Trump enters the stage

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.

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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

Democrats closing gap in key Senate races as late polls defy forecasts
by Kelly Cohen
| November 04, 2018 05:04 PM

An Emerson battleground poll found incumbent GOP Sen. Ted Cruz holding a slim advantage with 50 percent support. His Democratic challenger, Rep. Beto O’Rourke, above, has 47 percent, and 2 percent said they undecided.
(AP Photo/Richard W. Rodriguez)
As the electrifying, no-holds-barred battle for Congress in the 2018 midterm elections campaign comes to a close, Democrats appear poised to win back the House of Representatives.

Ramping up the drama, a slew of tightening polls indicate that the Senate might also drift away from Republicans if all the dominoes fall towards the opposition party on Tuesday.

While polling analysts still forecast the Senate to remain in GOP control, some surveys indicate nail-biting contests in key states in the final days before Nov. 6. In wave elections, close races often end up tilting the same way - that is what Democrats hope for this year.

Ahead of the Trend: A look at youth civic engagement ahead of the midterms
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In the Senate battle in recent weeks, Republicans have been confident of winning North Dakota but concede that Nevada and Arizona could go to the Democrats, making the chamber evenly balanced on 50 seats each but still in GOP control because of the tie-breaking vote of Vice President Mike Pence.

That, however, was before new polls in Tennessee - the “firewall” state for Republicans - dead level. If Democrats cling on in Florida, Missouri and Indiana, where their incumbents have faced tough fights and an energized Republican base loyal to President Trump, then it could all come down to the Volunteer State.

Here are what some crucial polls say ahead of Tuesday’s midterm elections:

Blue wave warning for the House

Though Democrats face some hurdles in the House, the majority of pollsters believe the odds are in favor of a “blue wave.” Democrats need to flip 23 seats to take control of the lower chamber. Last week, Dave Wasserman, who is House editor of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, said their forecast was being updated, predicting that Democrats gain 30-40 seats, up from 25-35 seats.

On Sunday, CBS News said it ran three scenarios for the House and shared its findings. The best scenario for Democrats showed 225 Democratic seats to 210 Republican seats. However, with a margin of error of plus-or-minus 13 seats on each side, even in the best-case scenario, Democrats winning the House isn’t a sure thing.

Another survey, the final ABC News/Washington Post pre-election poll, shows Democratic House candidates leading Republicans 52 percent to 44 percent among likely voters. But the Democratic lead has closed from 14 percentage points in August and 13 points in October to now just eight points.

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Senate likely to remain red, but…

Some individual races are looking tighter than ever in the waning days of the 2018 election cycle - and they are mostly moving towards the Democrats.

Among the tightest Senate races to watch are:
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Florida: Gov. Rick Scott, R, is leading incumbent Sen. Bill Nelson, D, in a new poll released Saturday. The results from St. Pete Polls give Scott a lead of 49.1 percent to 47.5 percent. But that is within the margin of error, with 3.4 percent undecided. That latest poll was the first for some time to put Scott ahead.
Tennessee: Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R, is in a dead heat with Democrat Phil Bredesen. On Friday, East Tennessee State University and Targoz Strategic Marketing released two separate polls that showed Blackburn and Bredesen tied. The ETSU poll found 44 percent of likely voters saying they supported each candidate, and in the Targoz poll, 48 percent of likely and early voters supported both Blackburn and Bredesen. Republicans had previously thought that Tennessee was moving out of Bredesen’s reach.
Texas: An Emerson battleground poll found incumbent GOP Sen. Ted Cruz holding a slim advantage with 50 percent support. His Democratic challenger, Rep. Beto O’Rourke has 47 percent, and 2 percent said they undecided. The GOP is still favored but O’Rourke appears to be closing the gap in a state where he shouldn’t have a. prayer.
Missouri: In a shock poll from Saturday, incumbent Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill and Republican challenger state Attorney General Josh Hawley are tied at 47 percent among likely voters. Until that poll, Republicans had been increasingly confident of picking up Missouri - an outcome that almost certainly would have ensured they held the Senate.
While picking apart specific polls indicates the Democrats moving towards what once seemed an elusive victory, forecaster FiveThirtyEight remains unconvinced the opposition party will pull it off, stating Sunday that Democrats have only a one-in-seven or 15.3 percent chance to take control of the Senate. Republicans have a six-in-seven chance, or an 84.7 percent chance to retain Senate control. But everyone remembers how wrong such forecasts turned out to be in 2016.

Tennessee in particular will be one to watch. Republicans view Tennessee as a “firewall” state protecting them from the loss of the chamber. With the current balance of power 51 to 49 and Democrats looking highly likely to lose North Dakota, the GOP could afford to lose Arizona and Nevada while failing to pick up Florida, Missouri or Indiana and still survive with 50 seats and Vice President Mike Pence’s casting vote. That calculation would be swept away by losing Tennessee.

[READ MORE: Yes, Trump is huge factor in midterms. But which Trump?]

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Republicans hold a 51-49 majority in the Senate and 26 Democratic senators are up for re-election on Tuesday, compared to just nine Republicans. Of the 26 Democrats, 10 are running in states President Trump won during the election in 2016.

Here is RealClearPolitics’ roundup of Senate polls.

A wide-lens look at Congress

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Overall, Democrats hold a seven-point advantage over Republicans in the final national NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.

Fifty percent of likely voters say they prefer a Democratic-controlled Congress, while 43 percent want Republicans in charge. It’s a slight drop for Democrats, who in October had a nine-point advantage. Among the wider pool of registered voters who were polled, Democrats lead Republicans by six points, 49 percent to 43 percent.

FiveThirtyEight puts Democrats ahead in its overall generic poll, which is based on polls that ask people which party they would support in an election. Democrats lead Republicans, 50.5 percent to 42.4 percent.

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[READ MORE: Twitter fatigue in Minnesota: Republican Erik Paulsen says Trump’s tweets a source of ‘anxiety’ with voters]

Morning Consult and POLITICO also surveyed registered voters to ask if they want Congress to be controlled by Republicans or Democrats. In that poll, Democrats are up eight points on Republicans, 46 percent to 38 percent.

RealClearPolitics has a comprehensive list of all overall Congressional polls here.

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What top politicians are saying

Vice President Mike Pence told The Hill last week that he believes Republicans will keep control of the House. President Trump told reporters Sunday that Republicans will “likely” do well in the House, while his “primary focus” has been on the Senate - sentiments that some Republicans viewed as the party accepting the House would slip from its grasp.

Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., who is chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, told “Fox News Sunday” that the Democrats have a “very narrow path” to retaking the majority in the Senate, but offered a downbeat assessment of their chances of pulling it off.

The New York Times
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Opinion

What We Have to Fear
Before the midterms, a trip to Hungary shows the dangers facing the United States.

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CreditAlex Nabaum
David Leonhardt
By David Leonhardt
Opinion Columnist

Nov. 4, 2018
BUDAPEST — The technology conference held here last week could have taken place in almost any other big city in Europe or the United States. It featured executives from Google, Slack, LinkedIn, Airbnb and more. I came to talk about The New York Times’s digital strategy, and I stayed for three days to explore Budapest and interview people here.

Like many other first-time visitors, I was charmed. The city is full of 19th-century architectural triumphs that loom over the Danube River and sparkle at night. In the old Jewish Quarter, bars and cafes bustle. There is a growing tech industry, with companies like Prezi, which makes a non-boring version of PowerPoint.

By now, you’ve probably heard that Budapest is also home to one of the world’s newly autocratic governments, led by Viktor Orbán and his far-right Hungarian nationalist party, Fidesz. These days, Hungary is often mentioned alongside Russia and China.

[Listen to “The Argument” podcast every Thursday morning with Ross Douthat, Michelle Goldberg and David Leonhardt.]

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And yet life in Budapest doesn’t feel authoritarian. It feels Western. It feels familiar.

Which, as I reflected on my trip — and on the midterm campaign that I returned home to — left me deeply unnerved.

Orbán is no Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping. He doesn’t put opponents in jail or brutalize them. “There aren’t secret police listening to us,” one Orbán critic told me over dinner. Zselyke Csaky of Freedom House, the democracy watchdog, told me, “There is no violence, not any kind of political violence.”

What Orbán has done is to squash political competition. He has gerrymandered and changed election rules, so that he doesn’t need a majority of votes to control the government. He has rushed bills through Parliament with little debate. He has relied on friendly media to echo his message and smear opponents. He has stocked the courts with allies. He has overseen rampant corruption. He has cozied up to Putin. To justify his rule, Orbán has cited external threats — especially Muslim immigrants and George Soros, the Jewish Hungarian-born investor — and said that his party is the only one that represents the real people.

Does any of this sound familiar?

I cannot imagine the United States or a Western European country turning into Russia or China. But I can see how a major democracy could slide toward Hungarian autocracy. Orbán clearly has such ambitions, and the far right across much of Europe views him as its model. Steve Bannon has praised him as the world’s most significant politician.

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Most alarming, the Republican Party has shown multiple signs of early Orbánism. No, the party is not as bad as Fidesz, and, yes, American democracy remains much healthier than the Hungarian version. But the parallels are there for anyone willing to see them: Like Orbán, Republican leaders have repeatedly been willing to change the rules and customs of democracy for the sake of raw power.

The list includes: rushing unpopular bills through Congress with little debate; telling bald lies about those bills; stealing a Supreme Court seat to maintain a Republican majority; trying to keep American citizens from voting; gerrymandering; campaigning on racism and xenophobia; refusing to investigate President Trump’s corruption and Russian ties.

Usually, Trump is not even the main force behind these tactics. Other Republicans are. In North Carolina, after Republicans lost the governorship in 2016, they went so far as to strip the office of some of its authority. Of course it’s true that Democrats sometimes play rough too, but there is no list remotely like the one above for them.

That’s why the midterms are so important. The Republicans will almost certainly lose the nationwide popular vote in the House elections. Yet if they still hold on to their majority — thanks to partly to voter suppression — party leaders will take it as an endorsement of their strategy. They will have paid no political price for their power grab. They will be tempted to go further — to suppress more votes, use more racism, cover up more scandals and violate more democratic rules and customs.

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The United States won’t suddenly become Hungary. We start from a much stronger place. But our democracy will suffer. And democracies can deteriorate more quickly than people often realize.

Not so long ago, Hungary was a shining example of post-Soviet success. Power alternated between the center-right and center-left. Orbán — a pro-democracy activist during the end of Soviet rule in Hungary, who co-founded Fidesz as a center-right party — originally became prime minister in 1998. After only one term, and to his shock, he lost the job.

He responded with a plan to recapture power for “15 to 20 years,” as he said at the time. “We have only to win once, but then properly,” he explained. Fidesz did win in 2010, with help from a bungling socialist government and widespread income stagnation. Orbán went to work.

His strategy has had three main pillars. One, he sought to control the media. Two, he launched a Christian-themed culture war that discredits his opponents. Three, he changed the rules of democracy. In each of these ways — just as Bannon understands — Fidesz is a turbocharged version of the Republican Party.

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Orbán has made sure his allies run most major media companies. If you imagine that Rupert Murdoch, Sinclair Broadcasting Group and conservative talk radio controlled most of American media, you’d have a good sense for today’s Hungarian media. (And many Americans indeed get much of their information from Murdoch, Sinclair or talk radio.)

Just like Fox News, the Hungarian media ignores inconvenient stories, like anti-Orbán protests. Instead, it pumps conspiracies, especially anti-immigrant, anti-Roma and anti-Semitic ones, as the writer Paul Lendvai has noted. During my stay, newspapers ran Soros-related stories for little apparent reason, and there was talk of “the Soros caravan” — the same made-up story making the rounds on the American right.

I found it chilling to return home to a Republican closing message in the midterms that echoed Orbán’s so closely. In both, fictitious invading hordes — and those who supposedly support them — are the enemy of the people.

More on Hungary from Opinion:
Opinion | Pamela Druckerman
The News Is Bad in HungaryNov. 1, 2018
Opinion | Alexander Soros
Alexander Soros: The Hate That Is Consuming UsOct. 24, 2018
Opinion | Agnes Heller
What Happened to Hungary?Sept. 16, 2018
Orbán’s culture war also involves a lot of machismo. He has tried to eliminate gender studies from Hungary’s universities. In the senior leadership of Fidesz, not a single minister is a woman. The role of women, the speaker of the National Assembly has said, is “to give birth to as many grandchildren as possible for us.”

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As I kept seeing photos of male politicians in Hungary, I was reminded of the all-male group of Republicans who tried to rewrite health care law in the United States. Or the all-male group of Republicans who designed Trump’s tax cut. Or the all-male group of Republicans who handle Supreme Court nominations on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

But no parallel is stronger or more worrisome than the subverting of public opinion, through changes to election laws and other steps. István Bibó, a 20th-century Hungarian politician and writer, once wrote that democracy was threatened when the cause of the nation became separated from the cause of liberty. That has already happened in Hungary, and there are alarming signs — signs that I never expected to see — in the United States.

Conservative parties, wherever they are, should by all means push for the political changes they favor, be it less immigration, more public religion, lower taxes on the rich or almost anything else. But win or lose, those conservative parties also need to accept the basic rules of democracy.

When they instead subvert those rules, I hope that citizens — including conservatives — have the courage to resist. In Hungary, it is no longer easy to do so. In the United States, this week will help determine the health of our democracy.

I was also in Hungary this summer, and people do have a very positive opinion of Mr. Orban.

All borders are guarded and immigrants undocumented can not enter. I was on a train from Budapest to Zagreb and back, and even though my passport states my Hungarian birth, my wife and I were asked many questions which heretofore were unprecedented. The debates in Parliament were very much slanted in favor of Mr. Orban.

Live TV
NBC and Fox finally stop running Trump’s racist ad after it was viewed by millions
By Brian Stelter and Oliver Darcy, CNN Business
Updated 2:48 PM EST, Mon November 05, 2018

(CNN) NBC and Fox News said in separate statements on Monday that their networks will no longer air the Trump campaign’s racist anti-immigrant advertisement.

NBC was first to announce the change, doing so after a backlash over its decision to show the 30-second spot during “Sunday Night Football,” one of the highest-rated programs on television.

“After further review,” NBC said, “we recognize the insensitive nature of the ad and have decided to cease airing it across our properties as soon as possible.”

Fox soon followed suit.

“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 told CNN in a statement.

The ad ran about a dozen times on Fox News and Fox Business, combined, before being pulled.

Facebook also came under scrutiny for letting the Trump campaign run the ad on its platform. On Monday afternoon the company said “this ad violates Facebook’s advertising policy against sensational content so we are rejecting it. While the video is allowed to be posted on Facebook, it cannot receive paid distribution.”

The ad was released by the Trump campaign late last week. It vilified the thousands of migrants walking toward the US southern border, wrongly portraying them as invaders and criminals. It seemed designed to stoke fear ahead of the midterm elections and increase Republican turnout.

CNN determined that the ad was racist and declined to sell airtime for it. But other networks agreed to sell the time.

Many viewers were stunned when it aired during “Sunday Night Football,” which raked in 21 million viewers this week.

This week’s game had a particularly big audience as it featured a highly-anticipated matchup between two of the league’s premier quarterbacks, Tom Brady and Aaron Rodgers.

A spokesperson for the NFL did not respond to requests for comment on Monday.

Along with the NBC broadcast network, NBCUniversal allowed the ad to air multiple times on MSNBC before Monday’s decision was made.

An NBC source said the ad was cleared by the broadcast network’s standards and practices team. “We regret the decision that the ad ran at all,” the source said, “and it will not air on any NBCUniversal property, locally or nationally.”

Fox News did not explain why it pulled the ad. The 30-second spot was not only racist, it also contained factual inaccuracies, and it is not uncommon for networks to reject advertisements on such grounds.

Fox’s decision was particularly surprising given the network’s close proximity and friendly relationship with the White House.

Critics of the network say its hosts and commentators employ some of the same racist rhetoric and scare tactics that were used in the ad.

“How does Fox News square this with offering hours of the same racial fear-mongering in primetime to promote Trump (at no cost) on a nightly basis?” asked Jesse Lehrich, communications director for the progressive group Organizing for America and a former Hillary Clinton spokesman.

On Twitter, Brad Parscale, Trump’s 2020 campaign manager, ignored the decision by Fox to pull the ad.

Instead, Parscale lambasted NBC, CNN, and Facebook and said the “#FakeNewsMedia” was “trying to control what you see and how you think.”

A little while later, the president was asked about the controversy by a reporter. He said “I don’t know about it. I mean, you’re telling me something I don’t know about.” He added: “We have a lot of ads, and they certainly are effective based on the numbers we are seeing.”

When asked about the offensive nature of the ad, Trump said, “Well, a lot of things are offensive. Your questions are offensive a lot of the times.”

People familiar with the matter told CNN that the advertisement was not submitted to either CBS or ABC, so those networks didn’t have to decide whether to sell the airtime or not.

CNN had to make the decision on Friday when the ad was submitted there.

The next day, Donald Trump Jr. complained on Twitter that CNN “refused to run” the advertisement.

A CNN spokesperson responded in a tweet, saying, “CNN has made it abundantly clear in its editorial coverage that this ad is racist. When presented with an opportunity to be paid to take a version of this ad, we declined. Those are the facts.”

This Election Day, one thought again dominates my thinking. “America, prove me right.”

It is a plea to my country to follow through on what I think it is going to do: Rebuke President Trump and his Republican enablers in Congress and restore some semblance of checks and balances by at least returning the House of Representatives to Democratic control.

Opinion from the Washington Post

Trump Gambles He Can Shatter Political Norms — and Keep Winning
Most presidents face a midterm thumping. But rarely do they make it so much about themselves.

By JOHN F. HARRIS and ELIANA JOHNSON November 06, 2018
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One constant of Donald Trump’s ascent to the presidency and his two years in power is how behavior that would be not just risky but downright stupid for any normal politician ends up working smartly for him.

This is the essence of the Trump Mystique—a three-year record in which he regularly demonstrated that many of the normal precedents, patterns and truisms of American politics simply do not apply to him. This mystique—Is it real or illusion? Is his patented sorcery still working?—is among the big questions being tested in Tuesday’s elections.

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Trump’s own decisions over the past month have put the issue—whether Trump has defied political gravity or merely delayed its impact—in even sharper relief than it would have been anyway.

It would be smart, viewed through a conventional prism, for a president who has never commanded majority support to try to float above the midterms and allow politicians of his own party to keep their elections locally focused. It seems stupid to unite and energize the opposition in their loathing by insisting that congressional elections are a national referendum on himself.

It would be smart, if playing by normal rules, for a leader presiding over the best employment numbers in decades to make an economic argument his main push against the headwind that the incumbent president’s party historically faces in midterm elections. It seems stupid to reduce this to secondary status in favor of picking scabs over immigration and societal violence in the days before voting.

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In the disoriented state of contemporary politics, however, it seems stupid for anyone to pretend to be smart in predicting the results of Trump’s decision to turn the volume up to 11 on Trumpism.
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As Trump himself cast the implications for Tuesday in a weekend stop in Georgia: “I wouldn’t say it’s as important as ’16, but it’s right up there.”

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Some dynamics seem inescapably true. One is that at nearly every important turn when traditional political logic would have pointed toward softening the tone and broadening support—from his 2016 acceptance speech to the 2017 inaugural address and countless other occasions since—Trump took the opposite path and along the way tightened his connection to his most devoted supporters.

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A vivid recent example was over the sexual assault allegations against his Supreme Court pick, Brett Kavanaugh. For a few days Trump deferred to prevailing wisdom that he needed to treat accuser Christine Blasey Ford respectfully and project an open mind on the merits. Before long he returned to his customary instincts and attacked Ford, Democrats and the media, while cheering on Kavanaugh’s own attacks on Democrats.

For every Republican operative who thinks Trump’s midterm strategy is nuts—one senior GOP strategist running competitive statewide races said the president’s image took a 15-point hit in internal campaign polling over the past 10 days—there is a Democratic operative who worries that Trump’s polarizing approach just might allow him to beat the odds as he did in 2016.

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But that same approach raises the cost of GOP setbacks for Trump, who has often made clear his own view that power is partly a matter of perception, and preserving an aura of strength and success. A narrow House loss, for instance, would surely be explained as the result of normal historical patterns. In the case of a national blowout, no matter if Trump blamed others, the result would be like a baby with a paunch and comb-over: No way to deny paternity.

“I do think it’s a little unfair to put it all on him, because you start behind the eight-ball,” said a senior GOP Senate strategist, pointing to the usual historical pattern with a president’s first midterm election. “What I think is different [in 2018] is that while the president always has the ability to define the agenda, he takes all of the oxygen out of the air. The reality is, these races are completely national. And while there’s always a national bent to congressional races, there’s really no escaping it this time.”

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A senior White House official said political advisers applied a three-prong test this fall in deciding where to send Trump. One was whether they could find good rally venues. Two was data suggesting which districts were especially promising if Trump could manage to ignite GOP-leaning voters who might normally vote in presidential elections but not midterms. Third was protectiveness, trying to avoid races where Trump would risk being blamed for a race that was a likely loser anyway.

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The president’s vituperative attacks on Democrats and race-baiting immigration rhetoric broke new ground on divisiveness, but in one sense he was making a calculation—can a president influence the midterms to advantage?—familiar to three of his recent predecessors.

In 1994, Bill Clinton’s advisers urged him to take it easy and mostly stay off the campaign trail in favor of the White House and overseas trips. He didn’t buy it—convinced he could persuade voters to back him and Democrats if he could just get in front of enough of them. Polling suggested otherwise, and political aides later concluded that an unseasoned president’s own efforts helped fuel the GOP’s historic congressional takeover that year.

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In 2002, the backdrop of 9/11 one year earlier changed the landscape for George W. Bush. Stressing national security themes, he helped Republicans make historically unusual congressional gains.

In 2010, Barack Obama saw a conservative backlash over spending to combat recession and the financial crash, as well as the Affordable Care Act. He campaigned in some districts where he was welcome, but he knew it wasn’t doing much good. “There’s no doubt this is a difficult election,” he said at a Cleveland rally. He was right: November brought a “shellacking,” as he called it, that lost the House and reached deep into statehouses around the country.

READ MORE
President Donald Trump arrives to Capitol Hill.
POLITICS

Wonder How Trump Will Handle Defeat? Don’t Bother with History.
By JEFF GREENFIELD
Donald Trump
ELECTIONS

Do Democrats Need a White Man to Beat Trump in 2020?
By BILL SCHER
Rep. Beto O’Rourke
2018

Did Beto Blow It?
By TIM ALBERTA
Similar results in the opposite direction against Republicans on Tuesday will not only put subpoena power in the hands of the president’s political foes—it could lead the handful of prominent Trump dissenters in the national GOP to urge others to join their cause.

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“Yeah, he’s going to lose the House,” said Bill Kristol, editor at large of the Weekly Standard and a leading Trump critic. “They’re gonna lose eight to 10 governorships probably. So, where is the brilliance? Where is the political magic? … He got 46 percent of the vote in 2016. It looks like Republicans are going to get, if they’re lucky, 46 percent of the vote [or lower]. … So what has Trump done for the party?”

Not that Trump will admit as much. Terry Sullivan, who managed Marco Rubio’s 2016 campaign, suggested that one key aspect of Trump’s mystique is that he will argue that his mystique is undimmed no matter the result. “Don’t take my word for it. Ask him tomorrow,” Sullivan said Monday. “Don’t take my word for it, ask his supporters. He will say that candidates that he campaigned with won and the ones who didn’t want to campaign with him lost. And the ones that lost that he campaigned with did better than they would have if they hadn’t campaigned with him—he made the race closer, so much closer.”

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For all Sullivan’s evident sarcasm, Michael Strain, director of economic policy at the American Enterprise Institute, effectively agreed that Trump’s activities in the closing days of the campaign might help in some districts but won’t be the decisive factor if the evening ends in a big GOP defeat. “I think that the cake on the president is kind of baked—that people have a view of the Republican Party under Donald Trump” that won’t swing widely based on any day’s headlines, he said. “That suggests to me that if the president were talking about the economy and not talking about the caravan, that wouldn’t necessarily be a better strategy to get Republicans to win.”

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A man waves an American flag in one hand, and with the other, holds a sign reading “Vote Now.”
2018

Here’s What Else Is Being Decided on Tuesday

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Trump Gambles He Can Shatter Political Norms — and Keep Winning

Probable election results today : CNN analysis

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The (Final) Forecast: A Democratic House and a Republican Senate, but still some uncertainty
Analysis by Harry Enten, CNN
Updated 7:55 PM EST, Tue November 06, 2018

(CNN) (Note from Harry: Follow me along live on Election Night here.)

The 2018 campaign (mostly) comes to an end today. If the polls and our forecasts are right, the Democrats and Republicans will each have something to be happy about.

Democrats are favored to take back the House, while Republicans are favored to maintain control of the Senate.

Our final House forecast has Democrats earning 227 seats to the Republicans 208. That’s a net gain of 32 seats from the 195 they hold right now. Democrats only need a net gain of 23 to win the 218 seats necessary for a majority.

But as we have noted all along, our forecasts come with a margin of error. Specifically, our 95% confidence interval finds that Democrats could win as few as 207 seats (11 short of a majority) to 259, according to our latest estimate.

There are two things you should note about the range. The first is that it’s wide because there are so many close races.

View this interactive content on CNN.com
There are, for example, 32 races that we think will have a margin of 4 points or less. There are 97 races in which the margin of error (95% confidence interval) is wider than the margin by which one of the candidates is projected to win.

Of those 32 races that are within 4 points, 19 are forecasted to be won by the Democratic candidate. If only about half of these 19 go the other way, Republicans could conceivably maintain control.

The second thing you should note is that the margin of error is asymmetric. That is, the difference between our median estimate (227) and the bottom range of our margin of error (207) is only 20 seats, while the difference between our median and the top range of our margin of error (259) is 32 seats.

There are an astounding 61 races where the Republicans are favored, but where we think the Democratic candidate is within the margin of error of winning. If there is a small, but systematic, error in the polling, it’s not inconceivable that Democrats could do far better than we have forecasted them to do.

The asymmetric range of our results is why if we were projecting our midpoint using an average instead of a median that would forecast a net gain of 34 seats for the Democrats.

Make no mistake though, the House race is still close enough that Republicans could win. The closeness of the result is such that the seven races within 4 points in California, Maine and Washington could be determinative. It may take some time to count the ballot for various reasons (e.g. mail-in ballots and ranked choice voting) in these contests. That means we may not know the winner for days.

Our final Senate forecast is something else altogether. It has Republicans controlling 52 seats and Democrats (and Independents who caucus with them) holding 48 seats in the next Congress. If this forecast were exactly right, it would mean that Republicans would have a net gain of a seat since the last Congress.

This overall forecast takes into account each state’s forecast, the margin of error of each state’s forecast and the correlation between the different state results. In cases where one side is expected to win many close victories, the overall forecast thinks there’s a good chance they will lose a few of these contests.

That’s exactly what’s going on this year. Right now, our forecast has Democratic candidates winning by 2 points or less in Arizona, Florida, Indiana, Missouri and Nevada. No Republican is forecasted to win by less than 6 points. Based upon past history, the model expects that two of these close forecasted Democratic victories will turn into Democratic defeats. If all these states end up going to the Republicans, they will win 55 seats.

Indeed, we shouldn’t underrate the possibility of Democrats winning the House and Republicans doing very well in the Senate tomorrow night.

If each of our state forecasts is right, however, Democrats will end up 50 seats to the Republicans 50 seats. Vice President Mike Pence would break the tie and give Republicans the barest of majorities in the Senate in this case.

Is it possible that Democrats win control of the Senate? Yes. Our forecasted margin of error gives Democrats the possibility of controlling up to 52 Senate seats in the next Congress.

Right now, the two most likely ways Democrats win the majority in Senate elections held tomorrow involve either Democrat Phil Bredesen winning in Tennessee or Democrat Beto O’Rourke winning in Texas. Both of those races are within 6 points, which means they are within the margin of error.

Perhaps the most intriguing scenario for election night is that if neither party wins a Senate majority tomorrow. There is little doubt at this point that the Mississippi Special Senate jungle primary will require a runoff in late November between the two top vote getters on Tuesday. In the jungle primary, all Democrats and Republicans run against each other. If no one receives a majority, there will be a runoff.

There are two Republicans (Chris McDaniel and Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith) who will split the Republican vote in this very red state. The question is who advances to the runoff.

For most of the campaign, the polls pointed towards Hyde-Smith making the runoff against Democrat Mike Espy. In such a scenario, Republicans would be heavily favored to hold onto the seat.

There has been some late polling though that has Hyde-Smith and McDaniel neck-and-neck. If McDaniel beats out Hyde-Smith, this seat becomes very winnable for Democrats.

And keep in mind that if we project every other state correctly and it’s a Espy-McDaniel runoff, said runoff will be for control of the Senate.

This story has been updated to reflect the most recent forecast figures.

As of 10:20 p.m. ET, NBC News projected that Democrats will win the House.

Now what?

Midterms: Trump threatens Democrats over investigations after they take House –

Don’t be fooled. The midterms were not a bad night for Trump
Cas Mudde
Republicans lost many races, but they still held on to most of their positions. And Trump will see that as a victory

But Democrats need a new strategy outside of metropolitan areas. They’re getting hammered there.
View in Browser | Add nytdirect@nytimes.com to your address book. The New York Times
The New York Times
Wednesday, November 7, 2018
NYTimes.com/Opinion »

David Leonhardt
David Leonhardt
Op-Ed Columnist
If you look at the national results, last night was a smashing win for Democrats. They retook control of the House of Representatives, putting an end to President Trump’s legislative agenda and giving them the power to investigate his corruption. Democrats did so with a runaway win in the national popular vote — likely by about seven percentage points.
“This is what happens to a party when it controls the White House and the president is unpopular,” Bloomberg’s Jonathan Bernstein writes. Trump’s “disdain for those who didn’t vote for him has turned out to be a disastrous strategy.” Anyone who finds Trumpism to be abhorrent should be very pleased with the judgment the country just delivered: On his current path, Trump is a clear underdog to win re-election in 2020.
And yet last night did not feel like a thorough rejection of Trumpism. In one statewide race after another, Democrats suffered disappointing losses. It happened with the exciting progressive candidates in Florida, Georgia, Ohio and Texas (pending recounts). It happened with the centrist candidates in Indiana, Missouri, North Dakota and elsewhere.
Why? Above all, because Democrats are getting trounced outside of metropolitan areas. “The consistent pattern you’re seeing is that Republicans are consolidating control of rural white America faster than Democrats are making inroads into educated suburbia,” the progressive writer David Klion tweeted.
I think Democrats need to take this problem more seriously than they have so far. They need a new approach to nonmetropolitan America, one that asks in an open-minded way which issues are damaging the party there. Is it about moving to the center on immigration, abortion or other issues? Or rather than specific policies, is the problem the party’s lack of a compelling story about the country’s future?
Progressives can’t simply write off these parts of the country. Last night’s results have given the Republicans a strong majority in the Senate. Until Democrats figure out a strategy for retaking it, they won’t be able to pass ambitious laws or control the confirmation process for federal judges. There is no progressive future without a better performance outside of metropolitan America.
Economic populism keeps winning. One clue may be in the continued success of the Democrats’ economic agenda. Obamacare, in particular, had a very good night.
Voters in Nebraska, Idaho and Utah all appear to have approved ballot measures to expand Medicaid. If the results stand, they would extend coverage to more than 300,000 low-income Americans, as Vox’s Sarah Kliff explains. Democrats also won the governorships of both Maine and Kansas, whose Republican governors had held up Medicaid expansions passed last year.
“Turns out people like Obamacare minus Obama,” tweeted HuffPost’s Lydia Polgreen.
Voter enfranchisement. Voting rights also had a mostly good night. Florida voters approved a ballot initiative that would restore the voting rights of nearly 1.5 million people convicted of felonies. Amazingly, this initiative gives the vote back to 40 percent of all black men in the state, according to Samuel Sinyangwe. Michigan and Maryland voters also passed measures making it easier to cast a ballot, including same-day registration.
On the flip side, North Carolina and Arkansas both passed ballot measures requiring voters to present an ID at the polls. These are laws designed to reduce voter turnout.
A year of the woman. Whether as a repudiation of Trump (as Jill Filipovic argues in The Times) or as “the aftershock from Hillary Clinton’s defeat” (as The Washington Post’s Karen Tumulty writes), more than 100 women will likely win their congressional races — a high-water mark in women’s representation in Congress.
Finally, if you’re a liberal feeling down about last night, consider the possibility that your expectations were set too high, writes Slate’s Jim Newell. “If you could’ve asked Democrats to take this night at the beginning of 2017, they would have eagerly accepted it,” Newell writes. “As bleh as it all might feel, it’s a start.”
The full Opinion report from The Times follows, including Ross Douthat, Frank Bruni, Mimi Swartz and The Editorial Board on the midterms.
The Democrats Won the House. Now What?
Journalists outside the Capitol reported Tuesday night on the midterm elections.
Journalists outside the Capitol reported Tuesday night on the midterm elections. Sarah Silbiger/The New York Times

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
For starters, pick policy battles wisely.
The Results Are (Mostly) In
OP-ED COLUMNIST

For Democrats — and America — a Sigh of Relief
By FRANK BRUNI
The party didn’t get everything it wanted. But it got what it and the country need.

OP-ED COLUMNIST

Midterms Deliver an American Stalemate
By ROSS DOUTHAT
A rebuke to President Trump in the overall returns, but not a presidency-ending repudiation. Two years of chaos and hysteria ending in a return to standoff.

CONTRIBUTING OP-ED WRITER

The Success in Beto’s Failure
By MIMI SWARTZ
O’Rourke gave Texans who have long felt disenfranchised a glimpse of what could be.

CONTRIBUTING OP-ED WRITER

The Thrill of a Women’s Wave
By JILL FILIPOVIC
Watching anti-Trump female candidates win is exciting, but I’m worried about all they’re being asked to do.

How the Midterms Made Us Feel: Afraid, Then Upset
By THE NEW YORK TIMES OPINION
The midterm election has been divisive and difficult for many Americans. Now that it’s coming to an end, how do we feel? This live map shows reactions from readers across the country through Election Day.

A To-Do List for Democrats in Albany
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
With control of the State Senate, they can reform the electoral system.

Winning the House Is Not Nothing
President Trump at Andrews Air Force Base early on Tuesday.
President Trump at Andrews Air Force Base early on Tuesday. Doug Mills/The New York Times

By KEVIN BAKER
The bumbling, exasperating Democratic Party claws back one branch of government.

No mandate no laundry for the shakedown the swamp what to uncover, other than exposure to gain , re-presenting their usual: gain personal, power sharing behind the door handshakes and squinted eye contacts, payoffs the hood’s crazy foxes their wagging tales , doggies as usual fornicating hid’n tales of fame and Fortuna smiles alongside Minerva, Them is & Dike.

Follow dear children the symbiotic need to react the logical synthesis, by debuting the hidden Heglelian undemonsratible functional utility by fiat nor ex-machines, only through spotty flashes and intermittent storms of presuming receptions of naive receptivity.

The lawyers know how reasoning and exposure a tale can go on untouched, even if, the out-world, the outside have the price to pay. That never ever changing, business as usual.

All the chess pieces a neat but stale mate,

Mate, and stale, mate, the king cornered, he is weak from the beginning spatially bounded by his reluctance and overcautive fear of moving too fast, oh his flights of fancy, only to impress by clever wagging of tongue & cheek, but its a game that minimal aristocrats of power holding , of shining reflectors inflaming the mirrors through the doors of presumption by sheets magic, but a vain magic more power ridden then that holding to gather, the stories of infamy behind the emperor’s clothes can.

That’s the measure and the texture up on which civilization’s bargains are negotiated , forever the most illustative being faust of whom said the terms unfair, for find not one man who would not set store for his own,

Even those who have been deprived, the Tzar, and Antoniette, become recipients of romance and drama, the evocation of sympathy for those their class, so that heritage and will of power’s application elevated to a form now thrice guaranteed to the nuevo riche.

The minima is always reduced to the lowest possibility, to sustain the bottom of its very lowest deconstruction, to construct the grand cathedrals of faithful obedience.