Melania Knew -- Charles Blow NYT

Dear America: Come on, you can’t be serious.

The ongoing saga over a president, a porn star and a payoff is so lewd and tawdry that it can’t simply be added to the ever-expanding list of horrible misbehaviors of a womanizing misogynist.

It’s not even the infidelity that most bothers me. I view that as an issue between spouses and with the other person involved. I contend that we on the outside never really know what understandings may exist in a marriage, unless the two parties within reveal it.

In this case, Melania knew exactly the kind of man she was getting.

When Donald first meets Melania, they are at a New York Fashion Week party to which Donald has been invited by the wealthy Italian businessman who brought Melania to America on a modeling contract and work visa. According to GQ, sometimes, to promote his models, the businessman “would send a few girls to an event and invite photographers, producers, and rich playboys.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/11/opinion/melania-trump-stormy.html

Former Assoc. Dir. of National Intelligence: "it was entirely possible votes were tampered with."

Mar 09, 2018 10:59am EST by ian douglas rushlau

There has been extensive discussion of Russian efforts to hack into US voting systems (for example, see the report of the Director of National Intelligence from January of last year), and it is no longer in dispute that Russia was successful in ‘compromising’ a number of voting systems. Nor is it in dispute that many elements of our voting system (not just the voting machines themselves) are vulnerable to cyberattacks, and old-fashioned tampering, as explained in the excellent diary from yesterday by DKos contributor Leslie Sazillo, which highlights the work of Dr. Barbara Simons, an expert in computer security and voting systems.

For all the efforts Russia engaged in over the course of years to attempt to determine the outcome of the 2016 election, and install their preferred candidate, and all that is publicly known of their multifaceted operations to penetrate our voting systems, there are still many here and elsewhere who hold onto the contention there is no direct evidence that any votes, or vote totals, were changed.

That contention relies on the notion that Russia did everything in its capability to capture the election, from hijacking social media platforms to recruiting Americans to assist them, and they breached various voting systems in dozens of states, but the one the one thing they held back from doing, was change votes themselves (even though, as the work of Dr. Simons and other experts show, they could do so ‘invisibly’). Why would Putin hold back in this one instance, when he has shown no such restraint in any other way?

The answer is, in all likelihood: he didn’t hold back. Claims that votes were not changed to ensure the election of Putin’s tool, are looking less plausible by the day.

An article by Dr. Eric Haseltine (in, of all places, Psychology Today) from last month, explicates why this is the case.

First, who is Dr. Haseltine? From his website:

Eric joined the National Security Agency to run its Research Directorate. Three years later, he was promoted to associate of director of National Intelligence, where he oversaw all science and technology efforts within the United States Intelligence Community as well as fostering development innovative new technologies for countering cyber threats and terrorism. For his work on counter-terrorism technologies, he received the National Intelligence Distinguished Service Medal in 2007.

A little more background on him, from Wikipedia:

Haseltine spent 13 years at Hughes Aircraft, where he rose to the position of Director of Engineering. He then left for Walt Disney Imagineering in 1992, where he joined the research and development group, working on large-scale virtual-reality projects. In 1998, he was promoted to senior vice president responsible for all technology projects.^[1] In 2000, he was made Executive Vice President. Haseltine was head of research and development for Walt Disney Imagineering^[2] by the time he left in 2002 to join the National Security Agency as Director of Research. From 2005 to 2007, Haseltine was Associate Director for Science and Technology, Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI)—that organization's first—a position he described in a 2006 US News and World Report interview by stating: "You can think of me as the CTO [chief technology officer] of the intelligence community"…
Eric has 23 patents in optics, special effects and electronic media, and more than 150 publications in science and technical journals, the web, and Discover Magazine.

Seems reasonably qualified, and from his years at NSA, reasonably informed.
Here’s his take on tampering with vote totals:

HOW TO HACK AN ELECTION: AN INTELLIGENCE ANALYSIS.

After the last presidential election, I heard one expert after another reassure voters that the Russians could not have hacked voting machines or state vote tallying systems on a scale large enough to tip the presidential election…

As much as we’d all like to believe such confident pronouncements, my experience in the intelligence world, where I served as Associate Director of National Intelligence, has lead me to one inescapable conclusion—the optimistic “experts” are probably wrong, and all of us should acknowledge that our unconscious (or not-so-unconscious) need to believe that our democracy can’t be subverted by foreigners, blinds us to powerful evidence to the contrary. And, after embracing this scary possibility, we should do a lot more to secure our voting systems than we are doing now…

The case for Russian tampering with the vote

Let me start by explaining the way intelligence professionals would approach the question of whether the Russians, or other skilled actors, could change the outcome of a U.S. election by tampering with voting. Then I’ll show why intelligence-style analysis leads to uncomfortable conclusions.

In making assessments about a state actor, such as the Russians, intelligence analysts ask two questions: what are the intentions of this actor and what are their capabilities?…

So, do the Russians intend to elect American candidates they prefer over those that we, the voters, prefer?

In a word, yes. In a rare display of unanimity, last year the U.S. Intelligence Community assessed that Putin, acting through his intelligence services, had indeed tried to tip the presidential election. One of the Russian Intelligence’s scariest accomplishments was to break into voter databases in 21 states (up to 50 states if you believe some sources). This success alone could have influenced the election by dictating who could and could not vote. In one target of Russian hacking, North Carolina for instance, some legitimate voters (in a “blue” precinct, as it turns out,) could not vote because the e-poll registration system used to allow voters to vote erroneously asserted that some legitimate voters weren’t registered…

One more thing. You might be wondering whether, despite their motivation to subvert our national elections, Russian leadership might still hesitate to alter vote tallies out of fear of getting caught. Whereas the U.S. Congress responded to voter registration hacks and email leaks from the Clinton campaign with sanctions—a mere slap on the wrist—the U.S. just might view outright alteration of vote counts an act of war and respond accordingly.

Sadly, I think the Kremlin views getting caught as more of a good thing, than a bad thing, because the net result would be favorable to Russia. Based on the way we responded to Russian behavior in 2016, Putin knows that a sizable portion of America—members of whichever major party the Kremlin favored—would, by and large, accept the inevitable Russian denials about vote tampering because we all believe what we want to believe, particularly when believing Russia committed an act of war could lead to armed conflict with a superpower…

In other words, if Russia were caught changing vote counts, America would be even more divided than today: exactly what the Kremlin wants. And the national will to respond to Russia’s provocation as an act of war simply wouldn’t be there.

Russia wins if they don’t get caught and Russia wins if they do get caught; what’s not to like? (emphasis added)

Note that Dr. Haseltine makes reference to information that, rather than the 39 states we know were in some way compromised, it may be the voting systems in all 50 states the Russians accessed.

Dr. Haseltine goes into detail about the vulnerabilities of voting systems, covering much of the same territory as Leslie’s review of Dr. Simon’s work, so I won’t go through it here, but Dr. Haseltine’s summary is well worth the read.

For our discussion, it’s his ultimate conclusion that warrants attention:

Adding up what we know about Russian intentions and capabilities, and factoring in the vulnerabilities just listed, I believe that it was entirely possible votes in the 2016 election were tampered with, and that attempts could be made to compromise future elections.

Why hold onto the notion that Russia didn’t try to change votes? (And if they tried, there’s no reason to think they wouldn’t be ‘invisibly’ successful.)

Dr. Haseltine suggests it is simply not wanting to believe it to be true: “the optimistic “experts” are probably wrong, and all of us should acknowledge that our unconscious (or not-so-unconscious) need to believe that our democracy can’t be subverted by foreigners”.
Charles Pierce, at Esquire, echoes this view:

The last outpost of moderate opinion on the subject of the Russian ratfucking during the 2016 presidential election seems to be that, yes, there was mischief done and steps should be taken both to reveal its extent and to prevent it from happening again in the future, but that the ratfucking, thank baby Jesus, did not materially affect the vote totals anywhere in the country. This is a calm, measured, evidence-based judgment. It is also a kind of prayer. If the Russian cyber-assault managed to change the vote totals anywhere, then the 2016 presidential election is wholly illegitimate. That rocks too many comfort zones in too many places.

Putin isn’t playing.

Saturday, Mar 10, 2018 · 8:21:45 AM EST · ian douglas rushlau
DKos member Hudson Valley Mark in a comment stressed the importance of communicating clear policy goals to address the vulnerabilities of our voting systems, and his point is well-taken.

The Verified Voting Foundation has created principles for making voting as secure as possible, which are as follows:

Any new voting system should conform to the following principles:
1. It should use human-readable marks on paper as the official record of voter preferences and as the official medium to store votes.¹
2. It should be usable by all voters; accessible to all voters, including those with disabilities; and available in all mandated languages.²
3. It should provide voters the means and opportunity to verify that the human-readable marks correctly represent their intended selections, before casting the ballot.³
4. It should preserve vote anonymity: it should not be possible to link any voter to his or her selections, when the system is used appropriately. It should be difficult or impossible to compromise or waive voter anonymity accidentally or deliberately.⁴ No voter should be able to prove how he or she voted.⁵
5. It should export contest results in a standard, open, machine-readable format.⁶
6. It should be easily and transparently auditable at the ballot level. It should:
export a cast vote record (CVR) for every ballot,
in a standard, open, machine-readable format,
in a way that the original paper ballot corresponding to any CVR can be quickly and unambiguously identified, andvice versa.⁷
7. It should use commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware components and open-source software (OSS) in preference to proprietary hardware and proprietary software, especially when doing so will reduce costs, facilitate maintenance and customization, facilitate replacing failed or obsolete equipment, improve security or reliability, or facilitate adopting technological improvements quickly and affordably.⁸
8. It should be able to create CVRs from ballots designed for currently deployed systems⁹ and it should be readily configurable to create CVRs for new ballot designs.¹⁰
9. It should be sufficiently open¹¹ to allow a competitive market for support, including configuration, maintenance, integration, and customization.
10.It should be usable by election officials: they should be able to configure, operate, and maintain the system, create ballots, tabulate votes, and audit the accuracy of the results without relying on external expertise or labor, even in small jurisdictions with limited staff.

Here's what will happen if Trump meets Kim Jong Un

1. Kim will flatter him.


2. Kim will impress him with his palaces and his military parades.


3. Kim will tell him what a historical achievement this diplomatic contact is. And Trump is the one who did it!


4. Kim will agree to take first steps that might eventually lead to denuclearization in the far, far future. In exchange for aid right now.


5. Kim will again tell him what a big win this meeting is.


6. Trump will leave and tout this as a victory.


7. Kim will do as little as possible to fulfill his side of any agreement and wait for Trump to leave office.


8. Once Trump is out of office, Kim sends North Korea back into isolation.

Source

Trump is too stupid to know just how stupid he is

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/2/25/1743434/-Because-Trump-is-too-stupid-to-know-just-how-stupid-he-is

A Wave Of Global Disappointment In Democracy Brought Trump To The White House

Harvard's Yascha Mounk explains how lack of faith in democracies is spreading around Europe.

By Chauncey DeVega

The Chauncey DeVega Show is the official podcast of Salon.com politics writer Chauncey DeVega. The weekly show features a relaxed and free-form conversation with artists, authors, musicians, researchers, academics, journalists, activists, actors and directors.

Yascha Mounk is the guest on this week's special fundraising month episode of The Chauncey DeVega Show. He is a lecturer on political theory at Harvard University's Government Department, a postdoctoral fellow at the Transatlantic Academy of the German Marshall Fund, and a nonresident fellow at New America's Political Reform Program. Mounk is the author of three books including the forthcoming The People versus Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It. He writes a column at Slate in addition to hosting The Good Fight podcast.

In this week's episode of the podcast, Yascha Mounk and Chauncey DeVega discuss how Trump rode a wave of global discontent about liberal democracies into the White House, how a lack of faith in democracies is spreading around Europe and other parts of the world, right-wing authoritarian populism, what can be done to save democracy, the responsibility of teachers and other educators in this moment of crisis, and what we know and don't know about how and why democracies succeed or fail.

DeVega also shares how the Trump administration is trying to kick immigrants out of the country if they dare to use public services such as Head Start or food stamps. He also reminds folks of the human cost of Trump's white supremacist war on black and brown immigrants by sharing a story about home healthcare workers and their importance to the most vulnerable Americans.

 


Chauncey DeVega is a politics staff writer for Salon. His essays can also be found at Chaunceydevega.com. He also hosts a weekly podcast, The Chauncey DeVega Show. Chauncey can be followed on Twitter and Facebook.

Wonder why Wayne LaPierre wasn't in the Army during Vietnam?

Whatever Trump Is Hiding Is Hurting All Of Us Now

Thomas L. Friedman FEB. 18, 2018

resident Trump in Washington on Friday. Credit Tom Brenner/The New York Times

Our democracy is in serious danger.

resident Trump is either totally compromised by the Russians or is a towering fool, or both, but either way he has shown himself unwilling or unable to defend America against a Russian campaign to divide and undermine our democracy.

That is, either Trump’s real estate empire has taken large amounts of money from shady oligarchs linked to the Kremlin — so much that they literally own him; or rumors are true that he engaged in sexual misbehavior while he was in Moscow running the Miss Universe contest, which Russian intelligence has on tape and he doesn’t want released; or Trump actually believes Russian President Vladimir Putin when he says he is innocent of intervening in our elections — over the explicit findings of Trump’s own C.I.A., N.S.A. and F.B.I. chiefs.

In sum, Trump is either hiding something so threatening to himself, or he’s criminally incompetent to be commander in chief. It is impossible yet to say which explanation for his behavior is true, but it seems highly likely that one of these scenarios explains Trump’s refusal to respond to Russia’s direct attack on our system — a quiescence that is simply unprecedented for any U.S. president in history. 

Russia is not our friend. It has acted in a hostile manner. And Trump keeps ignoring it all.

Up to now, Trump has been flouting the norms of the residency. Now Trump’s behavior amounts to a refusal to carry out his oath of office — to protect and defend the Constitution. Here’s an imperfect but close analogy: It’s as if George W. Bush had said after 9/11: “No big deal. I am going golfing over the weekend in Florida and blogging about how it’s all the Democrats’ fault — no need to hold a National Security Council meeting.”

At a time when the special prosecutor Robert Mueller — leveraging several years of intelligence gathering by the F.B.I., C.I.A. and N.S.A. — has brought indictments against 13 Russian nationals and three Russian groups — all linked in some way to the Kremlin — for interfering with the 2016 U.S. elections, America needs a resident who will lead our nation’s defense against this attack on the integrity of our electoral democracy.

What would that look like? He would educate the public on the scale of the problem; he would bring together all the stakeholders — state and local election authorities, the federal government, both parties and all the owners of social networks that the Russians used to carry out their interference — to mount an effective defense; and he would bring together our intelligence and military experts to mount an effective offense against Putin — the best defense of all.

What we have instead is a resident vulgarly tweeting that the Russians are “laughing their asses off in Moscow” for how we’ve been investigating their interventions — and exploiting the terrible school shooting in Florida — and the failure of the F.B.I. to properly forward to its Miami field office a tip on the killer — to throw the entire F.B.I. under the bus and create a new excuse to shut down the Mueller investigation.

Think for a moment how demented was Trump’s Saturday night tweet: “Very sad that the FBI missed all of the many signals sent out by the Florida school shooter. This is not acceptable. They are spending too much time trying to prove Russian collusion with the Trump campaign — there is no collusion. Get back to the basics and make us all proud!”

To the contrary. Our F.B.I., C.I.A. and N.S.A., working with the special counsel, have done us amazingly proud. They’ve uncovered a Russian program to divide Americans and tilt our last election toward Trump — i.e., to undermine the very core of our democracy — and Trump is telling them to get back to important things like tracking would-be school shooters. Yes, the F.B.I. made a mistake in Florida. But it acted heroically on Russia. What is more basic than protecting American democracy?

It is so obvious what Trump is up to: Again, he is either a total sucker for Putin or, more likely, he is hiding something that he knows the Russians have on him, and he knows that the longer Mueller’s investigation goes on, the more likely he will be to find and expose it.

Donald, if you are so innocent, why do you go to such extraordinary lengths to try to shut Mueller down? And if you are really the resident — not still head of the Trump Organization, who moonlights as resident, which is how you so often behave — why don’t you actually lead — lead not only a proper cyberdefense of our elections, but also an offense against Putin.

Putin used cyberwarfare to poison American politics, to spread fake news, to help elect a chaos candidate, all in order to weaken our democracy. We should be using our cyber-capabilities to spread the truth about Putin — just how much money he has stolen, just how many lies he has spread, just how many rivals he has jailed or made disappear — all to weaken his autocracy. That is what a real resident would be doing right now.

My guess is what Trump is hiding has to do with money. It’s something about his financial ties to business elites tied to the Kremlin. They may own a big stake in him. Who can forget that quote from his son Donald Trump Jr. from back in 2008: “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross section of a lot of our assets.” They may own our resident.

But whatever it is, Trump is either trying so hard to hide it or is so naïve about Russia that he is ready to not only resist mounting a proper defense of our democracy, he’s actually ready to undermine some of our most important institutions, the F.B.I. and Justice Department, to keep his compromised status hidden.

That must not be tolerated. This is code red. The biggest threat to the integrity of our democracy today is in the Oval Office.

Trump’s staggering dereliction of duty

By Ruth Marcus

National security adviser H.R. McMaster is in the news — and apparently in the presidential doghouse — for stating the obvious: that evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 election is “now really incontrovertible.” So it is appropriate to take, as this column’s theme, the title of McMaster’s book on the Vietnam war, “Dereliction of Duty.”

McMaster was writing about military leaders’ failure to stand up to presidents who insisted on pursuing an unwinnable war. Now, in the White House in which McMaster serves, the dereliction of duty starts at the top. And, as the past several days have shown, resident Trump’s failure is dereliction on a grand, unprecedented scale: We find ourselves at war without a commander in chief; in national mourning without a consoler in chief; and in political gridlock without a negotiator in chief.

The first is the most appalling and most terrifying. “Incontrovertible,” McMaster said, and so it is for anyone who bothers to read the indictment of 13 Russians for running a massive operation not only to disrupt the election but to do so to Trump’s benefit. But of course Trump never has and apparently never will be able to accept this. Is it his fragile ego that cannot tolerate the implicit challenge to his legitimacy? Is it something more sinister?

This much is clear: For whatever reason, Trump is unwilling to accept the reality of what happened in 2016 and, more alarming, unwilling to do his duty to seek to prevent it from happening again. We are at war with an enemy plotting to undermine our democracy, and our supposed leader, far from working to halt this, seems determined to ignore it. Where is Trump’s outrage now that the evidence against Russia is public, not that he needed to wait for that? It is invisible.

Instead, Trump’s anger is directed against McMaster, for omitting the untrue party line: “General McMaster forgot to say that the results of the 2016 election were not impacted or changed by the Russians and that the only Collusion was between Russia and Crooked H, the DNC and the Dems.

Remember the Dirty Dossier, Uranium, Speeches, Emails and the Podesta Company!”

Trump’s anger is directed against the democratic institutions that have rallied to discover what happened and seek to prevent its recurrence: “If it was the GOAL of Russia to create discord, disruption and chaos within the U.S. then, with all of the Committee Hearings, Investigations and Party hatred, they have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. They are laughing their asses off in Moscow. Get smart America!”

Laughing their asses off in Moscow, indeed. There has been not one word, not one syllable of residential anger directed toward the people who did this.

But there is no depth to which Trump will not sink in defense of the only thing he holds dear: himself. And so, the nation witnessed a tweet in which the resident, a leader to whom the country once looked for healing in times of national tragedy, instead used innocent victims, high school children mowed down in their own school, to make his bogus, self-interested point: “Very sad that the FBI missed all of the many signals sent out by the Florida school shooter. This is not acceptable. They are spending too much time trying to prove Russian collusion with the Trump campaign - there is no collusion. Get back to the basics and make us all proud!”

Did he? Did he really use dead children to attack an investigation into his campaign and his conduct in office? Yes, he did. This is a person devoid of empathy. He can experience the world only through the prism of his own ego. He can read the requisite words from a teleprompter — “To every parent, teacher, and child who is hurting so badly, we are here for you — whatever you need, whatever we can do, to ease your pain” — but he is incapable of feeling them. No one who imagines the shattered heart of a grieving parent could have written that despicable tweet.

Finally, a word about the “dreamers,” and the impending, unnecessary tragedy of Trump’s own making. He wanted a “bill of love” to protect the dreamers, Trump told us. “I will be signing it,” he said of any congressional deal to allow these promising innocents to remain. Trump broke the inadequate status quo for dreamers when he rescinded President Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals order allowing them to stay. Then he failed to fix it. Then, with an unnecessarily belligerent and premature veto threat, Trump got in the way of lawmakers of good faith attempting a solution.

“Dereliction of duty” is not a strong enough term to describe this man’s abysmal performance.

Read more from Ruth Marcus’s archive, follow her on Twitter or subscribe to her updates on Facebook.
 
Read more here:
 
Karen Tumulty: We’ve just hit a new presidential low

The Post’s View: What Trump still doesn’t get about Russian interference in the election

The Post’s View: Mr. Trump to the ‘dreamers’: Drop dead.

Brian Klaas: Russia is at war with our democracy. When will we finally start defending it?

Quinta Jurecic: Institutions can’t save America from Trump

Florida Gunman Who Killed 17 Previously Trained With White Nationalist Group

The man charged in this week’s Florida school shooting allegedly trained with a white supremacist group.

A spokesman for the right-wing group Republic of Florida claimed accused gunman Nikolas Cruz had been “brought up” by another member of the organization and took part in at least one training exercise in the Tallahassee area, reported ADL.

Jordan Jereb, who is believed to be the militia group’s leader, confirmed the association after self-described ROF members claimed on the online 4chan forum that Cruz had been a member.

The anti-government paramilitary group, which is only a few years old, describes itself as a “white civil rights organization fighting for white identitarian politics” and promotes the creation of a “white ethnostate.”

Jereb told ADL that his group had not directed Cruz to commit the shooting at his former school, and he said the ROF did not support his action.

Source

Note To Trump-Humpers: None Of Your Conspiracy Theories Exonerates Your Man

Posted by Rude One

Whenever some dingleberry of seeming bias against resident Donald Trump is sharted out by his state media on Fox "news," the resident and his supporters will crow that he is "vindicated" of one thing or other, usually that his campaign conspired with the Russian government to steal the 2016 election. Someone on some goddamn website or Twitter account finds some utterly minor thing that, blown up with graphics and set to sinister music, can be made to seem like the Deep State run by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama is just setting up poor, innocent, pure, God-chosen Donald Trump in order to frame him for some crime he wouldn't ever even contemplate committing.

They did it with the Uranium One bullshit, declaring that "the real Russia scandal." They did it with the Nunes memo, which just showed that the FBI follows leads. They accuse Republicans Robert Mueller and James Comey of bias, which seems to mean, "If you want to investigate whether Donald Trump and people around him might have committed crimes." And they're doing it with the text messages of a couple of FBI agents now, with the latest supposedly implicating President Obama (spoiler: it doesn't and you're stupid if you think it does).

But here's the deal: Not one of these things clears Trump or his awful family or his merry band of plague rats and rabid dogs that we are forced to call "the White House."

Let's lay it all out as clearly as possible once again (because this is shit I've talked about before).

- Hillary Clinton could have totally given away 20% of the U.S. uranium deposits to the Russians in order to secure donations to her family's charity (honestly, just writing that seems so patently absurd, it hurts my brain a little). Sure, she would have had to have bribed or threatened the dozens of other people involved in any decision about uranium, but, shit, she's Hillary Clinton, allegedly the stone cold murderer of dozens of political enemies, so, sure, yeah, let's say this could totally happen.

- The FBI could have totally lied about the Democratic Party's involvement in the Steele dossier, as the Nunes memo asserts (even though, factually, the FBI didn't lie, but we're saying if horseshit were gold here), in order to continue surveillance of Carter Page, which they had started in 2013, but, obviously, they totally knew that he would be named by Trump as one of his foreign policy advisers and just got a jump on it.

- James Comey could have totally been compromised into not charging Hillary Clinton with a crime on the emails, which somehow translates into something something no collusion Bill Clinton and Loretta Lynch in the parlor with a candlestick. (I really don't understand the "fuck evidence and punch reality in the dick" mindset.)

- Agents Peter Strzok and Lisa Page could have been totally biased against Trump and their texts about what an asshole he is indicate that they had preconceived notions about whatever part of the investigation they worked on. And there could totally be a secret society of FBI agents meeting in some off-site coven to do some hoodoo to Trump. And today's big revelation, that Page had texted in September 2016, "potus wants to know everything we’re doing," could totally mean Obama wanted to interfere with the Hillary email investigation and not that he wanted to know if the United States was being cyber-attacked by Russia, which is definitely what it was, but, you know, Hillary using a private email server is worse than Watergate times Teapot Dome times Iran-Contra, motherfuckers.

Goddamn, you people are fucking nuts.

And, you know, the only way that any of these conspiracies make sense as being real is if there is a massive uber-conspiracy involving everyone from grunt-level agents to the former president of the United States to discredit Trump and his administration, and, even then, it would have had to start 5 years ago.

Of course, all Trump needs for all this to work is a few craven Republicans, like Devin Nunes and Ron "Secret Sauce" Johnson, to run interference, as well as media outlets permanently attached to his poisonous man-teats. The idiot hordes will gobble it up like Jesus jizz.

Yet, if every single one of those conspiracies were true, it still does nothing to prove that Trump isn't a money-launderer who is in the back pocket of Vladimir Putin and other rich as fuck Russians, it does nothing to prove that Russia didn't use a bunch of different methods to tilt the election to Trump, and it also does nothing to change the outcome of the 2016 presidential race (the excuse that Trump and his spokeslackeys use as the reason why Democrats care about a foreign government fucking with our electoral process or that Trump may be compromised, not that they might actually give a shit that our sovereignty might have been breached).

If Donald Trump were innocent, you wouldn't need a single one of the crazy conspiracies to explain it all away. You'd have the truth. But truth is now just a ragged angel whose wings have been perforated by the birdshot of unending lies.

Trump vs. The Deep State

Why $1,000 One Time Bonuses Are Part Of The Tax Scam

By louis c

Let me give you a little background of what I've done for the past 22 years as work. I represent a union in the Greater Boston area and part of my responsibilities is to negotiate contracts with the employer on behalf of the union employees. The people I represent are mostly in the maintenance departments of schools, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, museums and sports' facilities.

The pay ranges from a low of about $26 per hour for unlicensed employees, to a high of $40 an hour for licensed personnel (electricians, plumbers, HVAC). So. let's just put the average at about $33 an hour for the sake of this argument.

A $1,000 bonus is not a pay raise. It represents less than fifty cents ($.50) an hour for the year. 40 hours a week x 52 weeks = 2080 x 50 cents is $1,040.

The one time bonus, instead of a 50 cent raise means the bonus is only for one year. A fifty cent raise is every year, as your salary has increased. On top of that, overtime is now calculated at the higher rate of pay, compounding the increase when you work the overtime.

I have generally been getting 2 and a half to 3 percent raises, per year, for 3 year contracts. This means we are getting 75 cents to a dollar increase each year, for each hour worked.

If I had to go into a ratification meeting on a three year contract with a $1,000 bonus and no raises for 3 years, they'd kill me, let alone not ratify the Tentative Agreement (TA).

When we enter the negotiations, we are often offered a bonus from the other side, for opener. A bonus doesn't increase the salary and dies after it is paid, as a salary increase lives on to the employee (and all the employees to follow) forever.

These well publicized one time bonuses should be seen for exactly what they are, part of the overall scam being perpetrated on the middle class workers of this country.

New York Attorney General To Investigate Firm That Sells Fake Followers

By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE JAN. 27, 2018

The New York attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman, on Saturday opened an investigation into a company that sold millions of fake followers on social media platforms, some of them copying real users’ personal information.

The company, Devumi, and its sale of automated followers to a swath of celebrities, sports stars, journalists and politicians, was detailed in a New York Times article published earlier on Saturday. 

While based in Florida, Devumi claims on its website to be based in New York City.

At least 55,000 of its “bot” accounts used names, pictures, hometowns and other details taken from people on Twitter. The real users hailed from every U.S. state, including New York, and dozens of countries, a Times analysis found.

“Impersonation and deception are illegal under New York law,” Mr. Schneiderman wrote on Twitter. “We’re opening an investigation into Devumi and its apparent sale of bots using stolen identities.”

Eric T. Schneiderman, the attorney general of New York. Credit Sasha Maslov for The New York Times

The investigation is the latest in a series of federal and state inquiries into the commercial and political abuse of fake accounts on social media. Tens of millions of fake accounts have been deployed to defraud businesses, influence political debates online and attract customers.

Social media companies, including Twitter and Facebook, have drawn intense scrutiny for not taking greater steps to weed them out. Many of the accounts identified by The Times appear to violate Twitter’s own policies, but remained active on the social media platform for years, each retweeting and promoting Devumi customers.

“The tactics used by Devumi on our platform and others as described by today’s NYT article violate our policies and are unacceptable to us,” Twitter said in a message posted on its media relations account on Saturday.

Mr. Schneiderman, who was first elected in 2010, has brought a series of cases focused on the emerging world of online fraud, impersonation and abuse. In December, he began an investigation into how the Federal Communications Commission was flooded with millions of fake comments on a proposal to scrap so-called net neutrality rules. Many of the comments used names and addresses borrowed from real people, almost always without their knowledge.

“The internet should be one of the greatest tools for democracy — but it’s increasingly being turned into an opaque, pay-to-play playground,” Mr. Schneiderman said.

A version of this article appears in print on January 28, 2018, on Page A20 of the New York edition with the headline: New York Opens Inquiry on Firm That Sells Fake Followers. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe

The Mueller Bombshell Proves Republicans Are Running Out Of Time

History will not be kind to Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, and others who stand by idly.

 

By Charles P. Pierce

Jan 26, 2018

6.5k

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It came with the wind through the silence of the night, a long, deep mutter, then a rising howl, and then the sad moan in which it died away. Again and again it sounded, the whole air throbbing with it, strident, wild and menacing.

—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles, 1902.

So, if I read the state of play correctly, special counsel Robert Mueller is investigating the president* and the president*’s administration* for obstruction of justice, and Mueller has been running this investigation for seven months knowing that the president* came within an ace of firing him last June for the purposes of, ah, obstructing justice. He’s had this information in his back pocket every time a member of the administration* came before him under oath. I’ve never been a criminal defendant charged with obstruction of justice, but this seems to me to be a bad situation for an obstructor of justice to be in.

The major scoop in The New York Times that has shaken up the world can be read in a number of different ways that all lead to the same conclusion. Right from jump, the president* has been scared right down to his silk boxers of what Mueller would discover regarding his campaign’s connections to Russian ratfcking and regarding his business connections to freshly laundered Russian cash. This conclusion does not change even if you think that White House counsel Don McGahn leaked this story to make himself the hero or to cover his own ass. This conclusion does not change even if you think the ratlines off the listing hulk of this administration are thick with fleeing rodents. This whole thing remains a product of the president*’s guilty mind.

(And the story did shake up the world. The president* went before a gathering in Davos on Friday and began raving about “fake news” and the perfidy of the American media. He got booed. Many cats were called. No shoes were thrown, but George W. Bush set a pretty high bar there.)

The story does explain the curious frenzy over the last week: the president*’s saying that he’s “looking forward” to a chat with Mueller, and that he might even deign to have the chat under oath; the apparent rush to present the Congress with a half-baked “compromise plan” on immigration that has no chance of passing the House of Representatives; and the fact that the president* took every member of his inner circle except his wife to Switzerland. I suspect those folks heard the baying of the hound even before Michael Schmidt and Maggie Haberman did. More ominous is the possibility that McGahn—or whomever—leaked this story because the president* is thinking about firing Mueller now, or in the near future, and whoever the leaker was understands very well what a monumental calamity that would be for all concerned.

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You would think that we would see the wheels turning now. You would think that Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell would find some slivers of patriotism between the cushions of their sofas and step up to fulfill the constitutional obligations of their respective offices. There is a genuine crisis on their doorsteps right now, and, next week, the president* is supposed to give his State of the Union address, and god alone knows what he’s going to say. They have not moved. They have given no indication that they will move. History will brand them as cowards and as traitors to the country’s best ideals. History’s not going to be kind to a lot of people who are living through these insane times.

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McConnell is so full of shit that he should be declared a hazardous waste site

Posted by Rude One

Not for one single second should anyone trust Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on his vaguely-worded fake promise to bring up a bill for the undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children. You know, the Dreamers. McConnell is so full of shit that he should be declared a hazardous waste site, but people keep wanting to build houses on that toxic bit of Senate real estate.

Democrats caved after making multiple offers for ways to reopen the federal government that would either force action on the DREAM Act or contain protection for those recipients of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. They even offered to fund the stupid fucking wall. It went nowhere.

To be fair, the bill to reopen the government until February 8 does contain six years of funding for the Children's Health Insurance Program, which takes that off the table on the upcoming negotiations.

And, to be fair, the shutdown has brought even more attention to the plight of the Dreamers, whose path to citizenship is supported by a huge majority of Americans, and the fact that their fate is in the hands of the callous GOP and their mad leader, Donald Trump. When the Republicans fail to do shit, and they will fail to do shit, it will (hopefully) be as clear as can be who broke their word when the government shuts down again. But we have reached the limit of trust in the political process.

At this year's Women's March, I saw many more signs about immigrants compared to last year. Hell, we even chanted pro-immigration slogans in New York City. But I've started wondering at what point is marching not enough of a statement, that the argument is not being made strongly and forcefully.

Anyone with a fucking ounce of heart was sickened by the sight of Jorge Garcia, saying goodbye to his wife and children in Michigan before being deported to Mexico, a country that he left 30 years ago, when he was ten. Garcia is, for all intents and purposes, American. He is married to an American woman. He has American children. Jesus fuck, can't we have some kind of squatters' rights to at least be left the fuck alone?

And maybe you were outraged at the idea of U.S. Customs and Border Patrol officers being able to walk onto a Greyhound bus in Florida and ask people for proof of citizenship. It's a "show me your papers" scenario right out of every anti-Nazi or anti-Soviet Union movie or book. They removed a woman from the bus and her family hasn't heard from her since. Sure, there may be some legitimate reason for the CBP's actions towards the woman. But if they really are routinely asking for your i.d., that's some 4th Amendment-violating shit right there.

And then maybe you can stomach watching this BBC report on Pacific County, Washington, which went for Trump by 7 points. The area has seen kids pulled out of schools to be with their deported parents, industries running low on workers, and general shock that, holy shit, "deportation" isn't just for undocumented murderers (of which there are precious few, despite the GOP's best efforts to scare you into thinking otherwise).

I keep wondering when is there going to be a breaking point. When is there going to be a point where the citizens of a town or city simply form a human wall against the Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers who have been showing up in hospitals and courthouses and other previously "safe" places? When will real resistance, peaceful, nonviolent, but decidedly not just about your tweets or your government-sanctioned march, come to be? When will people say that enough is enough, get themselves arrested, and all flood the judicial system so that it grinds to a halt (from the dying snail's pace it's on)?

In New Fairfield, Connecticut, another man with an American wife and two American children, Joel Colindrés, who escaped violence in Guatemala 14 years ago to come to the United States, was ordered to leave the country. He is currently appealing this decision, and several dozen people came out in this town north of Danbury to protest his possible deportation. What if agents come to take him away and some of those protesters decide that they will not allow it to happen? That is the wall that's needed, the humane, caring, righteous wall to halt the excesses of a government gone as crazy as its leader in tearing apart families, that is harming our citizens, especially the children of the deported.

This will be part  of the next phase of resistance. It will happen. Perhaps with Colindrés, perhaps with Lukasz Niec. Niec is the doctor in Michigan (the fuck is up with ICE agents in Michigan?) who was brought to the United States from Poland in 1979, when he was 5 years old. He received permanent resident status in 1989. But because he had a couple of low-level misdemeanor convictions from when he was a teenager, he is subject to deportation. He's a fucking doctor. He can't speak Polish. He's not even undocumented. Hell, I left Queens when I was 4, and I wouldn't know what the fuck to do if I were sent back there, let alone a completely foreign country.

It's fucking gut check time. We are into "First they came for" territory. We've gone from the undocumented immigrants to the Dreamers to legal residents. When will we speak out? When will we act? Or will we once again wait until it is us?

The government is operating against what a majority of the nation believes, and it is harming communities, as well as families, hurting the nation in the pursuit of a blatantly nationalistic and, frankly, anti-American goal. It is long, long past the time for a new non-violent resistance movement to protect the soul of the country. And if you believe that soul is white, you can fuck off to some fantasy place and wallow in hate and ignorance.

Dear Mr. Trump...In truth the only shithole nation is the one that tolerates a racist resident.

HYPOCRITES!!! Family Values Republicans Silent As Donald Trump Pays Porn Stars Hush Money

In this ‘Dollemore Daily’, Jesse addresses the reporting surrounding the $130,000 payment that was allegedly paid to porn actress Stephanie Clifford (Stormy Daniels), by Donald Trump, in an effort to keep her silent about their 2006 affair.

Have You Heard...

Stupidity

Martin Luther King Would Fuck Trump's Shit Up (Africa Edition)

Posted by Rude One

While conservatives continue their annual desperate attempt to colonize the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., King stubbornly remains a revolutionary figure, one who was blatantly socialist and vehemently anti-capitalist. In fact, King drew a direct line between Western capitalism and the exploitation of African countries. He knew what had turned those countries into "shitholes." A trip to Ghana in 1957 to celebrate that nation's independence from England and the election of a new prime minister solidified King's view that the treatment of African Americans by whites in the United States was strikingly similar to the effects of colonialism in western and southern Africa.

In a sermon after his Ghana trip called "Birth of a New Nation" (goddamn, you know King knew exactly what he was doing with that title), King connected Ghana to the slaves in biblical Egypt ridding themselves of their chains, and he explained what had just happened:

"Prior to March the sixth, 1957, there existed a country known as the Gold Coast. This country was a colony of the British Empire. This country was situated in that vast continent known as Africa. I’m sure you know a great deal about Africa, that continent with some two hundred million people, and it extends and covers a great deal of territory...

"For years the Gold Coast was exploited and dominated and trampled over. The first European settlers came in there about 1444, the Portuguese, and they started legitimate trade with the people in the Gold Coast. They started dealing with them with their gold, and in turn they gave them guns and ammunition and gunpowder and that type of thing. Well, pretty soon America was discovered a few years later in the fourteen hundreds, and then the British West Indies. And all of these growing discoveries brought about the slave trade."

King continued to tell the story of the Gold Coast, bringing it to the then-present: "Finally, in 1850, Britain won out, and she gained possession of the total territorial expansion of the Gold Coast. From 1850 to 1957, March sixth, the Gold Coast was a colony of the British Empire. And as a colony she suffered all of the injustices, all of the exploitation, all of the humiliation that comes as a result of colonialism. But like all slavery, like all domination, like all exploitation, it came to the point that the people got tired of it."

After talking about how the Gold Coast became Ghana, King brought it back to his opening images, "Ghana reminds us that freedom never comes on a silver platter. It’s never easy. Ghana reminds us that whenever you break out of Egypt, you better get ready for stiff backs. You better get ready for some homes to be bombed. You better get ready for some churches to be bombed. You better get ready for a lot of nasty things to be said about you, because you getting out of Egypt. And whenever you break aloose from Egypt, the initial response of the Egyptian is bitterness."

Martin Luther King would fuck up the shit of Donald Trump and his coterie of Republican motherfuckers because that is what he did, and he would specifically fuck up Trump's shit now over the ersatz president's inability to see beyond his own racism when it comes to African nations and their people. King would call out the oppressors for their oppression because that, too, is what he did.

When we remember King, it should always be as a balls-to-the-wall fighter for people of color and, eventually, for all disempowered people. He would be in the streets, marching now, and he would be confronted by white people with tiki torches and uncontrollable cops, and Donald Trump would blame King for any violence that took place because that is what he does.

Did Trump ever really win the election? What else did Russia do to cheat for him?