Massive voting by Americans in the midterm elections on Nov. 6 is the best way to respond to Republican campaign lies, fear-mongering, racism, and voter suppression intended rig elections for the foreseeable future.
If successful the effect of the tawdry GOP tactics would be to continue the massive tax cuts enabling rule by the GOP donor class, which reacts to increasing budget deficits by advocating austerity conditions that would kill tens of thousands of Americans by reducing the safety net on health care. Those are facts, easily verified.
So, it's not enough to document abuses and read about them. It's time to vote in such overwhelming numbers that would-be tricksters are intimidated, overwhelmed and otherwise rendered ineffective for the plan announced by GOP Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, right, to cut the increasing budget deficit after these elections by attacking Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.
New restrictions on the Affordable Care Act's "Obamacare" protections for pre-existing conditions would likely be attempted also. There have been 70 previous attempts by congressional Republicans (no matter what their election season rhetoric).
Congressional Republicans could also help President Trump end the threats against them posed by the continuation of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation of Trump campaign election rigging and other corruption.
The scope of the crisis has finally become too grave for the major media to ignore. One indication is Paul Krugman's New York Times column A Party Defined by Its Lies: At this point, good people can’t be good Republicans and the Washington Post's Judge rules against Brian Kemp over Ga. voting restrictions days before gubernatorial election. .
Krugman, a Nobel-prize winning economist and political commentator, wrote in that when he began his oped column in 1999 the Times forbade him from using the word "lie" for any American politician, no matter what the circumstances. Times have changed, as indicated by the title of his column, A Party Defined by Its Lies: At this point, good people can’t be good Republicans.
In similar fashion, the mainstream media have for years virtually ignored even well-documented instances mass voter suppression and electronic election-rigging.
Fortunately, investigative reporter and author Greg Palast is among those who have fought hard against those tactics via columns, books and litigation.
Palast has documented GOP election cheating in such news reports as GOP’s Brian Kemp Purged 1 in 10 Georgia Voters: I’ve Got the Names for Truthout. He and his team also undertook eve reporting and with photos (at the top of this article) showing the impact of Trump's bigotry at his Nov. 5 rally. The Palast team was working undercover at a Trump rally in Georgia.
"All my East and West coast liberal friends are telling me not to worry, thinking the Dems have got #Midterms2018 in the bag," Palast wrote on Monday via Twitter.
"What they're not seeing is stuff like this. This is what much of America looks like. ...Went undercover at yesterday's #Trump/#Kemp rally at the Middle #Georgia Regional Airport in Macon, GA. It was scary as shit: QAnon, Proud Boys, and a safe-zone for white supremacists. Just a patriot hate fest."
Palast is shown below left with the cover of his book Vultures' Picnic exposing techniques of ruthless billionaire "vulture" hedge fund power players like Paul Singer who pour vast amounts of unaccountable "dark money" into campaigns to fund deceptions, dirty tricks and other anti-democratic tactics to continue their tax cuts and vision of a nation run by billionaires via puppet officials and an uninformed and gullible electorate.
One former Washington Post political reporter unsuccessful in publishing allegations about electronic cheating that proved decisive in the 2004 presidential election confided to me that his newspaper had required years ago "one hundred percent proof" of any such fraud to before it would publish a story that might undercut public confidence in election integrity and official "results." That is a near-impossible standard to achieve publication on almost any news topic.
By contrast, this investigative site and our 2013 book Presidential Puppetry documented, as have many others in the alternative media, how candidates (primarily Republicans in the major races) have won elections via a variety of voter suppression and vote-rigging techniques. Those tactics would be in addition to such long-standing tactics as dark money, misinformation and such dirty tricks as hoked-up sex scandals.
Puppetry showed, for example, how investigative reporter Greg Palast proved that Republicans and their election contractors stole the 2000 presidential election by quietly removing the voter registrations of more than 100,000 Floridians (mostly Democrats) shortly before the election that cost Democrats far more lost votes than the "hanging chads" that riveted the media.
The massive confusion and lack of congressional concern and news coverage allowed the Republican majority on the U.S. Supreme Court to vote 5-4 on a party line vote to stop a vote recount and award the presidency to their fellow Republican George W. Bush.
The book reported also on how Alabama political operative Dana Jill Simpson had sought to describe as a whistleblower to Congress, the FBI and the news media how her former Republican colleges such as Bush White House Senior Advisor Karl Rove won many elections nationally by a variety of dirty tricks.
These included, by her own account and our subsequent investigations, frame-ups on corruption charges of prominent Democrats, such as former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, electronic tampering of election results (victimizing Siegelman in his 2002 re-election bid, and then others such as the Kerry presidential bid in 2004), and grooming with the help of dark money donors unethical politicians to ascend to secretary of state positions where the most devious pols could rig elections for others and, if they proved successful enough, ascend to higher office themselves.
Simpson was largely unsuccessful in winning congressional, Justice Department or media interest in her evidence, although CBS 60 Minutes did feature some of her allegations regarding the Siegelman frame-up in a 2008 broadcast and best-selling House of Saud, House of Bush author Craig Unger heavily quoted her findings in his important 2012 book Boss Rove: Inside Karl Rove's Secret Kingdom of Power.
Meanwhile, Palast and other authors, litigators and activists sought to maintain visibility for relevant issues, particularly regarding the core civic function of fair elections. In addition to the well-known civil rights groups, Ohio-based author-litigators Bob Fitrakis, Harvey Wasserman and Clifford Arneback, Code Red author Jonathan Simon of the Election Defense Alliance, and the editorial teams of Russ Baker at WhoWhatWhy and Rob Kall of OpEdNews have been tireless in documenting election shenanigans in the alternative media and to the courts.
But Republican majorities on the Supreme Court have significantly worsened these election problems by two activist decisions rewarding the GOP majority's radical right base.
In a 2011 5-4 party line vote, the court overturned the nation's federal campaign finance law in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, thereby enabling major donors to fund campaigns in many ways by avoiding previous limits.
Then in Shelby County (Alabama) v. Holder, court Republicans substituted their opinion in 2013 for that of Congress by removing the extra Justice Department scrutiny that lawmakers had ordered for localities tarnished by their history of illegal voter suppression and similar tactics to reduce minority vote. The court's Republicans theorized that officials would no longer act in biased fashion.
"Five years after the ruling, nearly a thousand polling places have been closed in the country, with many of the closed polling places in predominantly African-American counties," according to research published in September by the Pew Trusts. "Research shows that the changing of voter locations and reduction in voting locations can reduce voter turnout."
Many Tricks, Travesties
We cannot begin to summarize all of the tricks that politicians have devised -- even with the help of a long appendix of recent relevant stories arranged below in reverse chronological order.
At most, we can note a couple of relevant definitions, particularly notorious revelations and conclude with advice from several experienced commentators who believe, as does this reporter-historian, that we face a defining moment in the nation's history in the Nov. 6 elections. That is based on my coverage of, among other things, national presidential political conventions beginning in 1968 and, most recently in 2016.
Let's start with the distinction of "voting fraud" (most typically an individual voter who casts a vote illegally, a rare occurrence because the rewards are relatively low and punishment relatively high).
This boogeyman of "voting fraud" has thus been used increasingly by Republican officials to restrict voting, often by wholesale elimination of Democrats and minorities from the voting rolls.
Often these voting restrictions are in combination with demonstrated examples of extreme gerrymandering and some well-documented instances of electronic fraud. President Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced on Nov. 5 that they are sending Justice Department investigators to swing district localities around the nation and they warned that illegal voters would be severely punished. See: Without evidence, Trump and Sessions warn of voter fraud.
GOP Secretary of State Kris Kobach, left, the party's candidate for governor in the Nov. 6 election has been a national leader in formenting these largely bogus fears and very real voter restrictions, as has been his Georgia counterpart, GOP Secretary of State Brian Kemp, below right, the party's candidate for governor.
One type of fraud is flipping votes via software whose performance cannot be authenticated afterwards because the systems are "proprietary property" owned by election contractors hired by partisan secretaries of state or other elections officials with minimal oversight except occasionally by courts.
Palast is among those in the "election integrity movement" who has written extensively about electronic voting suppression, including large scale efforts in the swing states of Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Nevada, North Dakota and Arizona suddenly to purge scores of thousands of "ineligible" voters just before this week's elections, thus creating chaos in Democratic districts and reducing vote totals.
Fortunately, the nation has become far more aware of the dangers of electronic voting thanks to outcries against Russian "interference" in the 2016 elections, helping prompt ongoing probes by Special Counsel Robert Mueller and major mainstream media. These probes, which have not resulted in major indictments yet against U.S. citizens, in part because of the Justice Department's moratorium politically related indictments just before elections, encompass not simply suspected hackings of political and election databases but also use of bots via social media campaigns operated by offshore interests and with "dark money" from unknown donors.
This is an apt juncture to report that at least some Democrats have perpetrated at least sometimes virtually all such election shenanigans noted here. For example, the New York Times reported on Oct. 31 Democratic Dark-Money Group Floods the Zone With $30 Million.
"A structure unknown even to some of those involved, Floridians for a Fair Shake and 13 other groups around the country are funded and coordinated out of a single office in Washington, with the goal of battering Republicans for their health care and economic policies during the midterm elections," according to Times reporter Alexander Burns. He continued:
"The Hub Project — run by a former Obama administration official and public relations specialist, Leslie Dach, and Arkadi Gerney, a former political strategist for the liberal Center for American Progress — set up an array of affiliate groups around the country, many with vaguely sympathetic names like Keep Iowa Healthy, New Jersey for a Better Future and North Carolinians for a Fair Economy. The Hub Project then used them to mobilize volunteers and run advertising on policy issues against Republican members of Congress many months before the election. He continued:
More than a dozen of the targeted lawmakers remain among the most endangered incumbents this year, including Representatives Rod Blum of Iowa, Bruce Poliquin of Maine, Steve Knight of California and George Holding of North Carolina.
The quiet onslaught embodied two of the most important strategic choices by Democrats in the 2018 elections — putting health care and taxes at the core of their message, and using invigorated fund-raising on the left to challenge Republicans even in conservative-leaning areas. Several Democratic operatives involved in the group likened its role to that of Americans for Prosperity, the conservative advocacy network funded by the billionaire Koch brothers, during the Obama administration, albeit on a significantly smaller scale.
Mr. Gerney displayed no ambivalence about using undisclosed contributions — traditionally a source of dismay for Democrats — to punish Republicans for last year’s $1.5 trillion tax law and their attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
“We don’t believe in unilateral disarmament,” Mr. Gerney said.
It is obvious also, however, that Republicans are behind most of the more explosive and documented recently reported election scandals, particularly those involving voter suppression, 
race-baiting, fear-mongering with provable lies about immigration and other hot-button issues, and trumped up sex scandals.
The evidence (which includes the cover illustration at left last year by the politically conservative Economist magazine, is excerpted below.
We suffice here with one clip as an example from the Washington Post: Midterms test whether Republicans not named Trump can win by stoking racial animosity: "President Trump succeeded in 2016 after disparaging minority groups. That strategy has spread to other GOP campaigns, with blatant and overtly racial attacks rarely seen since the civil rights era of the 1960s."
The covert nature Republican ends-justifies-the-means political dirty tricks by recent disclosures of two serious allegations of sex scandals allegedly fostered by Republicans.
In one, The Atlantic Magazine reported that the late GOP political operative Lee Atwater confessed as he was dying that he had helped arrange the Monkey Business sex scandal that derailed the 1988 presidential campaign of Democratic front runner Gary Hart, who is shown in a now-iconic photo taken by a friend of model Donna Rice.
The details remain in dispute, partly because Rice (now known by her married name of Donna Hughes) and Hart decline to say much about it. But the episode, explored more in depth below, remains timely because of many other suspected politically motivated scandals of this nature.
A company that appears to be run by a pro-Trump conspiracy theorist offered to pay women to make false claims against Special Counsel Robert Mueller (right) in the days leading up to the midterm elections — and the special counsel's office has asked the FBI to weigh in.
One involved a recent claim by Trump supporters that Mueller, the Special Counsel expected to resume public announcement of findings soon after the election unless Trump fires him, has been involved in scandal. Mueller is shown at left in a file photo.
Here is a link to the report by Natasha Bertand of The Atlantic regarding the allegation and the special counsel's reaction: Mueller Wants the FBI to Look at a Scheme to Discredit Him, subtitled,The special counsel says a woman was offered money to fabricate sexual-harassment claims. The allegation appears to be an amateur-style dirty trick by would-be political assassins but the history of this type of tactic shows that it often succeeds when implemented by better-funded and more experienced dirty tricks artists.
Suggested Actions
What to do?
Several longtime political commentators of conservative and Republican backgrounds have suggested that Trump and his most extreme followers have brought the nation to such a crisis that the one-time remedy is for voters to select Democrats on virtually a straight ticket basis Nov. 6 restore balance to the three federal branches and state and local governments now dominated by Republicans.
Among these advocates is Max Boot, shown at left, a former oped editor of the conservative Wall Street Journal and Republican, who wrote an oped for the Washington Post on Nov. 1 entitled: Vote against all Republicans. Every single one. He listed his concerns as follows — along with his remedy:
I’m sick and tired of a president who pretends that a caravan of impoverished refugees is an “invasion” by “unknown Middle Easterners” and “bad thugs” — and whose followers on Fox News pretend the refugees are bringing leprosy and smallpox to the United States. (Smallpox was eliminated about 40 years ago.)
I’m sick and tired of a president [shown in a file photo at right] who misuses his office to demagogue on immigration — by unnecessarily sending 5,200 troops to the border and by threatening to rescind by executive order the 14th Amendment guarantee of citizenship to anyone born in the United States.
I’m sick and tired of a president who is so self-absorbed that he thinks he is the real victim of mail-bomb attacks on his political opponents — and who, after visiting Pittsburgh despite being asked by local leaders to stay away, tweeted about how he was treated, not about the victims of the synagogue massacre.
Most of all, I’m sick and tired of Republicans who feel that Trump’s blatant bigotry gives them license to do the same — with Rep. Pete Olson (R-Tex.) denouncing his opponent as an “Indo-American carpetbagger,” Florida gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis warning voters not to “monkey this up” by electing his African American opponent, Rep. Duncan D. Hunter (R-Calif.) labeling his “Palestinian Mexican” opponent a “security risk” who is “working to infiltrate Congress,” and Rep. Steve Chabot (R-Ohio) accusing his opponent, who is of Indian Tibetan heritage, of “selling out Americans” because he once worked at a law firm that settled terrorism-related cases against Libya.
If you’re sick and tired, too, here is what you can do.
Vote for Democrats on Tuesday. For every office. Regardless of who they are.
And I say that as a former Republican. Some Republicans in suburban districts may claim they aren’t for Trump. Don’t believe them. Whatever their private qualms, no Republicans have consistently held Trump to account. They are too scared that doing so will hurt their chances of reelection. If you’re as sick and tired as I am of being sick and tired about what’s going on, vote against all Republicans. Every single one. That’s the only message they will understand.
Even Kanye West, after famously grooving with Trump in a profane, adulatory rant in the Oval Office last month, has since renounced Republican politics and embraced former President Obama, as reported in Kanye West finally became an Obama supporter on Nov. 2, 2018. "Distancing himself from Trump this week, West declared support for a big chunk of the former president’s agenda."
Whatever the case on voter decisions, early voting in swing states shows huge numbers of voters are coming to the polls. As well they should.
The federal government is increasingly controlled by radical Republicans with activist, ultra-right agendas, as illustrated by Trump's claim that he can unilaterally void the citizenship of those whom he disapproves, as in children born in the United States to illegal immigrants.
Neither Congress, the courts nor states are in a position to stop such efforts, especially if Trump's allies win both houses, continue to pack the courts with radical activists and control enough state houses to resume their gerrymandering and voter suppression with the 2020 census.
In sum, those who disapprove of such tactics have one simple obligation on Nov. 6, no matter what fears exist of a rigged vote count: to vote in overwhelming numbers so that rigging, gerrymandering, fear tactics and all the rest will prove fruitless.
This could be looked on as a one-time effort to restore balance and democracy and a real two-party system. But, whatever the case, and as the poet Robert Burns wrote in Scots Wha Hae, Scotland's informal patriotic anthem, "Now's the day an' now's the hour."
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U.S. Voters: Find your polling location here. (This website is an initiative of the Voting Information Project (VIP), a partnership between state election officials and Democracy Works to connect voters with the election information they need to cast a ballot. Launched in 2008, VIP works with state and local election officials to provide official and up-to-date election information.)
Nov. 6
Election Results
New York Times, When Will the Results Come In? Astead W. Herndon and Jugal K. Patel, Nov. 6, 2018. An hour-by-hour mapped guide to the races at stake in the midterm elections across the country. The first polls close at 6 p.m., Eastern time, and the last closes seven hours later in Alaska. Here are the closing times, state-by-state, and what to watch each hour as the vote counting begins.
6 p.m., E.T. Most of Indiana / Eastern half of Kentucky. Keep an eye on the most watched race in Kentucky: the Sixth Congressional District, where Amy McGrath, a former Marine, is trying to unseat a male Republican incumbent. This race is likely to provide an early glimpse into whether the so-called blue wave is on. The big prize in Indiana is the Senate race, where Joe Donnelly, right, a Democrat, is trying to hold on to his seat.
Polls
538.com, Analysis: Forecasting the race for the Senate, Nate Silver, Nov. 6, 2018. 4 in 5 Chance Republicans keep control (81%). The chance of winning for each candidate in the 35 Senate elections taking place in 2018, as well as the controlling party for the 65 seats not on the ballot this cycle. Predicted average Republican gain: .5 seats.
538.com, Analysis: Forecasting the race for the House, Nate Silver, Nov. 6, 2018. 7 in 8 Chance Democrats win control (88.1%). The chance of each candidate winning, with all 435 House districts shown. Predicted average Democratic gain: 39 seats.
538.com, Analysis: Forecasting the races for governor, Nate Silver, Nov. 6, 2018.
- 195 million: Average population forecasted to be governed by Democrats
- 134 million: Average population forecasted to be governed by Republicans
- 24: Average number of states forecasted to be governed by Democrats
- 26: Average number of states forecasted to be governed by Republicans
Real Clear Politics Monday Polls
Commentaries
Palmer Report, Opinion: Donald Trump’s judgment day has arrived, Bill Palmer, Nov. 6, 2018. And here we are. For the past two years since Donald Trump treasonously conspired with a foreign enemy to rig the presidential election in his favor and then illegally seized the Oval Office, the Resistance has been heroically holding America together while Trump has tried to destroy it.
If we turn out and vote today, Donald Trump and his party will never be able to pass another corrupt piece of legislation. Every complicit Republican House committee chair will be replaced with a Democrat who will work to expose Trump’s crimes and bring him to justice. Republican subpoena power will become Democratic subpoena power. Robert Mueller will be chuckling at how much easier his job just became.
If we turn out and vote today, Donald Trump will be on a path to prison. Yes, Trump and his family really will end up getting locked up. Even if Mueller and the Democrats only manage to oust him and not incarcerate him, the state of New York will take care of the rest. The five or six Trump underlings who have been sent packing for prison these past two years will look like a drop in the bucket in comparison to what’s to come.
If we turn out and vote today, America has a chance to become America again. Democracy will be back in fashion. Donald Trump will be on the run. We’ve spent these past two years holding America together by a thread. Now, today, we get to take a proverbial sledgehammer those who have been trying to destroy it.
Washington Post, Without evidence, Trump and Sessions warn of voter fraud, Amy Gardner, Nov. 6, 2018. Accusations of voter fraud and voter suppression have roared to the forefront in several closely fought races this year, raising the possibility of recounts and disputed results among dozens of contests.
President Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Monday issued strong warnings about the threat of voter fraud in Tuesday’s elections, echoing the president’s baseless claims that massive voter fraud marred his 2016 election and prompting accusations that his administration is trying to intimidate voters.
In a tweet early Monday, Trump said that law enforcement has been “strongly notified” to watch for “ILLEGAL VOTING.” He promised that anyone caught voting improperly would be subjected to “Maximum Criminal Penalties.” Sessions, in a statement laying out the Justice Department’s plans to monitor ballot access on Election Day, said “fraud in the voting process will not be tolerated. Fraud also corrupts the integrity of the ballot.”
In remarks to reporters on his way to a campaign rally in Cleveland, Trump also falsely claimed that voter fraud is commonplace.
Purged Voters Get No Notice
Truthout, Purged Voters Get Out the Vote, Greg Palast, Nov. 6, 2018. On Sunday, I watched President Donald Trump warn a rally in Macon, Georgia, that Stacey Abrams, running to become the first Black female governor in US history, “is one of the most extreme far left politicians in the entire country," adding, "you know that! You put Stacey in there, you’re going to have Georgia turn into Venezuela. I don’t think the people of Georgia like that.”
Trump's rant against Abrams has not driven away her many supporters. But voters like Atlanta filmmaker Rahiem Shabazz are being driven away from the ballot box.
“I want to vote for Stacey Abrams.” Shabazz told me, but, “I won’t be able to vote in the November 6 election.”
Shabazz' voter registration, his right to vote, has been cancelled by Georgia’s Secretary of State, Brian Kemp, shown at right in adjoining photo.
Notably, Kemp, while running the election for the state of Georgia, is also running in the election for governor of Georgia — against Democrat Stacey Abrams (shown also at right).
Rahiem (shown in a Palast investigative team photo) is just one of more than 340,134 Georgians Kemp has purged from the voter rolls based on dead-wrong evidence they’d moved from the state or from their home county.. It took a federal lawsuit — which I filed jointly with voting rights advocate Helen Butler — to force Kemp to divulge the names and addresses of those whose registration he cancelled in a single year, 2017.
And, while Kemp may believe that the tidal wave of purges may overcome a Democratic Blue Wave, there is another possibility: When a voter turning up to the polling station discovers his/her registration is missing or cancelled, the voter has the right, under federal law, to cast a “provisional” ballot.
However, the man who decides whether these “provisional” ballots will be counted is… Brian Kemp.
But Kemp should stop grinning. “Federal judges may feel differently about Kemp’s right not to count these provisional ballots,” says Jeanne Mirer, lead attorney on the lawsuit filed against Kemp in October. If the court determines that Kemp misused his power as Georgia’s “Purge’n General” it could order that those provisional votes be counted.
During Trump’s Georgia rally, assorted right-wing and white supremacist attendants took selfies in front of Air Force 1, while fanatics sported Qanon, Three Percenter and Oath Keepers T-shirts. Proud Boys flashed “white power” signs. One Trumper thought Abrams’ supporters should stop complaining, telling me, “We all have rules to vote. Just follow the rules.”
Still, Kemp’s wrongful purging frenzy may, in the end, backfire, even if it does not come down to a court fight over the provisional ballots.
Shabazz warns Kemp, “You took one vote away, but Stacey Abrams is going to get ten more because I'm going to bring ten more people out to vote.”
Washington Post, Opinion: Five things to look for today, Jennifer Rubin, right, Nov. 6, 2018. More than 5,000 presidential lies later, we are ready to see if the electorate shifted in some permanent ways in 2016 or whether 2016 was a perfect storm, an aberration and a wake-up call.
The perfect storm explanation for 2016 would say that a poor presidential candidate, a complacent Democratic base, a TV celebrity candidate and a last-minute intrusion into the election campaign by FBI Director James B. Comey produced a narrow victory for President Trump, a result few expected, including the candidate.
The permanent-shift explanation is that Americans demand entertainment from politics, dismiss (or even embrace) racism and misogyny, and are indifferent about the survival of democracy. They want someone to break the furniture and don’t much care how he does it or what he says.
Here then are five questions, the answers to which will help clarify whether 2016 was closer to the perfect storm or a harbinger of a permanent shift, one that reveals democracy’s decay.
Guam Territorial Voting Results
Pacific Daily News / USA Today Network (Guam), Leon Guerrero maintains large lead, with 20 precincts counted, Staff reports, Nov. 6, 2018. Democrat Lou Leon Guerrero and running mate Joshua Tenorio retained their commanding lead in the race for governor, according to the latest batch of unofficial results, released about 12:55 a.m. on Nov. 7.
With 20 of 67 precincts counted, Leon Guerrero has 50.7 percent of the vote, with Republican Lt. Gov. Ray Tenorio receiving 25.89 percent of the vote. In the race for congressional delegate, Sen. Mike San Nicolas, D-Dededo, is leading Republican candidate and former public auditor Doris Brooks, with 53.02 percent of the vote, to Brooks' 45.77 percent.
Nov. 5
The fight for voting rights never ends. This photo from US News & World Report Magazine Photograph Collection depicts marchers with voting right signs at the March on Washington, August 23, 1963. Photo credit: Library of Congress courtesy of WhoWhatWhy and Wikimedia.
WhoWhatWhy, What Keeps Election Integrity Advocates Fighting? Nina Sparling, Nov. 5, 2018. With so much energy expended — and money spent — to restrict access to the ballot box, what’s it like to have to fight for one of the pillars of democracy?
Tomorrow, as Americans head to the polls, they face a potentially trying experience.
In many states, voters will cast a ballot on a paperless machine. Voters in 33 states will present identification to vote. Hundreds of thousands of voters may show up to vote only to find out that their registrations have been purged or challenged out of legitimacy. Election workers will only dish out ballots in English to people with the right to vote in their native tongue. Some voters may well find that the last polling site they visited has been relocated or shuttered entirely.
But as threats of foreign interference flit across the airwaves, politicians retrench restrictive policies, and election administrators balance stressed budgets with deficient resources, activists organize for a different future. Countless local groups register and educate voters. Advocates file lawsuits.
Washington Post, Midterms test whether Republicans not named Trump can win by stoking racial animosity, Matt Viser, Nov. 5, 2018 (print edition). President Trump succeeded in 2016 after disparaging minority groups. That strategy has spread to other GOP campaigns, with blatant and overtly racial attacks rarely seen since the civil rights era of the 1960s.
Washington Post, Analysis: ‘Full Trumpism’: The president’s apocalyptic attacks reach a new level of falsity, Philip Rucker, Nov. 5, 2018 (print edition). In the campaign’s final days, President Trump has claimed without evidence that Democrats want to destroy the economy, obliterate Medicare and open the borders to violent criminals.
Washington Post, Analysis: Will there be a youth wave? Early voting points to yes, Jacqueline Alemany, Nov. 5, 2018. Youth turnout rates in the midterm early vote are up by 125 percent compared to 2014, according to Catalist, a voter database servicing progressive organizations.
Wayne Madsen Report (WMR), Opinion: America and the world on edge, Wayne Madsen, Nov. 5, 2018 (subscription required). Former Navy intelligence officer Wayne Madsen, shown at left during a lecture, is the 
author of 16 books (most recently "Trump's Bananas Republic"), a syndicated columnist, and an investigatifve reporter who has exposed many scandals of leading Democrats, Republicans and global criminals.Until Madsen began reporting on scandals in the Trump admininistration, he was a frequent guest commentator for the Trump-friendly Alex Jones "infowars" radio show and the equally Trump-supporting National Enquirer. Madsen has published a chart showing relationships of more than three thousand entities related to the Trump, Kushner and Manafort families and their business partners.
Rarely, if ever, have the United States and the ever-dwindling pockets of democracy around the world been on edge prior to an American election.
For a mid-term election, which rarely generates large-scale interest from voters, the 2018 poll is being viewed from Maine to Hawaii and Florida to Alaska and shores beyond as an existential watershed for the future of the United States.
With a president in office who routinely lies, coddles foreign dictators, attacks his opposition with violent verbiage, and threatens to impose extra-constitutional measures, many Americans are voting as if their lives depended on it. Simply put, their lives and well-being are very much at stake.
November 6, 2018 will either be a date remembered for turning America away from the forces of fascism, racism, and oligarchical rule and re-anchoring itself into a safe democratic foundation -- or the day that the United States of America began to dissemble into fratricidal anarchy. It's your choice.
Is Justice Department 'Oversight' Intimidation?
Roll Call, DOJ Civil Rights Division to Monitor Polls in 35 Counties on Election Day, Griffin Connolly, Nov 5, 2018. Arizona, Nevada, Florida, North Dakota, and Texas among 19 states where DOJ personnel will monitor polling places.
When Americans head to the polls on Tuesday for the midterm elections, voters in 35 counties — from Las Vegas to Dallas to Tampa — will head to precincts that are being closely monitored by the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division for “compliance with the federal voting rights laws,” the DOJ announced Monday.
“Voting rights are constitutional rights, and they’re part of what it means to be an American,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in a statement.
Sessions also warned that “fraud in the voting process will not be tolerated.”
In January, President Donald Trump shut down a commission he created shortly after he arrived at the Oval Office to investigate possible voter fraud. In its six months of existence, that commission did not turn up any evidence of voter fraud from the 2016 election.
The list of jurisdictions that the DOJ will monitor comprises 35 counties, including many that election experts say are pivotal battlegrounds for the outcomes of roughly a half-dozen neck-and-neck Senate races and even more House races.
Civil Rights Division personnel will observe, for example, Maricopa County, Arizona, which encompasses much of Phoenix. Democratic Rep. Kyrsten Sinema hopes to see a surge of voting in Phoenix for her Senate match-up against GOP Rep. Martha McSally, who will be looking for a strong showing from the county's non-urban reaches. Inside Elections with Nathan L. Gonzales rates the Arizona Senate race Tilts Democratic.
Clark County (Las Vegas) and Washoe County (Reno) in Nevada will also be subject to the DOJ's monitoring efforts. Nevada GOP Sen. Dean Heller faces Rep. Jacky Rosen, right, in another prime pick-up opportunity for the Democrats in a race rated Tilts Democratic by Inside Elections.
In Florida, where Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson has faced an historically expensive challenge from Florida Gov. Rick Scott, DOJ personnel will be keeping an eye on polling places in Pinellas County (Tampa) and Palm Beach County. Inside Elections also rates that race Tilts Democratic.
The Texas, New Jersey, North Dakota, and Pennsylvania Senate races will also have some polling places under DOJ surveillance.
Palmer Report, Commentary: Donald Trump’s last minute voter distraction antics go off the rails, Daniel Cotter, Nov. 5, 2018. "President" Donald J. Trump is obviously scared, and also wants to try to explain the results of Tuesday should the blue wave transpire. On Monday morning, Trump tweeted: “Law Enforcement has been strongly notified to watch closely for any ILLEGAL VOTING which may take place in Tuesday’s Election (or Early Voting). Anyone caught will be subject to the Maximum Criminal Penalties allowed by law. Thank you!”
Trump is trying to make a big deal of illegal voting. He has claimed that during 2016, more than 3 million illegal votes were cast. Notwithstanding such scare tactics, the truth is that when a comprehensive investigation of 1 billion ballots cast, credible incidents of voter impersonation were found in 31 cases, or .0000031%.
Another statistic worth noting is the voter apathy in the United States. In the 2016 presidential election, nearly half of all eligible voters (46.9%) did not vote. If eligible voters are not heading to the polls, then who would be these illegal voters who march to the polls, risking conviction and punishment, when many of them are eligible and don’t vote as it is?
Not to be deterred, Attorney General Jeff “Suck up” Sessions issued a press release on Monday, confirming that he is sending out monitors to “35 jurisdictions in 19 states.” The jurisdictions include counties in North Dakota, Arizona, and Gwinnet and Fulton Counties in Georgia. Gwinett is the jurisdiction where thousands of absentee ballots were set aside by Brian “Corrupt as F” Kemp before a judge intervened. The press release cites potential voter fraud, which again is mostly non-existent.
Trump and Sessions should be reminded that intimidating voters is a federal crime and that any monitors sent should be very careful in interfering in local polling places. Voters should get out and vote in what is an important election and ignore what is more intimidation tactics by Trump.
Overall Analysis
Washington Post, Midterms test whether Republicans not named Trump can win by stoking racial animosity, Matt Viser, Nov. 5, 2018 (print edition). President Trump succeeded in 2016 after disparaging minority groups. That strategy has spread to other GOP campaigns, with blatant and overtly racial attacks rarely seen since the civil rights era of the 1960s.
New York Times, Trump’s America: Aggrieved and Adoring Voices From Inside the Presidential Bubble, Michael D. Shear, Nov. 5, 2018 (print edition). At rallies, the president’s most fervent supporters look past his falsehoods, racially charged statements and attacks on critics. For his party to win Tuesday, he needs them to turn out in droves.
New York Times, Two Vastly Different Election Outcomes That Hinge on a Few Dozen Close Contests, Nate Cohn, Nov. 5, 2018. Democrats appear
poised to win the House popular vote on Tuesday by a wide margin, with national polls showing sustained disapproval of President Trump — and yet the fate of the chamber is not a foregone conclusion.
On the day before the midterm elections, two vastly different outcomes remain easy to imagine. There could be a Democratic blowout that decisively ends Republicans’ control of the House and even endangers their Senate majority. Or there could be a district-by-district battle for House control that lasts late on election night and perhaps for weeks after.
Washington Post, Analysis: ‘Full Trumpism’: The president’s apocalyptic attacks reach a new level of falsity, Philip Rucker, Nov. 5, 2018 (print edition). In the campaign’s final days, President Trump has claimed without evidence that Democrats want to destroy the economy, obliterate Medicare and open the borders to violent criminals.
Washington Post, Analysis: Will there be a youth wave? Early voting points to yes, Jacqueline Alemany, Nov. 5, 2018. Youth turnout rates in the midterm early vote are up by 125 percent compared to 2014, according to Catalist, a voter database servicing progressive organizations.
Fallen Utah Mayor Urged Voting
Huffington Post, Utah Mayor Pleaded With Americans To Vote Before He Was Killed In Afghanistan, Mary Papenfuss, Nov. 5, 2018. Utah mayor Brent Taylor, a major in the Utah National Guard, pleaded with “united” Americans in a moving Facebook post to vote just days before he was killed in an insider attack in Afghanistan.
The emotional appeal came after Taylor witnessed Afghanistan citizens risking their lives to cast their votes.
The “beautiful” turnout of 4 million voters who braved “threats and deadly attacks” was a “success for the long-suffering people of Afghanistan and for the cause of human freedom,” wrote Taylor, the mayor of the small town of North Ogden, with a population of 17,000. He became mayor of the town, located an hour north of Salt Lake City, in 2013.
“As the USA gets ready to vote in our own election next week, I hope everyone back home exercises their precious right to vote. And that whether the Republicans or the Democrats win, that we all remember that we have far more as Americans that unites us than divides us,” he wrote in his last post.
Taylor, a father of seven young children, also posted photos of people voting in Afghanistan. He ended his post: “United we stand, divided we fall.”
Media, Elections
New York Times, Opinion: You ‘Approved This Message’? Seriously? Jim Rutenberg, Nov. 5, 2018 (print edition). In 2002, lawmakers tried to save voters from election-season sludge by adding a brief refrain as part of every commercial. Their plan didn’t count on the ugly campaign tactics of President Trump, our media columnist writes.
In the final week of the midterm campaigns, President Trump tweeted a 53-second video that interspersed footage of the caravan with a courtroom scene featuring Luis Bracamontes, an undocumented immigrant and convicted murderer. After Mr. Bracamontes boasts of killing two police officers, these words appear onscreen: “Democrats let him into our country. Democrats let him stay.”
As numerous fact checkers have pointed out, the ad is false. Mr. Bracamontes was deported after entering the United States during Bill Clinton’s presidency and came back during the years George W. Bush was president. He was deported once again, only to return and kill two sheriff’s deputies in California in 2014. He had even passed through the infamous Maricopa, Ariz., jail system of Sheriff Joe Arpaio, a Republican, before being released on drug charges that were never resolved.
The video was so demonizing of Latino migrants and so defamatory of Democrats that it took a place alongside the infamous Willie Horton ad that helped George Bush defeat his Democratic opponent, Michael Dukakis, in the 1988 presidential election.
Huffpost, Fox News Pulls Racist Trump Ad, Lydia O’Connor, Nov. 5, 2018. The Trump-friendly network said it’s decided to stop airing the ad “upon further review.” Fox News said Monday it has stopped airing the controversial political ad paid for by President Donald Trump’s campaign, which likens members of the Central American migrant caravan to a man convicted of killing police officers in the U.S.
The Trump-friendly network’s decision comes after CNN made headlines on Saturday for refusing to air it and after NBC came under fire for running it during prime time on Sunday night.
“Upon further review, Fox News pulled the ad yesterday and it will not appear on either Fox News Channel or Fox Business Network,” ad sales president Marianne Gambelli said in a statement.
Trump re-election official Brad Parscale responded on Twitter: So, @NBCNews @CNN @facebook have chosen to stand with those ILLEGALLY IN THIS COUNTRY. Instead of standing with LEGAL IMMIGRANTS and those that follow our laws. The #FakeNewsMedia and #PaloAltoMafia are trying to control what you see and how you think. STOP THE CARAVAN!
The ad is Trump’s latest effort to rouse fear about the migrant caravan in the days ahead of the midterm elections. Last week, he announced he was sending more than 5,200 troops to the U.S.’s southern border despite the caravan being weeks away and posing no known threat.
Palmer Report, Opinion: Trump camp goes berserk after NBC and Fox News cancel his racist caravan ad, Bill Palmer, Nov. 5, 2018. Various television networks, including CNN, have made clear from the start that they would not run Donald Trump’s racist and fictional “caravan” ad, no matter how much money they were being offered for the ad placement. But during last night’s NFL Sunday Night Football game, NBC decided to run the ad. Palmer Report and others quickly organized a pushback campaign, and while the ad did run again this morning, it’s now been pulled – and not just from NBC.
Early this afternoon, NBC and Fox News released separate statements announcing that they were canceling the remainder of the ad run. Facebook also announced that it would stop allowing Donald Trump to run the ad on its social network. Just how racist and dishonest does an ad have to be for Fox News to decide it’s gone too far? Suffice it to say that Trump and his people were not happy.
Brad Parscale, the “campaign manager” for Donald Trump’s imaginary 2020 reelection campaign, angrily lashed out on Twitter at NBC and Facebook, but conveniently left out the fact that Fox News had also dropped the ad. These television networks never should have aired this ad to begin with. But, at the least, this is further proof that mainstream Americans can work together and force soulless corporate entities to bend to their will.
Fighting Contested Results
Columbus Free Press via OpEdNews, Warning To Democrats! Do NOT Concede!! Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman, Nov. 5, 2018. Donald Trump is in power in large part because Democrats have repeatedly conceded elections they really won. On Tuesday, that MUST change. Anyone deemed a close loser MUST fight. Every tally must be contested, every denial challenged, all missing ballots found, every provisional honored.
Nov. 4
2018 U.S. Elections
Washington Post, Opinion: Why this election matters so much, Editorial Board, Nov. 4, 2018 (print edition). The stakes are higher than usual, much higher, in next Tuesday’s election. At issue is not simply the future of federal legislation on health care, taxes and many other policy matters, important as they are. Rather, the pivotal question this November is whether the American electorate will reward a campaign based on divisiveness and dishonesty.
Washington Post, Anxiety high in campaign’s final days as voters prepare to render judgment on Trumpism, Matt Viser and Philip Rucker, Nov. 4, 2018 (print edition). As the midterms roared into their final weekend — with the biggest names in both parties exhorting their followers to vote — tight races across the country were setting the stage for an uncertain, but dramatic, conclusion. Much is on the line as voters will render a nationwide judgment on whether Trumpism is a historic anomaly or a reflection of modern-day America.
Two years of political volatility will culminate Tuesday when voters for the first time since the stunning 2016 election render a nationwide judgment on whether Trumpism is a historic anomaly or a reflection of modern-day America.
As the midterms roared into their final weekend — with the biggest names in both parties exhorting their followers to vote — uncertainty enveloped the contest amid signs that tightening races appeared headed toward dramatic finishes.
Just how many House seats Democrats might pick up — they need a net gain of 23 to win the majority — remained unclear. Republicans are favored to keep control of the Senate, but enough top-tier races from Florida to Nevada to Tennessee and Missouri were sufficiently close that the outcome was in doubt. And in two closely watched gubernatorial races, where African American Democrats in Georgia and Florida are seeking to make history, the contests looked to be coming down to the wire.
Election Fraud Claims Mount
Washington Post, Brian Kemp’s office orders ‘hacking’ probe of Ga. Democrats on eve of election he’s competing in, Avi Selk, Vanessa Williams and Amy Gardner, Nov. 4, 2018. As Georgia's secretary of state, Kemp oversees the same election he is competing in for governor. Democrats called the investigation a sham and abuse of power.
But voters’ rights groups pushed back within hours of the announcement, suggesting that the investigation was a political distraction after Democratic officials, among others, alerted authorities over the weekend to security vulnerabilities in the voting system Kemp oversees. The Abrams' campaign called the investigation “nothing more than a pathetic attempt to cover up for his failures.”
The office of the secretary of state, which Democrats have accused throughout Kemp’s campaign of manipulating the electoral system for his benefit, announced the investigation Sunday morning with an all-caps headline that appeared directly below a voter’s guide on a government website.
The attached statement contained no evidence and almost no details on the Democratic Party of Georgia’s “possible cyber crimes,” but it said Kemp’s office had launched the investigation Saturday evening and alerted the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security.
The investigation was immediately condemned as a political ploy by Democrats and some commentators, who believe Kemp should not oversee an election in which he is competing.
“Brian Kemp’s scurrilous claims are 100 percent false, and this so-called investigation was unknown to the Democratic Party of Georgia until a campaign operative in Kemp’s official office released a statement this morning,” Rebecca DeHart, executive director of the state Democratic Party, wrote in a statement to reporters. “This is yet another example of abuse of power by an unethical Secretary of State.”
WhoWhatWhy graphic illustrating its ongoing investigations of voter suppression and electronic election frauds
WhoWhatWhy, Georgia's voter registration system like open bank safe door, Jordan Wilkie and Timothy Pratt, Nov. 4, 2018. Two days before the midterm elections, a series of security vulnerabilities have been discovered that would allow even a low-skilled hacker to compromise Georgia’s voter registration system and, in turn, the election itself. It is not known how long these vulnerabilities have been in place or whether they have already been exploited.
Just before noon on Saturday, a third party provided *WhoWhatWhy* with an email and document, sent from the Democratic Party of Georgia to election security experts, that highlights “massive” vulnerabilities within the state’s My Voter Page and its online voter registration system.
According to the document, it would not be difficult for almost anyone with minimal computer expertise to access millions of people’s private information and potentially make changes to their voter registration — including canceling it. In this election and during the primaries, voters have reported not showing up in the poll books, being assigned to the wrong precinct, and beingissued the wrong ballot.
All of that could be explained by a bad actor changing voter registration data — and at this point there may be no way of knowing if that happened. It is not clear what impact — if any — this will have on Tuesday’s elections, or what it has had on early voting.
Voters should still go to the polls and, if they are encountering problems, ask to cast a provisional ballot as is their right. *WhoWhatWhy *contacted five computer security and election systems experts to review the document. None of these cyber security experts tested the vulnerabilities described, downloaded any files, or altered any data. All five noted that testing these vulnerabilities without permission would be illegal. Instead, several logged onto the My Voter Page to look at the code used to build the site — something any Georgian voter could do with a littleinstruction — and confirmed the voter registration system’s vulnerabilities. They all agreed with the assessment that the data of voters could easily be accessed and changed.
Palmer Report, Opinion: You can vote for Robert Mueller on Tuesday. No, really, Bill Palmer, Nov. 4, 2018. Donald Trump is on the ballot in every single House and Senate race; you just won’t see his name. There’s also another person on the ballot: Special Counsel Robert Mueller. By all accounts he’s gearing up to make his big move against Trump shortly after the election. He’s simply waiting to see how things shake out, so he can decide how to proceed – and he needs your help.
If the Democrats win the House, it will allow Robert Mueller, right, to hand his findings and recommendations to the House, and let the Democrats run with it. After all, the destruction and ouster of a criminally corrupt president is still ultimately a political process. House Democrats can immediately begin holding daily televised hearings to destroy Trump one swift blow at a time, even while sending subpoenas flying and taking a proverbial buzzsaw to what little is left of Trump’s viability.
If the Republicans retain control of the House and Senate, that will leave Robert Mueller as the lone ranger. Much as we might enjoy the visual, it’s not the ideal scenario. Mueller would be forced to try more unilateral and riskier moves.
Nov. 3
New York Times, G.O.P. Has Strong Economy to Tout, but Trump Rhetoric Muddies Message, Astead W. Herndon and Sydney Ember, Nov. 3, 2018 (print edition). A glowing jobs report right before an election should be a gift to the party in power and a uniform talking point for its candidates. But President Trump’s strident tone on immigration is drowning out the good news, creating a political bind Republicans did not envision.
New York Times, Once Reluctant to Speak Out, an Energized Obama Now Calls Out His Successor, Peter Baker, Nov. 3, 2018 (print edition). Former President Barack Obama’s voice has a way of lifting into a high-pitched tone of astonishment when he talks about his successor, almost as if he still cannot believe that the Executive Mansion he occupied for eight years is now the home of President Trump.
For most of the last two years, he stewed about it in private, only occasionally speaking out. But as he hit the campaign trail this fall, Mr. Obama (shown in a file photo) has vented his exasperation loud and often, assailing his successor in a sharper, more systematic way arguably than any former president has done in three-quarters of a century.
Although some admirers believe he remains too restrained in an era of Trumpian bombast, Mr. Obama has excoriated the incumbent for “lying” and “fear-mongering” and pulling “a political stunt” by sending troops to the border. As he opened a final weekend of campaigning before Tuesday’s midterm elections, Mr. Obama has re-emerged as the Democrats’ most prominent face, pitting president versus president over the future of the country.
Washington Post, Obama rips hecklers: Why are the people who won the last election ‘so mad all the time?’ Cleve R. Wootson Jr., Nov. 3, 2018. For former president Barack Obama, it was a spontaneous response to a parade of hecklers — not a teleprompter remark that had been vetted for maximum effect — but it still seemed to sum up the final weeks of a searing midterm election campaign characterized by incendiary rhetoric, politically motivated package bombs and hate.
“Why is it that the folks that won the last election are so mad all the time?” Obama asked a crowd of 4,000 as the fifth interrupting protester was escorted out of a Miami rally on Friday. Any further shouts were drowned out by the crowd’s roar.
WhoWhatWhy graphic illustrating its ongoing investigations of voter suppression and electronic election frauds
WhoWhatWhy, Voting Machines — Unregulated, Unverifiable, Easy to Hack, Staff report, Nov. 3, 2018. On Tuesday, millions of Americans will cast their ballots on antiquated machines built when many voters were still in diapers. These machines use software that is even older. They are easy to hack, yet election officials don’t want to recognize that this is a problem.
- WhoWhatWhy, Ohio Voters Face Endless Obstacles to Voting, Travis Dunn, Nov. 3, 2018. Antiquated voting machines, voter roll purges, and absentee ballots may present problems for Ohio voters this election, potentially disenfranchising some voters.
- WhoWhatWhy, Who Saddled the Dems in North Dakota With Last Minute ‘Hunter Warning’ Disaster? Russ Baker and Kody Leibowitz, Nov. 3, 2018. Did Democrats in North Dakota try to scare hunters away from voting? If so, who is responsible for the ad that ended up doing no good and much harm and why was it put up in the first place?
Georgia GOP Voter Suppression Thwarted
Washington Post, Judge rules against Brian Kemp over Ga. voting restrictions days before gubernatorial election, Eli Rosenberg, Nov. 3, 2018 (print edition). The state must change its procedures to make it easier for some people flagged under the state’s restrictive “exact match” law to vote, a federal judge ruled, dealing a blow to Kemp, right, the GOP gubernatorial candidate and secretary of state.
Georgia must change its procedures to make it easier for some people flagged under the state’s restrictive “exact match” law to vote, a federal judge ruled Friday, dealing a blow to Republican gubernatorial candidate and Secretary of State Brian Kemp.
The “exact match” law flags voter registrations that are found to have discrepancies, such as a dropped hyphen, with other official identifications. Potential voters are allowed to settle the discrepancy by providing proof of identity.
But the state’s procedures under Kemp, whose office oversees elections, stipulated that those who had been flagged as potential noncitizens be cleared first by a deputy registrar when seeking to vote. In October, a coalition of civil rights groups sued him.
[Kemp is both supervising election rules as secretary of state and also running as the GOP candidate for governor against Democrat Stacey Abrams, left, an African-American and state legislative leader hoping to energize new voters.]
U.S. District Judge Eleanor L. Ross ruled Friday that the procedures were likely to result in the violation of voting rights for a large group of people and needed to be halted immediately. She said Kemp’s restrictions raised “grave concerns for the Court about the differential treatment inflicted on a group of individuals who are predominantly minorities."
The preliminary injunction she issued required the state to change its procedures immediately to allow those flagged, some 3,100 individuals, to prove their citizenship more easily, with a U.S. passport or similar documentation, and only to a poll manager. It also signaled that the coalition of civil rights groups that brought the case against Kemp would probably succeed should the lawsuit continue.
Economics / Politics
New York Times, Economic / Political Opinion: The Perversion of Fiscal Policy (Slightly Wonkish), Paul Krugman, right, 
Nov. 2, 2018. Austerity in a slump, stimulus in a boom.
As many people have pointed out, the Trump tax represented a total break with the normal principles of fiscal policy. Historically, we’ve tended to run big deficits when the economy is weak, smaller deficits or surpluses when it’s strong. But now the deficit is soaring even in the face of low unemployment. This is irresponsible, and shows that Republican handwringing over deficits was always phony – which some of us pointed out at the time.
But something that has been pointed out less is that this is actually part of a broader story: fiscal policy has been off the rails since 2010, not because of what it has done to the national debt, but because of what it has done to the macroeconomy.
Here’s what fiscal policy should do: it should support demand when the economy is weak, and it should pull that support back when the economy is strong.
Paul Krugman joined The New York Times in 1999 as an Op-Ed columnist. He is distinguished professor in the Graduate Center Economics Ph.D. program and distinguished scholar at the Luxembourg Income Study Center at the City University of New York. In addition, he is professor emeritus of Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School.
Nov. 2
Trump Pumps Race Fears
Washington Post, Trump ratchets up racially divisive messages in a bid to rally support in the midterms, Philip Rucker and Felicia Sonmez, Nov. 2, 2018 (print edition). President Trump, joined by many Republican candidates, is dramatically escalating his efforts to take advantage of racial divisions and cultural fears in the final days of the midterm campaign, part of an overt attempt to rally white supporters to the polls and preserve the GOP’s congressional majorities.
On Thursday, Trump (shown in a file photo of an Economist cover) ratcheted up the anti-immigrant rhetoric that has been the centerpiece of his midterm push by portraying a slow-moving migrant caravan, consisting mostly of families traveling on foot through Mexico, as a dangerous “invasion” and suggesting that if any migrants throw rocks they could be shot by the troops that he has deployed at the border. The president also vowed to take action next week to construct “massive tent cities” aimed at holding migrants indefinitely and making it more difficult for them to remain in the country.
“If you don’t want America to be overrun by masses of illegal aliens and giant caravans, you better vote Republican,” Trump said at a rally here Thursday evening.
Washington Post, After GOP’s 2018 tax cut plans fell apart, immigration filled the campaign void, Damian Paletta and Erica Werner, Nov. 2, 2018. With their 2018 tax plans having failed to come to fruition and their 2017 tax law still polling poorly, President Trump and some other Republicans have made a hard pivot away from economics and into nationalism to energize the conservative base ahead of Tuesday’s midterm elections.
Washington Post, Kanye West finally became an Obama supporter, David Swerdlick, Nov. 2, 2018. Distancing himself from Trump this week, West declared support for a big chunk of the former president’s agenda. The rapper shown at right wearing a "Make America Great Again" along with a sweatshirt with the name of civil rights protester Colin Kaepernick, has 28 million Twitter followers and recently made news by praising Donald Trump in an extended rant with the president in the Oval Office.
U.S. Politics / Dirty Tricks?
Model Donna Rice and 1988 Democratic presidential candidate Gary Hart, a Colorado senator taking a cruise on a yacht named Monkey Business.The photo, allegedly a political dirty trick set up against Hart, was taken during the campaign by Rice's friend Lynn Armandt and provided to the news media
New York Times, Opinion: Trump and the Hart-less Presidency, Maureen Dowd, Nov. 2, 2018. After 30 years, Gary Hart still wonders what might have been.
While the rest of us obsess on what happened in 2016 and what will happen on Tuesday, Gary Hart is bedeviled by what happened in 1987, and whether the tabloid mania sparked by his liaison with Donna Rice led down a rattlesnake-filled path straight to our tabloid president.
Hart, and a new Jason Reitman movie about the Rice imbroglio, The Front Runner, both pose the question: Is there a direct connection between Hart’s fall and Trump’s rise?
If reporters had not hidden in the bushes, would there have been any Bushes?
“I bear a very heavy burden of responsibility,” Hart says, picking at a “game plate” of elk, buffalo and quail at The Fort restaurant outside of Denver. “If all that stuff had not happened and if I had been elected, there would have been no gulf war. H.W. wouldn’t have been president. W. wouldn’t have been president. Everything would have changed. I don’t say that to aggrandize myself. It’s just, history changed.
“And that has haunted me for thirty years. I had only one talent and it wasn’t traditional politics — I could see farther ahead than anybody.’’
Hart maintained that “there was no relationship” with Rice. Rice — who became an evangelical and supports Trump — told People this week, “I’m just not discussing it.” But a married candidate can’t have a gorgeous young model fly up to D.C. from Miami for the weekend to visit his house — “the infamous townhouse,’’ as Hart’s son dryly calls it — and not attract questions if they are seen.
A recent piece by James Fallows in The Atlantic reported that Lee Atwater, the Republican dirty trickster and Poppy Bush party chief, confessed before his death that he had set up Hart for his weekend of doom on “Monkey Business.”
“That’s the only way that 48-hour period makes any sense,’’ Hart told me.
See also for background:
- Miami Herald, The Gary Hart Story: How It Happened, by Jim McGee, Tom Fiedler and James Savage, May 10, 1987. This article was prepared by Jim McGee, Tom Fiedler and James Savage. It was first published in the Miami Herald on May 10, 1987. It is reprinted with permission of The Miami Herald. Note: This article is from the University of North Carolina “AFS” site, which is being close on Nov. 13, 2018.
- The Atlantic, Was Gary Hart Set Up? James Fallows, Oct. 16, 2018. November 2018 issue, What are we to make of the deathbed confession of the political operative Lee Atwater, newly revealed, that he staged the events that brought down the Democratic candidate in 1987?
Nov. 1
U.S. Elections 2018
New York Times, Meet the Would-Be House Committee Leaders Who Could Torment Trump, Nicholas Fandos, Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Catie Edmondson, Nov. 1, 2018 (print edition). If Democrats win control of the House, they will gain control of powerful committees that could put a check on Mr. Trump’s agenda. Expect subpoenas, must-see hearings and lots of investigations.
In the House, the majority rules. Just ask Democrats, who have introduced bills destined for nowhere, watched oversight requests pile up and seen Republicans overrule most of their policy efforts. But if the Democrats take the House on Nov. 6, they will assume control of two of the most powerful tools in Washington: gavels and subpoenas.
Trump Complains Mass Murder Hurt GOP Campaign 'Momentum'
CNN, Trump laments that 'two maniacs' stopped GOP momentum in midterms, Caroline Kelly and Betsy Klein, Nov. 1, 2018. Trump: Maniacs stopped the momentum.
President Donald Trump lamented on Thursday that last week's two domestic terror incidents had stopped Republican momentum ahead of the midterm elections.Trump said the pipe bombs mailed to prominent Democratic politicians and CNN and the shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue had taken attention away from the Republican campaign to hold on to control of Congress during the midterms.
"We did have two maniacs stop a momentum that was incredible, because for seven days nobody talked about the elections," he said during his closing remarks at a Missouri rally. "It stopped a tremendous momentum."
Trump acknowledged the human cost of the package bombs and the shooting.
"More importantly, we have to take care of our people, and we don't care about momentum when it comes to a disgrace like just happened to our country," he added. "But it did nevertheless stop a certain momentum, and now the momentum is picking up."
U.S. Elections
Washington Post, Democrats in prime position to retake House, but wild cards remain, poll shows, Scott Clement and Dan Balz, Nov. 1, 2018. A Washington Post-Schar School poll of likely voters in battleground districts found the Democratic Party’s base of less frequent voters and concerns about illegal immigration stand out as wild cards in the final days of the midterm elections.
Trump Claims Black George Leader, Yale Law Grad 'Unqualified'
New York Times, Trump, Offering No Evidence, Cites Stacey Abrams’s ‘Past’ and Calls Her ‘Unqualified,’ Alan Blinder, Nov. 1, 2018. President Trump disparaged Stacey Abrams, the Democratic nominee for governor of Georgia, in ambiguous and unusually personal terms on Thursday, warning that “her past” left her “not qualified to be the governor.”
Mr. Trump did not elaborate and offered no evidence for his assertion, which seemed to be a potential preview of the political message he will deliver on Sunday, two days ahead of the election, at a Georgia rally for Brian Kemp, Ms. Abrams’s Republican rival.
But the decision of the president, who has been criticized for inflammatory language, to invoke Ms. Abrams’s background so broadly was a distinct escalation in his attacks on her bid to become the first black woman to be elected governor in the United States.
Ms. Abrams, a former Democratic leader of the Georgia House of Representatives, has staked out an array of liberal positions during her campaign, but her tenure in the Legislature has drawn measured praise from the Republicans who led the State Capitol.
New York Times, Commentary: When Trump Voters Go For Democrats, Timothy P. Carney (author of the forthcoming book “Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse”), Nov. 1, 2018. Why is the Rust Belt trending blue for the midterms? The collapse of community may provide an answer.
It’s easy to assume that Rust Belt voters have soured on the president, that blue-collar voters are upset Mr. Trump never Made America Great Again. But it’s not about the president: Mr. Trump still has extraordinarily high approval ratings among those who voted for him. The problem for the Republicans is that Mr. Trump made these Rust Belt voters into Trump voters, but he never made them Republicans.
Low social trust and low civic engagement defined the places that swung hardest to Mr. Trump. Because the vote was an expression of alienation and dissatisfaction, rather than an expression of partisan fealty, many of those places will swing back enough to give Democrats statewide wins on Election Day.
New York Times, The Tip Sheet: Warning Signs for G.O.P., Including Steve King; Trump’s Finger Pointing: 5 Days to Go, Jonathan Martin and Matt Flegenheimer, Nov. 1, 2018. We’re entering the homestretch, and our just-completed poll in the New Jersey district of Representative Leonard Lance carries ominous news for him — and for other Republicans in high-income districts....
President Trump is getting ahead of a possible midterm loss with an unsubtle message to fellow Republicans: It wasn’t me....Senator Jon Tester of Montana has won two Senate elections without clearing 50 percent of the vote. One big reason: A Libertarian on the ballot has presumably hurt the Republican more than Mr. Tester, a Democrat. But on Wednesday, Mr. Tester, right, faced a complication: The Libertarian candidate this year, Rick Breckenridge, endorsed Matt Rosendale, the Republican nominee and state auditor.
Washington Post, Opinion: Vote against all Republicans. Every single one, Max Boot, Nov. 1, 2018. I’m sick and tired of a president who pretends that a caravan of impoverished refugees is an “invasion” by “unknown Middle Easterners” and “bad thugs” — and whose followers on Fox News pretend the refugees are bringing leprosy and smallpox to the United States. (Smallpox was eliminated about 40 years ago.)
538.com, Analysis: Election Update: Democrats Need A Systematic Polling Error To Win The Senate, Nate Silver, Nov. 1, 2018. And even that might not be enough.
The divide between the House outlook and the Senate outlook continues to widen. Democrats’ chances of winning a majority remain at or near their all-time highs in our House forecast — ranging between 78 percent (7 in 9) and 85 percent (6 in 7) in the various versions of our model. But they’re at their lowest point yet in the Senate. All three versions of our forecast give them only about 1 in 7 shot (about 15 percent) of taking over the Senate from Republicans.
By a systematic polling error, I mean one that occurs in a correlated way across every race, or in certain groups or races — not merely errors that happen on a one-off basis.
Propaganda 'News'
Dealbreaker.com, Opinion: We Went To Jacob Wohl’s Most Important Press Conference Ever And It Was Everything We’d Hoped It Would Be, Thornton McEnery, Nov. 1, 2018. When we left our quiet, comfortable home in the pre-dawn darkness to drive alone to Washington DC this morning, we did so with the solitary hope the eventual reward would warrant our sacrifice.
Oh, how it did.
Awaiting us hours down I-95 was the promise of a press conference being hosted by our old pal Jacob Wohl and some MAGA DC lawyer that he’d pulled into his latest venture: becoming a global private eye hellbent on destroying prosecutor Robert Mueller. According to Jacob’s pre-sale, he was going to present a victim of sexual assault who would claim that her abuser was none other than Mueller himself. Our boy Jacob was going to show her off to the assembled press at a Holiday Inn in Arlington, VA and end the long investigation into his adopted daddy, President Donald Trump.
We had spent the previous day watching Jacob’s whole plan unravel in the most JacobWohlian way possible. The investigation firm that he claimed had contacted him turned out to be yet another of his adorable shell companies with a web registration bearing his email and a phone number that rang back to his mom’s cell. He had also apparently forgotten to update the photo template on the website he fabricated, leaving up bio headshots of famous actors and models, stock photo faces, and of course, his own head. The whole thing was very cute and dumb and totally what we’ve come to expect from Jacob over the years.
What we didn’t expect though was just how utterly fucking shambolic the whole presser would be once we finally arrived at the Rosslyn Holiday Inn....
New York Times, Opinion: A Party Defined by Its Lies: At this point, good people can’t be good Republicans, Paul Krugman, right, Nov. 1, 2018. Paul Krugman joined The New York Times in 1999 as an Op-Ed columnist. He is distinguished professor in the Graduate Center Economics Ph.D. program and distinguished scholar at the Luxembourg Income Study Center at the City University of New York. In addition, he is professor emeritus of Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School.
President Trump epitomizes the problem of lying by Republicans, but he is far from the only one.
During my first year as an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times, I wasn’t allowed to use the word “lie.”
That first year coincided with the 2000 election, and George W. Bush was, in fact, being systematically dishonest about his economic proposals — saying false things about who would benefit from his tax cut and the implications of Social Security privatization. But the notion that a major party’s presidential candidate would go beyond spin to outright lies still seemed outrageous, and saying it was considered beyond the pale.
Obviously that prohibition no longer holds on this opinion page, and major media organizations have become increasingly willing to point out raw falsehoods. But they’ve been chasing a moving target, because the lies just keep getting bigger and more pervasive. In fact, at this point the G.O.P.’s campaign message consists of nothing but lies; it’s hard to think of a single true thing Republicans are running on.
And yes, it’s a Republican problem (and it’s not just Donald Trump). Democrats aren’t saints, but they campaign mostly on real issues, and generally do, in fact, stand for more or less what they claim to stand for. Republicans don’t. And the total dishonesty of Republican electioneering should itself be a decisive political issue, because at this point it defines the party’s character.
What are Republicans lying about? As I said, almost everything. But there are two big themes. They lie about their agenda, pretending that their policies would help the middle and working classes when they would, in fact, do the opposite. And they lie about the problems America faces, hyping an imaginary threat from scary dark-skinned people and, increasingly, attributing that threat to Jewish conspirators.
Both classes of lie are rooted in the real G.O.P. agenda.
What Republicans truly stand for, and have for decades, is cutting taxes on the rich and slashing social programs. Sure enough, last year they succeeded in ramming through a huge tax cut aimed mainly at corporations and the wealthy, and came within one vote of passing a health “reform” that, according to the Congressional Budget Office, would have caused 32 million Americans to lose health coverage.
The G.O.P.’s problem is that this agenda is deeply unpopular. Large majorities of Americans oppose cuts in major social programs, while most voters want to raise, not reduce, taxes on corporations and high-income individuals.
But instead of changing their agenda to meet voters’ concerns, Republicans have resorted to a strategy of deception and distraction. On one side, they have gone full black-is-white, up-is-down on policy substance. Most spectacularly, they are posing as defenders of protection for people with pre-existing conditions — protection that their failed health bill would have stripped away, and which they are now trying to take away through the courts. And they’re claiming that Democrats are the ones threatening Medicare.
On the other side, they’re resorting to their old standby: race-based fear.
But selling racial fear was easier in the 1980s and early 1990s, when America really was suffering from high levels of inner-city crime. Since then, violent crime has plunged. What’s a fearmonger to do? The answer is: lie.
Oct. 31
U.S. Elections 2018
Washington Post, Trump, a self-styled ‘nationalist,’ turns midterms into a forum on American identity, Matt Viser, Oct. 31, 2018. President Trump escalated his rhetoric on immigration by vowing to end birthright citizenship, a move some experts say would run afoul of the Constitution. Trump’s sharpened tone also creates potential complications for some GOP candidates.
Washington Post, Commentary: Trump is wrong. He can’t revoke birthright citizenship, George T. Conway III and Neal Katyal, Oct. 31, 2018 (print edition). George T. Conway III is of counsel at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz [and husband of White House counselor Kellyanne Conway]. Neal Katyal is a partner at Hogan Lovells and former acting U.S. solicitor general in the Obama administration.
Sometimes the Constitution’s text is plain as day and bars what politicians seek to do. That’s the case with President Trump’s proposal to end “birthright citizenship” through an executive order. Such a move would be unconstitutional and would certainly be challenged. And the challengers would undoubtedly win.
Trump has long argued that birthright citizenship for the children of parents not legally in the United States should be abolished. “It’s ridiculous. And it has to end,” he told Axios in an interview released Tuesday, in which he disclosed his plan for the unilateral action.
But at its core, birthright citizenship is what our 14th Amendment is all about, bridging the Declaration of Independence’s promise that “all men are created equal” with a constitutional commitment that all those born in the United States share in that equality.
Washington Post, President Trump said House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) “should be focusing on holding the Majority rather than giving his opinions on Birthright Citizenship, something he knows nothing about!” John Wagner and Felicia Sonmez, Oct. 31, 2018. President Trump lashed out Wednesday at House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), right, over Ryan’s comments on birthright citizenship, saying he “should be focusing on holding the Majority.”
The extraordinary rebuke from Trump came one day after Ryan pushed back on the president’s remarks on the issue, saying “you cannot end birthright citizenship with an executive order.”
New York Times, The Trump Effect, Kobach’s Hand, Tester and DeWine Ads: 6 Days to Go, Matt Flegenheimer and Jonathan Martin, Oct. 31, 2018. Trump’s throw-everything-at-the-wall strategy a week before Election Day — particularly a constitutionally dubious call to end birthright citizenship — has brought new headaches for Republicans.
Republican officials have long had two questions about President Trump in the 2018 elections: Could he help when called upon, lending local candidates his #MAGA sheen in conservative ZIP codes? And could he avoid hurting the party’s cause too much everywhere else?
It’s the second one that’s worrying them now. Mr. Trump’s woeful approval rating in many swing districts is an issue, particularly in some suburban areas represented by Republicans where voters are dismayed at his presidency.
New York Times, How the Vilification of George Soros Moved to the Mainstream, Kenneth P. Vogel, Scott Shane and Patrick Kingsley, Oct. 31, 2018. A loose network of nationalists has used anti-Semitic imagery to cast Mr. Soros, the billionaire Democratic donor, as the shadowy leader of a globalist cabal. In the process, they have pushed their version of Mr. Soros from the dark corners of the internet and talk radio to the center of the political debate.
Trump / 'White Nationalism' / Racial Politics
Washington Post, Opinion: Trump finally gets the shunning he deserves, Jennifer Rubin, right, Oct. 31, 2018. I cannot imagine the families of those killed in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing refusing to meet with President Bill Clinton; or the families of the Sandy Hook children refusing to meet with President Barack Obama; or the families of 9/11 victims refusing to meet with President George W. Bush; or the shuttle Challenger crew’s family refusing to meet with President Ronald Reagan in 1986.
These presidents, whatever you think of their politics, were decent men, in possession of empathy and a deep understanding of the enormity of the office they held.
The bipartisan refusal of federal, state and local officials (including the Republican speaker and Senate majority leader) to accompany Trump to Pittsburgh and, thereby, condone his self-absorbed presidential photo-op was remarkable and, in a way, unifying.
Palmer Report, Opinion: The real reason the GOP is suddenly trying to finish off its own Congressman Steve King, Bill Palmer, Oct. 30, 2018. For years, the Republican Party leadership has been just fine with the racist, xenophobic rhetoric coming from GOP Congressman Steve King of Iowa [shown at left].
That’s suddenly changed this week, and the GOP leadership is officially branding King as a racist, just one week before the midterm elections. So what’s really going on here?
Palmer Report, Opinion: Kanye West declares “I’ve been used” and gives up on Donald Trump, Bill Palmer, right, Oct. 30, 2018. It looks like Kanye West has finally figured out what the rest 
of us have known for awhile: Donald Trump and his allies have been using Kanye for craven political purposes. That’s according to an uncharacteristically coherent message posted by Kanye on Twitter this evening, explaining how and why he’s giving up on the whole Trump thing.
The final straw appears to be the “Blexit” stunt by Trump surrogate Candace Owens, centered around merchandise urging black people to abandon the Democratic Party, launched under Kanye West’s name. According to Kanye, he had nothing to do with it, and his name was misappropriated.
Kanye West is – and we don’t say this to be mean – clearly not well. His recent political rants have been painful to watch. Donald Trump has been cruelly taking advantage of a psychologically vulnerable person in the name of race baiting. So it’s a good thing for all involved that Kanye is stepping off the Trump train. We hope he gets the help he appears to need.
New York Times, In Florida Rally, Trump Calls Constitutional Citizenship Protections ‘a Crazy Policy,’ Katie Rogers, Oct. 31, 2018. The president told a rapt crowd that “illegal immigrants are not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States.” (Legal experts would widely disagree.)
With a somber trip to Pittsburgh to visit victims of a synagogue shooting behind him, President Trump flew to one of his favorite places in the world — Florida — on Wednesday to host another one of his high-decibel political rallies.
On Thursday, Mr. Trump will be in Missouri. Before the week is out, he will hit West Virginia, Montana and Indiana, all part of an 11-rally blitz leading to the midterm elections on Tuesday.
That is fast, even for him.
For Mr. Trump, the next five days feature battleground states where the Republican Party’s hold on the House is in peril and come on the heels of a high-profile Twitter slap at Speaker Paul Ryan, who shot down Mr. Trump’s latest promise to issue an executive order denying birthright citizenship to people born to undocumented immigrants.
Mr. Trump was here to stump for Gov. Rick Scott, who is mounting a challenge against the incumbent Senator Bill Nelson, and for Ron DeSantis, a former Republican congressman facing a tight governor’s race against Andrew Gillum, the Democratic mayor of Tallahassee. On Twitter, Mr. Trump has accused of Mr. Gillum of running one of the most “corrupt” cities in the United States, a point Mr. DeSantis himself tried to hammer home onstage.
“I’m the only guy,” Mr. DeSantis said, “who can credibly say I’m not under investigation for corruption.”
The crowd responded with a chant tailored for Mr. Gillum, right, who has struggled amid investigations into his connections with a lobbyist tied to an F.B.I. investigation, and accepting gifts from an undercover agent: “Lock Him Up.”
Along with denouncing Democrats and journalists, Mr. Trump — and the candidates who model themselves in his image — has made immigration, and fears about it, the cornerstone of efforts to animate Floridians to vote for Republicans.
New York Times, Democratic Dark-Money Group Floods the Zone With $30 Million, Alexander Burns, Oct. 31, 2018. A structure unknown even to some of those involved, Floridians for a Fair Shake and 13 other groups around the country are funded and coordinated out of a single office in Washington, with the goal of battering Republicans for their health care and economic policies during the midterm elections.
The Hub Project — run by a former Obama administration official and public relations specialist, Leslie Dach, and Arkadi Gerney, a former political strategist for the liberal Center for American Progress — set up an array of affiliate groups around the country, many with vaguely sympathetic names like Keep Iowa Healthy, New Jersey for a Better Future and North Carolinians for a Fair Economy. The Hub Project then used them to mobilize volunteers and run advertising on policy issues against Republican members of Congress many months before the election.
More than a dozen of the targeted lawmakers remain among the most endangered incumbents this year, including Representatives Rod Blum of Iowa, Bruce Poliquin of Maine, Steve Knight of California and George Holding of North Carolina.
The quiet onslaught embodied two of the most important strategic choices by Democrats in the 2018 elections — putting health care and taxes at the core of their message, and using invigorated fund-raising on the left to challenge Republicans even in conservative-leaning areas. Several Democratic operatives involved in the group likened its role to that of Americans for Prosperity, the conservative advocacy network funded by the billionaire Koch brothers, during the Obama administration, albeit on a significantly smaller scale.
Mr. Gerney displayed no ambivalence about using undisclosed contributions — traditionally a source of dismay for Democrats — to punish Republicans for last year’s $1.5 trillion tax law and their attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
“We don’t believe in unilateral disarmament,” Mr. Gerney said.
Washington Post, Democrat says conservative group Project Veritas infiltrated her campaign in Va.’s tight 7th District, Laura Vozzella, Oct. 31, 2018. A conservative group that creates undercover “sting” videos infiltrated the campaign of Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat in a tight race with Rep. Dave Brat in Virginia’s 7th District.
The campaign said a young woman working for Project Veritas posed as a Democratic volunteer and spent every day over the past several weeks in Spanberger’s suburban Richmond campaign office, performing basic office tasks — and peppering her office mates with questions that eventually raised red flags.
Campaign staffers on Wednesday confronted her and asked her to leave, a video released by the campaign shows. “Dirty tricks like these are the worst part of politics, and this is exactly what Abigail is running to change,” Spanberger’s campaign manager, Dana Bye, said in an email. “We are proud of the campaign we have run, and wonder if Congressman Brat and his allies can say the same. While others may scrape the bottom of the barrel out of desperation, Abigail and our campaign will remain focused on talking to our neighbors on their doorsteps about the issues that matter to our community — that’s the campaign voters deserve and it’s the campaign that we believe will carry us to victory.”
Washington Post, Pittsburgh shooting suspect charged in 44-count hate crime indictment, Matt Zapotosky, Devlin Barrett and Mark Berman, Oct. 31, 2018. Robert Bowers, 46, of Baldwin, Pa., was charged in the shooting deaths of 11 people at Tree of Life synagogue on Saturday. The charges against him could carry the death penalty, though that will be decided later by Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
New York Times, Senator Claire McCaskill, a Democrat in a tough race in Missouri, slammed “crazy Democrats” on Fox News, Liam Stack, updated on Oct. 31, 2018. Senator 
Claire McCaskill, the Missouri Democrat facing one of the country’s toughest re-election races, raised eyebrows on Monday when she distanced herself from leading members of her own party, including two possible presidential hopefuls, Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, in a Fox News interview about “crazy Democrats.”
Ms. McCaskill, right, who has been attacked by her Republican challenger, Josh Hawley, as too liberal for Missouri, was asked on Fox about a radio ad that sunnily describes her as “not one of those crazy Democrats.”
When asked who she considered to be crazy Democrats, Ms. McCaskill pointed to liberal activists who have publicly confronted Trump administration officials and other Republican figures in recent months.
Looking Back: Dirty Tricks or Scandal?
Model Donna Rice and 1988 Democratic presidential candidate Gary Hart, a Colorado senator taking a cruise on a yacht named Monkey Business.The photo, allegedly a political dirty trick set up against Hart, was taken during the campaign by Rice's friend Lynn Armandt and provided to the news media
People, 31 Years After Gary Hart Sex Scandal, Donna Rice Hughes Can Feel PTSD from Old Media Firestorm, Sandra Sobieraj Westfall, Oct. 31, 2018. At first, she hoped she could remain anonymous.
When The Miami Herald‘s bombshell front-page headline — “Miami woman is linked to Hart; Candidate denies any impropriety” — hit newsstands on May 3, 1987, the 29-year-old woman in question thought her name could be kept out of what quickly spun into the first big political scandal of its kind. Hart, of course, was Gary Hart, the married U.S. senator from Colorado who, at the time, seemed to be coasting toward the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination.
The woman, spied by Herald reporters who staked out Hart’s Washington, D.C., home to investigate his reputation for womanizing, was Donna Rice, then a pharmaceutical sales rep and model-actress living in Miami.
Known today by her married name, Donna Rice Hughes spoke exclusively to PEOPLE for the new issue on newsstands Friday, ahead of the Nov. 21 nationwide opening of The Front Runner, director Jason Reitman’s big-screen retelling of the 1987 sex scandal that shut down Hart’s campaign and tarred Hughes, in her words, as a “bimbo, homewrecker, sleaze.”
“The Miami Herald didn’t know my identity. Somebody in the Hart campaign released my name to the media and so within the day the story broke, my name and other things were released,” Hughes, now 60, recalls in an interview at the kitchen table of the D.C.-area home she shares with her husband, Jack, a tech-industry businessman.
See also: The Atlantic, Was Gary Hart Set Up? James Fallows, Oct. 16, 2018. November 2018 issue, What are we to make of the deathbed confession of the political operative Lee Atwater, newly revealed, that he staged the events that brought down the Democratic candidate in 1987?
Oct. 30
Washington Post, Trump’s quiet visit to a grieving Pittsburgh met with hostility, Seung Min Kim, Josh Dawsey and Mark Berman, Oct. 30, 2018. The White House invited the top Republicans and Democrats in Congress and local leaders. Pittsburgh’s mayor had urged the president not to visit until after the funerals.
President Trump (shown in a file photo of an Economist cover) visited a grief-stricken Pittsburgh on Tuesday in a trip meant to unify after tragedy, but his arrival provoked protests from residents and consternation from local officials in the aftermath of the synagogue shooting that left 11 people dead.
The hastily planned day trip — which the city’s mayor urged Trump not to make — was executed with no advance public itinerary and without congressional and local politicians. Some had declined to accompany the president, and others were not invited.
Trump did not speak publicly during his brief trip, instead quietly paying tribute at Tree of Life synagogue by laying flowers for the 11 victims and visiting a hospital to see officers who were wounded in Saturday’s shooting. But Trump’s trip to the area so soon after the attack tore open political tensions in the largely Democratic city, as residents angered by Trump’s arrival protested even as the first couple tried to keep a low profile during the solemn, afternoon visit.
Washington Post, A mass shooting and a Trump visit expose a divided U.S., Greg Jaffe, Oct. 30, 2018. Pittsburgh and its suburbs are a reflection of a country so fractured that many in the area are asking whether the president and his most ardent supporters bear some culpability for the tragedy. Others bristle with anger at the suggestion.
Mueller Claims Phony Sex Claims Against Him
The Atlantic, Mueller Wants the FBI to Look at a Scheme to Discredit Him, Natasha Bertrand, Oct. 30, 2018. The special counsel says a woman was offered money to fabricate sexual-harassment claims.
A company that appears to be run by a pro-Trump conspiracy theorist offered to pay women to make false claims against Special Counsel Robert Mueller (right) in the days leading up to the midterm elections — and the special counsel's office has asked the FBI to weigh in.
“When we learned last week of allegations that women were offered money to make false claims about the Special Counsel, we immediately referred the matter to the FBI for investigation,” the Mueller spokesman Peter Carr told me in an email on Tuesday.
The special-counsel office’s attention to this scheme and its decision to release a rare statement about it indicates the seriousness with which the team is taking the purported plot to discredit Mueller in the middle of an ongoing investigation. Carr confirmed that the allegations were brought to the office’s attention by several journalists, who were contacted by a woman who identified herself as Lorraine Parsons. Another woman, Jennifer Taub, contacted Mueller's office earlier this month with similar information.
The woman identifying herself as Parsons told journalists in an email, a copy of which I obtained, that she had been offered roughly $20,000 by a man claiming to work for a firm called Surefire Intelligence — which had been hired by a GOP activist named Jack Burkman — “to make accusations of sexual misconduct and workplace harassment against Robert Mueller.”
Parsons wrote in her letter that she had worked for Mueller as a paralegal at the Pillsbury, Madison, and Sutro law firm in 1974, but that she “didn’t see” him much. “When I did see him, he was always very polite to me, and was never inappropriate,” she said. The law firm told me on late Tuesday afternoon, however, that it has “no record of this individual working for our firm.”
Parsons explained that she was contacted by a man “with a British accent” who wanted to ask her “a couple questions about Robert Mueller, whom I worked with when I was a paralegal for Pillsbury, Madison, and Sutro in 1974. I asked him who he was working for, and he told me his boss was some sort of politics guy in Washington named Jack Burkman. I reluctantly told [him] that I had only worked with Mr. Mueller for a short period of time, before leaving that firm to have my first son.”
Surefire Intelligence describes itself as “a private intel agency that designs and executes bespoke solutions for businesses and individuals who face complex business and litigation challenges.” Surefire’s domain records list an email for another pro-Trump conspiracy theorist, Jacob Wohl, who began hyping a “scandalous” Mueller story on Tuesday morning.
Wohl told The Daily Beast that Burkman had hired Surefire to assist with his investigation into Mueller’s past, but denied knowing anything about the firm’s involvement in an alleged plot to fabricate allegations against Mueller when asked why his email address appeared in the domain records. He did not respond when asked by NBC why a telephone number listed on Surefire’s website referred callers to another number that’s listed in public records as belonging to Wohl’s mother.
In an emailed statement, Burkman denied knowing Parsons and called the FBI referral “a joke, mueller wants to deflect attention from his sex assault troubles by attacking me.” He added in a separate email that “on Thursday 1200 NOON ROSSYLN HOLIDAY INN we will present a very credible witness who will allege that Mr. Mueller committed against her a sexual assault.” Mueller’s spokesman reiterated that the claims are false.
Burkman, a conservative radio host, is known for spreading conspiracy theories. He launched his own private investigation into the murder of the Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich, dangled uncorroborated claims of sexual harassment against a sitting member of Congress, and earlier this year offered $25,000 to FBI whistle-blowers for any information exposing wrongdoing during the 2016 election.
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Meidas Touch Network, Insurrectionist GETS HIT with DEVASTATING News she DESERVES, Michael Popok
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FEMA Coordinating Officer John Boyle has been appointed to oversee federal recovery operations. Following Biden’s declaration, federal funding can be used for recovery efforts including temporary housing, home repairs, loans covering uninsured property losses and other individual and business programs, the White House said in a statement.
