these purity tests,” he said, before listing a few key characteristics all Democrats should have. “You can’t be racist. You can’t be sexist. You can’t be homophobic — you’ve got to check those boxes — and then be economically progressive,” he said. “Other than that, we’ve got to be a big-tent party.” Ryan said he wants Democrats to come up with an umbrella economic agenda that can unify the party’s diverse coalition: “A robust economic message that all of those different groups could hear and go, ‘Yeah, you know, That’s me. I’m in on that.’”

 

So here you go, Tim. Here's your change to prove that "all working-class voters matter" can win you the race as a Dem, and you have a uniquely terrible faux working-class populist power to win against.

Off you go, chmap, and good luck. We're pulling for you. I want to see J.D. Vance crash into the ground like a meteor and blow up as much as anyone, but I also remember what Ryan has said nationally about the "coastal elites".

I know I've said in the past that you have to match the candidate to the electorate and Blue no matter who. Both remain true here.

But it's also true that when you come for the queen, you best not miss, and Ryan wasn't even in the same time zone. He's held on with no national support as it is, and even won a primary. He's a smart guy. Maybe he's got what it takes to win this seat.

Vote for Ryan if you're in Ohio, surely.

Just don't expect a national flood of cash at the end.