CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: John Podesta’s Best Friend At The DOJ Will Be In Charge Of The DOJ’s Probe Into Huma Abedin Emails.

HILLARY DIDN’T SEE CARLOS DANGER COMING, DID SHE? (bumped)

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1272.

ROGER SIMON: Last Call for the #NeverTrumpers.

THAT SOUNDS SEXIST: Clinton camp: The cake’s already baked.

MICHAEL WALSH ON TRUMP’S PATH TO 270: Yes, He Can.

Well, we’ll know soon enough.

WELL, WELL: Post-ABC Tracking Poll: Trump 46, Clinton 45, as Democratic enthusiasm dips.

Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are all but tied in the latest Washington Post-ABC News Tracking Poll, which finds Clinton backers slipping behind in enthusiasm even as the Democrat has an edge in early voting.

The tracking poll finds little shift in Clinton’s overall support following news of the FBI’s renewed look at Clinton emails, but strong enthusiasm among her supporters fell behind Trump in combined Saturday and Sunday interviews. By 53 to 43 percent, more Trump supporters say they are “very enthusiastic” about him, compared with Thursday and Friday when Trump’s edge was negligible (53 percent vs. 51 percent).

Stay tuned. There’s a week left, and it’s 2016 so anything can happen. And I mean anything.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. The Democrats Asked for This.

Clinton effectively locked up the nomination in June and wasn’t cleared of criminal wrongdoing by the FBI until July. What if she had been indicted? Would Democrats have run her anyway? Would they have substituted in a 74-year-old socialist who had lost the nomination battle, or someone else who hadn’t even run? Any of these circumstances would have been unprecedented, but Democrats risked it

They did it, in part, because they could never bring themselves to fully acknowledge the seriousness of the e-mail scandal and, relatedly, the ethical miasma around the Clinton Foundation. They considered it all another desperate trick of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy.

It isn’t just what Democrats risked for their party, but for the country.

TURKEY’S DEVOLUTION: Erdogan Moves Against the Mainstream Opposition.

The Turkish police on Monday morning raided the houses of and detained senior staff at Turkey’s oldest and one of its most respected daily newspapers. . . .

The detentions come a day after the firing of a further 10,000 civil servants and the closing of 15 other media outlets. Since the 15 July coup attempt, the government had already fired more than 100,000 people, detained 75,000 and arrested (which is a distinct and more legally serious measure in Turkey) another 35,000. What difference at this point does the arrest of 12 journalists make?

Quite a lot, actually. This marks the start of a new stage in the efforts to crush opposition to Erdogan’s rule. Until now, the purge has focused on those who have either plausibly had some association with the Gulenist movement, which the government blames for the coup (however tenuously), or on Kurds. As a result, the purge up to now hasn’t garnered much objection from the main opposition parties; nor has it particularly advanced Erdogan’s ultimate goal of establishing a Sultan-esque position for himself and institutional monopoly for his party. The (theoretically temporary) extension on October 3 of the State of Emergency law, which grants Erdogan effective power to rule by decree, raised eyebrows, but it didn’t end the post-coup honeymoon period that saw all of Turkey’s non-Kurdish opposition parties rally together in support of preserving democratic government.

Now, Erdogan’s Turkey has not been a friendly place, to put it mildly, for journalists or the opposition for some time. Cumhuriyet’s previous editor, Can Dundar, survived an assassination attempt in May while on trial for revealing Turkish intelligence’s support for Islamist rebels in Syria. He was convicted, and has since fled the country.

But the laughable charges against Cumhuriyet’s current staff—terroristic support for the Gulenist movement and the PKK—mark a new phase in Erdogan’s opposition suppression project. In an encouraging move, within hours of the arrests, Kemalist Republican People’s Party (CHP) leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu defied a ban imposed in Ankara against public demonstrations and met with with opposition protesters at a rally outside the newspaper’s offices.

When stuff like this happens, you have to respond fast and hard. If you don’t, the opposition will be defeated in detail until there’s no opposition left.

EVERGREEN HEADLINE: Democrat Pollster Asks Union Leaders to Lie to Their Members.

Why are Democrat monopoly institutions such cesspits of institutional duplicity?

THOMAS FRANK: “WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH KANSAS AMERICA?” Forget the FBI cache; the Podesta emails show how America is run.

They are the comfortable and well-educated mainstay of our modern Democratic party. They are also the grandees of our national media; the architects of our software; the designers of our streets; the high officials of our banking system; the authors of just about every plan to fix social security or fine-tune the Middle East with precision droning. They are, they think, not a class at all but rather the enlightened ones, the people who must be answered to but who need never explain themselves.

Let us turn the magnifying glass on them for a change, by sorting through the hacked personal emails of John Podesta, who has been a Washington power broker for decades. I admit that I feel uncomfortable digging through this hoard; stealing someone’s email is a crime, after all, and it is outrageous that people’s personal information has been exposed, since WikiLeaks doesn’t seem to have redacted the emails in any way. There is also the issue of authenticity to contend with: we don’t know absolutely and for sure that these emails were not tampered with by whoever stole them from John Podesta. The supposed authors of the messages are refusing to confirm or deny their authenticity, and though they seem to be real, there is a small possibility they aren’t.

With all that taken into consideration, I think the WikiLeaks releases furnish us with an opportunity to observe the upper reaches of the American status hierarchy in all its righteousness and majesty.

It’s nice of Frank to finally notice that what goes on in Washington is much worse than, say, Kansas.

COMEY’S PROBLEMATIC JULY DECISION:

Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey and several conservative attorneys and legal scholars held a private forum last month in which they harshly criticized FBI Director James Comey’s handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation just eight days before Comey sent a letter to Congress announcing his bombshell decision to review new emails in the probe. The event, billed as a discussion on “The Law after Comey’s decision,” featured several speakers including Mukasey, who served in the George W. Bush administration, hammering Comey over the legal precedent he set in concluding the email probe three months ago without charging Clinton with a crime.

Read the whole thing.

ALL-IN FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE at UNC Chapel Hill.

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HILLARY’S HUBRIS, WEINER’S PORN AND COMEY’S CONSCIENCE

AS IF THERE WEREN’T ALREADY SO MANY REASONS TO VOTE FOR HIM. Survey: 35% of federal workers may consider leaving their jobs if Trump wins.

Who says a moderate Republican like Trump wouldn’t shrink the federal government!

AN ARMY OF DAVIDS: Spooked by Russia, Tiny Estonia Trains a Nation of Insurgents.

“We just have to stay alive,” Ms. Barnabas said of the main idea behind the Jarva District Patrol Competition, a 24-hour test of the skills useful for partisans, or insurgents, to fight an occupying army, and an improbably popular form of what is called “military sport” in Estonia.

The competitions, held nearly every weekend, are called war games, but are not intended as fun. The Estonian Defense League, which organizes the events, requires its 25,400 volunteers to turn out occasionally for weekend training sessions that have taken on a serious hue since Russia’s incursions in Ukraine two years ago raised fears of a similar thrust by Moscow into the Baltic States.

Estonia, a NATO member with a population of 1.3 million people and a standing army of about 6,000, would not stand a chance in a conventional war with Russia. But two armies fighting on an open field is not Estonia’s plan, and was not even before Donald J. Trump, the Republican presidential candidate, said European members of NATO should not count on American support unless they pay more alliance costs.

Since the Ukraine war, Estonia has stepped up training for members of the Estonian Defense League, teaching them how to become insurgents, right down to the making of improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.s, the weapons that plagued the American military in Iraq and Afghanistan. Another response to tensions with Russia is the expansion of a program encouraging Estonians to keep firearms in their homes.

Forget the gratuitous swipe at Donald Trump, and marvel instead at reporter Andrew E. Kramer’s estimation of Estonians’ enthusiasm for their own national defense as “improbably popular.”

WHEREVER WOULD THEY HAVE GOTTEN THAT IDEA? Poll: Public overwhelmingly thinks media is in the tank for Clinton.

The American public thinks the media wants Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton to win by an almost 10-to-1 margin, according to a new poll.

The Suffolk University/USA Today poll released Friday asks, “Who do you think the media, including major newspapers and TV stations, would like to see elected president: Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump?”

Of the 1,000 adults surveyed, 75.9 percent answered Clinton, while just 7.9 percent picked Trump, the Republican nominee. Just more than 16 percent of respondents chose either “neither” or “undecided.”

The Suffolk University/USA Today poll comes on the heels of an Associated Press/GkF poll last week showing that 56 percent of likely voters, including 87 percent of his supporters, believe the media is biased against Trump.

In that poll, 51 percent of Clinton supporters said the media is biased in her favor, while just 8 percent said it’s biased against her.

Trump has repeatedly complained the media is against him.

Well, it is, at least now that the primaries are over and he looks like he might have a chance of winning.

IT’S COME TO THIS: In a rare moment of self-awareness, Hillary* tweets that she’s one of the most corrupt presidential candidates of all time:

* Much more likely her army of ghost-tweeters. As one Conquest’s Laws states, “The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.” Which neatly sums up the train wrecks that both candidates’ presidential runs have been.

JAYVEE: Terrorists Behind String of Hotel Attacks Pledge Allegiance to ISIS.

A CONSPIRACY SO VAST: Carville Blows Up On MSNBC Anchor: Our Democracy Is Under Assault By Comey, The KGB And Republicans. Usually when people start claiming they’re being targeted by the FBI, the KGB, and other parties simultaneously, it’s seen as a sign of clinical paranoia.

RIGGED, BY DEMOCRATIC PARTY OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES: Donna Brazile’s debate question flap boosts ‘rigged’ narrative. “’Trump has stressed over and over again that the press is not just biased, but that parts of it have become effectively adjuncts of the Democratic Party,’ said Boston College political science professor Dennis Hale. ‘This certainly feeds that story.’” Ya think? If I were a Bernie fan, I’d be livid.

LYING LIAR WHO LIES: Huma’s email testimony could haunt her as FBI renews probe.

FBI Director James Comey stressed in his letter to Congress Friday that investigators don’t know how significant the new emails may be. But even if they don’t implicate the Democratic presidential nominee, their mere existence could call into question testimony Abedin gave months ago about the email system.

FBI records reflect that she told investigators “that she lost most of her old emails as a result of the transition.”

During a June 28, 2016 deposition with the conservative Judicial Watch, Abedin also swore she looked for and turned over all devices she thought contained government work to the State Department.

“I looked for all the devices that may have any of my State Department work on it and returned – returned – gave them to my attorneys for them to review for all relevant documents,” Abedin said. “And gave them devices and paper.”

Then what were 650,000 emails doing on a computer shared with her husband?

JOURNALISM: Rolling Stone publisher to his alleged defamation victim: ‘I’ve suffered as much as you have.’

After it became clear that Jackie’s claims were false, the magazine appended an editor’s note to the top of the article but kept it on the website. After the Columbia Journalism Review investigated what went wrong in the reporting of the article in April 2015, the magazine finally retracted the article by removing it from the website.

Wenner also took responsibility for the problems in the article and the pain it caused for University of Virginia Dean Nicole Eramo, who is suing the magazine over her portrayal in that article.

“To the extent that we have caused you damage, and obviously we have, but the fact that we’re here, I’m very, very sorry. It was never meant to ever happen this way to you,” Wenner said. “And believe me, I’ve suffered as much as you have. And I know what it’s like. I hope that this whole thing hadn’t happened but it is, and it’s what we live with. But please, my sympathies.”

It is unclear how he suffered as much as Eramo.

It certainly is.