Foster Campbell is running as a Democrat for the US Senate in Louisana. The election has resulted in a run-off vote that will be held in December. Rachel Maddow interviewed him on Thursday.

RACHEL MADDOW: Louisiana voted on election night across the nation. Louisiana voted in their jungle primary. And in that Senate race in Louisiana, none of the 23 people who were running got a majority and won the seat. So now what happens next is the top two finishers, regardless of party, they go to a runoff that happens three weeks from now. I should tell you, happily, David Duke was not in the top two, nowhere near. He's now gone back to his regular life of being a full-time fan boy for Donald Trump, celebrating his victory as a coup for White supremacy. But the Louisiana Senate race continues without him. The runoff election takes place in Louisiana on December 10th. There's so much at stake here. Right? This is how the Senate looks now. Right now it's 48 Democrats and Senate horseshoe, pretty even. 51 Republicans. Democrats picked up two seats last week, but Republicans retained control of the Senate narrowly. You can see the one clear dot there that's not filled in, that's what we're talking about tonight. That's Louisiana. If a Republican wins that, that would make the difference 48-52, it's a four-seat difference, Republicans would have a fairly firm grip on that chamber, but if a Democrat would win, that would make the difference between the Democrats and Republicans only two. That is a gap Democrats can work with. That is a gap that stuff might happen. You know, winning this Louisiana Senate seat could mean a world of difference for Democrats trying to stop the Trump agenda, as the best website in the world, Wonkette.com, put it today,

"if a Democrat won that seat, it means it wouldn't be as much of a stretch to try to form majority coalitions with Republican senators who are occasionally decent on specific issues, like John McCain with Russia or Rand Paul opposing Rudy Giuliani and John Bolton for Secretary of State. If 49 Democrats can pull a John McCain or a Susan Collins across the aisle to oppose Trump in erecting a statue of Vladimir Putin on top of the White House, we might at least be able to mitigate some of Trump's damage, which is what we mean.
And I know, I know, Louisiana is a red state. Louisiana went for Donald Trump by 20 points, for Christ's sake, but Louisiana also did elect a Democrat for governor last year. And this Louisiana Senate race, the Republican is the State Treasurer. He's a former Democrat. He unsuccessfully ran in 2004, became a Republican in 2007. Smart money says he is favored to win, but the Democrat is no slouch. He's one-half of the last Senate race in the country right now. And he is carrying the hopes of Democrats not just in Louisiana, and honestly around the nation. "

The FDA’s residue testing for glyphosate was combined with a broader herbicides analysis program the FDA set in motion in February of this year. But the glyphosate testing has been particularly challenging for the FDA. The agency was finally forced to put the glyphosate residue testing part of the work plan on hold amid confusion, disagreement and difficulties with establishing a standard methodology to use across the agency’s multiple U.S. laboratories, according to FDA sources. Equipment issues have also been a problem, with some labs citing a need for more sensitive instruments, sources within FDA said.

FDA spokeswoman Megan McSeveney confirmed the testing suspension and said the agency is not sure when it will resume.

“As testing for glyphosate will expand to several locations, we are currently working to ensure that the methods are validated for use in these labs. As soon as the validation is completed, testing for glyphosate will resume,” she said. “We cannot speculate on timing at this point.”

Alongside the testing for glyphosate, the FDA laboratories have also been analyzing foods for 2,4-D and other “acid herbicides,” documents obtained from the FDA show. The category of acid herbicides includes five of the top 10 active ingredients used in homes and gardens. Usage of 2,4-D is expected to triple in the coming year, according to the FDA.

In addition to not believing in climate change, Myron Ebell has several other lovely qualities.

To lead the transition of the Environmental Protection Agency, President-elect Donald Trump settled on notorious climate change denier Myron Ebell. The decision rattled climate activists—see Julia Lurie's interview with Bill McKibbon and David Roberts on Vox. But it isn't just greenhouse gas emissions that are likely to get a free ride under an Ebell-influenced EPA. Farm chemicals, too, would likely flow unabated if Ebell's agenda comes to dominate Trump's EPA.

http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/11/trump-epa-pesticides

Embattled FBI Director James Comey's mansion in upscale Westport, Connecticut, had a Trump-Pence sign on its front lawn as late as Sunday this past weekend, according to photographs by neighbors who posted the pictures on Facebook.

The local newspaper, the Westport News, reported the sign had been removed after images of it “went viral.” The paper wrote, “The home, currently on the market for $2.5 million, is located on Westway Road and it is unclear if the controversial FBI head is living there. On Monday, Nov. 7 there was a car in the driveway and a garbage bag by the front door but no Donald Trump sign out front.”

The photo was posted by Chris Grimm, and shared by Sandra Wilson, who wrote, “From Chris Grimm, ‘FBI Director James Comey's house is Westport Connecticut. Share, if you think that Comey was trying to swing the election to Trump. (Absolutely undoctored photo. I took it myself. I live a mile away.)’”

http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/fbi-director-james-comey-had-trump-pence-campaign-sign-front-his-house-connecticut

The suspect in a chilling case where a missing woman was found alive and chained inside a metal container in South Carolina may have killed 7 people, the Spartanburg County sheriff said Saturday.

Todd Kohlhepp, 45, pointed out two more grave sites on his property and told investigators he killed four people in 2003 during Super Bike Week, Spartanburg County Sheriff Chuck Wright said.

The confirmed number of deaths linked to Kohlepp is five, Wright said. The grave sites could possibly hold two more victims but that has not been confirmed, he said.

Earlier Saturday, Wright and the county coroner identified a body found in a shallow grave Friday as that of Charlie Carver, the missing boyfriend of the woman who was found chained alive, Kala Brown
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/suspect-captive-woman-case-confesses-4-murders-sheriff-n678536

PEMBROKE PINES, Fla. — Hispanic voters in key states surged to cast their ballots in the final days of early voting this weekend, a demonstration of political power that lifted Hillary Clinton’s presidential hopes and threatened to block Donald J. Trump’s path to the White House.

In Florida, energized by the groundswell of Latino support and hoping to drive even more voters to the polls, Mrs. Clinton visited a handful of immigrant communities on Saturday and rallied Democrats in a town filled with Hispanic and Caribbean migrants.

But it was not just Florida where Hispanics were poised to send a powerful message. In Nevada, which has the fastest-growing Latino population in the West, Democrats appeared to have built a fearsome advantage in Las Vegas’s Clark County at the end of early voting Friday, largely because of a surge of votes from Mexican-Americans. The early voting period was extended until 10 p.m. at one Hispanic grocery store in Las Vegas, where the images of hundreds of voters waiting in line ricocheted across the internet.

Election polling is in near crisis, and we pollsters know. Two trends are driving the increasing unreliability of election and other polling in the United States: the growth of cellphones and the decline in people willing to answer surveys. Coupled, they have made high-quality research much more expensive to do, so there is less of it. This has opened the door for less scientifically based, less well-tested techniques. To top it off, a perennial election polling problem, how to identify “likely voters,” has become even thornier.

Since cellphones generally have separate exchanges from landlines, statisticians have solved the problem of finding them for our samples by using what we call “dual sampling frames” — separate random samples of cell and landline exchanges. The problem is that the 1991 Telephone Consumer Protection Act has been interpreted by the Federal Communications Commission to prohibit the calling of cellphones through automatic dialers, in which calls are passed to live interviewers only after a person picks up the phone. To complete a 1,000-person survey, it’s not unusual to have to dial more than 20,000 random numbers, most of which do not go to actual working telephone numbers. Dialing manually for cellphones takes a great deal of paid interviewer time, and pollsters also compensate cellphone respondents with as much as $10 for their lost minutes.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/21/opinion/sunday/whats-the-matter-with-polling.html?_r=0

Many people have a cellphone number with an area code that does not represent where they actually live. How do you know you’re getting a good sample if the location of a person does not match their cellphone?

What you’re describing is a phenomenon known as “under-coverage” and “over-coverage.” This isn’t an issue in national polling, since virtually every adult we reach in the U.S. is eligible for the survey, regardless of what location we thought we were calling. However, for state and local polling, under- and over-coverage can be a big issue. For example, in a recent national poll, 8% of people interviewed by cellphone in California had a phone number from a state other than California. Similarly, of the people called on a cellphone number associated with California, 10% were interviewed in a different state.

In a previous report, we discussed ways that researchers can attempt to correct this problem by attempting to merge in the commercially available billing ZIP code or full address associated with the cellphone number, though this is not available for all cellphone numbers.

Why don’t pollsters include more cellphones in their surveys?

The biggest reason is cost. According to federal regulations, cellphones have to be manually dialed by an interviewer, whereas landlines can be dialed automatically using a device known as an autodialer. Manually dialing cellphone numbers takes time, which increases interviewing costs. Each cellphone interview can cost almost twice as much as each landline interview. For this reason, some pollsters choose to either dial fewer cellphones or to exclude them from their sample altogether.
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/01/05/pew-research-center-will-call-75-cellphones-for-surveys-in-2016/