Russia and Putin are fiercely dangerous to our democracy. Putin has something very big on Trump, which has rendered him an impotent toady. These two facts are obvious. This is the biggest, scariest story in the world. Let’s stop pretending it isn’t.

Tweet, minutes ago, from Tony Schwartz, who wrote The Art of the Deal for Trump:

Russia and Putin are fiercely dangerous to our democracy. Putin has something very big on Trump, which has rendered him an impotent toady. These two facts are obvious. This is the biggest, scariest story in the world. Let’s stop pretending it isn’t.

— Tony Schwartz (@tonyschwartz) March 15, 2018

Trump fires Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State

Trump has ousted Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and plans to nominate CIA Director Mike Pompeo to replace him as the nation’s top diplomat, orchestrating a major change to his national security team amid delicate negotiations with North Korea, White House officials said Tuesday.

Trump last Friday asked Tillerson to step aside, and the embattled diplomat cut short a trip to Africa on Monday to return to Washington.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-ousts-tillerson-will-replace-him-as-secretary-of-state-with-cia-chief-pompeo/ar-BBKaaqF

The thing that ate America's brain

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.

Charles Koch all of a sudden has a problem with corporate influence in politics

By Joan McCarter

Yes, you read that right. Charles Koch, in an op-ed in The Washington Post, complains that there's too much corporate influence in policy-making. Charles Koch, the guy who with his brother has bought the whole Republican House conference and about a third of the Senate's, says this:

When large companies can pressure politicians to force everyday Americans to fork over unearned millions, we should all question the fairness of the system. […] To include millions more of our people in true economic progress, our lawmakers must act on behalf of all Americans—not just the privileged few.

For reals. What brought this sudden realization upon him? He doesn't like Trump's tariffs, which show, he says, that "Our entire economy is rife with cronyism."

Uh-huh. He really, really wrote that, after the Kochs spent more than $20 million on the Republican tax scam that will net them more than $1 billion in tax cuts. They gave a fund-raising committee that supports Paul Ryan, the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) and a pro-Ryan PAC $500,000 to get that tax law, a law that's going to cause plenty of everyday Americans to "fork over unearned millions when the few provisions benefiting them expire in a few years.

And he has the gall to say "We only support policies that are based on equality under the law and that help people improve their lives." His evidence of that? The Kochs lobbied for the end of ethanol subsidies. Because that really helps the great unwashed in their everyday lives.

The incredible thing is, he really believes he's been treated unfairly here.

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

The Columnist

Sam Nunberg Bit His Own Dick Off On Jake Tapper’s CNN Show

HI MR. TALKY MOUTH!

By Evan Hurst

LORD HAVE MERCY.

Former Trump aide/current idiot Sam Nunberg hung up his Obamaphone with MSNBC’s Katy Tur on Monday afternoon, and by the time we had posted the full video, he had picked that Obamaphone right back up to call CNN’s Jake Tapper, to continue his very sane temper tantrum about how Robert Mueller is not the boss of him, essentially daring the special counsel to arrest him for refusing to comply with a subpoena.

On Tur’s show, Nunberg said YEAH PROBABLY seems like Mueller has evidence of Donald Trump committing crimes during the campaign. On Tapper’s show, Nunberg expanded on that idea, saying BIG DUH, of course Donald Trump knew his crap-faced firstborn son was having a Russian conspiracy meeting with a bunch of Russian spies, because Trump was talking about it A WEEK BEFORE IT HAPPENED, like some kind of person who just loves doing conspiracies with Russia. WHOA IF TRUE, and holy shit, we bet it is! (Just like Steve Bannon said!)

BREAKING NEWS: After Sam Nunberg told Jake Tapper that Trump knew about Donald Trump, Jr.’s meeting at Trump Tower with Russians, Robert Mueller has offered him a deal: There will never be any charges if he agrees to keep going on Jake Tapper’s show. https://t.co/xKFL6n8SvD

— Mrs. Betty Bowers (@BettyBowers) March 5, 2018

Nunberg also told Tapper, without hesitation, TWICE, that Trump campaign Russian intelligence asset idiot Carter Page was definitely colluding with the Russians, DEFINITELY.

Sam Nunberg: “Carter Page was colluding with the Russians.” pic.twitter.com/Z83TxOjrfn

— Axios (@axios) March 5, 2018

HOO BOY!
And just for good measure, here is another clip where Nunberg states his belief, just like he did for Katy Tur, that Robert Mueller has “something” on Trump:

Sam Nunberg: “When they start asking for stuff like this, Trump is right. It is a witch hunt.”

Also: “They know something on him. And Jake, I don’t know what it is. Perhaps I’m wrong. But he did something.” pic.twitter.com/CQ00slXROs
— Axios (@axios) March 5, 2018

And here’s the one where Sam Nunberg says Trump is an “idiot” for admitting to NBC’s Lester Holt that he fired James Comey because of the Russia investigation, and also for inviting Russians into the Oval Office so he could jizz some classified secrets all over them, and now everything is terrible and Sam Nunberg has all these legal fees, because Donald Trump is an “idiot”:

😂😂😂

Nunberg: Granted, Donald Trump caused this because he’s an idiot … he gave an interview to Lester Holt after firing Comey then decided to have Russians in the Oval Office. You have to explain that one to me.
Tapper: I’m not going to be able to explain that to you, Sam. pic.twitter.com/c3zpxOQhA2
— Lis Power (@LisPower1) March 5, 2018

And finally, here is the part where Sam Nunberg asks Jake Tapper for legal advice, to which Jake Tapper replies that if he were in Nunberg’s shoes, he would cooperate, because “Sometimes life and special prosecutors aren’t fair.” Oh. My. God. This. Really. Happened.

NUNBERG: “Do you think should I cooperate? Should I spend 80 hours going over my e-mails, Jake?”

TAPPER: “If it were me, I would. Just asking my opinion. Because it sounds like pain. But he is the special counsel and he does have the long arm of the law.” pic.twitter.com/N8PFFNS5Ai
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 5, 2018

OK, for a palate cleanser, here are the five funniest tweets we saw after looking for seven seconds for funny tweets about Sam Nunberg and his afternoon TV meltdown of hilariousness:


God bless, what a time to be alive.
Follow Evan Hurst on Twitter RIGHT HERE. And if you love this article, tweet it and share it on the Facebooks!

7 Forgotten Windows 3.0 Gaming Classics

Explore seven games from the lost era of 16-bit Windows gaming.

https://www.pcmag.com/feature/336891/7-forgotten-windows-3-0-gaming-classics

Post-Traumatic Discourse

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.

All the brands that have cut ties with the NRA following gun-control activists' boycotts

By Kate Taylor and Leanna Garfield

• Gun-control activists are organizing boycotts and calling for companies to cut ties with the National Rifle Association.
• The NRA has partnerships with companies that offer members special deals, such as discounts on car rentals or hotel bookings.
• The car-rental giant Enterprise and the First National Bank of Omaha are among the companies that have cut since ties with the NRA.

---

Gun-control activists are organizing boycotts of companies with ties to the National Rifle Association — and they're already producing results.

People on social media are calling for boycotts of companies that offer or have offered special deals to NRA members who, as part of their membership, receive discounts on things like car rentals and prescription drugs.

While companies such as FedEx and Hertz still offer such discounts, other companies have cut ties.

Here are all the brands that have cut ties with the gun-rights group after the recent boycotts as well as past efforts by gun-control activists.

Delta Airlines

Delta

On Saturday, the airline tweeted that it is "reaching out to the NRA to let them know we will be ending their contract for discounted rates through our group travel program. We will be requesting that the NRA remove our information from their website."

United Airlines

Scott Olson/Getty Images

The airline announced on Saturday that it is cutting ties to the NRA.
"United is notifying the NRA that we will no longer offer a discounted rate to their annual meeting and we are asking that the NRA remove our information from their website," the company tweeted.

Hertz

Hertz rental cars are seen in a rental lot near Detroit Metropolitan airport in Romulus.

Thomson Reuters

On Friday, Hertz tweeted, "We have notified the NRA that we are ending the NRA's rental car discount program with Hertz."

Allied Van Lines

Allied Van Lines

In a statement to Business Insider, an Allied representative said the moving company is discontinuing its discount program with the NRA immediately. "We have asked them to remove our listing from their benefits site," the representative said.

MetLife

Thomson Reuters

MetLife told Business Insider on Friday that it would discontinue its NRA discounts program. "We value all our customers but have decided to end our discount program with the NRA," a representative said in an emailed statement.

SimpliSafe

SimpliSafe

On Friday, the home-security company SimpliSafe told Business Insider that it would withdraw from the NRA discount program. "We have discontinued our existing relationship with the NRA," SimpliSafe CEO Chad Laurans said in a statement.

First National Bank of Omaha

First National Bank

On Thursday, the bank said it would not renew a contract with the NRA that allowed members to receive an NRA-branded Visa card. "Customer feedback has caused us to review our relationship with the NRA," the bank said on Twitter in response to a call for a boycott. Previously, First National Bank offered members of the gun-rights organization an NRA Visa card, which offered a $40 cash-back bonus.

Paramount Rx

Thomson Reuters

On Friday night, Paramount Rx released the following statement to BI: "The prescription discount program that is made available to NRA members is offered through a third-party vendor. We are working with that vendor to discontinue the program and remove the offering."

Enterprise Rent-A-Car, Alamo Rent a Car, and National Car Rental

Joe Raedle/Getty Images

The car-rental giant Enterprise Holdings announced on Thursday that it would end its NRA discount program, effective March 26. The three car-rental brands that Enterprise operates — Enterprise Rent-A-Car, Alamo Rent a Car, and National Car Rental — will stop offering discounts to NRA members.
A representative did not respond to Business Insider's follow-up questions about why Enterprise was ending the program, though the company has been flooded with boycott threats on social media. Avis Budget Group and Hertz, two rivals of Enterprise, still offered NRA discounts as of Friday morning.

Symantec

Symantec

The cybersecurity company announced on social media Friday that it had "stopped its discount program with the National Rifle Association."

Best Western

Best Western Weinebrugge

Best Western has been targeted by boycott efforts because it has offered discounts to NRA members as recently as 2016. In response, the hotel chain has tweeted dozens of times that it "does not have an affiliation with and is not a corporate partner of the National Rifle Association."

"Best Western ended any association with the NRA in 2014," a representative said in a statement to Business Insider.

Best Western has been targeted in past NRA boycott efforts.

In 2012, after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, the activist group Avaaz organized a boycott of Best Western and Wyndham Hotel Group, calling for them to cut ties with the NRA. At the time, both hotel chains were listed on the gun-rights group's website as "friends of the NRA" and offered members discounts at hotels.

Wyndham Hotel Group

Wyndham

While Wyndham Hotel Group previously offered a 10% discount to NRA members, the hotel chain cut ties with the organization late last year. In response to boycott threats this week, the Twitter accounts for Wyndham and its rewards program tweeted dozens of times that the hotel chain was "no longer affiliated with the NRA."

Republic Bank

Republic Bank

"The NRA Prepaid Card program was previously under review. Upon conclusion of this review, we decided to discontinue the offering," a representative said in a statement.

Avis and Budget

Getty Images/John Moore

A representative for Avis and Budget told Business Insider that the brands would stop the NRA rewards program, effective March 26, 2018.

Corporations start dropping support for the NRA and you too can do your part to help: Tell Amazon, Roku, Apple, and Google to dump the NRA TV channel

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

Another Particle Blaster Incident

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

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