Item One, ya’ll folks in Florida, stay safe.

Item Two, there is more speculation about why Nikki Haley announced she is leaving the UN:

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley reportedly announced her departure on Tuesday — even though she’s leaving at the end of the year — because she wanted to avoid appearing as though she were leaving the Trump administration in response to potential negative outcomes of the midterm elections or any other negative news, Politico reported.

According to two people familiar with the matter, Haley also was trying to avoid the appearance that the findings of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe had anything to do with her departure.

While Haley’s official story is that her exit is fueled by her passion for term limits, her allies say Haley felt she couldn’t move up any further in the Trump administration and she decided to “bow out,” in Politico’s words.

There are hopes among the remaining Never-Trump Republicans that she’ll challenge Trump in 2020. Trump, for his part, is said to have been “annoyed” by her popularity and political ambitions, which means that if he weren’t such a sodden mass of Stupid he’d have offered her bigger jobs.

Item Three, There are new indicators that the post-Kavanaugh backlash is helping Demicrats and hurting Republicans, which is not what Mitch McConnell expected. See Philip Bump, “This Is Not What a Pro-Kavanaugh Electoral Backlash Looks Like.” See also “Dems Gain On Generic Ballot In Post-Kavanaugh CNN Poll, Contradicting Other Surveys” and “Poll: Kavanaugh confirmation energizes Democrats more than GOP.”

Item Four, My dad was born 100 years ago today. This photo was taken about 1944, when he was about 25.

No idea why.

I haven’t been this angry at politicians since I can remember. I am take-no-prisoners, display-their-dripping-heads-on-pikes angry. And I’m not generally an angry person. I can’t imagine how really angry people must feel.

Meanwhile,

A landmark report from the United Nations’ scientific panel on climate change paints a far more dire picture of the immediate consequences of climate change than previously thought and says that avoiding the damage requires transforming the world economy at a speed and scale that has “no documented historic precedent.”

Right now, I feel that it’s going to take some heads on pikes to get the U.S. government to address this. The political system is broken.

See also: Charles Blow, “Liberals, This Is War”

David Atkins, “With Kavanaugh, Republicans Secure An Unjust and Unsustainable Minority Rule”

Nancy LeTourneau, “Republicans Have Reason to Fear ‘Mob Rule’”

It’s expected that Beer Bong Brett will be confirmed today, so what’s next? This may not be the end of the story.

House Democrats will open an investigation into accusations of sexual misconduct and perjury against Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh if they win control of the House in November, Representative Jerrold Nadler, the New York Democrat in line to be the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said on Friday.

Speaking on the eve of Judge Kavanaughs’s confirmation vote this weekend, Mr. Nadler said that there was evidence that Senate Republicans and the F.B.I. had overseen a “whitewash” investigation of the allegations and that the legitimacy of the Supreme Court was at stake. He sidestepped the issue of impeachment.

“It is not something we are eager to do,” Mr. Nadler said in an interview. “But the Senate having failed to do its proper constitutionally mandated job of advise and consent, we are going to have to do something to provide a check and balance, to protect the rule of law and to protect the legitimacy of one of our most important institutions.”

Josh Marshall:

But now there’s this: FOIA lawsuits by Senate Democrats and the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) that have unearthed information “about potentially thousands of Brett Kavanaugh’s White House emails and other records related to the Senate hacking scandal from early in the George W. Bush administration and other controversial subjects that have not been disclosed to the Senate.”

Here’s the article. It’s not totally clear how much is really there. Read the piece to get your own sense. These emails are now approved for release, though White House could step in and say no.

However, if the Dems are the House majority they get subpoena power; seems to me they could get those records.

See also The Effort to Unseat Susan Collins in 2020 Is Already Underway.

I’m so depressed over the Kavanaugh mess I don’t even want to follow the news. I’ll check back in later.

Do read the blockbuster report out by the New York Times on the Trump Family Taxes.

Mr. Trump won the presidency proclaiming himself a self-made billionaire, and he has long insisted that his father, the legendary New York City builder Fred C. Trump, provided almost no financial help.

But The Times’s investigation, based on a vast trove of confidential tax returns and financial records, reveals that Mr. Trump received the equivalent today of at least $413 million from his father’s real estate empire, starting when he was a toddler and continuing to this day.

Much of this money came to Mr. Trump because he helped his parents dodge taxes. He and his siblings set up a sham corporation to disguise millions of dollars in gifts from their parents, records and interviews show. Records indicate that Mr. Trump helped his father take improper tax deductions worth millions more. He also helped formulate a strategy to undervalue his parents’ real estate holdings by hundreds of millions of dollars on tax returns, sharply reducing the tax bill when those properties were transferred to him and his siblings.

This all might have been criminal at the time, but unfortunately it’s all past the statute of limitations.

By age 3, Mr. Trump was earning $200,000 a year in today’s dollars from his father’s empire. He was a millionaire by age 8. By the time he was 17, his father had given him part ownership of a 52-unit apartment building. Soon after Mr. Trump graduated from college, he was receiving the equivalent of $1 million a year from his father. The money increased with the years, to more than $5 million annually in his 40s and 50s.

Horatio Alger would have been proud.

Fred Trump was relentless and creative in finding ways to channel this wealth to his children. He made Donald not just his salaried employee but also his property manager, landlord, banker and consultant. He gave him loan after loan, many never repaid. He provided money for his car, money for his employees, money to buy stocks, money for his first Manhattan offices and money to renovate those offices. He gave him three trust funds. He gave him shares in multiple partnerships. He gave him $10,000 Christmas checks. He gave him laundry revenue from his buildings.

Much of his giving was structured to sidestep gift and inheritance taxes using methods tax experts described to The Times as improper or possibly illegal. Although Fred Trump became wealthy with help from federal housing subsidies, he insisted that it was manifestly unfair for the government to tax his fortune as it passed to his children. When he was in his 80s and beginning to slide into dementia, evading gift and estate taxes became a family affair, with Donald Trump playing a crucial role, interviews and newly obtained documents show.

Truly inspiring.

The most overt fraud was All County Building Supply & Maintenance, a company formed by the Trump family in 1992. All County’s ostensible purpose was to be the purchasing agent for Fred Trump’s buildings, buying everything from boilers to cleaning supplies. It did no such thing, records and interviews show. Instead All County siphoned millions of dollars from Fred Trump’s empire by simply marking up purchases already made by his employees. Those millions, effectively untaxed gifts, then flowed to All County’s owners — Donald Trump, his siblings and a cousin. Fred Trump then used the padded All County receipts to justify bigger rent increases for thousands of tenants.

Good ol’ American ingenuity, huh?

All told, The Times documented 295 streams of revenue that Fred Trump created over five decades to enrich his son. In most cases his four other children benefited equally. But over time, as Donald Trump careened from one financial disaster to the next, his father found ways to give him substantially more money, records show. Even so, in 1990, according to previously secret depositions, Mr. Trump tried to have his father’s will rewritten in a way that Fred Trump, alarmed and angered, feared could result in his empire’s being used to bail out his son’s failing businesses.

How heart warming. And there’s lots and lots more. So much more. And as you read it, keep reminding yourself that if Dems take back the House, the head of the House Financial Services Committee will be Maxine Waters. And Maxine Waters could subpoena all of Trump’s bank records and tax returns.

See also this Forbes article about how Trump is trying but failing to make money off the presidency. So much winning.

What I’m seeing in the Kavanaugh mess is very different from what Republicans must be seeing. Because what I’m seeing is that the longer this drags out, the worse Kavanaugh looks to most voters. Yes, opinions about the candidate have hardened along partisan lines, but “swing voters” are mostly going into the opposition camp. Many people who were undecided last week are “no” this week. It also appears that opposition to Kavanaugh is stronger among Dems than support for him is among Republicans. He is, as someone might say, a loser.

Yet, rather than back off from the nomination, Republicans are doubling down. And they are doing this in spite of lots of indicators that Kavanaugh is going to hurt them more than help them in the midterms. Apparently, Republicans think otherwise.

Dylan Scott wrote a couple of days ago,

Republicans aren’t being irrational. While Democrats are appalled, Republicans are listening to a different drummer: the conservative grassroots. Those voters want their Supreme Court justice confirmed, or else they are threatening to stay home on Election Day — and that really could put the Republican majority at risk.

Evangelicals are maybe the single cohort most loyal to Trump and therefore crucial in midterm elections, which will be a referendum on the president. They were already warning Republicans not to withdraw Kavanaugh or else risk electoral disaster before Ramirez came forward. They don’t sound likely to change course now.

The nerds at FiveThirtyEight discuss this perspective and aren’t sure it holds water.  On September 26, at least, they were saying that the Republicans might be better off withdrawing Kavanaugh and replacing him with a less controversial conservative. There was still plenty of time to get the confirmation done and off the plate before the midterms.  They also questioned how important this Supreme Court pick is to the right-wing base, really. One anti-abortion judge is as good as another, and the woods are full of ’em.

However, by sticking with Kavanaugh, and making the whole confirmation about Kavanaugh, and not just about putting a conservative justice on the Court, Republicans could very well be shooting themselves in the foot. At least, it seems that way to me. But, apparently, the Right imagines it is standing on some kind of principle, or even moral higher ground, and they aren’t going to step down.

So Mitch McConnell is preparing to push Kavanaugh through, and if he doesn’t have the votes the Republicans will probably campaign on how Kavanaugh was “borked.”

Of course, a big part of the Republican’s perspective is that they don’t think sexual assault is really a wrong. Especially if it happened a long time ago and the perp is a powerful white guy.

From the perspective of not-Republicans, this issue isn’t really about what Brett Kavanaugh did to Christine Blasey Ford. It’s about a system that protects the predation of men and dismisses the damage done to those they assault. Every time someone stands up and expresses outrage about how Brett Kavanaugh and his family must be suffering, they are saying loudly and clearly that Christine Blasey Ford’s suffering is her problem and she should get over it already, and that, basically, women don’t count.

Yeah, but dude — they vote.

I don’t know that the “limited investigation” will be anything but a paper shuffle, but my sense of things is that the more time it takes to confirm Brett Kavanaugh, the less likely it is he will be confirmed. David Atkins wrote,

Senator Jeff Flake’s decision to to stall the confirmation vote of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh by a week while the FBI conducts a limited inquiry to the assault allegations may turn out to be a mere speed bump on the road to Kavanaugh’s confirmation. Given the nominee’s brazen lies under oath on matters small and large, it is also possible that a week will be more than enough time for a combination of journalistic and law enforcement inquiries to expose Kavanaugh as too patently unfit for even this hyperpartisan Republican Senate to force through.

Either way, in the current political environment a week is an ocean of time, giving Republican Senators like Flake, Murkowski, Collins and others ample opportunity to consider just how history will view them, and just how low the Republican Party will sink under their guidance.

My suspicions are that the biggest reason McConnell et al. agreed to the investigation is that he didn’t have the votes. But if that’s so, will another week make any difference? Or will a perfunctory investigation provide a fig leaf of an excuse to do the wrong thing for the likes of Susan Collins?

At Axios, Jim VandeHei writes that the whole mess reveals a massive miscalculation on the Republicans’ part:

I’ve been putting off posting until there was news that the Kavanaugh nomination had been approved by the Judiciary Committee. And the Judiciary Committee vote kept getting delayed. Then the news was that the aptly named Jeff Flake voted yes but requested a one-week delay on the floor vote for investigation. Otherwise, he said, he might choose to vote against Kavanaugh in the end.

However, now we’re hearing that Lisa Murkowski and Joe Manchin also have come out for a one-week delay, which is getting a little more serious. Kavanaugh might need Murkowski’s and Manchin’s votes.

Stay tuned.

Update: GOP Leaders Will Ask FBI To Investigate ‘Credible Allegations’ Against Kavanaugh

I deliberately did not watch or listen to the  hearings this morning, mostly because I have other work to do. I notice the leftie-leaning media are confident Professor Ford handled herself well. So I looked at not-leftie-leaning media. This is from Politico:

THERE ARE A LOT OF REPUBLICANS who are already hoping that the White House will pull BRETT KAVANAUGH’S Supreme Court nomination — “today,” as one put it to us. “Total disaster,” as another senior Republican told us. Factions in and around the White House — Trump allies — are getting concerned. As we said this morning: It’s hard to see what Kavanaugh can do to change the strikingly difficult political dynamics. He has already said, without a doubt, that he did not do anything — that has left him no wiggle room. We’ve not spoken to a single Republican so far who thinks this is going well for them. Most think it’s an abject disaster.

Also from Politico, GOP governors call for delaying Kavanaugh vote.  And it sounds like Grassley was a total jerk.

And see Silence on Wall Street. Tears in a retirement home. The country watches, transfixed, as Ford tells her story.

Frat Boy gets his turn later, I understand.

Update: This is from the Wall Street Journal, secondhand via Raw Story:

The Wall Street Journal talked with several former Trump administration officialsabout Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee — and they all agreed that it was a disaster for Republicans.

One former Trump official described Ford as a “very credible witness” and said that her sworn testimony had gone “worse than any Republican could have expected.”

Another former Trump official said that Ford’s testimony means that Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court is now in deep trouble — and they doubted that he could save it during his testimony.

“Ford’s testimony puts all the pressure on Kavanaugh,” they said. “He really needs to knock it out of the park.”

And finally, a third official lamented that it would be almost impossible for Republicans to paint Ford as a lying political operative.

“She seems sincere, kind, thoughtful and credible,” they explained. “Hard to suggest she is politically motivated.”

President Donald Trump is reportedly seething while watching Ford’s testimony because he has been surprised at how credible she seems as a witness.

Update: Josh Marshall, Blasey Ford’s Shining Moment; Grassley’s Catastrophe