A Little Look At Trump's America One Year Before The Fateful Choice

Barr, Pompeo, Trumpanzee and Pence

UPDATE: With 100% of parishes reporting, Governor John Bel Edwards (D) was reelected in red, red Louisiana, despite-- or more likely because of-- a barrage of Trump's carrying on and tons and tons of Republican sewer money:

• John Bel Edwards (D)- 763,386 (51%)
• Eddie Rispone (R)- 731,455 (49%)

If anyone wasn't already sure, this confirms that Trump has the kiss of death when it comes to endorsing candidates. America is onto this crook, even in states like Louisiana and Kentucky, and if Trump can't win in Louisiana and Kentucky, where exactly can he win? He's still relatively popular in both of those states, but his approval is underwater in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Iowa, Georgia, Arizona, North Carolina, Florida, Utah, Montana, Nebraska, Alaska, Ohio... all states he won in 2016. Watch him drag Republican senators Steve Daines, Martha McSally, Cory Gardner, Susan Collins, Joni Ernst, Thom Tillis, David Perdue and Dan Sullivan down the crapper with him. And don't they all ever deserve that!

Chris Strohm and Jordan Fabian, reporting for Bloomberg, wrote that Giuliani is being investigated by the Feds for "campaign finance violations and a failure to register as a foreign agent as part of an active investigation into his financial dealings. The probe of Giuliani, which one official said could also include possible charges on violating laws against bribing foreign officials or conspiracy, presents a serious threat to Trump’s presidency from a man that former national security adviser John Bolton has called a 'hand grenade.'" He is widely expected to be indicted.

Last night, the Washington Post published an Op-Ed by prominent authors Jon Meacham, Walter Issacson and Evan Thomas, It's The Wise Men vs The Wise Guys In Trump's America. They noted that Napoleon is reputed to have said that "geography is destiny" and continued that the axiom "came to our minds this week as we watched two very different but neighboring universes collide before the House Intelligence Committee. The ramrod-straight William B. Taylor Jr. and the bow-tied George Kent, two diplomats from the largely WASP ethos of the post-World War II foreign policy establishment, one headquartered at places such as the Council on Foreign Relations’ imposing Harold Pratt House at 68th Street and Park Avenue, found themselves bearing noble witness amid an impeachment imbroglio that may be best understood by an appreciation of the wilder mores of midtown Manhattan. Only a few blocks away from the portrait-lined walls and genteel cocktails of the Council lies the real center of gravity in the politics of 2019: the gilded Trump Tower, built on the fluid morals and cutthroat deal-making of New York real estate. The Tower sits cheek-by-jowl (the image is chosen purposely) with the Grand Havana Room, a cigar club frequented by Rudy Giuliani, atop a Fifth Avenue building owned by the family of Jared Kushner. Walk a bit farther south-- you don’t even need a Town Car-- and you reach Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., home of Fox News and the New York Post."

To Trump supporters, the testimony Wednesday was the “deep state” surfacing briefly from the depths of white papers, institutional knowledge and a facility with U.S. military and diplomatic history. (Kent’s evocation of von Steuben and Lafayette was straight out of a Ward Just novel.)

To Trump’s critics and defenders of constitutional norms, the Republican narrative that the president’s threats to deny security assistance to Ukraine was just the kind of thing tough guys do (and, after getting caught, he didn’t do it!), suggested that tabloid hyperbole, Fox News arcana and New York hardball had replaced the real world. From the Long Telegram to Twitter, and from Averell Harriman to Sean Hannity: To borrow a phrase of Henry Adams, himself a scion of presidents, the current moment disproves Darwin.

The story of upended conventions and of a president who careens between self-parody and serious lawlessness is by now familiar, as old as the Age of Trump itself. The distinction is that the impeachment hearings have given us perhaps the clearest example yet of the triumph of political demimonde wise guys such as Trump, Giuliani and the Rogers Stone and Ailes over the latter-day Robert Lovetts and Dean Achesons. And it’s not just Wise Men, of course: Jeane Kirkpatrick, Madeleine Albright and Condoleezza Rice hailed from the establishment world, as do Marie Yovanovitch and Fiona Hill.

The moment of decision between the Wise Men and the wise guys on Wednesday was subtle but nevertheless clear. It came when Rep. Michael R. Turner, a Republican, noted that diplomats such as Taylor and Kent “deal in words of understanding. Words of beliefs and feelings, because in your profession, that’s what you work with to try to pull together policy.” Theirs, the lawmaker was implying, was almost a touchingly naive way of life in which one trusted what one was told, assumed the fundamental truthfulness of, say, a presidentially appointed ambassador, and believed that a president himself meant what he said.

No longer: The midtown game of wheeling and dealing, often done over a cigar at the Grand Havana or perhaps an overpriced steak at 21, has now gone global as the denizens of Trump’s neighborhood run shadow foreign policy ops seeking 2020 election help and good paydays.

Had any other president, Taylor was asked, linked official aid in the American interest to private or political benefit? With a stoicism and brevity that would’ve made George Marshall quietly proud, Taylor replied, “No.”

To be sure, the establishment has been far from perfect, its fall from preeminence more than partly self-inflicted. Elite education and conventional expertise don’t guarantee good results, and America has been shaped by the battle between the privileged and the populist since long before Andrew Jackson. More recently, there was Vietnam writ large, and intelligence failures like Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. Grass-stained ideals of fair play learned on the playing fields of Groton could seem like forlorn hopes on the streets Basra or Baghdad. And the semi-aristocrats of places like Pratt House and the Century Association had a way of turning up their noses at the lesser mortals of Trump’s bridge-and-tunnel crowd.

Alger Hiss once inflamed a young congressman named Richard Nixon when he turned to Nixon, who was about to ask some probing questions about Hiss’s ties to the Kremlin, and sneered, “My law school was Harvard. Yours, I believe, was Whittier?” (Actually, it was Duke.) No wonder Nixon could sell himself as a man of the people when Hiss turned out to be a communist spy.

Such establishment condescension also fueled the rise of Joe McCarthy and of McCarthy’s chief counsel, Roy Cohn, who served as lawyer and mentor in the 1970s and ’80s to a young developer from Queens who was looking to make it big in Manhattan. And Donald Trump never forgot a thing Cohn taught him. (One particularly relevant lesson today: Confronted with a tough case to argue, Cohn would say that he didn’t need to know what the law was-- just who the judge was.)

In midtown Manhattan, Trump learned to dominate the news — in his rise, that meant the New York Post, with its screaming, one-sourced stories, an early harbinger of the presidential Twitter strategy. He learned the power of TV. And he learned that tough guys — or “killers,” in a favorite approbation of Trump’s-- like Ailes, who presided over this stew of often-abusive power, money and misinformation, were the kinds of guys he could count on.

For one thing was certain: The Wise Men of 68th Street or the United Nations or any of the traditional institutions of expertise weren’t his guys. The question America now faces in impeachment and, should Trump prevail, in the 2020 election, is whose New York will serve us best in the long run-- the wise guys’ or the Wise Men’s?

I bet you don't have to think about which side of the equation, the wretched and pathetic Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III falls on. Really wretched. You don't have watch them both... but you can. This doozy came first, "Blow Great Job:"





A week later, for whatever reason, Sessions' senate campaign released this cringe-worthy little portrait that illustrates how the Trump Regime is more a product of this America than an actual creator of it:

Red Hot Louisiana Appears To Be Trending Towards John Bel Edwards In The Gubernatorial Race

Louisiana's gubernatorial runoff is this coming Saturday, Nov. 16. It pits current governor, John Bel Edwards, a conservative Democrat, against a corrupt  Trumpist businessman, Eddie Rispone, who beat Rep. Ralph Abraham in the October 12 primary. Rispone beat Abraham by writing himself a $12 million check. Jungle primary results:

• John Bel Edwards (D)- 625,970 (46.6%)
• Eddie Rispone (R)- 368,319 (27.4%)
• Ralph Abraham (R)- 317,149 (23.6%)

Although Trump and Pence have been campaigning like their lives depended on it for Ripsone, two of the most prominent Republicans in state government, Senate president John Alario (a former House speaker and the longest-serving legislator in state history) and state Senator Dan Morrish, endorsed Edwards. This ad helps explain a lot about how a Democrat-- particularly a conservative one-- managed to put together a competitive coalition in a state as red (R+11) as Louisiana:





Trump beat Hillary in 2016 in a landslide-- 1,178,638 (58.09%) to 780,154 (36.45%). She won only 10 of Louisiana's 64 parishes. How did Edwards come to be the only Democratic governor in the Deep South? In 2015, the incumbent Republican Governor Bobby Jindal was not eligible to run again and the party's nominee was scandal-machine John Vitter. Edwards beat him 646,924 (56.11%) to 505,940 (43.89%), making him the first Democrat to win a statewide election in Louisiana since 2008, when Mary Landrieu won her third term as a U.S. Senator. The Republican Lt. Governor, Jay Dardenne, who had also run in the primary, endorsed Edwards over Vitter.

The Democratic Governors Association is funding Gumbo PAC to attack Rispone and as of the end of October had put $5.5 million in. The Republican Governors Association has it's own internal smear machine, Right Direction PAC, which had already sent $6.2 million against Edwards by the end of October. On top of that the neo-fascist Make Louisiana Great Again PAC spent another $373,000 on radio and TV spots smearing Edwards, and a third sewer money PAC, Truth in Politics, run by notoriously corrupt-- even by Louisiana-- Baton Rouge contractor Lane Grisby put $750,000 into ads against Edwards.

The most recent public poll, by JMC Analytics shows Edwards ahead 48-46% (and 50-47% including leaners). In person early voting-- which accounts for about 20% of the Louisiana vote, ended on Friday. And the big news was Democratic enthusiasm. JMC analyzed what we can learn for this cycle's early vote, which indicates a 51% total voter turn out (1.51 million voters) and a win for Edwards:

As of last night, 489,649 Louisianians either early voted by person or by mail in ballot (451,171 in person, and 38,478 mail in ballots). To put this number in perspective, this is the highest early voting turnout EVER for a non-Presidential election. Not only did it exceed the volume of in person early voting for the primary by 31% (or 115,459), but it was 91% (or 232,628) higher than day in person early voting for the 2015 runoff. The top five (by early voting volume) early voting parishes were East Baton Rouge (58,249 early/absentee votes), Orleans (39,260), St. Tammany (35,097), Jefferson (31,523), and Ouachita (20,854).

Whatever the turnout levels are from election cycle to election cycle, black voters (who are almost unanimously Democratic) tend to show up in greater numbers on the last day. But very rarely do they turn out to the extent that they did yesterday: a whopping 40% of the last day early voters were black (blacks represent 31% of Louisiana’s registered voters). As further illustration of how unprecedented black participation this strong is, in the 116 days of available data for in person early voting going all the way back to 2008, only four other times has the black early vote as a percentage of the total vote ever hit 40% (and three of those times were in 2008, when Barack Obama was first elected).

This 40% black electorate was in addition to stronger (relative to the primary) black early voting for the previous six days which never dropped below 29%. This means that the final early vote is 31% black-- a figure 6% higher (percentage-wise) than in the primary and 1% higher than in the 2015 runoff.

Does this 6% increase in the black share of the early voting electorate equate to a similar six point boost for Governor Edwards, though? Because at the same time that the black share of the electorate increased 6% relative to the primary, the Republican share only decreased 3% (it was 38%, compared to 41% in the primary). The remainder of the decrease came from lower turnout (percentage-wise) from white Democrats and white Independents. And since Governor Edwards has been running strongly among white Democrats (60-37% in the last poll JMC conducted and publicly released) and relatively well among white Independents (he trails 38-56% in the last poll), the incremental benefit to his campaign isn’t as much as it would seem, because the Republican percentage of the electorate remained relatively high, and among this group, Governor Edwards trails 17-79%.

What all of this analysis means in practical terms is that because of (1) the decrease in white Democrats/white Independents and (2) the relatively high Republican early vote, an Edwards poll lead of 50-47% over Rispone would become 50-46% Edwards/Rispone if the poll results were recalculated to reflect the demographic composition of the early vote.

Yesterday a Mason-Dixon poll was released by the local Fox affiliate and it also showed Edwards leading Rispone, 48-46%.

Why is this race such a big deal? Although he is a conservative, Edwards is immensely better than Rispone in terms of how Lousianans will be impacted by state government. Rispone is literally as bad as Trump-- yes that bad! And there's another factor to consider as well. The Democratic victories last week-- especially in Kentucky, Virginia and Pennsylvania-- have made a number of Senate Republicans very nervous about their lockstep support for and enablement of Trump. If Trump was unable to help GOP Governor Matt Bevin-- his closest gubernatorial ally anywhere (and in a state as red as Kentucky)-- what will he be able to do for anyone, anywhere? A win for Edwards in Louisiana next weekend will drive that home, particularly to vulnerable red state senators David Perdue (GA), Thom Tillis (NC), Martha McSally (AZ), Steve Daines (MT), Joni Ernst (IA) and Dan Sullivan (AK).

When Republicans Can't Win, They Always Try Cheating-- It's Part Of The Nature Of Conservatism... And Kentucky Is A Good Case

Gangsta President by Nancy Ohanian

Last week, Mehdi Hasan interviewed Bernie for The Intercept. I dealt with some of it last night, but not this interaction about 2020:

Hasan: I’ll hold you to that. I’ll hold you to that definitely, Senator. One last question before I let you go. Let’s say November, you beat Donald Trump. You win the popular vote. You win the Electoral College. It’s clear. It’s decisive. And he says, “No, I don’t accept the result. It’s fake news. It was the deep state. It was a coup. It was illegal immigrants voting for the Democrats.” What do you do in that scenario?

Bernie: I share the paranoia of many people. Trump is a pathological liar and a very dangerous person. Trump will accept the election results and when I defeat him, I will become the president of the United States.

Let's hope. Sportsmanship and patriotism aren't exactly part of Trump's wheelhouse. Yesterday, New York Times reporters Matt Rosenberg and Nick Corasaniti took a look at how Trump and his cronies tried-- and are still trying a week later-- to steal the gubernatorial election in Kentucky. They called the efforts "an omen for 2020." They reported that "A few hours after polls closed in Kentucky last Tuesday, a Twitter user writing under the handle @Overlordkraken1 posted a message to his 19 followers saying he had 'just shredded a box of Republican mail-in ballots.' It was clear that the Kentucky governor’s race was going to be excruciatingly close, and that the Republican incumbent, Matt Bevin, could be headed to defeat. But just in case anyone missed the significance of the destroyed-ballots claim, @Overlordkraken1 added a final touch to his tweet: 'Bye-Bye Bevin,' he wrote. For those eager to cry fraud as a reliably red state leaned blue, the fact that @Overlordkraken1 did not appear to be in Kentucky-- Louisville was misspelled in the location tag on his tweet, for one thing-- was not going to get in the way of a useful narrative. Nor was Twitter’s decision to suspend his account."

Within hours of @Overlordkraken1’s tweet, as it became apparent that Mr. Bevin was trailing in the vote tally, hyperpartisan conservatives and trolls were pushing out a screenshot of the message, boosted by what appeared to be a network of bots, and providing early grist for allegations of electoral theft in Kentucky. High-profile right-wing figures were soon tweeting out their own conspiracy theories about the election being stolen-- messages that were in turn pushed by even more trolls and bots-- and the Bevin campaign began talking about “irregularities” in the vote without offering any specifics or evidence.

The talk has only intensified in the days since, though it has yet to be matched by any evidence of actual election rigging. But with Mr. Bevin’s choosing not to concede, and Kentucky authorities’ preparing to recanvass all of the votes at his insistence, Kentucky is shaping up to be a case study in the real-word impact of disinformation-- and a preview of what election-security officials and experts fear could unfold a year from now if the 2020 presidential election comes down to the wire.

Since his election four years ago, Mr. Bevin has hitched himself to President Trump, and his allegations of irregularities echo the Trump playbook. Mr. Trump has sown doubts about a “rigged election” system since before his own election, including openly questioning the mail-in ballot process in Colorado. He then contended that fraud had lost him the popular vote (which Hillary Clinton won by 2.9 million votes). And he has amplified similar theories while in office, tweeting at least 40 times about unfounded voter fraud allegations, according to an analysis by the New York Times, including a claim after the midterm elections last year that “many ballots are missing or forged” in Florida.

Such divisive rhetoric after close elections has always risked shaking public faith in essential democratic institutions. But in a profoundly polarized country where narrow margins are hardly uncommon, sophisticated networks of social media users-- human and bot-- can quickly turn partisan rancor into grave threats, rapidly amplifying disinformation and creating an initial veneer of vast discord that can eventually become self-fulfilling.

“It shows how the same divisions that the Russians sought to expose in 2016 remain real vulnerabilities in our democracy,” said Laura Rosenberger, director of the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a nonpartisan group in Washington focused on election security. “The ugly partisanship that is dominating our democratic discourse continues to create openings for those who want to weaken our institutions and use the online space to fuel conspiracies or advance their own agenda.”

Mr. Bevin has not elaborated on the nature or source of the perceived irregularities, and his campaign did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

The campaign of Attorney General Andy Beshear, who is leading the governor by roughly 5,000 votes, said in a statement that “it’s deeply concerning to see shady coordinated disinformation campaigns trying to undermine our democracy.”

The Kentucky secretary of state’s office said federal law enforcement officials were investigating both the tweet about shredding ballots and the subsequent rapid amplification. The United States attorney’s office for the Eastern District of Kentucky did not respond to a request for comment.

Twitter, in response to questions from The Times, said the trolling and spread of disinformation about the Kentucky race appeared scattershot and haphazard, but largely appeared to originate in the United States. The company described @Overlordkraken1, whose profile said his name was Luis, as a user with a history of small-time trolling.

Graphika, a company that specializes in analyzing social media, agreed with the conclusion that much of the activity around the Kentucky vote was domestic and not likely to have been pushed by any foreign power. Graphika said the tweets about electoral fraud appeared to land in what it calls a “Trump core”-- a large number of highly interconnected social media accounts, many run by real people, that are typically reactive and loud and can keep a conversation going for days at a time.

But much like the Russian-backed networks of bots and trolls that impersonated Black Lives Matter activists in 2016, or more recently seized on divisive issues like gun rights after a mass shooting, the accounts that quickly amplified doubts and disinformation about the Kentucky election seemed ready for the occasion.

The tweet about the shredded ballots was first noticed by the secretary of state’s office, which alerted law enforcement officials and Twitter. The tweet was quickly taken down, but by then it had already been captured in a screenshot and would be widely shared.

Data compiled by VineSight, a start-up that detects disinformation on social media, showed that many of the accounts that tweeted the screenshot of @Overlordkraken1’s ballot-shredding claim appeared to be bots. Their tweets, in turn, were spread by other bots.

Of the more than 3,800 accounts that VineSight detected tweeting the screenshot, at least 2,350 appeared to be bots, based on an analysis of the accounts’ activities, including how quickly and how often they tweet.

One was an account that went by the handle @ConservaMomUSA and had both human and bot characteristics. @ConservaMomUSA’s post about the ballot shredding was retweeted about 1,300 times, and nearly 60 percent of that traffic was from bots, VineSight found.

The volume of bot-like tweets of the vote-shredding screenshot prompted VineSight to alert the Democratic Governors Association in Washington. Despite growing fears about national disinformation campaigns, the news startled some officials there.

“I was a little surprised,” said David Turner, the group’s communications director. He noted that while some small-scale bot activity had been detected after the 2017 elections in Virginia, “we didn’t see any of that in our close elections last year.”

The disinformation quickly grew beyond the allegation of shredded ballots. The conspiratorial hashtag #StopTheSteal, which had been prevalent in the 2018 midterm elections, then silent for nearly a year, spiked late on election night, tweeted more than 1,200 times, largely by accounts with bot-like characteristics.

Tweets explicitly claiming that the election had been “rigged” were also picked up. A quick sample of nine tweets decrying a “rigged” election were retweeted roughly 1,800 times, with nearly 60 percent of the retweets coming from bot-like accounts, according to data compiled by VineSight.

Other bot-like accounts were resurfacing unfounded allegations of “voter intimidation” by George Soros, the billionaire Democratic donor and favorite boogeyman of the far right.

Talk of possible electoral fraud was not limited to the fringes of online discourse. Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch, a prominent right-wing activist group, tweeted that Kentucky had weak voter ID laws and “dirty election rolls,” though he was careful not to make any direct allegation of wrongdoing.

Michael Coudrey, an entrepreneur and activist with more than 180,000 Twitter followers, posted a message on Wednesday that Kentucky had switched to machines that scanned votes and provided no paper backup, and “oddly enough the entire state turns blue.”

In an email responding to questions from The Times, Mr. Coudrey said warnings from federal officials about possible foreign interference in elections made Kentucky’s use of scannable voting machines a cause for concern. Still, he later deleted the tweet after it became apparent that Republicans had scored significant wins in the state. But by then it had been retweeted hundreds of times.

“Now we see as a reality that Kentucky was prime fertile breeding ground to amplify tactics that have previously been used in the 2016 election, and try out new tactics that I do believe will most likely continue to be used in the 2020 election,” said Alison Lundergan Grimes, the Kentucky secretary of state, a Democrat who ran unsuccessfully in 2014 against Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader. She said it foreshadowed “what is to come in elections not only here in the Commonwealth, but all across this nation.”

By Thursday, the online campaign was melding with real-world action. A supporter of Mr. Bevin, Frank Simon, had set up a robocall network telling people to “please report suspected voter fraud” to the state Department of Elections.

There are no indications of any voter fraud in Kentucky, according to Ms. Grimes.

“Beyond the routine calls that we field, up to and on Election Day, there are no irregularities that would substantiate a 5,000-vote difference margin that now separates unofficially Governor-elect Beshear with Governor Bevin,” she said.

While the Kentucky election, held in an off-year, remains a sideshow to most people outside the state, election security experts see in it a worrying sign of what Americans may be forced to contend with next November.

A situation like Kentucky’s, but on a national scale, would at the very least leave the government “paralyzed in terms of any real policy, domestically or abroad,” said George Beebe of the Center for the National Interest, a conservative think tank in Washington.

“We are not going to be able to actually do things,” Mr. Beebe said. “It’s going to be a challenge, I think, to hold things together. Where this is pointing is a crisis of systemic legitimacy.”

To better understand how Beshear won in beet red Kentucky, let's turn to Bill Bishop at Daily Yonder: Where the Vote Shifted in Kentucky from 2015 to 2019. it wasn't just the voter enthusiasm against Trump and Bevin the the cities-- and there was huge Democratic voter turn out in Louisville, Lexington and the Cincinnati suburbs-- but also a shift towards Beshear across the state compared to Bevin's election in 2015. Bishop acknowledged that "the areas that gave the Democrat a lead over incumbent Governor Matt Bevin were in the state’s major cities and close-in suburbs... Only 39 of Kentucky’s 120 counties were more Republican this week than four years earlier. Almost all counties were rural or exurban (the remotest suburbs) and they are concentrated in the western portion of the state. The counties that moved most strongly toward the Democrats were central city counties of the major metro regions of the state and their suburbs (including those neighboring Cincinnati, Ohio). Of the seven counties where Democrats increased their share by 10 percentage points from 2015, five were attached to major metro areas."

As I mentioned right after the election, most of the big coal counties that had been Bernie Country in 2016 and then went for Trump in the general, either outright voted for Beshear or gave him far more voters than they had given Democrats in recent times. Bishop: "There was a strong Democratic trend in a number of Eastern Kentucky counties. Magoffin, Knott and Perry counties (all once dependent on the coal industry) had some of the strongest Democratic shifts in the state. But since the urban and suburban counties have much larger populations than rural counties, most of the surge in Democratic votes was tied to the cities. Democrats increased their total vote by 283,000 from 2015 to 2019. Nearly two-thirds of that increase (177,000 votes) came from the state’s major cities or suburbs. In fact, nearly 40 percent of that increase came from just two counties, the central parts of Louisville (Jefferson County) and Lexington (Fayette County). The increase in voter turnout was massive in Kentucky, compared to 2015. The Democratic vote increased by 66 percent from 2015 to 2019. The Republican turnout increased by 37.7 percent-- a huge gain but not enough to offset the Democratic surge. The Democratic vote in downtown Lexington nearly doubled."

The Washington Post has a sophisticated analysis of the urban, suburban and rural shifts in Kentucky’s elections. It finds that the split between central cities and counties farther from city centers has widened since 2015.

The Yonder finds the same widening gap. For example, there was a 22.5 percentage point difference in the Democratic vote between Louisville (Jefferson County) and the state’s most rural counties in 2015. This week, the gap was 29.6 points.

Is The Scope Of The Ukraine Scandal Too Much For A Low IQ Trump Supporter To Grasp?

"We Met The Enemy And They Are Us" by Nancy Ohanian

Kentucky's PVI is R+15. Louisiana's is R+11. In 2016, Trump won Kentucky 1,202,971 (62.52%) to 628,854 (32.68%). Louisiana was also a strong Trump state, but not nearly as strong as Kentucky. Trump won 1,178,638 (58.09%) to 780,154 (38.45%). Tuesday, Trump's favorite governor, Matt Bevin, was defeated after Trump pulled out all the stops to help his reelection effort, including an election-eve rally in Lexington, which resulted in a massive county-wide 2-1 landslide against Bevin and for the victorious Andy Beshear. The size of Beshear's win in Lexington-- where Democratic voter participation went through the roof and outpaced the state average-- was most of the margin by which Bevin was defeated. Wednesday night, Trump was back in Louisiana, juicing Democratic turnout for the gubernatorial runoff there.

It was almost as if he was trying to turnout Democratic voters-- for a conservative Democrat base voters aren't enthusiastic about. By making the election about himself, Democratic voters will be tempted to overlook Gov. John Bel Edwards' shortcomings and go to the polls to vote against Trump and his puppet candidate. Although over 90% of Trump's standup routine was about himself, he idiotically branded the conservative Bel Edwards a "radical liberal Democrat."

The Monroe Civic Center, the 7,600 capacity home to the Monroe Moccasins ice hockey team and Louisiana Bayou Beast indoor football team, became a comedy club as Señor Trumpanzee railed against Democrats who he accused of spending their time on a "deranged, delusional, destructive and hyperpartisan impeachment witch hunt," even as more and more incontrovertible evidence pours in that Trump is guilty of exactly the kinds of high crimes and misdemeanors the founding fathers wanted used for impeachment.

His bullshit is persuasive to his dead-end racist fan base, but to no one else. "It’s all a hoax. It’s a scam. I had a perfect phone call, a totally perfect phone call." No one else believes his twaddle about the Democrats ripping "the guts out of our country," nor that impeachment is an "illegal act." Thursday morning, the New York Times' Andrew Kramer reported from Kiev that the newly elected Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky was about to bow to Trump's demands but was spared by sheer luck. "It was early September," wrote Kramer, "and Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, faced an agonizing choice: whether to capitulate to President Trump’s demands to publicly announce investigations against his political enemies or to refuse, and lose desperately needed military aid. Only Mr. Trump could unlock the aid, he had been told by two United States senators, and time was running out. If the money, nearly $400 million, were not unblocked by the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30, it could be lost in its entirety."

Rudy by Nancy Ohanian

In a flurry of WhatsApp messages and meetings in Ukraine’s capital, Kiev, over several days, senior aides debated the point. Avoiding partisan politics in the United States had always been the first rule of Ukrainian foreign policy, but the military aid was vital to the war against Russian-backed separatist forces in eastern Ukraine, a conflict that has cost 13,000 lives since it began in 2014.

By then, however, Mr. Zelensky’s staffers were already conceding to what seemed to be the inevitable, and making plans for a public announcement about the investigations. It was a fateful decision for a fledgling president elected on an anticorruption platform that included putting an end to politically motivated investigations.

Elements of this internal Ukrainian debate have appeared in the Ukrainian news media and seeped into congressional testimony in the United States, as part of an impeachment inquiry undertaken after accusations surfaced of Mr. Trump’s demands.

But interviews in Kiev with government officials, lawmakers and others close to the Zelensky government have revealed new details of how high-level Ukrainian officials ultimately decided to acquiesce to President Trump’s request-- and, by a stroke of luck, never had to follow through.

Aides were arguing in favor of “bowing to what was demanded,” said Petro Burkovskiy, a senior fellow at the Democratic Initiatives Foundation who has close ties to the Ukrainian government. They were willing to do so, he said, despite the risk of losing bipartisan support in the United States by appearing to assist Mr. Trump’s re-election bid. “The cost was high.”

As President Trump’s principal envoy to Ukraine, Gordon Sondland, admitted Tuesday in congressional testimony, the Trump administration had withheld the military aid to pressure Mr. Zelensky to make a public statement on the two investigations: one into whether former Vice President President Joseph R. Biden Jr. had pressed for the firing of a Ukrainian prosecutor who was investigating Burisma, a natural gas company where his son served on the board; the other into unproven accusations that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that meddled in the 2016 election to promote the candidacy of Hillary Clinton.

...A tug-of-war ensued between a senior aide to Mr. Zelensky, Andriy Yermak, and another of Mr. Trump’s envoys to Ukraine, Kurt Volker, over the wording of the proposed public statement. Mr. Volker went so far as to draft a statement for Mr. Zelensky that mentioned both investigations.

Mr. Yermak pushed back, suggesting language that mentioned investigations but in general terms, so as not to antagonize the Democrats. Late in the negotiations, the American diplomats consented to dropping mention of Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election.

Even as Mr. Yermak negotiated the wording in August, the stakes were clear. While rumors had been swirling for months about a possible hold on military aid, by early August high-level Ukrainian officials had confirmed the freeze.

The trade soon became explicit. They were approached in September by Mr. Sondland, a major donor to Mr. Trump’s inauguration who had been appointed ambassador to the European Union despite having no diplomatic experience. At that point, he explained in blunt terms to Mr. Zelensky and Mr. Yermak, there was little chance the aid would be forthcoming until they made the public statement on the investigations.

“I said that resumption of the U.S. aid would likely not occur until Ukraine provided the public anticorruption statement that we had been discussing for many weeks,” Mr. Sondland said in sworn testimony released Tuesday by the House committees leading the impeachment inquiry.

Mr. Trump wanted the Ukrainian president to speak on CNN, William B. Taylor Jr., the top American diplomat in Ukraine, testified.

But aides to Mr. Zelensky, on high alert to avoid any move that might irritate Mr. Trump, wondered if that was such a good idea, in that Mr. Trump habitually called CNN “fake news” in his Twitter posts.

They also uncovered a post from Mr. Trump attacking Fox News as “not working for us anymore!”

Nearly all Mr. Zelensky’s top advisers favored his making the public statement, said one of the officials who participated in the debate. United States military aid, they agreed, as well as diplomatic backing for impending peace talks to end the war outweighed the risks of appearing to take sides in American politics.

But there was a lone holdout-- Alexander Danyliuk, the director of the national security council. Mr. Danyliuk, who resigned in late September, told the Ukrainian news media that the Zelensky administration would now need to “correct the mistakes” in relations with the United States and “in particular their own.”

Finally bending to the White House request, Mr. Zelensky’s staff planned for him to make an announcement in an interview on Sept. 13 with Fareed Zakaria, the host of a weekly news show on CNN.

Though plans were in motion to give the White House the public statement it had sought, events in Washington saved the Ukrainian government from any final decision and eliminated the need to make the statement.

But word of the freeze in military aid had leaked out, and Congress was in an uproar. Two days before the scheduled interview, the Trump administration released the assistance and Mr. Zelensky’s office quickly canceled the interview.

Since then, Trump administration officials including the White House chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, have tried to argue that the security assistance could not have been conditioned on the public statement, because the aid was released without it.

That stance has crumbled as a succession of United States diplomats, capped by Mr. Sondland on Tuesday, have testified in the impeachment inquiry that the freeze on aid was part of a quid pro quo designed to coerce Mr. Zelensky into making the public statement.

In Kiev, there is still a debate about whether Mr. Zelensky caved or held out. “The Zelensky team was ready to make this quid quo pro,” said Mr. Burkovskiy, the analyst. “They were ready to do this.”

But Pavlo Klimkin, Ukraine’s foreign minister until a change of government on Aug. 29, said there was no telling what Mr. Zelensky would have ended up saying in the interview, as there were so many versions of a statement under negotiation.

“From the contacts that took place, it’s difficult to say if they led, or did not lead, to concrete deals,” Mr. Klimkin said in an interview. In public, Mr. Zelensky has insisted he would never order a politicized prosecution.

Either way, Mr. Klimkin said, Ukrainian officials were at the least keenly aware of the stakes-- a trade of United States assistance for political favors, even as Mr. Trump’s supporters have insisted they should not have viewed relations in this light.

“We are not idiots, or at least not all of us,” Mr. Klimkin said.

Oops... misfire! John Bolton by Nancy Ohanian

No, they're not idiots. The question, though, is what percentage of Trump's die-hard supporters in places like Monroe, Louisiana are? And especially now that it looks likely that John Bolton is almost certainly going to testify against Trump in open congressional session. Maybe the Trump base will have an easier time understanding what's at stake through illustrations and cartoons. This one seems simple enough:

Trump Has Led The GOP Into A Death Spiral-- Last Night Was Just A Taste Of What's Coming

This morning, Aaron Blake noted at the Washington Post that "When President Trump was elected, he promised the GOP that they would win so much they would get tired of it. But for a third successive election year since then, the Republican Party has walked away the loser." Also this morning a top Democratic congressional staffer told me that she spoke to "two different Republican Hill staffers who have expressed serious concerns with how badly last night went for them. They described Virginia and Kentucky outcomes as canaries in the coal mine for 2020. Despite all the negative news and concerning polls, they were holding out hope that the DC news cycle wasn't breaking through in the rest of the country. That illusion was shattered last night and now congressional Republicans are starting to realize what it will be like to run with Trump in 2020. It appears impeachment politics aren't as catastrophic to Democrats as initially thought; the Kentucky gubernatorial race was pitted as a referendum on impeachment in a state Trump won by 30 and the incumbent Republican still lost. Trump made the election about him (which he will of course do in 2020) and the result was a complete disaster for his party." As we mentioned last night, the Democrats won and Trump lost. Even in Mississippi, in the heart of the Confederacy/Trumplandia, Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves' less-than-stellar win is dimmed when put into historical context:

• 2019- Reeves (R)- 443,063 (52.3%), Hood (D)- 394,177 (46.5%)
• 2015- Bryant (R)- 476,697 (66.4%), Gray (D)- 231,643 (32.3%)
• 2011- Bryant (R)- 544,851 (61%), DuPree (D)- 348,617 (39%)
• 2007- Barbour (R)- 430,807 (57.9%), Eaves (D)- 313,232 (42.1%)
• 2003- Barbour (R)- 470,404 (52.6%), Musgrove (D)- 409,787 (46.8%)

Reeves had the worst results of any Republican candidate in recent times. And that was the best news Trump and the GOP had yesterday.

Kentucky is one of Trump's best states. The PVI is R+15. Only Idaho, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming are redder. These are the 2016 results that were the best for Trump:

• West Virginia- 68.50, Hillary 26.43
• Wyoming- Trump 67.40%, Hillary 21.63%
• Oklahoma- Trump 65.32, Hillary 28.93%
• North Dakota- Trump 62.96%, Hillary 27.23%
• Kentucky- Trump 62.52%, Hillary 32.68%
• Alabama- Trump 62,08, Hillary 34.36%

If Trump's best effort-- and his non-stop efforts on behalf of Bevin was the best he is capable of-- couldn't win the day in Kentucky, how will Trump be able to help anyone anywhere? On Monday night Trump was in Lexington playing the role of clown on behalf of Bevin: "If you lose, they’re going to say Trump suffered the greatest defeat in the history of the world. You can’t let that happen to me!" They did. Two days before the election, Kentucky Secretary of State Alison Lundegan Grimes predicted that turnout would be 31%, essentially the same miserable turnout Kentucky had in the 1015 gubernatorial election (30.7%). She was way off. By yesterday 42% of eligible voters had cast ballots. It was 45% in Jefferson (Louisville) and 47% in Fayette (Lexington) counties, an increase in the two counties that put Beshear ahead of Bevin.

Moscow Mitch isn't the only Republican incumbent who slept poorly last night. GOP senators in Arizona, Maine, Colorado, Iowa, North Carolina, Georgia, Alaska and Montana did not sleep well last night. Last chart. This one shows Trump's net approval/disapproval in each these key Senate battleground states-- along with how much Trump's approval has fallen in each state since he occupied the White House. (It didn't rise in any state).

• Kentucky- plus 15 (down 19 points)
• Arizona- minus 4 (down 23 points)
• Maine- minus 13 (down 21 points)
• Colorado- minus 15 (down 16 points)
• Iowa- minus 14 (down 22 points)
• North Carolina- minus 3 (down)
• Georgia- plus 1 (down 17 points)
• Alaska- plus 1 (down 23 points)
• Montana- minus 3 (down 27 points)

As the AP made clear this morning "The suburban revolt against President Donald Trump’s Republican Party is growing. And if nothing else, the GOP’s struggle across the South on Tuesday revealed that Republicans don’t have a plan to fix it. In Kentucky, Trump and his allies went all in to rescue embattled Gov. Matt Bevin, who literally wrapped himself in the president’s image in his pugnacious campaign. In Virginia, embattled Republicans ran away from Trump, downplaying their support for his policies and encouraging him to stay away. In the end, neither strategy was a sure winner... [T]there’s little doubt Tuesday’s outcome is a warning to Republicans across the nation a year out from the 2020 election and a year after the 2018 midterms: The suburbs are still moving in the wrong direction."

“Republican support in the suburbs has basically collapsed under Trump,” Republican strategist Alex Conant said. “Somehow, we need to find a way to regain our suburban support over the next year.”

...[T]he GOP’s challenge was laid bare in places like Virginia’s Henrico County just outside Richmond.

Republican state Sen. Siobhan Dunnavant won there by almost 20 percentage points four years ago. The area has recently been transformed by an influx of younger, college-educated voters and minorities, a combination that’s become a recipe for Democrats’ support.

With the final votes still trickling in Tuesday night, Dunnavant was barely ahead [final: 50.88% to 48.95%] of Democrat Debra Rodman, a college professor who seized on Trump and her Republican opponent’s opposition to gun control to appeal to moderate voters.

In northern Virginia, Democrat John Bell flipped a state Senate district from red to blue in a district that has traditionally favored Republicans. The race, set in the rapidly growing and diverse counties outside of Washington, D.C., attracted nearly $2 million in political advertising.

Democrats’ surging strength in the suburbs reflects the anxiety Trump provokes among moderates, particularly women, who have rejected his scorched-earth politics and uncompromising conservative policies on health care, education and gun violence.

Republicans’ response in Virginia was to try to stay focused on local issues. In the election’s final days, Dunnavant encouraged Trump to stay out of the state. The president obliged, sending Vice President Mike Pence instead.

Struggling for a unifying message, some Republicans turned to impeachment, trying to tie local Democrats to their counterparts in Washington and the effort to impeach Trump.

No one played that card harder than Kentucky’s Bevin, who campaigned aside an “impeachment” banner and stood next to Trump on the eve of the election.

But even in ruby-red Kentucky, Trump was not a cure-all and the trouble in the suburbs emerged.

Bevin struggled in Republican strongholds across the northern part of the state, where the Democrats’ drift and increased enthusiasm was clear.

In 2015, Bevin won Campbell County south of Cincinnati handily. On Tuesday, Beshear not only carried the county with ease, he nearly doubled the number of Democratic votes there, compared to the Democratic nominee of four years ago. Beshear also found another 74,000 Democratic votes in urban Jefferson County, home of Louisville.

Beshear led Bevin by the narrowest of margins Tuesday night.

Republicans were quick to blame Bevin for his stumbles. The governor was distinctly unpopular and picked fights with powerful interests in the state. Still, it was difficult for Republicans not to note the warning signs for the party next year and beyond.

“They continue to lose needed support in suburban districts, especially among women and college-educated voters,” said Republican strategist Rick Tyler. “That trend, if not reversed, is a death spiral.”

Democratic enthusiasm and turnout was sky-high in Kentucky and Virginia, where Democrats ran on Democratic issues and values. In Mississippi, where the fake-Democrat ran on a repulsive anti-Choice/pro-NRA, GOP-lite record, there was no enthusiasm and Democratic turnout was terrible. (As I noted last night, even in New Jersey's only state Senate race-- the one to replace Blue Dog ass-wipe Jeff Van Drew-- Van Drew's handpicked right-wing candidate, Bob Andrzejczak, ran on a GOP-lite record and lost to the real Republican, Mike Testa 27,163 (53.47%) to 23,636 (46.53%). Count on the Democrats-- especially the DCCC-- to absolutely not learn a lesson from this.

The were local races all over the country and the Philadelphia Inquirer reported on how dismally they went for Republicans in Pennsylvania. "The political forces that shaped last year’s midterm elections," wrote Julia Terruso, showed no signs of abating Tuesday, as voters turned on Republicans and establishment Democrats alike in races from Philadelphia and Scranton to the suburbs of Delaware and Chester Counties... Locally, Democrats will hold all five seats on the Delaware County Council, a Republican stronghold since the Civil War, and also assumed a majority on the legislative body in Chester County. In Bucks County, Democrats also held a late lead for control of the board of commissioners in a close race. And in Philadelphia, a third-party insurgent candidate weakened an already marginalized GOP by securing one of the at-large City Council seats reserved for minority parties-- a seat Republicans have held for decades. 'It’s a new day in Delaware County,' said Elaine Schaefer, one of three Democrats elected Tuesday in Delaware County. Democrats had never held a majority on the county council in its history, let alone every seat."

We Met The Enemy And They Are Us by Nancy Ohanian

In Virginia and Kentucky Republicans did everything they could to tie Democrats to Bernie and AOC and to "Socialism!!" and the Green New Deal. The backfired for them badly. In Kentucky the top coal counties are Pike, Harlan, Hopkins, Muhlenberg, Perry, Letchner, Floyd, Union, Knott, Webster and Ohio. Trump beat Hillary in every one of them in 2016-- and by a lot. But in the primaries, Bernie won these counties. In Pike Co. Trump won with 80.1%. It was 77.2% in Perry, 72.0% in Muhlenberg and 84.9% in Harlan County.

Hillary won the Kentucky primary, entirely because of the black turn-out for her in Louisville and Lexington. But she was swamped in every one of the coal counties. Bernie beat her. But Bernie also beat Trump in every one of these counties

Pike- Bernie- 4,848, Hillary- 2,335, Trump- 840
Harlan- Bernie- 1,092, Hillary- 451, Trump- 189
Hopkins- Bernie-2,696 , Hillary- 1,690, Trump- 574
Muhlenberg- Bernie- 1,632, Hillary- 1,544, Trump- 338
Perry- Bernie- 1,666, Hillary- 839, Trump- 421
Letchner- Bernie- 1,788, Hillary- 838, Trump- 410
Floyd- Bernie- 4,010, Hillary- 2,327, Trump- 278
Union- Bernie- 1,106, Hillary- 672, Trump- 92
Knott- Bernie- 1,114, Hillary- 583, Trump- 37
Webster- Bernie- 1,169, Hillary- 693, Trump- 116
Ohio- Bernie- 943, Hillary- 778, Trump- 663

Last night, Beshear won some coal counties and lost some-- but out-performed Hillary massively in all these counties. The biggest coal county in the state is Pike. Beshear took 42.94% compared to Hillary's 17.4%. Beshear won Floyd County with 52.56% and won Knott County with 49.43% compared with 24.3% for Hillary in Floyd and 21.6% for Hillary in Knott.

That billboard was produced and placed by the DSCC, attempting to tie state Senator Erica Smith--the progressive running for the North Carolina U.S. Senate seat-- to AOC and Rashida Tlaib. They produced similar campaigns against Andrew Romanoff in Colorado and Betsy Sweet in Maine. This morning Erica turned the tables on them and ran the billboard as part of a fundraising appeal for herself!

"Republicans," she wrote, "aren't the only ones engaging in rigging elections and suppressing the will of voters in our state. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) has been rigging the US Senate race in NC for far too long and it has had disastrous effects on Democracy. They recruited their endorsed candidate after he had been campaigning for Lieutenant Governor for a year. The DSCC doesn't want the people of North Carolina to choose their next Senator. They would prefer a 4 term Senator from New York to tell you how to vote! It didn't work in 2010 when they did the same thing with the same Democratic candidate. Together, we can make sure they don't get another chance to corrode our progressive coalition! 

• People are rationing their insulin and other life-saving medication because they can't afford it.
• Refusal to expand Medicaid reduces the leverage that lawmakers have to negotiate down drug prices.
• The wealthiest 1% receive the bulk of the benefits of our tax code while hard-working Americans continue to lose leverage with their tax dollars.

"If my devotion to your voice and these platforms for progress are considered radical," she concluded, "then sign me up! It should not be radical to amplify the voices of the people over the powerful. Help us continue to spread the good word of the Erica For Us Campaign by giving what you can. This is the people's campaign, now more than ever!"

Election Night 2019-- Trump Stunk It Up For The GOP

Let's follow up on last night's pre-election special for Virginia, Kentucky, Mississippi and New Jersey. The results look excellent tonight... unless your name rhymes with DUMP. Trumpanzee did the trick in Kentucky, a scorching red R+15 state... where the GOP lost the governor's mansion. Trump was there last night campaigning for his clone Matt Bevin and today Kentucky voters went to the polls and ignored Trump's pleas and retired Bevin. Andy Beshear won 711,955 (49.18%) to 707,297 (48.86%). Trump was in Fayette County last night (Lexington) and today Beshear won 65.1% of the vote there. In Jefferson County (Louisville) Beshear did even better-- 66.99% of the vote. And in Virginia, the GOP lost-- despite Pence practically camping out in the state-- control of both chambers of the legislature. The Senate looks like a 21-19 split in favor of the Democrats and the House should be at least 54 Democratic seats in the 100 seat chamber. The Democrats haven't controlled the House of Delegates in two decades! Tonight they won both chambers. Voter turnout, at least for Democrats, was superb-- and a good indication of what to expect one year from now. In Virginia Beach, the most hotly contested area of the state, around 96,000 voters turned out-- as opposed to 63,000 in the 2015 legislative elections. So... how does this look to you?

Kentucky was the most important of all the races to Trump and he and Pence spent a lot of time and political capital on trying to bolster the unpopular right-wing multimillionaire governor, Matt Bevin. Every Republican in the Senate has got to be rethinking their support for Trump right now. If he can't win in Kentucky, where exactly can he win?

Yesterday, Kentucky Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes (D) predicted that about 31% of the state's 3,451,537 million eligible voters would take part in today's election. In 2015 it was 30.7%. That's how Republicans win. The Lexington Herald-Leader reported that "Grimes, who is not seeking re-election because of term limits, said she was disappointed in the projected voter turnout. 'It’s simply not OK that only a small portion of Kentuckians will possibly elect our next constitutional officers,' she said. 'Our democracy depends on people showing up to the polls to make their voices heard. I challenge all registered voters to get up, get out and get loud and exercise their right to vote on Tuesday.' Grimes tracks absentee ballot totals as an indicator of final voter turnout. As of Monday, nearly 19,318 voters had voted in person on machines in county clerks’ offices or were sent absentee ballots, she said. About 8,169 of the 13,967 mail-in absentee ballots that have been issued had been returned."

Bevin could have never expected to be reelected on his own record. It was clear he was going to make it only on the basis of his adhesion to Trump. But it turned out not be be enough. If Trump couldn't save Bevin, who is he going to be able to save-- and we're talking about KENTUCKY! Last night Trump was in Lexington's Rupp Arena, ostensibly rallying the true believers for Bevin but, of course, talking about the only thing he ever talks about: himself... a stand-up routine that lasted an hour and twenty minutes. Kentucky Senator Rand Paul was there as well, defending Trump more than Bevin. "Trump," reported Politico this morning, "did tout Gov. Matt Bevin of Kentucky ahead of his reelection bid Tuesday, but he also offered a post-impeachment playbook for his own reelection bid 365 days away."

A few minutes ago, the count in the Mississippi gubernatorial race was up to 87% of precincts counted, with Republican Tate Reeves leading right-wing quasi-Democrat Jim Hood 390,544 (52.79%) to 339,897 (45.94%), closer than it should have been and closer than anyone thought it would be. At least Trump can run around claiming responsibility for winning that one. But members of Congress will all know what the loss for Bevin means and understand the scope of the catastrophe-- for their party-- in Virginia.

The Democrats maintained the majority in the New Jersey Assembly, although losing some seats. The special Senate election for the seat Jeff Van Drew gave up when he went to Congress to pretend to be a Democrat while voting with the GOP, pitted a pathetic Van Drew clone, ultra-conservative Bob Andrzejczak, against Republican Mike Testa. Testa beat the fake Democrat 27,163 (53.47%) to 23,636 (46.53%). Do you think it will teach the Democratic Party to run real Democrats with real Democratic values instead of shlubs from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party? I don't.

Meanwhile... back in the loony bin: