Trump Wants Revenge

Oh, girl!

Unless Trump gives it the go ahead-- tantamount to chopping off a finger-- Joe Manchin's fatuous proposal to censure Trump instead of impeaching him tomorrow, is DOA. The only good thing is that he would just need 51 votes to pass it-- all 48 Democrats + 3 Republicans. But there aren't 3 Republicans with the guts to go up against Trump. On the Senate floor yesterday, Manchin he sees "no path to the 67 votes required to impeach" Trump but that said he believes "a bipartisan majority of this body would vote to censure President Trump for his action in this matter. Censure would allow this body to unite across party lines. Censure would allow a bipartisan statement condemning his unacceptable behavior in the strongest terms." (He later admitted that there aren't enough Republican votes to pass it.)

This is the resolution Manchin wrote and circulated:

RESOLUTION
Relating to the censure of Donald John Trump.

Whereas Donald John Trump used the Office of the President of the United States to attempt to compel a foreign nation to interfere with domestic political affairs for his own personal benefit;

Whereas Donald John Trump wrongfully enlisted his personal lawyer to investigate a domestic political rival by meddling in formal diplomatic relations in a manner that is inconsistent with our established National Security Strategy;

Whereas Donald John Trump hindered the thorough investigation of related documents and prohibited Congress and the American people from hearing testimony by firsthand witnesses with direct knowledge of his conduct;

Whereas Donald John Trump, through his conduct in this matter, abused the trust of the American people;

Whereas Donald John Trump fully deserves censure for engaging in such behavior;

Whereas Donald John Trump’s conduct in this matter is unacceptable for a President of the United States, does demean the Office of the President, and creates disrespect for laws of the land;

Whereas Donald John Trump’s conduct in the matter has brought dishonor to himself, the Nation, and the Office of the President;

Whereas future generations of Americans must know that--

(1) such behavior is not only dangerous to our national interest but does not align with American values and the principles of the Constitution of the United States; and

(2) such actions bear grave consequences, including loss of integrity, trust, and respect; and

Whereas no one, not even the President, is above the law:

Now, therefore, be it Resolved, That--

(1) the Senate does hereby censure Donald John Trump, President of the United States, and does condemn his wrongful conduct in the strongest terms;

(2) allowing this statement of censure and condemnation to remain intact for all time; and

(3) the Senate now move on to other matters of significance to our people, to reconcile differences between and within the branches of Government, and to work together-- across party lines-- for the benefit of the American people.

After tomorrow's acquittal vote, Trump will be looking for revenge. Gabriel Sherman at Vanity Fair: It's Payback Time and Trump, who has nothing better to do, is plotting revenge against his enemies. He wants the Department of Justice to investigate-- criminally-- Bolton, Romney, Nadler and Schiff. If only Roy Cohn were his Attorney General, or... someone... like... him. "Washington," wrote Sherman, "is bracing for what an unshackled Trump does next. Republicans briefed on Trump’s thinking believe that the president is out for revenge against his adversaries." A prominent Republican told him that Señor Trumpanzee "has an enemies list that is growing by the day... "Trump’s playbook is simple: go after people who crossed him during impeachment."

Several sources said Bolton is at the top of the list. Trump’s relationship with Bolton was badly damaged by the time Bolton left the White House in September. Trump has since blamed his former national security adviser for leaking details of his forthcoming memoir that nearly derailed the impeachment trial by pressuring Republicans to call witnesses. In the book Bolton reportedly alleges Trump told him directly that Ukraine aid was tied to Ukraine announcing investigations into the Bidens (Bolton has denied being a source of the leak).

Augustus Gloop Trump

The campaign against Bolton has already begun. On January 23, the White House sent a cease and desist letter to Bolton’s lawyer demanding that Bolton’s publisher, Simon & Schuster, not release the book in March without removal of certain information. Trump intends to ratchet up the pressure, and some Republicans close to the White House fear how far Trump will take things after he’s gotten off for a second time (Trump famously made his July 25 call to Volodymyr Zelensky the day after Robert Mueller testified before Congress.) “Trump has been calling people and telling them to go after Bolton,” a source briefed on the private conversations said. The source added that Trump wants Bolton to be criminally investigated. A person familiar with Trump’s thinking said Trump believes Bolton might have mishandled classified information. According to a former official, the White House is planning to leak White House emails from Bolton that purportedly allege Bolton abused his position at the National Security Council. The official said that West Wing officials have discussed releasing emails “showing [Bolton] was doing pay-to-play,” the official said. A person close to Bolton dismissed the story. “John plays things straight,” the person said.

How Can California Help West Virginia?

Glad you asked. As you may know, the only gubernatorial candidate endorsed by Blue America so far this cycle is dedicated populist Stephen Smith. If that name is new to you, here's the guest post he did for us a month ago. In the post he tried to shatter common misconceptions about his state. "Some of you," he wrote "think we 'vote against our own interests.' But Good Old Boy Democrats held power here for 82 years, while wages fell, jobs vanished, and our divorce, obesity, and overdose rates soared. We’re not wrong to question whether the party has had our interests at heart. Some of you think we’re backwards. But it was our teachers and school service personnel who sparked a nationwide strike movement last year. And this February, our educators walked out again-- this time to reject an “education reform” bill that would have paid them the raise they were after-- because they knew the bill would make things worse for our kids by privatizing schools. Some of you call our home Trump Country. But more of us opted not to vote in 2016 than voted for the President. A 2017 poll of likely voters revealed that we favor Bernie over Trump, 48 to 46 percent. In West Virginia, we are rejecting a political establishment that rejected us long ago. We’re not foolish. We’re fed up."

Rumors are rampant-- both in West Virginia and in DC-- that conservative Democrat Joe Manchin will be announcing for governor next month. He doesn't have to give up his Senate seat to run and if he wins, he gets to pick the next senator (for about 9 months when there will be a special election a Republican would likely win). Manchin might beat Republican Jim Justice in a general election, but it would be a lot harder for him to win a Democratic primary against Stephen Smith. Smith is running one of the most exciting 2020 statewide campaigns in the country.

While Smith has his sights set on the governor’s mansion, the progressive-populist campaign he’s running isn’t just about that. Smith is setting out to build a statewide movement; his gubernatorial run is just the anchor.

“What we’re interested in is fundamentally changing who the government works for, and you can’t do that with one candidate, no matter what the office is,” Smith said in a phone interview with The Intercept. “So the way we do that-- the way we win that-- is by building an unprecedented political infrastructure in our state’s history.”

Operating with the battle cry of “West Virginia Can’t Wait,” the campaign is setting out to create a pipeline of progressive, working-class candidates to defeat the “good old boys.” The plan isn’t to get a new governor “and pat ourselves on the back,” Smith said.

The result is a broad political organizing effort: locally organized groups led by local “captains” and leaders dubbed “Constituency Captains” who volunteer to mobilize their communities. “This movement will be built by 1,000 leaders, not one,” says the campaign’s website. Key to these efforts are the small donors, who made up the rolls that broke the secretary of state’s software.

Smith won't identify himeself as a 'progressive.' Yet his campaign draws inspiration from the Battle of Blair Mountain, an armed uprising of coal miners in West Virginia, widely considered to be the largest labor rebellion in American history. “In 1921, West Virginia mineworkers-- black, white, and immigrant-- marched together on Blair Mountain against corporate rule,” says a video [above] on Smith’s campaign site. “They wore red bandanas to identify themselves in battle.”

The video cuts to a West Virginia Can’t Wait event where red bandanas are being handed out, then showing a crowd of onlookers with the kerchiefs around their necks.

Though stopping short of taking up arms, Smith in fact takes a host of standard progressive positions. He is emphatic about rejecting corporate cash, unapologetically supports a single-payer health care system, and is in favor of free college. But he refers to his ground game as a “people’s campaign.” The outlook is based on the fundamental belief that the everyday people of West Virginia are far better suited to solve their problems than the out-of-state lobbyists, out-of-state landowners, and monopolies that dominate the state. Smith said, “Our government would work a whole lot better for all of us if all of us were in charge, instead of a handful of lobbyists.”

It’s not an exaggeration. In January, Justice, the Republican governor, handpicked a registered lobbyist who represents his own family’s companies to replace former state Sen. Richard Ojeda, an aggressively pro-labor Democrat who left his seat for a short-lived presidential run. Justice, who campaigned in 2016 as a political outsider, is the wealthiest person in West Virginia. He inherited his coal mining business from his father, which allowed him to build a massive business empire of more than 100 companies.

It was Justice who gave the Republican Party nearly full control of West Virginia, long a bastion of southern Democratic support that has turned increasingly red on the state level. Justice had switched to the Democratic Party to run for governor, only to switch back to the GOP less than seven months after taking office.

Smith’s campaign wants to turn the governor’s mansion blue again, despite the fact that West Virginia handed Donald Trump his second largest margin of victory in the 2016 presidential race. The state is not inherently red, Smith’s team contends, and their anti-establishment message paves a plausible path to victory. After all, it’s the same state that voted for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Democratic primary.

“What we’re seeing all across the country is that the government is failing our people and both parties are failing our people,” Smith said. “Our people are picking up the baton and saying, ‘You know what, we can govern ourselves.’”

West Virginia Can't Wait, the campaign, formally launched at the end of November 2018 and has since held 12 kickoff events across the state. But the campaign doesn’t want Smith to be the face of the movement; the movement is supposed to transcend a single candidate and build a lasting infrastructure of political power.

The roadmap is simple: Organize locally, recruit local candidates who know their neighbors’ needs, and run those candidates in local races. So far, Smith’s campaign has recruited an estimated 56 candidates and potential candidates who are mulling a run in 2020. They have their sights set on positions like city council memberships, magistrate judge seats, county commissioners, and delegates. Their candidate pipeline includes people who are ready to go-- and have their campaign website set already-- to others who are considering running for office for the first time and want go to a training to get a sense of what it takes.

Smith’s campaign will train candidates and their campaign staff. Perhaps most crucially, West Virginia Can’t Wait will grant these smaller campaigns access to their team and join them on the trail, opening up town halls and events to the local candidates.

“When the election rolls around, the 10 volunteers that you’re recruiting for your city council race combined with the 10 I’m getting from the governor’s race and the 10 someone else is getting for the delegate’s race means that we all have 40, instead of 10 each,” Smith said.

The other part of their strategy is to get at least two “County Captains” in each of the state’s 55 counties, a position intended to act as a community organizer rather than a campaign spokesperson. West Virginia Can’t Wait has recruited and trained more than 160 people to work as County Captains, who are then responsible for building their own volunteer team within the county.

Those county teams will receive support from the statewide campaign but will be given the latitude to craft their approaches to specific local issues and concerns. West Virginia Can’t Wait has laid out a number of steps toward this end: County teams are to identify local issues by talking to at least 1,000 voters; plan events and actions; recruit and train additional volunteers; identify community members who might want to run for office as part of a slate; and run a get-out-the-vote operation leading up to the primary and general elections.

Another prong of the organizing calls for “Constituency Captains” to build support within their communities, the campaign says. These organizers-- distinct from the “county” organizing groups because they instead find likeminded individuals-- are to develop an online presence, host meetups, plan public events, and recruit candidates from their crew.

“It’s more a movement than a campaign, to be honest with you, for the simple fact that he’s trying to get everybody involved in his campaign, such as the Muslim community, the youth, the African American community, the LGBTQ community, anybody and everybody,” said Ibtesam Barazi, who has a long history of advocating for immigrant and refugee rights in West Virginia and is an adviser to the campaign as well as a captain of the Muslim constituency team.

It isn't Jim Justice that frightens Manchin. It's Stephen Smith... and his movement. Please consider clicking on the thermometer on the right to contribute to the movement/campaign. "The West Virginia Can't Wait campaign," wrote Aída Chávez for The Intercept last month, "is building on a renaissance of populism. 'West Virginia has a long and deep history of bottom-up politics and distrust for both parties,' Smith said. 'And that energy was not invented by our campaign. It was invented, you know, a hundred years ago during the Mine Wars. And people have kept connected to it and building our state off of it for a long time.' The campaign is seeking to harness the momentum of a major organizing feat last year: a wildcat teachers’ strike. Thousands of public school teachers and staffers across the state had launched an illegal nine-day strike to rebel against years of stagnant wages, poor working conditions, and privatization of the school system. During the work stoppage, Smith joined a handful of other organizers in setting up a support fund to help the teachers and school service personnel make ends meet, raising more than $332,000, mostly from small donations. Not only did teachers win concessions, but the teachers’ victories helped spark a wave of strikes across Republican-led states, including Arizona, Kentucky, and Oklahoma. The resurgence of Appalachian populism might cut both ways: Many analysts think Trump’s election and the Republican takeover of the state legislature suggest that West Virginians are increasingly turning more conservative. Smith disagrees, suggesting that the problems that have left so many West Virginians behind are evident in both parties: “More people stayed home in 2016 than voted for the president in West Virginia.” He also cited polling that has found West Virginians prefer Sanders over Trump. According to a survey a Sanders pollster conducted in late 2017, the Vermont senator would beat Trump by 2 percentage points in the state."

Smith’s wariness of more centrist, establishment-oriented Democrats could become the major theme of his primary race. Sen. Joe Manchin, one of the most conservative Democrats in Congress and frequent Trump ally, may yet jump into the governor’s race: He told Politico earlier this month that he’s thinking about running for the “best job in the world” and will make a decision sometime this fall.

Smith’s supporters note Manchin did a similar dance in 2016 and ultimately decided against trying to get into the governor’s mansion. Manchin barely won his Senate reelection last year-- the toughest race of his career-- against GOP Attorney General Patrick Morrisey. And despite Manchin’s decisive victory in the primary, that race offered a ray of hope for campaigns like Smith’s: The incumbent senator’s progressive primary challenger, Paula Jean Swearengin, pulled in 30 percent of the vote despite having a fraction of the name recognition and campaign cash. National politics might, however, keep Manchin out of the governor’s race entirely: In 2020, he would be giving up a seat that’s crucial to the Democratic Party’s uphill battle of retaking the Senate.

Smith is visiting family in California next week and former West Virginians here are hosting five FREE events for people to get to meet him in person.

• June 18 in L.A.
• June 20 in Santa Monica
• June 22 in San Francisco (morning)
• June 22 in Portola Valley (afternoon)
• June 22 in San Francisco (evening)

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

Motherfucker. It's only a word. It's a word! The horror! Motherfucker! A word! Oh! I feel so unclean at hearing that word! She said a bad word!

No! Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib spoke truth to power. THAT is what the rightwing snowflakes of both parties and their media suck-ups are so upset about. She's a threat to their willful detachment from reality, their incongruous and perverse Pleasantville 1962 view of life. They are scared of a word! They are scared of what the use of a word connotes! It has the ring of truth. It clangs loudly with head-shattering presence, as if right above the heads of the offended. It's a word that echoes in their emptiness. It has the ring of real people, real humans, humans with working brains, standing up to the archaic status quo and calling bullshit on those who fight to maintain it and all its real corruption. The unthinking robotic mindless Joe Manchins of the Washington world worry where it could end. THAT'S what begets a motherfucker like $enator Joe Manchin (D-WV) going on FOX "News" and, in his best Sarah Huckabee Sanders impersonation, saying:

I am so sorry. I want to apologize to all Americans, any sitting congressperson, there's 535 of us there, 100 senators, and 435 congresspeople. We should have better manners than that, I assure you.

Fuck you, motherfucker! Fuck you, you goddamn motherfucking piece of shit scumbag in a fucking suit! You who voted to put the likes Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court! You suddenly know something about morals and decency? Fuck You, Motherfucker! If there were any decency left in this world, I would have the chance to say that to your fat brainless, dead-eyed face just before I put my fist clean through it. Who the fuck are you, Joe Manchin, or any of you assholes, to think you can speak for me on this matter? "Apologize to all Americas" my ass, Motherfucker. Motherfucker is just a word and you don't like the lack of respect in connotes and the can of worms it opens up. You Washington assclowns think people should be all polite and nice to you just because you have a title and wear a tie. Fuck you! You who are one 100th of a body that backs death in every form every day and you smile and shake hands while doing it. You know what? There are no words that fit your kind. Motherfucker just isn't enough.

Oh, and Joe, here's your boy in 2011:

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

"I do not believe that these charges can fairly prevent Judge Kavanaugh from serving on the court."
-Senator Susan Collins, Maine

So said Maine $enator Susan Collins as she took to the floor of the $enate in a valiant effort to make the whole despicable Kavanaugh hearing process about her; giving her long-winded blather a 24 hour build up and using not just her own press agents but the entire media in one of the worst displays of $enatorial megalomania in a very long time. In reality, we should not call it megalomania. We should called Susan Collins' hogging of the TV time MAGA-lomania as that was what she was exhibiting in her efforts to stand by her man Comrade Trump. She could have just come out and issued a press release like a normal person, saying "I'm voting for Brett Kavanaugh" despite everything, but this was a case of a $enator having so much stored up bullshit hypocrisy that she just had to let it out or she would have just exploded on the steps of the Capitol, sending a tsunami of hypocritical bullshit all the way over to the White House. Do I make myself clear? To $usan Collins, ME TOO means something completely different.

I saw the whole thing live, Susan. Oh, those charges were enough when you called for Al Franken to get out, but not for Kavanaugh, eh? You mentioned that you believed Kavanaugh because he was under oath but you dismissed what Dr. Ford said under oath. It just didn't fit your sick agenda. Your deplorable display removed any respect you may have once deserved or possessed. I'm a big fan of just letting people talk and talk because, in doing so, they eventually reveal their true selves to you for better or worse. Well done Susan Collins! You know, if you have to get up there, hog the camera, and ramble on and on for almost an hour to justify your position and cover your ass, there just might be something amiss with your position. The staging of two women behind you as you spoke on this particular subject did not make it all OK. Maybe to a person with a now revealed high school intellect like yours it works but not for me or anyone with an IQ above 80. Sadly, that seems to be a dwindling number of people but we will see come election day. I may have some hope but I do not have great expectations. The leadership of both parties as repeatedly shown us that the bar is low for Democrats and, for Republicans, even lower.

In the end, 49 of the reptilian Republican caucus plus West Virginia's Joe Manchin, the fakest of fake democrats and the human equivalent of a 200 pound bag of bat droppings from an Appalachian cave, voted to confirm the hissing, slithering alcohol-infused lowlife named Brett Kavanaugh so that he would protect their traitorous president and, in turn, themselves. Yeah, it's ME TOO for them as well. They certainly don't want anyone knowing about their own connections to Moscow. We've already seen that they are taking laundered money from the NRA that has Russian origins.

You can see all of the names of the deplorables whoo voted for Kavanaugh at the provided link. Remember them forever. It seems that everything and everyone Comrade Trump endorses or touches turns vile and putrid and even more so if it was completely suspect in the first place. Now, his latest victim is the Supreme Court, an institution whose reputation was already weighted down with partisanship of the worst kind; the kind that completes transitions to banana republic status.

Republicans have also chosen to send a message to young boys that they can do anything they want to young girls and not be punished for it in any way. In fact, they have sent the message that those young boys might even "grow up" to be a justice or president some day! Certainly, they will be welcomed as fellow Republican senators. It wasn't all about just dismissing the very idea of sexual assault being bad, whether or not Kavanaugh can be proven guilty of such things. Talk about your inspiring politicians!

Even Lisa Murkowski, after voting no to advancing the confirmation vote at all the day before, decided with duplicity to merely vote "present" rather than make a courageous and moral statement by voting no. She claimed to be voting "present" as a courtesy to fellow morally bankrupt douchebag Steve Daines of Montana who was busy at home in Montana giving his daughter way at her wedding. Yeah, that's right. A "courtesy to Sen. Steve Daines" was her reason. What about the rest of us, Lisa Murkowski? What about courtesy for the rest of us? Oh, you played a good game. You pretended to give a shit when those 100 Alaskan women came across a continent to your office, but, as soon as they left, your true self took over again. You could have still voted no in a "profile in courage" moment and your party would have still gotten its despicable and deplorable way. Instead, you waffled. What's the matter, Lisa? Were you afraid you would lose the race to the bottom? Relax. You could never have overtaken vermin like Hatch, McConnell, Cornyn, Graham, or Grasshole on that score. You weren't even going to be the number one in your gender classification. That dishonor goes to Susan Collins, the featured target of tonight's two memes. Lisa, maybe you should have taken her 24-hour hype approach but two $enators fighting for the same camera time might turn into a boxing match, or, how about a two go in, one comes out Thunderdome kind of thing. We could do that with the entire $enate. Make it a tournament. That might actually be worth watching.

Phil Bredesen Probably Should Have Kept His Mouth Shut About Kavanaugh

Watch that lead disappear now

In 2016, Priorities USA raised $192,065,768, most of it from mega-donors like Donald Sussman ($15 million), the Sabans (over $12 million), George Soros (over $10 million). James Simons (over ($10 million), Fred Eychaner ($9 million), the Pritzkers ($6 million), Daniel Abraham ($5 million)... They gave EMILY's List over $14 million, VoteVets over $3 million, Planned Parenthood 2 million and millions more to other PACs. But their biggest expenditures were for Independent Expenditures against Trump ($126,049,815) and for Hillary ($6,455,293).

This cycle they're playing in congressional and gubernatorial politics. So far they've raised $18,212,305 (mostly from Soros and Sussman) and, as of August 31, had put $13,756,885 into Independent Expenditures. Their biggest expenditures were to help conservative Senate candidates Claire McCaskill ($2,732,707), Joe Donnelly ($2,206,454), Kyrsten Sinema ($2,062,863), and Bill Nelson ($1,146,503). They haven't spent anything to help progressives like Tammy Baldwin or Beto O'Rourke.

But there are a couple of other conservative Democrats they've been getting ready to jump in for-- until yesterday. They decided there would be no money to help Tennessee's Phil Bredesen and warned Joe Manchin that he's on shaky ground too. The ground is no longer shaky; he sold out again today. Disenchantment in both cases is because of the Kavanaugh confirmation battle. Bredesen said he would have voted to confirm Kavanaugh-- which will likely lose him the Senate race and Tennessee women abandon him in droves. They "also said it would steer clear of Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin’s reelection fight in West Virginia should he vote to confirm Kavanaugh on final passage this Saturday. On Friday, Manchin was the sole Democrat to vote to proceed with the nomination." It isn't likely Manchin needs their help.

The lack of help from Priorities USA won’t have much of a practical impact, in part because other Democratic-affiliated political outfits are heavily invested in the race. Majority Forward, a Democratic dark money group, has spent nearly $6.5 million backing Bredesen and attacking Blackburn. Bredesen has also received some air cover from a PAC affiliated with the United Steelworkers union.

Last week Bredesen issued a statement saying "This confirmation process has been abused by both parties, but some voices of sanity have finally appeared and this FBI investigation is an opportunity for the Senate to regain some of its self-respect. I cannot understand why any Senator, or Judge Kavanaugh himself, would not want the FBI to research these allegations. If they are unfounded, as the Judge claims, the FBI can erase a permanent stain on his appointment and on him personally. If the allegations have substance, any Senator of either party should want to take them into consideration before deciding on a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court. I would feel exactly the same if it were a Democratic appointment under consideration."

That was a smart approach for him. Yesterday he announced he would have voted to confirm Kavanaugh. Bad decision. But no one should have expected otherwise from him. He's a conservative. That's how conservatives role. Schumer knew it when he recruited him. Now it's just a matter of which will mean more in the election: conservative-leaning independents voting for him because he backed Kavanaugh or independent women and progressives not voting for him for the same reason.

Texas looks much better than Tennessee... and with no help from Schumer or the DSCC. Beto will owe them NOTHING if he gets into the Senate:

The Scripted Confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh

Consider the possibility that this is all a pre-planned script whereby Jeff Flake is depicted as the Honest Principled Man who ultimately gives everyone else cover to vote for Kavanaugh https://t.co/IqL3b020mh

— David Sirota (@davidsirota) September 30, 2018

by Gaius Publius

After you come down from praising of Jeff Flake's heroism (or his cowardice in the face of sexual assault victims) consider the following, from an interview with Flake in the Atlantic:

Coppins: So, you were motivated mainly by preserving institutional credibility?

Flake: Two institutions, really. One, the Supreme Court is the lone institution where most Americans still have some faith. And then the U.S. Senate as an institution—we’re coming apart at the seams. There’s no currency, no market for reaching across the aisle. It just makes it so difficult.

Flake's stated goal in insisting on an additional FBI check is to add credibility to the process so that the credibility of the government (which will put and contain Kavanaugh on the high court bench) can be maintained. An additional FBI check also takes away the strongest Democratic Party argument as presented in the hearings: "Why won't you submit to an FBI investigation?" and it gives the Joe Manchins of the world something to say in mitigation after they vote to confirm. 

Flake is worried, and rightly so, that if Kavanaugh is confirmed by raw power alone, without the blessing of the FBI, the Supreme Court will be seen as illegitimate. As I wrote earlier in "Anthony Kennedy and Our Delayed Constitutional Crisis," the Court is teetering on that perception already:

With swing-vote status comes great responsibility, and in the most consequential — and wrongly decided — cases of this generation, O'Connor and Kennedy were the Court's key enablers. They 

• Cast the deciding vote that made each decision possible
• Kept alive the illusion of the Court's non-partisan legitimacy

[...]

The second point above, about the illusion of the Court's legitimacy, is just as important as the first. If the Court were ever widely seen as acting outside the bounds of its mandate, or worse, seen as a partisan, captured organ of a powerful and dangerous political minority (which it certainly is), all of its decisions would be rejected by the people at large, and more importantly, the nation would plunged into a constitutional crisis of monumental proportions.

We are in that constitutional crisis now, but just at the start of it. We should have been done with it long ago. Both O'Connor and Kennedy are responsible for that delay.

I'm not alone in think along these lines. Juan Cole at Informed Comment agrees, offering two ways that Kavanaugh's confirmation, added to Trump's potential firing of Rod Rosenstein, could lead to a "Great American Apocalypse."

The Supreme Court is already a captured agent of the Republican Party. But thanks to "swing vote" justices like Anthony Kennedy, it's merely seen as "divided." That will change.

If Brett Kavanaugh is added to a captured Court via a process that itself is seen as captured, then joins 5-4 decision after 5-4 decision to a) further increase the power of the minority Republican Party via highly restricted voting rights; b) implement radical Koch anti-government ideology by removing, for example, regulatory power from the Executive Branch; and c) enable the freakish dreams of the most rightwing fundamentalists in the country (imagine if contraception were only available on a state-by-state basis) — I think that will tear the country clean apart.

I also think Jeff Flake agrees, and I think he thinks that if he gets the FBI to sign off on Kavanaugh first, he can head that outcome off. He's wrong, of course, but he'll be a lobbyist by the time anyone finds out. His future will be secured, even as ours will be very much more in doubt.

What Happens Next?

What happens next in the Kavanaugh confirmation process is anyone's guess, since the public and its anger are in play. But if I were to place bets on what just the political actors will do, here's the scenario:

• The FBI will issue a blatantly and politically manipulated report that neither confirms nor contradicts the charges against Brett Kavanaugh.
   
• Republicans will declare Kavanaugh vindicated and move the nomination to a vote at the earliest opportunity.
   
• Joe Manchin and Jeff Flake will both vote to confirm, providing 51 Yes votes and leaving one slot open for a single Republican No.
   
• Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski will decide between themselves who gets to vote No and save what's left of her reputation and career. The woman at most risk will take that slot.

• Since Susan Collins is under the most fire from hometown voters right now, I expect her to take a "principled stand" and find it in her conscience to vote not to confirm Brett Kavanaugh "for the sake of the women of this country" — all in a losing cause.

Which means:

• Kavanaugh will be seated on the Supreme Court for life, giving it the equivalent of five Antonin Scalias for the next two decades at least.
   
• When a critical mass of voters has had it with the decisions of a fully captured, radical-Republican Court, the country will come apart, just as it did 165 years ago, but not in the same way. 

Read Lincoln's Cooper Union speech. Addressing the people of the South, Lincoln said: "Your purpose, then, plainly stated, is that you will destroy the Government, unless you be allowed to construe and enforce the Constitution as you please, on all points in dispute between you and us. You will rule or ruin in all events."

In his era, a radical, intransigent, uncompromising "rule or ruin" minority drove the nation into civil war. That same "rule or ruin" minority is back — abetted this time by the very very wealthy — and they're doing it again. Kavanaugh is the next step in their putsch, their capture of the organs of the state, and unless the public derails his confirmation, it will succeed.

Nice work, Mr. Flake. You too, Mr. Manchin. I wish I had a gift for you equivalent to the one you're giving us. If I did have such a gift, it would arrive at your door tomorrow.

GP
 

Read Julie Swetnick's Charges Against Brett Kavanaugh

Does this seem cruel? Perhaps, but not nearly as cruel as what three credible witnesses have now alleged. Are there even more crimes in the wings? In cases like these, there are almost always more more crimes.

by Gaius Publius

Since this is a primary source, and I don't think most people have read it in full, I want to offer an opportunity to read in toto what Julie Swetnick alleges about Brett Kavanaugh and his behavior in the early 1980s.

Her sworn declaration is printed in full below. I could only find image files, but these are good ones. Click each to enlarge it to original size. It should be easy to get through this; there are only three pages.

But it should also be hard to get through this; the content is horrifying. She details multiple instances in which Kavanaugh was complicit in felony gang-rape. He was also likely a rapist as well — he was one of the men lined up outside the doors where drugged women were serially assaulted.

She also details her own drugging and gang-rape at a party attended by Kavanaugh. (She doesn't name Kavanaugh as one of her own rapists, but she says she was drugged against her will at the time.)

Read on:

The self-styled long-suffering virgin of Georgetown Prep.

I still don't know if he'll be confirmed, though if I were betting I'd say yes. Odds are Chuck Schumer will let Joe Manchin and Joe Donnelly vote yes, allowing Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski to vote a cosmetic no, though things could change quickly.

After that, we'll have to see.

GP
 

"Republicans Fear Losing, Democrats Fear Winning"

Bob Dylan's "Watching The River Flow," with Mick Jagger on vocals, Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood on guitars, Charlie Watts on drums and Bill Wyman on bass.

by Gaius Publius

Just sitting on this bank of sand, watching the river flow.

At the start of the year I wrote:

There's something greatly troubling about what the media-fronted #Resistance has morphed into, but I'm having trouble writing about it (it's lightly touched here: "A Nation in Crisis, Again"). Partly the problem is the marshaling of pages of proof; partly the problem is the unstoppable train wreck that's coming. Perhaps I should write about the train wreck instead.

This is about the train wreck, or two of them.

The Kavanaugh Confirmation

It looks like Democrats are going to allow Brett Kavanaugh to be confirmed, that their "resistance" will be minimal, as it has been all along. To explain, let's look at this in the New York Times. Jonathan Martin writes:

Few politicians have a greater stake in Judge Kavanaugh’s fate than these 10 [red-state] senators who are trying to appeal to red-state voters back home, and whose re-election bids will determine whether Democrats win control of the narrowly divided chamber in November. [emphasis added]

According to the article, they think their problem is political, not moral; and they think the voters they have to appeal to are "red-state" (meaning conservative) voters "back home." Or at least they say they think this when talking to the press.

Which according to Martin leads to this craven calculation for Joe Manchin, Heidi Heitkamp and Joe Donnelly, whom I fully expect to vote yes when the confirmation reaches the Senate floor:

And for three of the most moderate Senate Democrats — Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and Joe Donnelly of Indiana — the nomination represented an opportunity for them to vote yes on Judge Kavanaugh and demonstrate independence from their party and deny Republicans an issue in the fall campaign. The three had previously supported President Trump’s first nominee for the court, Justice Neil M. Gorsuch.

This leads the writer to this conclusion:

Democrats may not want him on the bench for a host of reasons, but Judge Kavanaugh narrowly winning confirmation would be politically tolerable to many of them...

As Ryan Grim tweeted in response to this article:

Republicans fear losing
Democrats fear winning https://t.co/R1tVmTyQcU

— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) September 19, 2018

The entire Democratic caucus supports Minority Leader Schumer's effort to keep Manchin, Heitkamp and Donnelly safe in the next election, which means, in reality, protecting them from having to vote no on Brett Kavanaugh. The whole of the caucus, to a person, is in on this scheme.

There are so many actions Democrats could be taking and aren't. They could be filing for Kavanaugh's impeachment in the House, for example, for lying under oath during his 2006 Senate hearing. They could be releasing all the rest of their nearly 200,000 pages of "committee confidential" documents.

They could be aggressively pursuing the information received from this whistleblower, who says he represents federal employees willing to come forward and talk about Kavanaugh's dealings with his mentor, disgraced Judge Kozinski. Amy Goodman said, "The employees wanted to talk about Kavanaugh’s work as a clerk for disgraced former 9th Circuit Court of Appeals Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, who resigned in 2017 after being accused by at least 15 women of sexual misconduct. But Sanai never heard back."

But Democrats would rather protect three corrupt senators than keep Brett Kavanaugh, the "one ring to bind them," from joining and creating what will be the most radical Supreme Court in our history.

So, what to expect? Look for an accelerated schedule amid much Democratic complaining; ineffective but showy "resistance" from elected liberals; and unless Trump, the public or Ms. Blasey Ford pull their irons from the fire for them, Democratic collusion in a successful confirmation vote the week of October 1 — or faster if Republicans can manage it.

All they want is the win, and they don't care how it looks for them when they get it. Democrats, on the other hand, want to look good in defeat, since that's preferable to them all than abandoning Joe Manchin and his friends.

Also look for both parties to pay a very high price for this when the nation wakes up to what's been done to them — but not nearly as high as the price the nation will pay.

What can we do? Nothing. Watch the river flow.

Climate News

While we're looking at the flow of things, let's add in three climate stories ripped from the most recent headlines. It took less than a minute to find them.

First, this:

Miami’s Existence Is Threatened With As Little As 18″ Of Sea Level Rise

...Miami may not be a major US urban center in a handful of decades.

There are several elements in the equation, but Miami’s existence could be untenable with as little as 18 inches or as much as 15 feet of sea-level rise. The operative question is how much of the city will still exist as a working urban area with citizens, but Miami will be at high risk with only 18 inches of sea-level rise.

It's a very good piece. A number of causes are cited, ten in all. Here are just two: "50% of Miami’s population of 5.5 million lives beneath 6 ft of sea level" and "Miami-Dade County’s low-lying real estate is worth tens of billions of dollars. But it’s already lost hundreds of millions since 2000 due to sea level rise. 10% of Miami’s real estate value could be a write-off by 2045."

When the exodus occurs, it will be in a panic. Best not own Florida land when tide turns against it.

Second this, from Newsweek:

NASA Has Discovered Arctic Lakes Bubbling With Methane—and That’s Very Bad News

...In a NASA-funded study published in Nature Communications, scientists have now discovered a source of methane that has not been accounted for in climate models—methane coming from “thermokarst” lakes.

These lakes form when the permafrost thaws at a faster rate and deeper into the ground than normal. The thawing creates a depression, which then fills with rain water, ice and snow melt. The water then speeds up the rate of the permafrost thaw at the shores of the lake.

The process—abrupt thawing—could speed up the release of methane into the atmosphere.

"Within decades you can get very deep thaw holes, meters to tens of meters of vertical thaw," Katey Walter Anthony, from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, said in a statement. "So you're flash thawing the permafrost under these lakes. And we have very easily measured ancient greenhouse gases coming out."

Flash-thawing methane-rich permafrost is a recipe for absolute disaster. Atmospheric methane is extremely potent as a greenhouse gas (GHG) but very short-lived — it resolves to atmospheric CO2 and water, each a greenhouse gas but bound for pound less damaging, in less than two decades. But in its first year, each methane molecule is hundreds of times more powerful than a molecule of CO2. Decades of continuous "flash thawed" methane bubbling up in volume would wreck us.

Finally, it looks like the Paris climate agreement, already behind schedule, was using too high a bar to measure against. Thanks to more sophisticated ways to incorporate methane from melting permafrost into climate models, the amount of "headroom" we have — how much GHG we can still emit and meet the Paris warming target — is even smaller than scientists anticipated:

Paris climate targets could be exceeded sooner than expected

..."Permafrost carbon release from previously frozen organic matter is caused by global warming, and will certainly diminish the budget of CO₂ we can emit while staying below a certain level of global warming. It is also an irreversible process over the course of a few centuries, and may therefore be considered a "tipping" element of the Earth's carbon-climate system that puts the linear approximation of the emission budget framework to the test," explains Thomas Gasser, a researcher with the IIASA Ecosystems Services and Management Program and lead author of the study published in Nature Geoscience.

This is the first time that such a tipping process is adequately accounted for in emission budgets, and according to the researchers, doing so shows that the world is closer to exceeding the budget for the long-term target of the Paris Agreement than previously thought.

Until we stop billionaires from controlling our world, there's not much we can do.

See what I mean? Watching the river flow, or the trains collide.

GP
 

Is Don Blankenship Going To Guarantee Joe Manchin Reelection In November?

Don Blankenship coulda been a contender. Despite having been in prison, he was on track to win the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate until Trump gave him the big thumbs down. By the May 8 primary he came in a distant third:

• Patrick Morrisey- 47,571 (34.92%)
• Evan Jenkins- 39,888 (29.28%)
• Don Blankenship- 27,153 (19.93%)
• Tom Willis- 13,322 (9.78%)
• Bo Copley- 4,206 (3.09%)
• Jack Newbrough- 4,080 (3.0%)

As of the primary Blankenship had put $4,015,000 of his own money into the campaign-- 99.88% of everything he used to finance his campaign. Only the GOP loser, Evan Jenkins spent more ($4,213,640). Now Blankenship says he's running as the Constitution Party. In fact, yesterday he submitted the necessary paperwork and 11,000 signatures at the Secretary of State’s Office. That saw office has announced they will challenge Blankenship's ability to run under West Virginia's "sore loser law." A sore lose is exactly what Blankenship is. He can't win-- but he could torpedo Patrick Morrissey's campaign. The funny thing about this is how Blankenship began this saga as a grudge match/revenge tour against Joe Manchin and Barack Obama only to turn it into a grudge match/revenge tour against Morrisey, McConnell and Trumpanzee.

In a news release under Constitution Party letterhead, party vice chairman Phil Hudok outlined the case for Blankenship’s right to ballot access.

Citing equal protection laws in both the state and U.S. Constitution, Hudok objected to the concept that Blankenship could run as a “sore loser” with a ballot-qualified party, but not with the Constitution Party.

“The fact that the ‘sore loser’ law applies only to an unsuccessful candidate seeking to run in the general as an independent or nominee of a non ballot-qualified party-- but not for a ballot-qualified party-- is facially unconstitutional,” Hudok said.

Around the state, at least two other candidates have successfully joined the general election ballot as Mountain Party candidates after losing in primary elections with other major parties.

Additionally, Hudok took up issue with changes the Legislature made to the “sore loser” law during the 2018 Legislative session and the timing those changes take effect. Gov. Jim Justice signed House Bill 4434 into law in March, and it took effect June 5. That bill explicitly delineated the “sore loser law,” which some legal experts were skeptical of prior to the changes.

Hudok said by the time the law took effect, the party had already named Blankenship to be its Senate nominee and had begun gathering signatures to get him on the ballot. Thus, he said, Blankenship’s bid should be considered under the laws before they were changed.

However, Steve Connolly, the deputy Secretary of State and general counsel for the administration, said the Office maintains the position that both West Virginia code and case law prevents Blankenship from running as a Constitution Party candidate after losing in the primary as a Republican.

He said Blankenship made a conscious decision to run as a Republican in a losing bid. Therefore, he said, there is no question or lack of ballot access for being denied “a second bite at the apple.”

As for the changes to the law, he said all statutes are considered active from when they are enacted unless specific text in the law marks otherwise.

The case is likely to wind up in court, and the state has retained Williams, of Nelson Mullins Riley and Scarborough LLP, as counsel. Given Morrisey has a vested interest in the election, his office began seeking outside counsel in May.

In an interview after he filed his election papers, Blankenship said he will appeal a denial if it occurs, likely in state court. He did not directly answer a question regarding whether he would make any special requests of the court, like a change of venue or judge, to ensure impartiality.

“I don’t think that judges anymore are impartial in any event,” he said. “The judges have proven in my case at least for the last 30 years that they’re not impartial, but we expect that this whole situation is so cut and dry that they won’t have any choice but to uphold the Constitution.”

When asked how he could win in a general election, Blankenship said external factors led to his loss. He blamed unfair treatment from the media, an unexpected move from President Donald Trump backing his opponents one day before the election, and an unfair justice system for his loss. He declined to accept any blame personally.

“No, I don’t know what more I could have done,” he said. “I was ahead in some polls by 10 points, 18 in others before the president came out the morning before the election, and there’s not much I could do in 24 hours.” Grant Herring, a spokesman for incumbent Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) signaled warmth to the notion of Blankenship in the race in an emailed statement.

“Senator Joe Manchin has always encouraged people to get involved and run an honest campaign,” he said.

In a statement in his own name emailed through a spokesman, Morrisey suggested the run is just a ruse, then turned it into a personal attack on Manchin, attempting to paint the moderate Democrat, who has voted with President Trump’s agenda about 60 percent of the time, as a “liberal” with a “record of supporting pro-abortion policies, gun control, and Hillary Clinton’s campaign against coal miners.”

Recent polling suggests a Blankenship run could be a boon for Manchin. According to a June poll from Monmouth University, Manchin leads Morrisey by 9 points with Blankenship in the picture, a lead that tapers down to 7 points if he doesn’t make it. However, Blankenship said he believes he could siphon enough votes from both Manchin and Morrisey to pull out a win.

Earlier today, West Virginia's Secretary of State, Mac Warner, turned down his bid to run, as expected. No doubt, Blankenship will see him in court.

How Does A Democrat Run In West Virginia? And How Does A Democrat Get Reelected?

Ojeda and Manchin

WV-03-- the southern third of West Virginia-- had two populist landslides in 2016. First Bernie beat Hillary by over 20 points and, in many counties got more votes than Trump did on the same day in the GOP primary. Then, in the general, the 3rd was Trump's biggest district in the state. He beat Hillary by a shocking 72.5% to 23.3%. The PVI of West Virginia is R+19. The PVI of WV-03 is R+23. But this cycle a Democratic state senator, Richard Ojeda, is leading in all the polls. Huh? Yeah. He picked the presidential candidate voters there backed both times-- Bernie in the primary and Trump in the general. and he's been very tight with arch-conservative U.S. Senator Joe Manchin who won every single county in the district last time he ran.

I first heard from the Ojeda campaign last April and I was... confused. He voted for Trump? They wanted a Blue America endorsement. His platform looked good and he was fighting-- fighting HARD-- for the teachers in their strike. Several teachers union members told me he was fighting harder for them than any other elected official. But I needed him to explain the Trump vote before we could endorse him. He never did-- and we never endorsed. I'm still rooting for him to win-- just not raising money for him. Those are two different things.

My question has always been the same-- my responsibility to Blue American contributors-- how will he vote when he gets to Congress? Like Joe Manchin? Like Bernie? I don't know. He says he's lost faith in Trump. OK, that's good. I don't know a single Democratic candidate running for Congress who has any faith in Trump.

Ojeda seems to be confused too. He says different things to different audiences. Talking to conservatives he said "When you hear about illegal aliens getting benefits and you have people here starving to death and can’t get nothing, it’s just a slap in the face. When you start talking about bringing in refugees and when they get here they get medical and dental and they get set up with some funds-- what do we get? So when people hear Donald Trump saying we’re going to take benefits away from people who come here illegally and give them to people who work, that sounds pretty good." But when he addresses progressives he says that his policy regarding immigration is that "open arms is what we should be all about. Let’s show people love regardless of where they’re from." Still, even during this interview, Ojeda made not one criticism of the policies, deregulations, corporate tax cuts, and war policies Trump has initiated. So I don't know. The DCCC added him to their Red-to-Blue list and, believe me, if he was a die hard Bernie populist-- in a district like that-- there would be no chance that that would have happened. The DCCC hates populists (more than they hate Republicans).

Yesterday, Evan Halper," writing for the L.A. Times called him a "fiery populist" and contrasted him to his political mentor, Manchin, who they dubbed "a business-friendly centrist"-- Contrasting paths toward a Democratic resurgence in West Virginia. "A cauldron of populist anger, the 47-year-old Ojeda breaks most every rule the Democratic consultant class has laid out for winning back coal country," wrote Halper. "He is nowhere near the playbook of West Virginia’s Democratic U.S. senator, Joe Manchin III, the folksy centrist and on-again, off-again President Trump ally who many in the party see as one of the last hopes for steering Democrats back to power in Appalachia."

Both Ojeda and Manchin are-- at least for now-- defying conventional wisdom by leading in polls in places where the 2016 election results suggest Republicans should be far ahead. Trump won this state by nearly 42 points. He won Ojeda’s district by nearly 50. A recent poll by Monmouth University showed Ojeda six points ahead of his Republican opponent, Carol Miller. Manchin holds a similarly sized lead in recent polls.

Their campaigns reflect two very different paths Democrats are testing as they seek a way back to relevance in white, working-class communities that abandoned the party for Trump, and where support for the president remains strong.

Both candidates are keenly aware that a poll-tested policy agenda alone won’t cut it here. For all their differences, their campaigns display at least one belief in common: Sharp instincts for the identity politics of the region will be needed to cut Trump’s coattails short in the upcoming midterm. It’s a point that many party activists in coastal Democratic strongholds struggle to comprehend at a time when Democratic candidates feel intense pressure to take up the talking points of the Resistance.

Ojeda voted for Trump. West Virginia politicos generally agree Manchin’s biggest career misstep may have been endorsing Hillary Clinton.

Manchin has spent the last 18 months trying to make amends with his electorate. He endeared himself to Trump enough to warrant consideration for the post of energy secretary. When Trump, instead, nominated Rick Perry of Texas for the job, Manchin introduced him at the Senate confirmation hearing.

Ojeda, for his part, has soured on Trump since the election, but it irks him that party leaders remain perplexed about how a fiery progressive like him could cast a ballot for the New York billionaire.

It’s simple, Ojeda said: The economic vision the Democrats offered for Appalachia was insulting and hopeless.

“You can’t take a coal miner making $95,000 a year, the only work in these parts where you can support a family without having to hold down three jobs at once … and tell them you can make minimum wage or we can give you job training for jobs that don’t exist in West Virginia,” Ojeda said during an interview at his threadbare office in his hometown of Logan.

Sure, he said, Trump’s promises were overblown. “But when one person says we will train you in something that does not exist here, and another person says, ‘I can keep coal alive, I can help you maintain the job making $95,000 a year and help you take care of your wife and children,’ what are you going to do?”

...“This is not about the message, it is about the messenger,” said Robert Rupp, a professor of history and political science at West Virginia Wesleyan College. “He is one of us. Even if voters don’t like what Ojeda is saying, they like where he stands.”

The message is a form of in-your-face populism stylistically similar to Trump’s, but different in the targets of his anger.

“We have to stop letting people come in here and make millionaires and billionaires of themselves off of West Virginia while West Virginia remains poor,” Ojeda said, as he launched into one of his signature indictments of big energy and big drug companies.

“You deploy to other countries and fight this nation’s wars because you have this sense that maybe these people can enjoy what we have in America because we are the greatest. And then you retire one day and you return and realize it was all a bunch of garbage. It was a lie.”

That populism marks a turnabout from West Virginia’s tradition of electing less volatile politicians, like Democratic Sens. Robert C. Byrd, John D. Rockefeller IV and also Manchin, valued for their ability to work within the system. Now, the system no longer works for most voters here.

Ojeda, a first-term state senator, shot onto the radar of labor leaders last year after unflinchingly taking up the cause of West Virginia’s teachers, who went on a strike that rattled school systems nationwide. He is angry that as teachers struggle to pay rent, energy companies eager to extract the state’s massive deposits of natural gas balk at an extraction tax that could be used to boost their pay.

As his community reels from the opioid crisis, he says to any politician “helping or protecting big pharma while they are killing our people, you are a murderer.” He blames feckless legislators beholden to drug interests for delaying implementation of a medical marijuana law Ojeda muscled through the Legislature.

In his own, more measured way, Manchin is also seizing on healthcare. The potential unraveling of the Affordable Care Act by Republicans and a more conservative Supreme Court is a key campaign issue for him in a state where 800,000 people have preexisting conditions, and most of them can’t afford insurance without government help.

“If insurance companies can go back to playing the games they played before, they can decide the fate of most of West Virginia,” Manchin said Wednesday at a Washington conference held by the Economic Innovation Group. “Whether they can buy insurance, afford insurance or whether they are one illness away from catastrophic ruin. These are the things we deal with.”

But the senator made clear his frustration with his own party, a theme that plays well at home. He recalled how Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) asked him after Trump’s election, “What happened to the West Virginia Democrats?”

“I said, ‘Not a thing. They want to know what happened to the Washington Democrats,’” Manchin said.

When the ringing of his mobile phone interrupted Manchin, fellow panelist Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) joked that the caller was probably Trump. Not skipping a beat, Manchin replied that it probably was.

Manchin, who is running for reelection against West Virginia attorney general Patrick Morrisey, is sitting on an impressive campaign war chest. Money is a bigger problem for Ojeda. His race against Miller, a wealthy Republican legislator expected to have considerable resources, is fast becoming a test case of how far modern grass-roots fundraising can take an unconventional candidate.

Help has also come from an unexpected place: Silicon Valley. Last year, as his campaign got underway, Ojeda found himself at a Palo Alto wine bar, pitching his vision to tech innovators at an event sponsored by the People’s House Project, a political action committee established by the journalist Krystal Ball to boost working-class Democrats running for office. Ball worked with Rep. Ro Khanna, the Democrat who represents much of the Silicon Valley, to introduce Ojeda to the tech world.

“That trip was unbelievable,” said Ball. “Richard had been all over the world with the military, but he had never been to California. He got in a room with these tech lawyers and entrepreneurs and executives and said, ‘I don’t know why you don’t think we have smart people in West Virginia.’

“These were progressive people who saw themselves as open-minded and not bigoted. They realized they had a lot of stereotypes about what West Virginians are like.”

Khanna, who has been travelling to coal country in an effort to build economic and political alliances, said Ojeda has a message the rest of the party should listen to.

“We default to the same platitudes and talking points people have been running on for the last 20 years,” the congressman said in an interview. “Party leaders can learn from [Ojeda]. Here is someone doing well in a part of the country where we have not been doing well.”

I know how Manchin is going to vote when he's reelected-- like a moderate Republican, just the way he's been voting. I still don't know how Ojeda's going to vote. No one does. I'm not even sure if he knows himself. It sure will be interesting to see though. As of the June 30 FEC filing deadline, he had raised $514,796 and Carol Miller had raised $463,818-- although $205,400 of that had come right out of her own fat bank account. The most recent poll, late June by Monmouth, shows Ojeda beating her among likely voters 47-41% or, if the Blue Wave hits West Virginia, 48-39%. And then we'll all find out how he'll be voting.