DAVID HARSANYI: The Only Remarkable Thing About Beto O’Rourke Is How Much The Media Loves Him. “A perfect example of bias, advocacy. and wishful thinking.”

Despite my best efforts, I know exactly what Texas Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke’s post-punk indie band from the mid-’90s sounds like (not as bad as you’d think!). At the same time, I don’t know much about Senate candidate Josh Hawley, who is 38 years old (meaning, around eight years younger than “rising star” Beto), the attorney general of Missouri, and the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate.

In fact, Hawley’s name recognition outside of his state is probably negligible. When his name does come up in national political coverage, it’s mostly as a tack-on in pieces accessing opponent Claire McCaskill’s latest face-saving move or a panicky story about voter registration in Missouri. As with most other Americans, I don’t have any idea if Hawley likes to air drum to The Who when he pretends to win a debate. What I do know is that Hawley is slightly leading McCaskill, a two-time incumbent, in the RealClearPolitics poll average in a race that could decide which party controls the Senate.

O’Rourke, who is also up against an incumbent, Ted Cruz, is down seven points and falling. It wouldn’t be completely surprising if Cruz ends up winning Texas by nearly the same margin he did in 2012. Yet you might not have discerned this reality if you were merely paying attention to Betomania.

The Democrat-Media Complex is obsessed with the superficial because, well, what else have they got?

THE HEAT IS ON: Women To Heitkamp: You’ll Hear From Our Attorney.

BETO SCHOOL OF DRIVING: Michigan Dem. Gretchen Whitmer Crashed Into Parked Car in 2016, Witness Said She Was ‘Intoxicated.’ “In a message to PJ Media, the campaign admitted the incident occurred but insisted that alcohol was not involved. They did not give an alternate explanation for why the collision occurred, however.”

LET’S GET FRACKING: Don’t rule out $400 oil if the U.S. sanctions Saudi Arabia.

OH: Sweden to expel 6-year-old orphan to Ukraine while granting amnesty to 9,000 Afghans.

WHOA, CANADA: Canada to pardon pot possession as the country legalizes marijuana.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Khashoggi in the Headlines and Much, Much More. “This story continues to lead news coverage with the media wagging their finger at President Trump, sneering that he needs to dump/sanction/cancel arms sales/start a war with the Sauds. Despite all the moral posturing, we have no evidence of anything yet, NONE and yet an entire scenario has been constructed and floated around but there is no evidence and no admissions only convenient allegations from the enemies (Turkey, Qatar, Iran) of a Saudi, Israeli, US alliance. If the U.S. turns on the Saudis, qui bono?”

Good question.

#METOO: Judge denies Ellison’s petition to keep divorce file sealed and redact ‘sensitive’ information.

OH: US Sanctions Threats ‘Unexpectedly’ Led To Deeper Economic Ties Between Iran And Russia.

According to a report by Israeli political analyst Dana Weiss, the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs has a secret document that describes Russia’s plan to aid Iran in subverting the incoming US Sanctions on the Islamic Republic’s oil exports.

According to Weiss, Iran will transfer its crude oil to Russian refineries on the Caspian Sea. After that Russia would present and sell the oil as Russian and reimburse Iran on the sales. According to the secret document, the plan was made together by Turkey, Russia and Iran during their summit on September 7th. In the summit the leaders of the three countries discussed avoiding an escalation in Idlib.

The document also said that European parties may be complacent in allowing Iran to circumvent US sanctions in order to trade oil with Asia. This would make sense, since the EU signatories on the Iran Nuclear Deal are interested in keeping Iran in the deal and upholding it. After all, the EU has made steps towards assisting Iran deal with the sanctions.

According to Weiss, this is worrying for Israel because Iran would avoid an economic collapse, which will also be reinforced by this new way of circumventing US sanctions.

We just need to find more soft spots to push on, is all.

CHANGE: Signs mount of a fundamental shift in US-China ties.

With efforts to resolve the tit-for-tat tariff battle in limbo, Vice President Pence this month served public notice that the US sees trade as just one grievance among many against China’s economic, military, geopolitical, and human rights policies. And he explicitly questioned a core assumption of US policy over the past two decades: that support for modernization in China and its integration into the world economy would temper Chinese leaders politically and provide the basis for a relationship of cooperation. Mr. Pence said, in effect, that ship had now sailed.

A new cold war, if that’s what it becomes, will likely look far different from the first. The Soviet Union was an underdeveloped country with an outsized military and a fearsome nuclear arsenal. China is also a nuclear power, and has been gradually building up its military reach in recent years. Yet with China, the root source of competition and of steadily growing friction has been an economic one. More specifically, it’s about how China has been using its growing economic might.

It’s interesting that Ned Temko should bring up the Soviet Union’s lack of economic might, when for decades we had been assured (always by the Left) that the Soviets were on the brink of overtaking us — if they already hadn’t. Given China’s debt explosion and coming demographic implosion, you have to wonder if they’re as economically mighty as so many people think they are.

HMM: Ukraine’s Spiritual Split From Russia Could Trigger a Global Schism. “For Moscow, the crisis is geopolitical as well as religious.”

“This is a victory of good over evil, light over darkness.” That’s how Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko described the announcement Thursday that the Orthodox Church’s Istanbul-based leader, Patriarch Bartholomew, will grant Ukraine’s Church independence from Russia.

In televised remarks, Ukraine’s president dubbed this a “historic event,” which it undoubtedly is: For more than three centuries, Ukraine and Russia have been religiously united within the Russian Orthodox Church. It was a union Poroshenko characterized this summer as a “direct threat to the national security of Ukraine,” given his view that the Russian Orthodox Church fully supports Kremlin policy; he said then that it was “absolutely necessary to cut off all the tentacles with which the aggressor country operates inside the body of our state.”

Now, four years after Russia annexed the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea, Ukraine is asserting its territorial independence by demanding its own national Church. For Russia, the crisis is geopolitical as well as spiritual. The stakes are so high that in order to protest Ukraine’s religious autonomy, Russia may respond harshly enough to trigger a deep schism in the Christian world.

“Little green men” and assassins can’t fix this problem for Putin.

I’D RATHER SEE MORE DISTANCE BETWEEN BIG GOVERNMENT AND BIG BUSINESS: Facebook’s ex-security chief will start a new center to bring Washington and Silicon Valley together.

BLUE WAVE? Conservative Leah Vukmir Looks To Defeat Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D) in Wisconsin. “The most recent poll shows Baldwin leading Vukmir by 10 points, 53% to 43%. Asked about this, Vukmir responded by noting that the usually reliable poll has been all over the map since the beginning of the senatorial campaign, showing her at one point trailing by 30 points and at another two points behind, well within the margin of error. Vukmir also noted that the polling was done before the recent debate at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee campus, in which she clearly dominated an uncomfortable and often flustered Baldwin.”

Good bio of an unconventional candidate in a largely overlooked race.

YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER BLOG: 11 Freakiest Things About Arizona Senate Candidate Kyrsten Sinema.

UPDATE (From Ed): “Another day, another Kyrsten Sinema video of her trashing Arizona. Kyrsten Sinema In Boston: ‘Let My Arizona … Serve As A Warning Symbol For Each Of You.’”

(Bumped.)

SATIRE… OR IS IT? Warren Mulls Starting Grassroots Call for Her to Run.

CHUTZPAH: China says internment camps are ‘free vocational training.’

BRUCE BAWER IS NOT MAKING THIS UP: New This Fall: The Preschool Hijab!

UGH: Emergency Meeting Called to Determine Global Risk of Latest Ebola Outbreak. “Instability is hampering efforts to contain the outbreak. CDC staff who were in the DRC to help have been pulled out of affected hot spots.”

HMM: What the media aren’t telling you about Jamal Khashoggi.

The fate of Khashoggi has at least provoked global outrage, but it’s for all the wrong reasons. We are told he was a liberal, Saudi progressive voice fighting for freedom and democracy, and a martyr who paid the ultimate price for telling the truth to power. This is not just wrong, but distracts us from understanding what the incident tells us about the internal power dynamics of a kingdom going through an unprecedented period of upheaval. It is also the story of how one man got entangled in a Saudi ruling family that operates like the Mafia. Once you join, it’s for life, and if you try to leave, you become disposable.

In truth, Khashoggi never had much time for western-style pluralistic democracy. In the 1970s he joined the Muslim Brotherhood, which exists to rid the Islamic world of western influence. He was a political Islamist until the end, recently praising the Muslim Brotherhood in the Washington Post. He championed the ‘moderate’ Islamist opposition in Syria, whose crimes against humanity are a matter of record. Khashoggi frequently sugarcoated his Islamist beliefs with constant references to freedom and democracy. But he never hid that he was in favour of a Muslim Brotherhood arc throughout the Middle East. His recurring plea to bin Salman in his columns was to embrace not western-style democracy, but the rise of political Islam which the Arab Spring had inadvertently given rise to. For Khashoggi, secularism was the enemy.

It seems possible that Khashoggi was murdered in order to embarrass Crown Prince bin Salman rather than to protect him.

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

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.”

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.’”

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

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.

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.