Morning Reads: Have Plutocrats Bought Off Your State's Attorney General?

Good morning!

Today marks the 85th anniversary of “Black Tuesday,” the worst day of the 1929 stock market crash and the beginning of the Great Depression. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 12 percent that day in trading so heavy it set a record that would stand for 40 years.

Six days to go…

On Tuesday, a judge “denied a petition from civil rights advocates to force Georgia’s secretary of state to process an estimated 40,000 voter registrations that have gone missing from the public database,” according to Alice Ollstein at ThinkProgress.
In the NYT Mag, Mark Leibovich looks at the “bumpkinification of the midterm elections,” as candidates try to outdo themselves appearing to be down-home, ordinary folk.
Outside spending shows just how few House races are in play this cycle. Derek Willis reports for the NYT’s Upshot blog.
At FiveThirtyEight, Harry Enten and Nate Silver write that the polling out of Alaska’s potentially pivotal Senate race makes them “sweat” because of a history of “quirky, and often inaccurate” polls in the state.
Seth Masket writes about “that time the polls were wrong” — all of them — for Pacific Standard.
WPRI reports that “the Rhode Island Democratic Party filed a formal complaint Tuesday with the R.I. Board of Elections against an Ohio nonprofit that’s spending nearly a half-million dollars on TV attack ads but hasn’t disclosed its donors.”
Daniel Angster reports that a Media Matters analysis of local newspaper coverage suggests that they’re doing little to shed light on the influence of dark money in this election cycle.

Plutocracy –> Eric Lipton reports for the NYT that state “attorneys general are now the object of aggressive pursuit by lobbyists and lawyers who use campaign contributions, personal appeals at lavish corporate-sponsored conferences and other means to push them to drop investigations, change policies, negotiate favorable settlements or pressure federal regulators.”

Must-read –> At The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg reports that a full-blown crisis has emerged as the Obama administration and Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu engage in an ever-louder war of words. “I don’t remember such a period of sustained and mutual contempt,” Goldberg writes.

“God isn’t ‘a magician with a magic wand'” –> So said Pope Francis on Tuesday, affirming the church’s position that evolutionary science isn’t in conflict with Catholic doctrine.

Tragic –> Sarah Varney reports for Politico Magazine that in Mississippi, a barrage of misinformation about Obamacare, combined with its conservative politics and refusal to expand Medicaid, has left “the country’s poorest and most segregated state trapped in a severe and intractable health care crisis.”

Survivable –> The second nurse to contract Ebola at a Dallas hospital has fully recovered and was released on Tuesday. The first nurse was released last week. Jason Sickles reports for Yahoo! News.

“Home ownership in America has collapsed” –> And The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson looks at how different generations have been affected by the trend.

Big mess –> Anastasia Pantsios reports for EcoWatch that a new study finds that the BP oil spill left a “Rhode Island-Sized ‘Bathtub Ring’” on the floor of the Gulf.

Moral Tuesdays in Texas –> More money is lost to wage theft than any other kind. Amy Roe reports for Equal Voice News that undocumented workers are “the impetus behind a campaign to get the city of El Paso to adopt a wage theft ordinance.”

Judging books by their covers –> A growing body of research suggests that we use “facial stereotyping” to judge other people. Via: The Raw Story

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