ONCE AGAIN, TO THE AID OF OUR SHI'A ALLIES:

 Diplomatic pressure from the United States and Britain, Saudi Arabia's biggest arms suppliers, abruptly intensified on Wednesday for a cease-fire in the Yemen war, the world's worst man-made humanitarian disaster.

OUR TWO rEPUBLICAN PARTIES:

Democrats would use their first month in the House majority to advance sweeping changes to future campaign and ethics laws, requiring the disclosure of shadowy political donors, outlawing the gerrymandering of congressional districts and restoring key enforcement provisions to the Voting Rights Act, top Democratic leaders said on Tuesday.

If they win, they would then turn to infrastructure investment and the climbing costs of prescription drugs, answering voter demands and challenging President Trump's willingness to work on shared policy priorities with a party he has vilified. The idea, said Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the Democratic leader, is to show voters that Democrats are a governing party, not the leftist mob that Mr. Trump describes -- and to extend an arm of cooperation to the president after an electoral rebuke.

NO ONE HATES JUST MEXICANS:

The son and daughter of a Missouri House candidate are urging people not to vote for him because he regularly espouses racial and homophobic views and dislikes Jews and Muslims.

Steve West, 64, gained attention after winning the August Republican primary for a northwest Missouri House seat when word spread about views he frequently expressed on a radio show, such as saying "Hitler was right."

"I can't imagine him being in any level of government," his daughter, Emily West, told The Kansas City Star on Monday.

On Tuesday, her brother, Andy West, told the newspaper his father is "a fanatic" who must be stopped.

"If he gets elected, it would legitimize him," Andy West said. "Then he would become a state official, and he's saying that Jews shouldn't even have civil rights."

HOW'S DEVIN SUPPOSED TO EARN HIS RUBLES? HE CAN'T BLOCK THAT ONE:

The U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee is pursuing a wide-ranging investigation into former White House adviser Steve Bannon's activities during the 2016 presidential campaign, three sources familiar with the inquiry told Reuters.

The committee is looking into what Bannon might know about any contacts during the campaign between Moscow and two advisers to the campaign, George Papadopoulos and Carter Page, they said. [...]

The panel also will examine Bannon's role with Cambridge Analytica, a former data analysis company that the Trump campaign hired to help identify and target messages to potentially sympathetic voters, the sources said.

THE QUESTION BEING...:

The catalog of inaccurate claims ranges from the weighty to the head-scratching.

He has asserted that construction has begun on his border wall (it has not), that he is one of the most popular American presidents in history (he is not), that he "always" opposed the Iraq war (he did not), that the stock market reopened the day after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 (it did not), that his tax cut was the largest in history (it was not) and that the United States is the only country that guarantees citizenship to those born here (it is not).

As he embarks on a final eight-state, 11-rally blitz before Tuesday's midterm elections, Mr. Trump has hammered Democrats -- not just for their actual policy positions but for some they have not taken. He accused them, without proof, of helping to orchestrate a caravan of Central American migrants; complained that Democrats had opposed opioid legislation when in fact they universally voted for it; and asserted that they would not protect patients with pre-existing conditions -- even though that was the heart of President Barack Obama's health care program.

Mr. Trump's penchant for prevarication has been a well-documented hallmark of his presidency. He dismisses journalists who point out his falsehoods as nit-pickers who do not understand that he is speaking a larger truth that resonates with many Americans. Supporters at his rallies across the country tell reporters that they understand he may not be strictly accurate in his roaring stump speeches, but they see him as a champion of their values.

Still, even some in Mr. Trump's orbit acknowledge that this campaign season has brought out a torrent of untruths that, they worry, distracts from a record he should be proud to outline factually. "If you want me to say he's a liar, I'm happy to say he's a liar," said Anthony Scaramucci, who served a highly abbreviated 11-day stint as White House communications director last year and says he remains an enthusiastic supporter.

Speaking on CNN last week as he promoted a new book, Mr. Scaramucci was invited to offer his advice directly to the camera as if he were addressing Mr. Trump. "You should probably dial down the lying," Mr. Scaramucci said, "because you don't need to do it. You're doing a great job for the country."

Mr. Scaramucci said the president created his own truth for the purposes of storytelling. "He definitely has a reality distortion field around himself where he curves facts toward himself," Mr. Scaramucci said on NBC's "Today" show. "He's living in that bubble."

THE SOLUTION TO POVERTY IS MONEY:

In 1993, the Great Smoky Mountains Study followed a group of children, comprised of both American Indian and non-American Indian families in rural western North Carolina.

Halfway through the study, a casino opened on the Eastern Cherokee reservation and all adult tribal members--regardless of employment status--were eligible to receive a portion of the profits.

Using publicly available voting records in North Carolina, Akee and coauthors matched the voter behavior for the children in the study from the 2002 election onwards. They find that the children whose families had received cash transfers from the casinos grew up to be more active voters as adults than their counterparts in the survey who did not receive these transfers.

"WHERE ART THOU?":

The golem endures as a uniquely Jewish vision; a mighty, earthen homunculus who warns us about the dangers of artificial creation. Scholar Lewis Glinert writes that if "there is such a thing as a specifically modern myth, then the myth of the Golem must surely rank as one of the most powerful." Explaining this narrative of an "artificial man, blessed with supernatural powers, that runs out of our control" requires us also to recognize the 250th anniversary of the most famous manifestation of Rabbi Loew's creature, albeit one shorn of his Hebrew origins, save for perhaps his superficially Jewish-sounding name.

Mary Shelley's gothic masterpiece Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus was written in 1816 at the age of 19, after a night of ghost stories traded between her future husband the poet Percy Shelley, the notorious Romantic poet Lord Byron, and the inventor of the modern vampire tale, John William Polidori, as they warmed themselves by the fireplace of Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva on a cold summer night. "Frightful must it be," the author later wrote, as "would be the effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world." Since Frankenstein's initial print run of 500, Shelley's monster has become a convenient symbol for scientific and technological hubris. Glinert has opined that Frankenstein enjoys a "status which appears to literary criticism as an anomaly, a scandal: it is a modern myth."

Literary critic Northrop Frye notes that a variation of the word "golem" appears millennia ago in Psalm 139, where it connotes that which is formless (or has yet to be formed). Peter Conrad describes this use of "golem" to denote "a shapeless form, a gobbet of chaos," and explains that in that context, the psalm writer has David reflecting "on the wonders of his making, which happened 'in the lowest part of the earth' where he was 'covered' by God." One hears intimations of Frankenstein's observation that all of us "are unfashioned creatures, but half made up." Such correspondences can also be seen in the Talmud, where at Tractate Sanhedrin 38b, Adam is referred to as "golem," drawing out the implications of a dangerous creation all the more literally.

DYING BEFORE THEY EVER GOT RICH:

The birth rate did see a bump in 2016, the first year the new policy was in effect. The number of newborns that year jumped 1.31 million year-on-year, ending up just shy of 18 million. Still, that fell far short of government hopes that the number of annual births could top 20 million. And experts warned that the boom would be short-lived: couples who wanted a second child would rush to do so in the first few years, leading the birth rate to stabilize and then fall.

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That happened sooner than expected. The number of births in China in 2017 was down by 630,000 compared to 2016. According to Xinhua, China's state news agency, over 50 percent of children born in 2017 were not the first children in their families, suggesting that permitting a second child had indeed helped to boost the birth rate. But the new births were not enough to reverse the general trend of decline.

Zhai Zhenwu, the president of the China Population Association, believes the number of births in China will fall again in 2018 -- and keep falling. According to China Daily, Zhai predicted that "the number of people born will undoubtedly continue to fall this year, as well as over the next few years."

OF COURSE, DONALD WOULD HAVE BACKED TANEY:

In the infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision, Chief Justice Roger Taney declared that a black man generally couldn't be a United States citizen--that he had "no rights which the white man was bound to respect." Candidate Lincoln campaigned against the decision in 1858 and 1860. Then, under President Lincoln, Attorney General Edward Bates took on Dred Scott in an 1862 legal opinion arguing that free blacks generally could be U.S. citizens. Finally, the Republican Congress enshrined the principle of birthright citizenship in America's first major civil rights law, the Civil Rights Act of 1866. Two months later, Congress included birthright citizenship in its proposed 14th Amendment.

At the simplest level, the 14th Amendment's Citizenship Clause was meant to repudiate Dred Scott and place the Civil Rights Act of 1866 on a firm legal foundation. However, it was also meant to root post-Civil War America in an inspiring Lincolnian reinterpretation of one of our nation's Founding truths, that we're all born free and equal.

Let's begin with the text of the Citizenship Clause: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside." While the 15th Amendment explicitly mentions race, the 14th Amendment's text is more capacious--speaking not just of African Americans, but of "[a]ll persons." This sweeping language grants U.S. citizenship to everyone born here and subject to our laws. The only relevant exception today (given that Native Americans no longer live in the same kind of tribal regime that existed in the 1860s) is for those who owe their allegiance to another sovereign, such as the children of foreign diplomats.

The Citizenship Clause is one of the richest single sentences in the entire Constitution, rivaling the Preamble in both theoretical depth and breadth. Among other things, the Amendment constitutionalizes Lincoln's reinterpretation of Jefferson by making clear that Americans are created equal--born equal, in the key language of this key sentence. This birth equality idea clearly condemns a racial caste system in which light-skinned children are born lords and dark-skinned children are born serfs. Indeed, the sentence goes far beyond race by condemning all sorts of other systems that improperly exalt some and degrade others because of birth status. The sentence thus explains why certain types of birth-based governmental discrimination are suspect (laws based on race or sex or sexual orientation or illegitimacy) whereas most other kinds of governmental line-drawing (say, between wage income and dividend income) should not be viewed with comparable skepticism.

Critically, the sentence focuses our attention on place, not parentage. Unlike the law of many European countries, in America the key issue of constitutional citizenship is based on the law of the soil, not the law of blood. 

HOW IS THAT EVEN A CRIME?:

A scientist accused of attempted murder in Antarctica plunged a kitchen knife into his colleague because 'he was fed up with the man telling him the endings of books' he was reading from the research station library.

This is the reason given by scientific engineer Sergey Savitsky, 55, for his fury at welder Oleg Beloguzov, 52, says a Russian report.

It is believed to the first time that a man has been charged with the crime on the world's loneliest continent.

The men had previously spent four harsh years at Russia's isolated Bellingshausen station on King George Island, part of the South Shetland island group.

ET TU, STRIPES?:

[T]he troops will not be allowed to detain immigrants, seize drugs from smugglers or have any direct involvement in stopping a migrant caravan that is still about 1,000 miles from the nearest border crossing. [...]

The extraordinary military operation comes a week before the Nov. 6 midterm elections as Trump has sought to transform fears about the caravan and immigration into electoral gains. On Tuesday, he stepped up his dire warnings, calling the band of migrants fleeing poverty and violence in Central America an "invasion."

"Our Military is waiting for you!" he tweeted.

R. Gil Kerlikowske, Customs and Border Protection commissioner from 2014 to 2017, said the military cannot stop asylum seekers who show up at border crossings to seek protection, and that Border Patrol agents have had no trouble apprehending people who cross illegally.

"I see it as a political stunt and a waste of military resources and waste of tax dollars," said Kerlikowske, who was at the helm during a major surge of Central Americans migrants in 2014. "To use active-duty military and put them in that role, I think is a huge mistake. I see it as nothing more than pandering to the midterm elections by the president."

WHY DONALD HATES AMERICA:

Ilhan Omar fled civil war in Somalia and spent four years of her childhood in a refugee camp in Kenya. Now she is poised to win a seat in the U.S. Congress, taking on a president who has tried to prevent people like her from coming to America. [...]

She is campaigning on policies embraced by the most liberal wing of the Democratic Party - universal healthcare, free college tuition, robust public housing - that are popular in a district that has not elected a Republican to the House since 1962.

Omar made history two years ago when she became the first Somali-American in the country to win a seat in a state legislature, unseating a 44-year incumbent Democrat along the way. No Somali-American has ever served in the U.S. Congress.

That same night, Republican Donald Trump won the presidency after a campaign in which he called for a ban on all Muslims entering the United States.

Trump has since banned people from Omar's native Somalia and several other Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States, citing national security concerns. He also has sharply scaled back the number of refugees admitted into the country.

THE rIGHT VS THE fOUNDING:

The U.S. is among more than 30 countries that give automatic citizenship to children born to nearly anybody living within a country's borders, according to the National Constitution Center, which was established by Congress to educate Americans about the Constitution.

"In the early 17th century, the principle of birthright citizenship was established pretty definitively in England and that was exported to a number of British Empire colonies, including America," said Bernadette Meyler, a professor at Stanford Law School.

Today, birthright citizenship, with few exceptions, is the norm in countries whose laws were crafted based on English common law, including Canada, Jamaica and Pakistan. 

MIKE...MIKE...MIKE....:

The "Messianic rabbi" who outraged many Jews by invoking the name of Jesus while delivering a prayer in memory of the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre victims was also spurned Tuesday by the organization that ordained him.

Loren Jacobs, who was invited onstage by Vice President Mike Pence to speak at a rally in Michigan for a GOP congressional candidate, was defrocked 15 years ago, according to a spokeswoman for the Union of Messianic Jewish Congregations.

"Loren Jacobs was stripped of his rabbinic ordination by the UMJC in 2003, after our judicial board found him guilty of libel," Monique Brumbach said in an email.

MADD AS HELL:

Sociopolitical movements like #MeToo have taken root in many parts of the world, but no soil has been quite as fertile for them as that of the United States. Alexis de Tocqueville was struck by this peculiarity of American life during his canonical visit in 1831. "Not only do [Americans] have commercial and industrial associations in which all take part," he wrote, "but they also have a thousand other kinds: religious, moral, grave, futile, very general and very particular, immense and very small." The Frenchman had a theory about the origin of this early form of community organizing: in a democracy, he suggested, where, unlike aristocracies, power was diffuse, individuals had to join together in groups to wield any influence over their social arrangements. Associations--particularly in the Northeast and the Midwest--were a civic by-product of America's brand of equality, freed from feudal, hierarchical memory.

If the 26-year-old wunderkind noticed the role that women were playing in these democratic associations, he didn't mention it. Yet women were the majority, as well as the most energized, of converts during the Second Great Awakening, and they brought their enthusiasm to great moral causes of the era, beginning with a battle against prostitution, a fact of collective life in those days. Ladies of the night were ubiquitous in ports where sailors and other male transients congregated; according to historian Stephen Mintz, as many as 10 percent of women in antebellum cities at least occasionally walked the streets. In an economy that had yet to create jobs for textile "mill girls" and telephone operators, the world's oldest profession was one of the few available to single women without means. It was a more lucrative choice than the even more prevalent domestic service, though it was not unknown for servants themselves to freelance during free hours. During the Great Awakening, evangelical ministers denounced the practice, but it was their female congregants who turned the cause into a Tocquevillian movement: in 1834, they founded the Female Moral Reform Society in New York. Within a few years, the society had 400 chapters, mostly in northeastern and midwestern states.

A march on Washington would have been logistically impossible at a time when no one had heard of frequent-flier miles, and strategically useless when all politics was truly local. Instead, the reformers marched on nearby brothels, where they passed out pamphlets and held prayer sessions. In the past, the working girls had suffered most of the blame for illicit sex, but reformers, some also active in abolition groups, tried to change public sentiment by recasting their "wayward" sisters as "white slaves," held captive by "destroyers."

They faced a bigger task than they realized, since their real enemy was more formidable than the brothel: male lust. The reformers proselytized against a double standard of sexual morality--not, as modern feminists have, with the goal of liberating women from sexual constraints, but rather to insist on "abstinence" for men as well as women. They wanted to protect "our daughters, sisters, and female acquaintances from the delusive arts of corrupt and unprincipled men," as one contemporary pamphlet put it. Some chapters threatened to publish the names of brothel visitors, though they apparently never did. They did petition state legislatures to criminalize seduction and prostitution; for them, incarceration was the proper punishment not just for pimps but also for ordinary johns--or "seducers"--themselves.

By the mid-nineteenth century, the key battleground in the war against "corrupt and unprincipled men" moved from the brothel to the nearby (sometimes as close as upstairs) saloon. The newly opened western lands in Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Kentucky helped make grain widely available. The ease of transporting wheat and rye and the relatively simple distillery process created a whiskey craze that lubricated communities across the young nation. Americans became world-renowned drinkers; foreign visitors often wrote in wonderment about their hosts' indifference to water but exceptional thirst for whiskey. In Last Call, his masterful history of Prohibition, Daniel Okrent cites estimates that annual per-capita alcohol consumption among the drinking-age population (15 and older) ranged from 6.6 to 7.1 gallons by the early decades of the century, three times the typical intake of our own hardly abstemious citizenry.

The pattern became a familiar one in our social history: American know-how leads to technical innovation, leading in turn to cheap pleasure-enhancing products (Internet pornography and opioids, for example), and then to excess. The temperance movement became an essential counter to early American vices and a crucial mechanism for the spread of bourgeois self-control. A citizen moral police force was probably the only way to regulate the habits of people in nineteenth-century towns and urban neighborhoods where government had limited reach and where reliable shared norms had yet to take root. As evangelical and Quaker leaders weighed in against the plague of drunkenness, women once again took up arms.

ALWAYS BET ON THE dEEP sTATE (profanity alert):

Two years ago, Cernovich was an indefatigable Trump cheerleader, among the most prominent of a small vanguard of Trumpist culture warriors who trolled their way from the fringes of the right-wing internet to real-world relevance. Loosely lumped together as the celebrities of the "alt-right"--a label most of them have since disavowed--they hailed from different corners of the web and professed different views, but they were united by a shared disdain for progressives and establishment Republicans, and a shared faith that the disruptive outsider named Donald Trump could usher in the change they believed America needed.

Once unleashed in Washington, they harbored dreams of taking over the Republican Party and pushing American popular culture sharply rightward. And, at a moment when it seemed that anything was possible in American politics, it looked like this group of fringe web firebrands just might be able to harness the right's anti-establishment energy into a muscular and profitable movement.

No longer. Halfway into Trump's term, the president has settled into power, remaking the office in his own attention-sucking style and pushing the national conversation in directions it hasn't taken in generations. But his most flamboyant supporters, who once planned to overrun Washington, find themselves in retreat. Milo Yiannopoulos, the former Breitbart tech editor and right-wing campus provocateur, has lost his book deal, the sponsorship of his billionaire patrons and most of his staff. Charles Johnson, the online alt-right activist who alarmed the public by attending this year's State of the Union address as a guest of freshman Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz, has quit social media. Lucian Wintrich, the inaugural White House correspondent for The Gateway Pundit, a pro-Trump outlet with a penchant for publishing fake news and conspiracy theories, has been dumped by the site and returned to New York. The white nationalist Richard Spencer, organizer of 2017's alt-right rally in Charlottesville, Va., has given up his residence in Alexandria, Va., and is living on a family property in Montana, where he is plotting a move to an undisclosed location.

As for Cernovich--a right-wing men's empowerment blogger who saw Trump as the counterweight to political correctness and establishment conservatism--he's become disillusioned with politics and increasingly critical of the president. These days, he spends most of his time on other pursuits, including the "Gorilla Mindset" lifestyle-coaching practice he runs from his home in Southern California. In September, he tweeted glumly, "There's no Wall. She's not locked up. But Flynn got fired and sent to wolves. And Sauadi [sic] Arabia sold weapons of murder."

A CHANCE TO BE CHILE:

A 3.7 percent jump in Brazil stocks and a near 2 percent rise in Argentine stocks took Latin American shares higher, while gains in Brazil's real and the Argentine peso against a strong dollar helped the currency index cap losses.

    

A rebound on Wall Street also boosted sentiment and helped the MSCI index of Latin American stocks log a gain of over 1 percent and outperform the emerging markets stockindex  which rose 0.2 percent.

    

Brazil markets recovered from Monday's steep losses on signals President-elect Jair Bolsonaro was moving towards promised reforms after he said he would talk to the current government next week to discuss projects that could be approved later this year, including an urgently needed pension reform.

DONALD WHO?:

During CNN's Jake Tapper Tuesday show, national correspondent Miguel Marquez said that he was shocked at how "how big" and "how quickly" the protest against Trump's visit grew.

According to Marquez, there were two different protests taking place. Marquez said that protest he was at, which was about a block away from the Tree of Life synagogue, was not planned 24 hours ago. 

According to CNN, police had tried to clear path for Trump's motorcade. But Marquez later said the president had "moved off in another direction."

THEIR MASTER'S VOICE:

Three men who were convicted of plotting to bomb an apartment building that housed a mosque and dozens of Muslim Somali refugees in Kansas were encouraged by President Donald Trump's rhetoric and asked a judge for leniency in their sentencing, their attorneys said.

In court documents filed this week, attorneys for Patrick Stein, Curtis Allen, and Gavin Wright, say the men were influenced by Trump's anti-Muslim rhetoric and Russian propaganda on social media and argue that life sentences against their clients would not deter others from committing similar crimes.

"As long as the White House with impunity calls Islam 'a dangerous threat,' and paints average Americans as 'victims of horrendous attacks by people that believe only in Jihad,' a mixed signal gets sent," Wright's attorneys wrote in a sentencing memorandum filed Tuesday.

"As long as the Executive Branch condemns Islam and commends and encourages violence against would-be enemies, then a sentence imposed by the Judicial Branch does little to deter people generally from engaging in such conduct if they believe they are protecting their countries from enemies identified by their own Commander-in-Chief," they continued.

WISDOM OF MARKETS:

DIRTY HO!:

Days before the midterm elections, President Trump claimed that he was preparing an executive order to end birthright citizenship. But Judge James C. Ho, a recent Trump appointee, may stand in his way.

"Birthright citizenship is guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. That birthright is protected no less for children of undocumented persons than for descendants of Mayflower passengers," the U.S. circuit judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit wrote in a 2006 law review article. Contrary to Trump's announcement Tuesday, Ho said that a constitutional amendment was the exclusive way to restrict birthright citizenship.

"Opponents of illegal immigration cannot claim to champion the rule of law and then, in the same breath, propose policies that violate our Constitution," Ho said in a 2011 opinion piece published by the Wall Street Journal, reinforcing his earlier position.

ON THE OTHER HAND, HE'S NOT EXPLICITLY PROPOSING WE KILL THEM:

THE PLOT TO MAKE PEOPLE DUMBER:

A study published Tuesday in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry finds that when adolescents stop using marijuana - even for just one week - their verbal learning and memory improves. The study contributes to growing evidence that marijuana use in adolescents is associated with reduced neurocognitive functioning.

THE BUMP REQUIRED THAT DEMOCRATS DEFEAT THE NOMINATION:

So much for the "Kavanaugh Bump." Republicans now fear some of their voters are losing enthusiasm a week away from midterm elections that will determine control of Congress.

Outrage amid the Republican electorate over Democrats' treatment of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh's nomination has dissipated, Trump aides and Republican pollsters say. After last week's mail-bomb scare and synagogue shooting, President Donald Trump's approval rating fell, potentially jeopardizing key Senate races that his allies thought had turned his party's way.

THEY NEEDED DEMOCRATS TO DEFEAT THE NOMINATION

DONALD WHO?:

The top congressional leaders from both parties declined an invitation from the White House to join President Trump on Tuesday in Pittsburgh in the wake of the shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue, according to sources familiar with the matter.

IMAGINE THINKING THEY AREN'T YOUR NEIGHBORS?:

On Monday, the same day that Trump ordered 5,200 troops to the U.S.-Mexico border to block the migrants, residents of the southern town of Niltepec, who still live among piles of rubble that once were their homes, prepared for the caravan with homemade soup, medical tents, and diapers for children.

"We wish we had a space dignified enough to offer our visitors," said Zelfareli Cruz Medina, Niltepec's mayor. [...]

Of 1,720 homes in Niltepec, 1,602 were damaged in the quake, according to town officials, while 530 collapsed entirely. At least 100 families are still without homes, they said.

A tower atop Niltepec's main church was stripped down to its fragile wood skeleton by the quake and Cruz said the town needed help to rebuild its library and the mayor's offices, which were serving as a shelter for the caravan's women and children.

But a willingness to help the needy comes as almost second-nature to residents of the hardscrabble town in Oaxaca, one of Mexico's poorest states, Cruz said. "We know now what it means to suffer," she said.

WHAT OBSTRUCTION?:

One of the shadier characters in politics, along with a number of fringe internet figures, appears to be behind an attempt to pay women to accuse Special Counsel Robert Mueller of sexual assault.

The scheme became public on Tuesday when Mueller's staff formally asked the FBI to launch an investigation into the matter. But for weeks it has been simmering below the surface, with numerous reporters having been tipped off by a woman who claimed she had been approached with promises of cash.

At the center of the scheme is publicity-hungry Republican lobbyist Jack Burkman, who has repeatedly dabbled in internet conspiracy theories in the past, including promoting the idea that murdered Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich was killed by deep-state government operatives. [...]

Burkman has proved eager to attach himself to a wide array of causes that have the possibility of getting him on cameras. He once introduced legislation (which lobbyists don't formally do) to get gay players banned from the NFL--a campaign that sparked a sharp rebuke from his gay brother.  

WE CAN'T IMPOSE HIGH ENOUGH COSTS FOR TRUMPISM:

Land O'Lakes, one of nation's leading agricultural and food businesses, said Tuesday its political action committee will stop donating to U.S. Rep. Steve King's campaign treasury amid continuing controversies involving the conservative Iowa lawmaker.

The Minnesota-based dairy company had been facing boycott threats on social media because of its campaign contributions to King, a Kiron Republican who represents the 4th Congressional District in north-central and northwest Iowa. It had donated $2,500 to King in 2018.

Steve Stivers had had enough.

In an extraordinary moment just a week before the critical midterm elections, the chairman of the House Republican campaign arm called out a sitting colleague for being racist.

Stivers, who leads the National Republican Congressional Committee, had been briefed on racially-charged comments made recently by Iowa Republican Steve King, an immigration hardliner with a history of controversial and insensitive remarks. And so with not even a heads up to GOP leaders, Stivers went on Twitter and blasted his colleague.

He "could not stay silent," said one source familiar with his thinking.

"Congressman Steve King's recent comments, actions, and retweets are completely inappropriate," Stivers wrote on Tuesday afternoon. "We must stand up against white supremacy and hate in all forms, and I strongly condemn this behavior."

SONNY CAME HOME:

Fortune, who most prominently played alto saxophone (though he frequently played soprano and also worked on tenor and baritone), was one of the key altoists to emerge in the troubled American jazz scene of the 1970s. He was part of a post-Coltrane wave of jazz saxophonists (and in fact came to New York from his native Philadelphia contemporaneously with John Coltrane's death), but steadfastly developed his own sound while exploring the new language Trane had established on the instrument. He was also an intrepid explorer of the possibilities of fusion, particularly its extensions of Latin rhythms and textures.

In addition to Jones and Davis, Fortune worked with conguero Mongo Santamaria, pianist McCoy Tyner, and vibraphonist Roy Ayers before establishing his own solo career in 1974, continuing until a few months before his death.

Cornelius Fortune was born May 19, 1939 in Philadelphia. A doo-wop singer in his youth, he turned later to saxophone, deciding at 18 to embark on a career in jazz. After studying at Philadelphia's Granoff School of Music, Fortune remained in the city for nearly a decade, working in rhythm & blues and jazz bands, especially in the soul-jazz idiom. His first recording, 1965's Trip on the Strip, found him co-leading a session with Philadelphia organist Stan Hunter.

Encouraged by Coltrane, Fortune finally moved to New York in 1967, joining the band led by Coltrane's sometime drummer Jones. The first stint with Jones was brief, and after another quick spell with saxophonist Frank Foster, Fortune joined Santamaria's band in 1968, remaining with the percussionist until a short-lived move to Los Angeles in 1970. Returning to New York, he joined Tyner's band--another Coltrane alumnus--where he would stay until 1974.

RIGHT OUT OF DONALD'S PLAYBOOK:

A campaign mailer showing a Jewish candidate for state Senate with a fistful of money is a drawing condemnation for what critics say is its blatant anti-Semitic imagery.

It was sent out by Republican Ed Charamut and targets state Rep. Matthew Lesser, a Democrat who gave up his seat in the House to vie for an open Senate seat representing Middletown, Wethersfield, Newington, Cromwell and Rocky Hill. [...]

The photo on the "VOTE NO ON MATT LESSER" flyer shows Lesser's face bearing a greedy grin while clutching a few $100 bills in his hands. The image is recognizable as Lesser, but is clearly edited heavily. He said he has already heard from local Republicans who are also outraged about the Charamut team's decision to mail the flyer.

"It's imagery used to depict Jewish people going back hundreds of years," he said. "Whether that was intentional or not I can't say. That's not what our community is about. On Sunday evening in Middletown we had a community gathering on the South Green in light of what happened in Pittsburgh, and it was the best of our community and it was really heartening. It's demoralizing to see the campaign go in this direction."

Stuart S. Miller, the academic director of the Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life at UConn, expressed his disgust over the mailer.

"I personally find this reprehensible, deeply offensive and inexcusable," Miller said Tuesday. "I cannot believe that it is an innocent allusion to a supposedly money-spending Democrat. It just leaves me shaking my head as to the lengths some people will go to get elected or to stay in office, particularly in the present climate."

Miller said the mailer recalls the anti-Semitic stereotyping that went on in the U.S. in the 1920s and 1930s, from Henry Ford funding the printing of 500,000 copies of "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" to the radio commentary of Father Coughlin.

Donald Trump's vigorous defense of an image widely regarded as anti-Semitic has alarmed many Jewish Americans, who are growing increasingly fearful that someone who could be the next president is willing to stoke the kinds of stereotypical attacks that have haunted Jews around the world for generations.

Rabbis and other Jewish community leaders point to a moment of reckoning following a Wednesday night appearance in which Trump, with his voice raised, defended the use of a six-pointed star, which resembled the Star of David, mounted over a pile of $100 bills as part of an attack against Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. The image previously appeared on a website popular with white supremacists.

WE ARE ALL DESIGNIST NOW:

A genetically modified yeast containing an endosymbiotic bacterium. Credit: Scripps Research

Scientists at Scripps Research and their collaborators have created microorganisms that may recapitulate key features of organisms thought to have lived billions of years ago, allowing them to explore questions about how life evolved from inanimate molecules to single-celled organisms to the complex, multicellular lifeforms we see today.

By studying one of these engineered organisms-a bacterium whose genome consists of both ribonucleic acid (RNA) and deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA)-the scientists hope to shed light on the early evolution of genetic material, including the theorized transition from a world where most life relied solely on the genetic molecule RNA to one where DNA serves as the primary storehouse of genetic information.

THE POWER:

NIKKI 2020:

As South Carolina approaches the one-year anniversary of a racially motivate massacre at a Charleston church, Gov. Nikki Haley (R) said Thursday that her party's likely presidential nominee, Donald Trump, needs to change his divisive rhetoric.

"I know what that rhetoric can do," Haley told the Associated Press on Thursday. "I saw it happen."

On a Wednesday evening last June, 21-year-old Dylann Roof attended a prayer service at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in downtown Charleston. Police say he opened fire, gunning down nine churchgoers. Roof later claimed he was trying to start a race war. He has been charged with more than 30 federal counts, including committing a hate crime.

Roof had proudly celebrated the Confederacy, according to his online postings, and the shooting quickly sparked a national discussion about the Confederate flag, which at that time was still flying on the grounds of the South Carolina state capitol. Soon after the shooting, the state legislature voted to remove the flag. [...]

[H]aley said Trump has a responsibility to use a civil, respectful tone, the AP reported.

"The way he communicates that, I wish were different," Haley said.

ELECTRIC LAND:

Lincoln on the basis and meaning of American citizenship: Those who have immigrated here are equally citizens "as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration...."https://t.co/aJY599khaB

— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) October 30, 2018

EVERYONE SAYS "NEVER AGAIN," BUT FEW MEAN IT:

In Perth Amboy, New Jersey, members of the Ku Klux Klan assembled to hear a xenophobic celebrity speak. An angry crowd gathered outside the building and as the lecture began inside, protestors interrupted the speaker and tried to shout him down. Eventually the crowd outside forced its way in. Scuffles broke out and several Klansmen were attacked. Later, the Klansmen complained that their constitutional rights had been violated and promised to return in larger numbers, ready to fight it out with their enemies.

The confrontation could have taken place during the last year in Berkeley or Portland or any number of cities where racists and anti-racists have clashed. But the Perth Amboy riot was one of numerous confrontations with the Ku Klux Klan that occurred during the early 1920s. The Klan was in a second ascendency, riding a wave of anxiety about crime, immigration, and economic unrest, and like the alt-right today, the Klan sought out confrontations by rallying in unfriendly cities.

In response to white supremacist organizing in our own time, radical voices on the left, notably Antifa, have drawn on the tradition of European resistance to fascists to declare that the appropriate response to racist organizing is physical opposition, doxing (publicly "outing" racists), and violent retaliation. Liberal critics, on the other hand, have argued that Antifa tactics break with U.S. traditions of free speech, open debate, and civility. For the most part, both sides of the debate fail to note that the United States has a long history of homegrown militant resistance to racist organizing. In the 1920s, when the Klan sought to secure a place in the U.S. political mainstream by organizing large public demonstrations and mounting electoral campaigns, anti-Klan organizers confronted the KKK using a range of techniques that included open ridicule and violence. Their goals were similar to anti-racists of today: expose the bigots and deny them the ability to march or rally in public. This all-but-forgotten story serves to remind that as long as racist and xenophobic movements have mobilized in this country, Americans have struggled to confront and expose them using every option at hand.

cONSERVATIVES DON'T:

President Donald Trump's call to end birthright citizenship has sparked a national debate. Within the Republican party, leading voices differ on the legitimacy of citizenship as a birthright. While some embrace the traditional view that the Constitution bestows citizenship on any citizen born on US territory, others agree with Trump that the Constitution permits Congress to decide on citizenship for those not born to U.S. citizens. Alternatively, some acknowledge birthright citizenship, but seek a constitutional amendment to abolish it.

Recently, the White House established a Citizenship and Immigration Services task force to denaturalize American citizens who gained citizenship through improper or questionable means. In addition, Trump administration members have vocally called for a stop to birthright citizenship entirely. As former national security official Michael Anton wrote in a recent op-ed, "the notion that simply being born within the geographical limits of the United States automatically confers US citizenship is an absurdity-historically, constitutionally, philosophically, and practically."

Conservatives should reject Trump's nativist siren song and reaffirm the law and policy of one of the Republican Party's greatest achievements: The 14th Amendment. According to the best reading of its text, structure, and history, anyone born on American territory, no matter their national origin, ethnicity or station in life, is an American citizen.

OBJECT LESSON:

The most important man in this battle is offstage--and indeed remains anonymous even to many Illinois voters. "Michael Madigan is the single most powerful state legislator in the country," says Mooney, the UIC political scientist. Madigan is one of the last surviving protégés of Richard J. Daley, the Chicago mayor who before his death in 1976 perfected the most enduring Democratic machine in American politics. (His son Richard M. Daley went on to rule Chicago for another 20 years starting a decade after his father's death.) Madigan has represented his district on Chicago's southwest side since 1971. With a two year interregnum in the 1990s, he has been speaker of the Illinois house for nearly 40 years. He is both the shaper and the embodiment of the way of politics that has brought Illinois to the brink.

Other Midwestern states, for better and worse, have a political culture at least partly under sway of an ideological tendency. Wisconsin, not the Land of Lincoln, was the birthplace of the Republican party and home to great progressives like Robert La Follette. Southern Indiana was the setting for the revival of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. Iowa's politics has always been infused with Christian piety. Illinois has none of this--what it has in their place, what it has that all its neighbors lack, is an urban powerhouse at the center of its political force field. The real impress on Illinois politics has been the ethnic machine of Chicago, transplanted into Springfield and spreading from there to all corners of the state.

And ideology has nothing to do with it. Madigan has moved with the direction of his party. He began his career, for instance, when Catholic politicians like him understood abortion to be murder, and he's just as comfortable today with its status as the preeminent sacrament of feminist individualism. The purpose of a machine, as Mooney points out, is the allocation among friends of the spoils of power: the jobs, contracts, services, and perquisites that government affords. "It's a very practical mindset," Mooney says. "It's all about ends and not means. And that kind of thinking doesn't really require any one person to take responsibility for long-term planning of the government's direction."

Madigan, by all accounts, is fiercely intelligent. When the legislature is in session he always eats dinner in the same seat at the same Springfield restaurant. Lunch is an apple, sometimes two, at his desk, and in meetings he seldom speaks: The signal that the meeting is over is when he starts eating the apple, according to pols who have experienced the brushoff. He doesn't use email and seldom a cell phone, preferring communication face to face. When he takes questions from the press it is considered a historic occasion. One veteran Springfield reporter said the other day he had never interviewed Madigan, but he did have fond memories of a Madigan press conference back in . . . 2004. "He must have spoken for 45 minutes!" the reporter said.

Madigan's power is enforced quietly and without pity. Under house rules, all legislative staff report to the leader. All perks from office space to parking slots flow through his office. He has an active program of internships and apprenticeships, bringing in recruits from all over the state. "It's like a training program for politicians," says Mooney. Most important, he is not only the house majority leader, he is chairman of the state party. Every dollar of party campaign funding is under his control. Over the years a dozen wayward Democrats who crossed him on important votes have found themselves suddenly faced with primary challengers, well-funded and usually victorious. And every other Democratic officeholder knows it could happen to them.

"There's one common denominator in Springfield over the last 40 years as the state has gotten deeper in trouble," Ardis says. "And that's Madigan." Indeed, Madigan was present at what Adam Schuster calls the "original sin" of Illinois government finance--he was a delegate to the constitutional convention of 1970 when a provision was inserted into the new state constitution that state pensions, once enacted by the legislature, could never be reduced. A cascade of political folly ensued, at the hands of Republicans and Democrats alike. In 1990, a Republican governor signed a provision that guaranteed increases in state pensions at a compounded rate. Increases have been regular and untouchable ever since, thanks to Madigan and his colleagues, with the resulting horror stories that fill the state's newspapers--like the retired teacher from the Chicago suburbs with a $452,000 pension payout. Eighty percent of the state's last tax increase went to the pension system.

Sooner or later, a political machine becomes its own object: The purpose of the machine is to keep the machine alive. This is the evolutionary stage that the Chicago machine, downstate version, has reached over Madigan's long reign.

WHAT A VILE CRETIN:

U.S. President Donald Trump said he plans to sign an executive order ending birthright citizenship for babies of non-immigrants and unauthorized immigrants born on U.S. soil, according to excerpts of an interview released Tuesday.

"We're the only country in the world where a person comes in and has a baby, and the baby is essentially a citizen of the United States," Trump told "Axios on HBO" Monday.

THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS CONTINENTAL ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM:

Some things are too obvious for intellectuals to notice. It's as if intellectuals were provided with a special kind of spectacles that automatically screens out what everyone else can plainly see. What, after all, is the point of being an intellectual if your perceptions are the same as everyone else's?

I recently observed an example of this strange dichotomy between the perceptions of ordinary people and those of intellectuals. Someone who did not know Paris came to visit me there, arriving by train. Knowing that Paris is regarded (rightly) as one of the most beautiful cities in the world, he was astonished by the sheer eye-scoring ugliness of the approaches to the city center. He had not expected such a thing. He asked me whether there was something wrong with him.

I assured him that there was nothing wrong with either his eyesight or his aesthetic judgment; the approaches to Paris are indeed of a visual hideousness that one might expect of the capital of a Third World country that had undergone uncontrolled rapid growth.

On that very day, however, the New York Times published an article by David McAninch about his six-day walk around the Boulevard Périphérique, the 20-mile-long ring road or beltway that encircles Paris. Taking and documenting this journey was an excellent idea in principle, though of course one cannot actually walk along the boulevard; indeed, the very word "boulevard" for this concrete boa constrictor is an implicit lie, like calling O'Hare Airport a landing strip or Versailles a cottage.

What is startling about McAninch's description of his tour is its non-mention of what was perfectly obvious to my visitor on first glance, and which never fails to appall me each time I take the B.P., as regrettably often as I do: namely, that practically everywhere the eye looks beyond the confines of central Paris, it is greeted by a modernist mess of gargantuan proportions, and that every occasional building that is not a total eyesore was built before 1945. In other words, there has been a total and utter collapse of aesthetic ability, judgement, and appreciation in France, a country with one of the world's greatest architectural heritages, extending back many centuries.

THE SCHOOL OF AUSTRALIAN ECONOMICS:

"We will just end up being a third-rate economy...a banana republic," warned Paul Keating in 1986. He used such threats to persuade the country to accept a series of radical economic reforms over the next decade, when he was treasurer (finance minister) and then prime minister. Along with his predecessor as pm, Bob Hawke, Mr Keating floated the Australian dollar, abolished import quotas, slashed tariffs, deregulated the financial sector, privatised state-owned enterprises, overhauled the tax code and did away with country-wide wage accords in favour of company-by-company "enterprise bargaining".

Many of these reforms were instituted during Australia's last recession in the early 1990s ("the recession we had to have", in Mr Keating's words). Most economists believe they have saved it from subsequent recessions by providing the flexibility needed to adjust promptly to changing economic conditions.

IT'S NOT THAT AMERICANS AREN'T JEWS BUT THAT THEY ARE AMERICAN:

[O]rthodox and Ultra-Orthodox parties wield enormous political weight in our parliamentary system. Their support gives Israeli coalitions the stability necessary to grapple with our complex social and security challenges. Confronted with Orthodox opposition to the liberal American Jewish streams, Israeli governments must often choose between acknowledging their legitimacy and effectively managing and defending the state. Accordingly, not only our current government but also every coalition going back to 1948, right and left, has refrained from recognizing the Reform and Conservative movements.

Another reason for the current situation is longstanding disagreements over core Jewish issues. For decades, the world's two largest Jewish communities differed over the definition of "who's a Jew" -- the Israeli government hews to the traditional requirement of matrilineal descent and Orthodox conversions, while liberal American congregations admit members born only of Jewish fathers and even those unwilling to undergo any conversion -- so-called Jews of choice.

More recently, numerous American Jews supported the Iran nuclear deal, which Israelis viewed as disastrous to our security, and opposed moving the American Embassy to Jerusalem, celebrated by Israelis as a long-awaited acceptance of our eternal capital.

These schisms and more have eroded the willingness of many Israeli legislators to please American Jews at the price of political instability. The June 2017 decision by the Israeli government to withdraw from those parts of the Western Wall agreement that would have guaranteed equal status for all the streams at our holiest site reflected this tension.

WHICH STILL WOULDN'T HAVE SAVED A WRETCHED SPECTACLE:

A lot of fans probably don't even realize that there is such a thing as a one-point safety, because there's never been on in NFL history. But it does exist, and if it ever does happen in the NFL it will probably happen like this: A team scores a touchdown and is going for two. The offense throws an interception into the end zone, the defensive player takes it out of the end zone, then he gets hit just after he runs out of the end zone, fumbles back into the end zone, and one of his teammates recovers. That would be a safety, but because it comes on a two-point conversion attempt instead of a regular play from scrimmage, it would be a one-point safety.

WISDOM OF MARKETS:

The US editor of the Financial Times is calling for a boycott of companies that advertise on Fox in the wake of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting and the pipe bombs sent to leading Democrats.

"The most effective thing Americans can do is boycott companies that advertise on Fox," Edward Luce tweeted Saturday. "They bankroll the poison that goes from the studio into Trump's head. The second is vote."

The call was an unusual one for a journalist. But Luce -- who had tweeted on Friday that Trump "has normalized the language of violence in US politics" -- was one of a growing number of prominent voices, including former conservatives who oppose Trump, speaking out against Fox News and Fox Business.

Within days of the new caravan's formation in Honduras, Fox News hosts and Republican congressmen were using dehumanizing language and casting the migrants as an imminent threat. In reality, the nearest caravan is about 1,000 miles from the nearest US port of entry, and many of the migrants say they want to seek asylum through legal avenues.

On Fox News, the word "invasion" was used in relation to the caravan more than 60 times in October, according to closed captioning transcripts. (This includes repeats of programs.) "Invading" was brought up more than a dozen times.

On Fox Business, the word "invasion" was invoked more than 75 times in October, mostly on Lou Dobbs' program.

Fox's Tucker Carlson referenced an "invasion" as early as October 16.

Eleven days later, on October 27, minutes before entering the Tree of Life synagogue, the suspect wrote another post about "invaders" and said "I'm going in," seemingly linking his anti-immigrant attitudes to his attack on the synagogue.

One of the congregations that rents space at the synagogue, Dor Hadash, reportedly has a partnership with HIAS, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, which has a long history of helping refugees.

The suspect claimed in his final post on Gab that "HIAS likes to bring in invaders that kill our people."

MAGA!:

The 51-year-old from Charlotte, North Carolina was heard shouting 'I'm white and I'm hot' and also threatened to draw a gun on the pair. Further to this she was bragging about her '$125,000-a-year job'.

She is now facing criminal charges and her employer, Spectrum, confirmed that her contract has now been terminated.

IT'S JUST ABOUT STOKING HATRED:

So: It is not clear that these migrants will ever arrive at the U.S. southern border; if they do, they have legal right to seek asylum and there's no reason to believe they will assert that right in anything but a peaceful manner; America is perfectly capable of absorbing another 3,500 asylum-seekers; and even if none of those things were true, U.S. soldiers still wouldn't be able to provide anything but logistical support to border patrol -- and it's hard to see why 5,200 troops are needed to serve that function.

But it's relatively easy to see why a political party that believes it can only win elections by sowing paranoid fear would want to engineer headlines about 5,200 troops headed to the border to counter the migrant "invasion" shortly before Election Day.

HURRY FRIDAY:

-- FOR THE PASTRY --

8 ounces Plain flour

2 ounces Butter

2 ounces Lard ; (dripping / lard or veg fat)

1 pinch Salt

-- FOR THE FILLING --

3 large Potatoes

1 Onion

2 ounces Butter ; cut into thin flakes

 

Sift the flour and salt into a bowl and stir in the butter and lard, using your fingertips, rub in the butter until it resembles fine crumbs, then drizzle in just enough cold water to make the pastry form a ball, leave in the fridge to rest for ? an hour.

Meanwhile, peel the 3 large potatoes and 1 onion, cut the potato into thick slices and the onion in to half rings, parboil the potatoes until they are just soft but still holding their shape.

Sweat the onions off in a little butter until soft.

Drain the potatoes and layer into a pie dish the potatoes, onions, and butter flakes, into which you have rolled out a bottom layer of pastry, season with salt and pepper and top off with the top layer of pastry.

Bake at 180 degrees for approx ? hour until golden, serve immediately with your preferred condiment.

CONSIDER THE BEAM:

Americans of all political stripes righty denounced the leader of the free world for making a moral equivalence between "very fine people on both sides." But while activists on the Left readily condemn the language that led to the attacks on Soros and in Pittsburgh, there's a disconnect when it comes to Minister Louis Farrakhan.

Just a few weeks ago, the long-time leader of the Nation of Islam posted a video on Twitter defending his decades of Jew-bashing by comparing people to insects, declaring, "I'm not anti-Semitic, I'm anti-termite." Back in March Tamika Mallory, one of the organizers of the Women's March, tried to square her praise for a man who regularly dehumanizes Jews as the root of all evil with fighting racism, writing, "I am the same woman who helped to build an intersectional movement that fights for the rights of all people and stands against hatred and discrimination of all forms."

Mallory isn't some passive observer either, unexpectedly caught up in the verbal crossfire. She's a full-on cheerleader, posting photos of herself on Instagram with Farrakhan captioned "GOAT" ("greatest of all time"). The Women's March then issued its own seven-paragraph word salad, which like Mallory's, failed to articulate a specific critique of Farrakhan's rhetoric while throwing around the term "intersectionality" to somehow defend being soft on anti-Semitism. The most they would allow is that Farrakhan's statements are "not aligned with the Women's March Unity Principles," followed by some half-hearted language about how anti-Semitism is wrong.

Unsurprisingly, Mallory and the organization she founded had nothing to say about Farrakhan's most recent play for attention even as Republicans follow his lead by fearmongering against a globalist conspiracy for political gain.

Words, or the lack thereof, matter.

NOW WALK THE WALK:

Brazil's president-elect Jair Bolsonaro said on Monday that he wants to nominate crusading anti-corruption judge Sergio Moro to either the Supreme Court or to serve as his justice minister.

Bolsonaro made the comments during a wide-ranging interview with TV Record. Moro is the judge leading the "Car Wash" trials that have convicted scores of high level politicians and business elite for a sprawling graft scheme. Among those Moro convicted was former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.  [...]

Investors are particularly heartened by his choice of Paulo Guedes, a Chicago University-trained economist and investment banker, as his economic guru and future economy minister.

Guedes said the new government will try to erase Brazil's unsustainable budget within a year, simplify and reduce taxes, and create 10 million jobs by cutting payroll taxes. New rules will boost investment in infrastructure, he told reporters.

Guedes is keen to privatize an array of state enterprises, including units of oil company Petroleo Brasileiro SA (Petrobras) and power utility Centrais Eletricas Brasileiras SA (Eletrobras).

However, his free-market ideas have clashed with the views of the retired army generals who are helping Bolsonaro flesh out his government program.

On Sunday, Guedes said Brazil would seek to improve trade relations outside the restrictions of the Mercosur bloc founded with neighboring Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay.

Bolsonaro's rise follows conservative electoral victories in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Paraguay, and Peru, pushing the continent to the right and undermining support for the authoritarian socialist regime in Venezuela. [...]

Bolsonaro said he would "unite Brazil" by cutting bureaucracy and red tape for businesses. He said he was committed to fiscal discipline and called for the early elimination of the federal government's budget deficit.

"We are going to think in terms of more Brazil and less Brasilia," he said, referring to the nation's capital where he will take office on Jan. 1.

Financial markets are expected to rally on Monday on Bolsonaro's victory.

The real currency has gained about 10 percent against the dollar in the last month as Bolsonaro's prospects of winning increased. Sao Paulo's benchmark Bovespa stock index has risen 13.5 percent since mid-September.

Investors are particularly heartened by his choice of Paulo Guedes, a Chicago University-trained economist and investment banker, as his economic guru and future economy minister.

Guedes said the new government will try to erase Brazil's unsustainable budget within a year, simplify and reduce taxes, and create 10 million jobs by cutting payroll taxes. New rules will boost investment in infrastructure, he told reporters.

Guedes is keen to privatize an array of state enterprises, including units of oil company Petroleo Brasileiro SA (Petrobras) and power utility Centrais Eletricas Brasileiras SA (Eletrobras).

However, his free-market ideas have clashed with the views of the retired army generals who are helping Bolsonaro flesh out his government program.

On Sunday, Guedes said Brazil would seek to improve trade relations outside the restrictions of the Mercosur bloc founded with neighboring Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay.

Bolsonaro's rise follows conservative electoral victories in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Paraguay, and Peru, pushing the continent to the right and undermining support for the authoritarian socialist regime in Venezuela.

KNOWING YOUR ALLIES:

Iran's parliamentary speaker Ali Larijani is under fire by hard-liners over his role in lawmakers' recent approval of bills related to the Financial Action Task Force (FATF). In this vein, hard-liners are reminding the Iranian public of Larijani's cooperation with President Hassan Rouhani in selling the nuclear deal to Iranians, arguing that Larijani is being groomed for the 2021 presidential election.

Iran's parliament passed the Combating the Financing of Terrorism bill on Oct. 7, one of the four key bills that parliament must approve for Iran to be removed from the FATF blacklist. It took parliament months to pass this controversial bill due to the determination of hard-liners to stop it. Hard-liners believe the bill would cut Iran's ties to the "Axis of Resistance" -- an argument refuted by the Reformists, who say the FATF only recognizes groups as terroristic if they are described as such by the United Nations.

The Oct. 7 parliament session turned into a real competition between the Reformists and hard-liners over the FATF bills. It was reminiscent of the day the lawmakers approved the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action back in 2015, despite the uproar from hard-liners. [...]

The hard-liners' reaction to Larijani's attempts to persuade parliament to vote for the CFT bill was harsh. Vatan-e Emrooz, a leading hard-line newspaper, dedicated its front page to the CFT issue, condemning Larijani for his "willingness" to give up anything the West wants from Iran.

Meanwhile, on Twitter and other social networks, the reactions were worse. Hard-liners created the hashtag "Larijani's betrayal" and compared him to Al-Ash'ath ibn Qays, who played an influential role in forcing the first Shiite Imam Ali bin Abi Taleb to accept arbitration even though he was close to victory in the Battle of Siffin in 657. Moreover, a short clip of hard-line parliamentarian Javad Karimi Ghoddousi was released to the media, in which he stated that Larijani and Rouhani are examples of the "betrayers" that Ayatollah Khamenei has spoken about.

What shouldn't be neglected here is that Larijani, once known as a hard-liner, has dealt with crucial issues in a down-to-earth manner over the past decade. Since the final years of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's presidency (2005-13), Larijani's distance from the hard-liners and the conservatives grew, reaching its peak with his cooperation with the Reformist-backed Rouhani on many key issues, including the 2015 nuclear deal.

In return, the Reformists have welcomed Larijani's stance and decisions, bringing up the likelihood of supporting him in the 2021 presidential election. This would not be Larijani's first presidential campaign. In 2005, the conservatives chose Larijani, who had headed the state broadcaster for a decade, as their candidate. But other conservative figures, including hard-liner Ahmadinejad and Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, rejected Larijani's nomination.

ALICE B. TOKELESS?:

A recent study placed marijuana among the five clearest triggers of schizophrenia, out of 98 catalysts under consideration. The other top triggers--a chemical predisposition, the experience of trauma as a child or adult, and obstetric complications (aka, trauma experienced in utero)--are less preventable than marijuana use. An earlier study, conducted over 15 years in Sweden, concluded that the risk of developing schizophrenia increased six times for high-level users. But even using moderately, just 11 to 50 times overall, doubles the risk according to a more recent study. And for those who start using younger, the risk is higher still: 15-year-olds who use marijuana are three-times likelier to develop psychotic symptoms than those who start at 18.

Psychosis usually rears its head during one's late teens or early 20s, which happens to be within a couple years of a typical recreational user's first experience with marijuana. It's a complex set of mental disorders that covers symptoms like hallucinations, paranoid delusions, all the way to full-blown schizophrenia--which, while sometimes manageable, has no known cure.

CUE TRUMPBOT DENIALS:

GOP Rep. Steve King (Iowa) on Saturday defended his association with a Nazi-linked group in Austria, telling The Washington Post that the group is "far right."

He made the comments about Austria's Freedom Party, a group founded by a former Nazi SS officer and whose current leader was active in neo-Nazi circles, according to the paper.

"If they were in America pushing the platform that they push, they would be Republicans," King, who is known for his inflammatory statements about immigration, told the Post.

Stein's attorneys, James Pratt and Michael Shultz, argued Monday in a sentencing memo that sending Stein to prison for life was unwarranted, and that a sentence of 15 years would be appropriate. They said the judge should factor in the "backdrop to this case" when crafting an appropriate sentence.

"2016 was 'lit.' The court cannot ignore the circumstances of one of the most rhetorically mold-breaking, violent, awful, hateful and contentious presidential elections in modern history, driven in large measure by the rhetorical China shop bull who is now our president," they wrote.

"Trump's brand of rough-and-tumble verbal pummeling heightened the rhetorical stakes for people of all political persuasions," they added. "A personal normally at a 3 on a scale of political talk might have found themselves at a 7 during the election. A person, like Patrick, who would often be at a 7 during a normal day, might 'go to 11.' See SPINAL TAP. That climate should be taken into account when evaluating the rhetoric that formed the basis of the government's case."

 Stein's attorneys, who called their client an "early and avid" Trump supporter, said it was important to keep in mind that "almost no one thought Trump was going to win" when evaluating the likelihood of an attack. The plot was supposed to take place after the election, as the group didn't want their attack to boost Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. Stein, in a message to an undercover agent, wrote that if they attacked ahead of the election it would "give a lot of ammunition to the Hillary supporters" and said that Clinton could never be allowed to be president.

"Trump's win changed everything, and it is reasonable to speculate that it would have changed things among the defendants as well," the attorneys wrote. "The urgency for action would be gone. The feeling of a losing battle would be gone. The conspiracies, in part, would be disproven as the transition from Obama to Trump took place. It is logical to conclude that the discussed attack would never have happened in the world that existed post-Trump."

Stein's attorneys said their client got caught up in the anti-Muslim information he was devouring online. His knowledge of the Quran, his attorneys wrote, "came directly from the internet and conservative talk-show hosts such as Sean Hannity and Michael Savage. Patrick himself had never read the Quran, nor had he participated in a comparative study of any religion."

Anti-Semitic incidents have increased dramatically, up 57 percent in just the last year according to the Anti-Defamation League, and, in fact, hate crimes are up across the board. Statistics show the number of people killed by far-right extremists since Sept. 11 are roughly equal to the number killed in the U.S. by jihadist terrorists-a fact that has received little public attention and gone unremarked upon by F.B.I. Director Christopher Wray in his annual testimony before Congress. Hate crimes against Muslims also rose almost 20 percent in 2016 over 2015.

Two major developments appear to be driving the increase in acts of hatred. The first is the creation of an extremist community online. [...]

The second development that has lit up this increasingly linked and animated extremist world is the advent of Donald Trump. The statistics demonstrate clearly that the biggest bump in hate crimes in recent history coincides with the period since his presidential campaign began. This is not just a matter of correlation but causation. Trump's incendiary rhetoric, from his accusation that Mexicans coming to the U.S. were rapists to his claims that the caravan of impoverished Central American migrants coming north included Middle Easterners-aka "terrorists"-has given license to those who peddle hatred to emerge from the shadows. Much as ISIS has done with its far-flung recruits, Trump's conspiracy theories have weaponized mental disability. Sayoc and Bowers seem clearly unhinged, barely functioning and susceptible to any utterance from the Commander-in-Chief. While Bowers wrote that he was concerned Trump was controlled by Jews, both believed his nonsense about a menacing horde coming to attack us. In Bowers's case, his twisted belief that the venerable Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society was a fifth column supporting the caravan, ignited his ghastly bloodletting.

Though he was sure to condemn Saturday's attack and last week's terror, Trump evinces little conviction. He denounces "globalists," not Jews, but anyone with eyes to see recognizes the reference to international Jewry - one made all the more palpable by his sly attacks on billionaire George Soros and gleeful suggestions that this Holocaust survivor is funding the caravan. His reference to his own former staffer, Gary Cohn, late of Goldman Sachs, as a globalist - as well as the closing ad of the 2016 campaign, which vilified Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein, Fed Chair Janet Yellen and Soros, a trinity of Jewish capital, all underscore the case. 

NO ONE IN THE ADMINISTRATION HAS DONE MORE DAMAGE TO HIMSELF THAN MIKE PENCE:

Two days after the worst anti-Semitic massacre ever on American soil, the Vice President appears at an event with group whose main purpose is to proselytize to Jews & convert them to Christianity. https://t.co/x4QU9uyGDy

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) October 29, 2018

SPEAKING TRUTH TO wHITE pOWER:

THE OPPOSITE OF DONALD:

President Donald Trump has mocked Maxine Waters as a "low IQ person" and she has called for the president's impeachment.

But Republicans who work with the California Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee see something different: a rare dealmaker in a polarized Congress.

Waters, who would chair the committee if Democrats win the House, has shown a surprising willingness to work across the aisle and with industry groups, even helping to deliver White House-backed legislation to ease regulations and crack down on China.

"There are many, many things that Maxine and I are completely, diametrically the opposite on," said Rep. Frank Lucas (R-Okla.), who is in the running to be the committee's Republican leader. "But I have dealt with her enough on issues to understand she can see the whole picture. It is possible to negotiate with her and she'll keep her word. That's an important thing in Congress. Not everybody does that anymore."

A Republican congressional candidate was caught on video complimenting an anti-Semitic sign while attending a rally in California last year.

Video obtained by Law&Crime shows the GOP's standard-bearer for California's 43rd congressional district, Omar Navarro, marching alongside various anti-Muslim protesters in San Bernardino on June 10, 2017.

In the video, Navarro is approached by a masked man holding a sign reading, "DA GOYIM KNOW." As Navarro and the masked man pass one another, Navarro smiles, gestures, and says, "Nice sign." After complimenting the anti-Semitic message, Navarro holds his smile and then chuckles.

IT'S AS IF FOMENTING HATE HAS CONSEQUENCES:

Cesar Sayoc stood in the throng of shouting, teeth-gnashing Trump supporters and joined a chant directed at news cameras.

"CNN sucks! CNN sucks!" they screamed. "Tell the truth! Tell the truth!"

Sayoc had seemingly found his tribe at the Trump rally in February 2017.

In previously unreleased video captured by the crew of filmmaker Michael Moore, the sleeveless shirt Sayoc wore that day in Melbourne, Fla., featured a collage of pro-Trump imagery, and his sign, like his chants, derided CNN -- perhaps the most frequent target of Trump's anti-media rage.

SCAMS ALL THE WAY DOWN:

The 160-page complaint alleges that Mr. Trump and his family received secret payments from three business entities in exchange for promoting them as legitimate opportunities, when in reality they were get-rich-quick schemes that harmed investors, many of whom were unsophisticated and struggling financially.

Those business entities were ACN, a telecommunications marketing company that paid Mr. Trump millions of dollars to endorse its products; the Trump Network, a vitamin marketing enterprise; and the Trump Institute, which the suit said offered "extravagantly priced multiday training seminars" on Mr. Trump's real estate "secrets." [...]

The suit is not the first to accuse Mr. Trump of fraud. Shortly after his election in November 2016, he agreed to pay $25 million to settle a series of lawsuits, including one by New York State's attorney general, that alleged unscrupulous practices by Trump University, another venture that claimed to sell access to his real estate secrets.

OBSTRUCTION HAS CONSEQUENCES:

A Kazakh acquaintance of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has been released from a U.S. prison after serving more than five years for obstruction of justice. [...]

Kadyrbaev and two other friends of Tsarnaev, Azamat Tazhayakov and Robel Kidane Phillipos, were sentenced in 2015 for removing items from his dorm room at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth after the Boston Marathon bombing on April 15, 2013.

MAGA! (profanity/inanity alert):

IF YOU BELIEVE IN sCIENCE YOU HAVEN'T UNDERSTOOD SCIENCE:

GREEN LIGHT!:

Trump calls media the "true Enemy of the People" days after CNN was sent a bomb https://t.co/PX8pqqpCH9

— Vox (@voxdotcom) October 29, 2018

IT'D BE HELPFUL TO HAVE AN ADMINISTRATION THAT WOULD HOLD HIM TO THAT:

Mr Bolsonaro, who won just over 55 per cent of the votes on Sunday, tried to allay fears about his win, saying he would "pacify" Brazil following an election campaign repeatedly marred by violence.

 

"This country belongs to all of us, Brazilians by birth or by heart, a Brazil of diverse opinions, colours and orientations," he said. Mr Bolsonaro also said he wanted "to change the destiny of Brazil". [...]

Mr Haddad, who took just under 45 per cent of the votes, promised to fight for human rights and the rule of law.

"We have the responsibility to mount an opposition, putting national interests, the interests of the entire Brazilian people, above everything," the Workers' Party candidate told supporters.

"Brazil has possibly never needed the exercise of citizenship more than right now."

SENTIMENTAL HYGIENE:

No disease any refugee might bring to America is as dangerous as the disease of fear, bigotry and hatred now being spread in America by Fox. https://t.co/aOPWAHDgH4

— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) October 29, 2018

SOLDIERS IN THE ARMY:

Spirituals began their transition to the concert hall in 1871 in an effort to save Fisk University from financial ruin. The school had been founded by the American Missionary Association in 1866 in Nashville for the education of freedmen. Its white treasurer, George White, was an amateur musician who in his spare time trained a group of some 10 to 12 female and male singers. Their repertory consisted of white parlor songs and hymns of the day until White overheard the students singing spirituals to one another. He then prevailed on them to teach him the songs.

After a series of local concerts, White gambled with the school's and his personal savings by taking his singers on tour. In October 1871 they set out for the north, initially touring towns and cities on the Underground Railroad from Ohio to Maine. Audiences met the parlor songs with indifference but enthusiastically embraced the spirituals.

White arranged the spirituals with the goal of transforming a participatory folk music into a concert music that would hold the attention of a listening audience. This meant training his singers to blend and synchronize their voices. He typically added harmony, regulated the rhythm, added dynamics and other expressive features, and changed dialect to standard English. Church musician Theodore Seward (also white) transcribed the songs, which were sold in books at concerts. Through this process, improvisatory songs became standardized.

In 1874, the Fisk Jubilee Singers went to England, spending most of their career in Britain and on the Continent until they disbanded in 1878. Over the course of their short career they collected $150,000 for their university.

The Fisk Jubilee Singers are justifiably renowned for their artistry, fundraising, and consciousness-raising. But public enthusiasm for jubilee songs might well have died out once the singers began performing abroad, had not numerous other jubilee groups materialized. Although the popularization of jubilee songs--as spirituals became known--began with the Fisk singers, it certainly didn't end with them.

cONSERVATISM AND THE rIGHT HAVE ALWAYS BEEN OPPOSED TO ONE ANOTHER:

President Reagan speaking out directly to bigots trafficking in hate:

"You are the ones who are out of step with our society. You are the ones who willfully violate the meaning of the dream that is America."

pic.twitter.com/0C1DHxi5UR

— Josh Campbell (@joshscampbell) October 28, 2018

INFORMATION WANTS TO BE FREE:

With nearly 1.5 million votes already cast and Election Day less than two weeks away, Andrew Gillum should move quickly to provide more complete answers about his interaction with undercover FBI agents who were investigating corruption in Tallahassee. The Democratic nominee for governor's confusing responses this week about a ticket to the Broadway musical Hamilton are not reassuring. He should be more forthright, and he should seek the immediate release of all records collected in an ongoing state ethics investigation.

DUDES, HE JUST ADMITTED HE IS ONE:

"Our Jewish community is not the only group you have targeted," the group wrote. "You have also deliberately undermined the safety of people of color, Muslims, LGBTQ people, and people with disabilities. Yesterday's massacre is not the first act of terror you incited against a minority group in our country."

Trump was fiercely criticized after he failed to condemn white supremacy and asserted that there is "blame on both sides" after last year's white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va.

The group also said Trump is not welcome in the city until he also stops targeting minorities, immigrants and refugees.

The president has "spread lies and sowed fear about migrant families in Central America," the group wrote.

"The Torah teaches that every human being is made b'tzelem Elohim, in the image of God. This means all of us," the leaders wrote. "In our neighbors, Americans, and people worldwide who have reached out to give our community strength, there we find the image of God."

They noted how Squirrel Hill, the Pittsburgh neighborhood where the attack took place, was once the neighborhood where children's television host Fred Rogers lived.

"Here in Mr. Rogers' neighborhood, we express gratitude for the first responders and for the outpouring of support from our neighbors near and far," they wrote.

BE NOT AFRAID:

THE HIGH COST OF RACIAL HYGIENE:

The other eleven countries in the deal, which also includes Brunei, Chile, Malaysia, Peru and Vietnam, were undeterred by the US's withdrawal from TPP. Even without the US, the new pact will be among the largest multilateral trade deals ever enacted (paywall). The CPTPP countries include 14% of world GDP. Beyond just lowering trade barriers between the countries, the deal also includes greater protection of intellectual property rights--a part of the deal the US fought for--and provisions to increase minimum labor standards for workers in participating countries. [...]

The non-profit Peterson Institute for Economics estimates that the total GDP of participating countries will increase by about 1.7%, with the largest gains for Vietnam and Peru. They also estimate that, overall, the US will be worse off due to the deal because US exports will now be less competitive in CPTPP nations.

AMERICA OWES HIM BETTER:

Judah Samet was four minutes late to synagogue.

Services at Tree of Life Congregation in Pittsburgh start at 9:45 A.M. Samet, who is 80 years old, pulled into a handicapped spot in front of the building on the morning of October 27 at 9:49.

"Somebody knocked on my window," Samet said the next day. "There was this guy. Very calm and respectful. [He] told me, you better back up, there is an active shooting going on in your synagogue."

It took Samet sixty seconds to process what the man was saying. Samet was born in Hungary. He turned eight years old at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany. He spent five and a half years in an orphanage in Israel. He has been a member of Tree of Life Congregation for fifty-five years.

"My God, my story doesn't end," he said.

FEAR FOX FRIENDS, NOT FOES:

On Saturday afternoon, federal prosecutors announced that Bowers would face 29 charges, including 11 counts of using a firearm to commit murder and several counts of hate crimes, such as obstructing the exercise of religious beliefs resulting in death and obstructing the exercise of religious beliefs resulting in bodily injury to a public safety officer.

Yet the reason he will not face domestic terrorism charges are simple -- no such charge actually exists.

"There is no federal crime labeled domestic terrorism," Department of Justice spokeswoman, Sarah Isgur Flores, told The Times of Israel on Sunday.

The migrant caravan is not a threat.

This needs to be stated plainly and clearly, because President Donald Trump is working overtime to convince Americans of the opposite. Earlier this week, he tweeted that "criminals and unknown Middle Easterners are mixed" into the caravan, implying that those unknowns are terrorists. There is absolutely no evidence to this claim, and it has been contradicted by a senior counterterrorism official within his own administration.

Like many of the president's falsehoods, the seed of this claim seems to be a Fox News segment. In this case, it was Fox and Friends co-host Pete Hegseth who referred to Guatemalan President Jimmy Morales' claim two weeks ago that his government had arrested and deported close to 100 people "linked to terrorists, with ISIS."  The claim, Hegseth admitted, has not been verified. And Guatemala has already deported these supposed fighters, meaning they could not be part of the caravan.

Homegrown violent extremists "clearly represent the most immediate and most ubiquitous threat to us here inside the United States on a daily basis," Nick Rasmussen, the outgoing head of the US's National Counterterrorism Center, said last November. "Most terrorists are either born or raised here, or only became radicalized well after they came to the United States," he said.

In recent years, America has experienced a "dramatic increase in attacks by disaffected people, and people searching for some sense of accomplishment," Cohen said. They connect with a "cause" whether it is white supremacy or Al Qaeda, and then "use for a motive of committing a violent attack," spurred on by what they're seeing on social media and the internet. The people most easily swayed by hateful rhetoric are often "looking for legitimacy and a sense of validation for their violent tendencies," Cohen said.

The National Institute of Justice, the US DOJ's research arm, published a report this June synthesizing different research that it had funded in recent years on the US's homegrown terrorism problem. So called "lone-wolf" terrorists "frequently combined personal grievances (i.e., perceptions that they had been personally wronged) with political grievances (i.e., perceptions that a government entity or other political actor had committed an injustice)," the report found.

In particular, "feeling that one (or one's group) has been treated unfairly, discriminated against, or targeted by others may lead individuals to seek justice or revenge against those they blame for this situation," the report notes.

Those grievances feed into a cycle of reinforcement and radicalization that culminates in a violent act, the report finds:

Dylann Roof, the ninth grade dropout who killed nine African Americans in a church in 2015, was radicalized after reading the white supremacist website "Council of Conservative Citizens," online, he claimed. Nikki Haley, then governor of South Carolina, warned on the one-year anniversary of Roof's massacre that Trump's divisive campaign statements could spur similar incidents. James Alex Fields, who killed a woman protesting a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, was a violent teenager who was kicked out of Army basic training, then seemed to find a community in online white supremacist groups.

James Hodgkinson, who shot at a Republican baseball team last summer, had been arrested for punching a woman, and had posted increasingly angry social media messages directed at Trump and Republicans before the shooting. [...]

For years, US officials have been saying that homegrown terrorism is surging, particularly on the right. But after Trump took office, the administration cut funding for the Department of Homeland Security's Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) program--except to address Islamic-inspired terrorism. It was a dangerous mistake, anti-terror activists said at the time.

"We have hundreds of thousands of homegrown sovereign citizens and militia members with ties to white nationalism, training in paramilitary camps across the US and standing armed in front of mosques to intimidate marginalized Americans," warned Christian Picciolini, a former skinhead who co-founded Life After Hate, to rehabilitate extremists, last year. "The greatest terror threat we face as a nation is already within our borders, yet we refuse to even call it terrorism when it happens."

Under Trump, the DHS has focused instead on curbing immigration, despite the fact that immigrants are less likely to commit violent crimes than US residents. As the investigation continues into the explosive devices sent this week to prominent Democrats and critics of Trump, the federal government remains reluctant to publicly call it terrorism.

AND DONALD IS THE ONLY THREAT TO THE ECONOMY:

Sentiment among independents tracking one party more closely has historically indicated which way those unaligned voters will lean, said Gary Langer, president of polling firm Langer Research Associates LLC, which produces the comfort surveys for Bloomberg. He said independent sentiment aligned more with Republicans in the lead up to Donald Trump's shock win in 2016, while it was more in tune with Democrats before Barack Obama's 2008 victory.

"Independents' vote preferences are decidedly Democratic right now, which makes it look like a strong Democratic year," Langer said. When independents are "more in-tune with the economic attitudes that are shared with one or the other party, then they're also more in-tune to that party in general."

PLENTY OF BLAME TO GO AROUND:

The volatile tribalism now so ingrained in American life will eventually right itself, says Robb Willer, a sociology professor at Stanford University, but not until the public decides it's had enough and stops rewarding politicians who use incendiary language and demonize the other side. It's impossible to guess, he notes, how much damage will be done in the meantime.

"That is the question of our time: Are we going to choose to continue the war, or are we going to choose peace? And we don't know yet what the answer to that will be, because while a majority of Americans are fed up with the extremity of our political divisions, it does feel like we're stuck here," Willer says. "It will get worse before it gets better."

Animosity between parties has been growing for decades now, to the point that studies show Republicans and Democrats don't want to date one another, don't want their children to marry one another and don't want to live in the same neighborhoods at a rate unprecedented in modern America. At the same time, politicians began using increasingly apocalyptic language. Willer says those two forces -- the splintering of society along party lines and the ascent of vitriolic campaigning -- merged to create a breeding ground for violence.

"It was simmering," says Parker. "It's like the gas burner was on, then Trump lit the fire."

The president vaulted to political prominence by promoting the racist and false conspiracy theory that Obama was not born in the United States, launched his presidential campaign by calling Mexicans rapists and murderers, and routinely describes his enemies, including the intended recipients of the pipe bombs, as "evil," ″dangerous," ″the enemy of the American people." [...]

"America is resilient; we find a way even in our darkest days," 36-year-old Cordell Lawrence said as he voted last week in Louisville. Lawrence described himself only as a moderate, preferring not to make public what party he leans to because he worries that could hinder personal and professional relationships.

"Maybe we have to hit rock bottom before we find how to get back up," he said. "We're probably pretty close to rock bottom today. At least I hope we are."

I'D SEEN ARMED SECURITY AT A TEMPLE IN MIAMI, BUT...:

Jewish places of worship are considering ramping up security after the deadly shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue, amid a growing atmosphere of hatred and intolerance encouraged by Donald Trump. 

Eleven people were killed and six others were injured in the shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh on Saturday. Following the massacre, Eric Robbins, president and CEO of the Jewish Federation in Atlanta, told CNN placing armed guards in holy places was a tough decision to make. "Trying to find a balance between being welcoming to a community and security is a difficult balance to find," Robbins said, noting that the synagogue he runs does have security teams.

Today, Los Angeles will be the first city ever to host an MLB (Dodgers), NFL (Rams), NBA (Clippers), and NHL (Kings) game on the same day.

All four games will be played within five miles of each other.

— Stats By STATS (@StatsBySTATS) October 28, 2018

FIGHTING THE DRAG:

While Senate Republicans are growing increasingly optimistic about their chances of adding to their 51-seat majority, the mood among their House counterparts is deeply pessimistic. Despite an enthusiasm boost among red-state conservatives, outside GOP groups are still scrambling to protect rank-and-file members who looked in solid shape several months ago.

In the last week, the Congressional Leadership Fund super PAC has spent money to protect Reps. Fred Upton in Michigan, Mia Love in Utah, Jaime Herrera Beutler in Washington, and George Holding in North Carolina. They're trying to salvage several conservative-minded seats where Republican congressmen retired, including those of Speaker Paul Ryan in Wisconsin, Rep. Dennis Ross in Florida, and Tom Garrett of Virginia. These are all districts President Trump carried, but have enough suburban constituencies where the president is a drag on the GOP candidates.

The National Republican Congressional Committee is also spending money to help Georgia Rep. Karen Handel, who narrowly survived a costly special election race last year, and Florida Rep. Brian Mast, who won bipartisan support for embracing gun control measures after the Parkland school shooting. Along with CLF, they're also aiding Herrera Beutler fend off a surprising challenge from Carolyn Long, a little-known Democratic college professor.

ABOVE AVERAGE IS OVER:

In a landmark study, 20 top US corporate lawyers with decades of experience in corporate law and contract review were pitted against an AI. Their task was to spot issues in five Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs), which are a contractual basis for most business deals.

The study, carried out with leading legal academics and experts, saw the LawGeex AI achieve an average 94% accuracy rate, higher than the lawyers who achieved an average rate of 85%. It took the lawyers an average of 92 minutes to complete the NDA issue spotting, compared to 26 seconds for the LawGeex AI. The longest time taken by a lawyer to complete the test was 156 minutes, and the shortest time was 51 minutes. The study made waves around the world and was covered across global media.

THEIR MASTER'S VOICE:

Both the suspect accused of conducting the massacre in Pittsburgh's Tree of Life Synagogue and the man accused of sending at least 13 potential explosive devices to prominent left-leaning figures trafficked in conspiracy theories that saw Soros' hand behind left-wing social movements and political sentiments. [...]

President Donald Trump has claimed, without evidence, that Soros paid the protesters opposing the nomination of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

Similarly, Senate Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley said he believed Soros was paying protesters who opposed Kavanaugh. "I tend to believe it," he said. "I believe it fits into his attack mode that he has and how he uses his billions and billions of resources."

The day after the explosive device was found in Soros' mailbox, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy tweeted about the attempted victim.

"We cannot allow Soros, Steyer and Bloomberg to BUY this election!" he wrote on Tuesday.

Earlier this month, Florida Representative Matt Gaetz claimed that Soros was funding the latest in a series of far-right talking points -- a group of migrants walking towards the U.S. that the President and others have called a 'caravan'. 

"Footage in Honduras giving cash 2 women & children 2 join the caravan & storm the US border @ election time. Soros? US-backed NGOs? Time to investigate the source!" he wrote on Twitter.

Majority Whip Steve Scalise, Rudy Giuliani, Texas Representative Louie Gohmert and Iowa Representative Steve King have also offered conspiratorial statements about Soros, according to BuzzFeed News.

Arizona Representative Paul Gosar questioned whether Soros has funded the 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

WINK, WINK, NUDGE, NUDGE:

Trump has had enough to say about the Jews that his supporters may easily make certain pernicious inferences. During the campaign, he joked at a meeting of the Republican Jewish Coalition that it wouldn't support him "because I don't want your money." A campaign-era tweet about Hillary Clinton superimposed a Star of David over dollar bills. He said the white-supremacist marchers at Charlottesville last year were "fine people." After I published a profile of Trump's third wife, Melania, that displeased her -- and his supporters -- the alt-right deluged me with anti-Semitic insults and imagery, culminating in clear death threats -- such as an image of a Jew being shot execution-style or people ordering coffins in my name. When Trump was asked to condemn these attacks by his supporters, he said "I don't have a message" for them. That day, my terrified father called me and pointed out that it was the 26th anniversary of our family's arrival in America. [...]

When I was faced with the anti-Semitic rage of Trump supporters defending "Empress Melania," I saw it clearly: Should Trump win the election, his followers -- some of whom threw the word "k---" around as happily as they use the n-word -- would be heartened and empowered, and they would quickly surpass the gas-chamber Twitter memes they were then deploying.

In the 2½ years that followed, Trump's tune has become a deafening roar. The closing ad of his campaign reprised the kind of anti-Semitic tropes that populated "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion": "It's a global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations and political entities," Trump's voice said, as pictures appeared of then-Federal Reserve Board chair Janet Yellen (a Jew), billionaire progressive donor George Soros (a Jew), and then-Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein (also a Jew). The ad was called "Donald Trump's Argument for America."

In fact, Trump had so much to say about the Jews that his Jewish son-in-law has had to publicly defend him as "not an anti-Semite."

But the anti-Semites have not been convinced. A month after he had ordered his trolls to attack me, white supremacist Andrew Anglin told the HuffPost what he thought of Trump's refusal to denounce them. "We interpret that as an endorsement," he said. To his readers, he wrote, "Glorious Leader Donald Trump Refuses to Denounce Stormer Troll Army." When President Trump blamed "both sides" for Charlottesville, his supporters heard him loud and clear: "I knew Trump was eventually going to be like, meh, whatever," Anglin said. "Trump only disavowed us at the point of a Jewish weapon. So I'm not disavowing him." Many others in the alt-right praised Trump's statement as moral equivocation on Charlottesville. To them, this, rather than the forced, obligatory condemnation, was the important signal. (According to the Anti-Defamation League, the incidence of anti-Semitic hate crimes jumped nearly 60 percent in 2017, the biggest increase since it started keeping track in 1979. What made 2017 so different? It was Trump's first year in office.)

When Trump called himself a nationalist in Houston last week, the alt-right knew exactly what he meant. One alt-right commenter was elated because nationalism "is inherently connected to race." Another wrote that he was "literally shaking" with glee. Still another wrote "THE FIRE RISES."

President Donald Trump is facing criticism for stating what many observers of his politics and rhetoric would say is obvious: that he is a nationalist. 

"A globalist is a person that wants the globe to do well, frankly, not caring about our country so much. And you know what? We can't have that," Trump said at a rally in Houston Monday.

"You know, they have a word - it's sort of became old-fashioned - it's called a nationalist. And I say, really, we're not supposed to use that word. You know what I am? I'm a nationalist, okay? I'm a nationalist. Nationalist. Nothing wrong. Use that word. Use that word."

President Trump, who's built a political career on inflammatory and racially-charged rhetoric, set off waves of outrage after he called his outgoing top economic adviser Gary Cohn a "globalist" during a Cabinet meeting Thursday.

THE AMERICA DONALD HATES:

The Muslim-American community has raised tens of thousands of dollars in a crowdfunding effort to help the victims of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting that left at least 11 people dead and six wounded.

The campaign, which is hosted by Muslim crowdfunding site LaunchGood, aims to help shooting victims, "whether it is the injured victims or the Jewish families who have lost loved ones".

It was started by Tark El-Messidi, a Muslim-American speaker and founder of CelebrateMercy, a nonprofit organisation that "teaches about the Prophet Muhammad's life and character".

According to an update the campaign's page, its original goal of $25,000 was raised in "only" six hours.

THE SHOOTING IS TRUMPISM DISTILLED TO ITS ESSENCE:

For the next six months, HIAS became the most important entity in my life. It was HIAS workers who were pulling us, and tens of thousands of others, off the trains in Austria; HIAS that got us settled in refugee camps; HIAS that rallied American Jewish communities to sponsor refugees in the United States. "HIAS will help," I silently intoned, as we hitchhiked like phantoms along Austrian roads and went through awful asylum interviews at the American embassy.

HIAS was what remained when the rest of your life had disintegrated, when there was no money, no way to communicate, no going back. HIAS was what kept you tethered to the world when you became a ghost, but weren't yet ready to die.

Two decades after I came to America, HIAS found itself at the crossroads. For the first time in memory, there weren't large numbers of Jews in need of resettlement. It was other people who needed help: children fleeing gang violence in Central America, victims of wars in East Asia, and most of all,  refugees from the wars in the Middle East -- people who had endured horrors that make my family's experience seem like a luxury cruise in comparison.

Some felt it was inappropriate for HIAS, a Jewish group, to devote resources to aiding Muslims; HIAS, to its eternal credit, disagreed. As Mark Hetfield, the president and chief executive of HIAS, once told me, "We decided to help, not because they are Jewish, but because we are Jewish." On Oct. 19, HIAS organized a national refugee Shabbat.

The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society became simply HIAS, to reflect the fact that about 90 percent of its clients were no longer Jewish. Offices sprang up in Kenya, Greece, Venezuela and Chad. The group engaged the same American Jewish communities that had adopted families like mine; today, more than 400 Jewish communities -- including Pittsburgh's -- have committed themselves to helping refugees. And after Donald Trump became president, HIAS became one of the most vigorous and vocal opponents of the White House's attempts to ban refugees.

NEIGHBORS, NOT STRANGERS:

One of the alleged shooter's obsessions on social media was HIAS, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, a Jewish organization originally founded in the late 1800s to resettle Jews fleeing pogroms in Eastern Europe. Today it rescues Jews and non-Jews facing persecution all over the world.

A few weeks ago, Mr. Bowers shared a link to an event called Refugee Shabbat, a national initiative organized by HIAS, of which Tree of Life was a participating synagogue. "Why hello there HIAS! You like to bring in hostile invaders to dwell among us?" he wrote on a social networking site often used by alt-right activists and white nationalists.

Just this morning, he posted: "HIAS likes to bring in invaders that kill our people. I can't sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I'm going in."

The heartbreaking coincidence is that the Jewish emphasis on the open door, on welcoming the stranger, is exactly what the Jews of Tree of Life and the Jews of every synagogue big and small in every far-flung corner of the globe were reading about this Shabbat morning.

They were reading from the chapters of Genesis we refer to as Vayera. The Torah portion opens on Judaism's founding father and mother: Abraham and Sarah. Three men show up to their tent -- strangers -- and the couple welcomes them: feeding them, giving them shade and washing their feet.

These strangers come with a shocking message: Sarah, then the ripe age of 90, will bear a child.

Sarah laughs, incredulous. But she soon gives birth to Isaac. And the strangers, tradition teaches us, are not strangers at all, but angels in disguise. [...]

Just as every Jewish couple gets married under a canopy open on all four sides -- a replica of the tent modeled for us by Abraham and Sarah -- so must Jewish communities keep our tents open. This is the true source of our longevity and resilience.

RISE UP:

GOOSE/GANDER:

Democrats eager to investigate the Trump administration if they seize the House would have the GOP to thank for one of their most potent tools -- a sweeping subpoena authority that Democratic lawmakers denounced as an abusive power grab three years ago.

House Republicans changed the rules in 2015 to allow many of their committee chairmen to issue subpoenas without consulting the minority party, overriding Democrats objections that likened the tactic to something out of the McCarthy era.

Now the weapon that the GOP wielded dozens of times against Barack Obama's agencies could allow Democrats to bombard President Donald Trump's most controversial appointees with demands for information. And many Democrats are itching to use it.

"The Republicans have set the standard and, by God, we're going to emulate that standard," Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) told POLITICO.

'Stronger than Hate': Internet version of Pittsburgh Steelers logo sends message https://t.co/Tvk7mktlc9 pic.twitter.com/0vwdcBKDYh

— WMUR TV (@WMUR9) October 28, 2018

WOULDN'T WANT TO ALIENATE DONALD'S CORE...:

A resolution condemning neo-Nazis and white nationalists has died a second time in the Tennessee legislature this week https://t.co/6A5ko4q2EM pic.twitter.com/hFbF3pjDKq

— CNN (@CNN) April 4, 2018

THE SOUND OF ONE HAN CLAPPING:

IT'S JUST POLITICS:

Montpelier -- In an era of mud-slinging and namecalling in national politics, a duet performed by rival candidates for the Vermont Legislature is resonating with voters far beyond a village library where they performed.

Lucy Rogers, a Democrat running for the Vermont House in rural Lamoille County, came up with the idea to perform with her Republican competitor, Zac Mayo, after a recent debate "as a nice way to end on a positive note." The 23-year-old cellist had learned through talking with Mayo during the primary election he was also a musician. She emailed him two weeks before the Oct. 10 forum and he agreed. They practiced for about two hours and then sang and played the song Society by Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder for the debategoers at a local library.

"Society, have mercy on me, I hope you're not angry if I disagree. Society, crazy and deep, I hope you're not lonely without me," they crooned.

TARGETED FOR BEING TOO AMERICAN:

The worst of humanity is cruelty to the weak, and the other. The best is compassion for just those groups. This theme runs through all of the world's faiths -- the Torah and the Talmud, the Bible, the Koran,  their Asian counterparts, and others all emphasize the obligation of kindness to the stranger. In practice, America has fallen grossly short of that ideal. But in concept, an openhearted inclusiveness is the idea of America: "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free."

What is a group that exemplifies these ideals? The best of religious traditions, the best of American aspirations, the best of human possibility? One excellent example is hias--a group that started out as a relief-and-resettlement agency for Jewish refugees from Europe in the late 1800s, and has become a tribune for refugees, the persecuted, and the desperate from around the world. Its motto and mission statement now is:

        Welcome the stranger

        Protect the refugee.

Its site says:

We understand better than anyone that hatred, bigotry, and xenophobia must be expressly prohibited in domestic and international law and that the right of persecuted people to seek and enjoy refugee status must be maintained. And because the right to refuge is a universal human right, hias is now dedicated to providing welcome, safety, and freedom to refugees of all faiths and ethnicities from all over the world.

Starting in the 2000s, hias expanded our resettlement work to include assistance to non-Jewish refugees, meaning we became involved in the aftermath of conflicts from Afghanistan, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Ethiopia, Haiti, Hungary, Iran, Morocco, Poland, Romania, Tunisia, Vietnam, and the successor states to the former Soviet Union. We began to work in countries where refugees fled to identify those in immediate danger to bring them to safety. We realized that there were many refugees who would not be resettled and that it was important for us to help.

Why mention hias right now? Because its Jewish background (and centrality in the family history of many Jews in America) and its current work in trying to deal with this era's tired, poor, and desperate were apparently part of the motive that led Saturday's murderer to gun down people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh.

Deputy Minister Michael Oren said Sunday that in light of the massacre at a Pittsburgh synagogue, Israel must recognize liberal Jews as a way of strengthening relations between the Jewish state and the Diaspora.

"Liberal Jews were Jewish enough to be murdered, but their stream is not Jewish enough to be recognized by the Jewish State," Oren tweeted.

HURTS SO GOOD:

8:42 p.m.: Roberts' head is spinning with matchups. After an intentional walk to Betts, Alex Wood comes in to face Andrew Benintendi, who reaches on a dribbler down the third-base line to load the bases. It's amazing how often soft contact produces something good. Kenta Maeda comes in to face Pearce and he drills on 0-1 fastball into right-center for a bases-clearing double. The Red Sox are so pumped up that Nunez punches Holt so hard in the chest it appears to actually hurt.

CAN'T EXPLAIN MARKETS TO NATIONALISTS:

A website that hosted anti-Semitic posts apparently authored by the man who allegedly killed 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue Saturday said it was being forced offline following the attack.

Gab.com, which is popular with white nationalists and members of the so-called alt-right, said its hosting provider Joyent would be suspending its services as of Monday morning, while PayPal has also reportedly banned the site.

CRANK UP THE DVR:

Explosions! Space! Puppets! If you grew up with Thunderbirds or Captain Scarlet as a kid, prepare to get a blast of miniature nostalgia, as Gerry Anderson's new series, Firestorm, is officially a go.

Firestorm was originally conceived and developed by the Thunderbirds creator back in 2001 under the title Storm Force. Eventually bought by a Japanese production company, it was developed as an anime. Now, director Mark Woollard (who worked with Gerry from the early 1980s), Jamie Anderson and a team have made a true Gerry Anderson version of the concept, going back to the original concepts - and, yes, the puppets.

The series is filmed in "Ultramarionation", a brand new method of filming based on the foundations of Anderson's own Supermarionation techniques, combining the physical sets and model work with modern film-making.

THEY EXIST TO KILL PEOPLE:

Since 2007, at least 173 people have been killed in mass shootings in the United States involving AR-15s, according to a New York Times analysis. The grim list includes crimes in Newtown, Conn.; Las Vegas; San Bernardino, Calif.; and now Parkland, Fla.

The main functional difference between the military's M16 and M4 rifles and a civilian AR-15 is the "burst" mode on many military models, which allow three rounds to be fired with one trigger pull. Some military versions of the rifles have a full automatic feature, which fires until the trigger is released or a magazine is empty of ammunition.

But in actual American combat these technical differences are less significant than they seem. For decades the American military has trained its conventional troops to fire their M4s and M16s in the semiautomatic mode -- one bullet per trigger pull -- instead of on "burst" or automatic in almost all shooting situations. The weapons are more accurate this way, and thus more lethal.

Straight out of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Just moments ago, Lou Dobbs guest Chris Farrell (head of Judicial Watch) says Caravan is being funded/directed by the "Soros-occupied State Department". pic.twitter.com/QBSong7uk1

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) October 27, 2018

MAGA MAN:

Bowers frequently posted about the "migrant caravan," a group of several thousand refugees walking to the U.S.-Mexico border from Honduras to seek asylum. Preventing refugees in the caravan from entering the U.S. has been a major talking point among both right-wing commentators and President Donald Trump, who has spoken about it in recent pre-midterm election stump speeches.

Bowers' anti-Semitic posts and his apparent disdain for the caravan are tied to a viral image that appears to show refugees hopping onto the bed of a truck that had a Star of David visible on the side. The image has been widely shared on far-right forums like 4chan and the Russian propaganda operation USA Really. He reposted a screenshot of a video of the caravan that that aired on Fox News, as well as other networks, that does not mention the symbol.

WHERE DO THESE SHOOTERS AND BOMBERS GET THE IDEA IMMIGRATION IS A THREAT?:

The commercial opens with an appeal to fear: a hoodie-wearing man prowling an alley, knife in hand. His face remains hidden but the ad makes it clear: He's an illegal immigrant.

"We need tough immigration enforcement to keep dangerous criminals out," says the ad by a national conservative political group, part of an effort to help a Republican challenger, Mike Braun, oust a Democratic incumbent in Indiana and capture a U.S. Senate seat in November's congressional elections.

As they try to hang on to control of Congress, Republican candidates are following the lead of President Donald Trump and turning to rhetoric about immigrants as a tactic to motivate voters. The scope of that strategy emerges in a nationwide Reuters examination of ad buys, candidates' social media posts and polling, as well as dozens of interviews with candidates, voters and campaign strategists.

The trend is especially visible on Twitter. Congressional Republicans seeking re-election have dramatically increased the number of tweets they post about immigration since Trump's election, a Reuters/Ipsos analysis of social media shows. Immigration messaging has surged across the spectrum of Republican-held districts - highly competitive swing seats and reliably Republican ones, in places with immigrant populations both large and small.

'Once is an accident,' wrote Ian Fleming in Goldfinger, 'Twice is a coincidence. Three times is an enemy action.'

That Cesar Sayoc, the Chippendale with a bomb in his pocket, mailed his pipe bombs to leading Democrats is no accident. That Robert Bowers, his paranoia  fanned by online incitement, decided to massacre Jews at Philadelphia's Tree of Life synagogue is not a coincidence. And who would be surprised if tomorrow there was a third action from these enemies of liberal democracy?

The violent actions of Sayoc and Bowers emerge from the long, digitally-enhanced continuum of the right. No president has been more reckless in his public speech than Donald Trump. And most Republicans have followed Trump in being very careless about how they speak, and the company they keep when it comes to winning elections. The paranoid style precedes the paranoid act.

TIME FOR THE TRUMPBOTS TO ASSURE US THAT SOROS IS FUNDING IT:

NO ONE JUST HATES MEXICANS:

HIAS and other Jewish groups had been promoting a nationwide "refugee shabbat" last weekend. bowers targeted shabbot service today pic.twitter.com/MvAIROLieF

— Laura Rozen (@lrozen) October 27, 2018

#BREAKING: #Pittsburgh Synagogue Shooting:
--8 dead
--3 police officers shot
--@GovernorTomWolf on scene
--Gunman arrested, walked in yelling "All Jews must die."
--Tree of Life Synagogue
--Live coverage: https://t.co/zNLpv1Uk3i
Latest details: https://t.co/JhSP1URRNT pic.twitter.com/CvFpKE1ZTQ

— KDKA (@KDKA) October 27, 2018

In memory of the Pittsburgh dead, Pierre Bernac and Francis Poulenc perform the "Kaddisch" from Ravel's "Trois chants hébraiques": https://t.co/dePypLgfvP

— (((Terry Teachout))) (@terryteachout) October 27, 2018

OF COURSE, TRUMP SUPPORTERS BLAME JEWS...:

In the aftermath of Trump's election, my colleagues and I tracked various incidents of hate (which were believed to be spiking in general) in the U.S. for three months.

The most-targeted group? Jewish people. https://t.co/uIfTwwT9nN pic.twitter.com/rG269zdoLZ

— Jack Jenkins (@jackmjenkins) October 27, 2018

THE PURE ESSENCE OF TRUMPISM:

[H]ere is a (partial) list of Trump supporters who are alleged to have carried out horrific attacks in recent years -- some of them seemingly inspired by the president himself.

Scott Leader and Steve Leader, August 2015

On 19 August 2015, Scott Leader, 38, and his brother, Steve Leader, 30, attacked a homeless man in Boston who they wrongly believed to be an undocumented immigrant.

"Donald Trump was right," they told police, after beating the man with a metal pipe and then urinating on him. "All these illegals need to be deported."

Trump's response? He eventually called it a "terrible" incident but only after an earlier statement to reporters in which the then-Republican candidate referred to his supporters as "very passionate. They love this country. They want this country to be great again. But they are very passionate. I will say that."

Curtis Allen, Gavin Wright, and Patrick Eugene Stein, October 2016

On October 14, 2016, the FBI arrested three men -- Patrick Eugene Stein, Curtis Allen, and Gavin Wright -- for plotting a series of bomb attacks against the Somali-American community of Garden City, Kansas. Calling themselves "the Crusaders," they had planned to launch what the Guardian said "could have been the deadliest domestic terror attack since the Oklahoma bombing in 1995," the day after the November 2016 presidential election.

Two of these three men were open supporters of Trump, and obsessed with anti-Muslim, anti-refugee conspiracy theories. For Stein, according to a profile in New York magazine, Trump was "the Man." Allen wrote on Facebook: "I personally back Donald Trump." The trio even asked a federal judge to boost the number of pro-Trump jurors at their trial (at which they were found guilty of conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction and and of conspiring against rights).

Trump's response? The president, who once suggested that Americans had "suffered enough" from an influx of Somali refugees, has never been asked about these three militiamen and has never condemned their plot.

Alexandre Bissonnette, January 2017

On the evening of January 29, 2017, Alexandre Bissonnette opened fire on worshippers at the Islamic Cultural Center in Quebec City, Canada, killing six of them and wounding 19.

Bisonnette, 27, was obsessed with Trump -- he searched for the president on Twitter, Facebook, Google and YouTube more than 800 times between January 1, 2017 and the day of the shooting. A former university classmate told the Toronto Globe and Mail that he "frequently argued" with Bissonette over the latter's support for Trump.

In his police interrogation video, Bissonnette can be heard telling officers that he decided to attack the mosque after Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tweeted a message of welcome to refugees in the wake of  the U.S. president's travel ban -- which was issued two days before the mosque attack.

Trump's response? The president may have expressed his condolences to the Canadian premier in private, but he has never publicly mentioned the shooting, the killer or the six dead Muslims.

Michael Hari, Michael McWhorter, and Joe Morris, August 2017

In March 2018, three alleged members of a far-right militia -- Michael Hari, Michael McWhorter, and Joe Morris -- were charged in connection with the bombing of the Dar Al-Farooq Islamic Center in Bloomington, Minnesota, on August 5, 2017. McWhorter is alleged to have told an FBI agent that the attack was an attempt "to scare" Muslims "out of the country."

Back in 2017, Hari, who owns a security company, submitted a $10 billion proposal to build Trump's wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. "We would look at the wall as not just a physical barrier to immigration but also as a symbol of the American determination to defend our culture, our language, our heritage, from any outsiders," Hari said. Sound familiar?

Hari is also alleged to be the ringleader of the "White Rabbit Militia -- Illinois Patriot Freedom Fighters, Three Percent," which has posted online messages about "Deep State activities" and "the attempt of the FBI to wiretap the Trump campaign and interfere in the election."

Trump's response? To date, the president has never publicly referenced, let alone condemned, the bomb attack on the Minnesota mosque. His then-adviser Sebastian Gorka suggested the incident might "have been propagated by the left."

James Alex Fields, Jr., August 2017

On August 12, 2017, a car crashed into a crowd of people protesting a neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer. The alleged driver of the car, James Alex Fields Jr., has been charged with, among other crimes, hit and run and first-degree murder.

Fields, according to a former middle school classmate, enjoyed drawing swastikas and talked about "loving Hitler." The registered Republican, according to a former high school teacher, also adored Trump. In an interview with the Associated Press, the former teacher "said Fields was a big Trump supporter because of what he believed to be Trump's views on race. Trump's proposal to build a border wall with Mexico was particularly appealing to Fields."

Trump's response? The president called the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville "very fine people" just three days after Fields allegedly killed Heyer.

Brandon Griesemer, January 2018

On January 9-10, 2018, 19-year-old Brandon Griesemer allegedly made 22 calls to CNN. In four of those calls, the part-time grocery clerk from Novi, Michigan, threatened to kill employees at the network's Atlanta, Georgia, headquarters, according to a federal affidavit.

"Fake news. I'm coming to gun you all down," he told a CNN operator. Again, sound familiar? Trump has spent his entire presidency slamming CNN as "fake news," singling out the network for criticism and abuse. According to the Washington Post, a high school classmate of Griesemer described him as a Trump supporter who "came in after the election and was very happy." The classmate, reported the Post, "compared Griesemer's reaction to that of a fan whose team had won a big game."

Trump's reaction? On the morning of January 23, the day after the news broke of Griesemer's threats against CNN, the president took to Twitter to mock...yep, you guessed it... "Fake News CNN."

Nikolas Cruz, February 2018

On the afternoon of February 14, 2018, 19-year-old gunman Nikolas Cruz shot and killed 17 students and staff members at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.

According to an investigation by CNN, Cruz was part of a private Instagram group in which he "repeatedly espoused racist, homophobic and anti-Semitic views" and "bragged about writing a letter to President Donald Trump -- and receiving a response."

Cruz also posted a photo of himself on Instagram wearing one of Trump's signature red MAGA hats, with an American-flag-colored bandana covering the bottom half of his face. Former classmates have confirmed that he also wore the red Trump hat to school.

Trump's response? The White House has never confirmed or denied whether they received, or responded to, a letter from Cruz.

I COULD GO on and on...

"He was attracted to the Trump formula of reaching out, Trump reaching out to these types of outsiders, people who don't fit in, people who are angry at America, telling them they have a place at the table and it's OK to get angry," Lowy said.

DONALD WHO?:

The crippling sanctions reintroduced in August by the US administration led to the isolation of Washington, Mr Rouhani said.

Speaking to parliament in a speech broadcasted by the country's state television, the president of Iran claimed: "It does not happen often that the US makes a decision and its traditional allies abandon it.

"A year ago no one would have believed that Europe would stand with Iran and against America.

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

This morning we learned the utterly unsurprising news that the loon who's--allegedly--been mailing crude bombs to every Democratic politician and TV talking head he could think of is--allegedly--a gentleman named Cesar Sayoc, who seems to be devoted to Donald Trump. And since then a few ordinarily chatty folks on Twitter have gone inexplicably radio silent.

Some talking heads in Trumpworld, you see, had backed themselves into a bit of a corner over the last few days, making increasingly bombastic pronouncements and speculations--they were just asking questions!--that the perpetrator was not a mentally imbalanced Republican, but a crooked, calculating libtard looking to drum up sympathy for the Democratic party before the midterms. Jim Swift compiled a list of these speculators on Thursday. Now seems like a good time to check in and see how they're doing.

HATE ITSELF:

[T]rump doesn't let facts hinder his panic-mongering. His falsehoods serve to assure whites with resentments or suspicions against Latinos, blacks, immigrants and Muslims that he is on their side.

It's often said that Trump won because he appealed to the pain and anxiety of blue-collar Americans harmed by economic change. But the evidence for that belief is lacking, according to the new book "Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America," by political scientists John Sides, Michael Tesler and Lynn Vavreck.

Economic anxiety, the authors note, declined under Barack Obama. They found "generally weak relationships" between "measures of economic anxiety and how people voted in 2012 or 2016." They add, "Changes in household income had little relationship to changes in people's votes between 2012 and 2016."

What accounted for Trump's success? His willingness to appeal directly to voters fearful of groups they see as alien or threatening. "Views of racial inequality, Muslims and immigration, as well as a more politicized white identity, not only were strongly related to whether Americans voted for Clinton or Trump but were also more strongly related to how people voted in 2016 than in other recent presidential elections."

Trump did much better than Mitt Romney among those who believe whites face a great deal of discrimination and those who have negative views about Muslims. Why? Because Trump made clear to them that he agreed -- and Hillary Clinton made clear that she didn't.

KNOWING YOUR ENEMIES:

A Saudi intelligence official fired for his alleged involvement in the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi met in early 2017 with an ally of Donald Trump and an Israeli social media strategist to discuss the potential overthrow of the Iranian regime, the Daily Beast reported Friday.

IN CASE ANYONE DOUBTED THE BOMBINGS ARE AN EXPRESSION OF TRUMPISM:

HIS LIPS WERE MOVING...:

IN FAIRNESS, THE rIGHT SAYS JEWS SET HIM UP:

King spoke to the Unzensuriert site Aug. 24 in Vienna, a day after concluding a five-day journey to Jewish and Holocaust historical sites in Poland, including the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. The trip, including airfare to and from Europe, was financed by From the Depths, an international nonprofit group that seeks to educate lawmakers about the Holocaust.

Unzensuriert, which translates as "Uncensored," is a publication associated with Austria's Freedom Party, which was founded by a former Nazi SS officer and is now led by Heinz-Christian Strache, who was active in neo-Nazi circles as a youth.

JUST BECAUSE HE HATES THEM?:

Half of Latinos say their situation in the U.S. has worsened over the past year, up from 32% in the weeks after Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election and the highest level since the Great Recession.1 In addition, more say they have serious concerns about their place in American society now (49%) than in 2017 (41%). And a majority (55%) say they are worried that they, a family member or close friend could be deported.

Many blame the current administration for what they see as the worsening situation of Hispanics, the nation's largest minority group. Two-thirds (67%) say the administration's policies have been harmful to Hispanics - a much higher share than during the administration of either Democrat Barack Obama (15% in 2010) or Republican George W. Bush (41% in 2007).2 Overall, six-in-ten Hispanics (62%) say they are dissatisfied with the way things are going in the country today, up since 2017 and the highest level since the Great Recession a decade ago, when 70% of Hispanics said they were dissatisfied with the nation's direction.

LUCKY BREAK:

Earl Livingston, an 87-year-old resident of Blackwood in Camden County, tripped, fell and broke his hip while going to the store to buy a ticket to Tuesday night's massive Mega Millions draw.

When he got to Jefferson Stratford Hospital in Stratford, he told caregivers where he was going when he fell, so they invited him to join their pool of tickets.

And he wound up being one of 141 players who nearly won the grand prize. One of their tickets drew the first five numbers but missed on the final Mega Ball which could have won them a share of $1.53 billion.

Five numbers were good for $1 million, which will be split evenly, a hospital spokeswoman said Thursday. The seven-digit prize cut into 141 equal portions comes out $7,092 apiece before taxes.

LAUGHINGSTOCK:

WHEN YOU ELECT THE DEMOCRAT INSTEAD OF THE REPUBLICAN...:

JUST ANOTHER nATIONALIST...:

A gunman who shot two in a Kroger in Kentucky allegedly told one man, "Whites don't kill whites." https://t.co/24lwEak8BT pic.twitter.com/m7rFMTNDOF

— Slate (@Slate) October 25, 2018

CHEERING ON THE BOMBERS:

Speaking at an Axios event in Washington Thursday, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich said that Trump's attacks on the media as "the enemy of the people" don't help improve the American political divide, but that he thinks "they've earned it."

IS IT THE MAR-A-LAGO ZIP CODE?:

ON THE SECOND DAY OF TRUMPMAS...:

The two bombs sent to former Vice President Joe Biden and a third to actor Robert De Niro on Thursday were similar to the devices intended for several other high-profile Democrats and critics of U.S. President Donald Trump, authorities said.

THE ANGER AND VIOLENCE IS ALL HE HAS TO OFFER:

After being named as one of the intended targets of a series of bombs that were sent out to political leaders this week, including former President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former CIA Director John Brennan took aim at President Donald Trump, accusing the U.S. leader of helping to incite "feelings of anger, if not violence" with his "un-American" rhetoric. 

New from ⁦@oneunderscore__⁩: An image on the bomb sent to Brennan on Tuesday appears to be a parody of an ISIS flag taken from a meme that has been circulating on right-wing corners of the internet since 2014. https://t.co/7KuUh96icV

— Natasha Bertrand (@NatashaBertrand) October 25, 2018

LOOK, A DUCK:

On race, DeSantis appeared to get flustered when moderator Todd McDermott asked him about his associations with white supremacists and financial backers who used racist language. He interrupted McDermott to call his unfinished question "McCarthyist" and suggest incorrectly that McDermott was wrong about racist statements David Horowitz made at a conference DeSantis participated in. "How the hell am I supposed to know every single statement somebody makes?" DeSantis said when McDermott noted that Horowitz had indeed made the comments at the conference. "I am not going to bow down to the altar of political correctness."

Gillum, who is black, was ready. "My grandmother used to say, 'A hit dog will holler,' and it hollered through this room," he said. "I'm not calling Mr. DeSantis a racist. I'm simply saying the racists believe he's a racist." 

LEGALIZE THEM:

THE WAGES OF ANGLOAMERICAN IMPERIALISM::

In 1981, the year Ronald Reagan became America's 40th President, 44.3 percent of the world lived in extreme poverty (i.e., less than $1.90 per person per day). In 2015, it was 9.6 percent. That's a decline of 78 percent. https://t.co/E69yBiTP8o

— HumanProgress.org (@HumanProgress) October 20, 2018

HUMAN CAPITALISM:

The biggest population increase in six decades, driven by international migration, is one reason the Bank of Canada has been able to match the Federal Reserve hike-for-hike since June 2017 -- making the two easily the most hawkish central banks in the Group of Seven. In its latest increase Wednesday, the Ottawa-based central bank highlighted how the surge has bolstered consumption and housing activity.

"Labor income is being boosted by the larger population," the Bank of Canada said in a report Wednesday that accompanied its decision to increase borrowing costs for a third time this year, keeping pace with the Fed's three moves.

Under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Canada's population has jumped by 1.4 percent over the past year, double the U.S. pace, driven by a surge in non-permanent residents like students and higher immigration levels.

"We've called it the 'human stimulus,'" Brett House, deputy chief economist at the Bank of Nova Scotia, said in a phone interview.

AN ONION RING DELIVERY SYSTEM:

Campbell Soup officials said the New Jersey resident [Dorcas Reilly] was the driving force behind the popular dish, made with green beans and cream of mushroom soup topped with crunchy fried onions. The company said it is the most popular recipe ever to come out of its corporate kitchen. [...]

Reilly was a Campbell Soup kitchen supervisor in 1955 when she combined the ingredients of the now-legendary green bean casserole for an Associated Press feature.

In a 2005 AP interview marking the recipe's 50th anniversary, Reilly said she didn't remember having a hand in it because the dish was among hundreds that were created during her time at Campbell's. She also helped create a tomato soup meatloaf, a tuna noodle casserole and Sloppy Joe-like "souperburgers."

SALARY HIKES FOR EVERYONE!:

U.S. companies pay $327 billion in income taxes, but they pay $1.1 trillion -- more than three times as much -- in health insurance costs. No other OECD country imposes anything close to such a heavy "health care tax" on its businesses. Eliminating this tax by shifting all responsibility to the federal government under a single-payer system would create a massive economic stimulus, providing Democrats with the universal coverage they seek while offering corporate America a far greater stimulus than any proposed Republican tax cut.

After all, when the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) lowered corporate tax rates by 40%, saving corporations an estimated $950 billion over a decade, it created an immediate economic stimulus that bolstered corporate earnings and pushed the stock market to record heights. Eliminating the corporate health care tax would free up more than a trillion dollars of corporate earnings every single year, a stimulus 10 times more powerful than the TCJA.

Transferring all responsibility for health care to the federal government would not only offset 100% of what companies now pay in income taxes, it would provide an additional $773 billion a year in immediate bottom-line corporate profits that would be available for new investment. (Depending on how companies use these funds, they may end up paying tax on their increased profits, but even so, the net increase in after-tax income would substantially exceed their total taxes.)

The magnitude of this stimulus is hard to comprehend.

VIZZINISM:

Pence has a long history of covering for Trump and dutifully did so again only to be caught midair by Trump's pump fake. So while Trump was conceding he had made up the bit about Middle Easterners, Pence was out front, adamant that Trump was right. "It's inconceivable that there are not people of Middle Eastern descent in a crowd of more than 7,000 people advancing toward our border," the vice president said during a Washington Post event.

REHUMANIZING CITIES:

On Tuesday, Germany's highest administrative court ruled that, in an effort to improve urban air quality, cities can ban cars from some streets.

As The New York Times notes, the ruling could open the floodgates for cities around the country to go car-free.

Stuttgart and Düsseldorf -- German cities with high pollution levels -- will likely enact the first bans in the fall. Stuttgart, home to Mercedes-Benz and Porsche, has recently favored such bans. In 2017, Stuttgart announced that starting this year, it will keep diesel vehicles that don't meet emissions standards from entering the city on high-pollution days.

But German cities are not the only ones getting ready to take the car-free plunge. Urban planners and policy makers around the world have started to brainstorm ways that cities can create more space for pedestrians and lower CO2 emissions from diesel.

Here are 13 cities leading the car-free movement.

THERE IS NO FLOOR:

From 82% in April, it fell to 66% in October, according to independent pollster the Levada Center. The drop follows his decision to reform Russia's pensions; a move that inspired tens of thousands of Russians to take to the streets this year.

The protests forced Putin into taking the rare step of softening the reforms in August. The Kremlin initially planned to raise women's retirement age from 55 to 63, but later changed it to 60. Nevertheless, his ratings continue to fall.

In response to demonstrations, he called the reforms, "a difficult, complicated, but necessary decision," for the good of the economy.

The former KGB agent is now approaching his lowest-ever approval rating of 61%, which he has hit twice before: In June 2000 (shortly after he was first elected), and in Nov. 2013. A few months after the latter trough, Putin annexed Crimea and his approval sky-rocketed to the mid-80s.

Military forces from 31 countries began Nato's largest exercise in decades, stretching from the Baltic Sea to Iceland, on Thursday, practising military manoeuvres close to Russia, which held its own huge military drill last month.

As temperatures fell below freezing across training grounds in central Norway, giving a taste of what it means to defend Nato's vast northern flank, some 50,000 troops, 250 aircraft and 10,000 tanks, trucks and other land-based vehicles were ready.

"Forces are in position, they are integrating and starting combat enhancement training for major battlefield operations over the next two weeks," said Colonel Eystein Kvarving at Norway's Joint Headquarters.

THEY PUNISH UIGHURS BY MAKING THEM LISTEN:

When President Trump calls old friends on one of his iPhones to gossip, gripe or solicit their latest take on how he is doing, American intelligence reports indicate that Chinese spies are often listening -- and putting to use invaluable insights into how to best work the president and affect administration policy, current and former American officials said.

Mr. Trump's aides have repeatedly warned him that his cellphone calls are not secure, and they have told him that Russian spies are routinely eavesdropping on the calls, as well. But aides say the voluble president, who has been pressured into using his secure White House landline more often these days, has still refused to give up his iPhones. White House officials say they can only hope he refrains from discussing classified information when he is on them.

Mr. Trump's use of his iPhones was detailed by several current and former officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity so they could discuss classified intelligence and sensitive security arrangements. The officials said they were doing so not to undermine Mr. Trump, but out of frustration with what they considered the president's casual approach to electronic security.

WHEN YOU TREAT THE OTHER PARTY LIKE AN ENEMY:

Authorities said Wednesday they had intercepted packages containing homemade explosive devices addressed to former secretary of state Hillary Clinton in New York and former president Barack Obama in Washington, while another bomb was discovered at CNN's offices in Manhattan.

The string of explosive devices and suspicious packages located in Washington, New York and Florida -- sent to public officials, former presidents and a cable news network in what politicians called attempted terror attacks -- prompted bipartisan condemnation and set off spasms of unease across the country, as security and law enforcement officers rushed to scour incoming mail for other potential undiscovered bombs.

The bombs and suspicious packages were located after an explosive device was found this week in a mailbox at the Bedford, N.Y., home of George Soros, the liberal philanthropist who is a frequent target of criticism from far-right groups.

Absolutely unreal https://t.co/cq2aE3DgP0

— Chris Cillizza (@CillizzaCNN) October 24, 2018

KNOWING YOUR ALLIES:

A fresh beginning to gather Reformist forces under one roof is perhaps the best way to describe the nascent Parliament of Reforms, a new assembly whose charter is set to be approved at the Council for Coordination of the Reforms Front by mid-November.

The idea of a comprehensive and democratic entity to represent Iran's Reform movement has been on the table for quite some time, and a number of names have been suggested for it over the years. For example, the Executives of Construction Party once called for the "National Assembly of the Reformists." Top Reformist strategist Saeed Hajjarian talked about "the hard core" of the Reform movement and 100 young activists, in an open letter to former Reformist President Mohammad Khatami (1997-2005), spoke of the need to create a "National Institution of Reforms."

All those ideas appear to have converged in what is now billed as the Parliament of Reforms. Freedom Movement of Iran member and political activist Emad Bahavar is one of the figures actively engaged in writing the charter of the emerging body.

Bahavar told Al-Monitor that "26 to 27 parties, a majority of Reformist politicians and figures who believe in the inclusiveness of this institution as well as certain individuals who are trusted within the camp, have shared their thoughts on this subject." He added, "If a new Reformist front is to be established, a wide spectrum of groups and forces should be involved so it can be registered [with the Interior Ministry] as a coalition of Reformist parties."  

AND NIKKI WILL HAVE COATTAILS:

There is simply no plausible path to a Democratic Senate majority that doesn't run through successful campaigns in both Nevada and Arizona. And if Heitkamp is really a goner in North Dakota, Democrats will need Tennessee or Texas, too. Texas Democrat Beto O'Rourke is a sensation, but he's down by an average of 7 points to Republican Sen. Ted Cruz in recent surveys. And that's to say nothing of close races in Missouri and Florida. Incumbent Democrat Claire McCaskill is tied in polling averages with Republican Josh Hawley, and in Florida, the flagging campaign of Democrat Bill Nelson may be getting a lift from gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum, a potential national star. Nelson looks like he has a small lead, but those races could still easily go either way.

So, things are not looking good! But those hoping for a reprieve from this kind of steep incline have probably not had a look at the climb facing the party in 2020.

Only Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) occupy Republican-held seats in Clinton states, and neither will be easy to unseat in 2020. Democrats also have to defend the Alabama seat improbably captured in December 2017 by Doug Jones, which will be a struggle against any Republican who managed not to seduce teenagers in his 30s.

But there are a few seats that might be in play if the national environment remains as bad for Republicans as it is today, or if the economy goes into a long overdue recession -- including those of Joni Ernst in Iowa, David Perdue in Georgia, and Thom Tillis in North Carolina. And Democrats will get another crack at an Arizona Senate seat, because Jon Kyl's abbreviated term as fill-in for the late John McCain will be expiring. But if that's the landscape of flippable targets, Democrats may very well be underdogs everywhere but Colorado.

...AND CHEAPER...:

A new development in fibre optics could make internet speeds up to 100 times faster - by detecting light that has been twisted into a spiral.

The research, published in the journal Nature Communications, can be used to easily upgrade existing networks and significantly boost efficiency, scientists say.

Fibre optic cables use pulses of light to transmit information, but currently information can only be stored through the colour of the light, and whether the wave is horizontal or vertical.

By twisting light into a spiral, engineers effectively create a third dimension for light to carry information: the level of orbital angular momentum, or spin. "It's like DNA, if you look at the double helix spiral," said Min Gu from RMIT University. "The more you can use angular momentum the more information you can carry."

THANKS, DONALD!:

Companies including 3M, down more than 3%, and Caterpillar, down more than 7%, suggested in earnings reports that they would be passing along to consumers increased costs due to tariffs.

MAKE MORE TEA:

This election is the Democrats' first opportunity to push back against a thoroughly Trumpified Republican Party. It is a remarkable opportunity to realign the electorate, since polls continually show the percentage of the country that buys Trump's ethnic nationalism is in the low 40s.

So how, at this crucial moment in history, have the Democrats responded?

"The top three issues this year are health care, health care and health care," J.B. Poersch, of the Democratic-aligned Senate Majority PAC, told CNN.

The Wesleyan Media Project recently surveyed the political landscape and came out with a report called "2018: The Health Care Election." It found that a majority of recent pro-Democratic political ads featured health care. Sixty-one percent of recent pro-Democratic ads in U.S. House races have been on health care.

Democratic candidates like Senator Claire McCaskill are hammering home the same point in debates. Republicans tried to take away coverage for pre-existing conditions.

In normal times, there's good reason to run on this issue. Millions of families are plagued by inadequate insurance coverage. If you're trying to win a swing voter in Arizona, it's a bread-and-butter issue that has appeal.

But the Democratic campaign is inadequate to the current moment. It offers no counternarrative to Trump, little moral case against his behavior, no unifying argument against ethnic nationalism. In politics you can't beat something with nothing. 

TRY TEAM AMERICA:

I've spent much of the past several years reporting on political psychology, asking the country's foremost experts on human behavior some variation of, "What the hell is going on in the United States?" They often deliver.

Here are the social science lessons I keep coming back to, to help me explain what's happening in America in the Trump era. Perhaps you'll find them helpful too.

Rooting for a team alters your perception of the world.

We can be immune to uncomfortable facts.

Leaders like Trump have special powers to sway public opinion.

People don't often make decisions based on the truth.

Political opponents are often really, really bad at arguing with one another.

White people's fear of being replaced is a powerful political motivator. [...]

AMERICA IS EVEN GOOD AT SOCIALISM:

The chart compares wait times for seniors in countries like Canada, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and the United States. It purports to show that seniors in single-payer countries wait much longer than those here in the United States.

It all looks pretty clear cut: Places like Canada and Norway have long wait times in their single-payer systems, whereas we here in the United States have very short wait times.

Except, here's the key thing it leaves out: America's seniors are essentially in a single-payer system. The vast majority of Americans over 65 get coverage through Medicare, a government-run health care plan.

And Medicare operates in a way that is incredibly similar to the Canadian health care system. Both of them set prices for all sorts of medical procedures and let patients see a wide array of doctors.

THE UR WAS TOO CONSERVATIVE FOR HIS OWN GOOD:

More than half of Republicans in a new American Barometer poll say they support "Medicare for all," also known as a single-payer health-care system. 

The survey, conducted by Hill.TV and the HarrisX polling company, found that 52 percent of Republicans polled said they supported the option, while 48 percent said they opposed it. 

WE'RE GONNA NEED MORE SALTPETER:

NOW THERE'S A FIERCE COMPETITION:

NEVER TOO LATE TO WISE UP:

YOUR NEXT CAR WILL BE A VOLT:

You can buy a Bolt for $36,620 (before tax credits and other incentives), and Elon Musk promises that the version of the Model 3 that costs $35,000 will arrive soon. You can go cheaper, with a $30,000 Nissan Leaf. But if that's still a bit rich for your taste--and it will be for many--there's good news. You can go even cheaper with a used electric, and still get a usable, practical, fun, car. A few years into the nascent age of EVs, many cars are coming off two- or three-year leases. Plenty are available for under $10,000, and still carry warranties on the batteries and drivetrains. They need less maintenance than a gas car, and charging is cheaper than filling up, especially as gas prices rise.

LAUGHINGSTOCK:

Florida gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis was asked on Sunday night if he thought Donald Trump, who endorsed him, was a good role model for children.

DeSantis, who recorded a now famous campaign ad in which he taught his children the president's slogans and policies, responded by saying he thought Trump did the right thing by moving the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.

Referring to his opponent, the Democrat Andrew Gillum, the Republican said: "I know Andrew didn't support that and doesn't think that's right."

Gillum looked at the host of the first debate of the race, Jake Tapper of CNN, and said: "I'm confused by the question."

"The question," Tapper said, "was whether or not he thinks President Trump is a good role model for the children of Florida."

"That's what I thought," Gillum said, drawing laughter from the audience. "No, he's not. Donald Trump is weak, and he performs as all weak people do. They become bullies, and Mr DeSantis is his acolyte. He's trying out to be the Trump apprentice. At every turn he's tweeting him."

FOOTBALL COUNTRY (profanity alert):

"Boxing was my number one sport, then NFL, then some basketball, so unless you were getting dunked on, run over at the one-yard line or knocked out in the first round, I wasn't interested," says Russell Gaither , a telecommunications worker and capo for the Footie Mob supporters group. "Then we got our team. And I just got the bug."

The contagion is spreading. The fact that Atlanta United, in only their second year of existence, are top of the MLS table with less than a month remaining in the regular season is remarkable enough. That an upstart soccer team are attracting upwards of 50,000 fans to games in a city notorious for professional sports apathy - and in a corner of the country where the other football is less pastime than cultural vanguard - is without precedent. Sunday's game was its seventh 70,000-plus crowd of the season and set a new MLS record.

Atlanta's well-documented indifference to professional sports is down to several factors. The south didn't have a long-term presence in any major league until the 1966, when baseball's Braves relocated from Milwaukee and the Falcons joined the NFL as an expansion team - a stark contrast to the Southeastern Conference football programs, many dating back more than a century, and which many southerners are born into and follow with religious fervor. Even as the Braves won a staggering 14 consecutive division championships during the 1990s and 2000s, the team's struggle to fill seats even for playoff games became a national punchline.

Atlanta is also a city of émigrés, a demographic shift only accelerated by the influx of corporate headquarters and dramatic economic growth during the 1990s. A 2016 study shared by WABE, the local NPR affiliate, showed that 37% of the city's population were born in another state or country. Here the relative youth of MLS for once works in the league's favor: while a newcomer from Boston, for example, might be loth to surrender a generational allegiance to the Red Sox or Celtics upon relocating to the city, the ties that bind them to the MLS club they left behind may be more flexible.

"You go to any other game, I don't care if it's Braves or Falcons or whatever, there can be a lot more away fans than home fans," says local native and Footie Mob co-founder Terri Harrington, a high school English teacher by day. She estimates less than 10% of the group were born in Atlanta: "It's a city of transplants."

This makes the eye-popping attendance figures for Atlanta United all the more remarkable. The club set the league's single-game attendance record during last year's inaugural campaign and broke it again when more than 72,000 fans turned up for 2018's opener. This year's average attendance of 51,826 is light years beyond any team in the league outside of Seattle - and ranks among the top 15 for any club in the world.

"I don't care where you're from," Harrington adds. "If you moved here in the past 10 years, this is your team."

TRUMPISM IN ITS ENTIRETY:

THE BREAK WITH REALITY:

Most of what Mr. Trump says these days is literally made up. He's trying to construct a world of make believe and fairly tales, of myth and fiction, of illusion and hallucination. It's a world increasingly detached from reality. The rest of us must refuse to live within the lie. https://t.co/LCH7Dpz2RP

— Peter Wehner (@Peter_Wehner) October 23, 2018

JUST ADD "SOCIALIST":

"They have a word that has become old fashion. Nationalist and they say we do not support the use of that word, but you know what I'm a nationalist."

According to dictionary.com, the true definition of globalist is, "A person who advocates the interpretation or planning of economic and foreign policy in relation to events and developments throughout the world."

GREEN LIGHT!:

His activism has made him a villain to conservative groups and the target of anti-Semitic smears. Roseanne Barr called him a Nazi in an infamous tweetstorm, and just this month, Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida, falsely speculated that Mr. Soros had funded a caravan of migrants moving north toward Mexico. There is no evidence that Mr. Soros paid thousands of migrants to storm the border. Nor is there evidence that Democrats support the effort, as President Trump has said.

Mr. Soros became a major political donor in the United States during George W. Bush's presidency. He spent millions backing John Kerry's unsuccessful bid to deny Mr. Bush a second term, was an early backer of Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign and contributed more than $25 million to Hillary Clinton and other Democratic candidates and causes during the 2016 election cycle.

Though Mr. Soros's name has become a trigger for a subset of Republicans and conservatives, he has said that his main goal as a political activist was to see a return to bipartisanship.

He has said it was the extremism of the Republican Party that had prompted him to become a major Democratic donor, but also said he is opposed to the extreme left.

"I don't particularly want to be a Democrat," he said.

IMPLAUSIBLE DENIAL:

He ran social media for Saudi Arabia's crown prince. He masterminded the arrest of hundreds of his country's elite. He detained a Lebanese prime minister. And, according to two intelligence sources, he ran journalist Jamal Khashoggi's brutal killing at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul by giving orders over Skype.

Saud al-Qahtani, a top aide for Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, is one of the fall guys as Riyadh tries to stem international outrage at Khashoggi's death. On Saturday, Saudi state media said King Salman had sacked Qahtani and four other officials over the killing carried out by a 15-man hit team.

But Qahtani's influence in the crown prince's entourage has been so vast over the past three years - his own rise tracking that of his boss - that it will be hard for Saudi officials to paint Qahtani as the mastermind of the murder without also raising questions about the involvement of Prince Mohammed, according to several sources with links to the royal court. [...]

Khashoggi, a U.S.-based Saudi journalist often critical of Saudi Arabia and its leadership, walked into the Istanbul consulate at around 1 pm on Oct 2, to pick up some documents that would allow him to marry.

Turkish security sources say he was immediately seized inside the consulate by 15 Saudi intelligence operatives who had flown in on two jets just hours before.

According to one high-ranking Arab source with access to intelligence and links to members of Saudi Arabia's royal court, Qahtani was beamed into a room of the Saudi consulate via Skype.

He began to hurl insults at Khashoggi over the phone. According to the Arab and Turkish sources, Khashoggi answered Qahtani's insults with his own. But he was no match for the squad, which included top security and intelligence operatives, some with direct links to the royal court.

A Turkish intelligence source relayed that at one point Qahtani told his men to dispose of Khashoggi. "Bring me the head of the dog", the Turkish intelligence source says Qahtani instructed.

It is not clear if Qahtani watched the entire proceedings, which the high-ranking Arab source described as a "bungled and botched operation".

The Arab source and the Turkish intelligence source said the audio of the Skype call is now in the possession of Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan. The sources say he is refusing to release it to the Americans.

NEVER TOO SOON TO FIX A MISTAKE:

WHILE ELECTION DAY IS still just over two weeks away, more than 5 million people have already cast ballots in this year's midterm general election, with a number of states experiencing record levels of early voting.

In Indiana, home to one of the most crucial U.S. Senate contests in the country, residents in centrally located Hamilton County are casting ballots at a rate equal to the 2016 presidential election. In Minnesota, which is hosting a trio of competitive U.S. House races, early voting statewide has thus far surpassed ballots returned in 2016.

And in Georgia, which is featuring one of the most competitive governor's races of the year, ballots are being returned at three times the rate of the 2014 midterm.

More than half the country is already voting and experts say the surge ahead of Election Day leads to one likely conclusion: Overall turnout is going to spike.

"We're going to have high turnout," says Michael McDonald, a University of Florida political science professor who meticulously tracks the early vote. "You'd have to go back to the founding of the country to see presidential turnout rates during midterm elections. In some states, it's possible, if the trajectory holds up."

WHEN THE BABYSITTER IS CHILDISH:

The near brawl -- during which Mr. Kelly grabbed Mr. Lewandowski by the collar and tried to have him ejected from the West Wing -- came at a time when the chief of staff was facing uncertainty about how long Mr. Trump would keep him in his job. A guessing game over his departure has colored his tenure ever since. [...]

While Mr. Kelly's initial appointment was widely seen as a move to restore a sense of order, he has instead been at the center of a succession of conflicts, from his contradictory statements about Rob Porter, the White House staff secretary who left after previous allegations of domestic violence were made public, to his heated interactions with other aides.

Anthony Scaramucci, who has written a book about being Mr. Trump's communications director for 11 days until Mr. Kelly fired him after the release of a recording of his own profanity-laced call with a reporter, said on NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday that Mr. Kelly had "hurt the morale inside the place."

"And he's hurt the president. And he has hissy fits," Mr. Scaramucci said, adding that "he's demonstrating his personality now the way he really is."

WAGGING DONALD AND THE PRINCE:

GREEN LIGHT!:

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin met Monday with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) in Riyadh, the day before the controversial Saudi Future Investment Initiative conference.

OUR TWO REPUBLICAN PARTIES:

These "opportunity accounts" would, theoretically, make sure all children have significant assets when they enter adulthood, rather than just those who grow up in wealthier homes.

"It would be a dramatic change in our country to have low-income people break out of generational poverty," Booker said in an interview with Vox. "We could rapidly bring security into those families' lives, and that is really exciting to me."

Similar ideas have swirled around think tanks since the early 2000s, but Booker appears to be the first high-profile senator to introduce legislation to create such a program. [...]

His American Opportunity Accounts Act would give each child born in the United States a savings account with $1,000. Each year, until the child turns 18, the government would deposit as much as $2,000 into that account. The size of the annual payments would depend on the child's family income, with lower-income families receiving larger checks.

These accounts would be off limits until the child turns at 18, at which point the child could use them for specific "asset-building" purchases, like a down payment on a house, for example, or college tuition.

US VS THEM:

 A jihadist group has claimed responsibility for the abduction of 12 Iranian security personnel near the border with Pakistan, Iran's semi-official news agency ISNA reported Monday.

"The terrorist group Jaish al-Adl (Army of Justice in Arabic) has posted two photos... claiming that those in it are the forces abducted" on October 16, ISNA said.

Jaish al-Adl, formed in 2012, is a successor to the Sunni extremist group Jundallah (Soldiers of God) which has carried out a spate of attacks on Iranian security forces in recent years in the southeastern province of Sistan-Baluchistan.

NAZI, NOT FASCIST:

King's position is nothing new for the eight-term congressman, who, of course is up for reelection in a couple of weeks, but doing so in an interview with Caroline Sommerfeld, a prominent part of Europe's neo-fascist thinking in the Austrian far-right propaganda site Unzensuriert (which means "uncensored" in English), just underscores how far adrift we are getting.

It should serve as a reminder to us that we need to act to keep King's style of racism from becoming part of the norm in our society. And yet, there's no criticism from Republican leadership, no denunciations of the type leveled against a would-be Republican congressional candidate of neo-Nazi roots in Illinois. Rather, his views are ignored or seen within a larger set of acceptable bounds. And so, we should take notice. [...]

According to The Huffington Post version of the interview, King's remarks largely revolve around the paranoid idea of the Great Replacement -- the belief that mass migration, particularly from Muslim-majority countries, is an extinction-level event for white European culture and identity. Or as he put it in the interview, a "slow-motion cultural suicide."

"The U.S. subtracts from its population a million of our babies in the form of abortion," King said. "We add to our population approximately 1.8 million of 'somebody else's babies' who are raised in another culture before they get to us."

It's a phrase widely used by anti-Muslim European networks to refer to the supposed Islamification of Europe by migrants and refugees and heralded in a book called The Camp of the Saints, a stunningly racist 1973 novel by Jean Raspail that envisions the world undergoing the fight to the death between races." King even said George Soros, the billionaire philanthropist and bogeyman of the far right, might be paying for the Great Replacement.

Last year, Austrian intelligence services found that Unzensuriertis known in Austria for routinely publishing Islamophobic, anti-refugee articles, promoted anti-Semitism and extreme xenophobia. The site also spreads misinformation and conspiracies. The site has close ties with the far-right Freedom Party, or FPO, and its former editor-in-chief is now the head of communications for the Ministry of Information.

RUN, NIKKI, RUN:

Though you won't hear this from pundits and political analysts who are still smarting from getting it wrong in 2016, Trump is highly unlikely to win a national presidential race in 2020. His chances aren't zero, and whoever wins the Republican nomination two years from now has a chance to win. But his prospects for a second term are extremely dim. Four years ago, he ran against a candidate nearly as unpopular as he was. He had help from the Russian government. He was aided by an eleventh-hour intervention from then-FBI Director James Comey. Aggressive voter suppression efforts by Republicans also played a role in his victory. (Some version of each of those things might still be in place in 2020, but they are not nearly as rooted as they were in 2016.) And despite all of that support, he lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million and won the Electoral College because of a roughly 80,000-vote difference in three states. He's unlikely to benefit again from a confluence of such events.

Things have gotten only tougher for Trump since he got into office. Democrats are energized in a way they weren't in 2016. His poll numbers remain in the high 30s or low 40s, even with a historically low jobless rate. Trump is incredibly unpopular despite a strong economy. Econ 101 tells us that we are overdue for a recession. What if that materializes in the next two years? We should not forget that Robert Mueller is still quietly going about his work, the results of which reportedly might be revealed by the end of this year and alone could have a devastating effect on Trump's 2020 plans.

Beating Trump--a sitting president--in a primary would much harder than defeating him in the general, of course. But a poll from analytics firm Applecart suggests he is more vulnerable even among Republicans than many think. The same poll also found that Haley is the most popular among GOP challengers and would have a real shot if she declared her intentions to run.

Republicans should be jumping at that chance. Let's be frank. Haley is a highly-qualified woman and a member of a minority group who shattered the glass ceiling and destroyed racial barriers in a Deep South state to become governor of South Carolina. She is also far more conservative than Trump. That combination of attributes should be extremely appealing to a party that knows, despite its current hold on power, its base is shrinking by the year. The party knows that in order to avoid becoming a regional party a couple of decades from now, it must make a choice: Either keep trying to subvert the democratic process by implementing voter-ID and other laws designed to curtail the Democratic vote--which will be harder to do once Democrats begin retaking power in Washington and numerous state capitals during the midterm elections, not to mention as the American electorate continues to change--or make itself seem more inviting to minority voters. Those paying close attention know Trump is more Jesse Ventura than Ronald Reagan--a shock to the system, not a transformative figure--and that his brand of racist, white nationalistic, angry politics has a short shelf life.

YEAH....BUT....JUDGES!:

OUR TWO REPUBLICAN PARTIES:

Sinema did wear a tutu. She told a Libertarian talk-show host that she had no problem with him joining the Taliban. But she also was one of the few Democratic state lawmakers who was willing to try to work with then-Senate President Russell Pearce, who authored the tumultuous Senate Bill 1070. She also became close friends with former Republican U.S. Rep. Matt Salmon.

People change. They learn and grow. And Sinema's record in Washington proves it.

More than 60 percent of the bills she co-sponsored this session were introduced by Republicans. She voted just a couple of weeks ago to make some of the tax cuts permanent in last year's Republican-led bill - making her one of three Democrats to do so.

Sinema sides with Trump's agenda 62 percent of the time, according to an analysis by the website FiveThirtyEight - less so on social issues than on the economy and defense. But it's hard to argue that the Sinema of the last few years is some sort of commie - not when Andy Biggs, perhaps one of Arizona's most right-leaning politicians, votes with Trump only 74 percent of the time. [...]

McSally's foes have painted her as a negative hardliner who voted to ruin your health care. Sinema's campaign even ran an ad claiming McSally voted to cut Medicare, saying, "If she'll lie about our Medicare, she will lie about anything." 

For the record, McSally voted in 2017 for a Republican budget resolution that sought to slow cost increases by expanding the role of private insurance in Medicare. But nothing's actually been cut, and the debate's out on whether that plan would turn Medicare into a voucher system, as Democrats allege.

McSally does vote with Trump's position on issues 97 percent of the time. But she is not the ideological hardliner that many make her out to be, and you can see that in how she approaches legislation. Like Sinema, McSally studies issues deeply, works to make compromises within the legislation and, in the end, votes based on whether the bill is better than the status quo.

Perhaps most illustrative of her approach -- and completely lost in the campaign rhetoric on both sides - is how McSally handled Obamacare. She voted for repeal, but when that effort failed, she joined a bipartisan group that offered solutions to shore up the program - and noted in an op-ed that you fight the battle you're in, not the one you wish you had.

KNOWING YOUR ALLIES:

Vidino traces the Saudis' intense hostility toward the Brotherhood to the uprisings that swept through much of the Arab world in 2011. "The Saudis together with the Emiratis saw it as a threat to their own power," says Vidino.

Other regimes in the region thought they could use the Brotherhood to extend their influence. First among these was the powerful government in Turkey of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has such longstanding ties to the Islamist movement that some scholars refer to his elected government as "Brotherhood 2.0." Also hoping to ride the Brotherhood wave was tiny, ultra-rich Qatar, whose leaders had used their vast natural gas wealth and their popular satellite television channel, Al Jazeera, to project themselves on the world stage and, they hoped, buy some protection from their aggressive Saudi neighbors. As one senior Qatari official told me back in 2013, "The future of Qatar is soft power." After 2011, Jazeera's Arabic channel frequently appeared to propagandize in the Brotherhood's favor as much as, say, Fox News does in Trump's.

Egypt, the most populous country in the Arab world, and the birthplace of the Brotherhood, became a test case. Although Jamal Khashoggi often identified the organization with the idealistic hopes of the peaceful popular uprising that brought down the Mubarak dynasty, in fact the Egyptian Brotherhood had not taken part. Its leaders had a modus vivendi they understood with Mubarak, and it was unclear what the idealists in Tahrir Square, or the military tolerating them, might do.

After the dictator fell and elections were called, however, the Brotherhood made its move, using its party organization and discipline, as well as its perennial slogan, "Islam is the solution," to put its man Mohamed Morsi in the presidential palace and its people in complete control of the government. Or so it thought.

In Syria, meanwhile, the Brotherhood believed it could and should lead the popular uprising against the Assad dynasty. That had been its role 30 years earlier, and it had paid mightily.

For more than a year, it looked like the Brotherhood's various branches might sweep to power across the unsettled Arab world, and the Obama administration, for want of serious alternatives, was inclined to go with the flow.

But then the Saudis struck back.

In the summer of 2013, Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sissi, the commander of the Egyptian armed forces, led a military coup with substantial popular support against the conspicuously inept Brotherhood government, which had proved quickly that Islam was not really the "solution" for much of anything.

Al-Sissi had once been the Egyptian military attaché in Riyadh, where he had many connections, and the Saudis quickly poured money into Egypt to shore up his new regime. At the same time, he declared the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization, and launched a campaign of ruthless repression. Within weeks of the coup, the Egyptian military attacked two camps of Brotherhood protesters and slaughtered hundreds.

In Syria, the efforts to organize a credible political opposition to President Bashar al-Assad proved virtually impossible as the Qataris and Turks backed the Brotherhood while the Saudis continued their vehement opposition. But that does not mean that Riyadh supported moderate secular forces. Far from it. The Saudis still wanted to play a major role bringing down the Syrian regime allied to another arch enemy, the government of Iran. So the Saudis put their weight behind ultra-conservative Salafis, thinking they might be easier to control than the Muslim Brothers.

Riyadh is "okay with quietist Salafism," says Vidino. But the Salafis' religious extremism quickly shaded over into the thinking of groups like the al Qaeda spinoff called the Nusra Front. Amid all the infighting, little progress was made against Assad, and there to exploit the chaos was the so-called Islamic State (which Assad partially supported in its early days). [...]

In 2017, MBS and his backers in the Emirates accused Qatar of supporting "terrorism," issuing a set of demands that included shutting down Al Jazeera. The Saudis closed off the border and looked for other ways, including military options, to put pressure on the poor little rich country that plays so many angles it has managed to be supportive of the Brotherhood and cozy with Iran while hosting an enormous U.S. military base.

"It was Qatar's independent streak--not just who they supported but that they had a foreign policy divorced from the dictates of Riyadh," says Bodine. "The basic problem is that both the Brotherhood and Iran offer competing Islam-based governing structures that challenge the Saudi model."

"Jamal's basic sin," says Bodine,"was he was a credible insider, not a fire-breathing radical. He wrote and spoke in English for an American audience via credible mainstream media and was well regarded and highly visible within the Washington chattering classes. He was accessible, moderate and operated within the West. He challenged not the core structure of the Kingdom but the legitimacy of the current rulers, especially MBS."

LICENSE TO KILL:

When President Donald Trump called the press the "enemy of the people," he wasn't only speaking to his pep rally audience. Autocrats and despots around the world were listening. Right-wing governments from Poland and Hungary to Turkey and the Philippines have cracked down on freedom of the press over the past two years, with little worry that the Trump administration would raise a fuss. But last week's disappearance and presumed murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi by a Saudi hit squad in Turkey should alarm even this tone-deaf White House that words have consequences.

Khashoggi, a U.S. resident who was born in Saudi Arabia, wrote frequently about his native country with the fearlessness any opinion writer for an American newspaper enjoys. He called shots as he saw them. When Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the heir apparent to his father, King Salman, led economic reforms and lifted barriers to female driving, Khashoggi praised the moves. But he was also a critic of the crown prince's autocratic methods. Writing in the Post last year, Khashoggi said, "The crackdown on even the most constructive criticism -- the demand for complete loyalty with a significant 'or else' -- remains a serious challenge to the crown prince's desire to be seen as a modern, enlightened leader." Such criticism of your country's leader might get you disinvited from dinner parties in Washington but can get you killed in many places in the world. What is unusual about this case is that the assassins thought they could act with impunity against a permanent U.S. resident who expressed his views in an American paper.

FAITH IMPOSES OBLIGATIONS:

The question asked by both liberals and conservatives is what Muslims must do to integrate into Europe. No one asks what Europe must do to welcome Muslims. The presumption is that secular liberalism is the unquestioned hegemonic power: take off those hijabs.

Kaemingk isn't surprised at liberalism's failure. Every ideology can be­come hardened and brittle once in power; that's precisely why we need multiple competing interests. Western Europe once figured it was the eschatological culmination of all history: with brutal religion left behind, tolerance and multiculturalism were unquestioned and unquestionable. No longer. Kaemingk observes: "a small group of veiled Muslim women walking down the Champs-Élysées confront the young, secular Parisians they pass with a series of questions many of them have never asked during their young lives." The hijabs challenge secular presumptions.

So what's the answer? There is none writ large. Kaemingk professes to write for Christians, not to offer universal truths. Yet he finds a resource in a surprising place--the 19th-century Dutch Reformed theologian and politician Abraham Kuyper.

Christians in Holland and America have often dropped their distinctiveness in attempting to show the world they can be tolerant. Kaemingk's response is not hostile, but it is accurate: these churches win some outside respect but few converts. At the other end of the spectrum, right-wing Christians just parrot their secular counterparts in the culture wars. Kaemingk presents Kuyper as someone as christologically anchored as the conservatives, which enables him to be more pluralist than the liberals. He allows for an "uncompromising commitment to the exclusive lordship of Jesus Christ" and also "an uncompromising commitment to love those who reject that lordship."

WHAT A BUNCH OF SISSIES:

The survey asked 1,500 adults across the U.S. a series of questions on topics ranging from politics to baseball from Oct. 14 to Oct. 16. One question asked, "How much discrimination do the following people face in America today?" Respondents were then presented with a list of different demographic groups and could choose "none at all," "not much," a fair amount" or "a great deal."

Forty-nine percent of Trump voters surveyed said men face either "a great deal" (18 percent) or "a fair amount" (31 percent) of discrimination in America today. By contrast, this same group found 41 percent of LGBTQ people, 30 percent of women, 38 percent of African-Americans and 42 percent of Mexican-Americans faced either "a great deal" or a "fair amount" of discrimination.

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

Sen. Ben Sasse on CNN: "I think the cover stories from the Saudis are a mess. You don't bring a bonesaw to an accidental fist fight." https://t.co/UBIQ6dWuU9

— Axios (@axios) October 21, 2018

NO MATTER HOW FAR WE REDUCE THEIR WAGES, THEY'RE OURS AS LONG AS WE ATTACK THE OTHER:

from new NBC/WSJ poll,
America's mid-term election in a nutshell:

it's white men without college degrees (+42 R) against white women college graduates (+33 D), Latinos (+40 D) and African-Americans (+70 D)https://t.co/WZov67BCEL

— John Harwood (@JohnJHarwood) October 21, 2018

MORALITY IS THE ABNEGATION OF DESIRE:

In the context of sexuality, some people in same-sex relationships have told me that they accept the reality that their same-sex relationships are counter to the God-authored order of creation in terms of the physiological complementarity between males and females. However, they have also told me that they do not believe that countering that God-authored order of creation is a sin. This reveals a deficiency in people's understanding of sin. To avoid sin, we must strive to uphold the visible and invisible order of creation that God has authored. Overall, I'm grateful for the transparency in these conversations but also saddened because they reveal how much their experience (and their attachment to it) determines whether or not a sin has been committed.

Furthermore, striving to uphold the order of creation is less about managing behaviors than about examining the state of our hearts. By doing so, we can become more completely honest with ourselves about the degree to which we allow God to take precedence over our own desires. Thus, the idea that people ought to strive to uphold the order of creation is applicable to all people, regardless of the attractions they experience.

A SWAMP THE SIZE OF THE AMAZON:

THE TAX COLLECTOR FOR THE ETHNO-NATIONALIST STATE:

Well before President Donald Trump began slapping tariffs on steel, aluminum and other imported goods, there was a deal with South Africa that gave U.S. chicken producers duty-free access to a market that had effectively been shut to them for years.

But that trade deal, worth tens of millions of dollars to American businesses, now is being threatened by Trump's metal tariffs.

A group of senators from chicken-producing states -- Democrat Chris Coons, of Delaware, and Republicans Johnny Isakson, of Georgia, and Roger Wicker, of Mississippi -- have detailed their concerns in a recent letter to Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross. They cite a lawsuit in South Africa that aims to end duty-free imports of American chicken unless South Africa is exempted from Trump's metal tariffs.

The dispute illustrates the risk Trump runs by employing tariffs so aggressively. The president has wielded the import taxes -- real and threatened -- as part of a campaign to force countries like Mexico and Canada into trade pacts with terms he considers more favorable to the United States. But along with Trump's confrontational approach comes the potential fallout for American companies and consumers, as countries take retaliatory action.

ALWAYS BET ON THE dEEP sTATE:

Activists in Alexandria, Va., are pressing the sheriff to drop an agreement to detain migrants for ICE. The sheriff in Contra Costa County, California, canceled a similar contract in July, soon after at least 1,000 protesters marched on the local jail.

And at Philadelphia City Hall, organizers camped out for weeks beneath a banner that read "I.C.E. Get Out" before the city recently agreed to stop sharing real-time arrest information with immigration authorities.

With little leverage to counter the Trump administration's aggressive immigration crackdown in a Republican-controlled Washington, immigrant advocates and grass-roots groups are mounting a furious backlash in communities across the country.

They can't stop deportations, but they hope to throw sand in the gears by targeting pressure points in the system: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement relies on local agencies to jail detainees who may be in the country illegally, notify ICE of their release and even help conduct immigration enforcement.

ALWAYS AMUSING WHEN THE rIGHT/lEFT CLAIM...:

NOW DONALD AND CO. BELIEVE THIS ONE:

As Saudi Arabia faced intensifying international scepticism over its story about the death of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a senior government official laid out a new version of the death inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul that in key respects contradicts previous explanations.

KNOWING YOUR ALLIES:

[I]ran faces the threat of being blacklisted by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), an intergovernmental organization tasked with combating financial crimes including money laundering and terrorism. To avoid blacklisting, Iran must carry out nine actions. The watchdog body said on October 19 that Iran had until February to complete reforms that would bring it into line with global norms or face consequences that could completely isolate Tehran from the international banking system.

To meet the nine FATF requirements, the Rouhani administration introduced four bills in parliament. Two bills--authorizing Iran to join the Combating the Financing of Terrorism (CFT) Convention and the UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime (the Palermo Convention)--sparked a fierce battle between hardliners and centrists. Combining resistance to financial transparency and to the "imperial West," the deep state, dominated by hardliners, is strongly opposed to acceding to the FATF requirements.

However, Iran must satisfy these requirements to survive the coming sanctions avalanche. By doing so, it will make it easier to solidify European Union support in confronting Trump's punitive policy of "maximum pressure" toward Tehran. The EU is reportedly setting up a special purpose vehicle (SPV) to allow Iran to trade with European companies and bypass the US financial system.

On June 20, Khamenei fiercely attacked the bills that authorized joining the two conventions. "These conventions are cooked up in the think tanks of the great powers securing their interests and for the sake of their benefits," he remarked. Many thought that the hardliners had won the battle.

But in an unexpected reversal on September 10, Falahatpisheh announced that Khamenei had authorized the "administration and the parliament" to decide about dealing with FATF. Khamenei turned his back on conservatives, his social base, and gave the green light to the moderates to resolve the issue.

Iran's parliament, led by speaker Ali Larijani, whose views are closer to Rouhani than to the hardliners, pushed for ratification of the bill on joining the CFT convention during a contentious closed session on October 7. At the session, lawmakers voted 143 in favor of and 120 against; five abstained. The Guardian Council, a supervisory body led by the ultra-conservative Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, who cannot even pronounce FATF, has yet to approve the bill. However, Khamenei's silence in this matter suggests that the Council will eventually approve it.

It was in this context that Falahatpisheh spoke of engaging Americans who oppose the Trump administration's harsh line on Iran.

Even Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which for two years attacked the idea of submitting to FATF requirements, has changed its approach. The latest issue of the IRGC weekly political organ, Sobhe Sadegh, features an interview with Mehdi Pazouki, an economist who supports joining FATF. In the interview, he describes the risks of rejecting the organization's recommendations.

HIS LIPS WERE MOVING:

The Trump administration just confirmed-for at least the second time-that there is no evidence then-candidate Donald Trump was wire-tapped at Trump Tower in late 2016.

In a 178-page court filing released late Friday night, the Department of Justice noted, "[t]he Government has made two acknowledgments" regarding claims that the previous administration of Barack Obama wiretapped Trump near the tail-end of the 2016 general election.

The latter man famously made those claims in a series of four tweets posted on the morning of March 4, 2017.

ONE ECONOMY TO RULE THEM ALL:

 

The first thing to note is that this is the first year that we have formally adopted a new methodology for measuring competiveness. It's a radical departure: around 66% of the indicators we use this year are new, covering areas such as businesses' openness to disruptive ideas, the level of digital skills among the population or how flat company hierarchies are. We made these changes as we believe that factors such as these will increasingly capture the essence of a nation's competitive strength in the future alongside the more traditional indicators such as good transport infrastructure and well-functioning markets.

The United States, as one of the world's great innovation powerhouses, is very well positioned in this new competitive landscape. It ranks first overall in the world in three of our twelve pillars; business dynamism, labour markets and financial system. It comes second in another two; innovation (behind Germany) and market size (behind China).

This is in contrast to the US' fortunes under the previous methodology; there, the last time it topped the Index was in 2008. An uncertain macroeconomic environment as a result of the financial crisis was only one of the factors holding the country back in the intervening years.

But even under the 'old' methodology, the US has been on an upward path for some years; to the point where last year it had pulled itself back to second in the rankings. This supports the thesis that many of the conditions that contribute towards competitiveness cannot simply be acquired or constructed overnight.

While 2018 marks the first time that we formally adopt our new model for competitiveness, we actually recast our 2017 data to see how countries' performance have varied from year to year. The US also came top of that, again suggesting that there are longer term forces behind its ascent to the summit of competitiveness and that this year's performance was no one-off.

THE PROPER ROLE OF PUBLIC EDUCATION IS TEACHING CIVICS:

One by one, each of New Hampshire's five Supreme Court justices, clad in black robes and carrying folders, filed past attorneys and onlookers before taking their seats at a large table before them.

And at the same time the justices sat down, so did the more than 100 students who gathered in a temporary courtroom inside Hanover High School's auditorium on Thursday morning to get a firsthand look at how the justice system operates.

The Supreme Court was in Hanover as part of its "On the Road" program, which brings the justices to a new school every year. Hanover High marks the 20th location and the first in the Upper Valley since 2003, when the event came to Dartmouth College.

"I think all of us would say unanimously that doing these On the Road things we consider a highlight of the year," Chief Justice Robert Lynn said. "It's very, very enjoyable for us, and we hope that you get a lot out of it also."

CHEETO JESUS STANDS ALONE:

DONALD'S CHINA POLICIES THREATEN AMERICA, NOT CHINA'S:

[B]eijing would be wise to avoid any sort of long-term geopolitical contest; it surely would end up on the losing side, for several obvious reasons.

Who has the best allies in such a struggle would be an important indicator of who would win the new cold war. And unfortunately for China, its only ally is North Korea. America's alliance network is global, with military bases across Asia and around the world. Washington's treaty allies alone in the Asia-Pacific include South Korea and Japan -- two of the world's premier economic and military powers. When you consider America's membership in NATO, where an attack on one is considered an attack on all, and its smaller regional partners, the depth of Washington's overall diplomatic, economic and military alliance network is unmatched -- and unchallengeable.

Next, despite China's growing military might, America still holds a decisive advantage in overall training and warfighting capability. Beijing has never fought a modern war, whereas the United States has been involved in some form of armed conflict since 9/11. In fact, China's last armed contest against another nation was a short war against Vietnam in 1979 -- and China lost badly.

One must also look at each nation's economic outlook to see who has the stronger fundamentals. Again, America comes out on top. Though some argue that China's economic might will surpass America's in 10 years or so, by measure of GDP, many economists argue that Beijing's growth estimates are simply fiction. Some even claim China is only growing at an anemic 1 percent.

Also, Beijing has tremendous debt issues, largely a result of trying to spend its way out of the 2008 economic crisis. Such debt could worsen, with the Chinese government opening the liquidity taps knowing that U.S. tariffs will hurt export-led growth.

Finally, and most important, is the issue of demographics: China's are a disaster. Thanks to a one-child policy that was meant to stem challenges from overpopulation, China's population, as of last year, includes 241 million elderly citizens. By 2050, that number is expected to spike to 487 million, almost 35 percent of the population.

All the above only scratches the surface.

ALWAYS BET ON THE dEEP sTATE:

"Catch and release is not an official policy, but it is the default until we have better laws," Chris Chmielenski, deputy director of Numbers USA, a research group that supports immigration restrictions, told The Daily Signal.

While curbing illegal immigration was Trump's signature campaign issue, and the Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security have increased enforcement, the problem of illegal border crossings has escalated again in recent months.

Experts say the Trump administration may have done everything possible through executive action, and must rely on Congress to close certain loopholes to better secure the border.

In lieu of consequences, the number of migrant parents illegally entering the United States escalated since Trump ended separation of children from parents at the border, The Washington Post reported this week.

MAN, THE STUFF YOU HAVE TO SWALLOW TO BE HIS FAN:

Speaking at a round table in Arizona, President Trump called the Saudi attorney general's statement regarding Jamal Khashoggi a "great first step" and believes it is credible.

"LET'S MAKE THE MOVIE!"

PHILIP KAUFMAN (WRITER, DIRECTOR): When I read The Right Stuff I was just amazed. What I loved about it was not only getting to the truer stories but really beginning where he did, with a quality called "the right stuff" as personified by Chuck Yeager. I envisioned a movie that could be based around that central character or quality.

THE TENDENCY TO EXCUSE LIBERAL ENTHUSIASM FOR THE USSR...:

Applebaum's main storyline begins in early 1917, when the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II touched off a period of upheaval throughout the newly defunct Russian Empire. Nowhere was this chaos more pronounced than in Ukraine, whose short-lived experiment in democratic rule collapsed under the weight of foreign-backed coups, invasions, and peasant rebellions.

As she leads her reader through this dizzyingly complex period, Applebaum argues that these events taught the early Bolshevik leadership -- and Joseph Stalin in particular -- to "see Ukraine as potentially dangerous and explosive, and Ukrainian peasants and intellectuals as threats to Soviet power."

Desperate for grain, the infant Bolshevik regime in Moscow embarked on a policy of forced requisition throughout the Russian, Belarusian, and Ukrainian agricultural heartland that contributed to the first major Soviet famine in 1921-1922. Applebaum explains how the unexpected severity of this famine shook the Bolsheviks' confidence, leading them to pursue more liberal economic and nationalities policies, under which the Ukrainian language and culture experienced a brief state-sponsored revival.

By the end of the 1920s, this more lenient approach gave way to darker trends. To hasten the Soviet Union's industrialization, Stalin made the case for a radical rearrangement of the Soviet economy: the forced collectivization of the agricultural sector. Mass arrests and property seizures plunged rural Ukraine into chaos as Stalin sought to eliminate land-owning peasants as a social class. All the while, grain production plummeted. The countryside began to go hungry.

Applebaum convincingly illustrates how Stalin and his top aides had plenty of warnings from lower-level officials about the problems with the harvest during 1930 and 1931. Yet Ukrainian officials' requests for food aid and a reprieve from the quotas only enraged Stalin, who accused them of incompetence and deceit.

Applebaum dissects the fascinating communications between Stalin and his closest advisers to paint a picture of a leader gripped by paranoid visions of his enemies -- the Ukrainians chief among them -- conspiring to sabotage the grain-production effort. Recalling Ukraine's insubordination after the Bolsheviks seized power, Stalin wrote to a colleague that, without urgent changes, "we could lose Ukraine."

Leading up to the fall of 1932, Stalin could have taken any number of off-ramps to ease the crisis. Instead, he directed a series of measures that, according to Applebaum, "launched a famine within a famine, a disaster specifically targeted at Ukraine and Ukrainians." These cruel tactics included stricter food requisitions, trade sanctions against entire villages, and population-movement controls so that starving Ukrainian villagers could not escape their fates.

In tandem, Stalin reversed the earlier Soviet policy of supporting the development of Ukraine's national identity. Ukrainian party officials were purged for questioning the draconian requisition orders. Ukrainian history and language courses were abolished from universities. Within a few years, Applebaum writes, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian teachers, writers, artists, librarians, scientists, publishers, and religious figures -- an "entire generation of educated, patriotic Ukrainians" -- were fired, jailed, or executed.

UNAMERICAN ACTIVITIES:

President Trump targeted his ire at migrants who want to come to the United States and the Democratic Party at a campaign rally in Arizona Friday night.

Referring to the caravan of an estimated 4,000 people traveling on foot from Honduras to the U.S. border, Trump alleged "many of those people -- a fairly big percentage of those people -- are criminals."

The president has often been magniloquent in his praise of those who control the press, suppress dissent, and strike down dissidents. He praised Vladimir Putin, saying before the 2016 election, "The man has very strong control over a country. Now, it's a very different system, and I don't happen to like the system. But certainly, in that system, he's been a leader, far more than our president."

When Bill O'Reilly, then of Fox News, called Putin "a killer," Trump memorably replied, "There are a lot of killers. You think our country's so innocent?"

The president lauded President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, while human rights groups say his police and vigilante groups killed more than 7,000 drug dealers and drug users, without arrest or trial.

"Many countries have the problem, we have a problem," Trump told him, "but what a great job you are doing and I just wanted to call and tell you that."

President Trump celebrated with President Xi of China when his parliament prepared to approve a change to allow President Xi to stay in office indefinitely. "I think it's great," Trump told him at his Mar-a-Lago estate. "Maybe we'll give that a shot some day."

And of course the president has gotten almost dewy-eyed over Kim Jong Un of North Korea, telling Fox News, "He's got a very good personality, he's funny, and he's very, very smart." Later he told a rally in West Virginia, "He wrote me beautiful letters. And they're great letters. We fell in love."

AMERICA'S GAME:

It seemed that every player worth his salt from Europe and South America wound up playing in the NASL. Pele, Franz Beckenbauer, Carlos Alberto, Johan Cruyff, Eusebio, Gerd Müller, Geoff Hurst, Bobby Moore and Giorgio Chinaglia are just some of the names who played in the league. But in the early days, before the influx of those superstars, the league's heart was in the right place, even if the games weren't. Many teams called baseball stadiums home, making for some challenging situations for everyone, especially goalkeepers, who had to deal with a dirt infield in front of the net.

"It made it very challenging especially when you had the dirt surface and the grass next to it," said Dick Howard, a goalkeeper who emigrated from England to pursue a soccer career (he was there at the league's birth and death). "The quality of the playing surfaces pale in comparison to what they are today. It was great from my standpoint because I enjoy watching baseball games and to play at Yankee Stadium and Fenway Park was great."

Howard was one of the many players who took on missionary roles, spreading the gospel of the sport. As Rochester's director of youth development, Howard assigned teammates to visit schools to hold clinics. That could be a challenge, when soccer was foreign to many American kids.

"I went with my bag of soccer balls on my own and they directed me to the gymnasium," he recalls. "I heard this rumble. The rumble was students hurtling down the corridor and into the gym for phys ed. They saw the soccer balls, started dribbling, shooting baskets and said, 'Is this a new game that you devised?' They eventually played some sort of soccer."

Eventually, the league stabilized and grew. A New York team - the Cosmos - was added in 1971. In 1975, the team added a certain three-time World Cup champion. Pele's signing with the Cosmos put the league into another orbit in terms of recognition. It also helped turn the Cosmos into a team of all-stars, setting attendance records at Giants Stadium.

In many ways, the NASL was the wild west of professional soccer. Each team had personality, character and characters. For example, the coach of the Fort Lauderdale Strikers, Ron Newman, was also a brilliant salesman. During a losing streak in 1978, he was brought onto the Lockhart Stadium field in a coffin, sprang out and ran to a microphone and shouted: "We're not dead yet!" The crowd went wild.

The games themselves could be odd. The Rochester Lancers took on the Dallas Tornado in the 1971 playoffs but the lack of a penalty shootout meant the game lasted 176 minutes. The contest finally ended with a 2-1 win for the Lancers just before midnight, with the players understandably exhausted.

And while stars such as Pele and Cruyff earned plenty, many players were in it for the love of the game, rather than money. Toronto Metros-Croatia, the 1976 NASL champions, had their fans pass the hat around in a church basement to pay for players' salaries. The team lasted just three years. The most Howard earned in a season was $3,000 with Detroit in 1968 (around $21,000 in today's terms).

"Money was immaterial," he said. "We just had the opportunity to play the game we loved sometimes in front of good crowds, sometimes in front of wives and girlfriends, family. We certainly didn't enrich our bank accounts so thankfully now players are getting paid what they deserve to get paid for. You had to have that love, that passion for the game."

After Pele's arrival, teams wanted their own superstars. Some were worth their weight in gold, others were such poor investments that teams may as well have thrown cash out the window. "Pele had come and now there was all of this excitement and people had to get players and they overpaid for them," says Ted Howard, who was the NASL executive director for 14 years.

He looked at me as if I had just written my own obituary. "Don't waste your time on soccer, kid. It's a game for Commie pansies."

OUR TWO REPUBLICAN PARTIES:

[T]he new tax law purposely punishes people in the expensive-to-live-in blue states, which is where Wall Street people live. To them, this is not just about money. It's personal. [...]

Speaking of which, decidedly middle-class people also get sucker-punched by this tax on their taxes. In Long Island's Nassau County, where a good chunk of the New York City police force resides, the average property tax alone exceeds $11,000.

This attack on blue states is the handiwork of Southern and rural politicians intent on making taxpayers in mostly Democratic regions bear more of the nation's tax burden. Keep in mind that the income tax is already a blue state tax. The federal tax code treats a $110,000 income in super-expensive San Francisco the same as a $110,000 income in highly affordable El Paso.

In 2016, New York state sent about $41 billion more in tax revenues to Washington than it got back in federal spending, the 47th-worst deal in the country. New Jersey ranked 50th. Now we can expect the imbalance to get worse.

There is a potential remedy, and it is to replace the Republican Congress with a Democratic one. The Democrats need to gain 24 seats in the midterms to take over the House. There are now 37 Republican-held seats in the high-tax blue states of California, New York, New Jersey, Illinois and Maryland. Their voters tend to be especially sensitive to taxes.

SERVING VLAD:

Committee Democrats asked to immediately send the transcripts to Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who hasn't been allowed to see them under Nunes' rules. There's good reason to believe many witnesses committed perjury or offered information relevant to the special counsel's work. But Nunes opposed it, and it was voted down.

Committee Democrats then moved to have the transcripts released to the public immediately -- after a 10-day intelligence community review -- to avoid any selective release or other political manipulation. Again, Nunes opposed this.

This is his modus operandi. Though incomplete due to Republican obstruction, our investigation did reveal worrisome contacts between the Russians and candidate Trump, his family, his businesses, and his campaign. Yet every time we sought to learn more, we were blocked.

We sought to test witnesses' accounts by subpoenaing third-party records such as cell phone, bank and travel records. Republicans refused to allow it.

To arrange the infamous June 9, 2016 Trump Tower meeting, Donald Trump Jr. called his Russian contact, then called a blocked number, and then called his Russian contact back. We had evidence from other witnesses that Donald Trump used a blocked number. Republicans refused to pursue whether it was the same number.

The Republicans ran a "take them at their word" investigation when most of the Trump team clearly didn't deserve that benefit of the doubt. So at last week's hearing, I moved to subpoena many of the records that could fill a lot of the gaps. Nunes nixed it.

NO ONE CARES ABOUT PRIVACY IF WE CAN TRAVEL QUICKER:

After a grueling 10-hour flight, you finally land back home in the United States. But your relief is short-lived as you remember the endless customs line you'll soon encounter. As you approach the dreaded entrance, you stop in your tracks. There's no line. Everyone ahead of you walks up to a machine that takes their picture and asks them a few questions. Within seconds, they're free to go, except for one guy who is picked out by the machine as suspicious. Welcome to the future of border patrol -- and to a revived security-versus-privacy debate in a new arena.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection first tested facial biometric technology for exit verification in June 2016 at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. They've since expanded biometric exit verification to 15 U.S. airports. The agency began biometric entry verification at JFK in July 2018 and has since then expanded that to 13 other U.S. airports. The idea is the same both for entering and exiting passengers: to more quickly recognize suspicious travelers. The Department of Homeland Security has partnered with the University of Arizona's BORDERS program to develop an AI-based screening system that can identify suspicious behavior more accurately than humans can. And information technology company Unisys in March 2018 unveiled a new AI-based system called LineSight that can more efficiently screen travelers as they go through customs.

These technologies promise to significantly reduce waiting times at immigration counters and allow officials to focus on a smaller set of identified suspects instead of every person entering the country. 

hISTORY eNDED IN '76:

Bringing together the classic defense of liberty and democracy, the political economy of hierarchy, endogenous growth theory, and the new institutional economics on growth, we propose a new institutional theory that identifies democracy's unique advantage in prompting economic growth. We contend that the channel of liberty‐to‐innovation is the most critical channel in which democracy holds a unique advantage over autocracy in promoting growth, especially during the stage of growth via innovation. Our theory thus predicts that democracy holds a positive but indirect effect upon growth via the channel of liberty‐to‐innovation, conditioned by the level of economic development.

THE ILLUSION OF FREEDOM:

Nothing gets our hackles up more than being told that we have no choice over something. The powerful urge we get to regain a lost or threatened freedom, even at great cost, is formally called "reactance". I call it the "Braveheart effect".

This effect is likely to kick in if we are told we must do something or that we can't do something. It can be triggered by being told our personality or gender means we will necessarily act in a certain way. Anything that makes us feel our freedom is threatened awakens powerful forces.

Anger wells up. We mentally rail against whatever or whoever threatens our freedom. What we have been pushed into tastes bitter. What we have lost smells sweeter.

We then act to restore our sense of freedom. We may do what we were told not to. If a judge tells jurors that they have no choice but to disregard inadmissible evidence, it can increase the chance they are influenced by this evidence.

We may also confound predictions. We may choose the opposite of what we are told someone of our personality type would choose, or outperform an unhelpful stereotype of what is expected of our gender.

This effect only tends to occur if we feel capable of restoring our freedom. Otherwise we rationalize our actions ("Oh, that's what I wanted to do anyway"). If the Braveheart effect occurs, its strength depends on a number of factors.

First, the more we sense an actual person is thwarting our freedom, the greater the effect is. We will experience a greater Braveheart effect if someone tells us to do something in person than if we receive the same message in written form.

Second, the effect depends on how the message restricting our freedom is phrased. The use of forceful and controlling language (should, ought, must, need), results in a greater Braveheart effect than non-controlling language (consider, can, could, may).

Third, it depends on who you are. The extent to which you experience the effect is a personality trait. Questionnaires can measure it. Some people are more disposed to experience the Braveheart effect than others.

Finally, culture plays a role. People from more individualistic cultures (such as Britain) experience a stronger Braveheart effect when their personal freedom is threatened than when their group freedom is threatened. In contrast, people from more collectivist cultures (such as China) show the opposite pattern.

YOUR NEXT CAR WILL BE A VOLT:

ALL COLLUSION ALL THE WAY DOWN:

Special counsel Robert Mueller continues to examine the 2016 hack of the Democratic National Committee and whether various individuals had knowledge of it before documents were dumped on WikiLeaks. These individuals include Jerome Corsi (who we have covered before), former Trump campaign advisor Roger Stone and the associates of the deceased Peter W. Smith.

According to Byron Tau of the Wall Street Journal, "Mueller has Stone's telephone records and evidence Smith had foreknowledge of hacks" by the fictitious persona known as Guccifer 2.0.

The Mueller Probe has concluded Guccifer 2.0 was actually a group Russian military intelligence officers.

DONALD WHO?:

A top Trump administration political appointee who just two days ago was on track to lead the Interior Department's inspector general's office resigned Friday from the federal government, according to an administration official.

Suzanne Israel Tufts was scheduled to be interviewed Friday morning for another inspector general position elsewhere in the government, according to a person with knowledge of the interview. But she did not show up for the appointment.

Her departure ends a madcap week, as the administration quickly scuttled an arrangement to make Tufts acting Interior watchdog amid media reports and scrutiny from Capitol Hill lawmakers. 

THANKS, HERITAGE!:

Support has grown for a ballot initiative seeking to fully expand Medicaid and provide health care to roughly 150,000 low-income Utahns, according to a new Salt Lake Tribune-Hinckley Institute of Politics poll.

The poll shows 59 percent of Utah voters favor Proposition 3, up from 54 percent in a similar survey conducted in June. The share of voters opposing the initiative fell slightly from 35 percent to 33 percent between the two polls.

President Trump might not mind if people starting calling Obamacare Trumpcare, because the controversial health program signed into law in 2010 is finally stabilizing.

After several years of sharp rate hikes, insurance premiums for people participating in Affordable Care Act exchanges are actually due to fall in 2019. The Trump administration says the average premium for a typical plan will drop by 1.5% next year. That's based on rates insurance companies must file with the states in which they operate. About 9 million Americans buy insurance on an ACA exchange.

"There's been a lot of tumult under the ACA up till now," says Larry Levitt, a senior vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation. "But there's no question it's viable, in the face of significant headwinds. The ACA is embedded in the health care system."

CONFIRMATION WAS THE FINAL NAIL:

Just about every poll predicts it won't happen: Suburban voters are too fed up with Donald Trump, and Democrats too awash in cash, for Nancy Pelosi's party not to seize the House on Nov. 6.

And yet House Republicans -- and privately, even a few Democrats -- say the GOP could still hang on, if only by a few seats. [...]

Nevertheless, it's indisputable Republicans are in a serious jam: Democrats have infinitely more paths to win the chamber than Republicans do of holding it. Even Republicans admit that Democrats have already closed out about 15 races, well over halfway to the 23 seats they need to win the majority. Democrats are competing in more than 75 districts currently represented by Republicans, giving them ample room to secure the final dozen seats needed to take the majority.

At the same time, Republicans say there's no question that their lot has improved in the past few weeks. Their internal polls show the president's approval ratings have increased by an average of 5 points in a handful of swing districts, giving Republicans who were underwater a fighting chance.

GOP fortunes have improved in a grab bag of districts, from Trump strongholds where the Kavanaugh battle has energized conservatives, to racially diverse districts where incumbents with strong connections to voters appear to be staving off challengers. [...]

Of course, everything would have to break their way for Republicans to eke out a victory. For one, several party officials said it's critical that President Donald Trump not antagonize more suburban women in the run-up to the election with comments like the "horseface" insult he hurled at Stormy Daniels this week.

They also said they need to prolong the momentum of the Kavanaugh confirmation for a few more weeks -- or, better, build upon it.

HE TAINTS EVERYTHING HE TOUCHES:

During his 20 months in office, Attorney General Jeff Sessions has swept in perhaps the most dramatic political shift in memory at the Justice Department, from the civil rights-centered agenda of the Obama era to one that favors his hard-line conservative views on immigration, civil rights and social issues.

Now, discontent and infighting have taken hold at the Justice Department, in part because Mr. Sessions was so determined to carry out that transformation that he ignored dissent, at times putting the Trump administration on track to lose in court and prompting high-level departures, according to interviews over several months with two dozen current and former career department lawyers who worked under Mr. Sessions. Most asked not to be named for fear of retribution.

President Trump has exacerbated the dynamic, they said, by repeatedly attacking Mr. Sessions and the Justice Department in baldly political and personal terms. And he has castigated rank-and-file employees, which career lawyers said further chilled dissent and debate within the department.

The people interviewed -- many yearslong department veterans, and a third of whom worked under both the Bush and Obama administrations -- said that their concerns extended beyond any political differences they might have had with Mr. Sessions, who is widely expected to leave his post after November's midterm elections.

"Since I've been a lawyer, going back to the late 1970s, I can't recall a time when morale has been as low as I have heard from some former colleagues," said Robert Litt, a former Justice Department official during the Clinton administration. [...]

The president has also frequently targeted Rod J. Rosenstein, who as deputy attorney general oversees the day-to-day operations at the department as well as the special counsel investigation. In a turnabout this month, Mr. Trump declared his relationship with Mr. Rosenstein good, to the relief of some federal prosecutors. To them, Mr. Rosenstein's office symbolizes the department's independence because he oversees its inquiries into the president and his inner circle.

More unnerving, employees said, was the president's threat to remove the security clearance of Bruce Ohr, a civil servant who worked to combat Russian mobs and oligarchs. The message, said one lawyer in the criminal division: Doing your job can make you vulnerable to a career-ending attack.

Two former attorneys said that they stepped away from Russia-related work as a result.

"The underlying message from Trump is that department employees are either enemies of the White House or vassals doing its bidding," said Norman L. Eisen, who served as special counsel for ethics and government reform under Mr. Obama. Mr. Eisen is co-counsel for the plaintiffs in a lawsuit accusing Mr. Trump of violating the Constitution by maintaining a stake in his hotel in Washington.

As a target of Mr. Trump's high-profile rebukes, Mr. Sessions has gained cautious support even from some rank-and-file lawyers who find his culture wars zeal distasteful. They cited instances where he pushed back on Mr. Trump's broadsides and his simply enduring months of presidential invective.

IN FAIRNESS....:

He accepts less-than-credible denials from autocratic heads of state about nefarious acts. He disputes the existence of man-made climate change and insists that photographic evidence of the crowd at his inauguration is fake, part of a media plot to harm him.

Over the course of 21 months, President Trump has loudly and repeatedly refused to accept a number of seemingly agreed-upon facts, while insisting on the veracity of a variety of demonstrably false claims that happen to suit his political needs. In the process, he has untethered the White House from the burden of objective proof, creating a rich trove for professional fact-checkers, and raising questions about the basis for many of his decisions.

"If there's no truth, how do we discuss and make decisions that are rooted in fact?" said Rob Stutzman, a Republican operative based in California. "It's been abandoned. And it's something that the Republican base certainly isn't going to revolt on him on. But it is a huge fundamental problem of how to govern when there are no facts." [...]

Mr. Trump's approach has profound consequences for the credibility of the presidency and the boundaries of acceptable political discourse. It also has serious ramifications for his advisers, as well as people who hear the president's words outside the United States. And, according to Mr. Hayden, it particularly affects the intelligence officials whose job it is to present Mr. Trump with the information he needs to make critical national security decisions.

"Intelligence is all about context, which is history and consequence," said Mr. Hayden, and intelligence officials are "trying to pull him into an agreed view of objective reality."

But in briefings and meetings, Mr. Trump has frequently chosen to adhere to his own beliefs on issues such as the Iran nuclear deal. He has declared that pact to be "a horrible one-sided deal that should have never, ever been made," based on his belief that Iran was not in compliance with it, despite evidence to the contrary.

For Mr. Trump, personal relationships are more important than institutional ones. That means he "gives weight to data based on who told him, not the evidentiary stack underneath it," Mr. Hayden said.

The result is that the Russian president or the North Korean leader can seem to have a greater impact with Mr. Trump than his own State Department or C.I.A. His willingness to repeat claims like the notion that Mr. Khashoggi was the victim of "rogue killers" is a function of that, Mr. Stutzman said.

"This rhetoric really matters," he said, "in that it belies how little he fundamentally understands the institutions of American democracy."

WE ARE RELIABLY ASSURED HE DOESN'T DO THINGS LIKE THIS:

Donald Trump has praised Greg Gianforte, the Congress member from Montana, for violently attacking a Guardian reporter, saying that someone who performs a body slam is "my guy".

Trump described in glowing terms the physical assault that occurred on 24 May 2017 when Ben Jacobs, the Guardian's political correspondent, was asking Gianforte a question about health care policy in the course of a special congressional election in Bozeman, Montana. The US president incited cheers and chants from a crowd of about 8,000 supporters on Thursday night when he said: "Greg is smart. And by the way, never wrestle him. You understand. Never."

THE MOST UNDERRATED ANGLOSPHERIC NOVEL:

"That's part of nature - nature is very tough," explains Martin Rosen, Watership Down's director, speaking as the film marks its 40th anniversary this weekend. "Richard [Adams] was very strong on that element. I felt it was absolutely critical. I did not make this picture for kids at all. I insisted that the one-sheet [the film poster] indicate how strong a picture it was by having Bigwig the rabbit in a snare. I reckoned a mother with a sensitive child would see that - a rabbit in a snare with blood coming out its mouth - and reckon, 'well maybe this isn't for Charlie - it's a little too tough'." [...]

There was no PG rating in the UK in 1978 - so it was either U (universal) or 15. It was felt the former was more fitting. The film's suitability became an unlikely source of debate two years ago when Channel 5 aired it at 2.25pm on Easter Sunday. Families across Britain sat down to what they presumed would be a tale of cuddly derring-do in the woodland.

Instead, they and their children were assailed by an hour and a half of death and cruelty. After the Channel 5 switchboard and Twitter feed lit up with complaints, the head of the British Board of Film Classification intervened, saying that, released today, Watership Down would almost certainly carry a PG rating.

"The film has been a U for 38 years, but if it came in tomorrow it would not be," said David Austin. "Standards were different then." It's a debate likely to be reignited when the BBC and Netflix debut their new TV adaptation of the book this December (it's as yet unclear whether it will be as gruesome as the movie).

Adams, who died in 2016 aged 96, was aware his story could be considered visceral - but saw no reason why he should apologise. In an interview with The Telegraph in 2014, he said: "I never consider the readers. I was allowed to read anything I liked when I was little, and I liked all sorts of things that I shouldn't have been reading." [...]

[T]he idea that such films have the potential to distress an entire generation has been challenged by recent research. Death on the screen can provide a healthy basis for children to discuss difficult subjects, a 2017 University of Buffalo study found.

"These films can be used as conversation starters for difficult and what are oftentimes taboo topics like death and dying," said a study author. "These are important conversations to have with children, but waiting until the end of life is way too late."

With a BBC/Netflix adaptation due on Christmas Day, Adams's world of feuding rabbits is likely to have a fresh lease of relevance. It already has its modern equivalents: Coco is similarly matter-of-fact about the reality of death.

HISTORY ALWAYS REPEATS ITSELF:

Following is the text of the two articles of impeachment passed by the House on December 19. 

1. The president provided perjurious, false and misleading testimony to the grand jury regarding the Paula Jones case and his relationship with Monica Lewinsky. 

Approved by House 228-206

3. The president obstructed justice in an effort to delay, impede, cover up and conceal the existence of evidence related to the Jones case. 

Approved by House 221-212

KNOWING YOUR ENEMIES:

A Saudi Arabian journalist and commentator has been banned by his country for criticising US President-elect Donald Trump.

Jamal Khashoggi has been banned from writing in newspapers, making TV appearances and attending conferences, Middle East Eye reports.

After Mr Khashoggi criticised Mr Trump's Middle East policies at a Washington think-tank on 10 November, an official Saudi spokesman said he did not represent the Kingdom in a statement to the Saudi Press Agency.

THE CARDINAL SIN IS DECENCY:

WHAT KIND OF GUTTERSNIPE....:

Warren's DNA was sequenced and analyzed by a group led by Carlos Bustamante, a well-regarded Stanford University geneticist. Researchers studied a fraction -- far less than 1/1000th -- of Warren's DNA, and then compared it to the DNA of 148 people from Finland, Italy, Spain, China, Nigeria and North and South America. Additional comparison was done with 185 individuals from Utah and Great Britain.

As one might expect, the vast majority of Warren's DNA indicated European ancestors. But five genetic segments were identified, with 99 percent confidence, as being associated with Native American ancestry. The largest segment identified was on Chromosome 10.

"While the vast majority of the individual's ancestry is European, the results strongly support the existence of an unadmixed Native American ancestor in the individual's pedigree, likely in the range of 6-10 generations ago," the report said. [...]

The most important point is this: The results in Warren's DNA test are static. The percentage of Native American DNA in her genome does not shrink as you go back generations. There could be one individual in the sixth generation -- living around the mid-1800s, which is similar to Warren family lore -- or possibly a dozen or more ancestors back to the 10th generation, which would be about 250 years ago. The results are consistent with a single ancestor, however.

OUR TWO REPUBLICAN PARTIES:

If Democrats win the House (and the Senate, though that's still considered a long shot), the best-case scenario for the party may be that, as Republicans did after 2010, they fall back on their common hatred for the man in the White House.

The temptation to do this will be enormous: according to Gary Jacobson, a scholar at the University of California at San Diego who has tracked electoral data going back to the 1940s, a sitting president has never been as central an issue in a midterm election as Trump is in 2018. Despite an unemployment rate that is near mid-twentieth-century lows and other good economic news, public outrage at Trump's offensive policies and statements--the "Muslim ban," the separation of families seeking asylum, his ceaseless barrage of insults aimed at women, African-Americans, and other minorities--has kept him at 50 percent-plus disapproval ratings, according to most major polls. To become a party that stands for little else than ousting a hated president is an enticing but perilous path--especially if you fail.

The Republican Party establishment lost its base after Mitt Romney's defeat in 2012, and one can trace a direct line from that reckoning to the rise of the incendiary populist outsider who cost the party its soul (or, at the very least, its platform) and has since become the GOP's sole owner and proprietor. Or witness those sixteen hapless Trump rivals in the 2016 GOP primaries, several of whom (like Romney) tried and failed to square the demands of the base with the evidence of their more reasonable voting records (the exception being Ted Cruz, who came in second to Trump). It wasn't until August, after Trump was nominated, that Republicans really knew--for good or ill--who or what they were voting for.

Win or lose on November 6, Pelosi will have a pack of progressives at her back--and so will the eventual Democratic presidential nominee in 2020. For the Democrats this reckoning is ultimately about whether their leadership can finally acknowledge that since the Reagan era they've too often been a party of counter-punchers. They've sought merely to temper free-market ideology without offering an alternative vision of their own. Judging from her 2017 memoir, What Happened, and various postmortems, Hillary Clinton still doesn't seem to fully grasp--or at least admit--that the seeds of the (largely white) working-class distress that sank her campaign were planted during her husband's presidency, with its embrace of Wall Street deregulation and GOP-driven deficit-cutting that left a pittance for job retraining and adjustment programs.

Barack Obama did little better. Perhaps the greatest irony of his "Yes, we can" presidency was that income inequality actually increased during his terms. Obama's administration failed to send a single major Wall Street, real estate, or insurance executive to jail despite their complicity in the biggest securities fraud in history. Under pressure from the right, Obama too became a proud deficit cutter. And he submitted to his financial gurus, Tim Geithner and Larry Summers, when they argued that the moral hazard of bailing out millions of desperate underwater homeowners was far too risky, even as they shrugged off the moral hazard of bailing out big banks.

PITY THE POOR FLATLANDERS:

Money really does grow on trees.

Camera-toting tourists have been descending upon New England in droves for its iconic display of fall colors, even since the autumnal equinox in the Northeast. It's a rite of autumn.

While summer is still the frontrunner, Technicolor foliage fireworks in fall account for the second most important season for tourism in this part of the U.S. Leaf-peeping has been estimated to be a $3-plus billion industry for the six states of New England, with earnings growing each year. There's a lot of green in those red, yellow and orange leaves.

The New Hampshire Division of Travel and Tourism Development projects 3 million out-of-state visitors this fall. The hotel and restaurant industry expects these visitors to translate into $1.4 billion in sales, or a 5 percent increase in spending year over year.

While many areas of the U.S. get their own version of leaf season - swaths of golden aspens in the Colorado Rocky Mountains and vibrant trails in Tennessee's Smokey Mountains - there is something quintessential about New England fall. Maple, oak, elm, pine, ash, beech, and birch trees marble that particular landscape to the delight of locals and visitors alike.

In addition to its forests' chromatic variety, New England offers an array of classic fall activities.  You can go apple picking, take a hayride, navigate a corn maze, enjoy a cider donut, frolic in a rainbow of crunchy leaves, and rev up for Halloween.

NO ONE WILL MISS JOBS:

Four ways a shorter workweek could help improve your health:

       1.  Less stress

A study published in the Journal Psychological Medicine in 2011 found that working more than 55-hours per week was associated with symptoms of anxiety and depression among people ages 44 to 66 who were employed full-time.

Those who worked less had a lower risk of those symptoms.

       2.  Sleep more

A lack of sleep may lead to poor performance, memory and difficulty processing information. 

Getting the right amount of sleep can improve your health. 

       3.  Improve your heart health 

Working less could lower the risk of coronary heart disease among adults. 

       4.  Spend more time with loved ones

They can help combat loneliness and encourage a person to engage in leisure activities and exercise.

WINNING AT VLAD'S GAME:

Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny has accepted a challenge to a "duel" from the head of Russia's National Guard and has proposed a venue and his weapon of choice.

In a comical-but-defiant video published on October 18, Navalny expressed his "thanks" to Rosgvardia Director Viktor Zolotov and offered to meet him in a live televised debate. [...].

Despite the sometimes-humorous nature of the video, Navalny offered strong criticism of Zolotov and Putin's administration.

He said that, with the original challenge to a duel, Zolotov had "proven" that "inadequate and insane" people are in power in Russia.

He added that Zolotov and Putin are turning Russia into "a banana republic."

Navalny showed images of luxurious properties in and around Moscow and in other Russian regions, claiming they were bought by Zolotov and members of his family for "stolen money."

DONALD WHO?:

Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin will not attend the Future Investment Initiative summit in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, as questions linger about what happened to journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Mnuchin and White House press secretary Sarah Sanders announced on Twitter Thursday.

JOBS WHITE PEOPLE WON'T DO:

Walk through the sliding glass doors of the Shirokane no Mori nursing home in Tokyo and you'll find a cabinet with individual cubbies where visitors can leave their shoes and borrow a pair of slippers. 

It feels homey for the seniors and care workers who spend their days with them. 

"I like Japan. It's very convenient. You can go to go anywhere by train," says 29-year-old Putu Supadmi, a care worker from Indonesia, through a translator. "I don't need any motorcycle or vehicles or cars. And everything is clean and the food is tasty. So I like it."

Supadmi has a big smile and a long black ponytail. She's been taking care of people at this nursing home for four years. Japan needs more workers like her because its aging population doesn't have enough workers to care for the elderly. 

 By 2040, one in three among Japan's 111 million people is projected to be elderly, according to Japan's National Institute of Population and Social Security Research.

In the past, Japan allowed mostly highly skilled professionals in the country. Now, due to severe labor shortages, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has ordered the government to look into new policies that would attract less skilled workers to fill additional jobs.

A SHARED INTEREST IN OPPRESSING MUSLIMS:

Behind the scenes, Israel continues to side with Saudi Arabia. As such, it has no choice but "overlook" the Khashoggi incident. "The fight against Iran stunts everything else," one senior Israeli minister told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity. "Israel's national security and the Iranian threat top our agenda, whereas Saudi Arabia's internal affairs are less important and less interesting [to Israel] right now."

The minister added, "If this had happened during the Obama administration, the Americans would have turned against Saudi Arabia at full speed, as seen in the president's Cairo speech [2009]."

According to the minister, Trump takes the opposite approach, which is much more suited to the circumstances of the Middle East. "It should be remembered," the minister said, "that [former President Barack] Obama was quick to throw [Egyptian President Hosni] Mubarak under the bus, as soon as the demonstrations erupted in Tahrir Square. With him, democracy came before all else. With Trump, that would never have happened. The president understands handling the Iran issue is more important now, and democracy will have to wait. After all, the ideals of President Thomas Jefferson don't really exist here, in the Middle East."

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

There's an older episode of The Green Room with Paul Provenza when the late Patrice O'Neal, arguably one of the best stand-up comics in recent history, gets serious for a moment, saying: "I love being able to say anything I want. I had to learn how to stop caring about people not laughing. Because the idea of comedy, really, is not everybody should be laughing. It should be about 50 people laughing and 50 people horrified. There should be people who get it and people who don't get it."

O'Neal gets right to the chaotic, trickster heart of comedy with that statement. Comedy at its best balances humor against shock-not necessarily vulgarity, mind you, but a sort of unsettling surprise. It's a topsy-turvy glimpse at an uncanny, upside-down world, which, if the joke lands, provides a bulwark against torpor and complacency. Great comedy inhabits the absurdity of the world. It makes itself into a vantage point from which everything seems delightfully ridiculous, including (often especially) the comedians themselves. We wouldn't need comedy in a world that wasn't absurd. Perhaps that's why Dante only included humor in his Inferno. There is no absurdity in paradise.

Unfortunately, Hannah Gadsby's Nanette, a comedy special recently released on Netflix, only embraces the non-laughter half of O'Neal's dictum. It's the very epitome of self-serious, brittle, didactic, SJW "comedy." It's not funny. And worse, it's not meant to be. Gadsby, a queer Australian comedian, uses her "stand-up special" as a way to destroy the very medium she pretends to be professionally engaged in. Her basic argument is that, since comedy is by its very nature self-deprecating (true), people who define themselves as members of an oppressed minority shouldn't engage in comedy because they're only participating in the violence already being done to them by society at large.

THANKS, HERITAGE!:

Obamacare favorability at an all-time high in FOX News poll. Can't wait for the closing ads from Republicans: "And if those Democrats try to take away your Obamacare, I'll fight to protect it like I've always done." pic.twitter.com/pJaa7MVkHK

— Nick Gourevitch (@nickgourevitch) October 18, 2018

.@RedSox radio broadcaster Joe Castiglione got so excited during the final play, he literally fell out of his seat.

Can you believe it? 😂 😂 😂 pic.twitter.com/HdMe6upUpF

— MLB (@MLB) October 18, 2018

ALWAYS BET ON THE dEEP sTATE:

President Donald Trump is facing increased pressure from Congress over his handling of journalist Jamal Khashoggi's disappearance, exposing a widening rift between the White House and Capitol Hill over the U.S. relationship with Saudi Arabia.

Lawmakers from Trump's own party, including the president's ally Senator Lindsey Graham, are openly voicing their discontent and threatening to sanction the Saudi government over the objections of the president, who has sought to build a closer relationship with Riyadh.

The stark differences underscore that Saudi Arabia enjoys far greater respect in the Oval Office than in the Capitol. Many lawmakers harbor a distrust of the kingdom dating back to its connection to the Sept. 11 attacks. Its bloody involvement in Yemen's civil war and interference in Lebanese politics have cost it further U.S. support.

The Trump administration, meanwhile -- led by the president's son-in-law, Jared Kushner -- has drawn ever closer to the Saudis as it fashions a strategy in the Mideast that revolves around the kingdom.

...AND TIGHTER...:

IT'S THE eND OF hISTORY AND WE ALL FEEL FINE:

Homi Kharas and Kristofer Hamel, two of the researchers behind the work, done under the auspices of the World Data Lab, characterise the global middle class as having enough discretionary income to buy consumer durables like fridges and motorcycles; being able to spend money on entertainment like trips to the cinema; and being fairly confident that they can weather an economic shock without falling back into extreme poverty.

The more precise measure they use is earnings of between $11 and $110 per day on a 2011 purchasing power parity basis.

The researchers divide the world's population into four groups. They estimate that 600 million people are poor (living on under $1.90 per day); 3.2 billion people are financially vulnerable (living on between $1.90 and $11 per day); 3.6 billion people meet their definition of middle class and 200 million people are rich (living on more than $110 per day).

Explaining the significance of what they are describing, Kharas and Hamel do not mince their words: "For the first time since agriculture-based civilization began 10,000 years ago, the majority of humankind is no longer poor or vulnerable to falling into poverty."

SINCE W, BEN & BARRY SAVED THE WORLD ECONOMY:

VOX CLAMANTIS...:

A note from Karen Attiah, Global Opinions editor

I received this column from Jamal Khashoggi's translator and assistant the day after Jamal was reported missing in Istanbul. The Post held off publishing it because we hoped Jamal would come back to us so that he and I could edit it together. Now I have to accept: That is not going to happen. This is the last piece of his I will edit for The Post. This column perfectly captures his commitment and passion for freedom in the Arab world. A freedom he apparently gave his life for. I will be forever grateful he chose The Post as his final journalistic home one year ago and gave us the chance to work together.

I was recently online looking at the 2018 "Freedom in the World" report published by Freedom House and came to a grave realization. There is only one country in the Arab world that has been classified as "free." That nation is Tunisia. Jordan, Morocco and Kuwait come second, with a classification of "partly free." The rest of the countries in the Arab world are classified as "not free."

As a result, Arabs living in these countries are either uninformed or misinformed. They are unable to adequately address, much less publicly discuss, matters that affect the region and their day-to-day lives. A state-run narrative dominates the public psyche, and while many do not believe it, a large majority of the population falls victim to this false narrative. Sadly, this situation is unlikely to change.

The Arab world was ripe with hope during the spring of 2011. Journalists, academics and the general population were brimming with expectations of a bright and free Arab society within their respective countries. They expected to be emancipated from the hegemony of their governments and the consistent interventions and censorship of information. These expectations were quickly shattered; these societies either fell back to the old status quo or faced even harsher conditions than before.

My dear friend, the prominent Saudi writer Saleh al-Shehi, wrote one of the most famous columns ever published in the Saudi press. He unfortunately is now serving an unwarranted five-year prison sentence for supposed comments contrary to the Saudi establishment. 

KEEPING IT FACT FREE SINCE 6/16/15!:

When asked if Saudi authorities had disclosed whether Mr Khashoggi was alive or dead, the secretary of state claimed the matter had not come up during discussions.

"I don't want to talk about any of the facts, they didn't want to either..."

THERE ARE NO DARWINISTS:

She is also reinforcing one of the most insidious ways in which Americans talk about race: as though it were a measurable biological category, one that, in some cases, can be determined by a single drop of blood. Genetic-test evidence is circular: if everyone who claims to be X has a particular genetic marker, then everyone with the marker is likely to be X. This would be flawed reasoning in any area, but what makes it bad science is that it reinforces the belief in the existence of X--in this case, race as a biological category.

REDEFINING SOVEREIGNTY:

One of the successes of the past 17 years has been to entrench the idea of elections as the key to political transitions in Afghanistan. This fragile step toward democratization and the idea that the government can be held accountable to the people could be undermined by a failed or deeply contested voting process. The progress in recent weeks of talks between the Taliban and U.S. representatives will be deeply compromised if a legitimate Afghan government is not seen as a part of the negotiation process.

Despite this, there are far fewer international monitors providing oversight and international troops providing security than in recent rounds of voting in 2009, 2010, and 2014 and there are signs that these elections could be even more destabilizing than earlier waves. To stem the violence, the Afghan government has announced that 54,000 security forces will be deployed to protect the polls. Even with these forces, already 2,000 polling stations have been deemed too risky to open, and at least seven parliamentary candidates have been killed.

To combat fraud, biometric devices are being sent to polling stations around the country, but Afghan politicians have raised concerns about their reliability, and there's a possibility that these devices could undermine the legitimacy of the elections if they are seen as being manipulated and corrupted. In previous elections, rumors about the fallibility of the ink used to mark the fingers of voters led to an increase in conspiracies about fraud.

Even before the voting there is evidence to suggest the process has been corrupted. For example, the number of voters registered in some provinces is higher than the actual number of people believed to be living there.

Public confidence in the government and the Independent Election Commission is already low. District elections, mandated in the constitution but never held, were dropped by the Commission over the summer, as were elections in the contested province of Ghazni. This suggests to many Afghans that the commission may not be equipped to manage either the logistics or the political pressure that will come with this vote.

Other indicators are more positive and there has been a large amount of interest and mobilization around a series of younger parliamentary candidates. Many of these candidates, who have been educated and come of age in the years since the U.S. invasion in 2001, represent a genuine alternative from the generation of Afghan leaders who earned their reputations during the war against the Soviets and the ensuing civil war that tore the country apart.

The issue is that even if young incumbents are elected to replace this older generation, there is little to suggest that the outgoing members of parliament will go quietly. In the 2014 election, supporters of both current President Ashraf Ghani and CEO Abdullah Abdullah dismissed the vote as corrupted. When the threats of violence became more serious, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry stepped in to negotiate a truce between the two sides. With 250 seats up for grabs, negotiating between various interest groups, commanders and political parties will be far more challenging.

FROM HER BEACON-HAND GLOWS WORLD-WIDE WELCOME:

More than 2,000 people fleeing poverty and violence have joined the convoy of people travelling on masse through Central America, walking along the roadside with strollers and wheelchairs or hitching rides on pickup trucks and buses.

Five days after they set off from the Honduran city of San Pedro Sula, they have already crossed much of neighbouring Guatemala. And despite growing fatigue, many said they were determined to reach the United States and ask for asylum. Few seemed aware of Donald Trump's demand that regional governments stop them - or of Mexico's warning that anyone who enters the country in an "irregular manner" faces detention and deportation.

On Wednesday, Mexico's government sent two planeloads of federal forces to the border city of Tapachula, some of the equipped with riot gear. The deployment suggested that Mexico would not allow the caravan to head north together as it did with a similar group in April, infuriating Trump.

Most of the migrants said they were trying to escape the biting poverty and breathtaking violence that has turned Central America into one of the most dangerous regions in the world. Luz Abigail, 34, was traveling with her one-year-old son. "It's so hard to hear my boy say: 'Mami, I'm hungry' - and know that I only have enough money to buy him a juice box," she says.

One of the few unaccompanied children with the group was Mario David, 12, who left home in Honduras because his family is so impoverished. "The little money we have gets stolen by the gangs," he said.

Mario said he hoped to reach the US and get an education and a job. What would he study? "Anything - as long as I can make a good buck," he laughed.

THE ONLY SURVIVOR OF THE ADMINISTRATION:

[T]oday, the feeling at the UN is that Haley was "about as good as it can get under Trump," says Richard Gowan, a senior fellow at the United Nations University.

Despite fears that seasoned diplomats from Russia and China would outplay this folksy politician, she leaves her job with an excellent reputation both in New York and Washington. "Haley actually played her political hand remarkably well and really had an unusual level of political clout for a UN ambassador in a Republican administration," Gowan says.

Her major wins include a series of sanctions on North Korea, and a partnership with UN secretary general Antonio Guterres to reform the institution. She achieved these victories in part by leveraging one thing--Donald Trump.

The job seemed a poisoned chalice, at first. At the UN, Haley would represent a president who had called the organization "just a club for people to get together, talk and have a good time." Trump was also threatening to aggressively defund the UN, and, on the campaign trail, had attacked two major multilateral achievements: the Paris Climate Accord and the Iran nuclear deal.

But Haley's number one tactic in negotiating the North Korea sanctions was to make use of the threats, essentially deploying the Nixonian "madman theory." She would constantly remind the Chinese of the "unpredictability of president Trump," she told students at the University of Houston earlier this year.

TOOTHLESS DRAGON:

Despite those Herculean efforts, Shanghai shares are now below 2015 levels. The ongoing $3 trillion rout has the Shanghai Composite Index at the lowest since November 2014. Why? The same concerns about growth and dodgy corporate governance.

Donald Trump's trade war surely isn't helping. But if Xi's government had worked harder to modernize corporate practices, recalibrate growth engines away from exports and get the government's hand out of the economy, US President Trump's tariffs wouldn't be an existential threat.

Beijing, in other words, made the Japan-like mistake of treating the symptoms of its problems, not the underlying causes. Xi is erring anew as Beijing ramps up stimulus efforts that will only exacerbate dueling bubbles in credit, debt and property.

His team also is cutting taxes as data on exports, fixed-income investment and purchasing managers' orders turn ugly. So, sure, China might make this year's 6.5% growth target, but at what cost in the long run?

The yuan's drop by that same amount - 6.4% - this year is another metric worth considering. It sheds light on why Xi's team is desperately working to keep capital in China.

INCOMPETENCE IS NO BAR TO THE rIGHT'S LOVE:

"More Johnny English than James Bond," was how British Security Minister Ben Wallace branded the failed assassination of Russian double agent Sergei Skripal on British soil last March, for which UK authorities blame Russia's military intelligence service the GRU, pronounced "Groo."

Given that even Russian media as partisan as Sputnik are now conceding that the two suspects fingered by London are, indeed, GRU officers, the Skripal saga is starting to make the feared spy agency look farcical.

It is a major turnaround from the early days of the investigation. Then, British authorities pointed the finger, but failed to produce evidence. As a result, London's version of events was roundly mocked by Russian ministers, spokespersons and media, which also produced a range of conspiracy theories.

Most asserted that Russia was blameless, that it was Western powers attempting to blacken Russia's reputation.

Things look different now. Much more data has recently emerged that goes far beyond the Skripal case. It reveals malignant and, at times, sloppy GRU activities taking place around the globe - activities which would appear to extend well beyond the remit of a military intelligence organization.

With incompetence by Moscow operatives being revealed not only by Western counter-intelligence, but even by investigative websites using open-source data, some of which has now been confirmed by Russia media, the derision voiced by Russian officials and pro-Kremlin media is ringing increasingly false.

HE'S JUST GIVING US THE TAX HIKES AND REGULATION BOOM HE PROMISED:

[T]o recap: Trump's tariffs have caused higher prices, supply shortages and foreign tariff retaliation. The government has answered these by introducing price control legislation, setting up a Soviet-style government exemption framework and Depression-era government purchasing program, respectively. And these are Republican policies -- supposedly coming from the party of free markets and limited government.

Keep in mind that this big government response to tariffs comes in addition to the pain and uncertainty they've already caused consumers, small businesses, and exporters. I've aggregated more than 200 separate stories of businesses being negatively affected by tariffs.

The kicker: Tariffs aren't even improving the trade deficit -- their stated aim. The U.S. trade deficit increased to a six-month high in August, widening by the highest amount since January 2006 when adjusted for inflation as soybean exports declined further.

ALONG THE ANGLOSPHERE:

Having debarked from ports in western Sweden, military convoys from various NATO countries are crowding Swedish streets and prompting the police to issue traffic warnings. They are on their way to Norway, where some 50,000 soldiers, airmen, and seamen will come together for NATO's largest military exercise in years. The operation - "Trident Juncture" - has a clear goal: to demonstrate the alliance's ability to defend Norway against a foreign aggressor.

There is no need to name the potential aggressor. Obviously, it is not Sweden or Finland, both of which have contributed soldiers to the exercise. During the Cold War, Finland did occasionally come under Soviet pressure as the Kremlin sought to expand its room for maneuver. But it always remained firm in its commitment to defend its Nordic and Western identity.

Similarly, Sweden has always abstained from joining NATO, owing to its longstanding geopolitical neutrality, and out of solidarity with the Finns. And while Denmark and Norway did join the alliance, they long opted out of hosting foreign forces during peacetime.

But in recent years, Northern Europe's security landscape has changed. In response to Russian aggression and revisionism, NATO has deployed battalion battle groups in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, as well as air force squadrons to police those countries' skies. And in both Sweden and Finland, defense spending is increasing, and there is an ongoing debate about whether to upgrade the privileged partnership with NATO to full membership.

WHICH IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU PRIORITIZE CANDIDATES OVER MESSAGE:

Writing in The Atlantic in August, former Democratic Congressman Steve Israel described attending a campaign fundraiser in "a plush residence on the 64th floor of Trump World Tower," where "most in the crowd wanted to know one thing: What's the Democratic message?"

"There, in a building staffed with uniformed doormen, standing on floors so fine that we'd been asked to remove our shoes, the donors demanded to know why their party had no unifying theme. Or, more precisely, why wasn't the message the specific message that they wanted messaged?" he continued. "These questions have come up at Democratic gatherings across the country this year, from grassroots fund-raisers to posh weekend retreats."

Israel argued that "Democrats have it wrong that they need a national-message template in the first place. Past elections have shown that the most effective messaging is local and specific to each district." This year's election seems to be proving this true, or at least Democratic candidates are campaigning as if it is. By and large, they are running on a single issue. It's not impeachment or collusion or corruption or #MeToo; it's not even specific to Trump. The election, for many Democrats, is all about health care.

"The top three issues this year are health care, health care, health care," J.B. Poersch, the head of the Democratic Senate Majority PAC told CNN last week. Candidates across the country, from Cindy Axne in Iowa to Claire McCaskill in Missouri to Josh Harder in California are talking about their own struggles dealing with the high cost of medical care. West Virginia's Joe Manchin, toe lone Democratic senator to vote to confirm Kavanaugh, is leading in the polls in his state, thanks in large part to his embrace of Obamacare, which he even made an issue during the most recent Supreme Court confirmation.

Republicans are following suit, even those who voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act in 2017. Republican Martha McSally, who is running to fill Jeff Flake's Arizona Senate seat, has campaigned on protecting coverage for pre-existing conditions, despite voting for the AHCA, which would have repealed the ACA, last year. In a debate on Monday, she told voters, "We can't go back to where we were before Obamacare."

Trump's most significant legislative accomplishment, the $1.5 trillion corporate tax cut passed last December, has also factored into Democratic messaging--partly to highlight the hypocrisy of Republicans' deficit hysteria during the Obama years, but also as another way to discuss health care.

Journalists and politicians talk about "the health care repeal and the Trump tax plan as two different issues," Democratic consultant Jesse Ferguson told CNN back in May. But "the voters see them as ways Washington isn't looking out for them.... On both of them, it's basically the same: [Republicans] have been giving tax breaks to health insurance companies, to pharmaceutical companies, and those come at the expense of people who work for a living. It means higher health care costs, eventually higher taxes, more debt for your kids, and cuts to Social Security and Medicare as you get older."

After Mitch McConnell said on Tuesday that entitlement cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security are the only way to reduce the deficit, Democrats immediately sent out emails tying his statement to the tax cut.

BADMINTON?:

In a major victory for free speech, the city of Atlanta has awarded former Fire Chief Kelvin Cochran with $1.2 million after violating his First Amendment rights. [...]

In December 2017, a federal district court ruled that the city's treatment of Cochran had violated his constitutional right to free speech. The court affirmed that the city cannot police non-work speech, nor can it target views with which it does not agree.

The court pointed out how the city's over-broad "pre-clearance" rules, which stipulate that the government must sign off on what materials can be disseminated at work, impede free speech.

"This policy would prevent an employee from writing and selling a book on golf or badminton on his own time and, without prior approval, would subject him to firing. It is unclear to the court how such an outside employment would ever affect the city's ability to function, and the city provides no evidence to justify it," the court found. "The potential for stifled speech far outweighs any unsupported assertion of harm."

Such arbitrary standards are unconstitutional.

This ruling was an important win for free speech because it reaffirmed that the government cannot censor views it happens to disagree with.

Now, city officials have taken action to restore justice. On Monday, the city council awarded $1.2 million in damages and attorneys' fees to Cochran and his attorneys.

DONALD WHO?:

OFF AND RUNNING:

Less than a week before her resignation, Ambassador Haley made a pilgrimage to a decidedly immoderate, highly secretive organization of right-wing, mostly evangelical Republican operatives known as the Council for National Policy, or CNP. Her appearance before the group featured her last major speech before she announced that she would leave her official post. There was no public notice, no transcript. I was present as the only journalist inside the closed-door gathering.

Haley's appearance before the CNP was structured like a campaign fund-raiser, opening with a prepared stump-style speech that segued into an informal question-and-answer session. She riled the crowd with boastful yarns about facing down global evildoers, and revealed that she used the widespread perception of President Trump as erratic and unpredictable to frighten her Chinese counterparts. She once attempted to intimidate the Chinese ambassador with threats of a military invasion of North Korea, she said, warning that she had no idea what her boss was capable of. In a way, Haley had deployed a version of Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon's "madman theory," holding up Trump as an unstable actor who might do anything. It seemed that she herself also genuinely had no idea what Trump would do.

Haley had been scheduled to speak to the CNP for a half hour, but as she completed her scripted address and took a seat for an off-the-cuff Q&A with Tony Perkins, the CNP's president, she appeared in no hurry to leave. Lapping up the council's adulation, Haley stayed over her time for an extended series of candid, and at times disturbing, recollections of Trump's campaign of maximum pressure against North Korea. She began by recounting a debate with the president on his planned remarks before the UN General Assembly in September 2017. When she learned that Trump planned to denigrate the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un as "Rocket Man," she said she urged him to remove the line.

"I told the president, 'This is the UN; it's a little more formal of a setting than a campaign rally,'" Haley remembered, holding back laughter. [...]

Haley told the CNP crowd that Priebus initially offered to make her secretary of state. "I thought the job should go to someone who didn't have the same learning curve," she said, conceding that she was not qualified for a top diplomatic position.

Days later, the president pitched another opportunity: US Ambassador to the UN. "I told [Trump], 'Honestly, I don't even know what the UN does,'" Haley revealed. The crowd erupted with sympathetic laughter and applause, apparently untroubled by Haley's confession of ignorance.

"I finally decided that I could take the job, but with a few conditions," she continued. "I told the president I wanted to be a cabinet secretary. And he said, 'I can do that.' I said I wanted to serve on his National Security Council. 'Done.' Then I said I'm not going to be a wallflower or a spokesperson. I want to be able to have a decision-making role and give my advice on policy. And he said, 'Done!'"

As she wrapped up her remarks, Haley beamed with pride and placed her right hand to her heart. "I have been able to lead the state that raised me and been able to serve the country I love so much," she declared. "I have been such a lucky girl."

She then basked in a standing ovation, smiling as she accepted her anointing by the cabal of well-funded activists that effectively represented the vast right wing. [...]

A diplomat who was present for several meetings with members of Trump's foreign policy team over UN-related matters told me that Haley formed a personal vendetta when the General Assembly voted to condemn Trump's recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital. " The US will be taking names," Haley rumbled before the December vote, vowing to punish nations that defied her boss. She then moved in to strangle the UNRWA, pushing for heavy cuts in US funding to the agency. In doing so, she appeared to be courting support from one of the most influential donors to the Republican Party. Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire confidant of Netanyahu who contributed $5 million to Trump's inauguration, had been the largest donor to the 527 political organizations that Haley formed while serving as South Carolina's governor, with $250,000 in 2016. Her legacy of pro-Israel rabble rousing at the United Nations virtually guaranteed that Adelson's beneficence would continue and will likely expand if she embarks on a presidential run.

Haley's choice of aides at the United Nations offered another indication that she saw the high-profile diplomatic post as a springboard to the White House. Her top advisor at the United Nations was not a foreign policy expert but a veteran Republican consultant from her home state named Jon Lerner. A former adviser to Republican Senator Marco Rubio, a neoconservative darling, Lerner identified his mentor as Arthur Finkelstein, the notoriously cutthroat Republican operative who advised Netanyahu's 1996 run for Israeli prime minister and helped him cobble together his 2013 right-wing governing coalition.

Haley's lonely fight against Israel's enemies was calculated to appeal not only to the Likudnik GOP donors who saw the self-proclaimed Jewish state as their fortified home, but also to the evangelicals who viewed the country as a landing pad for the Messiah. These included Tim LaHaye, a CNP veteran who coauthored the best-selling Left Behind series: Armageddon fantasy novels that identify the UN secretary-general as the Antichrist. If the admiring treatment Haley received from the CNP was any indication, she could count on support from rapture-ready pastors across the country, along with the flock of grassroots Republicans they shepherded to the polls each election day.

THERE IS NO RUSSIA:

ACCIDENTALLY HUMANE:

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

DO THEY THINK THEY'RE THE PATRIOTS?:

Whatever the Houston Astros were trying to do at Fenway Park during Game 1 of the ALCS on Saturday night, they got caught.

In the third inning of the first game of the series, security removed a man claiming to be an Astros employee from the media-credentialed area next to the Boston Red Sox dugout, according to multiple security sources who were on the scene at the time of the incident. The man had a small camera and was texting frequently, but did not have a media credential.

After the man was removed another Astros staffer intervened - according to sources who were on the scene - and tried to convince security that he was authorized to be in the area next to the dugout. The man was not allowed back into the credentialed area, but was allowed to remain in the ballpark. 

Security sources say they had been warned about the man, because of some suspicious activity in Houston's ALDS series against the Cleveland Indians.

GONNA NEED AN AWFUL LOT MORE IMMIGRANTS:

The Permian's impact on global oil markets, the U.S. economy, and Donald Trump's agenda has already been profound. The U.S., the world's biggest consumer of crude, now imports less oil than at any time since 1968, when Richard Nixon won the presidency. That's enabled President Trump to conduct foreign policy with a freer hand than predecessors hamstrung by dependence on Middle Eastern producers. Consider his sanctions on Iran. "Today the U.S. has its own petrodollars," said Harold Hamm, the billionaire CEO of Continental Resources Inc. and a Trump confidante, on a conference call with analysts in August. "We're seeing the current administration embrace this more and more every day, realizing the importance of it."

Texas and New Mexico will account for a third of the entire world's growth in oil supply next year, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The payoffs are already visible. Texas has logged 21 consecutive months of job growth tied to the oil industry. And while oil and gas accounts for only about 1.3 percent of the nation's economic output, that statistic is up a third from 2008.

The Permian, however, is also showing signs of overheating. Sand, which is used to prop open the fractures in rock that allow the oil to flow, has become a precious commodity that fetches about $60 a ton. Truck drivers command salaries of $150,000 a year. Getting a child into day care "is like you're scalping tickets to a Rolling Stones concert," says Jessica McCoy, a mother in Midland, Texas, the Permian's unofficial capital. 

THE TOOTHLESS DRAGON:

China's local governments may have accumulated 40 trillion yuan ($5.8 trillion) of off-balance sheet debt, or even more, suggesting further defaults are in store, according to S&P Global Ratings.

"The potential amount of debt is an iceberg with titanic credit risks," S&P credit analysts led by Gloria Lu wrote in a report Tuesday.

PITY THE POOR MALTHUSIANS:

The amount of milk dumped by farmers in the northeastern U.S. reached almost 145 million pounds through July, including 23.6 million pounds that month alone. Dairy cooperatives will likely be forced to heavily discount milk prices in the coming months as a result, going below the current futures price for benchmark Class III milk, which goes into making cheese, and is currently under $16 per 100 pounds--a price that has farmers treading water, said Dave Kurzawski, a Chicago-based broker at INTL FCStone.

ALL THE TAXES, NONE OF THE RESPONSIBILITY!:

The federal government collected a record $1,683,537,000,000 in individual income taxes in fiscal 2018 (October 2017 through September 2018), according to the Monthly Treasury Statement released today.

However, the federal government also ran a deficit of $778,996,000,000 during the fiscal year, according to the statement.

WINNING THE WoT:

Saudi Arabia's extensive--and expensive--network in the D.C. power broker community and in the rest of the Western business and political world has gotten a little smaller. Two major lobbying firms, one more aligned with Democrats and the other with Republicans, dropped or planned to drop Saudi Arabia as a client, the Washington Post reported.

The ultimatum came after the disappearance of Jamal Khashoggi, a U.S. permanent resident who was a columnist for the Post and wrote critically of the Saudi government. Khashoggi was last seen entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul earlier this month, and allegations that he was killed by Saudi authorities have strained the U.S. relationship with Saudi Arabia.

The lobbyist, Ed Rogers, the chairman of the BGR Group, writes for the newspaper's PostPartisan blog.

POD FODDER:

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AS THE STORY SUGGESTS...:

According to a Lincoln Institute study in 2009, universities in Boston were sitting on more than $12 billion in real estate, which if taxed would have generated more than $340 million for the city. Through voluntary contributions in lieu of taxes, colleges and hospitals in Boston sent the city about $14 million that year. Tom Murphy, the former mayor of Pittsburgh, says this is the predicament cities who play host to major research universities invariably confront. "You want the universities to grow, you need the jobs they provide," Murphy says. "But as they grow, you lose property off the tax roll."

Gifted with its huge endowment, Yale has created an urban center that would not exist without its money and influence. Each summer, parents, prospective students and tourists flock to the city to lay eyes on an institution older than the country itself, and to spend money in the Yale-controlled business district. This is the New Haven that nearly all the visitors see. But it is not the only New Haven. Once a manufacturing hub where the rifle maker Winchester Repeating Arms employed more than 15,000 workers, the industrial core of the city has been hollowed out over the last 40 years. Poverty has followed and persisted. Currently, 1 in 4 New Haven residents lives at or below the poverty line. 

For many years, as the town struggled and the university grew, Yale remained an island seemingly cut off from the ills of the city. A statewide fiscal crisis in the late 1980s began to change that. New Haven was on the verge of bankruptcy in part because the state was underfunding aid meant to compensate cities for the taxes lost to large nonprofit landowners like Yale and the university's hospital. Douglas Rae, who teaches management and political science at Yale and was chief of staff to the mayor in the early 1990s, helped broker a deal where Yale would voluntarily pay New Haven a fee each year to offset the cost of public services that benefited the university. It wasn't so much a partnership; it was the university throwing the city a lifeline that would in turn help Yale. "The university," Rae says, "was willing to make modest concessions to the city, but wanted wherever possible to justify it through direct self-interest that alumni would understand." 

Yale was slowly acknowledging that its fate was tied to New Haven. The "Yale bubble" was pierced for good in 1991, when a varsity lacrosse player, Christian Prince, was murdered walking to his apartment near the campus. "The Prince murder," Rae says, "was the event that caused Yale University and the Yale Corporation to say we have to give the highest priority to the community around us."

Former Yale President Richard Levin took office in 1993, shortly before DeStefano became mayor. They each served nearly 20 years. And it was under the leadership of the two that town and gown would enter a marriage of sorts. 

 

Under Levin, the university began to aggressively extend its real estate footprint both commercially and in residential real estate. Yale purchased the financially challenged Chapel Street Historic District and became landlord to the businesses in that district. It began to extend its reach into the residential neighborhoods through handsome housing subsidies offered to faculty and staff. Yale offers $30,000 in cash assistance to employees who buy in the city, with an additional $5,000 for those who purchase homes in the long-blighted Dixwell neighborhood. In all, the program has invested $31 million since it was launched. "Certainly, there are pros and cons when the university and its students and faculty expand their footprint in the city," says the Lincoln Institute's Adam Langley. Yale employees buying homes are contributing to the city's tax base. But the investment has come at a cost. 

The housing cash incentive has helped fuel gentrification in places such as East Rock, a traditional Italian enclave where rising home prices and corresponding spikes in property taxes have pushed out working class white residents. The Dixwell and Dwight neighborhoods have also felt the impact of Yale's homeownership program in the form of displacement.

DeStefano and Levin's transformation of New Haven resembles events in other cities with powerful universities. The neighborhoods surrounding the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia have seen similar shifts in the housing market thanks to home-buying subsidies and major investments by Penn in the nearby University City neighborhood. Housing prices have tripled there in the last 15 years, while the black population in University City has declined by more than half. 

As Yale has reshaped -- and in many ways, revived -- its host city, it has left a gaping hole in the city budget. Thanks mostly to the university, a full 54 percent of all the property in New Haven is tax exempt. Student housing, academic buildings, research facilities and Yale's sprawling hospital complex all escape taxation. Despite these exemptions, Yale is still the fourth-largest property taxpayer in New Haven, because of the size of its retail presence. But of the $3 billion in real estate Yale owns, it pays property tax on roughly 3 percent -- the commercial space it rents out in the city. Since 2014, Yale has invested $700 million in new construction, all of it tax exempt.

DONALD'S GOP IN A NUTSHELL:

A porn star who attended Dennis Hof's birthday party says he and a woman found the pimp's body. [...]

His name will remain on the November ballot as the Republican nominee for a state Legislative seat. 

AND?:

Simpson, who appeared for the closed-door session Tuesday under subpoena, invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. His attorney decried the committees' proceedings as "an utter sham" that would "make Senator Joseph McCarthy proud."

"This committee has destroyed the reputations and careers of prosecutors and agents, it has gratuitously exposed personal aspects of their private lives, it has levied false accusations of criminal wrongdoing against them, and this mistreatment is no different as applied to our client," Simpson attorney Joshua Levy told reporters. "Rather than continue any further in this charade, Mr. Simpson has proudly stood today on his constitutional privileges not to testify."

One panel member, Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), questioned whether Simpson had the legal right to refuse to answer Congress's questions.

"Glenn Simpson has to have a reasonable apprehension of criminal prosecution to validly invoke the Fifth," he told reporters after the brief interview. "If not, you can't just invoke the Fifth to avoid answering congressional questions."

WHAT MACHINE?:

THANKS, HERITAGE!:

Health insurance premiums in the 39 states that use HealthCare.gov will fall 1.5 percent on average for the most commonly purchased plans in 2019, marking the first time that rates have dropped since the 2010 health care law was implemented.

WE ARE ALL DESIGNIST NOW:

OUR PRESIDENT, NOT OUR LEADER:

About 44 percent of troops had a favorable view of Trump's presidency, the poll showed, compared to 43 percent who disapproved.

The results from the survey, conducted over the course of September and October, suggest a gradual decline in troops' support of Trump since he was elected in fall 2016, when a similar Military Times poll showed that 46 percent of troops approved of Trump compared to 37 percent who disapproved. That nine-point margin of support now appears gone.

A PEOPLE WHO THINK THEMSELVES A NATION ARE ONE:

The 193-member United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday allowed the Palestinians to act more like a full U.N. member state during meetings in 2019 when they will chair the group of 77 developing nations. [...]

In 2012, the U.N. General Assembly overwhelmingly approved the de facto recognition of the sovereign state of Palestine when it upgraded the Palestinian Authority's U.N. observer status to non-member state - like the Vatican - from entity.

The status upgrade has allowed them to participate in some General Assembly votes and join some international bodies. However, as a non-member state the Palestinians cannot speak in meetings until after member states, diplomats said.

The Egyptian-drafted resolution allows them to procedurally operate like a member state when acting on behalf of the G77 and China - making statements, submitting and co-sponsoring proposals and amendments, giving rights of reply and raising points of order.

NEIGHBOR LOVE:

Dallas Area Interfaith (DAI), a nonpartisan group that counts about two dozen churches, synagogues, and schools among its member organizations, hosted the forum at Christian Chapel Temple of Faith, a venerable African-American church in North Dallas. Ten cushioned, dusty-rose chairs were set out on the floor, beneath a high bank of choir risers. There was one chair for each major-party candidate in each of five closely-contested local elections: Texas's 32nd Congressional District (where I live), and four state legislative districts. Each of the Democratic candidates took a seat. Next to each one was an empty chair with a sheet of paper siting on it that read, "UNACCOUNTABLE."

This meant the Democrats got the chance to voice their support for DAI's positions-greater funding for public education and job training, Medicare expansion, repeal of the state law that bans sanctuary cities, and preservation of DACA-and earn loud cheers from the attendees. (Full disclosure: I belong to a DAI member church and have participated in DAI actions before.) In a city that's sharply segregated by race and class, the forum was a rare example of cohesive pluralism. What united the diverse attendees was that they all shared some religious affiliation and some commitment to using the political process to improve the lives of their neighbors and fellow congregants.

COULDN'T HAPPEN TO A WORSE ISLAMOPHOBE:

King's Democratic opponent, Liuba Grechen Shirley, raised more than King's last five opponents combined, The New York Times reported in August, and Grechen Shirley told Newsday in September that she outraised King by $25,000 in the last quarter.

Grechen Shirley now has a 26.9 percent chance of defeating King, based on FiveThirtyEight's model. For comparison, the same forecast gave President Trump a 28 percent chance of being elected in 2016.

This shift comes after the Cook Political Report moved King's seat from being "safe Republican" to "likely Republican" in September. The New York Times reported last month that Republican and Democratic strategists both felt King "might not be safe," especially after his district was redrawn in 2012 to include more registered Democrats than Republicans. 

LIE DOWN WITH DONALD...:

Graham's comments were made on Fox & Friends and his "casual bigotry"--which earned him laughs with the hosts--drew immediate outrage among those who recognized them for what they were (or cared):

In a statement, Jamal Abdi, president of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), said the comments were "racist," "absolutely disgusting," and disqualifying for a sitting U.S. senator to  make. 

"This is not the first time that Graham has made bigoted remarks about Iranians," Abdi continued. "In 2015, he said 'I know Iranians are liars' based on his experience in his dad's pool hall. If you dread the notion of Iranian ancestry and believe all Iranians are liars, you are hopelessly bigoted and unfit to serve in the U.S. Senate where votes affect tens of millions of Iranians and millions more of Iranian ancestry in the diaspora."

OUR HEALTHY DISREGARD FOR THE WINGS:

According to the report, 25 percent of Americans are traditional or devoted conservatives, and their views are far outside the American mainstream. Some 8 percent of Americans are progressive activists, and their views are even less typical. By contrast, the two-thirds of Americans who don't belong to either extreme constitute an "exhausted majority." Their members "share a sense of fatigue with our polarized national conversation, a willingness to be flexible in their political viewpoints, and a lack of voice in the national conversation."

Most members of the "exhausted majority," and then some, dislike political correctness. Among the general population, a full 80 percent believe that "political correctness is a problem in our country." Even young people are uncomfortable with it, including 74 percent ages 24 to 29, and 79 percent under age 24. On this particular issue, the woke are in a clear minority across all ages.

Youth isn't a good proxy for support of political correctness--and it turns out race isn't, either.

NOT THAT ANY ANALYTICS WERE REQUIRED...:

Some things in 2018 aren't so different from 2003: The Red Sox are in the ALCS, Pedro remains a prominent postseason presence, and managers still make maligned decisions about how long to stick with starters in Yankees-Red Sox playoff games. But Pedro is now a TBS analyst, Boone is the manager whose decisions are being savaged, and those crucial managerial junctures in important playoff games are arriving more and more often in the third or fourth inning instead of the eighth. A baby born on October 16, 2003, would be a high-school student today, as I was when I sat--or, during the eighth inning, stood--in the upper deck in right field at the old Yankee Stadium and watched the Red Sox unravel. High school doesn't feel like it was that long ago, but the Grady game seems like an artifact from an earlier era, one in which managers' minds and pitching moves bore little resemblance to the way they work today.

With the pennant and the upper hand in a historic rivalry at stake, Martínez had cruised through the game's first six innings with only one blemish on his line, a leadoff homer by Jason Giambi in the fifth. His first jam arose in the seventh, when he got a groundout and a Posada lineout--hit much harder than the bloop double would be--to start the inning, then allowed another Giambi blast and back-to-back singles to, of all opponents, Enrique Wilson and Karim García. (Wilson, weirdly, was a well-known nemesis of Pedro's, which is why he started over Boone. The extremely light-hitting utility man boasted a 1.167 OPS against Pedro in 23 plate appearances through the 2003 regular season, but he went 2-for-12 with two singles thereafter, which made much more sense.) With two on and two out in the seventh, righty reliever Mike Timlin was ready to enter.

 

But Martínez fanned the free-swinging Alfonso Soriano to end the threat and preserve the 4-2 lead. On his way back to the dugout, the starter signaled to the sky, believing his day was done. He had thrown exactly 100 pitches.

David Ortiz homered in the eighth to give the Red Sox some extra insurance, and as Martínez later told Tom Verducci, Little asked him to return to the mound for the eighth. On a TBS segment last week, Pedro implied that he expected to face only one batter, the oft-injured Nick "OBP Jesus" Johnson. Johnson was a lefty, but he was 3-for-7 that season against Sox southpaw Alan Embree, which may have signified something to Little. Pedro could get anyone out--his career platoon split spanned just 29 points of OPS--and whether Little knew it or not, Johnson wasn't susceptible to lefties. (He retired with one of the largest-ever career reverse splits for a left-handed hitter.) It wasn't a terrible matchup, and it went Boston's way, as Johnson popped to shortstop on the seventh pitch he saw. Pedro had gotten his hitter.

Timlin and Embree had been up in the bullpen before the first out. Still, Little didn't budge, electing to let Martínez face the right-handed Derek Jeter, who doubled (thanks in part to a Trot Nixon misread in right) on an 0-2 fastball that was lower than neck level, where Jason Varitek wanted it.

Pedro's pitch count stood at 110, with five consecutive switch-hitters or lefties due up. It was an obvious Embree opportunity, but again Little left him in. "You get the feeling that [Embree] will be the pitcher against [Hideki] Matsui one way or the other," Tim McCarver said in the Fox broadcast booth as Bernie Williams batted. Williams lined a single to center to make it 5-3, which finally brought Little out to the mound--not to pull Pedro, but to ask him whether he had enough left to face Matsui. "A proud man, a proud baseball player, a proud pitcher, never really wants to give up his sword," Martínez said last week. "I was a wounded warrior, but I wanted to continue to fight."

...AND JUSTICE FOR ALL:

REPUBLICAN BULWARK:

The night before I had jury duty, I contemplated searching online for tips on how to get out of it. I knew from pop culture that this was the thing to do.

In "30 Rock," Liz Lemon dresses up like Princess Leia when called to serve so she will seem insane and be dismissed. In Milton Bradley's The Game of Life, if you land on jury duty, you lose a turn. Without any reflection, I had come to believe that jury duty was a pain and something most people tried to avoid. It was for suckers.

Then I served on a jury, and my perspective changed.

A quick search on social media for #voting reveals threads about the importance of voting, while searching #juryduty returns posts about the joys of being released from jury duty. As the midterm elections approach, voting is the civic responsibility capturing everyone's attention and admiration. But jury duty is characterized as something to be avoided at all costs. How is it that we have come to see these two ways of participating in government so differently?

The right to a trial by jury, one of the most time-honored inheritances from Magna Carta in United States law, refers to the guarantee that courts will depend on a body of citizens to render judgments in most civil and criminal cases. The origins of the jury trial precede the creation of Magna Carta. However, Chapter 39 of King John's Magna Carta includes the guarantee that no free man may suffer punishment without "the lawful judgment of his peers." By this measure the barons sought to force the king to delegate part of his judicial authority to men who were peers of the individual on trial. While Magna Carta did not institute the jury system in the modern sense, its political intent--to prevent the king's domination of the courts--inspired later generations to view the right to a trial by jury as one of the basic safeguards of freedom from arbitrary government.

Eighteenth-century Americans viewed the right to a jury trial as one of the essential liberties of a free country. They saw the jury as an independent deliberative body that could refuse to cooperate with an unjust court or law. 

THE GOBLINS AMONG US:

Against these arguments are the fairly standard counterclaims about market failure, moral hazard, and the tragedy of the commons. Sometimes a marketplace of ideas does not result in truth if evil propaganda is shouted more loudly and frequently, especially by well-armed thugs. A free market for environmental goods is impossible because I cannot buy my own individual slice of clean air. And the efficiency of the private sector is only true when all parties have full, free, perfect information--which they never do unless the owners of information are compelled to disclose it by the government. These arguments boil down to the fairly obvious point (obvious to everyone except libertarians, that is) that sometimes working in groups and vesting power in a central authority is more efficient and productive than working in competition.

Libertarianism has the appeal of a personal organizer, or cargo pants, or a trapper keeper. It is a total organization system for all your ideas, convictions, and beliefs about society and politics. When you put libertarianism on, you have a tidy little place for every little thought and opinion. Even better, you can automatically generate an opinion on any issue by pure deduction with very little knowledge of actual facts. Take the first principle of libertarianism--personal autonomy is the highest good to which all other goods should be subordinated-and you can quickly Tweet about school choice (good), the Affordable Care Act (bad), NSA surveillance (very bad), and Miley Cyrus (who cares as long as she is a rational adult?). There is a pleasant empowerment in the comprehensiveness of libertarianism. Like every all-encompassing ideology, it gives you the ability, with very little thought or knowledge, to explain everything. As much as I hate the writing of Ralph Waldo Emerson, he was on to something when he wrote that "foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."

And libertarianism is certainly the product of little minds. By "little minds" I mean those so enamored with their own ideas that they have shrunk inwards to the point that larger ideas and facts simply float by, unobserved and unexamined. How else to explain the regular and distressing gap between libertarian ideas and reality?

For example, one of the more frustrating aspects of libertarianism is the yawning vacuum that exists where historical awareness should be. Friedman argued that "the great advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science or literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government" (3). This is simply embarrassing. Friedman was an educated man. He was either being maliciously deceptive or was stupefyingly blinded by his own ideology to write such a sentence. It is further embarrassing that many of his followers believe it today.

In fact, princes and kings have always been among the biggest patrons of the arts and literature. In architecture, many of the great wonders of the world, from the Hagia Sophia to the Taj Mahal to Versailles, were built by kings and emperors, not private individuals or corporations. Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel on retainer from Pope Julius II (the head of the Papal States). William Shakespeare's company was called The King's Men because his patron was, literally, the King of England. More recently, at least twelve Pulitzer prize-winning books were written by authors supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, including James McPherson's magisterial history of the civil war, Battle Cry of Freedom.

The biggest scientific endeavors of the last two centuries have been government-funded. The Manhattan Project was overseen by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The Apollo Program was designed, funded, managed, and executed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration: The moon landing was the triumph of federal bureaucratic efficiency. The technological foundation of the internet was developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The Human Genome Project was funded by the National Institutes of Health. The Tevatron supercollider, which enabled scientists to conduct experiments in particle physics, was built with funding from the U.S. Department of Energy; the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, which discovered the Higgs Boson in 2013, is funded by twenty governments. Much of the funding for Norman Borlaug's research (father of the "Green Revolution" in agriculture) came from the Mexican government. Government funding for science and exploration is not new. Congress appropriated funds to support Samuel Morse's development of the telegraph in 1843. The Lewis and Clark expedition was a U.S. Army reconnaissance operation (Meriwether Lewis, that dashing Byronic hero, was an army captain). Christopher Columbus' voyage was funded by the King of Spain. Marco Polo's travels were undertaken at the behest of the Khan of Beijing.

The free market almost certainly would not have led the way towards any of these discoveries because they required massive overhead and incalculable risks with no immediate prospects for returns. I do not deny that private enterprise and individual entrepreneurship have also produced great works of art, science, and civilization; of course they have. But Friedman's assertion that such achievements have never come from central government is nakedly, willfully false.

A lack of historical awareness is not the only illustration of the intellectual littleness of libertarianism. Libertarianism is linked, historically and philosophically, with the work of Ayn Rand, yet another reason that conservatives should give libertarianism a wide berth. Ayn Rand was a mid-twentieth century Russian-American novelist, screenwriter, and self-proclaimed philosopher. She was an ardent anti-communist--though not, as is sometimes assumed, a persecuted exile from her native Russia. She is most widely-known for The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957), a pair of philosophical novels or, to put it another way, fables. They are thin, melodramatic, faux epics in which Rand's protagonists (Howard Roark and John Galt, respectively) parade about thundering forth Rand's philosophy in self-serious monologues.

Rand's philosophy (which she called "objectivism" but most people call Randianism, because "objectivism" is vague and nonsensical) is the moral and anthropological companion of libertarian political theory. Rand argued that the highest ethical value is selfishness, or the imperative to pursue one's own happiness and fulfillment. This ethical egoism looks down on altruism as one of basest vices. Living sacrificially for another is a betrayal of the obligation to live, first and primarily, for oneself. The flip side is equally true: We should never ask and never expect someone else to live for us. Accepting someone else's help is degrading; offering help to another is insulting. Each individual should strive to achieve what they can on their merits.

It is easy to see how Rand's political philosophy grows from this anthropology. A political system should simply allow individuals to strive and achieve and do little else. High achievers are the main drivers of civilization. Entrepreneurs, risk-takers, businessmen, inventors, and the like are the heroic, creative geniuses who make society function and thrive. The role of government is, by and large, to get out of their way. Progressive income tax rates, capital gains taxes, inheritance taxes, and environmental and safety regulations are barriers to achievement. By hurting the high achievers, such policies hurt everyone, since we all depend on the few demigods for continued progress. Meanwhile, government programs that help the poor, sick, elderly, or handicapped are degrading, and, worse, by engendering a culture of dependency, social welfare policies might actually prevent one of the poor and downtrodden from pulling himself up by his bootstraps and discovering that he, too, is one of the intellectual and creative elite.

Rand's work has become popular with conservatives. It offers a veneer of philosophical justification for policies that business groups favor for their bottom line. Representative Paul Ryan, the Republican party's vice presidential nominee in 2012, told a group in 2005 that "the reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand." (He later repudiated Rand.) Justice Clarence Thomas hosts a screening of the 1949 film version of The Fountainhead for his new clerks each year. Senator Ron Johnson is outspoken in his admiration for Rand's work.

Ayn Rand's influence in conservative circles is an embarrassment. Conservatives who routinely denounce the influence of postmodernism in American life should recognize, with only a moment's thought, that Rand is little more than a populist mouthpiece for Friedrich Nietzsche, the forerunner of conservatives' favorite philosophical bete noir. It may seem odd to compare Rand, who insisted on the objectivity of truth, with Nietzsche, who insisted on its subjectivity. The similarity lies in their egoism--and Nietzsche's subjective egoism was at least softer than Rand's objective one. Absent a traditional, religious moral framework in which to embed her belief in objective truth, it had nowhere to go but towards the individual. That is why Rand and Nietzsche, despite their different paths, ended up at the same mountain, worshiping at the altar of the übermensch.

Conservatives, who made their name championing the equal dignity of all people, should be disquieted by Rand's celebration of aristocracy. But Rand's Nietzschean admiration of superior men is not the only flag that should warn off conservatives. Rand was quite clear about her atheism and contempt for Christianity, making her an odd philosophical hero for a movement made up of many devout believers. It is bothersome that Paul Ryan, for example, a publicly devout Roman Catholic, could be so fervent in his admiration of Rand despite the obvious contradictions between the two belief systems. Nor can you simply jettison Rand's atheism and graft the rest of her thought onto a Christian worldview, as so many of her disciples claim they do. The entire premise of egoism and dislike of altruism is, shall we say, in tension with the ethic of Christianity's founder.

Some Christian Randians might claim that they are Christians in their private lives and Randians in politics while mumbling something about the separation of church and state. Such a stance plays into the state-sponsored secularism favored by the progressive left; assumes that, theologically speaking, it is unproblematic to essentially stop thinking like a Christian once you start thinking about politics; and accepts, uncritically, explicitly anti-Christian premises as your political foundation--a trifecta of questionable intellectual shortcuts.

But the most damning thing about Randianism, from a political standpoint, is that it is not conservative. The ultimate reason to reject libertarianism (and Randianism) is that it bears little resemblance to actual, historical conservatism. Some readers may be confused, thinking the two terms are synonymous because they have been used interchangeably in some circles. They are not synonymous. They are, in fact, radically divergent ideologies.

Russell Kirk's classic formulation, conservatism respects custom, tradition, and continuity with the past. The libertarian view of the role of government would be a radical break with the past. Conservatives believe strongly in the authority of precedent. Libertarians, who lack precedent for most of their favored policies, are bold to advocate untested, unproven policies. Conservatives are cautious and patient, happy to work for justice and order incrementally, by degrees. Libertarians, with their complete blueprint for the country, are pitchfork radicals ambitious to fight the system as a whole. Conservatives are comfortable with inconsistency, variety, and local solutions. Libertarians have an ideological cookie cutter they want to slap down on every policy issue in every jurisdiction. Conservatives have lower expectations of people and politics because of their understanding of human nature; libertarians betray a naiveté about nature of the world and its inhabitants when they wax utopian in their zeal to remake the world.

PROTECTIONISM IS RACE THEORY, NOT ECONOMICS?:

One of the first things budding economists learn is the principle of "comparative advantage." A country has a comparative advantage when it can produce a product or service more cheaply than others.

For example, the U.S. specializes in producing wheat because it is cheaper to do so here than in Japan, while Japan specializes in producing cars for the same reason. Specialization with trade allows consumers in both countries to buy more wheat and more cars.

Much economic research has shown that when countries trade with each other, global wealth grows, and all countries gain.

Policies that aim to reduce trade deficits hinder trade and work against the potential gains from comparative advantage.

A country like the U.S. runs an annual trade deficit with a partner country when Americans buy more goods and services from the partner than they sell to it. As a result, money flows out of the U.S. to the country, which sounds bad.

But that's not the end of the story. Those foreigners with the trade surplus - let's say in China - now have extra saving that needs to be put to work. A lack of productive investment opportunities at home means they look to other countries - like the U.S. - to profitably use their money.

In other words, money flowing out to pay for imports flows back in to help pay for productive investment in new capital. The U.S. is an appealing place for the Chinese to put their money because the U.S. is really good at producing capital goods. Put another way, it has a comparative advantage in investment.

FILLING THE JEB-SHAPED HOLE IN THE PARTY:

Of likely GOP primary or caucus voters in 2020, 52 percent in New Hampshire and 51 percent in Iowa said they would consider casting their vote for the outgoing U.N. ambassador over Trump. None of the nine other potential Republican challengers -- whom Applecart declined to name -- were able to garner the support of more than 50 percent of the voters surveyed.

Haley also had the lowest number of respondents saying they would not consider voting for her -- 40 percent in New Hampshire and 38 percent in Iowa.

Voters in South Carolina, another early primary state where Haley also happened to be governor for six years, were not surveyed as part of the poll.

NOT BORROWED FOOTAGE:

Minnesota Republican Senate nominee Karin Housley once compared Michelle Obama to a "chimp," according to a Facebook posting, HuffPost reported Monday.

THE PARTY DOESN'T DESERVE THE BENEFIT:

"The sad reality is nobody would be assuming that this is anything other than an unfortunate coincidence, except for the fact that Donald Trump is president, and he has given aid and comfort to the kind of people who gravitate toward this symbol of hate," said Brandon Dillon, chair of the Michigan Democratic Party.

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

Some @APDiploWriter 🔥🔥in the state department briefing .... Via @playbookplus pic.twitter.com/UDGYHbTzKw

— Hadas Gold (@Hadas_Gold) October 11, 2018

...AND CHEAPER...:

Scottish Power has become the first of the UK's big six energy firms to ditch fossil fuels for electricity generation, by selling off its last remaining gas power stations to Drax for more than £700m.

Iberdrola, Scottish Power's Spanish parent company, said the move was part of its strategy to tackle climate change and would free it up to invest in renewables and power grids in the UK. The deal also marks a significant expansion and diversification for Drax, whose main business is a coal- and biomass-fired power station in North Yorkshire.

Included in the £702m sale are four gas power stations in England, two hydro schemes and a pumped storage plant in Scotland. That leaves Scottish Power producing all its power from windfarms. While it has many onshore, the firm's growth is in offshore windfarms, including East Anglia One, which should take the crown of the world's largest when it opens in 2020.

THERE ARE NO EXTERNAL THREATS:

KISS OF DEATH (and not enough tic-tacs):

Under Trump, congressional criticism over U.S. support for the Saudi war in Yemen has been growing, and a resolution blocking a sale of precision-guided munitions to the kingdom was narrowly defeated last summer.

Saudi Arabia is not popular with the U.S. public, either. Only 31 percent of Americans had a favorable view of the kingdom, just behind China and just ahead of Russia, according to a Gallup poll from last year. So members of Congress generally feel safe expressing grave concerns about the kingdom. (Trump himself used to refer to the Saudis as "the world's biggest funders of terrorism" back when he was running for president.) Presidents, meanwhile, have generally found the U.S.-Saudi partnership too valuable to cut loose, no doubt on the advice of the Pentagon.

This dynamic is in play once again in the wake of the Khashoggi affair, but the Saudis' critics do appear to have a stronger position this time. Sen. Bob Menendez, ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, who has sided with the administration on Saudi issues in the past, is pausing a proposed sale of precision-guided munitions to Saudi Arabia, and Congress would likely reject any proposed arms deal with the Saudis right now. What's more, 22 senators have triggered a provision in the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act to force an investigation to determine whether sanctions should be applied on Saudi officials in response to Khashoggi's probable killing. While the strongest criticism of Saudi Arabia has typically come from liberals as well as libertarian-leaning Republicans like Sens. Rand Paul and Mike Lee, in the past week Iran hawks like Sens. Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham have spoken out too.

Critics have, fairly, asked how these leaders can be so outraged about one death when Saudi Arabia has killed thousands of people in Yemen. But the death of a journalist and well-known Washington figure has had an impact in the U.S. Capitol that a murky, faraway war, with atrocities committed on both sides, has not.

THANKS, DONALD!:

The Trump administration wants pharmaceutical companies to include the list price of drugs in television advertisements.

The Department of Health and Human Services released a proposed regulation Monday afternoon that, if finalized, would require companies that sell drugs covered by Medicare or Medicaid to put a standard price in their ads, if the price is larger than $35 per month. [...]

The policy is sure to rankle the pharmaceutical industry. Its main trade group tried to preempt the proposal Monday morning by announcing that dozens of companies had voluntarily agreed to include in television advertisements links to websites with information about a drug's cost. Each company will determine exactly what information to include on those websites.

ALWAYS BET ON THE dEEP sTATE:

The Pew Research Centre has polled Americans on their opinions about growing trade and business ties with other countries since 2002. The proportion suggesting such ties were very good has never been higher than in 2018, and the proportion suggesting they were either somewhat or very good, at 74%, was only surpassed in 2002. Gallup, meanwhile, has asked if trade is primarily an opportunity for economic growth or a threat to the economy since 1992. Before 2015, the proportion suggesting it was primarily an opportunity had never risen above 56%. It reached 72% in 2017 and was still at 70% percent in February 2018. 

Gallup has also asked Americans if immigration should be increased, decreased or kept at the present level since 1965. The proportion that wants to see immigration increase has never been higher, nor has the proportion calling for a decrease been lower. Over two-thirds of Americans polled in June 2018 wanted to keep immigration at its current level or increase it. Asked if immigrants mostly helped or mostly harm the economy, the majority of those who offered an opinion in 2017 thought that immigrants mostly helped. This was the first and only time that the positive view has been in the majority since the question was first asked in 1993.

INDIAN GIVER:

Now that Warren's taken this step to prove the authenticity of her claim, she was understandably curious about whether Donald Trump would in fact make good on his million-dollar offer. (She would prefer the donation go to the National Indigenous Women's Resource Center.) When a swarm of reporters asked him about it on Monday, though, the president responded in a way that would be unusual for anybody with less of a laissez-faire relationship to reality: He denied ever making the offer.

FAKE BILLIONAIRE ATTACKS REAL INDIAN?:

The analysis on the Massachusetts Democrat was done by Stanford University professor Carlos D. Bustamante, The Boston Globe reported Monday. He concluded Warren's ancestry is mostly European but says "the results strongly support the existence of an unadmixed Native American ancestor."

Bustamante, a prominent expert in the field of DNA analysis, determined Warren's pure Native American ancestor appears "in the range of six to 10 generations ago."

IT WAS LOST WHEN THEY CARRIED DONALD IN:

Republicans have begun to concede defeat in the evolving fight to preserve the House majority.

The party's candidates may not go quietly, but from the Arizona mountains to suburban Denver to the cornfields of Iowa, the GOP's most powerful players this midterm season are actively shifting resources away from vulnerable Republican House candidates deemed too far gone and toward those thought to have a better chance of political survival. [...]

"This is going to be a devastating election for Republicans across the ballot," said Republican strategist Terry Sullivan, who called the party's fundraising issues a symptom of the GOP's broader challenge this fall.

MAKES YOU PROUD, HUH?:

Donald Trump has dismissed Russian poisonings - such as the Salisbury novichok attacks - because they did not take place in the United States.

In an interview broadcast on Sunday evening, Mr Trump admitted that Vladimir Putin was "probably" behind such assassination attempts. 

But he said that he did not need to be any tougher on the Russian leader because "I rely on them ... it's not in our country".

THE BEER HALL MUST HAVE BEEN RENTED ALREADY....:

Leaders of a Manhattan political club that was once the archetype of moderate Republicanism say they stand behind the decision to invite the founder of a far-right men's group as police investigate violence by and against his group after his speech at their clubhouse Friday night.

The Metropolitan Republican Club advertised Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes's appearance as an opportunity to see McInnes reenact the samurai sword assassination of Japanese socialist leader Inejiro Asanuma. In a Facebook post, the club called the Proud Boys founder the "Godfather of the Hipster Movement [who] has taken on and exposed the Deep State Socialists and stood up for Western Values."

Following McInnis' speech, a group of about 30 men who appeared to have just left the event were caught on video attacking two or three protesters near the club, while screaming threats and slurs.

DUDE, HE WAS A SOBER ADULT WHEN HE ACTUALLY DID RAPE A WOMAN:

"In retrospect, do you think Bill should've resigned in the wake of the Monica Lewinsky scandal?" correspondent Tony Dokoupil asked.

"Absolutely not," Clinton said.

"It wasn't an abuse of power?"

"No. No."

In the past year, with the rise of the #MeToo movement, a host of key political, business and entertainment figures have resigned or withdrawn from their positions in the wake of allegations of sexual harassment or assault. There has been criticism -- from New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, for one -- that President Clinton, too, should have resigned after he was impeached by the Republican-led House in December 1998

DISTRACTED WHILE MALE:

Researchers are warning teachers and clinicians are mistaking immaturity in the classroom for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder or ADHD.

A global study shows the youngest children in a classroom are often compared with their older and more mature classmates and that is leading to overdiagnosis in the younger students.

WE FEEL YOU, BROTHER:

When Donald Trump was elected president, I wondered what had happened to my party. He was filthy, the opposite of everything that I was taught to strive for. His name was on strip clubs in Atlantic City and Las Vegas. He openly bragged about taking sexual advantage of women. As a boy, I looked up in reverence to the men who stood on stage at the Promise Keepers conventions, preaching about living with integrity. They talked about being unselfish, sacrificing yourself for others, keeping promises at all costs. To see a president so out of sync with these values was jarring. Weren't we the Moral Majority? The people for whom free markets were our highest economic value and righteous leadership was our highest qualification for governance? How were we supporting someone who seemed so disconnected from our values? Someone who seemed to regard free markets as anathema instead of an ideal? Weirdly, this businessman didn't seem to understand how trade worked.

When I moved to Devin Nunes' district I was proud to be represented by him. He was a farmer, one of the salt-of-the-earth people I could trust to carry out my commonsense Republican values. His influence grew and his family stopped farming in California, but I was proud to see him listed on Time's Most Influential 40-Under-40 list of politicians to watch. He said then that the Founding Fathers were his political heroes, and I applauded. I voted for him in every election.

But Devin Nunes's behavior became bizarre and erratic after President Trump's election. His ardent support for this amoral man betrayed the values that we hold as Republicans and as Christians. He seemed to entirely discard the Constitution, with its brilliant ideas about checks and balances. He seemed to be possessed, serving a new master who neither knew about nor cared about the value of integrity or the ideas that Nunes' former heroes Madison and Jefferson enshrined in our founding documents. When he followed President Trump into attacks on the free press, I saw the once-valued fourth estate under attack. Those who aspire to integrity encourage the accountability of the press. Those with something to hide attack it. 

ONLY A CRETIN WOULD FIND THAT DISQUALIFYING:

U.S. President Donald Trump said he is unsure whether Defense Secretary James Mattis is planning to step down from his post, but told CBS' "60 Minutes" in a pre-taped interview that the retired general might and that he regards Mattis as "sort of a Democrat."

JOBS WE NEED IMMIGRANTS FOR:

WARREN COMMISSION:

Vortex Construction, whose principal owner is William Wages, the brother of McCarthy's wife, Judy, received a total of $7.6 million in no-bid and other prime federal contracts since 2000, The Times found.

The Bakersfield company is co-owned by McCarthy's mother-in-law and employs his father-in-law and sister-in-law, Wages said. McCarthy's wife was a partner in Vortex in the early 1990s.

Vortex faced no competitive bids for most of the contracts because the Small Business Administration accepted Wages' claim in 1998 that he is a Cherokee Indian. Under the SBA program, his company became eligible for federal contracts set aside for economically and socially disadvantaged members of minority groups, a boon to its business.

ABOVE AVERAGE IS OVER:

The developing world's use of new technology to leapfrog entire stages of development that richer countries had to go through is a well-documented phenomenon. Examples include mobile phone-based financial services in places where there are no high street banks or, indeed, high streets. Then there's the use of distributed forms of renewable energy where there are no electricity grids or big central power stations.

But that's just for starters. If progress in artificial intelligence results in significant automation of specialisms such as the law, accountancy and education, then developing countries may be able leapfrog a lot of the services infrastructure that appears to be so essential to the functioning of a western economy.

Note that this does not require complete automation. For instance, in ten or 20 years time, an AI 'law bot' probably won't be able to do everything that a London QC can do now, but it might be able to undertake more basic legal work. Such tools could combine to allow developing economies to advance without the highly expensive - and, one might argue, self-justifying - public and private sector bureaucracies that weigh us down in the West.

This would free the brightest and best in rising nations to focus on real entrepreneurship and true innovation.

THE rIGHT LOSING IS GOOD FOR BUSINESS:

Since the end of July, Republican candidates in the 70 most contested races have reserved $60 million in TV ads, compared to $109 million for Democratic hopefuls, according to figures compiled by media trackers and reviewed by POLITICO. The disparity is almost certain to grow, as former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg makes good on plans to spend nearly $80 million to help Democrats flip the House.

"From Democrat candidates to outside groups, we've never seen anything like this before," said Brian Walsh, president of the pro-Trump America First Action super PAC. "They are dumping in cash by the truckload."

YOU CAN'T HAVE A CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS WHEN THERE IS ONLY ONE:

As many analysts have recently written, the rules-based international order is under threat. The post-World War II system needs to be reformed to better address today's global challenges; global multilateralism and overarching institutions need to be defended in the face of shifts towards bilateralism; alliances need to be re-thought in some cases and bolstered in others.

In the meantime, an unlikely self-declared savior has emerged: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. At the United Nations General Assembly last month and in a recent op-ed, he enthusiastically defended free trade, multilateralism, and the international liberal order.

But Turkey's recent record doesn't match this new rhetoric: Erdoğan has been seeking alternative alliances away from the West as part of a decade-old "axis shift," has sought "precious loneliness" (from what it deems "immoral" world actors), and has lamented the concentration of power in the U.N. Security Council ("the world is bigger than five"). Meanwhile, Turkey has been drifting away from liberal democratic norms: For the first time since it began the "Freedom in the World" report in 1999, Freedom House classified the country as "not free" in 2018.

In fact, recent conciliatory messages from Erdoğan--via the op-ed, his U.N. speech, and his attempts last month to charm Germany, in particular--reflect concern about the country's growing economic woes. Despite Erdoğan's ideological resistance to the principles of liberal order, he knows that the solutions to his country's economic troubles lie in that very order.

OPEN SOURCE EVERYTHING:

Tuberculosis kills more people than HIV and malaria combined

So imagine you shared those choices in an open, free and transparent way. You would get results quicker as competing labs would learn from each other's mistakes, exchange ideas and perspectives -- you'd collaborate.

It does happen. Large firms and academia do share their compound "tool boxes." But it could probably also happen more broadly.

Torreele mentions a recent discovery of two new tuberculosis drugs.

Tuberculosis, according to the WHO, kills more people than HIV and malaria combined.

So when the new drugs hit the market, it was a win for patients. Perhaps not as big a win, however, as may have been possible. The drugs were developed in isolation, but it turns out they may work better together, complimenting each other. 

"It's the TB community that's trialing those drugs together, now, not the companies, because they have no incentives," says Torreele. "If we had developed these drugs in an open way, we would have combined them during the development phase, not six years after they had got to market."

But still one of the greatest inefficiencies in drug discovery is that most drug candidates fail very late in the process, when most of the money has gone.

About 80-90 percent of candidate drugs fail in Phase 2 trials, and of the 20 percent that progress to Phase 3, a further 50 percent fail as well, says Bountra.

With those statistics, is it any wonder that publicly-traded companies are risk-averse? That's a lot of wasted cash. With more people working on a shared project, though, developers could fail fast and move on together.

Divisions of labor remain. You often hear both industry and academia say that universities are incapable of bringing drugs to market. They can do the early leg work, the mantra goes, but only the industry can turn candidates into viable products.

Oliaro, however, says no.

"I challenge the idea that only pharma can do clinical trials. That is wrong," Oliaro says. "They farm out clinical trials to contract research organizations and that adds enormously to the cost of R&D. But people in the not-for-profit sector also know how to do clinical trials, and we do it with patients in mind."

If Oliaro is right, then academia pitching in right through to the end in an open source setup would bring down costs even more.

IT WAS A VITAL FIGHT FOR dEMOCRATS TO LOSE:

Overall, 51 percent of American disapprove of his appointment to the Supreme Court, while only 41 percent approve.

An even larger majority of people support a further congressional objection of Kavanaugh -- 53 percent -- while only 43 percent oppose a probe. Women as a whole support an investigation 58 percent to 37 percent, while men are nearly evenly split on that matter, with 47 percent supporting an investigation and 49 percent opposing it.

IT'S NOT ACTIVISM WHEN WE DO IT!:

But consider what each account elides. For starters, nearly all progressive Democrats favor Supreme Court rulings that stop democratic majorities from passing popularly supported laws restricting abortion, birth control, sodomy, and same-sex marriage. Insofar as they fear Kavanaugh's influence on any of those matters, their worry is precisely that he may return them to the people. He obviously won't rule that the Constitution forbids any of them.

He might rule that the Constitution forbids the use of race in college admissions. If he does, he'll be staking out a view subscribed to by a majority. "Americans continue to believe colleges should admit applicants based solely on merit (70%), rather than taking into account applicants' race and ethnicity in order to promote diversity (26%)," Gallup noted in 2016, adding that "these findings suggest Americans would disagree with the Supreme Court's recent decision in Fisher v. University of Texas, in which the court essentially ruled that colleges can continue to consider race as a factor in their admissions decisions."

Most conservatives Republicans, meanwhile, favor jurisprudence that would forbid majorities from restricting gun ownership, limiting campaign donations, or using race as a factor in university admissions.

Americans are fortunate that neither major party favors pure democracy and both seek to limit the coercive power of popular majorities.

IT'LL NEVER FLY ORVILLE...:

Two years ago, BNEF Chief Editor Angus McCrone and I wrote a piece entitled Electric Vehicles - It's Not Just About the Car. At the time, BNEF was forecasting 406 million electric cars by 2040, and our article described the profound implications such growth would have on different sectors of the economy, from oil companies to the electricity system, from city streets to ministries of finance.  We also predicted that other parts of the transport industry would go electric, noting that "there are already 200 million electric bikes in China alone, and their use is spreading worldwide. Improved battery, motor and power control technology will challenge the dominance of small fossil-fuel engines in every light sector: motor boats, lawnmowers, snowmobiles, mopeds and motor cycles."

At the start of 2016, fewer than one million EVs had been sold in the history of the world, now there are four million, and the next million will hit the streets in just six months. The news today is full of cities and countries banning internal combustion vehicles, and of car companies launching electric models every other week. There may still be some who are convinced that battery electric vehicles will never catch on, or that the world's drivers will wait for hydrogen cars, but their numbers are dwindling.

Most mainstream energy and transport forecasters are coming around to our 2016 bullishness. At the start of 2016, the International Energy Agency were predicting just 23 million electric cars on the world's roads by 2030; by this year it had upped its figures to 127 million in 2030, and 280 million by 2040. BP has upped its forecast for 2035 from 72 million to 210 million. Even OPEC has moved - from 46 million EVs, to 253 million in 2040. See the article by our Head of Advance Transport Analysis, Colin McKerracher.

Just as the rest of the world's energy cognoscenti try to catch up, it has become clear that our 2016 predictions were in fact too conservative. In its latest annual forecast, published in May, BNEF said there would be 560 million electric cars by 2040: over one third of the fleet and over half of all new car sales (client link here).

Buses, which were under the radar in 2016, have started going electric faster than light-duty vehicles. There are nearly 400,000 electric buses on the road already, 99 percent of them in China; BNEF expects electric buses to have a lower total cost of ownership in almost all charging configurations by 2019. By 2030, it expects 84 percent of all municipal bus sales globally to be electric, and by 2040, some 80 percent of the global municipal bus fleet will be electric. Clients can see the work by Aleksandra O'Donovan, head of our electric vehicle team, here and here.

Over the past two years we have also seen the beginnings of the electrification of commercial vehicles, starting, as expected, with light vans. A few years ago DHL Deutsche Post couldn't find a manufacturer willing to sell it any short-range electric post vans, so it bought a company called StreetScooter and started to make its own; this year it opened a second StreetScooter factory to meet third party demand. UPS is doubling the number of electric vehicles in its London fleet to 170. Renault and Nissan got a bit of a head start in the market for electric delivery and trade vans, based on their electric car platform, but Volkswagen, Daimler, Ford and all other vehicle makers are rushing to catch up.

We are also starting to see that the trend will not be confined to light vehicles, as many thought. I have been saying for a few years that the real barrier for electric vehicles is not weight, but distance: if an electric car can compete with internal combustion on a total cost-of-ownership (TCoE) basis for a given route pattern, an electric bus or truck will too. And since bus and truck purchasers are driven almost entirely by TCoE, not sticker price or branding, once break-even is achieved, the switch to electric will be as fast as the supply chain and charging infrastructure will allow.

THEIR MOCCASINS WON'T FIT YOU:

[H]ere's the thing: Almost no research has investigated whether trying to take the perspective of another person actually increases your insight into what they truly think, feel, or want.

We recently explored this through a series of 25 experiments with a total of 2,816 people (undergrads, MBA students, Mechanical Turk workers, and other working adults) from the U.S. and Israel. We asked them to predict the thoughts, feelings, and preferences of other people, ranging from complete strangers to spouses. And we found that perspective-taking did not have the effect it's often expected to.

Our first series of experiments assessed judgments of strangers. In some studies, participants viewed photos of other people and assessed their emotions based on their eyes, facial expressions, and body postures. In others, participants watched videos of people and judged whether their expressions were fake or genuine or whether their statements were true. In each of these experiments, one group of participants was asked to engage in perspective-taking -- to "try to see things from that person's point of view, as if you were that person." Participants in the control group simply answered each question.

In contrast to the common intuition that perspective-taking increases understanding, we found that people in our perspective-taking condition were slightly less accurate in their judgments than people in the control condition. For example, in experiments in which participants viewed photos of people expressing different emotions, those encouraged to take the perspective of the people in the pictures guessed the emotions less accurately, on average, than those in the control condition. Perspective-taking did not help accuracy. If anything, it hurt it.

Of course, these were judgments of strangers. whose perspective might have been hard to assess. Perhaps perspective-taking is more helpful when you are considering someone whose perspective you know well, such as a friend or a spouse, or in a context where more is known about another's point of view.

Our next series of experiments asked people to predict the opinions and preferences of either a stranger they had just met or their romantic partner. This included predicting whether the person liked particular activities, jokes, videos, or art, or whether they were likely to agree with certain opinions. Once again, participants who were asked to engage in perspective-taking did slightly worse than those given no specific instructions.

For example, in one experiment in which romantic partners predicted how much their partner liked or disliked activities (for example, "go out to a pub or bar," "play tennis"), those encouraged to take the perspective of their partner guessed less correctly, on average, than those in the control condition. Perspective-taking may indeed work some wonders, but increasing insight into another's mind does not seem to be among them.

If perspective-taking doesn't help, what can you do to better understand others? Our research indicates that you gain understanding about someone only when you acquire new information from them. Instead of perspective-taking, you need to do some perspective-getting.

CRIMINALS ARE A SUPERSTITIOUS COWARDLY LOT:

Born in 1957 to Irish-American Roman Catholics, Miller grew up in Vermont, one of seven children.  From about age five, he fell head over heels in love with comics, and his parents encouraged and nurtured this passion. At times, he found his early adult careers on the edge of derailment. Finishing high school because of the advice of his parents, Miller tried his hand at janitorial work, at transporting goods in trucking, and at driving buses.  Every boss he had prior to entering the field of comics fired him.

In the late 1970s, as he lost job after job, he began to study with the then-best artist in the comic world, Neal Adams. After working at Gold Key comics and on lesser-known titles at DC, Miller moved to Marvel and soon took over the then nearly-defunct character, Daredevil. Much to the surprise of all at Marvel and in the comic world, Miller wrote what is now considered the definitive Daredevil, an anguished and blind Matt Murdock who regularly seeks the sacrament of Confession, confiding in his parish priest, as he wonders just how far he can fight in the name of vigilante justice.  With Miller as writer, Daredevil went from being relatively obscure to being one of Marvel's finest, most nuanced, and popular comics. After working on his independent cyberpunk comic and hero for DC, Ronin, Miller then moved to Batman. Miller not only revived the then-failing character but, along with Alan Moore and his The Watchman, but revitalized the entire comic industry, then on the edge of bankruptcy.

An avowed gnostic, a Leftist, and a seemingly particular person, Alan Moore soon left the industry in boredom and disgust, but Miller stuck with it. A monumentally determined perfectionist, Miller kept his politics much closer to his chest than had Moore, though his quietly expressed views almost always embraced a kind of Goldwater libertarianism.  Trying to improve his writing, Miller also read and studied like mad. Not surprisingly, he has read everything from Dashiell Hammett to Robert Heinlein to Christopher Lasch, and he has studied Japanese and European comic styles. Restless and curious to the nth-degree, he became an amateur anthropologist as he traveled throughout Asia and the Near east, observing everything from cultural norms to speech patterns to the shades of light hitting the landscape.

His reading and traveling, combined with his love of cinema, seeing everything from Hitchcock to Dirty Harry, Miller honed his own art--in drawing and writing--to write modern myth, centering around the hero and anti-hero, around good and evil, and around beauty and chaos.

If understood properly, Miller persuasively argued, heroes bring us back to first principles of "right and wrong."

"I love heroes, I believe in heroism. I also adore fantasy, and so I'm drawn back to these superheroes," Miller explained in October 2016. "Their mythology is open to infinite expansion, and the basic myth is irresistible. They got so much right in that first Superman movie, down to the tagline "you'll believe a man can fly. That's our job."

His explicit goal has always been "to do heroic adventures without compromise."  Too much of modern culture, he complains in the vein of Russell Kirk and C. Wright Mills, has become nothing but conformist drivel, with movies, television shows, and comic books serving the public at large as heavy "sedatives." Instead, we need the Batmans and Dirty Harry's to bring the "wrath of God" down upon the murderers, rapists, and tyrants of the world. The world desperately needs morality, order, and myth.

THE ESSENCE OF TRUMPISM IS THE DEFENSE OF CHATTEL SLAVERY:

RUN, NIKKI, RUN:

Only in retrospect does it seem obvious this was the best job in the Trump administration and that she was the best person for it.

First, the U.N. is the best arena in the world for picking the right enemies. Also, the U.N. ambassador is outside the snake pits of Washington while still at the center of the media world. Haley was also blessed to have a political nonentity, Rex Tillerson, working as secretary of state.

Because it's a foreign-policy post, Haley didn't have to weigh in on every Trumpian controversy. But when she did -- on the "Me Too" movement, Russian meddling, etc. -- she did it in a way that differentiated herself from Trump and his sycophants without seeming disloyal or mealy-mouthed.

Haley made it all look easy, in part because she's a good politician -- a daughter of Indian immigrants in a state renowned for ugly politics who managed to win two governor's races.

But she's also willing to do something too few politicians with charm and luck on their side bother to do: her homework. After all, she started out as the family bookkeeper at 13.

The timing and manner of her decision was near perfect. Once again, she's not only leaving on a high note, she's leaving as the only prominent Republican around today who can simultaneously unite the party and also appeal to non-Republicans. (Which is why you can expect the knives to come out soon.)

"PARTNERS IN CRIME"

"I didn't realize at the time that anybody noticed what we were doing... He is my partner in crime at every major thing where all the formers gather... I love him to death." @MichelleObama talks about George W. Bush handing her a cough drop (an old one at that!) at McCain's funeral pic.twitter.com/hS9fV0DHjB

— TODAY (@TODAYshow) October 11, 2018

THANKS, DONALD!:

Ford is having a bad year in 2018. Its stock is down 29%, and the tariffs imposed by President Trump have reportedly cost the company $1 billion, as the company is in the midst of a reorganization. Now, the company is announcing layoffs.

Jim Hackett, Ford's CEO, is working to engineer a $25.5 billion restructuring of the automaker, hoping to cut costs and remain competitive, the Wall Street Journal reports. But auto sales are down, and one reason is the trade tariffs that Trump has imposed on metals and other goods. According to Bloomberg, Hackett has said they have already cost the company $1 billion in profit and could do "more damage" if the disputes aren't resolved quickly.

IMPORTING THE SUPERIOR CULTURE:

The young man held the medication in his hand -- and considered using it to end his life.

But then he "put it down and said, 'No. I need help,'" before heading to a Laredo emergency room, said Kimberly Gallegos, who at the time earlier this year was a mobile crisis worker for a local mental health center.

Gallegos was helping evaluate whether the patient, a Latino in his early 30s, should be immediately hospitalized or could go home safely until seeing an outpatient doctor.

He returned to the home he shares with his mother and a sibling. The family agreed to lock up the medication -- which belonged to a family member -- and watch out for any problematic behaviors and other warning signs of suicide, Gallegos recalled.

The man's experience illustrates a "suicide paradox," experts say. Even though Latinos face economic disadvantages and other stress in their lives, their suicide rate is about one-third that of non-Hispanic whites, both in Texas and nationally.

Experts attribute the relatively low suicide rate among Latinos to the culture's strong family and community support systems, which appear to provide some degree of protection.

DONALD WHO?:

On Thursday, the U.S. Energy Information Agency reported that estimated U.S. coal production dropped 2.7 percent from the previous week and 3.3 percent from a year earlier. Year-to-date, the EIA said, total U.S. coal production is 2.8 percent lower than during the same period in 2017. Trump essentially slowed coal's decline when he took office, but the long downward slide continues.

THE BOOMERS TURN EVERYTHING INTO A PATHOLOGY:

Zoe, 17, likes to switch off her phone and put it in another room so she's not distracted. Sitting on her bed, she opens her book and begins to read. "I've really got into actual books, they are tangible, real and my imagination can run wild," she says, with a geunine sense of wonder. She consumes anything from novels to non-fiction - especially works on feminism and art.

She used to purchase her items on Amazon but "that took loooong, like 24 hours to be delivered", so she's started going to her local library: "It's great, the books are just there waiting for you." Uploading a 'shelfie' of current reading material has become a popular status update amongst her friends.

Zoe's generation is rediscovering books in the same way that Millennials discovered vinyl; the difference is that the former are increasingly doing it as a way of logging off from their smartphones. [...]

Babyboomers are actually the fastest growing demographic on social media, revelling in the sensation of greater connectivity, but Gen Z - who have lived its realities and its damaging impact on their time and mental health - are the ones questioning the point of it all. In the US, researchers at the University of Chicago found that 58% of teens said that they had voluntarily taken a break from social platforms in the last year.

HE DESERVES CREDIT FOR THE HELSINKI ACCORDS...:

Ford, for his part, adopted the Kissinger policy as his own, so much so that his closeness to the man who served as both his secretary of state and his national-security adviser, if not as his Metternich and Bismarck, created what Rumsfeld calls "a worrisome perception of dependency." It didn't help when, in response to a query, Rumsfeld was told by a National Security Council staffer that "Henry is in the middle of sensitive negotiations and therefore the President shouldn't mess in foreign affairs." Yet Ford was soon more royalist than the king. Hesitant to offend Kremlin sensibilities, he refused to receive Solzhenitsyn in the White House. Kissinger himself, who was in the Virgin Islands at the time, was more accommodating. He has suggested that, had he been in Washington, he might "have been wise enough to propose a low-key meeting with either the President or me."

Rumsfeld sensed in the predominance of Kissinger the makings of a political disaster. He "understood far better than I," Kissinger has written, "that Watergate and Vietnam were likely to evoke a conservative backlash." To Ronald Reagan, whose star was rising in the Republican party, "détente seemed like an accommodation with totalitarianism." Rumsfeld urged Ford to declaw Reagan by bringing him into the administration. "If [the Reaganites] are out," he told Ford in 1975, "they can make mischief," but "if they're in, they're in the same rowboat we are." Ford offered Reagan a seat in the cabinet, but Reagan refused it.

Plan A having failed, Rumsfeld moved to Plan B. However unfairly, Ford was coming to be perceived as a bumbling incompetent out of touch with vital elements in his party. There was only one way to restore the impression of command and reassure the GOP faithful: He must smack down the man his opponents had made out to be his Svengali. Kissinger, Rumsfeld writes, continued to "wield outsized power and influence" over Ford even as he enjoyed the constant support of his friend Nelson Rockefeller, whose aura of wealth and power made him a force in the administration in spite of his bad ideas. In every NSC meeting, Rumsfeld writes, Rockefeller "was a consistent vocal supporter of any position or view Kissinger put forward." At the same time, Rockefeller conceived himself as Ford's unofficial "head of domestic policy," a role in which the architect of the Great Society on the Hudson could only antagonize voters sympathetic to what Rumsfeld calls the "new Sunbelt, limited-government" Republicanism Reagan was selling.

Rumsfeld made his move in late October 1975. In When the Center Held, he describes how he submitted his resignation to Ford. Having failed to "get the President to take the management actions that I was convinced were required for him to succeed," he would fall on his sword. But it was not Rummy's blood that was shed in the Halloween Massacre that followed. Taking his chief of staff's counsel to heart, Ford summoned a startled Kissinger to the Oval Office and without inviting discussion outlined a reordering of the regime. Rocky was purged -- he would not have a place on the 1976 ticket. Kissinger was out as national-security adviser, though he retained the State Department. Rumsfeld himself replaced James Schlesinger at the Pentagon, where, as Kissinger tells it, he would ensure that the State Department's SALT negotiations with Moscow went nowhere. Détente was dead, and Kissinger ceased to be the prime minister of the Ford administration.

It was brilliant Machiavellian stuff, a realignment that moved Ford's government a little farther away from Nixon Republicanism, a little closer to the world of Reagan. But whether sacrificing a vizier or two and throwing the bones to the Reagan camp amounted to centrism is another question: It might as easily be read as weakness, expediency, and desperation. Ford seems less to have found a middle way than to have meandered unsuccessfully between two different paths.

The same confusion that marred the president's foreign policy spoiled his conduct of domestic affairs. As the GOP was recovering its faith in the rational self-interest of markets, Ford bizarrely launched into the volunteerist whimsies of "Whip Inflation Now," in which citizens were urged to wear shiny red buttons while planting vegetable gardens in order to stabilize prices, a program about as viable as Mao's pipe dream of promoting Chinese steel production with backyard furnaces. It is true that Ford would later, in his own words, "reverse completely" the unpropitious direction of his economic program and sign the Tax Reduction Act of 1975, which cut some $22 billion in taxes and led to the beginnings of an economic recovery. But an administration that embraced both WIN and the Laffer curve savors less of centrism than of incoherence.

THE WORLD AS IT IS (profanity alert):

After many years of asking myself what art is for, I've arrived at this: the role of the artist is to reach across space and time and console--to offer not a cure or a prescription but, rather, non-trivial consolation.

Jeff is our great, wry, American consolation poet. I don't mean this abstractly: to see him play is to find yourself in a crowd of people being actively consoled--being moved, reassured, validated, made to feel like part of a dynamic aural friendship. Jeff told me once that what he's trying to communicate to his listener is, "You're O.K. You're not alone. I'm singing to you, but I also hear you." A testimony to the value Jeff places on this connection: after playing a number of solo acoustic shows in 2016 and 2017, he decided to make an album of those songs that seemed to speak most directly to those audiences. [...]

For a long time now, it seems to me, our culture has assumed that the function of art is to warn, to blame, to critique, to scoff, to dismiss. And those are some of its functions, for sure. But an art that only does those things is destructive. Destruction already being the dominant mode of our culture, we don't need any more of it. Anyone who advocates "burning down the house" has likely never been inside a building on fire. By what do we really live? Our lives--our real lives--are made almost wholly of attempts at tenderness. We work hard on behalf of those we love, daydream about their future happiness, go out of our way to save them even the slightest pain, comfort them when the pain arrives just the same.

Jeff is, to my mind, a warrior for kindness, who has made tenderness an acceptable rock-and-roll virtue. By "tenderness" I don't mean that New Age thing, where someone drives a spike through your head and you place hands palm to palm and do a cheesy deep bow while thanking them for the new coat rack. No: Tweedy-tenderness is sophisticated and badass and funny. It proceeds from strength and good humor and does not preclude being angry or tough or peeved. It is based on the premise that you are as real as he is and as deserving of attention, and that the world is worthy of our full and fearless interest, just as it is.

THE lEFT IS THE rIGHT:

The author is historian Marilyn Lake (University of Melbourne). Here's the description from the publisher's website:

The paradox of progressivism continues to fascinate more than one hundred years on. Democratic but elitist, emancipatory but coercive, advanced and assimilationist, Progressivism was defined by its contradictions. In a bold new argument, Marilyn Lake points to the significance of turn-of-the-twentieth-century exchanges between American and Australasian reformers who shared racial sensibilities, along with a commitment to forging an ideal social order. Progressive New World demonstrates that race and reform were mutually supportive as Progressivism became the political logic of settler colonialism.

White settlers in the United States, who saw themselves as path-breakers and pioneers, were inspired by the state experiments of Australia and New Zealand that helped shape their commitment to an active state, women's and workers' rights, mothers' pensions, and child welfare. Both settler societies defined themselves as New World, against Old World feudal and aristocratic societies and Indigenous peoples deemed backward and primitive.

In conversations, conferences, correspondence, and collaboration, transpacific networks were animated by a sense of racial kinship and investment in social justice. While "Asiatics" and "Blacks" would be excluded, segregated, or deported, Indians and Aborigines would be assimilated or absorbed. 

THANKS, W:

While it was indubitably fault lines in the American financial system had led to the crisis, Crashed also argues it was the speed and intensity of U.S. policymakers' response that ensured 2008 "did not result in a spectacular transatlantic crisis," with the economies of Britain and the Eurozone imploding completely. To save transatlantic finance the Fed licensed a core group of allied central bankers to issue dollar credits on demand: "Through this they pumped trillions of dollars of liquidity into the European banking system."

What is so jarring in Crashed is the contrast between American and German officials. "If we are looking for one crucial difference it is surely this," Tooze writes. "From the morning of September 11, 2001, America was a superpower at war." Whereas Bernanke, Geithner and Paulson knew they are imperial actors defending a financial system that ultimately undergirds American power, in chapter after chapter, we see Merkel and Schauble refusing to move.

This is a key point of Tooze's, and one worth ruminating on. The divergence in response to 2008 can be traced to how the decisions of 1991 were arrived at on either side of the Atlantic. Whereas the "liberal world order" was built to empower America, the Eurozone was built to constrain Germany. The French intention all along had been to federalize the newly united Germany just enough to prevent it from becoming an imposing hegemon. "Without a common currency," Mitterrand warned Thatcher in 1989, "we are all already subordinate to the Germans' will."

Thus, beginning in 2008, as America acted to preserve its global prerogative, we see Germans refusing to act, also to preserve their own power. At a crucial moment, America wants to remain hegemon while Germany refuses to be federalised--refuses to be the lender of last resort for its profligate European partners. "There will be no transfer union," Angela Merkel declared.

Though the European Union remained, symbolically and more, a political peace project, thereafter the Eurozone showed itself to be a conflict generator. The consequence of Germany's decision to not act was the exact mirror image of the Federal Reserve's aggressive moves--with near mirror image results. Europe's German and the Federal questions, fundamentally unanswered, were still causing trouble.

Instead of acting like the Fed in stabilizing allied economies, the ECB, squeezed by Berlin, dawdled. It showed little interest in getting involved in Central Europe. "One might have expected the ECB to extend similar support to the East European neighbors of the Eurozone," writes Tooze. But the Euro-swap lines never came. "Where the Fed had given the ECB the lifeline of dollar swap-lines," writes Tooze, "the ECB had no intention of extending equivalent privileges to Poland or Romania." Frankfurt's decision "shocked the Fed," which had expected Euro-swap lines to be extended to Poland and Hungary. But with their economies hit by a sudden stop in foreign credit supplies, all the ECB was willing to do was provide Poland and Hungary with short-term funding in exchange for first-class euro-denominated securities. "When the problem," writes Tooze, "was a shortage of euro funding, this was of no great help."

FIRST WAY MEANS FOR SECOND WAY ENDS:

NO ONE WILL MISS JOBS:

In a letter to his wife Abigail during America's War of Independence, John Adams described the necessity of politics:

I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.

For a country fighting for independence and a man risking his life for the cause, there is little to life beyond politics of the moment. Every marginal decision is a matter of survival. But that momentary imperative is only in pursuit of higher humanistic goals.

Politics is important, but it is only a means to an end. Human flourishing, or the good life, is the proper end of social life. Government plays but a part in laying the foundation for people to flourish in society. Like Adams, we want a relatively stable and effective regime so we can be free to pursue better, more satisfying things.

Unlike Adams, we have the space and luxury of pursuing all of them today -- even if the political radicals say otherwise. Family and friendship, economic prosperity, scientific and technological progress, medical advances, the arts and entertainment, and much more. There is far more to life than politics. We study it only so we don't have to worry about it very much. We owe it to our forefathers to not allow it to overtake the finer things in life.

OUR TWO rEPUBLICAN PARTIES:

The first thing we noticed is that there were many more self-identified progressives running in 2018 than in 2014 or 2016. In those earlier two elections, 26 percent and 29 percent of Democratic House candidates called themselves progressive; by 2018, 44 percent did. This is compelling evidence of a lively progressive movement within the party.

But in spite of their large numbers, progressives did not do as well at the polls as the candidates we identified as establishment Democrats. This past primary season, 140 establishment candidates, or 35 percent of the total establishment candidates, won their primaries, in contrast to 101 progressive Democrats, or 27 percent.

Moreover, establishment Democrats tended to win the nomination in districts that are most likely to flip from Democratic to Republican, meaning that the House Democratic Caucus that meets next January will probably be composed of fewer progressives than would be indicated by their numbers on the ballot. In congressional districts that are evenly matched or slightly Republican, there are more establishment challengers than progressive challengers. More solid Republican districts, however, have a relatively large number of progressive nominees. In these districts, it is more difficult for a Democrat to win -- unless the blue wave turns into a blue tsunami.

NIKKI V. MICHELLE 2020:

"Today" co-host Savannah Guthrie asked Obama if her motto from a 2016 Democratic National Convention speech, "when they go low, we go high," still stands.

"Absolutely," Obama said. "Fear is not a proper motivator. Hope wins out, and if you think about how you want your kids to be raised, how you want them to think about life and their opportunities, do you want them afraid of their neighbors? Do you want them angry? Do you want them vengeful?"

"Which motto do you want them to live by?" Obama continued. "I have to think about that as a mother, as someone who's a role model to young girls. We want them to grow up with promise and hope, and we can't model something different if we want them to be better than that."

ALWAYS BET ON THE dEEP sTATE:

Donald Trump's former chief strategist slammed Nikki Haley's decision to announce her resignation as U.S. ambassador to the UN on Tuesday as "suspect" and "horrific," saying it overshadowed positive news the president needs to help rally support ahead of next month's midterm elections.

"The timing was exquisite from a bad point of view," Steve Bannon said in an interview Wednesday with Bloomberg News Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait at the Bloomberg Invest London forum. "Everything she said yesterday and everything she said about stepping down could have been done on the evening of November 6. The timing could not have been worse."

Bannon said Haley's announcement, which took top White House officials by surprise, distracted attention from Brett Kavanaugh's first day as a justice on the Supreme Court and last week's news about the lowest U.S. unemployment rate in five decades. Her move undermines Trump's message to voters with the Republican majority in the House of Representatives at stake, Bannon said.

COME BACK, ADMIRAL POINDEXTER, ALL IS FORGIVEN:

Last week was a rough one for Russia's military intelligence service. On Oct. 4, the U.S. Department of Justice announced the indictment of seven officers of the Main Intelligence Directorate (known as the GRU by its Russian acronym) in connection with hacking operations. At the same time, Dutch intelligence services released a report on the April arrest of four of the men that included their passport information and photos of their hacking equipment. Then independent investigators, using the internet and social media, dug up additional information on the GRU's cyberwarfare unit, confirming the identity of one of the suspects in a nerve agent poisoning in the United Kingdom and identifying the second suspect for the first time.

These developments emphasize how social media and open-source information on the internet -- though inherently neutral -- can be used for either good or ill. It is highly ironic that the GRU, which has been quite successful in using social media to stir up discord inside the United States and Europe, also has been embarrassed by open-source reporting. These recent developments also show how technological innovation is changing the spying game, and intelligence services are moving -- sometimes not so quickly -- to adapt. [...]

Sadly for Morenets, the receipt was not the end of his woes. A student in an intelligence seminar reportedly found an online dating profile for him, which happened to contain a selfie profile picture that showed the GRU building in the background. The student sleuth was associated with Bellingcat, an organization that uses open sources and social media to conduct online investigations. Working with the citizen journalism organization The Insider Russia, Bellingcat was able to confirm that Morenets was his real name, and not a pseudonym. They also discovered that his vehicle was registered to Komsomolsky Prospekt 20 in Moscow; that address is associated with Unit 26165 of the GRU, which U.S. and Dutch law enforcement say is its cyberwarfare department. Bellingcat reported that a search for other vehicles registered at that address turned up 305 names, potentially providing an extensive list of GRU cyberwarfare personnel -- an embarrassing breach of operational security for the intelligence agency.

OUR TWO REPUBLICAN PARTIES:

Democrats believe America is strongest with a health care system that prioritizes people -- not one that taxes and takes advantage of  patients. We will fight to protect your right to quality and affordable health care by reining in the costs of prescription drugs, building on the current system to make it work better for everyone, and protecting those with pre-existing conditions from Republican attempts to strip them of care.

Democrats believe America is most prosperous when every American has a shot at success and plays by the same fair rules. We know that our economy is stronger when everybody's hard work is respected and pays off with higher wages, higher incomes and decent retirement benefits. We will invest in our crumbling infrastructure to create 16 million well paid jobs rebuilding roads, bridges and ports all around this country.

And Democrats believe that government exists to serve the American people, not just those with the biggest checkbooks. On day one, we will take steps to end the culture of corruption in Washington. We will strengthen ethics laws to remove the corrosive influence of lobbyists and special interests from Congress, stop foreign money from influencing our elections and create more transparency and accountability for our leaders.

WHILE PROVIDING NONE OF THE BENEFITS!:

It's official: The latest round of tariffs now means that the total tax increase on Americans from enacted tariffs exceeds the tax increases from the Affordable Care Act, (un)popularly known as "Obamacare."

NOTHING WOULD BE MORE AMERICAN...: