WHAT ARE THOSE PEOPLE IN WASHINGTON SMOKING? It turns out that a big majority of Americans — 65 percent of the respondents to a recent Rasmussen Reports survey — think mandatory random drug testing is a great idea for politicians.

ASTROTURF: Two Professors Featured in Warren Campaign Video About Native American Ancestry Are Donors.

THE INFECTION IS COMING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE: Hospital-acquired bloodstream infections traced to patients’ own bodies.

THIS WILL END WELL: Spain is to remove razor wire from border fences in north Africa to prevent serious injuries to migrants who storm the barriers. “After criticism from aid groups Spain’s Socialist government said that it would replace the wire with “smart” sensors to track movement near the barriers in Melilla and Ceuta, Spanish cities that border Morocco, and alert their Moroccan counterparts.”

AT AMAZON, Shop Amazon Warehouse Deals – Deep Discounts on Open-box and Used Tools & Home Improvement.

TONI AIRAKSINEN: Cornell University Teams Up With Planned Parenthood to Fight ‘Masculinity’ in Boys as Young as 12. “Define what it means to be a ‘real man.’”

HORMONES: Women Suffer Vastly More Migraines Than Men, Here’s Why.

NEWS YOU CAN USE? The Science Behind the U.S. Military’s Super Sandwich.

EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN: Winamp Is Coming Back in 2019.

COLLABORATE WITH DON’T BE EVIL: Google Finally Acknowledges Censored Chinese Search Engine Project.

For readers who missed the damning series of leaks sketching out the scope of the project, “Dragonfly” is intended to be a censored search engine that would block results for queries that the Chinese government considered sensitive, like the Mandarin phrases for “human rights” and “student protest”. It would also require Chinese users to log in with their credentials before searches can be run, ensuring that the Communist Party can log and examine a comprehensive record of search activity.

But while Pichai acknowledged that “Dragonfly” would censor some search terms, ultimately, Google would be able to serve well over “99%” of queries. While it’s unclear how Pichai arrived at this metric, we imagine there aren’t too many Chinese citizens sitting at their terminals Googling “Nobel Peace Prize” over and over again.

Given that the mainland market harbors hundreds of middle-class users, whose personal data Google and its tech rivals are eager to exploit for profits, Pichai said Google was obligated to “think hard” about the problem of returning to China, and that US companies shouldn’t scuttle what could be an enormously profitable initiative just because it would require making a few ethically dubious concessions to a totalitarian state.

Giving up the Waze navigation app wasn’t fun, but that was the last Google-owned service I used — and that was two years ago.

For search I get generally good results from DuckDuckGo, with Microsoft’s Bing as the occasional fallback. DropBox and Apple’s iCloud are fine (if not as fully featured) for cloud storage and file creation/sharing. And I’ve relied on HostingMatters for my domain and email needs since 2002 with nothing but great service.

NEW CIVILITY WATCH: Democrat Party Official Says Republicans Should Be Brought “to The Guillotines.”

A member of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor (DFL) Party was suspended after saying Republicans should be brought “to the guillotines” after the November midterm elections.

William Davis, who is the spokesman for the party in Minnesota, commented in a Facebook post: “11.7 — bring them to the guillotines.” Party executive director Corey Day said Davis deleted the post and party spokeswoman Charlene Briner said Davis’s suspension started Monday with no pay for one week, according to The Associated Press.

So much for “Minnesota Nice,” about which Wikipedia assures me that “The tradition of social progressivism in Minnesota politics has been linked to the Minnesota Nice culture.”

BLUE WAVE? Polarization Seems to Be Helping Republicans in Run-Up to Midterms. “Energized voters on the right dim prospects for big Democratic gains in red districts and states.”

Nate Cohn:

The fight over Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court seems to have contributed to polarizing the electorate, helping Republicans gain in red states and districts even as Democrats cement their strong position elsewhere. The trend might fade, but if it holds it will be an abrupt change from earlier polls and last year’s special election results, which indicated that Democrats were highly competitive in red areas.

Instead, the district and state polling raises the possibility of an election more like last year’s Virginia elections or the 2010 midterm elections. Both were strong results for the party out of power — but the big numbers came mainly on home turf. A similar result this year would tend to lock the Democrats into their single biggest disadvantage: the map.

The Democratic geographic disadvantage is so severe that it gives the Republicans a chance to survive a so-called wave election, like the 1994, 2006 and 2010 elections that flipped control of the House.

Don’t. Get. Cocky.

YES. NEXT QUESTION? Will Elizabeth Warren’s ‘Woman of Color’ Sham Come Back to Haunt Her? “Elizabeth Warren is, by just about anybody’s definition, white. At the very least, she was comfortable with Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania describing her as a ‘person of color’ or a racial ‘minority.’ The ‘person of color’ characterization is what really worries Warren, I suspect. It’s easy to imagine some future presidential debate stage, and Kamala Harris, or Cory Booker, or Deval Patrick turning to Warren and asking, ‘Did you really think you deserved to be called a ‘woman of color’ in American society?’”

CYBERTHREAT UPDATE: Doubts Swirl Around Bloomberg‘s China Chip Hack Report.

A week later, I remain deeply troubled by this story—not because of its substance, but because of its lack of substantiation. It seems a little odd that no one has reported identifying a single one of these spy chips in the wild since Bloomberg’s report appeared, no? Wouldn’t it have been easy for any companies using servers containing components from Supermicro, the company whose products were allegedly backdoored, to send an engineer into a data center, pry open a server, pluck out an offending implant, and reveal China’s alleged subterfuge to the world? Instead, we hear cricket chirps.

While this absence of evidence is not enough to debunk the report, it does raise doubts. Besides, wouldn’t it be easier for spies simply to meddle with Supermicro’s notoriously buggy firmware? This approach would achieve the same results and be far less complicated to pull off logistically.

After this long and still no physical evidence that even one of these chips exist, it’s looking more and more like Bloomberg blew it.

YOUR DAILY TREACHER: DNA Test Proves Elizabeth Warren Is Heap Big Authentic.

(Bumped.)

MICHAEL WALSH: Will the End of Merkel Mean the End of Merkelism? “Merkelism — pretending to be “conservative” while moving steadily to the left — has now been exposed for the fraud it always was. The German voters have spoken — will the politicians in Berlin heed the warning?”

OH: ‘Aromantic’ Is a Legitimate Identity for People Who ‘Don’t Experience Romantic Attraction.’

WHY? IT’S NOT LIKE THEY’VE GOT A BIG ELECTION IN 3 WEEKS OR ANYTHING: Leading Democrats criticize the timing of Liz Warren’s reveal. “If you want to talk about health care, or children being ripped from their parents and put in cages, great. But I have no interest whatever in shaking Sen. Warren’s family tree before Nov. 7.”

WHEW: “USAF suggesting the early reports of badly-damaged F-22s at Tyndall may have been overstated. Also, nice to see they resurrected jet 4006. That was the best performer of early Raptor production.”

This comes from former VodkaPundit co-blogger Will Collier, who used to work on the Raptor program.

FASTER, PLEASE: Ending Anti-Asian Discrimination at Harvard: Plan B.

THE BEST AND THE BRIGHTEST: Democratic Gubernatorial Candidate Stacey Abrams Makes Up a County in Georgia. “There is no Glasgow County in Georgia. What makes this really rich is that Stacey Abrams was touring the national news networks to attack Brian Kemp for purported voter suppression while Brian Kemp was actually in South Georgia working with local elections officials to make sure they’d be able to start early voting today and carry out the election.”

Or maybe the GOP has suppressed Glasgow County’s votes so successfully that the county has ceased to exist. . . .

SALENA ZITO INTERVIEWS DONALD TRUMP: ‘It really is all about hope.’ “Two years and a handful of days earlier, I interviewed then-candidate Trump in Pittsburgh ahead of a natural gas convention where he was the keynote speaker. It was at a time when most pollsters and pundits showed him unable to close the deal with voters to beat Hillary Clinton. His demeanor that day isn’t much different than it was last Wednesday. He appears to be still more comfortable chatting or sharing jokes with the service workers and police officers backstage than he is with the elite he grew up with.”

SULTANS GOTTA SULTANATE: Turkey suspends almost 260 local officials amid crackdown.

And: Turkey to seize opposition party’s bank stake.

“THEY WOULD LIKE A REALLY BIG TURNOUT:” Prof offers extra credit for attending Democrat campaign event.