So many polls but the one that strikes me most is Trump’s 13-point drop in approval among Republicans (from 87 to 74 percent since July). Keep that going down and Senate Republicans might just feel politically confident to do what they’d privately like to do: get rid of this idiot.
John Oliver discusses how voting machines work, how they don’t, and how we can fix them.
Happy 140th birthday to Will Rogers. You may want to come back to this. It is the full two hour Broadway production of the Will Rogers Follies that was filmed for Japan and has never appeared on American TV
considering the above alarm rung by john oliver while considering below this alarming story re mitch from a few months ago:
McConnell blocks two election security bills
at
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/454742-mcconnell-blocks-two-election-security-bills
Not sure of status but Nannymm, goodmorgan, madmustard, Ran(?), Nash
wapo:
Governor’s races in three states test whether every election now is about Trump
[…]
In 2016, Trump carried Mississippi by about 17 points, while Kentucky voters handed him a 30-point victory. With Trump still relatively popular in both states, the White House says those two governor’s races, as well as a runoff election for governor in Louisiana on Nov. 16, will give the president a major political boost by proving that he can still mobilize religious conservatives and working-class voters to the polls, regardless of — or because of — the confrontation in Washington.
Democrats see the three governors’ races as an opportunity to prove that voters still want local leaders to prioritize issues of health and economic well-being in states that continue to rank among the poorest in the nation. Political strategists from both parties warn that the Democrats’ issue-centric strategy comes with risks as partisan polarization creeps deeper into voters’ everyday lives.
[continues]
add to the missing/missed list tom in Belgium, Jason, carol, solar and tony.
O, brothers, where art thou?
Tom in Belgium is still active on Facebook. Last heard from, he was dealing with early onset Alzheimer’s and depression, but seems to be traveling a lot with Mauro
It was Ran who spoke on the death of Don Ho during the Imus/MSNBC fracas:
”He was a happy headed Ho.”
RezDog, Chloe
dangerous for whistleblower to be named. consequences described in politico:
[…]
…. If the whistleblower’s anonymity is revealed, that could put him or her in dangerous and uncertain territory.
Since the beginning of whistleblowing in America, government whistleblowers who put their name and face on their revelations have not fared well, particularly those from the intelligence community. They are typically tarred in the media, often prosecuted and almost inevitably fired and blackballed from further government service. “So far as I’m aware, from [Daniel] Ellsberg to the present day, there hasn’t been a single case in which a genuine whistleblower who exposed major problems in the intelligence community has experienced anything other than retaliation,”
Patrick Eddington, a former CIA employee who revealed that his agency and the military were covering up U.S. soldiers’ exposure to toxins during the 1991 Iraq War, told me. Especially in an unstable, emotionally charged, politically polarized era like the one in which the current whistleblower is operating, government truth-tellers are all too easily vilified as traitors, deflecting attention from the problems they are attempting to reveal.
[…]
Even national security whistleblowers who rigorously follow protocol often undergo vicious legal and professional reprisal. In 2007, for instance, after four senior National Security Agency officials and a member of the House Select Committee on Intelligence blew the whistle through official channels to the Defense Department inspector general about massive fraud and misconduct at the agency that they believed had facilitated the 9/11 attacks, officials at the inspector general’s office itself apparently identified them to the Department of Justice as potential leakers.
This revelation led to FBI raids of their homes at dawn, threats of criminal prosecution and the permanent end to five illustrious careers in public service. One of the five whistleblowers, Thomas Drake, was actually indicted on 10 criminal counts under laws including the Espionage Act, and was threatened with 35 years in prison after the FBI discovered documents in his home that they alleged were “highly classified.” (They were in fact unclassified documents that NSA officials retroactively pronounced as classified after they were seized from Drake.) The DOJ’s case was so feeble and overblown that it collapsed on the eve of trial, leading Judge Richard Bennett to condemn the prosecution’s treatment of Drake as “unconscionable.” “It is at the very root of what this country was founded on—against general warrants of the British,” Bennett exclaimed. “It was one of the most fundamental things in the Bill of Rights that this country was not to be exposed to people knocking on the door with government authority and coming into their homes.” Nevertheless, Drake lost his job and his security clearances, and became permanently unemployable in national defense.
[…]
Although the Trump whistleblower went through the official channels, so far those channels have tended to conceal rather than to reveal his or her disclosures. It’s not clear how much longer the whistleblower will stay anonymous, but losing that anonymity is almost guaranteed to bring professional and personal pain—an unfortunate reality of whistleblowing in every occupation, but above all in national security.
But the real number is 270 and according to a new NY Times poll Only Biden can get it done. I think what the “get out the base” folks forget is that Trump stole a big chunk of the Democratic base in the rust belt states and they ain’t coming back.
I still visit OldSeaHag every year on Martha’s Vineyard. I know she’s still in touch with Tony. Dog’s Eye and Chef Sheila are on FaceBook. I’ll bet Solar is traveling. I do miss MadMustard who has shown up here every once in a rare while. Nash told us he had turned hard left… bet he’s gone elsewhere to for his political stuff.
I too miss all those that have passed on… glad to see this place keeping them in our hearts.
One other thing for the folks who whine about old white guys? Save that for when the election is not on the line.
Jack
Jack… I’ve come to the same conclusion when I posted yesterday that I wanted a Dem candidate that could beat trump and have some foreign policy chops immediately upon taking office. The only candidate that fits that bill is Biden.
Renee, I wish some other candidate had stepped up because he still has all the problems I listed several months ago and I’m sure some of them will come up and bite him on the ass in the general election.
I would have loved to vote for Harris but she has been too timid. When she was being criticized for being a prosecutor she should have stood up and said “hell yes, if you prey on my people, I going to lock you up!”
*sigh* so many woulda, coulda shoulda ‘s this election cycle.
Jack
what if –
some bigger better name jumps into the Dem race at last minute?
or trump is removed/resigned/otherwise gone and pence is the ballot?
or trumpence both are no longer on ballot, but a romney/ jeb! is resurrected?
or we’re at war or incurring catastrophic nationwide natural disasters or the twit tyrant simply declares no elections?
if “ifs” and “buts” were candy and nuts… we’d all have a merry christmas
NEW YORK (Reuters) – President Donald Trump’s longtime accounting firm must hand over eight years of his tax returns to New York prosecutors, a U.S. appeals court ruled Monday in the latest setback for Trump in his tenacious efforts to keep his finances secret. The ruling by a unanimous three-judge panel of the New York-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals backed the ability of prosecutors to enforce a subpoena for the returns against accounting firm Mazars LLP. Jay Sekulow, a lawyer for Trump, said the Republican president will appeal the ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court, whose 5-4 conservative majority includes two justices appointed by Trump.
The office of Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, a Democrat, is seeking the returns as part of a criminal investigation into Trump and his family real estate business. The scope of that probe is not publicly known.
The 2nd Circuit did not decide whether Trump is immune from being charged with a state crime while in office, as the president has argued. However, it found that even if he is, the immunity could not stop Vance from getting the returns from a third party, or from prosecuting him once he leaves office.
It would “exact a heavy toll on our criminal justice system to prohibit a state from even investigating potential crimes committed by him for potential later prosecution,” 2nd Circuit Chief Judge Robert Katzmann wrote in the ruling.
Vance’s office has agreed not to enforce the subpoena while Trump petitions the Supreme Court. Under the agreement, Trump has 10 business days to file the petition.
[continues]
house investigators release first transcripts:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/context/testimony-of-former-u-s-ambassador-to-ukraine-marie-masha-yovanovitch/f9742f2d-4fd2-467f-b069-531c663d52d3/
and
https://www.washingtonpost.com/context/testimony-of-former-senior-advisor-to-the-secretary-of-state-ambassador-p-michael-mckinley/7605871a-ac88-4009-b6dd-9db0f77be7b6/
Showing the volatility of the Dem race, on October 6 Biden and Lizzie were virtually tied at 26% (RCP average); today, Biden is plus 8.8% at 29.1 -20.3 (again, RCP average). Lizzie’s energy is undeniable, but if it doesn’t translate to support, so what? If the first 4 primaries leading to Super Tuesday were held today Lizzie would take 2 – IA & NH and Joe would take 2 – NV & SC. Money aside, neither has any incentive to drop out and Lizzie’s “won IA & NH” meme would be countered by Joe’s “big comeback in NV & SC” meme. Notice whose name is not included in the current front runners in the 1st 4 states – Bernie! Horse race, I tell you. I think the best that can be said about the recently released head-to-head matchups with SFB is that Joe tends to do a little better against him than the other candidates – generally by a point or two, but the close polls in MI, WI, & PA give me some concern.
Harborwoman, CBob with the blue corn experiment.
Good and Mad Productions
the guardian:
E Jean Carroll, the widely respected New York journalist who alleges Donald Trump raped her in the Bergdorf Goodman department store in the mid-1990s, is suing the president for defamation after he ridiculed her claim on the grounds she was “not my type”.Carroll, 75, filed her lawsuit in the supreme court of New York state on Monday. She argues that Trump’s vociferous denials and characterisation of her as a money-grabbing liar have damaged her reputation and career.
In the suit, the writer repeats her allegation that about 23 years ago at the upscale store on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, Trump seized her, forced her against the wall of a dressing room and raped her. The suit notes that Carroll remained silent for more than two decades about the incident, though she says she told two close friends at the time.
One of the friends, the journalist Lisa Birnbach, told the New York Times that she replied to Carroll: “E Jean, he raped you. If he penetrated you that was rape. Let’s go to the police. [But] she said, ‘No, I’m not going to do that … I just want to go home.”
0Carroll’s lawsuit says: “The rape of a woman is a violent crime; compounding that crime with acts of malicious libel is abhorrent. Yet that is what Defendant Donald J Trump did to Plaintiff E Jean Carroll.”
[…]
In her defamation suit, Carroll accuses Trump of lashing out “with a series of false and defamatory statements. He denied the rape. But there was more: he also denied ever having met Carroll or even knowing who she was … he accused Carroll of lying about the rape in order to increase book sales and for good measure, insulted her physical appearance.”
In a statement released to mark the launch of her suit, Carroll explained her decision to act in the language of the #MeToo movement.
“I am filing this lawsuit for every woman who’s been pinched, prodded, cornered, felt-up, pushed against a wall, grabbed, groped, assaulted, and has spoken up only to be shamed, demeaned, disgraced, passed over for promotion, fired and forgotten.”
She added: “No one, not even the president, is above the law.”
NYTimes:
[…]
In Virginia, Kentucky and Mississippi on Tuesday, impassioned voters are set to deliver a final multistate report card on Mr. Trump before the 2020 presidential clash, at a time when an impeachment inquiry is galloping ahead in Washington and further splitting voters in a country that has rarely been so polarized.
Mr. Trump was headed to Kentucky on Monday to try to boost a Republican in a tight governor’s race, as he did in Mississippi on Friday, but he has pointedly skipped Virginia, where Republicans in contested districts are distancing themselves from him and the party.
With all 140 seats in the Virginia legislature on the ballot, the normally low-interest races are expected to send a national message from a state that has been a seismograph of voting quakes in the Trump era. A strong blue wave in statehouse races in 2017 and a Democratic gain of three congressional seats in the 2018 midterms reflected the national grass-roots mobilization of women, as well as the suburban revolt against the president.
[…]
In another race set to be decided on Tuesday, Gov. Matt Bevin of Kentucky, an unpopular Republican, has closely aligned himself with the president and fanned anger over impeachment in an attempt to outlast his Democratic challenger, Andy Beshear.
In Mississippi, the closest governor’s race in a generation matches Jim Hood, a Democrat who appeared in ads with his hunting dog and his pickup truck, against Tate Reeves, a Republican, for an open seat.
Yet Virginia is the main event, because partisan control of its legislature hangs in the balance. Republican majorities of 20-19 in the State Senate and 51-48 in the House of Delegates are threatened by demographic changes that have remade the state.
A transfer of power would enable Democrats, who already hold the governor’s mansion, to advance liberal priorities including gun restrictions and civil rights protections for women and L.G.B.T. people, and, most crucially, to draw new voting districts in 2021. Polling shows voters agree with Democrats on expanding background checks to all gun buyers, banning assault weapons and protecting abortion rights.
[continues]
Why has MSNBC hired Amy Holmes she is a liar and has worked for such people as Bill Frist (remember him??????) and Glenn Beck. She is feckless and factless and apparently will now do anything to go on tv.
It is irresponsible to have her on. She repeats every conspiracy theory and adds nothing to the conversation.
It is more of the crappy “news” coverage
She’s cheap ?
To keep up her conservative credentials she agreed to make the office coffee, show cleavage, and run the bosses errands?
KGC – MSNBC is no longer the left of center station it used to be. Most of it is now republican, r’s not liking SFB. Occasionally I will take in a few minutes of the show that starts at four pm Eastern time. But not for long. Even that is like watching republicans talking amongst themselves.
Rachel Maddow is the shining star. If it were not for the ratings, she probably would have been gone a long time ago and the slot handed over to some republican.
If Warren and Biden are smart, whichever one wins the nomination will ask the other to fill out the ticket. Well, not sure Joe wants to be a bridesmaid, again.
Tylenol
The Daily Beast
@thedailybeast
· 11h
The head of Russia’s State Security Service, the FSB, made the surprising announcement that Russia and the United States have resumed cooperation on cybersecurity https://trib.al/Lb6zbQl
Speaking of CBob, this is November 4 which means Dona Pacem Nobis created by Mimi Lennox 14 years ago. You can see some of the blogger contributions on her web page: Mimi Writes. This year her peace post is Bathing In Persimmon Trees.
CBob created Bear #339 and the Bear-A-Tones for the event and they do a command performance every year:
This year’s Let There Be Peace theme is climate.
My post this year is Dona Nobis Pacem – 2019
Senor Horsedoody
Someone painted a great pic of Horsedooty (Lee) as Santa holding a sign that said he would work for carrots. It was on his FB page as a tribute to him when I was still on that platform many years ago. Someone painted a great pic of Patsi and posted it on her page, too.
We are late with All Souls Day, but we always do things a little differently around here.
Granny Mumantoog
Women are 52% of the population. People of color are 25% of the population. That leaves a 36% minority, who are male and colorless. If white males don’t support the Democrats in Nov 2020, they can’t expect Dems to listen to their whines in 2021. It’s as simple as that.
– xrepublican, a recovering male chauvinist swine.
X-R, you may have been a boar, but never ever a bore
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