The world is experiencing virulent outbreaks of Ebola and Islamist radicalism.Personally, I'm just not that worried about it.
What if the two threats converge into one?
In June 2001 — a few months before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks — a group of leading Democratic national security experts gathered at Andrews Air Force Base to carry out a national security exercise called Dark Winter. Hosted by the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense and the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Dark Winter simulated a biological attack on the United States in which terrorists release smallpox virus in three shopping malls in Oklahoma City, Philadelphia and Atlanta....
So what about Ebola?
Unlike smallpox, which is hard to come by, the Ebola infection is raging right now in parts of Africa where Islamist extremists could have easy access. As physician Scott Gottlieb of the American Enterprise Institute points out, with Ebola, “Mother Nature has created the perfect bioweapon in many respects, as long as the attacker has suicidal aspirations.” Ebola has up to a 21-day incubation period — more than enough time for terrorists to infect themselves and then come here with the virus. In a nightmare scenario, suicide bombers infected with Ebola could blow themselves up in a crowded place — say, shopping malls in Oklahoma City, Philadelphia and Atlanta — spreading infected tissue and bodily fluids.
Think it can’t happen? If an Ebola-infected Liberian, Thomas Eric Duncan, was able to fly to Dallas, what is to stop an Ebola-infected terrorist from doing the same? And if our health-care system was unable to handle a single Ebola patient, imagine what would happen if 50, 100 or more Ebola patients started showing up at U.S. hospitals. Already we have seen schools closed in Dallas and Cleveland and a ship denied entry in Mexico and Belize. It would not require a attack on the level of Dark Winter to cause mass disruptions to our way of life and our economy.
The "always evolving" Democrats doing whatever is politically expedient. Integrity is secondary.Word.
The likelihood of a Republican Senate takeover continues to increase with all three major election models giving the GOP at least a six in ten probability of winning the six seats the party needs to win take back control.All leftist outlets. All of them, which means it's even worse for the Democrats than Cillizza lets on. It's going to be a bloodbath on November 4th. I can't wait!
Two of the three models have moved in Republicans' direction over the past week. FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver's model, gives Republicans a 62 percent chance at the majority, which is up from 58 percent last week, while LEO, the New York Times Senate model, now shows a 69 percent probability of a GOP win -- up from 64 percent last week. (The Washington Post's Election Lab model show Republicans with a 94 percent chance at the majority last Monday and a 93 percent chance today.)
The trend lines in both the LEO and FiveThirtyEight models highlight movement over the past week toward Republicans -- with a slight tick back toward Democrats in the last few days...
I found God doing Fury. I became a Christian man, and not in a fucking bullshit way—in a very real way. I could have just said the prayers that were on the page. But it was a real thing that really saved me. And you can't identify unless you're really going through it. It's a full-blown exchange of heart, a surrender of control. And while there's beauty to that, acting is all about control. So that was a wild thing to navigate. I had good people around me who helped me. Brad [Pitt] was really instrumental in guiding my head through this. Brad comes from a hyper-religious, very deeply Christian, Bible Belt life, and he rejected it and moved toward an unnamed spirituality. He looked at religion like the people's opium, almost like a Marxist view on religion. Whereas [Fury writer-director] David [Ayers] is a full subscriber to Christianity. But these two diametrically opposed positions both lead to the same spot, and I really looked up to both men. It was nice to have conversations with Brad about the family he came from and what he was using to get through the day. People don't know this about Brad: He's a very thoughtful actor. That's not a motherfucker who just shows up and does the job. He puts a lot in, so you get a lot out. He's hard on himself, very hard. I think every great artist is bipolar to some degree. To be great you have to have self-criticism, which, in that moment, becomes some sort of bipolar thing. You go from "That was fucking great" to "I'm fucking shit." And Brad has a bipolar element to the way he deals with his work. We have a lot of similarities that way.
Leaving church on a recent Sunday, Jose Trujillo paused to consider the upcoming midterm election and two of the hottest Senate and gubernatorial races in the country, blazing away right here in Georgia.The Democrats are screwed, heh.
Trujillo hasn't paid much attention to either contest, but it's not his flooring business that's kept him too busy to care, or his infant daughter who's taken away his interest. Rather, he cited President Obama and his failure to overhaul the nation's vexing immigration laws.
"Obama promised too much and never delivered," Trujillo, 44, said, gently rocking 1-year-old Dorothy in his arms outside Iglesia Des Dios Vivo church in Gainesville, a center of Georgia's booming Latino population. Why bother voting, Trujillo asked, "when the politicians never listen to what the people say?"
As Democrats struggle to hold the Senate, limit their losses in the House and maybe gain a few governor seats Nov. 4, they are counting on strong support from Latino voters, a rapidly growing part of the electorate and a big reason states like California, Nevada and Colorado have gone from red to blue in their presidential preferences.
But Latino voting tends to drop in midterm elections and, as Trujillo's sentiment suggests, that may prove all the more so next month, given deep frustration with the president.
He drew a record Latino turnout in 2012, but since then has repeatedly deferred action after pledging to push through comprehensive changes in immigration law, acting without Congress if necessary. For many, that failing seems to trump anything positive Obama has accomplished.
"All the air has been let out," said Matt Barreto, a University of Washington political scientist who conducts extensive polling among Latinos nationwide...
This desire results from people's anger
Towards the system
Fight the system fight back
Fight the system fight back
People die in police custody
Why dont you go see if God can see them
Fight the system fight back
Fight the system fight back
We been shit on far too long
London wants is no freedom
Fight the system fight back
Fight the system fight back
Stand up fight for freedom
Stand up fight for your rights
Fight the system fight back
Fight the system fight back
Fight the system fight back
Imagine there's no warming
It's all just been a lie
CO2 is not a pollutant
The Polar Bears aren’t gonna die
Imagine if all the people
Livin' another day
Imagine there's no Kyoto
It isn't hard to do
Gas at 99 cents a gallon
And no carbon taxes too
Imagine all the people
Driving SUVs
You may say I'm a denier
But I'm not the only one
31,000 scientists
Say the world’s climate follows the sun
Imagine no politicians
I wonder if you can
No one to fear monger
No need to eliminate man
Imagine all the people
Drilling all over the world
You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be more fun
All Along the Watchtower
Bob Dylan
10:09 AM
If You Really Love Me
Stevie Wonder
10:06 AM
Good Lovin'
Grateful Dead
10:01 AM
Wooly Bully
Sam the Sham & The Pharaohs
9:59 AM
Going Up the Country
Canned Heat
9:56 AM
Hoedown
Emerson, Lake & Palmer
9:51 AM
Gemini Dream
The Moody Blues
9:47 AM
Baby Blue
Badfinger
9:44 AM
Nobody
The Doobie Brothers
9:40 AM
Ring of Fire [Live]
Johnny Cash
9:37 AM
White Bird
It's a Beautiful Day
9:31 AM
Vehicle
The Ides of March
9:28 AM
Heart of Gold [Live]
Neil Young
9:25 AM
Blowin' In the Wind
Peter, Paul & Mary
9:22 AM
Bridge Over Troubled Water
Simon & Garfunkel
9:17 AM
San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers In Your Hair)
Scott McKenzie
WASHINGTON — The confidential memo from a former pollster for President Obama contained a blunt warning for Democrats. Written this month with an eye toward Election Day, it predicted “crushing Democratic losses across the country” if the party did not do more to get black voters to the polls.More.
“African-American surge voters came out in force in 2008 and 2012, but they are not well positioned to do so again in 2014,” Cornell Belcher, the pollster, wrote in the memo, dated Oct. 1. “In fact, over half aren’t even sure when the midterm elections are taking place.”
Mr. Belcher’s assessment points to an urgent imperative for Democrats: To keep Republicans from taking control of the Senate, as many are predicting, they need black voters in at least four key states. Yet the one politician guaranteed to generate enthusiasm among African Americans is the same man many Democratic candidates want to avoid: Mr. Obama.
Now, Democrats are deploying other prominent black elected officials and other surrogates, buttressed by sophisticated voter targeting efforts, to stoke black turnout. At the White House, the president is waging an under-the-radar campaign, recording video advertisements, radio interviews and telephone calls specifically targeting his loyal African-American base.
“Anybody who looks at the data realizes that if the black vote, and the brown vote, doesn’t turn out, we can’t win. It’s just that simple,” said Representative Marcia L. Fudge of Ohio, the chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus, referring to African-American and Latino voters. “If we don’t turn out, we cannot hold the Senate.”
African-Americans could help swing elections in Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina and possibly Arkansas, a New York Times analysis of voter data shows, but only if they turn out at higher-than-forecast rates. They will also be important in Kentucky, where Alison Lundergan Grimes, the Democratic Senate candidate, refuses to say if she voted for President Obama — a stance that black leaders including Ms. Fudge fear will depress turnout.
Republicans, who are expanding outreach to African-Americans in states like North Carolina and Georgia, have their own aggressive get-out-the-vote effort, mindful of the success of the Obama campaign, which turned out voters in record numbers.
Black voters made history in 2012, exit polling and census data show, when they turned out at a rate higher than whites to help re-elect Mr. Obama. But fewer voters go to polls in midterm elections. In 2010, a disastrous year for Democrats, blacks voted at a rate lower than whites, creating a “turnout gap.”
The numbers are significant. Although more than 1.1 million black Georgians went to the polls in 2012, only about 741,000 voted in 2010. In North Carolina, Democrats say there are nearly one million black registered voters who did not vote in 2010.
Mr. Belcher declined to discuss for whom he had written the memo, saying it was private, but the document was circulated by the Democratic National Committee. In the memo, he also argued that the turnout gap, more than any Republican Tea Party wave, was responsible for Democrats’ 2010 defeats. So the challenge for Democrats is to get midterm voters to the polls at presidential election-year rates.
“If you tell me in Georgia that, on the closing of the polls, the electorate is 32 percent African-American, I’m going to tell you we have probably elected a Democratic senator,” he said. “That’s not theory. It’s basic math.”
All of the major Senate forecasting models, including ours at Election Lab, now rely heavily on averages of public polls. This raises the question of whether those averages will be correct on Election Day, and whether any misses could affect which party manages to retain control of the Senate. In particular, there is the question of whether polling misses might mean that the Democrats end up with a slim Senate majority after all.Continue reading.
There are reasons to be skeptical that this will happen. It’s not just that we can’t easily predict whether the polls will over- or underestimate one party’s vote share, as discussed by Nate Silver and by Mark Blumenthal & Co. And it’s not just, as Josh Katz and Sean Trende have found, that Senate polls already tend to be pretty accurate at this point in time — especially when candidates have a 3- to 4-point lead, as do Republican candidates in Alaska, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky and Louisiana.
The other key point is this: Late movement in Senate polls tends to be in the direction of the underlying fundamentals. I discussed this movement in the polls in an earlier post, and it’s worth revisiting it now.
The analysis is pretty straightforward. Estimate a simple model of Senate elections from 1980 to 2012 that relies on only a few factors: economic growth, presidential approval, whether it’s a midterm or presidential year, and how the state voted in the most recent presidential election. Then estimate an out-of-sample forecast for every Senate election between 1992 and 2012. Then compare the polls to that forecast.
Here is the gap between the polls and the forecast for the last 60 days of the campaign...
Three weeks out from an election that could give Republicans a historic majority, House Democrats are resorting to the painful strategy of retreat.Crush them just like any threat to American prosperity needs to be crushed and violently destroyed.
Faced with a perilous midterm environment and a sudden gush of Republican money, Democrats are shifting cash from blue-chip recruits to prop up teetering incumbents. The goal is to minimize losses and keep Republicans from their most dominant hold on the House since Harry Truman’s presidency — potentially expelling Democrats from the speaker’s chair for years to come.
In recent days, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has scrapped spending on behalf of two prominent candidates in districts the party had high hopes of snatching from the GOP: Colorado Democrat Andrew Romanoff, a former state House speaker once seen as the party’s best 2014 prospect; and Virginia Democrat John Foust, who is trying to defeat Republican Barbara Comstock, a hard-nosed former operative who played a key role in the investigations of President Bill Clinton in the 1990s.
The money that had been planned in those districts, where airing TV ads is costly, is being shifted to shore up incumbents and keep once-safe seats in the party’s column. Conservative outside groups in recent days have invested millions of dollars in races, erasing what had been a sizable Democratic financial advantage.
Democratic strategists say they’re trying to determine how much damage they might incur on election night. On Monday, the DCCC announced a $600,000 investment to save a suddenly endangered northeastern Iowa district that President Barack Obama won by 14 percentage points. It was an unmistakable sign of how much the political terrain has shifted against Democrats since the 2012 election.
Other similar moves could be on the way.
“Making these decisions is the hardest part of this job, but the amount of outside Republican money raining down on our incumbents means that we need to fine-tune our reservations,” New York Rep. Steve Israel, the DCCC chairman, wrote in an email. “It hurts to scale back any ad buy, but especially when you have strong candidates like Foust and Romanoff who are polling well, have momentum and could win their races.”
Democrats are now almost exclusively playing defense. Of the 28 districts seen as most seriously in contention, all but seven are held by Democrats. Republicans are virtually assured to expand their current 17-seat majority; strategists have pegged GOP gains at six to eight seats. But if Republicans can reach their goal of netting 11 seats, they will have their largest majority since 1949.
The good news for Democrats is that, at least for now, there’s no indication that Republicans are poised for a double-digit gain. Of the 18 Democratic incumbents in the most challenging races, pollsters from both parties say, there isn’t one who appears certain to lose. While 2014 is shaping up to be a good year for Republicans, they add, it does not yet resemble the wave-like environment of 1994 and 2010 for Republicans, or 2006 and 2008 for Democrats.
Republicans are hopeful that a late push from deep-pocketed conservative groups could yield bigger gains. Over the final three weeks of the campaign, GOP-aligned outside organizations have reserved more than $22 million worth of commercial airtime in competitive districts across the county, nearly double the investment from third-party Democratic groups.
During the final stretch of the election, few Democrats will be targeted with more cash from GOP-friendly outfits than California Rep. Ami Bera, who was first elected two years ago. Conservative groups will spend nearly $3 million against Bera, far outpacing their liberal counterparts.
In that race and others, conservative groups are coordinating their efforts to avoid overlap. On Tuesday, American Action Network began airing a TV commercial attacking Bera for his support of Obamacare. That ad will run through Oct. 20, and the next day, Congressional Leadership Fund, a group with close ties to Speaker John Boehner, will begin a commercial buy in the district that will go on for a week. Finally, the baton will be passed to the Karl Rove-founded American Crossroads, which will air ads for the final week leading up to Election Day...
@AmPowerBlog ~> https://t.co/Z9NFdscir8
— Inherent Craigé (@CraigR3521) October 18, 2014@CraigR3521 indeed. can't get enough of her.
— David Partridge (@beegdave) October 18, 2014Writer-director David Ayer takes his gritty explorations of masculinity and violence to the battlefields of World War II in "Fury," starring Brad Pitt as the hardened leader of an American tank crew behind German lines.More.
Movie critics largely agree that "Fury," like the crew it depicts, accomplishes what it set out to do with unflinching violence and skilled execution — though not without its share of casualties.
