Saturday, December 31, 2016

When did Trump develop fealty to Russia, & why does it persist after their cyber attack?


ALTHOUGH PRESIDENT Obama’s sanctions against Russia for interfering with the U.S. presidential election came late, his action on Thursday reflected a bipartisan consensus that penalties must be imposed for Moscow’s audacious hacking and meddling. 

But one prominent voice in the United States reacted differently. President-elect Donald Trump said “it’s time for our country to move on to bigger and better things.” Earlier in the week, he asserted that the “whole age of computer has made it where nobody knows exactly what is going on.”

No, Mr. Trump, it is not time to move on. U.S. intelligence agencies are in agreement about “what is going on”: a brazen and unprecedented attempt by a hostile power to covertly sway the outcome of a U.S. presidential election through the theft and release of material damaging to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. The president-elect’s dismissive response only deepens unanswered questions about his ties to Russia in the past and his plans for cooperation with Vladi­mir Putin.

For his part, Mr. Putin seems to be eagerly anticipating the Trump presidency. On Friday, he promised to withhold retaliatory sanctions, clearly hoping the new Trump administration will nullify Mr. Obama’s acts. Then Mr. Trump cheered on Twitter: “Great move on delay (by V. Putin) — I always knew he was very smart!”

For any American leader, an attempt to subvert U.S. democracy ought to be unforgivable — even if he is the intended beneficiary. Some years ago, then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta warned of a “cyber-Pearl Harbor,” and the fear at the time was of a cyberattack collapsing electric grids or crashing financial markets. Now we have a real cyber-Pearl Harbor, though not one that was anticipated. Mr. Obama has pledged a thorough investigation and disclosure; the information released on Thursday does not go far enough. Congress should not shrink from establishing a select committee for a full-scale probe.

Mr. Obama also hinted at additional retaliation, possibly unannounced, and we believe it would be justified to deter future mischief. How about shedding a little sunshine on Mr. Putin’s hidden wealth and that of his coterie?

Mr. Trump has been frank about his desire to improve relations with Russia, but he seems blissfully untroubled by the reasons for the deterioration in relations, including Russia’s instigation of an armed uprising in Ukraine, its seizure of Crimea, its efforts to divide Europe and the crushing of democracy and human rights at home.

Why is Mr. Trump so dismissive of Russia’s dangerous behavior? Some say it is his lack of experience in foreign policy, or an oft-stated admiration for strongmen, or naivete about Russian intentions. But darker suspicions persist. Mr. Trump has steadfastly refused to be transparent about his multibillion-dollar business empire. Are there loans or deals with Russian businesses or the state that were concealed during the campaign? Are there hidden communications with Mr. Putin or his representatives? We would be thrilled to see all the doubts dispelled, but Mr. Trump’s odd behavior in the face of a clear threat from Russia, matched by Mr. Putin’s evident enthusiasm for the president-elect, cannot be easily explained.

Read more on this topic:
 
Greg Sargent: The Trump camp’s spin on Russian interference is falling apart
Ruth Marcus: On Russia, Trump is incapable of looking past politics
Jennifer Rubin: A moment of truth on Russia

Why Donald Trump Is Going To Be A Uniquely Terrible President

America has elected a dim-witted demagogue. We're in for a long, bumpy ride.

Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore / Flickr

The world was gloomy before I won – there was no hope. Now the market is up nearly 10% and Christmas spending is over a trillion dollars!”

“Doing my best to disregard the many inflammatory President O statements and roadblocks. Thought it was going to be a smooth transition – NOT!”

We cannot continue to let Israel be treated with such total disdain and disrespect. They used to have a great friend in the U.S., but not anymore. The beginning of the end was the horrible Iran deal, and now this (U.N.)! Stay strong Israel, January 20th is fast approaching!”

These are tweets from President-elect Donald Trump’s account.

“Aren’t you scared?” my friend Q asked, tilting his red cup back as I filled mine up. “The world will be laughing at us. He’s like a substitute president. Trump is the substitute teacher of presidents!”

We laughed even though it wasn’t funny.

“Substitute teacher?” I replied, scratching my head.

I never really thought about it like that, but Q is so right. I instantly flashed back to sixth grade, seventh grade, eighth grade and straight through high school, and to the universal language all kids speak: A substitute in the classroom means a day off, no work, a break until the teacher decides to come back and question why nothing got accomplished while they were away, as if they already don’t know the answer.

No one ever thinks about, looks for or honors substitutes; they have no Sub Of The Year Awards, appreciation days or even a system to gauge their effectiveness. The only difference between Donald Trump and a classroom sub is that I can never imagine a substitute taking credit for fixing or even trying to fix a school system.

Like Donald, substitutes are outsiders, nothing like the people responsible for shaping a normal routine. Full-time teachers normally hold degrees in their fields and have completed the work to attain and maintain some type of official certification. They are qualified, for the most part. Teachers don’t just step into a classroom one day because they are bored with business or want to somehow Make Teaching Great Again. But I do remember a number of substitutes from my years in school who would say things like, “I don’t need this job, I have my own business! You need me more than I need you, and all you kids will fail at life!” Sounds familiar.

My favorite sub in middle school was Mr. Yancy. He’d make those types of statements over and over again, but we never really listened, because he was a sub! But we liked to hold a trash can above his head and slam dunk paper balls on him until he threatened to call the principal. On good days, Yancy would try to block the dunks or attempt to slam one himself, which is why we liked him, but all in all, no one really learned anything, because we couldn’t take him seriously. It reminds me now of how we think of Trump and his sophomoric Twitter tirades as a joke, too. Which brings me to the fear question my friend Q raised.

Other countries follow our celebrities and public figures; they pay attention to our reporting and are witnessing Trump’s incomplete, logic-free stump speeches. They see the way in which he celebrates racism and divisiveness — to many of his fans, the good ol’ days. What are they thinking? Will they still want to do business with us? Will they continue to see us as a super power, or are we now super idiots?

Hopefully they’ll be able to understand that this is just a brief four-year intermission, a last hopeless attempt at sustaining white supremacy. Like Yancy, Trump will disappear. He’s a substitute who won’t be around for long. Some things may become chaotic during his tenure, like with any substitute, but real leaders will return some day soon, and we can get back to business as usual.

D. Watkins is the author of The Beast Side: Living and Dying While Black in America. He has been published in Salon, New York Times, the Guardian and other publications, and he is a frequent contributor to NPR and CNN. 

Friday, December 30, 2016

Fuck You, Donald Trump

Fuck You, Donald Trump

Fuck you, Donald Trump.

Fuck you for being a hypersensitive, grossly plump caricature of a human being; a squirming mass of cockroaches lurking under a skinsuit veneer.

Fuck your wanton plundering of our social fabric, your willingness to tear down the structure that allows you to exist, your glorification of the worst parts of humanity, all in the name of your own insatiable greed and depravity.

Fuck your racebaiting, fearmongering, Nazi-enabling rhetoric that allows the darkest and most destructive corners of our collective zeitgeist free reign to terrorize the rest.

Fuck your ignorant paucity of intellect, your narcissistic belief in your own ego, your inability to recognize your own descent into fascism.

Fuck your promotions of white supremacists to positions of power, of science denying crackpots to oversee our future, of bootlicking toadies to oversee your transition.

Fuck your misogynistic views on women’s rights, fuck your archaic beliefs on the freedom of press and religion, and fuck your idiotic venality when it comes to the destruction of a country that, while not always achieving freedom for all of its citizens, has done the best to get there in the entirety of recorded human history.

Fuck you, Melania Trump.
Fuck you for being willing to support this disgusting slime mold because it means you can live a life of privilege and luxury, never mind the hardships that will befall women across this nation due to your husband’s philistinic views.

Fuck you for posing for puff pieces in entertainment magazines while the cabal of shitgoblins your partner is assembling gets ready to reverse everything that has allowed you to possess even the most moderate amount of power.

Fuck you for taking the easy choice, the choice to suck the dick of a loathsome troll in order to wear Hugo Boss dresses, instead of taking a stand in order to protect the fifty percent of our population who shares your gender.

Fuck you for smiling and waving at the cameras when your husband is on record as saying, “Grab them (women) by the pussy. You can do anything.”

Fuck your betrayal of everything Susan B. Anthony and other suffragettes fought for, fuck your tacit acceptance that a woman should be an accessory to a man, fuck your self-centered interest in insuring your own well-being over the well-being of the country that allows you such a lifestyle.

Fuck you, Ivanka, Eric, and Donald Trump Jr.
Fuck you for being willing lackeys of this pusillanimous ape, for carrying his water on television and in media interviews.

Fuck you for clinging to his hairy teat, for not finding the courage to strike out on your own, for not recognizing that even though you can’t choose your parents, you can certainly choose your own path in life.

Fuck you for normalizing this piece of shit wannabe-Hitler, for treating his wretched series of business enterprises as anything other than the fraudulent snake-oil jobs that they are, for bowing beneath the lash instead of standing tall and making your own way, despite the loss it might incur.

Fuck you for the hate and pain you will inflict on hundreds of thousands of American citizens because you couldn’t muster the courage to say, “No, this isn’t right, and even though I’m related to you by blood, I refuse to proceed with this abhorrent state of affairs.”

Fuck your greasy, slimy, frat-house words and beliefs, your ideals that would tear us apart, your craven unworthiness to occupy a public space that you achieved through no merit of your own, one which you have no idea what to do with other than to cause hurt.

Fuck you, Jared Kushner.
Fuck your anti-Semitism.

Fuck your quisling compliance, your willingness to see those like you tortured and degraded in order to further your own lot in life.

Fuck your manipulation of our media through your financial control of the Observer, fuck your sheltered life of wanton privilege, fuck your inability to understand the arc of history.

Fuck everything you do to uphold a wretched lout who would suffer no qualms in ordering you in front of the firing squad if it meant he might live another day.

Fuck you, Republicans who refuse to disown this bloated leech.

Fuck your cowardice, your disavowal of the solemn duties of your office?—?keeping this country safe from tyrants and demagogues.

Fuck you for meekly bending the knee in compliance, instead of speaking truth to power.

Fuck you for choosing political expediency over courage, fuck you for sacrificing the poor and the sick, fuck you for dragging our government into a hole from which it may never recover.
Fuck you, members of the media.

Fuck your constant pursuit of ratings, of quarterly profits, of giving this tinpot cumdumpster a platform with which he can influence a large part of our country

Fuck you for buying into the idea that racism should be afforded an equal platform with equality, for calling a Nazi anything other than a Nazi.

Fuck your smarmy think-pieces attempting to normalize a new hegemony, fuck your cowardice in the face of totalitarianism, fuck your CEOs and VP's and executive producers who are willing to feed the innocent to the depraved in order to forestall their own demise.

Fuck you for not doing your job.

Fuck you, Trump supporters.
Fuck you for your willing ignorance, your inability to understand that a fascist is telling you exactly what he wants to do to you.

Fuck you for tearing apart the rule of law, and bringing back the rule of force.

Fuck you for not caring, for believing the easy lies you read instead of using your brain to find the truth.

Fuck you for putting your petty hatreds and squabbles ahead of everything that once made this country great, and fuck you for unwittingly causing it to fall.
Fuck you everyone who refuses to take a stand against this man.

Fuck your inability to understand history.

Fuck your selfish interests that ignore the fact that if one of us isn’t free, none of us is free.

Fuck your willingness to normalize this dictator, your filthy desire for more lucre, your inability to fight for your fellow citizens and everything this country once stood for. The Founders would be ashamed of you.
Fuck your blind optimism that things will somehow magically turn out okay, fuck your American exceptionalism draped in the corpses of communities of color, fuck your overwhelming ignorance that could be solved if you simply wished to learn and ask ‘why.’

Above all, fuck your cowardice, your self-loathing hypocrisy, your myopic blinders keeping you from identifying the single greatest threat our republic has faced since we took up arms against the British, because if someone other than you suffers, somehow that makes it just fine.

Fuck you, Donald Trump, for turning my country into something that it never should have become, for turning it into something no country should ever become.

Fuck you, Donald Trump, for driving us into conflict, one that will most likely end in violence.

Fuck you, Donald Trump.

https://medium.com/@ChrisWarcraft/fuck-you-donald-trump-c644ae3dd94c#.26s36lva0

Thursday, December 29, 2016

How To Tell Black People Apart

I need to laugh, mainly because of the fucked up year that we just went through.  This is some of the funniest shit that I could come up with. dlevere.

By PW Staff

David Bowie, Prince, Zsa Zsa Gabor all gone. Just to screw with us, rocker George Michael who famously wrote the tune “Last Christmas” died...on Christmas.

Carrie Fisher died and Debbie Reynolds a day later.

There was Zika in South America, Brexit in the U.K., and wildfires in Tennessee. An alligator swallowed a 2-year-old in Florida, and they murdered that gorilla Harambe in Cincinnati. A bunch of armed white dudes took over a federal building (and beat the rap); a bunch of unarmed black men were shot and killed by cops (and never got justice).

Then someone retaliated by assassinating police officers in Dallas. There were mass shootings in Orlando, Chicago and Kansas and a warehouse club fire in Oakland. America continues to fight wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and did little as thousands were being decimated in Syria.

Back home in Philadelphia, some idiot ripped off the banister from the Union League steps, Teamster boss John Dougherty got pinched and people got robbed while wasting hours of their lives trying to find those coveted Charizards in Pokemon Go.

Oh and then as a nation, we elected Donald Trump as leader of the free world.

How to Tell Black People Apart


David Alan Grier may be responsible for solving Hollywood's most awkward problem - those moments when black celebrities are confused with other black celebrities. We're sure you remember the Samuel L. Jackson debacle, the Alfre Woodard, Idris Elba disaster, or the Octavia Spencer red carpet mishap.
This infomercial for David Alan Grier’s book “How To Tell Black People Apart” featured on Jimmy Kimmel Live is not only the funniest thing we've seen all day, but it's also just what the world needs.

In it, Grier shares the side-splitting acronym you’ll never remember: PATWWFLLM. Which stands for “Pay Attention To What We Fucking Look Like Motherfuckers!!!”

The book may not be real, but the problem sure is. Hopefully Grier’s spoof is as educational as it is hilarious.

O Holy Night worst rendition ever FUNNIEST SONG ON EARTH

If you need a good laugh, and I mean 'can't breathe, stomach hurts' belly laugh, listen to the worst rendition of Oh Holy Night ever. Warning, put all drinks down and take a few deep breaths first so you don't suffocate from laughter. It starts out as sounding like a merely poor rendition of the song, but just wait.
 

Wing - Dancing Queen 

For 8 years, I've watched you be the better man

By babylonsister

Emerging Christian pastor to President Obama: For 8 years, I've watched you be the better man
By Leslie Salzillo
Wednesday Dec 28, 2016 · 2:21 PM EST

In this open letter to President Obama, John Pavlovitz writes about how history will secure the President’s grand legacy and body of wor. After watching President Obama for eight years, Pavlovitz shares his observations. Here are some excerpts from his June piece.


• I’ve watched the way you’ve absorbed a billion body blows from your critics; brutal words that run far deeper than policy or platform, words composed within poisoned hearts long before you served a single day in office.

• I’ve watched you bombarded with a daily Molotov cocktail of white privilege and hidden or overt racism disguised as objective opposition.

• I’ve watched your wife and children attacked with a ferocity and malevolence that defy any sense of decency and that have no precedence.

• I’ve watched your birthplace called into question, your personal faith ridiculed, your very humanity discounted.

• I’ve watched you endure the incessant, bitter venom of those for whom the color of your skin was always going to be a problem.

• And through all of it, I’ve watched you be the better man.

Pavlovitz tells President Obama that “In the face of a sustained, spitting, violent, raw-throated hatred, you’ve never responded in kind.” He writes that Obama never allowed himself to be defined by bigotry and never disrespected his critics — by becoming them. This, Pavlovitz says, will be President Obama’s greatest legacy.

The truth is, many of us understand that the Evangelical Right, the NRA, FoxNews, and far too many ordinary folks living here were simply never going to be okay with a man of color leading them and succeeding—and yet you have done both.

Eight years later, those same people still strain to bait you into reciprocating bitterness and in fulfilling their toxic prophecies of you, while you simply continue to do what you do with nobility, compassion, good humor, and steadfast, unapologetic conviction.

John Pavlovitz tells President Obama, “You live the grace so many Christians invoke but rarely model.” The pastor adds, as a father, he realizes his children are always watching him, taking cues from the way he treats people and how he responds to adversity. He knows his children watch how he cares for those in pain, how he handles mistreatment and that his words will always be secondary to his conduct. “This is where I find my deepest gratitude for you in these days.” He tells the President, “For eight years you have worked for those who have been marginalized, even while so many have sought to marginalize you. “

Pavlovitz writes that he and so many others are trying to live passionately yet with integrity and are committed to standing upon principles and never upon people. He says, “We are seeing the way you’ve done it and are moved to move similarly together.”


So you’ll forgive me if I speak informally right now, and if I use words used often brandished by your critics to undermine the work you’ve done and the life you’ve lived and the character you’ve shown.

Without a trace of irony or sarcasm, let me simply say:

Thanks, Obama.

This. Once again, John Pavlovitz proves there are Christians out there who actually follow the words of Christ, who actually care deeply about others, and who are not afraid to speak out against religious hypocrisy. More, please — and thank you, Pastor Pavlovitz.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/12/28/1614975/-True-Christian-pastor-to-President-Obama-For-8-years-I-ve-watched-you-be-the-better-man?detail=facebook

Wednesday, December 28, 2016

FORTRAN for the Web

By Al Williams




There’s an old saying: “I don’t know what programming language scientists and engineers will use in the 22nd century, but I know it will be called FORTRAN.” FORTRAN was among the first real programming languages and, along with LISP, one of the oldest still in common use. If you are one of those that still loves FORTRAN, you no longer have to be left out of the Web development craze thanks to Fortran.io.

Naturally, the Fortran.io site is served by — what else — FORTRAN. The system allows for Jade templates, SQLite databases, and other features aimed at serving up web pages. The code is hosted on GitHub, and you can find several examples there, as well.

If you’ve ever wanted to do formatted I/O to a web page, here’s your chance. Come to think of it, why not? We’ve seen servers in BASIC and even in Linux shell script. Of course, today’s FORTRAN isn’t the one we learned back in the 1970’s (we assume if you didn’t learn about FORTRAN in the 1970’s, you quit reading this post a while back… prove us wrong and show us your FORTRAN projects).

Don't you dare tell me to 'get over it' or 'be tolerant'!

I listened as you called my President a Muslim.
I listened as you called him and his family a pack of monkeys.
I listened as you said he wasn't born here.
I watched as you blocked every single path to progress that you could.
I saw the pictures you made of him as Hitler.
I watched you shut down the government and hurt the entire nation, twice.
I watched you turn your backs on every opportunity to open a worthwhile dialog.
I watched you say that you would not even listen to any choice for Supreme Court no matter who the nominee was.
I listened as you openly said that you will oppose him at every turn.
I watched as you did just that.
I listened.
I watched.
I paid attention.

Now, I'm being called on to be tolerant.
To move forward.
To denounce protesters.
To "Get over it."
To accept this...
I will not.

I will do my part to make sure, this great American mistake, becomes the embarrassing footnote of our history that it deserves to be.
I will do this as quickly as possible, every chance I get.
I will do my part to limit the damage that this man can do to my country.
I will watch his every move and point out every single mistake and misdeed in a loud and proud voice.
I will let you know in a loud voice every time this man backs away from a promise he made to you.
The people who voted for him. Yes you, the ones who sold their souls and prayed for him to win.

I will do this so that you never forget.
And you will hear me.
You will see it in my eyes when I look at you.
You will hear it in my voice when I talk to you.
You will know that I know who you are.
You will know that I know what you are.
Do not call for my tolerance. I've tolerated all I can.
Now it's your turn to tolerate the ridicule.
Be aware, make no mistake about it, every single thing that goes wrong in our country from this day forward is now Trump's fault just as much as you thought it was Obama's.
I find it unreasonable for you to expect from me, what you were entirely unwilling to give.

-Author unknown

Tuesday, December 27, 2016

White Nationalists Are 'Prepared to Revolt' If Trump Runs From Their Support

Newly emboldened, these bigots will accept nothing less than full control of the Republican Party.

Someone answers the question: "Do I want Trump to fail?"

By Steve Marmel

Kellyanne Conway to Trump critics: Be careful what you say - I say fuck Kellyanne Conway and Donald Trump

By UCmeNdc

That didn't take long. Not even a week has passed, and the president elect's team is already warning Trump critics to be "careful" about the way they criticize Trump. (Freedom does not include criticizing President Trump.)

Donald Trump's minions seem to be confused about this, so let's fill them in on something they're going to need to know going forward: The President of the United States has the least legal protection against criticism or libel of anyone in the country. As the ultimate public figure, courts are obliged to grant public citizens wide leeway. This is why, for example, elected public officials, private citizens, and the Fox News channel have been repeatedly able to peddle 100% false information about Barack Obama for a decade with absolutely no repercussions.

To demonstrate how this works, I could, for example, say something like "President Donald Trump is a small-penised sex-obsessed pervert who stands accused of raping a 13 year old girl and who, given his temperament, has in all likelihood sexually abused at least one of his own children. He is mentally unstable and among the dumbest individuals ever to hold any public office anywhere, is quite probably colluding with Russia to undermine American interests, and spends his evenings aggressively masturbating to National Geographic footage of burrowing meerkats. His sole aim in acquiring the presidency is to convert the Lincoln Bedroom into a Rape Room, and he will sell an American nuclear weapon to ISIS for fifteen dollars and change if he thinks he'd make two dollars worth of profit on it."

Welcome to the big leagues, President Summer Squash. You're going to have quite the adventure from here on in.

http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/11/13/1598359/-Kellyanne-Conway-to-Trump-critics-Be-careful-what-you-say

Monday, December 26, 2016

America’s Second Civil War

By RKP5637

I often wonder if there will be civil unrest. How horrible what millions will be facing as America likely changes. This is an older article, but now the past is about to be the present on Jan. 20, 2017.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rev-dr-susan-k-smith/the-coming-of-americas-civil-war_b_9501120.html

Rev. Dr. Susan K. Smith
Writer, author, musician, pastor, preacher and social justice advocate.

I am really trying to figure out what is going on in America, and what will happen to America should Donald Trump win the presidency.

I never for a moment believed that Trump could not win the nomination, contrary to the pundits’ takes on television. I was furious that they could not see, or would not see, that this man had a platform and an audience.

Even now, some pundits and news people insist upon saying that Trump cannot win the presidency, but I believe they are wrong. Trump has a swath of supporters that is not backing down or backing away that we know about, but I believe his base of support includes a lot of people who will never admit publicly that they are rooting for him, but who are, nonetheless.

From the beginning, I was disappointed that so many people resonated with him. He was, and is, crude and rude. He is disrespectful to women; I was horrified when he characterized all Mexicans (the ones coming to the United States) as rapists and criminals. His disrespect of Sen. John McCain stunned me; like McCain or not, he is a war hero, but not to Trump. His parodying a man who was developmentally disabled made me sick. The fact that he says nothing of substance in his rallies is appalling. His arrogance at saying he will build a wall between the United States and Mexico and will make Mexico pay for it was hateful, and his plan to deport millions of illegal immigrants out of this country made me shake my head.

This is America, right?

His dog whistle language as concerns his feelings about black people is hardly subtle; his ordering his people to “get them out of here” when they have showed up at his rallies, and his reminding his followers that there was a day when they would have been able to take care of those protesters in a way that they would be taken out on a stretcher...was...well, really white.

But it wasn’t the fact that Donald Trump was and is so narcissistic and arrogant that bothers me so much. What bothers me is the blind following he seems to have, of both white and black people, who seem to think he can do no wrong. They do not care that he does not have any viable foreign policy; he seems to feel he will be able to act unilaterally and just ...get rid of people or nations he doesn’t like. His rambling about how he will just sort of magically fix the economy has made no sense to me at all. He has made all his followers believe that he and he alone can bring jobs back to this country. They believe him. He is right about one thing: he could go out onto Fifth Avenue and shoot someone and his supporters would still support him.

The question is “why?” So, the white working class is angry. So...what? What makes their anger so different, so virulent, and so strong and so much more worthy of mention? Why is their anger more important than that of all the other people in this nation who have been marginalized? Why isn’t more of the country upset that what seems to be the unifying thread holding his base together is white supremacy, racism, in its most ugly form?

Why is their anger more important than the anger of everyone else?

Could it be that these people have found out that white supremacy loves no person who is not only not white, but prefers people who are white with money? Could it be that they are realizing that the phrase in the Constitution, “all men are created equal” really does pertain now, as it did then, primarily to these wealthy, white landowners? Could it be that, as they have looked around, that they see how they are no better off economically than are black people, in spite of their being white?’

Don’t accuse me of playing the race card. It is the pundits and the news operations who have made it clear that it is angry white men who are behind Trump in the biggest numbers. It is angry white men who no longer have the manufacturing or construction or mining jobs they used to have so they could make a decent living. The pundits are pointing out the fact that the demographic that is most responsible for the Rise of Trump ...is angry white men.

They are tired of being “politically correct,” meaning, they can’t say the “n” word when they want. They cannot openly discriminate against black and brown people like they used to. The Black Lives Matter movement has been steadily dismantling their false confidence that the police take care of “the bad people,” who happen to be ...”the black people.” The shootings of innocent and/or unarmed black people by white police officers, caught on tape, has shattered the lie behind which law enforcement has hidden for decades. Their officers, some of them, are being called to accountability. In this country where, historically, a police officer never had to prove he or she did anything wrong and who never had to worry about going to jail for participating in state-sanctioned murder, things are changing ...and it is making some white people more and more angry. They want “their country back.” They want to “make America great again.” That greatness included free-flowing racial violence by whites against blacks and rampant discrimination; it included white people being able to have jobs when many black people were denied those same jobs. That America included having trials (and still does) where a black person could and would be tried by an all-white jury for a crime he or she might not have committed, and nobody could do anything about it.

That is changing.

And now, to add insult to injury, there are too many brown people here, brown people who have done the work for white people that neither white not black people would have done themselves because the pay is so low. Brown people in the form of Hispanics, and now, brown and black people in the form of Muslims...are all over the place ...and some white people are not only angry, but they are afraid that they are losing the power they always had
.
These people believe that Trump - who sounds eerily like the Hitler I have read about - will make everything all right. He will build that wall. He will “get the coloreds out.” He will reset the American equilibrium and return things to the way they used to be. And that’s why they do not care what he says or does. They do not care who he berates or puts down. They do not care if he says one thing on one talk show and something entirely different on another show minutes later.

They want America back. Their America.

They began to mumble when Barack Obama was elected president.; their lawmakers vowed, even as Obama was being inaugurated, that they would make him a one-term president. While there were many people who believed his election meant that America was a post-racial country, there were those who vowed that this country would be post-racial over their dead bodies. That’s why we heard the cry, “We want to take our country back!” They were intentional about what they meant. And they are intentional now.

I shudder to think about where America is headed. If Trump wins the nomination and then the White House, it will be bad for a whole lot of people. If Trump is bumped from contending for the presidency by a brokered convention, it will still be bad for a whole lot of people, because, as Trump as alluded, his angry white people will rise up. He said, “I think you’d have riots.” I think he’s right. Trump’s supporters would rise up...

But someone would rise up against them.

It will be America’s Second Civil War.

God, help our nation.

Trump Pretends He's Already The President

http://crooksandliars.com/2016/12/trump-pretends-hes-already-president

Sunday, December 25, 2016

5 Reasons Senate Democrats Should Block All Trump Supreme Court Nominees, Forever

After the GOP's disgraceful treatment of Obama, the president-elect deserves nothing less.

Saturday, December 24, 2016

Merry Christmas From President Obama and First Lady Michelle

We have been blessed more than we know for the last eight years of your great leadership. Thank you, President and Mrs. Obama.

We look forward to a great future for you and your family.



Thursday, December 22, 2016

Bill O’Reilly sparks Twitter outrage over 'white privilege' comments



By

Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly infuriated thousands of Americans when he went on national television Tuesday night and said that liberals want to abolish the Electoral College because they want “power taken away from the white establishment.”

The conservative “O’Reilly Factor” host claimed that mounting pressure to do away with the antiquated voting system is “all about race,” and only intends to favor diverse urban areas over primarily white rural ones.

“The left sees white privilege in America as an oppressive force that must be done away with,” O’Reilly said during his namesake primetime show, just one day after the Electoral College officially elected Donald Trump as the next President. “Therefore, white working class voters must be marginalized and what better way to do that than center the voting power in the cities.”

O’Reilly went on to claim that Hillary Clinton’s massive popular vote win is but a reminder of the College’s necessity.

Wednesday, December 21, 2016

Billionaire Backed Plan To Use Shipping Containers To House The Homeless

By

Displaced homeless people watch as a bulldozer removes their encampment known as The Jungle on Dec. 4, 2014, in San Jose, Calif. © Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty Images Displaced homeless people watch as a bulldozer removes their encampment known as The Jungle on Dec. 4, 2014, in San Jose, Calif. 

 Tiny houses have emerged in the past decade as a promising way to house more homeless people for less money. Now the idea has gained a powerful proponent in the billionaire California real estate developer John Sobrato, who unveiled a proposal this month to build 200 micro-apartments for homeless and low-income renters in Santa Clara.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/money/realestate/a-billionaire-backed-plan-to-use-shipping-containers-to-house-the-homeless/ar-BBxn8N9?li=BBnb4R7

Monday, December 19, 2016

We are completely & utterly screwed. But Happy Holidays


http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/12/19/1611924/-Cartoon-Post-truth-world

This Horrible Belief About the Election and What to Do With It

Posted By Rude One

If a Republican were president right now and an incoming Democrat had won in an election where there was even a whiff of Russian interference, the nation would be shut down right now. Lawyers would be filing every lawsuit imaginable in every court everywhere. Marches would be ready to blockade the path of the electors from even getting to their meeting place. Impeachment documents would have been drawn up and, if they were in the minority in Congress, Republicans would be nonstop shaming Democrats, asking if they're loyal to the United States or Russia, until they agreed not to certify the election.

It would be a 50-alarm fire and no one would be able to stop the momentum until the president-elect agreed to postpone inauguration until either a definite determination was made about the Russian influence or until a new election could be held. And that's what they'd do if the Democratic president-elect was an entirely competent, qualified person. If it was an egomaniacal hedonist who craps all over the traditions and decorum of the government? We'd be at Def-Con Monica.

And who could blame them, really? If Democratic elected officials truly believe that Russia hacked the Republican and Democratic National Committees' email servers in an effort to push the needle even slightly towards Donald Trump, then that's exactly how they should be acting.

In a twist right out of Shakespeare, President Obama's fatal flaw is the very thing that launched him into the presidency in the first place: his belief in the basic decency of people. It has failed him time and again, yet so often when dealing with his political opposition, he has treated them with respect and dignity that they did not deserve and that they refused him. It failed him when he tried to get Mitch McConnell to release a joint statement on the hack before the election. McConnell said he wouldn't do it and, if the Democrats did, he would just call it political games and discredit it. So, being decent, Obama backed down. Everyone in that situation should be ashamed.

Now, in the last weekend before the Electoral College votes on Monday, in the last month before Donald Trump takes over and attempts to completely destroy his legacy, it is time for President Obama to at long last forgo his instinct to trust that right will somehow always win and to actually reach out to bend the arc of history towards progress. In simpler terms, he needs to fuck some shit up.

This is where we are right now: Obama has such confidence that Russia did hack the servers that he is promising that the United States will retaliate. Now, yes, real evidence needs to be presented to the nation (which will automatically be dismissed as false in many quarters, notably the ones that inform Trump's opinions). But, at this point, I'm gonna trust Obama over Russia or the guy who told an audience in Chicago a blatant lie last night: that the murder rate is "the largest it’s been in 45 years."

In the course of two tweets, Trump pretended no one had ever talked about the hacking until now and then admitted that people had talked about the hacking before the election. It's no wonder that White House Spokesman Josh Earnest could directly say, "Mr. Trump obviously knew that Russia was engaged in malicious cyber activity that was helping him and hurting Secretary Clinton's campaign."

As Trump continues to deny and deflect on Russia's involvement, it would be good to remember the rule that whatever Trump says about others generally applies to himself. During the election, for instance, Trump kept insisting that Hillary Clinton's email server something or other "disqualified" her from even running for president. The truth is that Trump's financial entanglements that will likely put him in violation of the Constitution from the moment he's sworn in actually should have disqualified him from running. And he knew that (and, as many others have said, I'm still not convinced that this election is not a publicity stunt that got out of hand).

So we have to consider both Trump's just weird refusal to take the intelligence agencies he's going to need at their word on Russia and that, in the latter part of the election cycle, he claimed that the whole thing was "rigged" against him. Again, it's just a damned odd thing to say. What we originally thought was simply a shot across the bow of the legitimacy of a Clinton victory is seeming more and more like a deflection from the election actually being, if not rigged, then manipulated. Ultimately, if there was coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia, then do we call that "treason"? And if we do, then we have to follow through with all that that requires.

At the very least, President Obama should ask that Congress delay the Electoral College vote until, as Trump might say, we can figure out what the hell is going on. Barring that, he should ask Congress to delay the January 6 count of electoral votes. Barring that, Democrats should file objections to the vote that will force Congress to have to go on record in support of Trump.

And rank and file Democrats better be calling their members of Congress and the White House to voice their concern. And they better be ready to take to the streets to shut this down before the Trump cancer metastasizes so that its diseased tendrils grow deep into the American body. Act like our goddamned lives depend on it. Obama should be leading the charge on this, asking all concerned Americans to get involved. Just don't expect decency from a good many of them.

Barring all of that and Trump becoming president (as is most likely), well, then we need a new plan. And I've got an idea or two.

One last thing for President Obama: Fire the fuck out of James Comey. Shit, arrest that motherfucker.

Sunday, December 18, 2016

"Sit down, Donald...there is something we need to tell you..."

By kentuck

You did not win in a landslide. You won the electoral vote by one of the lowest margins in our history. Also, you lost the popular vote by the largest margin of anyone...ever. So you need to stop acting like you had some great victory. You didn't.

Thanks in large part part to your disgusting words and actions during the campaign, the country is more divided than it has been in a very long time.

You need to stop pounding your chest and acting as if everybody in America loves you. They don't. They find you disgusting and unfit to hold any public office, let alone the Presidency.

Your job is not to brag and further divide our country. You need to realize that you won nothing. You willl be appointed on a technicality.

 If you do not have it within you to even try to unite our country, then you are not ready or qualified to hold the office you so desire.

You're fired!

Thursday, December 15, 2016

Boycott Trump App

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www.DemocraticCoalition.org

Donald Trump Is Gonna Get Us Killed

By Michael Moore

A week has gone by since Donald Trump admitted he's only been to "two or three" of his daily presidential national security briefings. There have been 36 of them since the day he secured enough electoral college votes to be appointed president next Monday when the Electoral College meets.

Most would agree the #1 job of the leader of any country is to keep its people safe. There is no more important meeting every day for the President than the one where he learns what the day's potential threats are to the country. That Trump would find it too cumbersome or too annoying to have to sit through 20 minutes of listening to his top intelligence people tell him who's trying to kill us today, simply boggles the mind.

Of course, our minds have been so boggled so many times in the past year by this foolish man no one seems that surprised or concerned. He can get up at 5 in the morning and send angry, childish tweets about how he's being portrayed on SNL ("Not funny! Unwatchable!"), or belittling the local elected union leader in Indiana, but he doesn't have time to hear about the threats to our national security.

So, my fellow Americans, when the next terrorist attack happens -- and it will happen, we all know that -- and after the tragedy is over, amidst the death and destruction that might have been prevented, you will see Donald Trump acting quickly to blame everyone but himself. He will suspend constitutional rights. He will round up anyone he deems a threat. He will declare war, and his Republican Congress will back him.

And no one will remember that he wasn't paying attention to the growing threat. Wasn't attending the daily national security briefings. Was playing golf instead or meeting with celebrities or staying up til 3 am tweeting about how unfair CNN is. He said he didn't need to be briefed. "You know, I think I'm smart. I don't need to hear the same thing over and over each day for eight years." That's what he told Fox News on December 11th when asked why he wasn't attending the security briefings. Don't forget that date and his hubris as we bury the dead next year.

We had a president like him before. He, too, lost the popular vote, a majority of Americans saying they didn't want him in the Oval Office. But his governor/brother and his ex-CIA chief/dad's appointees to the Supreme Court put an end to that, and he was installed as Commander-in-Chief. On August 6, 2001, he was on a month-long vacation at his ranch in Texas. That morning, the White House Counsel handed him his daily national security briefing. He glanced at it, set it aside and then went fishing for the rest of the day. Below is the photo of that moment which I showed the world in "Fahrenheit 9/11". The headline on the security briefing reads: BIN LADEN DETERMINED TO STRIKE INSIDE U.S. On the top page it tells how bin Laden will do this: with planes. George W. Bush didn't leave the ranch to go back to work for the next four weeks. In the fifth week, bin Laden attacked the US with planes on September 11th.

It's one thing to have a president who was asleep at the wheel. But, my friends, it's a whole other thing to now have a president-elect who REFUSES TO EVEN GET BEHIND THE WHEEL! This utter neglect of duty, a daily snub at the people who work to protect us, the first Commander-in-Chief to literally be AWOL and announcing proudly he isn't going to change -- this, I assure you, is going to get a lot of innocent people killed.

To you, Mr. Trump, I say this: When this next terrorist attack takes place, it is YOU who will be charged by the American people with a gross dereliction of duty. It was YOUR job to pay attention, to protect the country. But you were too busy tweeting and defending Putin and appointing cabinet members to dismantle the government. You didn't have time for the daily national security briefing.

Don't think we're going to let you use a modern-day burning of the Reichstag as your excuse to eliminate our civil liberties and our democracy.

We will remember that while the plot to kill Americans was being hatched, your time was consumed by whom you saw as the real threat to America: Alec Baldwin in a wig.

Tuesday, December 13, 2016

Donald Trump Is The Biggest Loser In History To Ever Become President

By Jason Easley


Donald Trump Is The Biggest Loser In History To Ever Become President
Donald Trump didn’t just lose the popular vote. His margin of defeat is five times bigger than any president in US history.

The Independent reported Trump’s landslide popular vote deficit of more 2.8 million votes:

That deficit is more than five times bigger than the 544,000 by which George W. Bush lost to Al Gore in 2000 – the second biggest popular vote deficit in history for a candidate who has still gone on to become President.

Only five US presidents in history have been elected despite losing the popular vote: John Quincy Adams in 1824, Rutherford Hayes in 1876, Benjamin Harrison in 1888, George W. Bush in 2000 and Donald Trump this November.

Donald Trump’s electoral vote total is only bigger than five winners since World War II. Two of the five smallest belong to George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004. There is no metric by which Trump’s victory can be characterized as a landslide.

No candidate has ever lost by so much, but still won the White House. This fact is why Trump and his team keep using the word landslide. They believe that if they keep calling the results a landslide, people may forget that Trump lost the popular vote. Donald Trump is running a propaganda effort to convince the majority of the country that they really didn’t vote against him.

Donald Trump has become exactly what he despises the most. Trump is the biggest loser president in the history of US presidential elections.
Recent posts on PoliticusUSA

Monday, December 12, 2016

Nancy Pelosi Defends Her Losing Record With Republican Talking Points

Democratic House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi appeared on the Face the Nation and sounded a lot like the party she claims to oppose.

Jimmy Dore breaks it down.

Revealing Video Proves Why Democrats Are Full Of Shit

Single payer healthcare has been on the tongues of Democratic politicians for decades, including Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. They've never delivered.

Jimmy Dore breaks it down.

From the files of Conservative Jones



Sunday, December 11, 2016

The Evidence To Prove Russian Hack



In this post, I’m going to lay out the evidence needed to fully explain the Russian hack. I think it will help to explain some of the timing around the story that the CIA believes Russia hacked the DNC to help win Trump win the election, as well as what is new in Friday’s story. I will do rolling updates on this and eventually turn it into a set of pages on Russia’s hacking.

As I see it, intelligence on all the following are necessary to substantiate some of the claims about Russia tampering in this year’s election.
  1. FSB-related hackers hacked the DNC
  2. GRU-related hackers hacked the DNC
  3. Russian state actors hacked John Podesta’s emails
  4. Russian state actors hacked related targets, including Colin Powell and some Republican sites
  5. Russian state actors hacked the RNC
  6. Russian state actors released information from DNC and DCCC via Guccifer 2
  7. Russian state actors released information via DC Leaks
  8. Russian state actors or someone acting on its behest passed information to Wikileaks
  9. The motive explaining why Wikileaks released the DNC and Podesta emails
  10. Russian state actors probed voter registration databases
  11. Russian state actors used bots and fake stories to make information more damaging and magnify its effects
  12. The level at which all Russian state actors’ actions were directed and approved
  13. The motive behind the actions of Russian state actors
  14. The degree to which Russia’s efforts were successful and/or primary in leading to Hillary’s defeat
I explain all of these in more detail below. For what it’s worth, I think there was strong publicly available information to prove 3, 4, 7, 11. I think there is weaker though still substantial information to support 2. It has always been the case that the evidence is weakest at point 6 and 8.

At a minimum, to blame Russia for tampering with the election, you need high degree of confidence that GRU hacked the DNC (item 2), and shared those documents via some means with Wikileaks (item 8). What is new about Friday’s story is that, after months of not knowing how the hacked documents got from Russian hackers to Wikileaks, CIA now appears to know that people close to the Russian government transferred the documents (item 8). In addition, CIA now appears confident that all this happened to help Trump win the presidency (item 13).

1) FSB-related hackers hacked the DNC

The original report from Crowdstrike on the DNC hack actually said two separate Russian-linked entities hacked the DNC: one tied to the FSB, which it calls “Cozy Bear” or APT 29, and one tied to GRU, which it calls “Fancy Bear” or APT 28. Crowdstrike says Cozy Bear was also responsible for hacks of unclassified networks at the White House, State Department, and US Joint Chiefs of Staff.
I’m not going to assess the strength of the FSB evidence here. As I’ll lay out, the necessary hack to attribute to the Russians is the GRU one, because that’s the one believed to be the source of the DNC and Podesta emails. The FSB one is important to keep in mind, as it suggests part of the Russian government may have been hacking US sites solely for intelligence collection, something our own intelligence agencies believe is firmly within acceptable norms of spying. In the months leading up to the 2012 election, for example, CIA and NSA hacked the messaging accounts of a bunch of Enrique Peña Nieto associates, pretty nearly the equivalent of the Podesta hack, though we don’t know what they did with that intelligence. The other reason to keep the FSB hack in mind is because, to the extent FSB hacked other sites, they also may be deemed part of normal spying.

2) GRU-related hackers hacked the DNC

As noted, Crowdstrike reported that GRU also hacked the DNC. As it explains, GRU does this by sending someone something that looks like an email password update, but which instead is a fake site designed to get someone to hand over their password. The reason this claim is strong is because people at the DNC say this happened to them.

Note that there are people who raise questions of whether this method is legitimately tied to GRU and/or that the method couldn’t be stolen and replicated. I will deal with those questions at length elsewhere. But for the purposes of this post, I will accept that this method is a clear sign of GRU involvement. There are also reports that deal with GRU hacking that note high confidence GRU hacked other entities, but less direct evidence they hacked the DNC.

Finally, there is the real possibility that other people hacked the DNC, in addition to FSB and GRU. That possibility is heightened because a DNC staffer was hacked via what may have been another method, and because DNC emails show a lot of password changes off services for which DNC staffers had had their accounts exposed in other hacks.

All of which is a way of saying, there is some confidence that DNC got hacked at least twice, with those two revealed efforts being done by hackers with ties to the Russian state.

3) Russian state actors (GRU) hacked John Podesta’s emails

Again, assuming that the fake Gmail phish is GRU’s handiwork, there is probably the best evidence that GRU hacked John Podesta and therefore that Russia, via some means, supplied Wikileaks, because we have a copy of the actual email used to hack him. The Smoking Gun has an accessible story describing how all this works. So in the case of Podesta, we know he got a malicious phish email, we know that someone clicked the link in the email, and we know that emails from precisely that time period were among the documents shared with Wikileaks. We just have no idea how they got there.

4) Russian state actors hacked related targets, including some other Democratic staffers, Colin Powell and some Republican sites

That same Gmail phish was used with victims — including at a minimum William Rinehart and Colin Powell — that got exposed in a site called DC Leaks. We can have the same high degree of confidence that GRU conducted this hack as we do with Podesta. As I note below, that’s more interesting for what it tells us about motive than anything else.

5) Russian state actors hacked the RNC

The allegation that Russia also hacked the RNC, but didn’t leak those documents — which the CIA seems to rely on in part to argue that Russia must have wanted to elect Trump — has been floating around for some time. I’ll return to what we know of this. RNC spox Sean Spicer is denying it, though so did Hillary’s people at one point deny that they had been hacked.

There are several points about this. First, hackers presumed to be GRU did hack and release emails from Colin Powell and an Republican-related server. The Powell emails (including some that weren’t picked up in the press), in particular, were detrimental to both candidates. The Republican ones were, like a great deal of the Democratic ones, utterly meaningless from a news standpoint.

So I don’t find this argument persuasive in its current form. But the details on it are still sketchy precisely because we don’t know about that hack.

6) Russian state actors released information from DNC and DCCC via Guccifer 2

Some entity going by the name Guccifer 2 started a website in the wake of the announcement that the DNC got hacked. The site is a crucial part of this assessment, both because it released DNC and DCCC documents directly (though sometimes misattributing what it was releasing) and because Guccifer 2 stated clearly that he had shared the DNC documents with Wikileaks. The claim has always been that Guccifer 2 was just a front for Russia — a way for them to adopt plausible deniability about the DNC hack.

That may be the case (and obvious falsehoods in Guccifer’s statements make it clear deception was part of the point), but there was always less conclusive (and sometimes downright contradictory) evidence to support this argument (this post summarizes what it claims are good arguments that Guccifer 2 was a front for Russia; on the most part I disagree and hope to return to it in the future).

Moreover, this step has been one that past reporting said the FBI couldn’t confirm. Then there are other oddities about Guccifer’s behavior, such as his “appearance” at a security conference in London, or the way his own production seemed to fizzle as Wikileaks started releasing the Podesta emails. Those details of Guccifer’s behavior are, in my opinion, worth probing for a sense of how all this was orchestrated.

Yesterday’s story seems to suggest that the spooks have finally figured out this step, though we don’t have any idea what it entails.

7) Russian state actors released information via DC Leaks

Well before many people realized that DC Leaks existed, I suspected that it was a Russian operation. That’s because two of its main targets — SACEUR Philip Breedlove and George Soros — are targets Russia would obviously hit to retaliate for what it treats as a US-backed coup in Ukraine.

DC Leaks is also where the publicly released (and boring) GOP emails got released.

Perhaps most importantly, that’s where the Colin Powell emails got released (this post covers some of those stories). That’s significant because Powell’s emails were derogatory towards both candidates (though he ultimately endorsed Hillary).

It’s interesting for its haphazard targeting (if someone wants to pay me $$ I would do an assessment of all that’s there, because some just don’t make any clear sense from a Russian perspective, and some of the people most actively discussing the Russian hacks have clearly not even read all of it), but also because a number of the victims have been affirmatively tied to the GRU phishing methods.

So DC Leaks is where you get obvious Russian targets and Russian methods all packaged together. But of the documents it released, the Powell emails were the most interesting for electoral purposes, and they didn’t target Hillary as asymmetrically as the Wikileaks released documents did.

8) Russian state actors or someone acting on its behest passed information to Wikileaks

The basis for arguing that all these hacks were meant to affect the election is that they were released via Wikileaks. That is what was supposed to be new, beyond just spying (though we have almost certainly hacked documents and leaked them, most probably in the Syria Leaks case, but I suspect also in some others).

And as noted, how Wikileaks got two separate sets of emails has always been the big question. With the DNC emails, Guccifer 2 clearly said he had given them to WL, but the Guccifer 2 ties to Russia was relatively weak. And with the Podesta emails, I’m not aware of any known interim step between the GRU hack and Wikileaks.

A late July report said the FBI was still trying to determine how Russia got the emails to Wikileaks or even if they were the same emails.
The FBI is still investigating the DNC hack. The bureau is trying to determine whether the emails obtained by the Russians are the same ones that appeared on the website of the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks on Friday, setting off a firestorm that roiled the party in the lead-up to the convention.
The FBI is also examining whether APT 28 or an affiliated group passed those emails to WikiLeaks, law enforcement sources said.
An even earlier report suggested that the IC wasn’t certain the files had been passed electronically.
And the joint DHS/ODNI statement largely attributed its confidence that Russia was involved in the the leaking (lumping Guccifer 2, DC Leaks, and Wikileaks all together) not because it had high confidence in that per se (a term of art saying, effectively, “we have seen the evidence”), but instead because leaking such files is consistent with what Russia has done elsewhere.
The recent disclosures of alleged hacked e-mails on sites like DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks and by the Guccifer 2.0 online persona are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts.
Importantly, that statement came out on October 7, so well after the September briefing at which CIA claimed to have further proof of all this.

Now, Julian Assange has repeatedly denied that Russia was his source. Craig Murray asserted, after having meeting with Assange, that the source is not the Russian state or a proxy. Wikileaks’ tweet in the wake of yesterday’s announcement — concluding that an inquiry directed at Russia in this election cycle is targeted at Wikileaks — suggests some doubt. Also, immediately after the election, Sergei Markov, in a statement deemed to be consistent with Putin’s views, suggested that “maybe we helped a bit with WikiLeaks,” even while denying Russia carried out the hacks.

That’s what’s new in yesterday’s story. It stated that “individuals with connections to the Russian government” handed the documents to Wikileaks.
Intelligence agencies have identified individuals with connections to the Russian government who provided WikiLeaks with thousands of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and others, including Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, according to U.S. officials. Those officials described the individuals as actors known to the intelligence community and part of a wider Russian operation to boost Trump and hurt Clinton’s chances.
[snip]
[I]ntelligence agencies do not have specific intelligence showing officials in the Kremlin “directing” the identified individuals to pass the Democratic emails to WikiLeaks, a second senior U.S. official said. Those actors, according to the official, were “one step” removed from the Russian government, rather than government employees. Moscow has in the past used middlemen to participate in sensitive intelligence operations so it has plausible deniability.
I suspect we’ll hear more leaked about these individuals in the coming days; obviously, the IC says it doesn’t have evidence of the Russian government ordering these people to share the documents with Wikileaks.

Nevertheless, the IC now has what it didn’t have in July: a clear idea of who gave Wikileaks the emails.

9) The motive explaining why Wikileaks released the DNC and Podesta emails

There has been a lot of focus on why Wikileaks did what it did, which notably includes timing the DNC documents to hit for maximum impact before the Democratic Convention and timing the Podesta emails to be a steady release leading up to the election.

I don’t rule out Russian involvement with all of that, but it is entirely unnecessary in this case. Wikileaks has long proven an ability to hype its releases as much as possible. More importantly, Assange has reason to have a personal gripe against Hillary, going back to State’s response to the cable release in 2010 and the subsequent prosecution of Chelsea Manning.

In other words, absent really good evidence to the contrary, I assume that Russia’s interests and Wikileaks’ coincided perfectly for this operation.

10) Russian state actors probed voter registration databases

Back in October, a slew of stories reported that “Russians” had breached voter related databases in a number of states. The evidence actually showed that hackers using a IP tied to Russia had done these hacks. Even if the hackers were Russian (about which there was no evidence in the first reports), there was also no evidence the hackers were tied to the Russian state. Furthermore, as I understand it, these hacks used a variety of methods, some or all of which aren’t known to be GRU related. A September DHS bulletin suggested these hacks were committed by cybercriminals (in the past, identity thieves have gone after voter registration lists). And the October 7 DHS/ODNI statement affirmatively said the government was not attributing the probes to the Russians.
Some states have also recently seen scanning and probing of their election-related systems, which in most cases originated from servers operated by a Russian company. However, we are not now in a position to attribute this activity to the Russian Government.
In late November, an anonymous White House statement said there was no increased malicious hacking aimed at the electoral process, though remains agnostic about whether Russia ever planned on such a thing.
The Federal government did not observe any increased level of malicious cyber activity aimed at disrupting our electoral process on election day. As we have noted before, we remained confident in the overall integrity of electoral infrastructure, a confidence that was borne out on election day. As a result, we believe our elections were free and fair from a cyber security perspective.
That said, since we do not know if the Russians had planned any malicious cyber activity for election day, we don’t know if they were deterred from further activity by the various warnings the U.S. government conveyed.
Absent further evidence, this suggests that reports about Russian trying to tamper with the actual election infrastructure were at most suspicions and possibly just a result of shoddy reporting conflating Russian IP with Russian people with Russian state.

11) Russian state actors used bots and fake stories to make information more damaging and magnify its effects

Russia has used bots and fake stories in the past to distort or magnify compromising information. There is definitely evidence some pro-Trump bots were based out of Russia. RT and Sputnik ran with inflammatory stories. Samantha Bee famously did an interview with some Russians who were spreading fake news. But there were also people spreading fake news from elsewhere, including Macedonia and Surburban LA. A somewhat spooky guy even sent out fake news in an attempt to discredit Wikileaks.

As I have argued, the real culprit in this economy of clickbait driven outrage is closer to home, in the algorithms that Silicon Valley companies use that are exploited by a whole range of people. So while Russian directed efforts may have magnified inflammatory stories, that was not a necessary part of any intervention in the election, because it was happening elsewhere.

12) The level at which all Russian state actors’ actions were directed and approved

The DHS/ODNI statement said clearly that “We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.” But the WaPo story suggests they still don’t have proof of Russia directing even the go-between who gave WL the cables, much less the go-between directing how Wikileaks released these documents.

Mind you, this would be among the most sensitive information, if the NSA did have proof, because it would be collection targeted at Putin and his top advisors.

13) The motive behind the actions of Russian state actors

The motive behind all of this has varied. The joint DHS/ODNI statement said it was “These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process.” It didn’t provide a model for what that meant though.

Interim reporting — including the White House’s anonymous post-election statement — had suggested that spooks believed Russia was doing it to discredit American democracy.
The Kremlin probably expected that publicity surrounding the disclosures that followed the Russian Government-directed compromises of e-mails from U.S. persons and institutions, including from U.S. political organizations, would raise questions about the integrity of the election process that could have undermined the legitimacy of the President-elect.
At one level, that made a lot of sense — the biggest reason to release the DNC and Podesta emails, it seems to me, was to confirm the beliefs a lot of people already had about how power works. I think one of the biggest mistakes of journalists who have political backgrounds was to avoid discussing how the sausage of politics gets made, because this material looks worse if you’ve never worked in a system where power is about winning support. All that said, there’s nothing in the emails (especially given the constant release of FOIAed emails) that uniquely exposed American democracy as corrupt.

All of which is to say that this explanation never made any sense to me; it was mostly advanced by people who live far away from people who already distrust US election systems, who ignored polls showing there was already a lot of distrust.

Which brings us to the other thing that is new in the WaPo story: the assertion that CIA now believes this was all intended to elect Trump, not just make us distrust elections.
The CIA has concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency, rather than just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system, according to officials briefed on the matter.
[snip]
“It is the assessment of the intelligence community that Russia’s goal here was to favor one candidate over the other, to help Trump get elected,” said a senior U.S. official briefed on an intelligence presentation made to U.S. senators. “That’s the consensus view.”
For what it’s worth, there’s still some ambiguity in this. Did Putin really want Trump? Or did he want Hillary to be beat up and weak for an expected victory? Did he, like Assange, want to retaliate for specific things he perceived Hillary to have done, in both Libya, Syria, and Ukraine? That’s unclear.

14) The degree to which Russia’s efforts were successful and/or primary in leading to Hillary’s defeat

Finally, there’s the question that may explain Obama’s reticence about this issue, particularly in the anonymous post-election statement from the White House, which stated that the “election results … accurately reflect the will of the American people.” It’s not clear that Putin’s intervention, whatever it was, had anywhere near the effect as (for example) Jim Comey’s letters and Bret Baier’s false report that Hillary would be indicted shortly. There are a lot of other factors (including Hillary’s decision to ignore Jake Sullivan’s lonely advice to pay some attention to the Rust Belt).

And, as I’ve noted repeatedly, it is no way the case that Vladimir Putin had to teach Donald Trump about kompromat, the leaking of compromising information for political gain. Close Trump associates, including Roger Stone (who, by the way, may have had conversations with Julian Assange), have been rat-fucking US elections since the time Putin was in law school.

But because of the way this has rolled out (and particularly given the cabinet picks Trump has already made), it will remain a focus going forward, perhaps to the detriment of other issues that need attention.