Trump enters the stage

breitbart.com/politics/2018 … -campaign/

Yes, Fixed, the point is taken, but there is always a cross bleeding between the parties , Mcain was likewise I believe , so was Trump himself a one time democrat I think he changed affiliation five times meaning little except to show that there is great of uncertainty among the representation and what it is really that is being represented. Is it a matter of interest that can be gleaned from such variance, and does that imply one that is more a show of intentional self heading motives, or one that begins with socially constructed acts of benefit?

The deep South was at one time faithfully Democratic , so is it merely a matter of changing labels, due to the content of the dynamics having changed, or is it merely an example of irrefuted presence of some thing much more ominous, the sunset of the political corrected lack of transparency? Such is usually subject of undeniably falsified heavily funded
Political expression , regardless of their validity .

That is the cesspool, and the most that can be said about it, is that its consistent with more mud slinging
then efforts to clarify the reasons and possible outcome of gaining social rather then personal benefits.

I think to a larger part the latter , the need to hold roles of power , is the facade behind which such tremendous shifts occur, irrespective of public support or gain, and this is why, all is in such turmoil now, because it’s election time.

If things don’t turn out well for either party, the fixers can always come in, to gain precious time, to try to minimize the damage by using the public’s loss of memory in direct proportion to regain support.

President Trump derided rival billionaire Tom Steyer as a “wacky” and “crazed & stumbling lunatic” on Sunday, after Steyer – who was one of the prominent liberals to receive a threatening suspicious package last week – said he “absolutely was blaming” Trump for creating an atmosphere in which “anything can bubble up, and anything is bubbling up.”

POLITICO

How a Democratic majority could undermine the Mueller probe
If Democrats retake the House, they want to aggressively open probes into issues the special counsel is also investigating.

By DARREN SAMUELSOHN 10/28/2018 05:04 PM EDT
Adam Schiff
Rep. Adam Schiff, the likely new chairman of the House Intelligence Committee if Democrats win power in November, has signaled plans to focus on unfinished business related to the Russia investigation. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

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Democrats have religiously deferred to special counsel Robert Mueller over the last 17 months, hamstrung by their lack of congressional power and expressing faith that the respected investigator will get the job done if left alone.

That could all change after November.

Story Continued Below

If Democrats retake the House in the midterm elections, they’re prepared to use their newfound subpoena power to aggressively open probes into President Donald Trump’s finances and connections to Russia. But doing so — just as Mueller appears to be entering the final laps of his own probe — would create tensions between the special counsel and a newly crowned majority party replenished by scores of freshman lawmakers who rode into Capitol Hill on an anti-Trump wave.

House Democratic aides have been meeting informally in recent months to discuss ways to do their jobs while avoiding stepping on Mueller’s toes in 2019, even toying with the idea of calling the special counsel in for a private bipartisan briefing.

“The House may want to start their oversight by bringing in special counsel Mueller to hear from him,” said former California Rep. Henry Waxman, who chaired the House Oversight Committee during the final two years of the George W. Bush administration and has been meeting informally with House Democrats to discuss investigation strategies.

Potential conflicts could come on many fronts. For starters, Democrats will be eager to see Mueller’s findings and hard-pressed to give him space if he’s not finished yet. If Mueller’s Justice Department supervisors resist making the special counsel’s work public, a clash could emerge.

Perhaps most potentially disruptive: Democrats could cause Mueller problems if they start granting immunity to witnesses whom the special counsel still wants to question or prosecute.

“It’s something that I think we have to handle with great care,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) conceded last week during an event at Harvard University.

“We won’t interfere,” the potential next House speaker added. “We shouldn’t. We won’t. But we do have to have one thing that we should all agree on: the truth for the American people and where the truth leads us is another thing.”

Pelosi’s pledge is easier said than done, though, with early signs that the two sides could overlap just as Democrats gear up for an open 2020 presidential primary season.

Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee earlier this year released a “partial list” of more than 70 people, organizations and companies they said Republicans refused to fully pursue as part of their Russia investigation.

California Rep. Adam Schiff, the likely new chairman of the panel if Democrats win power in November, has signaled plans to focus on that unfinished business, including hearings on suspected money laundering at the Trump Organization and issuing a subpoena for communications between the president and his oldest son, Donald Trump Jr., surrounding a 2016 meeting with a Russian attorney who was promising to deliver dirt on Hillary Clinton.

On the House Judiciary Committee, Democrats poised to begin impeachment proceedings have offered up an oversight road map that signals potential conflicts with Mueller. In August, they called for a Justice Department briefing to glean more details about former Trump personal lawyer Michael Cohen’s guilty plea and the allegations that Trump directed him to break campaign finance laws. They’ve also called for an examination into Trump potentially abusing his pardon power, as well as his associates implicated in crimes from the Mueller investigation.

It’s not known to what extent Mueller is probing these areas, but Democrats concede that poking around could inadvertently draw out the special counsel’s own investigative interests far sooner than the special counsel might like.

“It’s a problem I’d like to have one day,” said a senior House Democratic aide.

Come January, Democrats say they will reassess their oversight plans based on the election outcome and to take into account whatever stage Mueller is at in his investigation. They’ll also need to consider whether Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein remain in their jobs. Trump has signaled interest in changing up his DOJ leadership, a move that would mean new oversight of the special counsel’s investigation.

If history is any guide, an aggressive Congress and the Justice Department don’t always get along, especially when there’s an independent counsel involved.

Already, there are ongoing disputes between Trump-allied Republicans on Capitol Hill and the Justice Department over documents and briefings tied to the origins of the government’s Trump-Russia investigation.

Story Continued Below

Further back, in 2008, Democrats — led by Waxman — argued that President George W. Bush thwarted their investigations into the leak of a covert CIA officer’s identity by invoking executive privilege in response to a subpoena for Vice President Dick Cheney’s testimony to the FBI.

And during the investigations into the Reagan administration’s secret sale of arms to Iran, Congress’ decision to offer immunity in exchange for testimony from retired Marine Corps Lt. Col. Oliver North and Reagan national security adviser John Poindexter drove a federal appeals court to vacate the two officials’ convictions.

Lt. Col. Oliver North
Lt. Col. Oliver North testifies before Congress in the Iran-Contra probe. Congress’ decision to offer immunity to North and John Poindexter later led to their convictions being reversed. | AP Photo

The Watergate scandal was a rare example of the judicial and congressional branches working in tandem. Special prosecutor Leon Jaworski in 1974 even sent a road map of his work with a federal grand jury to the House Judiciary Committee, which helped pave the way for impeachment proceedings and President Richard Nixon’s resignation.

Not all legal experts believe having Congress put its stamp on work that’s simultaneously part of an active law enforcement probe is a bad thing.

“Being supportive of an investigation doesn’t in the end mean deferring to the criminal investigators,” said John Q. Barrett, a former associate counsel who worked under independent counsel Lawrence Walsh during the Reagan-era investigation into secret U.S. arms sales to Iran. “When you’re the minority and powerless to do the investigation, then it’s easy to be cheering for the Justice Department investigation. But when you’re the majority and doing your own House investigation, you may well butt heads.”

Douglas Letter, a recently retired DOJ senior attorney who teaches at Georgetown University Law Center, noted that Congress and Mueller have “totally different goals.”

The congressional investigation is designed to give the American public a report on what happened in the 2016 election and “whether there’s anything political that can be made of it,” he said. Mueller, in the meantime, is a criminal investigator whose job is to identify crimes and prosecute the perpetrators.

But Republicans will be quick to pounce on the earliest whiff of oversight overreach. They’re primed to point out changes in tone from lawmakers who have been deferential to the Justice Department. Schiff, for example, has been insistent that DOJ shouldn’t give up information about core parts of the Mueller investigation.

“If the shoe is on the other foot in a month and a half, let’s see if he stays consistent,” said William Moschella, the former head of Justice Department legislative affairs office during the George W. Bush administration.

Trump allies slammed Pelosi earlier this week after she said during a CNN event that subpoena power was “a great arrow to have in your quiver in terms of negotiating on other subjects.”

“This is what they do in Third World countries. Disgusting concept and a slippery slope that America wants no part of,” Eric Trump wrote on Twitter.

“It’s about politics for them,” Mark Corallo, a former spokesman for the Trump personal legal team and the Bush DOJ, told POLITICO. “If they think there’s political advantage to stepping on the special counsel’s toes, they’ll do it.”

Most observers believe, though, that the Democrats will hold back from causing problems for Mueller, at least for a few months, if they take the majority. Some predicted that Democrats could even try to strike an arrangement with the special counsel to let his team operate for six months or so without significant congressional pressure.

For Democrats, though, that’s a narrow window before other demands start taking over, said Paul McNulty, a former George W. Bush deputy attorney general.

“There won’t be any purchase of a long-term peace,” he said.

Dark Knight, Westworld) to paint a very grim picture of the dangers of development, reliance upon, application of and usage of Artificial Intelligence in our society today.

According to a previously released statement about the film, Paine says, “I hope we inspire people to keep technological tools working on behalf of the greater good and stay aware of what’s happening in the meantime.” Yet the tone of the film seems to somewhat override such a noble goal to which the former part of the sentence aspires.

While there is some quick reference to the benefit that AI can provide mankind such as more accurate disease diagnosis and lessening of fatal car crashes via self-driving cars (which one would have the clear hope that the data relating to the number of self-driving car crashes changes fast in order to support such a statement), the majority of the film leans heavily toward doom and gloom with such terms as “Faustian bargain” used through the documentary to describe our interaction with advanced technology.

SpaceX founder and chief executive Elon Musk speaks after announcing Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa as the first private passenger on a trip around the moon, Monday, Sept. 17, 2018, in Hawthorne, Calif. Musk is also adamant regarding a conservative approach to Artificial Intelligence. (AP Photo/Chris Carlson)

The view that machines will dominate us because they will become “smarter” or simply teach themselves to pick their own targets and release missiles that will annihilate at will via autonomous weapons is reinforced throughout Do You Trust This Computer. Google is alluded to as being the dark, secretive seat of which personal data will be used for harm. And basically, anyone who has a job, no matter what their profession, will become unemployed.

And that’s the lighter side.

The issue with this documentary is, not that it gets any of the above completely wrong but that it offers no counter-views nor calls-to-action in an era of empowerment of individual voice, cultural paradigm shifts and growing enthusiastic movements pertaining to social good that could be harnessed to drive a better way in AI. It seems the filmmakers’ objective is paralysis by fear instead.

There are no directives about, for example, the importance of contacting policymakers to encourage proper regulation. There is no probing into why most of the life-like robots injected with AI always seem to take the shape of one’s (read: the male creator’s) ideal human you can finally get to do what you want. And the film misses a real opportunity for depth by not exploring how bias and subconscious make-up of engineers creating such algorithms impact the applications of them, how that can be combatted and the psycho-social reasons behind our need for and desire to control and replicate intelligence in the first place. That is the foundation for any discussion within artificial intelligence because it is the root cause for all that springs forth in terms the drive for continued expansion and application.

Ben Goertzel, chief scientist of Hanson Robotics Inc., left, interacts with the company’s humanoid robot “Sophia” during the Rise conference in Hong Kong, China, on Tuesday, July 10, 2018. The conference runs through July 12.

Where such other tech-docs succeed at creating connection is where Do You Trust Your Computer falls a bit short in that it seems to have no more cards to play than that of generalized fear. In an era of racial tension and identity politics, perhaps tie-ing the concerns around the technology in terms of how it relates specifically to that such particular emotionally-charged area could do more to elicit the concern the film seems so desperate to provoke rather than spreading around overall terror. One cannot reach people today just based on general mayhem because, unfortunately, this is the now the everyday occurrence (see: record-breaking hurricanes, bombs sent to media and much, much more). Such social movements that the film seems to be trying to spark typically need to be tied to a specific cultural narrative in order to take hold, and it does not.

This documentary is more a look at what, primarily, Caucasian males in prime positions (mixed with a sprinkling of a couple of Caucasian females) fear about Artificial Intelligence with no infusion of other minds, values and concerns about the technology from both inside and outside of the United States. Thus, the homogeneity also makes for a pacing that is, at times, monotonous.

New Jersey Senator Cory Booker who has expressed concern about the links of algorithms with prison sentencing and profiling. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)

While the interview subjects are noteworthy and the direction is solid, somehow this piece comes off as just a bit self-aggrandizing like a cold parent who glumly says, “I told you so” after a misbehaved child touches a stove to really see if it’s hot or not even after the parent says not to touch it. There is no real empathy here or deeper explanations around concerns and insights that are needed to help truly create change and understanding within the massively problematic area of AI that is so very much fraught with issues.

As viewers might sit and ponder after viewing such a film, perhaps that greater questions we should all be asking ourselves is not only how to do more than just worry about the potential ending of society by machines but also what to do, simultaneously, to make society patently better each day so that even makes it worth preserving anyway.

The achievement to synthesize by appearently inconsistent functional -utilitarian informational derivatives and pragmatic common sense notions, presenting a processed time testing of increasing rates of change of technical development, may present a continuous applied format, and get rid of increasing senses of uncertainty and fear. It is imperative to bypass missed variables which still present aggregates of overly wide assumptions.

’ forecasting power trends and public sentiment .’

In reference to the basic elevated mistrust of the intrusion of technology into political processes. (As in the basic charge leveled against Ms. Clinton’s negligence with her telephone.) - starting the expansion into the collusive efforts between suppression and analysis.
the truth versus fake contest between the center and the periphery; the liberal and conservative, and the nationalistic vs. the global signifiers.

Clinton reference is mine.

As there are already fear related opinions that express the likelihood of continuing tech intrusion into the upcoming Congressional election, the question is bound to arise of how the effect of uncertainty of this may bear on the outcome of the election, regardless of the relative truth or falsity of such a possibility.

There may come other opinions which again produce convincing arguments regarding the probable reality behind such possible conflation between various levels of probability/improbability: causing a reductio absurdum.

Artifizielintelligenz existiert schon. Es gibt es zwitschen den Bezeichnungen und Nuetzhaftlichkeiten. Werthe ohne Bekanntheit oder Dastellung, oder nie schlafend… Sie schaffen sich einen Neunen Realitaet aus unserer Nichtshaftlichkeit.

That’s good. But when I am having insomnia, it is when everyone can pretend to be unconcerned, and unconnected. A reversal can/may take place on a Universal transformative metamorphosis, and that is maybe the missing transcendental link sought for .

Artifizielintelligenz existiert schon. Es gibt es zwitschen den Bezeichnungen und Nuetzhaftlichkeiten. Werthe ohne Bekanntheit oder Dastellung, oder nie schlafend… Sie schaffen sich einen Neunen Realitaet aus unserer Nichtshaftlichkeit.

President Donald Trump’s job approval rating plunged 4 percentage points last week amid a wave of violence, the latest troubling signal for Republican chances in upcoming midterm elections.

White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders held her first briefing in 26 days on Monday, following the murder of 11 people at a Jewish synagogue in Pittsburgh over the weekend. Not surprisingly, things went off the rails almost immediately after she began taking questions.

“This atrocity was a chilling act of mass murder, it was an act of hatred, and above all it was an act of evil,” Sanders said, at times choking up. “We all have a duty to confront anti-Semitism in all its forms…our nation mourns the loss of these extraordinary Americans.”

The nice sentiment lasted approximately 4.1 seconds, and the rest of the briefing was full of exchanges like this one, in which Sanders exploded at the suggestion that President Donald Trump isn’t “unifying” the country and proceeded to spit out the same drivel (90 percent of what the media says about Trump is negative! No one blames Bernie Sanders for Steve Scalise’s shooting!!!) that you could have found on MAGA Twitter since we found out suspected mailbomber Cesar Sayoc was a Trump superfan.

And so it goes on.

There is no way this problem can be solved long term .

Short term yes, by invictivrs, political cowering, simulated guesses and approximations, even now, the puzzling anxiety ridden atmosphere blown up to unrecognizable dimensions, philosophy become life become a zoo filled with dead end zones of unphilosophical enigma.

No, the dialogue must produce more then an assumed theme based on technical manpower shifting zombies living in insecurity depending on whims of broken down signs of derelict monuments to fallen denied heroes, the huge gamble of wait and see if they can live with it may turn the triangle up side down, the absurd will come back to haunt.

And if they can live in a secured thought out world without poaching vainly from their brother next door they do and can produce measured and controlled in a non wasteful market where 1 or 2 children will suffice.

Otherwise there be a chain down from controllers to the controlled , and at the very top big brother.

Or: The whole thing will collapse from greed and avarice.

It has to come from inside, substantial lack of covered inequality will not work because the soul of man will be stolen orbit will look like.

Can psychic realism tale center stage?

Like the Shadow, haunting by the hunted, it the race to find the rattiest , no longer human but living in a lonely convergence , bare sunlight illusive chains of spiraling grey vapor , the haunt is all about us, living as if,
as if the auto, Mata matters, Abstract
Mata is Stata’s matrix language. In the Mata Matters column, we show how Mata can be used interactively to solve problems and as a programming language to add new features to Stata. In this quarter’s column, we look at the programming implications of the floating-point, base-2 encoding that modern computers at ya Matt’s tarts data, infusion.

Of pleasing delight here and there, the signified not looking drastically but withering away from basic rot. No no no the new means absolute lobotomy of the past in abstraction, linger though the scent and the faint glow of undertow.

Philosophy

Primary secondary process
Universalization = opposites
Inervening variable shortcut
Boundaries - melting boundaries
Only top down trickle done
Short circuit - -memory - lost or stored in different file for upload
Shift to wider signifiers,
Older signifiers wider- more presumptive acceptance.
Changes in space time upon more
Shared presumption -hypothetical
Its on ok

Intellectual bonding or enclosing of
Mutually exclusive content
Alphaville scenario old hat

Carl Solomon

Brilliantly founded by Trump by contradiction brining the level down to where people get in touch with the widest possible logical foundation of denial and projection

Alteration or variation between storages short and long term forgotten and remembered with as many found fill ins makes and breaks space time

Different storages universal or regional~leads to Ayer/Russel reductio.

… …

… … …

… … … …

.
Yet from an aesthetic point of view, its binding to differentiate object from the overall subject, and is it that the focus of the feminine defines what the object is, the male objective of carefully calibrating what is, what it is?

Or uncovering it disassociating it from the predisposing one background, causing all kinds of trouble trump disassociating the transsexual being from their opposites have any bearing on representation. As art form?

It deprives the formal realization of intentional pre envisaged boundaries of the era of enlightenment enlightenment at least in art, the ideal testing in the phenomenal congruence.

That leaves parties to the aesthetic presumed vulnerability .

But can a focus be had to either when the edges are not blended?

That’s why excursions into real expression and impression, causing strange abstractions of what they really intended.

An existential failure .

Art for its sake turning into a misnomer.

Does that verify the preponderemce and place the signal which signifies the preferred objective?

Can distance and time emuliate finer contours again? To be great again or not to be, that is the question. But what’s so great about being (grate).

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Trump shocks with racist new ad days before midterms
Analysis by Stephen Collinson, CNN
Updated 1:58 AM EDT, Thu November 01, 2018

(CNN) In the most racially charged national political ad in 30 years, President Donald Trump and the Republican Party accuse Democrats of plotting to help people they depict as Central American invaders overrun the nation with cop killers.

The new spot, tweeted by the President five days before the midterm elections, is the most extreme step yet in the most inflammatory closing argument of any campaign in recent memory.

The Trump campaign ad is the latest example of the President’s willingness to lie and fear-monger in order to tear at racial and societal divides; to embrace demagoguery to bolster his own political power and the cause of the Republican midterm campaign.

The ad – produced for the Trump campaign – features Luis Bracamontes, a Mexican man who had previously been deported but returned to the United States and was convicted in February in the slaying to two California deputies.

“I’m going to kill more cops soon,” a grinning Bracamontes is shown saying in court as captions flash across the screen reading “Democrats let him into our country. Democrats let him stay.”

The ad recalls the notorious “Willie Horton” campaign ad financed by supporters of the George H.W. Bush campaign in the 1988 presidential election. Horton was a man and convicted murderer who committed rape while furloughed under a program in Massachusetts where Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis was governor.

The ad has since come to be seen as one of the most racially problematic in modern political history since it played into white fear and African-American stereotypes. It was regarded at the time as devastating to the Dukakis campaign.

Trump’s ad, while just as shocking as the Horton spot, carries added weight since, unlike its 1988 predecessor, it bears the official endorsement of the leader of the Republican Party – Trump – and is not an outside effort. Given that Trump distributed it from his Twitter account, It also comes with all the symbolic significance of the presidency itself.

In a first reaction, Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez said the ad was a sign of desperation and suggested that Trump was losing the argument over health care that is at the center of the Democratic campaign.

“This is distracting, divisive Donald at his worst,” Perez said on CNN’s “Cuomo Prime Time.”

“This is fear mongering. … They have to fear monger and his dog whistle of all dog whistles is immigration. This has been Donald Trump’s playbook for so long.”

“Family unification to invasion”
The Trump ad also flashes to footage of the migrant caravan of Central American asylum seekers that is currently in Mexico, which Trump says is preparing an invasion of the United States, implying that everyone in the column of people fleeing repression, poverty and economic blight is bent on murder and serious crime on US soil.

“Who else would Democrats let in?” a caption asks.

A source close to the White House told CNN’s Jim Acosta that the web ad was produced by Jamestown Associates for the Trump campaign for the midterms and was designed to fit into Trump’s broader immigration push and to change the argument from “family unification to invasion.”

“It’s clearly working. We are all talking about it and not health care,” the source said.

Trump has repeatedly warned that the caravan is laden with criminals or also includes Middle Eastern terrorists. He has offered no evidence for such claims, however, and even admitted last week there is no proof to support them.

Trump fills final days of midterms with false promises and divisive rhetoric
The President has also often used racially suggestive rhetoric in his tweets and launched his presidential campaign in 2015 with a tirade against Mexicans. But he accuses the media, which points out his frequent falsehoods and flaming rhetoric, of being to blame for national divides.

Controversy over the new ad is certain to explode across the final days of the election in which polls suggest Democrats could take back the House of Representatives but Republicans could keep or even expand their Senate majority.

The new campaign ad was the culmination of a day on which the President staked out ever more extreme positions.

He took advantage of his role as commander-in-chief to promise to triple the number of troops to 15,000 that he has pledged to send to the southern border to repel the caravan – which is still hundreds of miles away.

He also made a dubious claim of presidential power to reinforce his vow to change the Constitution on his own to end birthright citizenship that is guaranteed by the 14th Amendment.

A sign of weakness?
Trump’s combustible strategy is coinciding with an energetic final campaign swing featuring 11 rallies that opened in Florida on Wednesday night.

His increasingly inflammatory tactics are allowing him to refocus next Tuesday’s election on his chosen issues, after a week of serial bombings and shootings that drowned out his closing argument.

Still, Democrats are increasingly confident five days out that they will take back the House, which they lost in the 2010 midterms.

“Up until today, I would have said, 'if the election were held today, we would win,” former and possibly future speaker Nancy Pelosi said on “The Late Show” on CBS Tuesday.

“What now I’m saying is, we will win.”

Nancy Pelosi is right. Democrats should win the House on Tuesday.
One way of looking at Trump’s increasingly frantic approach is that it is a sign of political weakness, because it seems to be a bid to drive up turnout in red state Senate races but might imply that tight House elections, that could be affected by such rhetoric, are out of reach.

However, everyone wrote Trump off in 2016, and it’s possible his combative approach could defy pollsters again.

In another extraordinary development on Wednesday, the sitting President lashed out at the House speaker of his own party five days before an election, in a possible preview of a post-voting blame game.

Paul Ryan had had dismissed the President’s birthright gambit, but Trump told him in a tweet to do more to save the House.

“This is a great way to screw up the message a week before the election,” a senior GOP aide told CNN’s Acosta.

“First the birthright comment itself and now attacking the top Republican in Congress who is trying to save our majority.”

The President insisted he would not blame Ryan if Democrats won the House, though sounded less confident about Republican prospects in that chamber than in the Senate.

“I know we’re doing well in the Senate and it looks like we’re doing OK in the House. We’re going to have to see,” Trump told reporters.

Critics have accused Trump of abusing his power by sending troops to the southern border as part of a campaign stunt on a mission that has yet to be defined and he has implied will feature combat troops, but will in fact be made up of support forces.

But Defense Secretary James Mattis said Wednesday “we don’t do stunts” and said the troops were being sent to offer “practical support” at the request of the Department of Homeland Security.

However, Democratic Rep. Jackie Speier of California accused Trump of squandering taxpayer funds in a desperate bid to buy votes, and predicted the American people would see through the plan.

“We are sending 10 to 15,000 troops, which means we are going to spend between $100 (million) and $150 million so he can have, I guess his surprise, his October surprise,” she said on CNN’s “The Situation Room.”

Trump will Thursday press on with his pre-election blitz in Missouri, where he is trying to take out Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill in the first of two rallies in the state in the next few days. Before Tuesday he will also visit West Virginia, Indiana twice, Montana, Florida again, Georgia, Tennessee and Ohio.

But two senior GOP sources told CNN’s Jeff Zeleny that the President had been asked to steer clear of Arizona and Nevada amid concern he could hurt rather than help Republicans locked in tight Senate races.

Trump : as the playboy.
Of the western world.

Rehearsal for Playboy of the Western World

The riotous history of The Playboy of the Western World
When first staged in Dublin in 1907 JM Synge’s play caused a riot. Two years later its author was dead but his play was soon to go global
Declan Kiberd

Fri 23 Sep 2011 17.55 EDT First published on Fri 23 Sep 2011 17.55 EDT
'Whenever a country produces a man of genius," said WB Yeats of his friend John Millington Synge, “that man is never like the country’s idea of itself.”

Ireland in 1907 saw itself as ready for self-rule and it expected its artists to promote the image of a steady, sober, self-reliant people. Instead, with The Playboy of the Western World, Synge gave them a play in which a village loon splits his father’s head open with a spade, runs away, tells people he “killed his da” and is promptly installed as a hero by excitable women and drunken men. Worse still, this drama was staged not in some backstreet art-house, but at the Abbey, Ireland’s national theatre, one of whose mission statements was to show that Ireland was not the home of buffoonery but of an ancient idealism.

Even before the opening night of Saturday 26 January 1907, trouble was brewing. Synge’s relation with nationalists had always been uneasy. They didn’t like the frenchified themes of his earlier plays such as The Shadow of the Glen, in which a frustrated young wife in the Wicklow mountains walks away from her home and marriage into the arms of a tramp whose name she doesn’t even know.

Nationalists also resented the implication behind the Abbey project that there could ever be an Irish national literature in English, the language of the coloniser. Synge believed that there could, albeit in an English as Irish as it is possible for that language to be. So he created sentences in which standard English was reconfigured by peasants who were thinking still in Irish: “Is it you that’s going to town tomorrow?” “Is it tomorrow that you’re going to town?” Emphasis is achieved not by tonal underlining but by bringing the key word forward to the start of the sentence.

His labours to appease Irish Ireland were in vain. Protesters against his new play uttered “vociferations in Gaelic”, according to newspaper reports. They insisted that the Irish were not by nature a violent people – and on the second night they stormed the stage and rushed the actors to prove their point. Some of the actors were in silent agreement with them. The Abbey had, after all, recruited many stalwarts from the ranks of advanced nationalism, who had joined in the belief that it was one of the few liberated zones in an occupied country. No wonder that members of the cast felt conflicted. One Abbey hand had warned that the bad temper and violence on stage (the Playboy tries to repeat his murder before being burned by a lighted sod) would inevitably spill over into the pit.

Throughout Ireland, in the aftermath of the Playboy riots, local councils passed motions condemning the Abbey. Catholics took particular offence at the way in which a writer of Protestant Ascendancy background causes the Playboy, Christy Mahon, to utter such imprecations as: “With the help of God, I killed him surely, and may the holy immaculate mother intercede for his soul.” But others were outraged too. Some writers who had admired Synge’s earlier work felt that now he had gone too far. “It is not against a nation that he blasphemes,” wrote Patrick Pearse in a journal of the Gaelic League, “so much as against the moral order of the universe.” The Irish Times’s critic identified one cause of the trouble: “It is as if a mirror were held up to our faces and we found ourselves hideous. We fear to face the thing. We scream.”

Synge had some idea of what might happen. “My next play will make them hop,” he promised a friend. The role of Christy Mahon, father-slayer, was played by an actor who was the Woody Allen of the theatre, no more than five feet three inches in height and one normally cast in comic roles. It is a mark of the mediocrity of life in the Mayo village that peasant girls can turn such an unpromising figure into a celebrity. Christy provides a blank space which they can fill with their dreams.

At the centre of the play is a clear implication that the besetting vice of the Irish is not pugnacity but paralysis – a point made in the same period by the young James Joyce, in those short stories which would be published (after delays) as Dubliners in 1914.

It was predictable that ancient Gaelic hero-cults would flourish against a backdrop of social poverty and colonial torpor. The most notable of these surrounded the epic warrior Cuchulain, who fought and beheaded enemies in single combat, before dying strapped to a pillar while a raven drank his blood. That blend of pagan energy and Christlike suffering must have struck Synge as ridiculous. It was as if the Irish were being allowed to find only in the remote past a disguised version of the “muscular Christians” of the imperial present, a Celtic hero who was really just a public schoolboy in drag.

The audience at the Abbey on the opening night was predominantly male. Its members were already committed to the fabrication of male heroism through the Cuchulain texts of Yeats and Lady Gregory, which they saw as offering an antidote to the triumphalist militarism of the British imperial army.

Yeats was away in Scotland at the outset and Synge laid low with flu. Thinking all well, a relieved Lady Gregory (who didn’t like it at all) wired Yeats: “Play a great success.” Her next telegraph was different: “Audience broke up in disorder at the word shift.”

What offended were lines in which Synge had remodelled a scene in the life of Cuchulain. In the epic the hero underwent a “battle rage” after fighting, which so terrified his comrades that they would not permit him to reenter the city of Emain Macha. Eventually, they solved the problem in high style: 30 virgins were sent naked across the plain of Macha, walking towards the hero. Being a bashful lad, he blushed, bowed low, and, so the manuscripts say, “with that his battle rage left him”.

Rage turned to riot when Christy voiced his love for the publican’s daughter in a reprise of that scene: “It’s Pegeen I’m seeking only and what’d I care if you brought me a drift of chosen females, standing in their shifts itself maybe, from this place to the Eastern World?” Synge had clad his maidens in shifts, presumably to mollify strict moralists among his Abbey audience. But perhaps he half-suspected a truth which Hugh Hefner would later turn into a different Playboy business: that a scantily clad woman can be even more inflammatory to the jaded imagination of male puritans than one who is wholly naked.

The Russian writer Maxim Gorky found in the play “a subtle irony on the cult of the hero”. So did, in all fairness, many of the rioters. They were not fools or knaves, but proud, clever people, some of them leading public intellectuals who knew that their deepest convictions were being thrown into question.

Some may have felt that their very virility was being mocked. Synge’s play, like earlier dramas of Shaw and Wilde, is filled with gender-bending, based on the theory that womanly men are attracted and attractive to manly women. Christy’s delicate feet are fetishised by women who seem far more muscular than any man in the village. When some women catch Christy preening himself in a mirror, it is as if Synge is inverting that ancient pictorial tradition whereby a male artist placed a mirror in the hand of a female (who held it up to her face in a painting titled Vanity). Now, it is Christy who is tokenised as sex object and toyboy by village girls. As he holds the mirror shyly against his back (effectively holding it up to his own bottom), the women giggle: “Them that kills their fathers is a vain lot surely.”

If psychologists are right to say that the sense of masculinity is less strongly rooted in males than that of femininity in women, then it’s not surprising that members of the audience tried to vindicate their manhood by throwing punches or emitting howls. On Monday 28 January 1907 the play was mostly inaudible amid shouts of “kill the author”. On Tuesday a returned Yeats not only called in the Dublin Metropolitan Police (“Know I would accounted be / True brother of the DMP”) but identified for arrest those intellectuals whose names he knew. Outside, the young Sean O’Casey, who couldn’t afford the shilling admission fee, was pushed back and forth by what he called “Gaelic Leaguers foaming at the mouth”.

Synge insisted that his plot was not to be taken as social realism. Rather it was an “extravaganza”, a semi-abstract account of what he called “the psychic state of the locality”. The word “shift”, he pointed out, had been used without offence in Love Songs of Connacht, a best-selling collection edited by – of all people – the president of the Gaelic League. But then perhaps, he waspishly added, you could get away with things in Irish that you couldn’t smuggle through in English. In similar mode, he once delighted a hospital doctor by saying as he emerged from an anaesthetic: “May God damn the bloody Anglo-Saxon language in which a man can’t swear without being vulgar.”

Certain contemporaries thought that Synge was hurt more by the controversy than he pretended. That seems unlikely – he gave as good as he got, and then some. His own family turned a blind eye to the row. A nephew recalled that the morning after the riots, when papers were filled with reports, Synge’s mother disdained even to mention the topic. She never recognised his career or his genius.

Two years later, he was dead – but The Playboy was soon to go global. Abbey actors who brought it to the US were arrested. Back in Ireland, that same Patrick Pearse who had called for a boycott of the Abbey now began to identify with Synge, as he rehearsed his own martyr’s role as leader of the Easter rising. By 1913 Pearse had revised utterly his image of the playwright, describing him as a patriot who baffled his people by using images which they could not understand.

In the wider world, The Playboy was soon recognised as a masterpiece. A play about parricide, appearing just after Freud defined the Oedipus complex, was destined to fascinate. Antonin Artaud saw it as the true origin of the theatre of cruelty. The young Jean-Paul Sartre insisted on taking Simone de Beauvoir to repeated viewings, so that she might understand the existential values of a protagonist without filial obligation who “wished to derive only from himself”. Among socialists such as Bertold Brecht Christy was treated as a proletarian insurgent against a corrupt order, though Synge’s irony at the making and unmaking of celebrities may also inform one of Brecht’s most cited exchanges: "Unhappy the land that has no hero. No; unhappy the land that needs a hero. "

In Trinidad in the 1980s, Mustafa Matura rewrote the text as The Playboy of the West Indies. More recently, back in the Abbey, a Nigerian Christy from the pens of Bisi Adigun and Roddy Doyle is a new, urban, multicultural take on the old story. But the real author, like the true playboy, was Synge. As Bernard Shaw said: “His libel on Ireland was really the truth about the world.”

Not that everyone has loved it. When it was finally staged in the west of Ireland, audiences were bored rather than annoyed, saying that “You could see the like of that carry-on any day in the pub.” The dismissive view has had some distinguished overseas supporters. The poet Philip Larkin downed a second gin-and-tonic during the interval of a performance in the Oxford Playhouse, decided that it was “all balls” and didn’t go back for the second half. But then he didn’t need a Synge to tell him what your dad can do to you.

The Playboy of the Western World is at the Old Vic, London SE1, until 26 November. oldvictheatre.com

Democracy Dies in Darkness

Politics

National Security

With new indictment, U.S. launches aggressive campaign to thwart China’s economic attacks
By Ellen Nakashima

November 1, 2018 at 5:31 PM

Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a new initiative to combat what he says is mounting criminal economic activity by China. (The Washington Post)
The Justice Department on Thursday unveiled a broad new initiative to combat what it says is mounting criminal economic activity by China, announcing the plan as U.S. officials unsealed charges against several individuals and Chinese and Taiwanese companies for trade-secret theft.

Thursday’s actions follow a series of moves meant to put Beijing on notice. The Trump administration has prioritized countering threats to U.S. national and economic security as China seeks to supplant the United States as the world’s dominant economic power. The administration already has imposed tariffs on $250 billion worth of Chinese goods, and since September federal prosecutors have brought charges in three intellectual property theft cases allegedly involving Chinese spies and hackers.

“Chinese economic espionage against the United States has been increasing — and it has been increasing rapidly,” said Attorney General Jeff Sessions. “Enough is enough. We’re not going to take it anymore.”

Related: [Read the indictment against agents of the Chinese government]

The initiative is significant in that it fuses ongoing efforts within the FBI, Justice Department and other federal agencies into a single coordinated initiative, and sends a clear message to Beijing that Chinese economic espionage — whether by cyber or human means — will not be tolerated, officials said.

As both countries place greater emphasis on competition and security, the big question, analysts say, is whether the two governments can maintain commercial engagement despite increasing tensions over the quest for technological supremacy. In the meantime, Washington is signaling that the gloves are off.

Under the initiative, Sessions said, the department will aggressively pursue trade-secret theft cases, and develop a strategy to identify researchers and defense industry employees who’ve been “co-opted” by Chinese agents to transfer technology to China.

“China wants the fruits of America’s brainpower to harvest the seeds of its planned economic dominance,” Assistant Attorney General John Demers said. With this new initiative, he said, “we will confront China’s malign behaviors and encourage them to conduct themselves as they aspire to be one of the world’s leading nations.”

The indictment alleges the defendants conspired to steal trade secrets from Micron, an Idaho-based semiconductor company with a subsidiary in Taiwan. Micron is worth an estimated $100 billion and is the only company in the United States that makes “dynamic random-access memory,” or DRAM, high-capacity data storage used in computers, mobile devices and other electronics. The company has a 20- to-25 percent share of the world’s supply of DRAM, prosecutors said.

According to the indictment, the Chinese government set up a state-owned company, Fujian Jinhua Integrated Circuit Co. Ltd., for the express purpose of developing DRAM technology and sought to learn trade secrets through the criminal acts of former employees of Micron’s Taiwan branch.

In July 2015, the president of Micron’s Taiwan subsidiary, Chen Zhengkun, also known as Stephen Chen, left to join United Microelectronics Corp., a semiconductor foundry headquartered in Taiwan. Some months later, in early 2016, Jinhua, the Chinese company, began discussions with United Microelectronics to forge a technology cooperation agreemen, according to the indictment. Chen helped negotiate the agreement, and in early 2017 became president of Jinhua in charge of its DRAM factory, prosecutors said.

It was Chen, Sessions alleged, who orchestrated the theft of trade secrets from Micron worth up to $8.75 billion.

Chen is said to have recruited former colleagues, including defendant He Jianting, or J.T. Ho, a Taiwanese national, who before leaving Micron allegedly stole confidential DRAM materials, U.S. officials say. Chen also brought on defendant Kenny Wang, a Micron manager and Taiwanese national who allegedly stole more than 900 files, some containing confidential DRAM designs, the indictment says. Wang allegedly downloaded secrets from Micron’s servers in the United States and stored them on his Google Drive account, the indictment said.

“This was,” said U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of California Alex Tse, “some of the most advanced semiconductor technology in the world.”

If convicted, the defendants face up to 14 years in prison and $5 million in fines. The two companies, United Microelectronics and Jinhua, could face fines worth more than $20 billion. The three men charged Thursday are in China, U.S. officials said.

This week, the Commerce Department added Jinhua to its “entity list” to prevent it from buying goods and services in the United States, effectively cutting it off from the U.S. market. Without equipment sold only in the United States, Jinhua cannot build the DRAM chips.

The Justice Department on Thursday also filed a civil suit in San Francisco seeking to stop the further transfer of these stolen trade secrets and to prevent the defendants from exporting to the United States any products resulting from the alleged theft.

“We are not just reacting to crimes — we are acting to block the defendants from doing any more harm to Micron,” Sessions said.

The attorney general outlined a number of laws that prosecutors would use, including the Foreign Agents Registration Act, to identify unregistered agents seeking to advance China’s political agenda.

Congress in August passed the Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act to expand the government’s power to review investments from foreign countries — a response to China’s efforts to obtain U.S. technology through mergers, acquisitions and takeovers. Last month, the Treasury Department released interim rules to implement the new law. Sessions said the Justice Department will work with Treasury on further developing those regulations.

The Justice Department also will target Chinese threats to U.S. companies that provide components for sensitive technologies, especially those in the telecommunications sector as it readies for the transition to 5G networks.

“This is consistent with the state of confrontational actions over the last couple of weeks taken by the administration to tackle everything China’s trying to do,” said Samm Sacks, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “It’s bigger than intellectual property theft. It’s supply chain risk. It’s China’s efforts to be global leaders in 5G. It’s traditional espionage. It’s influence operations. This is part of a much broader whole-of-government approach to countering China’s efforts to gain strategic advantage, particularly in emerging technology.”

Sessions noted that earlier this year U.S. Trade Representative Robert E. Lighthizer found that Chinese sponsorship of hacking into American businesses has gone on for more than a decade. By some estimates, the cost to the U.S. economy is $30 billion annually. In September 2015 Chinese President Xi Jin Ping pledged that China would not target U.S. companies for the economic benefit of nonmilitary Chinese companies.

“Obviously that commitment has not been met,” Sessions said.

Dmitri Alperovitch, a cyber expert and chief technology officer at the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, said the Chinese military curtailed its commercialhacking in 2016, but that over the last year operatives affiliated with China’s Ministry of State Security have increasingly taken up the slack, stealing military, medical, agricultural, high-tech and other secrets.

For months, the Trump administration has been considering ways to decouple the U.S. and Chinese tech sectors: restricting visas for Chinese students in the scientific, engineering and math fields, banning Chinese telecommunications equipment companies from U.S. 5G networks, expanding export controls on U.S. tech firms, and increasing official scrutiny of Chinese investments and joint U.S.-Chinese research, said Sacks.

“This initiative is an important set of hammer blows against China’s efforts to disadvantage American companies, steal their intellectual property, and exercise unwanted influence in our universities and political system,” said James Mulvenon, a China expert and general manager of SOS International LLC’s Special Programs Division, which provides consulting services to intelligence and defense agencies.

559 Comments
Ellen Nakashima is a national security reporter for The Washington Post. She covers cybersecurity, surveillance, counterterrorism and intelligence issues. She has also served as a Southeast Asia correspondent and covered the White House and Virginia state politics. She joined The Post in 1995.

It seems as if a delicate balance is put up, in terms of probability of discerned opinions regarding I eternal and external issues.

That said, the calibrations are very carefully evaluated by experts who are using very sensitive weights to move them either left or right.

I suspect the scene will enhance the middle , albeit hidden, but come useful when the next big litmus test comes around.

brief sub analysis as to underlying structural motives:

Religion successfully covered the object: carried up the hill by Sysyphus, even to the brink of faith: and then the final break, and angst and despair set in.

People were unable to carry willfully an object, that lost its value, because they started to remember it, and fear its total loss, intuiting that they can never really reach the goal of setting foot on that plateau, by the time the goal appeared within sight, it has lost a lot of that value, it somehow diminished.

Now the cover was no longer necessary, because there was so little left; to cover.

So now the clincher. The angst developed into the fear, the specific fear of mortality with no returns, and it was based on perception of the futility of the goal related to the value of being, as an existential crisis, foremost as apart in alienation.

More and more got alienated, and the more it got uncovered from families , particularly the heads of families : the Father.

So they needed support. Social support. They needed it more as the ideal families started to fall apart, in proportion to it.

It has slowly resulted in a crisis, where the father started to leave the family, and the mother had to take over.

The mother had to become self sufficient, and increasingly sought help from agencies that could give a hand to increase her perception of security.

What resulted is a willingness to trade ideal values for security. The need to become somebody that could face life and death with more and more like people, which added to the feeling that if they were to become more alike, then the fear of will be perpetually diminished, since they did not fear lookin. through an ideal state as the father did , but envisioned a perpetuum of alike and liked , by familiarity, their own families disintegrating and becoming dysfunctional , they pine for familiarity, of resembling qualities in people.

And most of it done in remembrance of the Son, their son.

How is this significant?

This is hard to understand , but in developing countries qualities and characteristics are more valued as racial characteristic then cross national-political Alliances.

The mortal fear is allayed somewhat by global identifocation of power motives, and the prior colonisation does bode for trouble when reactions start to pop up , as they are now, in many parts of the world.

The fear of eruption and subsequent suppression of them, create the overall con flirting tableau, to those, who think that short term band aid affects will fool such large cover ups, by clever oratory based on contradictory subterfuge.

However given the extremely ideological machines on both sides, of is yet a matter of conjecture which set of advertised program will be more credible overall… The enormous power of the U.S. military empire , holding together by the threat of unlimited war, caused pop ups all over the world. Angela of Germany resigned, under tremensous pressure May of Britain is under constant pressure by a male dominated international syndicate.

That is the real name of the game, and both sides do have warranted gripes not at all in conjunction with internationally cohesive sane dialogue, and all fear the oncoming insanity of a probable real war.

To avoid it , it is imperative that a cohesive and stable multi leveled political standard be set, regardless of those few power mad , who would see it as an opportunity to radically reduce population as a.solution, and profit qualitatively, at least.

Imagine some very uncompromised men sitting with members of their tribe conjoined , relishing the thought of survival on their misinformed retro-looking terms into the manna loaded haven of qualifying a new life with a new oncoming visions of nature’s retributive solutions.

Impossible? Think again.

The New York Times

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Why Aren’t Democrats Walking Away With the Midterms?
Democrats miss Trump’s political gifts and the immigration at a campaign rally

Nov. 2, 2018
The night Donald Trump was elected was supposed to be, for most liberals and a few conservatives, the beginning of the end of the world. The economy would surely implode. The U.S. would probably blunder into a catastrophic war. The new American president would be blackmailed into conducting foreign policy as Putin’s poodle.

None of that has happened — not yet, at any rate. On Friday, The Wall Street Journal reported the fastest rate of annual wage hikes in almost a decade, depriving Democrats of one of their few strong arguments about the true state of the economy. Unemployment is at its lowest rate since Vince Lombardi coached his last game in December 1969. The North American Free Trade Agreement has been saved with minor modifications and a new name.

Oh, and: The Islamic State is largely defeated. Tehran has not restarted its nuclear programs despite America’s withdrawal from the Iran deal. U.S. sanctions on Russia are still in place. Democrats badly damaged their chances of taking the Senate with their over-reaching and polarizing crusade to stop Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court. What more could Trump ask for?

In normal presidencies, good news, along with your opponents’ mistakes, is good politics. It’s your Topic A. In normal presidencies, the politics of cultural anxiety, social division or ethnic scaremongering — that is, of proposing the end of birthright citizenship and demonizing elite media and militarizing the U.S. border — is Plan B. It’s what you turn to first when you don’t have enough to say for yourself otherwise.

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But that’s not how the Trump presidency rolls. In this campaign, fear is what’s on the Republican menu. Peace and prosperity? Mere side dishes.

The mystery of Donald Trump is what impels him to overturn the usual rules. Is it a dark sort of cunning or simple defects of character? Because the president’s critics tend to be educated and educated people tend to think that the only kind of smarts worth having is the kind they possess — superior powers of articulation combined with deep stores of knowledge — those critics generally assume the latter. He’s a bigot. He’s a con artist. His followers are dumb. They got lucky last time. They won’t be so lucky again.

Maybe this is even right. But as Trump’s presidency moves forward, it’s no longer smart to think it’s right. There’s more than one type of intelligence. Trump’s is feral. It strikes fast. It knows where to sink the fang into the vein.

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This has been Trump’s consistent strength from the moment he entered the Republican race until the second he got wind of the migrant caravan. Yes, his administration doesn’t even have an ambassador in Honduras, and if the U.S. has any kind of coherent Central American policy it would be news to me. Also, the idea of deploying thousands of U.S. troops to repel and even fire on the caravan is repellent, fascistic and probably unlawful.

Image
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Central American migrants crossing the Suchiate River on Friday to enter Mexico from Guatemala.CreditCarlos Garcia Rawlins/Reuters
Still, several thousand people are pushing their way to the U.S. border with the idea that they will find a way to push their way through it. If they do, tens or even hundreds of thousands more will surely follow. It’s perfectly reasonable for fair-minded voters to wonder how the U.S. will vet and then absorb even a fraction of them (though I think we easily can), and what doing so will mean for our wider immigration system.

To which the Democratic response is — what, exactly?

If it’s “compassion,” it’s a non-answer. If it’s to abolish ICE, it’s a dereliction of responsibility for governance. If it’s to open the border, it is an honest form of political suicide. If it’s more trade and foreign aid for Central America, that’s a solution for the too-long term.

The truth is that there is no easy fix to the challenge of the caravan, which is why Trump was so clever to make the issue his own and Democrats have been so remiss in letting him have it. The secret of Trump’s politics is to mix fear and confidence — the threat of disaster and the promise of protection — like salt and sugar, simultaneously stimulating and satisfying an insatiable appetite. It’s how all demagogues work.

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I have written previously that the real threat of the Trump presidency isn’t economic or political catastrophe. It’s moral and institutional corrosion — the debasement of our discourse and the fracturing of our civic bonds. Democrats should be walking away with the midterms. That they are not is because they have consistently underestimated the president’s political gifts, while missing the deeper threat his presidency represents.

There’s a lesson here worth heeding. Our economic GDP may be booming, but our moral GDP is in recession. The tragedy of Pittsburgh illustrates, among other things, that the president cannot unite us, even in our grief. Whatever happens on Tuesday, Democrats will only win in 2020 if they find a candidate who can.

(An opinion piece on Tuesday’s elections )

And this an revealing anticipitation of what may be forth coming: is this another of Trump’s successful twist’traps? :

Robert Mueller
Alex Wong/Getty Images

SWAMP DIARY

Week 76: Is Mueller About to Roll Out the Barrels?
Now that the special prosecutor’s quiet period is nearly over, many Russia-scandal observers expect dramatic news from the long-silent investigation.

Robert S. Mueller III did it. He really did it. He honored to the letter the Department of Justice guidelines that direct prosecutors and other to avoid actions that might influence the outcome of an election.

Doing his work at Quiet Car levels for the past six weeks, the most raucous news to radiate from his investigation into collaboration between the Trump campaign and the Russians has been about its relative noiselessness. Without opening a tab to Google it, tell me the last time something big broke. Manafort’s guilty plea feels like it happened last year. I’ll bet you can’t even remember who got indicted last. Not that the special prosecutor went into hibernation, as CNN noted. His office did its sleuthing on padded feet, conducting at least nine sit-downs with convicted felon Paul Manafort in recent weeks; conversing with President Donald Trump’s legal team; and scrutinizing the connections between Trump devotee Roger Stone and WikiLeaks, which dumped the stolen Democratic emails late in the campaign. Did self-avowed dirty trickster Stone (more on him, later) and WikiLeaks coordinate an October surprise in the release of the hacked Podesta emails?

The press has filled the quiet period with speculations of what will come next. With the baffles taken off his investigation, how high will Mueller turn up the volume? Will he complete and file his report on Russian meddling to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein? Will Rosenstein still have a job by the time the report is complete, or will he have been swept out by the president along with Attorney General Jeff Sessions? Will Trump have Mueller sacked, too? Or will Mueller issue new indictments in the case? Will he taper off his investigation? Will he go to court in an attempt to force the president to testify? Has the president already been subpoenaed? Will he amp his investigation up with an excursion into previously unexplored realms of corruption illuminated by the insights of Manafort and former Trump attorney Michael Cohen, who has so completely turned on his former boss he is encouraging people to vote Democratic? Finally, if Mueller finds no evidence of collusion, might he instead allege obstruction of justice by the president? No criminal indictment has ever been leveled at a sitting president, and many legal scholars say he can’t be charged. But such an indictment could rally Democrats to impeachment.

This week, at the request of legal scholars and activists, the National Archive unsealed the “Watergate Road Map,” the report independent prosecutor Leon Jaworski sent to Congress detailing the evidence collected against President Richard Nixon. The facts-only road map didn’t recommend prosecution or claim that Nixon had committed an impeachable offense. The petition for its release asserted that the road map could provide “a key precedent for assessing the appropriate framework for Special Counsel Mueller to report to Congress any findings of potentially unlawful conduct by President Trump.”

Given all the variables at work, we’ll need more than an ancient road map to make a precise prognostication of which way Mueller will go. Complicating the divination is the likelihood the Democratic Party will take the House of Representatives and ignite new investigations of its own. As my Politico colleague Darren Samuelsohn wrote this week, the Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee have a list of 70 people, organizations and companies they say the Republican-led committee ignored during its investigation and a 98-page document on outstanding lines of inquiry.

“One of the issues that is of great concern to me is: Were the Russians laundering money through the Trump Organization,” said Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), a favorite to head the Intelligence Committee in a Democratic Congress. “That to me would be far more powerful kompromat than any video.”

If Schiff pilots that committee, Trump might start waxing nostalgic about the treatment he got from Mueller’s allegedly angry, allegedly Democratic investigators compared to the genuinely angry committee Democrats working him over. As the Republican inquiry into Benghazi attests, congressional investigations are often conducted as politics by other means, especially in times of divided government. The procedural niceties and Department of Justice guidelines that steer an investigation like Mueller’s hardly exist on Capitol Hill. The point of most Hill investigations is not to determine guilt or innocence but to score political touchdowns. Unlike legal investigations, where professionalism deters prosecutors from leaking to the press, congressional investigations gush like a garden hose sprinkler to reporters eager to amplify the findings and accusations to the voting public.

Lord knows the Democrats have enough kindling to start an investigative bonfire. In addition to suspected Russian efforts to help the Trump campaign, evidence points to assistance from Middle Eastern figures. As Chris Geidner writes in BuzzFeed, top Trump stalwarts, including Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, Steve Bannon and Erik Prince all made curious political contacts in the Middle East worth investigating. “Longtime Trump friend and billionaire investor Tom Barrack also has met with the special counsel’s office, although it is not clear whether those conversations led to any further lines of inquiry for the office,” Geidner continues.

David Axelrod: Democrats Are Walking Into Trump’s Trap
By TIM ALBERTA
POLITICO Illustration
2018

The only safe bet to make for the post-quiet period would be Mueller’s indictment of Roger Stone, something Stone himself has been predicting since at least August. He has claimed that he was probably the unnamed Donald Trump associate who was described in an earlier Mueller indictment as communicating with Russian hacker “Guccifer 2.0.” Stone, who once famously predicted on Twitter on August 21, 2016, that “it will soon be Podesta’s time in the barrel,” has denied any wrongdoing.

This week, Stone’s long-running denial that he had ever discussed WikiLeaks with Trump campaign officials unraveled as the New York Times reported on an email exchange between Stone and Steve Bannon in which Stone “presented himself to Trump campaign officials … as a conduit of inside information from WikiLeaks, Russia’s chosen repository for documents hacked from Democratic computers.”

Story Continued Below

Stone took petulant umbrage in the pages of the Daily Caller, denying any advance knowledge of WikiLeaks’ plans. “What I am guilty of is using publicly available information and a solid tip to bluff, posture, hype and punk Democrats on Twitter. This is called ‘politics.’ It’s not illegal,” Stone wrote.

Good luck, Roger, but it looks like it will soon be your time in the barrel


This article tagged under:
Donald Trump Swamp Diary

SWAMP DIARY

Week 76: Is Mueller About to Roll Out the Barrels?
By JACK SHAFER
People cast their ballots ahead of the Nov. 6, general election at Jim Miller Park, in Marietta, Ga.
LETTER FROM GEORGIA

Democrats Say Republicans Are Stealing the Midterms. Are They Right?

All the good economic news may undercut all the political polemics, and its very feasable that the republicans cannot be stopped at this point. Even of the dems win, its inconceivable that they would be able to reset a contrary course.

And this:

The election-eve NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll shows Democrats leading by seven percentage points, 50 percent to 43 percent, among likely voters. That’s down from a nine-percentage point lead last month.
Republican pollster Bill McInturff, who conducts the NBC/WSJ survey with his Democratic counterpart Peter Hart, said “the base is coming home.”

MIDTERMS 2018
Record turnout upends midterm predictions
On Meet the Press, Tom Brokaw, Savannah Guthrie, Kasie Hunt, Cornell Belcher and Hugh Hewitt explore why polling can’t keep up with record turnout

Voters wait in a line to cast their ballots on the last day of early voting at the Green Hills Library in Nashville, Tennessee on Nov. 1, 2018.Rick Musacchio / EPA
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Nov. 4, 2018 / 11:22 AM ET
By Ben Kamisar
With Election Day just two days away, both the candidates and major party committees are gearing up for a historic midterm that will provide the first major referendum on President Donald Trump’s first two years in office.

Democrats appear to poised to make big gains in the House, challenging in many GOP-held seats. But it’s unclear whether they will be able to win the 23 seats they need to take control of the House.

Republicans are hoping a favorable map in the Senate can help weather the storm and give their party something to crow about when the dust settles.

And both sides are competing furiously in governors races, where more than half are up for grabs.

Historic levels of enthusiasm on both sides of the aisle, confirmed by a brand new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, are complicating the forecasting, leaving both sides anxiously awaiting Tuesday’s results.

In the final “Meet the Press” before Tuesday, anchor Chuck Todd peppered politicians and analysts about how they see the election shaking out.

Here’s a glimpse at their thoughts on the three major battlefields.

THE HOUSE
The nonpartisan Cook Political Report’s list of competitive races paints the picture of a historically large battlefield in the House, with dozens of Republican incumbents playing serious defense.

The new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll shows Democrats heading into the final weekend with a clear edge among likely voters, but what’s unclear is how that edge will play out in individual races.

Democrats have a 7-point edge in the generic ballot, as 50 percent of likely voters said they’d prefer a Democratic-controlled Congress. Forty-three percent of those voters said they’d prefer a Republican majority in Congress.

Democrats are performing best with minorities, young voters, college-educated voters and women. Republicans score best with white voters without a college degree, men and white voters.

The stark differences among voting blocs underscores the importance of the mobilization efforts done by the parties to bring their most reliable voters to the polls.

Democrats have spent tens of millions of dollars looking to boost minority turnout, while President Donald Trump and his allies have crisscrossed the country to juice enthusiasm among the voters that helped him win the White House in 2016.

Democratic pollster Cornell Belcher, a guest on the “Meet the Press” panel, said that while Republicans have historically been better at turning out their base during midterm elections, that the president’s calculus may not ultimately pay off thanks to how voters view him.

Belcher pointed to the NBC/Wall Street Journal’s finding that more voters want to send a message that Trump and the GOP need a “check and balance” in Congress, than those who want to give Trump more allies in Congress.

“The president’s job disapproval right now really means something,” Belcher added.

But to Hugh Hewitt, the GOP conservative pundit and Salem Radio Network host, the new polling shows a bright spot for Republicans — the economy.

“Seventy four percent of people think their own personal economics are good. That is a remarkable thing,” Hewitt said. “Do you vote to keep the economy humming or do you vote against President Trump?”

THE SENATE
Unlike the House, where Republicans are playing defense in districts where Trump isn’t too popular, the Senate map runs right through states Trump won easily, and sometimes overwhelmingly, in 2016.

Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen, the head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, admitted on “Meet the Press” that “it’s a very different sort of political battlefield in Senate races than House races.”

But he praised his candidates for building their own personal brands in their home states and said there’s still a “narrow path” for a Democratic Senate majority.

Even as polls show North Dakota Democratic Sen. Heidi Heitkamp trailing Republican Rep. Kevin Cramer in the wake of her decision to vote against Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation, Van Hollen cautioned that “no one should ever count Heidi Heitkamp out.” He also called Missouri Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill, locked in a tight race against Republican Attorney General Josh Hawley, as a “fighter.”

The weakness of New Jersey Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez, whose bribery charges ended with a hung jury, has inserted uncertainty into the Democrats already difficult map. But Van Hollen said he’s “confident Bob Menendez will win,” criticizing Republican Bob Hugin’s past as a pharmaceutical company head.

One surprising battleground has been Tennessee, where popular former Democratic Gov. Phil Bredesen remains better-liked than Republican Rep. Marsha Blackburn but still trails at the polls.

Van Hollen said Bredesen is “pragmatic” and willing to work with Trump to help Tennessee. But Tennessee Republican Gov. Phil Haslam, the head of the Republican Governors Association, espoused confidence about Blackburn’s campaign and argued that Tennessee voters have been mobilized to vote for Republicans after the Kavanaugh confirmation.

“Marsha Blackburn has run a really good race,” he said. “The color of the jersey you’re wearing up there is really important. And I don’t know exactly. But I think the Kavanaugh hearings had a 5 or 6-point swing in Tennessee. I personally think Marsha will by at least that much.”

GOVERNORS
The gubernatorial races could prove to be true wildcards.

Republican incumbents are poised to cruise in blue states like Vermont, Maryland and Massachusetts. But Democrats are giving conservative Republicans tough challenges in red states like Oklahoma, Georgia and Kansas.

Haslam credited that uncertainty to an electorate that looks at these elections through a less partisan lens than through which they view federal elections.

“People look at the practical aspects of electing a governor,” he said.

“Who’s going to create jobs here? Who’s going to produce the best schools? And who’s going to run our state’s budget in a way that works? And so it’s a lot different decision voting for your governor than it is for your senator, and definitely than it is for your House member.”

Along those lines, Georgia Democratic gubernatorial hopeful Stacey Abrams argued that her background will help her become the first Democratic governor since 2003.

Pushing back against Trump’s recent criticism of her qualifications, Abrams said she is the “most qualified candidate” in her race against Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp.

“I am a business owner, a tax attorney who trained at Yale Law School. I am a civic leader who helped register more than 200,000 Georgians. I am a very accomplished political leader who worked across the aisle to improve access to education, transportation, and I blocked the single largest tax increase in Georgia history,” she said.

“There is no one more qualified standing for this office in Georgia.”

Ben Kamisar
Ben Kamisar is a political writer for NBC