John Locher/AP

Now it’s time to take a look at the Democratic side of the presidential race. Obviously nobody cares about Webb, O’Malley, or Chafee, so let’s zero in on Clinton and Sanders. Who won Tuesday’s debate? Andrew Prokop summarizes the early polls in the chart on the right.

Now, these results are fairly consistent with Bernie supporters thinking Bernie won and Hillary supporters thinking Hillary won—plus a few extra for Hillary. We’ll have to wait for the big national polls to see if the debate actually changed support levels much for either of them. At a rough glance, though, it looks as if most of the folks who prefer Joe Biden in the polls ended up choosing Hillary when the choice was limited to just her and Bernie.

This makes sense ideologically, since Biden and Clinton occupy pretty similar niches, and it makes sense from a name recognition standpoint too. But I’d point out one other thing that we political junkies might miss: Bernie Sanders can sometimes come across on TV as loud and angry. We’re all so used to his speaking style that it doesn’t affect us much, but for people tuning in for the first time, it might have been fairly off-putting. I don’t know if likely Democratic voters feel the same way, but they might. Just a thought.

Who will be the Republican nominee for president? Beats me. GOP voters are obviously in a weird mood this year. But let’s suppose two things:

• The folks who are currently polling below 3-4 percent have no chance.
• The non-politicians will eventually fade out or implode. No Trump, no Carson, no Fiorina.

If—if!—those things are true, we’re left with Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz. So how are they doing? I was curious, so I took a look at only those three on HuffPost Pollster. I don’t really have any point to make, so I won’t make one. Just consider this raw data.

A friend writes to point out that initial unemployment claims have continued dropping, and are now at their lowest level in 40 years. In fact, if you look at unemployment claims as a percentage of total employment, they’re at their lowest level in forever:

I’m not quite sure what to make of this. Unemployment claims have been steadily dropping since the mid-80s, and didn’t spike during the Great Recession nearly as much as they did during the recessions of the 70s and 80s. Is this because the rules have gotten tougher? Because employers aren’t laying off as many people as they used to during recessions? Or is it just an artifact of the drop in workforce participation, which means fewer marginally attached workers are getting permanent jobs in the first place?

I’m not sure. But initial claims are now below 0.2 percent of the workforce, a modern record.

Last week the Bureau of Prisons removed pork from its menus, supposedly because pork had become less popular among inmates. Also, it was getting expensive.

In the case of bacon, this is a little hard to believe. Everyone loves bacon. Still, who cares about a bunch of felons, anyway? Republicans, it turns out. In particular, a Republican from the great pig-producing state of Iowa:

“The pork industry is responsible for 547,800 jobs, which creates $22.3 billion in personal incomes and contributes $39 billion to the gross domestic product,” Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) wrote in a letter Thursday to Bureau of Prisons Director Charles E. Samuels, Jr.

….“According to a spokesman for the Bureau of Prisons, the decision was based on a survey of prisoners’ food preferences that reflected that pork has been the “lowest-rated food” by inmates for a number of years.

“To corroborate the validity of the claim that prisoners indicated a lack of interest in pork products, I am requesting copies of the prisoner surveys and responses that were used to support the determination to no longer serve pork in federal prisons….The Bureau of Prisons’ spokesman indicated that pork was expensive to provide. Please provide any economic evaluations the Bureau of Prisons has relied on that detail the cost of pork as compared to beef, chicken, and non-meat products such as tofu and soy products.”

As of this week, pork is back on the menu. Concern for the welfare of prisoners may be low in the Senate, but concern for the welfare of the pork industry definitely isn’t. You’d think the whole pork business was going to live or die based on whether the Bureau of Prisons serves pork roast for dinner occasionally.

Last year, when I was getting my blood drawn with dismaying frequency, I sang the praises of Elizabeth Holmes, a young billionaire who founded a company that promises to perform lab tests with only as much blood as you get from a finger prick. That sounded great.

My blood tests have gotten much less frequent these days, and I’ve mostly gotten over my needle phobia anyway,¹ so I haven’t paid much attention to Theranos, the Silicon Valley darling Holmes founded. But this morning, John Carreyrou of the Wall Street Journal reported that Theranos was basically a house of cards. It actually does very little testing using its “Edison” finger-prick technology, and has had trouble getting FDA approval for its tests due to questions about the accuracy of its results.

Tonight, Carreyrou reports that things are even worse than that:

Under pressure from regulators, laboratory firm Theranos Inc. has stopped collecting tiny vials of blood drawn from finger pricks for all but one of its tests….That test detects herpes and was cleared by the FDA in July.

….Theranos has since nearly stopped using the lab instrument, named Edison after the prolific inventor, according to the person familiar with the situation. By the time of the FDA inspection, the company was doing blood tests almost exclusively on traditional lab instruments purchased from diagnostic-equipment makers such as Siemens AG , the person says.

….Most of Theranos’s blood-drawing sites, which it calls “wellness centers,” are located inside Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc. drugstores….A blood-drawing technician at a Walgreens in the Phoenix area, reached by phone late Thursday, said Theranos had “temporarily suspended” finger-prick draws and was only drawing blood from patients’ arms with needles at that store.

That doesn’t sound very promising. I have a feeling that Elizabeth Holmes might not make the Forbes list of billionaires next year. She might be lucky if Theranos even still exists.

¹So far, the upsides of my chemotherapy have been (1) better hair, (2) weight loss², (3) less dread of blood draws, (4) forbidden to clean the litter box,³ and (5) the purchase of a powered bed, which is really cool.

²Though, sadly, I’ve gained most of it back.

³Though, sadly, I’ve since been given permission to do this again.

From Alex Isenstadt’s Politico account of a leaked RNC conference call that ended in chaos:

Ken McKay, Chris Christie’s campaign manager, expressed worry about stating his position on an open conference call line, saying that it could expose his campaign to leaks.

I would expect the Christie campaign to understand the need for operational secrecy pretty well, and sure enough, they were apparently the only ones to think about this. And they were right: the entire conversation was immediately leaked.

But here’s the best part: the chaos was over the pressing question of whether candidates would be allowed to give opening and closing statements at the next Republican debate. Seriously. CNBC wants to ditch them, for obvious reasons I think. But the candidates are fuming over this brazen display of disrespect toward their God-given right to give mini-stump speeches on national TV. Rand Paul’s representative put it the most pungently: “If we don’t have opening and closing statements, CNBC can go fuck themselves.”

Trump and Carson later sent a letter to CNBC promising to boycott the debate unless opening and closing statements were allowed.¹ The others didn’t go that far, but in a display of their shaky grasp of what the TV-watching public wants, they did all agree on the crucial need for the viewing audience to hear 30 minutes of tedious speechifying from their own silver tongues. However, that doesn’t mean there was a completely united front on this issue:

Christian Ferry, a representative for Lindsey Graham, who’s been relegated to undercard debates, chimed in. If any of the top-polling candidates didn’t want to participate in the Colorado debate, Graham would gladly take their place.

Atta boy, Lindsey!

¹They also want assurances that the debate won’t go longer than two hours. This just goes to show that Trump and Carson can occasionally be right about something.

The New York Times reports that Russian jets in Syria are “conducting nearly as many strikes in a typical day against rebel troops opposing the government of President Bashar al-Assad as the American-led coalition targeting the Islamic State has been carrying out each month this year.”

Got that? As many in a day as we do in a month. So how’s that working out? Zack Beauchamp points me to an analysis of the first week of the Russian campaign from the Institute for the Study of War:

The offensive reportedly included reinforcements in the form of “hundreds” of Iranian troops….Quds Force commander Maj. Gen. Qassem Suleimani personally oversaw operations….Direct assistance from Russia in the form of airstrikes “synchronized” with the ground operations.

….Nonetheless, the Syrian regime and its allies have thus far failed to achieve significant gains…. Confirmed reports indicate that pro-regime fighters have seized only six villages and towns…. At the same time, regime forces suffered heavy losses in manpower and materiel in the face of heavy rebel resistance. Free Syrian Army (FSA)-affiliated rebels forces claimed to destroy at least twenty tanks and armored vehicles as well as a helicopter gunship in a “tank massacre” on the first day of the offensive.

….Operations against the Syrian opposition will likely prove harder and slower than anticipated by either Russia or Iran….The foreign allies of the Syrian regime may be forced to expend further financial and military resources in order to preserve their initial gains.

We’ll see how this goes. But both Russia and Syria are all-in on this campaign. Russia is maintaining a sky-high operational tempo along the border between regime territory and rebel territory, and the Iranians are helping out too. Nonetheless, it’s rough going and the Syrians are apparently taking heavy losses. How long can Putin keep this up before his glorious nose-thumbing at the West turns into an exhausting quagmire?

Hard to say. Maybe the rebels are at the end of their rope, and Syrian regime troops will soon break through. I wouldn’t count on that, though.

Twenty years ago, gun control all but disappeared as a Democratic issue. There were still a few halfhearted attempts to ban assault weapons or eliminate the “gun show loophole,” but basically Dems decided that gun control was a losing effort. The NRA was too strong and guns were too popular. Better to just lie low and focus on other stuff.

But not anymore. At Tuesday’s debate, Democratic presidential candidates were tripping over each other to insist that they were tougher on guns than anyone else on the stage. Bernie Sanders practically had to apologize for only getting a D- grade from the NRA. Why the change? I think Steve Benen gets it right. The “lie low” strategy didn’t work, so there’s not much point in it anymore:

It’s slowly dawning on Dems that as the NRA becomes more extreme, there’s no placating the group….Just ask former Sen. Mark Pryor (D-Ark.), who eagerly tried to keep the NRA on his side, only to find during his re-election campaign that the NRA targeted him with a vengeance anyway.

….The group’s message used to effectively be, “Play ball with us and we’ll leave you alone.” That’s transformed into, “We’re coming after you, whether you try to work with us or not.” With incentives like these, Democrats might as well speak their minds, since condemnations from the right are inevitable either way.

The polarization of American politics is making this common. Benjamin Netanyahu has essentially turned the Israeli government into an arm of the Republican Party. The NRA goes after Democrats regardless of whether or not they support gun rights. Abortion groups target Republicans.

This trend is likely to get even more pronounced as America continues its journey toward de facto parliamentary government. For the NRA, ensuring that Republicans control Congress is probably a more reliable strategy than playing ball with the shrinking number of Democrats who support gun rights. With a Democratic Congress, they’re probably OK—as long as they don’t lose the votes of a few of their Dem supporters because of a gun massacre or something. But with a Republican Congress, they’re guaranteed to be OK. They’re unlikely to lose votes for any reason, and even if they do the party leadership will prevent any anti-gun bills from reaching the floor.

Obviously there are dangers to this strategy. When Democrats are in power, they no longer have any incentive to support the NRA at all, which means they might as well go ahead and pass gun control laws if they can. Likewise, Republicans have little incentive to be moderate on abortion, so when they’re in power they might as well go to town on anti-abortion laws. Which is exactly what’s happening at the state level.

Ed Kilgore would like you to read these two quotes from Ted Cruz together. The first one is a reaction to the Democratic debate (which Cruz admits he didn’t actually watch):

We’re seeing our freedoms taken away every day and last night was an audition for who would wear the jackboot most vigorously. Last night was an audition for who would embrace government power for who would strip your and my individual liberties.

And this is from a fundraising email sent out earlier this year:

The 2nd Amendment…is a Constitutional right to protect your children, your family, your home, our lives, and to serve as the ultimate check against governmental tyranny — for the protection of liberty.

Kilgore says it’s a mistake to dismiss the first quote as just Ted being Ted. “When a guy like Cruz starts tossing around words like ‘tyrant’ and ‘jackboot’ and ‘destroy the country’ and ‘strip your and my individual liberties,’ isn’t it possible, perhaps even likely, that at least a few of his supporters might think he’s signaling that the time is near to get out the shooting irons and start executing the Tyrant’s agents?”

This business of the 2nd Amendment being the ultimate bulwark against tyranny has been around for a long time, but it sure has gotten louder and more mainstream these days. And the target—liberals in general and Barack Obama very much in particular—sure has gotten more explicit. Maybe it’s time to cool it, folks.

Republican congressman Richard Hanna talks about the Benghazi committee today:

This may not be politically correct, but I think that there was a big part of this investigation that was designed to go after people and an individual, Hillary Clinton.

Hanna supports gay rights, so I suppose that basically makes him a Democrat who can be ignored on this subject. Still, the evidence that Republican leaders viewed the committee as mostly a way of making trouble for Hillary Clinton is sure getting tough to dismiss. Greg Sargent comments on how Team Hillary is exploiting this:

It isn’t just that Clinton is using the new GOP quotes to tar it as a partisan exercise and attack its credibility, though that is a key goal….The idea is to turn the ongoing Benghazi battle with Republicans into an emblem of her willingness to fight on in the face of determined opposition — thus playing to one of her strengths, i.e., perceptions of her tenaciousness.

Maybe. But I’d say there’s something else at work here. Do you remember Mitt Romney’s big problem back in 2012? He was perceived as too moderate by the base of the Republican Party. He addressed this by endlessly making over-the-top attacks on President Obama. The calculus was simple: the base hated Obama more than they distrusted Romney, so he could gain their trust by showing that he hated Obama more than anyone else.

Hillary is playing a similar game here. The Democratic base distrusts her, but they hate Republicans more than they distrust Hillary. By making it clear that she’s the primary target of Republican attacks, she’s tapping into that. If Republicans hate her more than anyone, she must have something going for her. Plus there’s just the Pavlovian instinct to defend any Democrat against Republican attacks. The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Republicans have screwed the pooch on Benghazi. The press can only play along with their faux investigation as long as they maintain plausible deniability about its partisan goals. But now we have (a) Kevin McCarthy spilling the beans, (b) news reports that John Boehner wanted to use the committee to attack Hillary, (c) Richard Hanna agreeing that it was mostly a partisan witch hunt, and (d) no less than the New York Times reporting that the committee has all but given up on Benghazi in favor of holding hearings on Hillary’s email server. We knew all along there was a man behind the curtain, but now he’s actually been exposed. It’s getting harder and harder to play along with the charade.