Malware Infected All Eddie Bauer Stores In U.S., Canada

By Brian Krebs

Clothing store chain Eddie Bauer said today it has detected and removed malicious software from point-of-sale systems at all of its 350+ stores in North America, and that credit and debit cards used at those stores during the first six months of 2016 may have been compromised in the breach. The acknowledgement comes nearly six weeks after KrebsOnSecurity first notified the clothier about a possible intrusion at stores nationwide.



On July 5, 2016, KrebsOnSecurity reached out to Bellevue, Wash., based Eddie Bauer after hearing from several sources who work in fighting fraud at U.S. financial institutions. All of those sources said they’d identified a pattern of fraud on customer cards that had just one thing in common: They were all recently used at some of Eddie Bauer’s 350+ locations in the U.S. The sources said the fraud appeared to stretch back to at least January 2016.

A spokesperson for Eddie Bauer at the time said the company was grateful for the outreach but that it hadn’t heard any fraud complaints from banks or from the credit card associations.

Earlier today, however, an outside public relations firm circled back on behalf of Eddie Bauer. That person told me Eddie Bauer — working with the FBI and an outside computer forensics firm — had detected and removed card-stealing malware from cash registers at all of its locations in the United States and Canada.

The retailer says it believes the malware was capable of capturing credit and debit card numbers from customer transactions made at all 350 Eddie Bauer stores in the United States and Canada between January 2, 2016 to July 17, 2016. The company emphasized that this breach did not impact purchases made at the company’s online store eddiebauer.com.

“While not all transactions during this period were affected, out of an abundance of caution, Eddie Bauer is offering identity protection services to all customers who made purchases or returns during this period,” the company said in a press release issued directly after the markets closed in the U.S. today.

Given the volume of point-0f-sale malware attacks on retailers and hospitality firms in recent months, it would be nice if each one of these breach disclosures didn’t look and sound exactly the same. For example, in addition to offering customers the predictable and irrelevant credit monitoring services topped with bland assurances that the “security of our customers’ information is a top priority,” breached entities could offer the cyber defenders of the world just a few details about the attack tools and online staging grounds the intruders used.

That way, other companies could use the information to find out if they are similarly victimized and to stop the bleeding of customer card data as quickly as possible. Eddie Bauer’s spokespeople say the company has no intention of publishing these so-called “indicators of compromise,” but emphasized that Eddie Bauer worked closely with the FBI and outside security experts.

For more on the importance of IOCs in helping to detect and ultimately stymie cybercrime, check out last Saturday’s story about IOCs released by Visa in connection with the recent intrusion at Oracle’s MICROS point-of-sale unit. And for the record, I have no information connecting this breach or any other recent POS malware attack with the breach at Oracle’s MICROS unit. If that changes, hopefully you’ll read about it here first.

Alex Jones Is Excited By Trump’s Retreat From Our Fact Based Reality

By Hrafnkell Haraldsson



Trump’s complete surrender to the fantasy world of paranoia and conspiracy theories has Alex Jones very excited. Yes, Alex Jones is excited by Trump’s retreat from our fact-based reality into a Breitbart-based reality. It hardly needs be said the two have nothing to do with one another.

As CNN’s Brian Stelter put it, the addition of Breitbart’s Stephen Bannon as chief executive of the Trump campaign means “nothing is off limits now,” and “we’re going to see the most fringy ideas, the most right-wing ideas bubble up to the surface.”

And you thought it was bad before.

According to Jones, the addition of Bannon means a “globalist’s nightmare” because of Bannon’s focus on “a globalist New World Order takeover program.” This is Bannon’s milieu, a place so out there that even Tolkien’s elves and orcs wouldn’t feel at home. Because as Jones says,
“Just because the old mainstream media calls us conspiracy theorist when we cover facts, doesn’t mean we should then bow down to them.”

Oh dear.

Take a listen courtesy of Media Matters for America:

We also have, obviously, massive news dealing with the Trump campaign, with the chairman and head of Breitbart, Stephen Bannon, who is a patriot and who is an anti-globalist, taking over as the CEO/chairman of the entire campaign.

Paul Manafort, who has also been doing a great job, is going to be staying on in the position he’s at right now. This is just an expansion of the campaign in Bannon’s own words and in Manafort’s own words. And I talked to Roger Stone, he concurs with that and said that he was also part of the research and trying to bring the head of Breitbart, who also heads up the institute dealing with government corruption, fighting government corruption. He’s the co-founder and executive chairman of Government Accountability Institute and the executive chairman of Breitbart News LLC.

You’ve noticed since he’s been running Breitbart it’s gotten more hardcore, more pro-Second Amendment — not that it was ever bad, and really tells it like it is about the true nature of what’s happening, that this is a globalist New World Order takeover program.

I mean, we have the emails from the U.N., we have the emails from the normal cast of characters like George Soros. We know what’s going on, and just because the old mainstream media calls us conspiracy theorist when we cover facts, doesn’t mean we should then bow down to them.

And that’s why they’re calling him a street fighter, a brawler. The media is scared of this move because Manafort’s pretty hardcore but not compared to Trump.

Obviously you get Stephen Bannon and these other folks who have joined the campaign in there, this is really creating a globalist nightmare.

“Just because the old mainstream media calls us conspiracy theorist when we cover facts, doesn’t mean we should then bow down to them.”

Well…it’s not just the mainstream media, buddy. It’s most people. My third grader was into stories about the Illuminati. By the time fifth grade was over he knew better. Now you’d blame public schooling for that. I thank public schooling for that.

Bretibart is nothing these days but a Trump fansite, or as former editor-at-large Ben Shapiro wrote in The Daily Wire, “[Bannon] has sold out Andrew’s mission in order to back another bully, Donald Trump; he has shaped the company into Trump’s personal Pravda.”

“With Bannon embracing Trump…Breitbart has become the alt-right go-to website…pushing white ethno-nationalism as a legitimate response to political correctness, and the comment section turning into a cesspool for white supremacist mememakers.”

Well…Hitler and the Nazi’s preferred pseudo-science to the real thing too. So did Stalin. Millions died in each case. Millions will lose their jobs at least in a Trump administration as a result of clinging to fantasy over fact. Seems dictators can’t stomach the world-as-it-is and need a fake version more congenial to their wants and desires.

Cults of personality don’t stand up to close inspection.

Bannon, like Jones, hasn’t had one foot in the pool of our shared reality in a long time. Neither, apparently, has Trump. It’s the stuff of fiction to see something like the Trump campaign, and I hope you are keeping your diaries updated, because if we’re lucky, we’ll never see anything like it again.

The Trump campaign is a bad acid trip, which unfortunately, we’ve been pulled into by some Alice Through the Looking Glass effect. Seriously, ladies and gentlemen, it doesn’t get any more bizarre up than this.

Now we know the real reason Aetna bailed on the Affordable Care Act

By Bob Bryan

On Monday night, news broke that one of the five largest insurers in the US, Aetna, was leaving 70% of the counties in which it offers insurance through the Affordable Care Act's public healthcare exchanges.

The move was seen as a huge blow to the future of the act, making Aetna the third large insurer, after United Healthcare and Humana, to significantly reduce its Obamacare business.

Aetna cited the large losses that the company has incurred from the exchange business — $200 million in the second quarter alone — when explaining its decision to roll back its business.

These statements, however, appeared to be a dramatic turnaround from the company's first-quarter earnings call in April, when CEO Mark Bertolini said the firm planned to stay in the exchanges and that the company was "in a very good place to make this a sustainable program."

Now, however, it appears a large reason for the shift in tone was the Department of Justice's lawsuit to block Aetna's merger with rival Humana.

A July letter, acquired by Huffington Post reporters Jonathan Cohn and Jeffrey Young, outlined Aetna's thinking on the public exchanges if the deal with Humana were blocked. The letter from Bertolini to the DOJ outlined the effect of a possible merger on its Affordable Care Act business.

For one thing, Bertolini notes that the cost savings from the Humana deal would allow the companies to further expand coverage into parts of the US.

"As we add new territories, given the additional startup costs of each new territory, we will incur additional losses," the letter said. "Our ability to withstand these losses is dependent on our achieving anticipated synergies in the Humana acquisition."

Additionally, the letter seemed to foretell the move on Monday. Here's the key passage (emphasis added):

"Our analysis to date makes clear that if the deal were challenged and/or blocked we would need to take immediate actions to mitigate public exchange and ACA small group losses. Specifically, if the DOJ sues to enjoin the transaction, we will immediately take action to reduce our 2017 exchange footprint.

 

"We currently plan, as part of our strategy following the acquisition, to expand from 15 states in 2016 to 20 states in 2017. However, if we are in the midst of litigation over the Humana transaction, given the risks described above, we will not be able to expand to the five additional states. 

"In addition, we would also withdraw from at least five additional states where generating a market return would take too long for us to justify, given the costs associated with a potential breakup of the transaction. In other words, instead of expanding to 20 states next year, we would reduce our presence to no more than 10 states."

 

In other words, the cost of fighting the DOJ would make Aetna unable to sustain the losses incurred from the public exchanges.

According to a letter from the DOJ provided by Aetna, the DOJ asked the company what the effect would be on the firm's Affordable Care Act business if the merger were not completed. Thus, Aetna responded with its letter.

A spokesperson for Aetna said the decision to roll back the coverage was not because of the DOJ's lawsuit, but rather realizing the full details of the losses. The statement from the spokesperson reads, in part:

"In the time since we submitted our written response to DOJ and provided a courtesy copy to [the Department of Health and Human Services], we gained full visibility into our second quarter individual public exchange results, which — similar to other participants on the public exchanges — showed a significant deterioration. That deterioration, and not the DOJ challenge to our Humana transaction, is ultimately what drove us to announce the narrowing of our public exchange presence for the 2017 plan year. 

"If the Humana transaction is eventually blocked, which we don't believe it will be, the underlying logic of our written response to DOJ would still apply with regard to the public exchanges where we will participate in 2017." 

In the original letter from Aetna to the DOJ, Bertolini said that if the company lost the lawsuit and the deal were eventually scuttled, Aetna would drop its remaining Affordable Care Act business and leave the public exchanges entirely.

The DOJ declined to comment.

The DOJ blocked the merger between Aetna and Humana, along with the merger of fellow big-five insurers Anthem and Cigna, on the grounds that consolidating the industry would lead to lower competition and higher costs for consumers.

"They would leave much of the multi-trillion health insurance industry in the hands of just three mammoth companies, restricting competition in key markets," Attorney General Loretta Lynch said when announcing the lawsuit to block the mergers.

Typically the number of independent options available to consumers is correlated with lower costs.
"If the big five were to become the big three, not only would the bank accounts of the American people suffer, but the American people themselves," Lynch said.

The companies countered that the merger would not affect consumers and would allow the combined firms to be more cost-efficient and sustainable.

Read the full letter from Bertolini, via The Huffington Post, here »

FBI Just Threatened The Entire Republican Party With Prosecution

The Republican Party has been squirming to find anything incriminating on Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in order to derail her presidential campaign and their obsession with her emails is now the stuff of legends. Despite the fact the the FBI has conducted an investigation and found no criminal intent by Clinton, the Republican Party continues to come after her, especially in the wake of Trump’s miserably failing campaign. 

House Republicans have managed to get their hands on the notes from Clinton’s interview with the FBI about her email server. Now, the FBI has issued a clear warning to Republicans that if they leak any of the notes, they can face prosecution. Here is their statement:

“Consistent with our commitment to transparency with respect to the FBI’s investigation to former Secretary of State Clinton’s use of a personal server, the FBI is providing certain relevant materials to appropriate congressional committees  assist them in their oversight responsibilities in this matter. The material contains classified and other sensitive information and is being provided with the expectation it will not be disseminated or disclosed without FBI concurrence.”

JUST IN: FBI issues statement on giving Congress notes from interview w/ @HillaryClinton about private email server: pic.twitter.com/0Np19YoEe5

— Paula Reid (@PaulaReidCBS) August 16, 2016

Here is what Politico reported:

“As Donald Trump slides into oblivion and takes the Republican Party with him, the GOP-controlled House Oversight Committee is trying to revive the Clinton email scandal. House Republicans are trying to build a case for the Democratic nominee to be charged with perjury, but everyone understands what is really happening.”

Democrat and member of the House Oversight Committee Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) said:

“The FBI already determined unanimously that there is insufficient evidence of criminal wrongdoing. Republicans are now investigating the investigator in a desperate attempt to resuscitate this issue, keep it in the headlines, and distract from Donald Trump’s sagging poll numbers.”

The FBI reminded desperate Republicans that anyone who leaks information can face criminal prosecution. However, desperate times call for desperate measures so we’ll see how this plays out as some of them, especially those who support trump, a man who has called for foreign governments to spy on the United States, deserve prison time.

Source

Trump Is Self-Sabotaging His Campaign Because He Never Really Wanted The Job In The First Place

He's running for president to get a better deal for "The Apprentice."

By Michael Moore / AlterNet

August 16, 2016

Photo Credit: Tinseltown / Shutterstock.com

Donald Trump never actually wanted to be president of the United States. I know this for a fact. I’m not going to say how I know it. I’m not saying that Trump and I shared the same agent or lawyer or stylist or, if we did, that that would have anything to do with anything. And I’m certainly not saying that I ever overheard anything at those agencies or in the hallways of NBC or anywhere else. But there are certain people reading this right now, they know who they are, and they know that every word in the following paragraphs actually happened.

Trump was unhappy with his deal as host and star of his hit NBC show, “The Apprentice” (and “The Celebrity Apprentice”). Simply put, he wanted more money. He had floated the idea before of possibly running for president in the hopes that the attention from that would make his negotiating position stronger. But he knew, as the self-proclaimed king of the deal makers, that saying you’re going to do something is bupkus—DOING it is what makes the bastards sit up and pay attention.

Trump had begun talking to other networks about moving his show. This was another way to get leverage—the fear of losing him to someone else—and when he “quietly” met with the head of one of those networks, and word got around, his hand was strengthened. He knew then that it was time to play his Big Card.

He decided to run for president.

Of course he wouldn’t really have to RUN for president—just make the announcement, hold a few mega-rallies that would be packed with tens of thousands of fans, and wait for the first opinion polls to come in showing him—what else!—in first place! And then he would get whatever deal he wanted, worth millions more than what he was currently being paid.

So, on June 16th of last year, he rode down his golden escalator and opened his mouth. With no campaign staff, no 50-state campaign infrastructure—neither of which he needed because, remember, this wasn’t going to be a real campaign—and with no prepared script, he went off the rails at his kick-off press conference, calling Mexicans “rapists” and “drug dealers” and pledging to build a wall to keep them all out. Jaws in the room were agape. His comments were so offensive, NBC, far from offering him a bigger paycheck, immediately fired him with this terse statement: “Due to the recent derogatory statements by Donald Trump regarding immigrants, NBC Universal is ending its business relationship with Mr. Trump.” NBC said it was also canceling the beauty pageants owned by Trump: Miss USA and Miss Universe. BOOM.

Trump was stunned. So much for the art of the deal. He never expected this, but he stuck to his plan anyway to increase his “value” in the eyes of the other networks by showing them how many millions of Americans wanted him to be their leader. He knew, of course (and the people he trusted also told him) that there was no way he was actually going to win many (if any) of the primaries, and he certainly would not become the Republican nominee, and NEVER would he EVER be the president of the United States. Of course not! Nor would he want to be! The job of being president is WORK and BORING and you have to live in the GHETTO of Washington, DC, in a SMALL 200 year old house that’s damp and dreary and has only TWO floors! A “second floor” is not a penthouse! But none of this was a worry, as “Trump for President” was only a ruse that was going to last a few months.

And then something happened. And to be honest, if it happened to you, you might have reacted the same way. Trump, to his own surprise, ignited the country, especially among people who were the opposite of billionaires. He went straight to #1 in the polls of Republican voters. Up to 30,000 boisterous supporters started showing up to his rallies. TV ate it up. He became the first American celebrity to be able to book himself on any show he wanted to be on—and then NOT show up to the studio! From “Face the Nation” to “The Today Show” to Anderson Cooper, he was able to simply phone in and they’d put him on the air live. He could’ve been sitting on his golden toilet in Trump Tower for all we knew—and the media had no problem with any of that. In fact, CBS head Les Moonves famously admitted that Trump was very good for TV ratings and selling ads—music to the ears the NBC-spurned narcissist.

Trump fell in love with himself all over again, and he soon forgot his mission to get a good deal for a TV show. A TV show? Are you kldding—that’s for losers like Chris Harrison, whoever that is (host of “The Bachelorette”). He was no longer king of the dealmakers—he was King of the World! His tiniest musings would be discussed and dissected everywhere by everybody for days, weeks, months! THAT never happened on “The Apprentice”! Host a TV show? He was the star of EVERY TV SHOW—and, soon, winning nearly every primary!

And then… you can see the moment it finally dawned on him… that “Oh shit!” revelation: “I’m actually going to be the Republican nominee—and my rich beautiful life is fucking over!” It was the night he won the New Jersey primary. The headline on TIME.com was, “Donald Trump’s Subdued Victory Speech After Winning New Jersey.” Instead of it being one of his loud, brash speeches, it was downright depressing. No energy, no happiness, just the realization that now he was going to have to go through with this stunt that he started. It was no longer going to be performance art. He was going to have to go to work.

Soon, though, his karma caught up with him. Calling Mexicans “rapists” should have disqualified him on Day One (or for saying Obama wasn’t born here, as he did in 2011). No, it took 13 months of racist, sexist, stupid comments before he finally undid himself with the trifecta of attacking the family of a slain soldier, ridiculing the Purple Heart and suggesting that the pro-gun crowd assassinate Hillary Clinton. By this past weekend, the look on his face said it all—“I hate this! I want my show back!” But it was too late. He was damaged goods, his brand beyond repair, a worldwide laughing stock—and worse, a soon-to-be loser.

But, let me throw out another theory, one that assumes that Trump isn’t as dumb or crazy as he looks. Maybe the meltdown of the past three weeks was no accident. Maybe it’s all part of his new strategy to get the hell out of a race he never intended to see through to its end anyway. Because, unless he is just “crazy,” the only explanation for the unusual ramping up, day after day, of one disgustingly reckless statement after another is that he’s doing it consciously (or subconsciously) so that he’ll have to bow out or blame “others” for forcing him out. Many now are sensing the end game here because they know Trump seriously doesn’t want to do the actual job—and, most importantly, he cannot and WILL NOT suffer through being officially and legally declared a loser—LOSER!—on the night of November 8th.

Trust me, I’ve met the guy. Spent an afternoon with him. He would rather invite the Clintons AND the Obamas to his next wedding than have that scarlet letter (“L”) branded on his forehead seconds after the last polls have closed on that night, the evening of the final episode of the permanently cancelled Donald Trump Shit-Show.

Michael Moore is an Academy Award-winning filmmaker and author. He directed and produced Roger & Me, Bowling for Columbine, Fahrenheit 9/11, and Sicko. He has also written seven books, most recently, Mike’s Election Guide 2008

King Of Comedy

Donald Trump, POW, Prisoner of Wharton

His remarks about John McCain's service drew sharp criticism, but what about Donald Trump's own POW status during Vietnam?

Trump throws a tantrum over reports that his campaign is a ‘disaster of biblical proportions’

U.S. Republican Donald Trump on Saturday repeated his attack on President Barack Obama that he helped “found” Islamic State and railed against media reports that his campaign is failing, at a campaign rally in Connecticut, a state where he has a long-shot of being victorious.

Speaking for more than an hour in a sweltering room, Trump spent a significant portion of his speech complaining about the media.

He again threatened to revoke the press credentials of The New York Times. The credentials allow reporters access to press-only areas of his campaign events. He has already banned other outlets, including The Washington Post.

On Saturday, the New York newspaper published an article detailing failed efforts to make Trump focus his campaign on the general election.

“These are the most dishonest people,” Trump said. “Maybe we’ll start thinking about taking their press credentials away from them.”

Trump visiting Connecticut, a heavily Democratic state, raised eyebrows among many Republicans.

“It’s asinine that he would be in Connecticut holding a public rally less than 90 days before the election,” said Republican strategist Matt Mackowiak. “You don’t see Hillary publicly campaigning in Idaho and Mississippi. I have to think this proves the candidate is running the campaign, which explains why it’s such a disaster of biblical proportions.”

At several points the crowd chanted “lock her up,” a frequent campaign rally chant in reference to Trump’s Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.

Trump told the crowd that normally he responds by saying he intends instead to defeat her in the Nov. 8 election, but this time added, “You know what? You have a point!”

Trump also dropped his recent efforts to say he was not being serious when he said Obama was the “founder” of the Islamic State militant group .

“It’s the opinion of myself and a lot of people that he was the founder,” Trump told the crowd.

Democrats and Republicans alike have criticized Trump’s assertion as patently false.

Trump took a detour from attacking Clinton’s economic record to discuss the 1998 scandal involving White House intern Monica Lewinsky and former President Bill Clinton, whom Republicans attempted to impeach.

“Remember when he said, he did not have sex with that woman, and a couple of weeks later, oh you got me,” Trump said, to cheers. He then made reference to a blue dress that became a symbol in the investigation. “I’m so glad they kept that dress, so glad they kept that dress, because it shows what the hell they are.”

(Editing by Sandra Maler)

Team Trump is a disaster: It’s not just the candidate — his entire staff is ill-equipped for a presidential campaign

Trump has filled out his economic policy team with a long list of wealthy donors and female right-wing cranks

By Heather Digby Parton
 

Donald Trump; Betsy McCaughey (Credit: AP/David Furst/Faleh Kheiber/Photo montage by Salon)

 

Donald Trump says he isn’t running against crooked Hillary Clinton anymore, he’s running against the crooked media. This comment was in response to a couple of scorching articles by The New York Times and the AP over the week-end that featured off the record interviews with people inside the campaign making it clear that it’s in chaos, with Trump himself having serious mood swings and refusing to listen to anyone. This seems obviously true judging by the “low energy” desultory performances in Florida on Friday followed by his highly agitated behavior in a rally in Connecticut on Saturday after the articles were published online. By Sunday he was refuting the notion that he’d ever agreed to follow the advice of his small cadre of political advisers, tweeting like Popeye: “I am who I am!”

 

It had been yet another bad week in which he pretty much stepped all over what was supposed to be his big economic speech. He’d gathered quite a group of big donors along with a few of the GOP old guard to pull together a policy designed to reassure contributors and confused normal Republicans that he had some kind of economic plan.

Though the speech was obviously conceived as a standard issue conservative economic manifesto, the Fact Checks were brutal which raises an interesting question. If that speech was a product of Trump’s team rather than his own off-the-cuff remarks at a rally, who are these people?

Prior to the speech it was announced that he was being advised by 13 CEOs, hedge fund managers, Wall Street investors, a couple of obscure economists and the Club for Growth’s Steven Moore.

There are some big names among them, like hedge fund manager John Paulson, best known for his prescient 2007 bet against the mortgage market and Hollywood financier Steven Mnuchin, Trump’s finance chair. (In fact, there are so many men named Steve among them that wags are just calling his advisory group “the Steves”.)

Trump promised to flesh out more details as time went on but nobody’s heard a word about it from him since, leaving members of of his team to spend the rest of the week trying to explain his plans on TV while Trump was on the stump creating firestorm after firestorm. Steven Moore was everywhere explaining Trump’s innovative view that tax cuts for the wealthy always create growth while CEO of CKE restaurants, Andy Puzder, spent the weekend on CNN defending Trump’s electoral strategy for some reason and told the Huffington Post that he believes in Trump because “he certainly has all the indications of wealth.” Trump’s senior economic adviser, former Reagan official David Malpass ineffectually tried to make a case for the estate tax helping the average Joe.

Trump, meanwhile, added a little zazz to his usual red-faced stump rant by holding up charts (which only the people in the front row will be able to see.) One of them is a list of Arab countries from which the Clinton Foundation supposedly received millions of dollars after which the “Clinton State Department” then sent military equipment.Trump surrogate Jason Miller said the charts originated from “the policy department” which is odd since this one came from a far-right web site and was tweeted out weeks ago by David Duke, replete with a Star of David. (It’s unclear if the star was on the chart Trump used for the rally.) It turns out that Trump has quite the diverse policy department: hedge fund managers to KKK Grand Wizards.

But for all that the one thing everyone noticed about his economic team was the fact that he couldn’t manage to find even one worthy woman in the whole country. This is not surprising since when Trump was asked recently which women he would consider putting in his cabinet the only name he could come up with was his daughter Ivanka. But never say he is unresponsive to criticism. Last Thursday he released an additional list of economic advisers that included eight women and one man to his team. (The man was Anthony “the Mooch” Scaramuchi who I wrote about here.)

The most interesting of the bunch of mostly businesswomen (no economists among them) is the notorious former lieutenant governor of New York Betsy McCaughey best known for being one of the tools that tanked Hillary Clinton’s health care plan back in 1994 and years later spreading the malicious misinformation that Obamacare featured “death panels.” She’s also known as a fierce foe of immigration reform due to the danger it presents to the GOP’s electoral prospects and she cheers on government shutdowns and Bundy-style anti-government protests. There couldn’t be a more perfect female “policy adviser” for Trump. It’s a wonder she took so long to jump on his crazy train.

So Trump has filled out his economic policy team with a long list of wealthy donors and female right-wing cranks even as he still gets a good bit of his information from his Twitter feed. Today he is slated to give another stilted teleprompter speech on foreign policy which his campaign says Trump will use to “put blame for the rise of ISIS at feet of Obama and Clinton dating to 2009.”  It’s clear that the 70 plus foreign policy bigwigs who signed a letter condemning Trump are not among his advisers and nobody really knows who they might be. Speculation is that Senator Jeff Sessions is a big influence along with the flamboyantly Strangelovian General Michael Flynn. Newt Gingrich and Rudolph Giuliani are fluttering around in the background.

Oh, and there’s his campaign manager Paul Manafort who knows a lot about foreign affairs, especially in the Ukraine. (This blockbuster New York Times expose headlined “Secret Ledger in Ukraine Lists Cash for Donald Trump’s Campaign Chief” hit the internet like a nuclear bomb last night.) Everyone will no doubt listen closely to Trump’s speech about NATO and Russia in light of what we’ve learned.

But there’s really only one serious adviser to Donald Trump as he will tell you himself: “I’m speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain and I’ve said a lot of things.”

Heather Digby Parton, also known as "Digby," is a contributing writer to Salon. She was the winner of the 2014 Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism. 

 

More Heather Digby Parton.

Niantic Says It'll Perma-Ban Pokémon Go Cheaters

By Carli Velocci

Niantic Inc., the company behind that app you won’t stop hearing about Pokémon Go, has taken a stand against cheaters in the past, or anybody who violates its terms of service, such as sending out cease and desist letters to tracker apps. Now the company has stated that it will outright ban users for those violations.

In a post on the official website, Niantic writes that accounts can be fully terminated for a number of reasons.

“This includes, but is not limited to: falsifying your location, using emulators, modified or unofficial software and/or accessing Pokémon GO clients or backends in an unauthorized manner including through the use of third party software.

Our goal is to provide a fair, fun and legitimate game experience for everyone. We will continue to work with all of you to improve the quality of the gameplay, including ongoing optimization and fine tuning of our anti-cheat system.”

Some of the best parts at following the game’s success online have been seeing the myriad of ways people try and skirt around the system.

There’s a way to hack your phone in order to tap to walk anywhere on the Pokémon Go map; you can trick your phone into faking your GPS location; and a group of hackers cracked a piece of the code to create a new API that can be integrated into bots.

There’s also fun, not-as-technical ways people have tried to cheat the game, including that guy who tried to use a drone to catch Pokémon (it didn’t work).

Niantic came under fire after it issued the cease and desist letters to programs like Pokevision, which was a live updating Pokémon tracker. People in suburban or rural areas made use of similar programs since finding actual things to interact with is more complicated. The company also wrote a letter to Twitch, which streamed live videos of hacks and cheats on its website.

It’s also unclear how this will work. If Niantic bans an account, couldn’t users just make another one? If it’s done by IP address, it runs into the issue of addresses that are shared among users in the same area. Is it done by device? There are so many questions and Niantic isn’t known for being transparent.

Niantic does add in its post that anybody whose account has been suspended should not make a plea on social media due to “privacy reasons,” but also so that Niantic can manage requests better and you don’t call them out publicly if you disagree.

The issue of what is allowed with this app is up in the air, but because this is the Internet, I’m sure people will find ways around even these new restrictions.

[Verge]

TNA iMPACT Wrestling 11 Aug 2016 Full Show

Imam And His Assistant Shot Dead In Queens; Local Muslims Blame Trump For Encouraging Islamophobia

http://www.mediaite.com/online/imam-and-his-assistant-shot-dead-in-queens-local-muslims-blame-trump-for-encouraging-islamophobia/

In Texas, you can be executed even if you didn't kill anybody

http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/texas/article/In-Texas-a-man-who-didn-t-kill-anybody-is-about-9139382.php

If the 2016 election is hacked, it's because no one listened to these people

By Cory Doctorow

(Image: Andrew Appel, by Alex Halderman) 

Ever since the Supreme Court ordered the nation's voting authorities to get their act together in 2002 in the wake of Bush v Gore, tech companies have been flogging touchscreen voting machines to willing buyers across the country, while a cadre computer scientists trained in Ed Felten's labs at Princeton have shown again and again and again and again that these machines are absolutely unfit for purpose, are trivial to hack, and endanger the US election system.

Felten has moved on to the White House, where he's deputy CTO, while his grad students have fanned out across the country to take positions at some of America's top universities, where they and their students continue to mercilessly attack the unsound computers that America has put its democracy inside of.

Ben Wofford's comprehensive account of the war on shitty voting machines in Politico is by turns frightening and enraging, and even though the touchscreen voting era appears to finally be drawing to its inevitable close, the remaining machines in the field are, if anything, even more vulnerable to remote attacks, and, worryingly, many are clustered in hotly disputed districts in key battleground states for the 2016 presidential race.

It's not for lack of trying to raise alarms. Felten's team and proteges have gone to far as to meet mysterious whistleblowers in dark New York alleys to take receipt of smuggled-out voting machines to run tests on, and then produced some of the most mediagenic, easy-to-understand videos and articles detailing their findings that you could ask for.

Combine this indifference with North Korea's attack on Sony, China's attack on the Office of Personnel Management, and Russia's (presumptive) attack on the DNC, and you've got a situation where it's all-too-plausible that the coming election will be hacked, and where it's certain that any irregularities will be blamed on hackers, domestic and foreign.

After all, Virgina took 13 years to ditch its wifi-connected Winvote machines, whose crypto key is now known to be "abcde," and which runs a version of Windows that hasn't been updated since 2005.

Jeremy Epstein, the whistleblower who fought for the machines' removal for all that time, says of the elections that were balloted on Winvote systems, "If these machines and elections weren’t hacked, it was only because no one tried."

To make things worse, many of the same vendors who denied, threatened, and obfuscated when caught selling defective voting machines are now trying to sell online voting systems that will have every problem of the worst voting machines, times a thousand.

The Princeton group has no shortage of things that keep them up at night. Among possible targets, foreign hackers could attack the state and county computers that aggregate the precinct totals on election night—machines that are technically supposed to remain non-networked, but that Appel thinks are likely connected to the Internet, even accidentally, from time to time. They could attack digitized voter registration databases—an increasingly utilized tool, especially in Ohio, where their problems are mounting—erasing voters’ names from the polls (a measure that would either cause voters to walk away, or overload the provisional ballot system). They could infect software at the point of development, writing malicious ballot definition files that companies distribute, or do the same on a software patch. They could FedEx false software to a county clerk’s office and, with the right letterhead and convincing cover letter, get it installed. If a county clerk has the wrong laptop connected to the Internet at the wrong time, that could be a wide enough entry window for an attack.

“No county clerk anywhere in the United States has the ability to defend themselves against advanced persistent threats,” Wallach tells me, using the parlance of industry for highly motivated hackers who “lay low and stick around for a while.” Wallach painted an unseemly picture, in which a seasoned cyber warrior overseas squared off against a septuagenarian volunteer. “In the same way,” continues Wallach, “you would not expect your local police department to be able to repel a foreign military power.”

In the academic research, hacks of the machines are far more pervasive; digitized voting registrations or tabulation software are not 10 years old and running on Windows 2000, unlike the machines. Still, they present risks of their own. “There are still plenty of computers involved” even without digital touch screens, says Appel. “Even with optical scan voting, it’s not just the voting machines themselves—it’s the desktop and laptop computers that election officials use to prepare the ballots, prepare the electronic files from the OpScan machines, panel voter registration, electronic poll books. And the computers that aggregate the results together from all of the optical scans.”

“If any of those get hacked, it could could significantly disrupt the election.”

The digital touch screens, even with voter verified paper trail, will still be pervasive this election; 28 states keep them in use to some degree, including Ohio and Florida, though increasingly in limited settings. Pam Smith, the director of Verified Voting—a group that tracks the use of voting equipment by precinct in granular detail—isn’t sure how many digital touch screens are left; no one I spoke with seemed to know. Nor is it clear where they’ll be deployed, a decision left up to county administrators. Smith confirms that after 2007, the number of states that adopted the machines plateaued, and has finally begun to shrink. The number of states using paperless touch screens—and nothing else—is five: South Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana, New Jersey and Delaware. But the number of states with a significant number of counties with the easily hacked machines is much larger, at 13, including Indiana, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. For hacking purposes, there’s little difference: In a close election, only a few precincts with paperless touch screens would be required to deflate vote totals, says Appel, even if the majority of counties are still in the Stone Age. Many of Felten’s mad-scientist experiments were designed to metastasize the nefarious code once it gained entry into a machine system.

How to Hack an Election in 7 Minutes [Ben Wofford/Politico]
(via Memex 1.1)

Protester Interrupts Rally To Call Donald Trump ‘Putin’s Bitch’

By Sean Colarossi

A man was thrown out of a Trump campaign event in Kissimmee, Florida on Thursday after shouting about Donald Trump’s affection for Russia and, more specifically, Vladimir Putin.



“You love Russia,” the heckler shouted at Trump. “You’re Putin’s bitch.”

The Republican nominee, who has become very low-energy since his poll numbers began to plummet, repeatedly told the protester “goodbye” before asking, “Where the hell did he come from?”

Not only was the protester’s comment funny, but it also hits on a larger truth about Trump – that he seems to admire Putin and favor Russia-friendly policies.

The Republican nominee has repeatedly praised Putin’s leadership abilities. Even when asked about the Russian government’s alleged killing of journalists, Trump said, “at least [Putin’s] a leader.”

The spray-tanned buffoon had also called Putin’s land grab in the Ukraine “so smart,” and his campaign went out of its way to remove anti-Russian language from the 2016 Party Platform.

None of this is all that surprising given the fact that Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort spent over a decade as a pro-Russian lobbyist.

So, while stunts by protesters can often be laughed off, there is a great dose of truth in the message this particular one was trying to send to Trump.

McGinty overtaking Toomey in Pa. Senate race

Larry Roberts and Nate Guidry/Post-Gazette

Democratic Senate candidate Katie McGinty and Republican U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey.

---

By Jonathan Tamari / The Philadelphia Inquirer

WASHINGTON - Another new poll has found Democrat Katie McGinty surging into a late summer lead over Republican Sen. Pat Toomey in the critical Pennsylvania senate race.

A Quinnipiac University survey released this morning found Ms. McGinty leading Mr. Toomey, 47 percent to 44 among likely Keystone State voters. That's within the poll's margin of error, but suggests a far tighter contest than pollsters found earlier this summer, when Mr. Toomey had solid leads.

The new poll is the third in the past week showing Ms. McGinty, Gov. Tom Wolf's former chief of staff, with a small lead a few weeks ahead of Labor Day, when campaigns typically kick into high gear. Her rise coincides with Hillary Clinton's sharp gains in Pennsylvania in the wake of the Democratic National Convention.

Mr. Toomey's 44 percent support is similar to the 42 percent backing Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump registered in the same poll. But while Ms. Clinton had 52 percent support, Ms. McGinty - who has never held elected office and is still introducing herself to many voters - has won less backing.

The poll shows sharp disparities among races and genders. Mr. Toomey, seeking his second senate term, won 51 percent of white voters, but only 12 percent of non-whites. Women favor Ms. McGinty 52 - 38, while men support Mr. Toomey 51 – 41.

Pollsters have cautioned that surveys at this point may still be picking up the effects of the Democratic convention, which was held in Philadelphia and dominated media coverage. The poll was conducted immediately after the convention, from July 30 to Aug. 7, and surveyed 815 Pennsylvania voters. It has a margin of error of 3.4 percentage points.

Joe Scarborough Re-Writes His Own Internal History

By Frances Langum

Retcon! Joe Scarborough Re-Writes His Own Internal History

Just days after Mr. Helms, a Republican from North Carolina, created a furor by saying that President Clinton was not up to the job of Commander in Chief, he told The News and Observer, a newspaper in Raleigh: "Mr. Clinton better watch out if he comes down here. He'd better have a bodyguard." -- New York…

Donald Trump's faithful manservant, Chris Christie, might be in a spot of bother, again!

Back in 2013, Christie did a press conference where he vehemently assuring reporters that he had no idea at all about any of those political vengeance bridge closings!

 http://wonkette.com/605379/surprise-chris-christie-is-a-lying-liar-who-lies-about-stuff-love-his-staff

Americans deserve more than an apology for the foreclosure fraud epidemic

Despite talk of "recovery," former homeowners remain scarred after their government abandoned them

By David Dayen

(Credit: Reuters/John Gress)

“I lost my home of 30 years to fraudclosure.”

“I have been fighting this bank for over five years now. I am finally losing everything to their fraud.”

“We feel captive in our own home.”

This is a sampling of what I have awakened to practically every day for the past few months, since my book “Chain of Title: How Three Ordinary Americans Uncovered Wall Street’s Great Foreclosure Fraud” came out. Hundreds of people have emailed me, sent me letters, attended my public events, to relate their personal horror stories of foreclosure and dispossession. They come from across America, from different social and economic backgrounds. Some lost everything, and some haven’t given up.

They contact me, a non-lawyer who has only written about and not participated in their struggle, because they have been abandoned, by a government that chose sides against them after the crash of 2008. They seek answers that I mostly don’t have and support I mostly cannot provide. Outside of referring them to legal aid, I cannot solve their foreclosure problems. I cannot convince a judge disinclined to rule in their favor, or a bank disinclined to see them as anything but a financial asset to be plucked, to change their minds. I can only note in sorrow that the massive netting of fraud laid by the mortgage industry over a decade ago continues to capture people like them.

But despite my lack of assistance, they typically express to me their gratitude, for one simple reason: just by giving voice to similar nightmares, I have instilled in them hope that they aren’t utterly alone in their misery, that they haven’t been singled out by a vengeful nation, that somewhere out there they have an ally and a confidant.

I wrote my book for them, for everyone who suffered as a result of the largest consumer fraud in American history and the greatest economic collapse in nearly a century. They shouldn’t be forgotten. In fact, somebody should apologize to them for having to bear the weight of the financial collapse on their shoulders, even while that suffering was exacted through outright fraud. It might as well be me.

In “Chain of Title”, I detailed how three foreclosure victims uncovered an unparalleled pattern of deceit: mortgage companies systematically using false evidence in courtrooms and county offices to take people’s homes away. This routine document fabrication covered up the unspeakable crime of breaking the chain of title on millions of home mortgages, confusing the underlying ownership and damaging 350 years of functioning property records law.

It was a work of history, depicting events mainly in 2009 and 2010. But that history lives on in my email inbox, to this very day.

Julian Soncco of Phoenix, Arizona, told me how his bank, GMAC Mortgage, broke into his home and changed the locks while he was supposed to be under bankruptcy protection. He received a favorable judgment on two occasions but has still never recovered his home. “In this country,” Soncco wrote, “no such person, no matter how much power they hold, should have the right to take or rob a family from their home without any just reason.”

Michael Powell of Albuquerque, New Mexico, said he survived two foreclosure cases over the past five years, with a third attempt possible. “People would look at me like I was crazy when I’d talk of bogus documents and robo-signing,” he wrote. Diane Bauman of Baldwin, New York, described a foreclosure case against her by JPMorgan Chase going on six years, where affidavits suddenly turned up in the last month, purporting to fix defective documents.

Kim Bolin of St. Louis, Missouri, was told to stop making payments while she negotiated a modification, and then was put into foreclosure simultaneously. The lender submitted as proof of ownership an assignment dated 2013 from the original lender Intervale Mortgage, which went out of business in 2008. Kim, her husband and her three kids expect to be out on the street in the next two weeks. “The feeling of failing your kids is unbelievable,” Bolin wrote. “I now have a heart condition that is causing rapid breathing and a rapid heart rate – the only reason they can find is the huge amount of stress I’m living with every day.”

It’s impossible to expend the time and resources necessary to verify these and the hundreds of other stories I get daily. I can’t even get through all the names of these victims. But I can paint a picture of the type of people who write them, which is nothing like the one the industry frames, a tale of deadbeats and losers who miss mortgage payments and try to scam banks into acquiring a free house.

These people are meticulous. They’ve kept every scrap of paper related to their cases, probably to preserve their own sanity. They know how the law works. Their perseverance, even while recognizing the odds against them, is remarkable.

Andy Williams drove four hours from Chicago to St. Louis to see me speak last month. His foreclosure case began eleven years ago, and he’s compiled a half-dozen law firms to help borrowers in foreclosure in the Chicago area. His lonely battle for consumer rights occurred in parallel with the subjects of my book, thousands of miles away in Florida. There was no wide-ranging community to bring all these voices together, nobody to tell them they weren’t alone.

Which I guess made me the conduit. So I hear all these stories, knowing that years after the foreclosure crisis began, judges and lawyers and prosecutors and politicians don’t want to hear them anymore. Any drive to protect the public, if it was ever there, has withered. Having exhausted other options, foreclosure victims have to approach a writer as a last line of defense. It powerfully illustrates the dislocation people feel, of being stuck in a Kafka-esque trauma without resolution.

Political analysts still manage to wonder why people are angry in a time of economic recovery, without ever even hinting recognition of the scarring impact of the foreclosure disaster. More than 9.3 million American families gave up their home between 2006 and 2014, either in a foreclosure or a short sale or some other transaction. That translates to about 14 million people, all of whom have family and friends and colleagues who at least know of the pain caused by the foreclosure crisis. 

There have been more since then.

It didn’t have to turn out that way. All of the losses didn’t have to be placed upon homeowners. Somebody could have been held responsible. We could have enforced the simple rule that you can’t take a person’s home with false evidence. This bare minimum would have engendered some faith that the system works, that justice still burns somewhere in America.

So to those who have reached out to me, and those who haven’t, to everyone still feeling the pain of foreclosure, I have just one thing to say. Your government failed you. Those entrusted with protecting you failed you. And when in your desperation you turned to me, I failed you. Because I wish I had something better to express than an apology.

POSTSCRIPT: This is my last column for Salon as a contributing writer. I am tremendously thankful to everyone I worked with here for their encouragement and support, and I exit with the best wishes that this incredible operation will thrive in the future. Thanks.

David Dayen is a contributing writer for Salon. His first book, "Chain of Title," is out now. Follow him on Twitter at @ddayen.

More David Dayen.

Are You Ready For The End Of The Republican Party?

It's been a long, a long time coming...

Getty Chip Somodevilla

By Charles P. Pierce

(Optional Video Accompaniment To This Post)

In Friday's New York Times, the former director of the CIA wrote something that's going to leave a mark even through nine layers of spray-on tan.

Mr. Putin is a great leader, Mr. Trump says, ignoring that he has killed and jailed journalists and political opponents, has invaded two of his neighbors and is driving his economy to ruin. Mr. Trump has also taken policy positions consistent with Russian, not American, interests—endorsing Russian espionage against the United States, supporting Russia's annexation of Crimea and giving a green light to a possible Russian invasion of the Baltic States. In the intelligence business, we would say that Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.

The polls have gone so utterly sour on the Republican presidential nominee over the past week that many Very Serious People inside the Beltway have developed an even more devastating night-terror than El Caudillo de Mar-A-Lago with a nuclear arsenal at his beck and call—namely, that Hillary Rodham Clinton will get elected and then try to govern according to the progressive platform that was hashed out with so much sturm und drang with the Democratic primary process. This likely is also true of the many billionaires who have rushed to her side as the GOP nominee cratered.

There already is a strong undertow pulling HRC toward "reaching out" to the GOP, toward governing from "the middle," and toward not accelerating the now-rapid descent of the Republican Party into the final madness of the prion disease it has welcomed so warmly into itself ever since the late 1970's. 

Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker even posited that, as a gesture of good faith, HRC should allow the Republicans to pick a Supreme Court justice, a stratagem that has been proven to work only on The West Wing, which was not a documentary series.

Professor Krugman has knocked down most of the arguments in favor of this rainbows-and-unicorns idea. First of all, it's insane politics. It will divide the Democratic Party just as the Republicans are engaging in what is bound to be an entertaining interlude of public fratricide.

Second, it would be an act of astonishing bad faith that would set in concrete all of the most unflattering opinions held about HRC by the people who trust her the least.

Third, it assumes Democratic control of the Congress, which remains a long shot. As long as the Republicans still hold the House of Representatives, where all the bills involving federal spending are born, and assuming that the Democrats aren't gifted with a super-majority in the Senate, it's logical to expect that the GOP won't be any more willing to cooperate with a President Clinton II in governing the country than they were with either President Clinton I or Barack Obama.

 

And, finally, and this is something Professor Krugman touches on only briefly, there is a more important reason for a President HRC to press her advantages on all fronts to put in place the policies she committed herself to run on: For the good of the nation, the Republican Party as it is presently constituted has to die.

Ever since the late 1970's, when it determined to ally itself with a politicized splinter of American evangelical Protestantism, having previously allied itself with the detritus of American apartheid, the Republican Party has been reeling toward catastrophe even as it succeeded at the ballot box, and taking the country along with it. 

Crackpot economic theories were mainstreamed in the 1980's. Crackpot conspiracy theories and god-drunk fantasies were mainstreamed in the 1990's. Crackpot imperial adventures abroad were mainstreamed in the 2000's. And all of these were mainstreamed at once in opposition to the country's first African American president over the past eight years.

Modern conservatism has proven to be not a philosophy, but a huge dose of badly manufactured absinthe. It squats in an intellectual hovel now, waiting for its next fix, while a public madman filches its tattered banner and runs around wiping his ass with it. It always was coming to this.

For the good of the nation, the Republican Party as it is presently constituted has to die.

There have been three chances since 2000 for the Democratic Party to beat the crazy out of the Republicans. The first was after the thumping that the Avignon Presidency received in the 2006 midterms. The second was immediately after the election of Barack Obama. Both of those went a'glimmering because the Democrats listened to people who convinced them that, because they were the grown-up governing party, they had to make nice with the pack of vandals on the other side of the aisle. Even this president bought this line of argument, until it became obvious to him that the prion disease was too far gone.

 

Ever since he looked deeply into that big back of fucks and discovered that it had been empty for a while, the president obviously determined to keep proposing sensible measures even though he knows the Congressional majorities will decline to do even the minimal work required of them by the Constitution. My god, they won't even come back into session to address the Zika epidemic that is now breaking out in Florida. Merrick Garland is sipping a cool one on the veranda somewhere, waiting for someone to tell him where he'll be working come winter. The president is not budging.

Why should he? He's not the crazy one. He doesn't belong to the party that, with its eyes wide open, nominated a vulgar talking yam for president.

It long has been the duty of the Democratic Party to the nation to beat the crazy out of the Republican Party until it no longer behaves like a lunatic asylum. The opportunity to do this, to act unilaterally in returning sanity to the Republic, never has been as wide and gleaming as it is right now. To argue that responsible government requires that you treat sensibly a party that has gone as mad as the Republicans have is to argue for government by delirium.

Trump doesn't need an intervention. His party does.