Wave, Ripple or Rip Current?

One Day to Go:  According to pollsters and pundits Democrats are ahead of Republicans by 7 to 8% on the generic ballot, then again, as far as I can tell, no one named Joe or Jane Generic is on the ballot in any district or state anywhere within the US.  Experts, to the extent they know what they are talking about, say that a 7% margin is about what it takes for Democrats to overcome the gerrymandering advantage held by Republicans and is enough to turn the House blue which probably explains why House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi was just a wee bit prematurely talking takeover this weekend.  Statistical guru Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight fame whose record was spotless until 2016, although to be fair even he saw that something red was enveloping Florida and by red think Republican not just the red tide that might actually help swing Florida blue this time around, still projects that Democrats have a 6 in 7 or 86% chance of taking control of the House, while Republicans maintain a similar chance of maintaining control of the Senate.  It’s that remaining 14% that has both sides concerned.  Enough House and Senate seat polls fall into the statistical margin of error to make the outcome just a little too unpredictable for this Nervous Nellie and for Republicans who are now starting to sweat over all the close Senate races.  As to Nancy Pelosi, she better not have jinxed the election with her early celebration.  Trump has turned the election into a referendum on him, a strategy that he hopes will help him hold or even strengthen Republican control over the Senate but one that even he admits might throw a few more toss-up House seats over to the blue side.  To that end, he spent the weekend pinballing across the country, holding rallies in states where Democratic Senators are fighting uphill battles to retain their seats, giving special attention to Florida because as bad as it would be for him to see his good friend and fellow rich guy, current Governor Rick Scott lose out to former astronaut, current Senator Bill Nelson, he will  go positively apoplectic if his racist mini-me Ron DeSantis loses out to Andrew Gillum, the Mayor of Tallahassee, in the gubernatorial election that Agricultural Secretary Sonny Perdue says is too “cotton-pickin” important to lose, a description that Purdue would also apply to the Georgia gubernatorial contest, the one between Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp, who controls all of that state’s election levers and Stacey Abrams, the Yale law school educated, state Democratic leader who Trump says is unqualified to serve.  Need I mention that both Abrams and Gillum are African American and thus by Trump and Perdue’s standards, not up for any job of note? Current statements certainly should put to rest any doubt that Trump, who still firmly believes that the exonerated Central Park 5 are guilty of assaulting and raping the Central Park jogger merely because they are Black, but, in case any doubt remains, Emily Fox, Vanity Fair’s Michael Cohen whisperer, reported on Friday that Trump repeatedly spews racist language and selected the first Apprentice winner Bill Rancic over Harvard MBA Kwame Jackson because Rancic is white and Jackson is not. Moving back to Georgia’s Brian Kemp, he’s up to his usual election shenanigans.  Since Federal judges keep ruling against his egregious voter suppression tactics, yesterday he came up with another questionable way to attack Democrats.  He’s now claiming that a Democratic aide tried to hack into the Georgia electoral system and has referred his accusation to the FBI. Kemp who refuses to update the Georgia system, one of the five in the country that still does not keep paper back-ups of votes,  has made similar accusations in the past.  It’s likely that, like last time, the FBI will conclude that nothing out of the ordinary is up, but that’s not stopping Kemp for using his newest accusation as a cudgel against Abrams.  The two remain in one of those statistical ties and unless one wins more than 50% of the vote, their election will go into extra innings with Kemp acting as both the Republican candidate and the election overseer. Anyway, Trump has been sticking to his favorite themes: the malevolent political environment is the fault of the press and their fake news; hordes of migrants are on the verge of crossing the border with middle eastern terrorists in their midst; Republicans are all in on health care and are the only party that will protect Medicare and people with pre-existing conditions; and the Democrats to the extent that they win will destroy the economy.  In response Barack Obama has thrown his no drama persona to the wayside.  He’s been out all weekend, as has Joe Biden and a number of the more secure populist Democratic Senators/future presidential candidates, as has possible future presidential nominee Michael Bloomberg who has been throwing money around to help a few more Democrats make it through to the House or Senate.  The Democratic crowd has been hammering home civility, truth and at least with regard to Obama, the fact that it was he who started the whole economic turnaround in the first place.  As to the health care debate, though she repeatedly voted for the repeal of Obamacare, Congresswoman Martha McSally who is in a hotly contested battle against Kyrsten Sinema for the Arizona Senatorial seat being vacated by Senator “Flaky” Flake, has been lying through her teeth.  When asked, she insists that she is fully for health care, supports coverage of pre-existing conditions and then begs reporters to pivot to asking her about the crisis on the border, you know the one where millions of migrant babies are crawling across the desert in the hope of voting illegally on Tuesday.   For his part, Trump denies that Attorney General Sessions ever told him that he was supporting the anti-Obamacare lawsuit filed by several Republican Attorneys General to overturn the pre-existing condition requirement or if Sessions told him, he just didn’t focus or understand those small details. Not to worry, he insists, he’ll fix it if only his candidates win tomorrow.  

Other News:  Though she doesn’t have much in the way of qualifications, unless of course looking a little bit like Cameron Diaz or having once been a Fox News starlet counts, State Department communications guru Heather Nauert has emerged as the top candidate for UN Ambassador.  As predicted, that job will no longer be a Cabinet level position, instead, to the extent that she passes a confirmation hearing she will report to Secretary of State Pompeo and/or security advisor John Bolton. The previously lifted sanctions against Iran are going back into effect today with a few waivers for eight countries including South Korea, Turkey and India but most definitely not for any of our European allies.  Though  Secretary of State Pompeo asserts that the sanctions will be successful in changing Iran’s aggressive posture and will limit its funding of terrorist activities he also is quite sure that the Iranian people won’t be hurt.  That said he has kind of admitted that he’s not so secretly hoping for regime change and that generally doesn’t happen without a lot of spilt blood.  As to blood and guts, the Turks now suspect that  journalist/dissident Jamal Khashoggi who the Saudis describe as a dangerous Islamist and Moslem Brotherhood advocate was removed from the Saudi’s Istanbul embassy with his body parts stuffed into various pieces of luggage.  In any case, his sons want his remains back so that they can take him back to Saudi Arabia for a proper burial in Medina which is understandable but bizarre because if I was them I am not so sure that I’d be all that anxious to return to Saudi Arabia anytime soon.  Trump is still trying to figure out how to “punish” the Saudis without punishing the Saudis.  As to the two Saudi sisters whose bodies were found duct taped together on the shore of the Hudson river, the NY police say that there are no signs of foul play, that it appears that the sisters were so freaked out at the thought of being sent back to Riyadh that they ran up their credit cards, enjoyed a few more days of freedom and then committed suicide instead of going home.  The police say that the tape wasn’t all that tightly wound around the girls, that they put it on themselves so that they would be found together.  To the extent that Trump makes it past 2020 as frightening as that sounds, he won’t be able to beat up on Angela Merkel during his second term.  The long time German Chancellor has announced that she will be stepping down in 2021 at the end of her term.  In the meantime, French President Emanuel Macron is hitting his own snags as recent polls indicate that Marine Le Pen’s far right party is ‘nudging” ahead of his party in polling for the upcoming EU parliament elections.  More red tides ahead?