Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly/NY Times:
But while we found Dr. Ford’s allegations credible during a 10-month investigation, Ms. Ramirez’s story could be more fully corroborated. During his Senate testimony, Mr. Kavanaugh said that if the incident Ms. Ramirez described had occurred, it would have been “the talk of campus.” Our reporting suggests that it was.
At least seven people, including Ms. Ramirez’s mother, heard about the Yale incident long before Mr. Kavanaugh was a federal judge. Two of those people were classmates who learned of it just days after the party occurred, suggesting that it was discussed among students at the time.
We also uncovered a previously unreported story about Mr. Kavanaugh in his freshman year that echoes Ms. Ramirez’s allegation. A classmate, Max Stier, saw Mr. Kavanaugh with his pants down at a different drunken dorm party, where friends pushed his penis into the hand of a female student. Mr. Stier, who runs a nonprofit organization in Washington, notified senators and the F.B.I. about this account, but the F.B.I. did not investigate and Mr. Stier has declined to discuss it publicly. (We corroborated the story with two officials who have communicated with Mr. Stier.)
The excerpt is about Yale culture, but there are some major news bits in there.
The’re running for re-election. Up to us to show them how we feel about their judgment.
NY Times:
‘People Actively Hate Us’: Inside the Border Patrol’s Morale Crisis
Overwhelmed by desperate migrants and criticized for mistreating the people in their care, many agents have grown defensive, insular and bitter.
The job has taken a psychological toll on men and women alike.
From 2007 to 2018, more than 100 Customs and Border Protection employees, many of whom had worked as Border Patrol agents, killed themselves. Ross Davidson, who retired in 2017 after 21 years with the agency, said he was certain that stress from the job has been a factor.
“The repetitive monotony of doing the same thing over and over and seeing no outcome, seeing no end to it and nothing changing,” he said. “It’s just going deeper and deeper, and getting worse and worse.”
Max Burns/Independent:
Thanks to Donald Trump, Texas is about to become a Democratic stronghold
Immigration and Latinx campaigning is only part of the problem for Republicans. Polls show they're also losing suburban, middle class whites
For millennial voters, Texas gained its ruby-red reputation after elevating native son and previous youth movement bête-noir George W Bush to the White House. Bush’s mannerisms and eccentricities became the running Texan stereotype: gun-toting, hyper-religious, contemptuous of the educated and unquestioningly conservative. The state hadn’t voted for a Democratic president since 1976 – before most millennials were born. Texas was a lost cause.
Rumors of Texas’s death as a purple state turned out to be greatly exaggerated. While predominantly white Democratic elites wrote off Texan congressional districts and Senate seats as wastes of party money, grassroots Latinx and LGBTQ coalitions sprang into action in cities like Austin, El Paso and San Antonio. Each electoral cycle narrowed the voter gap between complacent Republicans and upstart, progressive Democrats.
In 2013, freshman Congressman Joaquin Castro urged Democrats to rethink their Texas playbook. The voters were there, Castro insisted. Adapting the message wouldn’t be enough; Democrats would need better messengers. Six years later, Castro’s brother Julian took the presidential debate stage to introduce Blue Texas to a new generation of voters.
WSJ:
Slow Growth Hasn’t Hurt Trump in Key Midwest Counties
While local job growth lags behind the nation’s, president’s approval rating has risen since 2017
“This is the Motor City. We make cars. Now the people making the cars can’t afford the cars,” said Ms. Nuculaj, owner of the Motor City Sports Bar & Grill in Warren.
She added: “I voted for Trump because I was hoping for better, hoping for more jobs to stay here. … I don’t think I’ll vote for him again.” ...
Democrats say they don’t expect to win a majority in the blue-collar counties, and in many cases they don’t need to.
Mark Brewer, former chairman of the Michigan Democratic Party, said his party doesn’t need to regain all the votes it has lost in Macomb County, for example, which backed Barack Obama in both 2008 and 2012.
“They can lose the county and still win the state,’’ he said. “But you can’t lose it by tens of thousands of votes.”
Hannah Natanson/WaPo:
They were once America’s cruelest, richest slave traders. Why does no one know their names?
Isaac Franklin and John Armfield committed atrocities they appeared to relish
The two most ruthless domestic slave traders in America had a secret language for their business.
Slave trading was a “game.” The men, Isaac Franklin and John Armfield, were daring “pirates” or “one-eyed men,” a euphemism for their penises. The women they bought and sold were “fancy maids,” a term signifying youth, beauty and potential for sexual exploitation — by buyers or the traders themselves.
Rapes happened often.
“To my certain knowledge she has been used & that smartly by a one eyed man about my size and age, excuse my foolishness,” Isaac Franklin’s nephew James — an employee and his uncle’s protege — wrote in typical business correspondence, referring to Caroline Brown, an enslaved woman who suffered repeated rape and abuse at James’s hands for five months. She was 18 at the time and just over five feet tall.
WaPo:
Former British prime minister Cameron says Boris Johnson acted ‘appallingly,’ misled voters on Brexit
It was Cameron who confidently called for the June 2016 Brexit referendum — and it was Cameron who led the muddled, muted campaign for Britain to remain in the European Union.
After Brexit won 52 percent to 48 percent, Cameron quickly resigned, notably caught on a hot mic humming a tune as he strode away from the podium in front of 10 Downing Street.
Many Britons blame Cameron for today’s Brexit quagmire, branding the former prime minister as “the man who broke Britain.”
Cameron’s critics say the British public was never really clamoring for the 2016 referendum and that Cameron called it only to quell internal squabbles in his fractious Conservative Party and to quiet the rabid Tory tabloids.
Cameron confesses the whole thing quickly devolved into a “terrible Tory psychodrama.”
WaPo:
Virginia’s ‘off-off-year’ elections were once sleepy. And then came Trump.
“To have the turnout advantage favor the Democrats in off years was very significant and was really an example of what I call the negative Trump effect,” said Bob Holsworth, a longtime Richmond political analyst. “The question is, does that still linger in 2019? Can the Democrats gin that up again?”
The stakes could not be higher for the state — and beyond.
Republicans are clinging to control of the General Assembly by the thinnest of margins. If Democrats win the House and Senate, the party will control every lever of state power for the first time in 25 years. Many long-stymied Democratic goals — to restrict guns, expand gay rights, loosen restrictions on abortion and raise the minimum wage, to name a few — would probably become law. And a Democratic legislature would redraw state legislative and congressional districts following the 2020 Census, affecting elections into the future…
Measuring enthusiasm is an inexact science, but Democrats say their fundraising, volunteer activity and roster of candidates suggest the blue wave has not subsided.