Month: October 2016

True Grit

by digby

This is a nice piece by Michael Tomasky about Clinton’s toughness:

People ask why she’s winning, and the usual answer is that Trump is such a catastrophe. And he is, obviously. But I say she’s winning mainly because she’s one tough dame. She’s made of steel. And not Trumpian Chinese steel. And even though she’s going to face a wall of total resistance from Congress if she’s president, I say history tells us not to sell this woman short.

I’ve seen it for years. I’ve covered her on and off for 17 years, when she first went up to New York to run for Senate. All these alpha males were supposed to bury her. First, the tabloid New York media (a metaphorical alpha male) was supposed to eat her alive. And it took some bites out of her, no doubt about that. Especially Murdoch’s Post, and especially in those early months of the race, in 1999, when she kissed Suha Arafat. But in time, she neutralized them. The Post never warmed to her during that campaign, God knows, but the Daily News did (it endorsed her), and she learned how to anticipate the tabs’ rhythms and return their best serves.

Then Rudy Giuliani was supposed to crush this carpetbagger. He left the race in the spring of 2000 for reasons that didn’t have anything to do with her. It was about his prostate cancer diagnosis. But by the time he dropped out, she’d been running a better campaign than he had (he could hardly be bothered to go upstate) and she was a couple points up in most polls. You might think he’d have beaten her in the end, but I can tell you he didn’t think so: He might deny this now, but he told me himself December 2000 that he didn’t think he’d have won, mainly because Al Gore beat George W. Bush by 1.7 million votes in the state, and Rudy didn’t believe he could have wooed enough ticket-splitters to overcome that. Clinton 2, alpha males 0.
Rick Lazio wasn’t exactly an alpha male, but after he got in the race, Clinton was in an important sense running against the whole vast right-wing conspiracy she had so famously named on the Today show two years before. Tons of national right-wing money was thrown at stopping her, heavyweights came in to campaign against her, and the New York State Republican Party made robocalls linking Clinton to the terrorists who’d just bombed the USS Cole in Yemen (yes, they did; don’t ask). They all thought they could bully her. But in the end it was she who conquered them. They went too far, got hysterical (imagine if she, a woman, had done that). She stayed steady as a rock.

Next up was Trent Lott, Mississippian, consorter, shall we say, with white supremacist groups, and at the time the Senate majority leader. After Clinton won, he—the leader of the United States Senate, a body that fetishizes decorum, far more so in those days—said: “I tell you one thing, when this Hillary gets to the Senate, if she does—maybe lightning will strike and she won’t—she will be one of 100, and we won’t let her forget it.”

And she? In the face of the boss at her new workplace wishing that she’d be struck by lightning, she said nothing and got to work. Within two years, most Republican senators were working with her and marveling that she was a pretty decent human being after all—Sam Brownback once publicly admitted he had hated her and asked for her apology to her face, which she of course graciously accepted. And into the bargain, she was someone who could really hold her liquor. Three-nil.

Oh, there were plenty others, before and since. Back in her first lady days, Ken Starr, and Bill Safire of the Times, and Fred Thompson, and Al D’Amato, and Michael Chertoff—every one of them was going to bring her down. They’re now deceased (Safire), disgraced (Starr), retired from public service (D’Amato and Thompson), or endorsing her (Chertoff). She’s the one who’s standing.

And now, she’s two-plus weeks away from becoming the first woman president of the United States. Imagine what she’s been through. Some of it, yes, she brought on herself; the email server, the speeches, some aspects of the foundation story. But most of it has been a cabal of ideologues who’ve been trying and failing for 25 years to put her in jail. And in two months and 28 days, unless something goes really kablooey, she’ll be standing up there becoming president.

I would guess that one reason so many women admire her is because of that toughness. We’ve all experienced at least some of the misogyny and sexism if not the bizarre, inexplicable hatred and mind-boggling distortion of her personality and record. And we simply cannot believe that she just keeps going. That’s grit. I have to wonder if many women will want to follow in her footsteps once they see the amount of abuse you are required to take, though. It’s inspiring but also frightening.

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Please tell me the upside

by digby

The latest in the New York Times’ investigative series on gun violence is really depressing. In a country that fetishizes guns and has a large patchwork of laws and jurisdictions, this problem seems to be beyond solutions.

The New York Times examined all 130 shootings last year in which four or more people were shot, at least one fatally, and investigators identified at least one attacker. The cases range from drug-related shootouts to domestic killings that wiped out entire families to chance encounters that took harrowing wrong turns.

They afford a panoramic view of some of the gun control debate’s fundamental issues: whether background checks and curbs on assault weapons limit violence; whether the proliferation of open-carry practices and rules allowing guns on college campuses is a spark to violence; whether it is too easy for dangerously mentally ill or violent people to get guns.

The findings are dispiriting to anyone hoping for simple legislative fixes to gun violence. In more than half the 130 cases, at least one assailant was already barred by federal law from having a weapon, usually because of a felony conviction, but nonetheless acquired a gun. Including those who lacked the required state or local permits, 64 percent of the shootings involved at least one attacker who violated an existing gun law.

Of the remaining assailants, 40 percent had never had a serious run-in with the law and probably could have bought a gun even in states with the strictest firearm controls. Typically those were men who killed their families and then themselves.

Only 14 shootings involved assault rifles, illustrating their outsize role in the gun debate. Nearly every other assailant used a handgun. That is in line with a federal study that concluded that reviving a 1994 ban on assault weapons and ammunition feeding devices that hold more than 10 rounds would have a minimal impact, at best, on gun violence.

But there were also cases in which victims arguably would have lived had they been in a state with tighter firearms restrictions, because it would have been harder for their attackers either to get guns or to carry them in those circumstances. That includes several of nine attackers who were dangerously mentally ill but still met the federal standard for gun possession.

Ever since Newtown I’ve wondered if anything could change this in any serious way. After all, that horror was met with the NRA doubling down on any restrictions.

We’ve had gun culture go even more crazy since then. I honestly don’t know what it would take to end this nightmare here. So many yahoos, so many guns.

Read the whole article. It’s important.

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The website you have dialed is not in service at this time
by Tom Sullivan

Photo by Marcin Wichary via Wikimedia Commons.

PLEASE STAND BY. The Internet is experiencing technical difficulties.

According to reports, a number of popular sites went down Friday, victims of a massive cyberattack. Reuters reports:

Hackers unleashed a complex attack on the internet through common devices like webcams and digital recorders and cut access to some of the world’s best known websites on Friday, a stunning breach of global internet stability.

The attacks struck Twitter, Paypal, Spotify and other customers of an infrastructure company in New Hampshire called Dyn, which acts as a switchboard for internet traffic.

The attackers used hundreds of thousands of internet-connected devices that had previously been infected with a malicious code that allowed them to cause outages that began in the Eastern United States and then spread to other parts of the country and Europe.

The FBI is investigating:

Obama administration officials have determined the outages were the result of a malicious attack, according to a federal law enforcement official speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal assessments. Investigators have come to a preliminary conclusion as to who carried them out, but are not planning to make that public for now, the official said.

Atlantic has more:

If it seems like there have been more of these sorts of outages lately, it’s because there have. “Recently, some of the major companies that provide the basic infrastructure that makes the Internet work have seen an increase in DDoS attacks against them,” the security technologist Bruce Schneier wrote in a blog post in September. “Moreover, they have seen a certain profile of attacks. These attacks are significantly larger than the ones they’re used to seeing. They last longer. They’re more sophisticated. And they look like probing.”

“Probing” refers to a specially calibrated kind of attack, one that’s designed to take advantage of an individual website’s precise security weaknesses. “We don’t know who is doing this, but it feels like a large nation state. China or Russia would be my first guesses,” Schneier wrote.

Why not aliens? Probing used to have another connotation that involved alien attackers. In the Star Trek universe, unexpected probing usually provoked “Shields up!” and “Red Alert!” To date, the response in the meatspace seems less decisive. (Does Patrick Stewart need another project?)

Your brain may no longer be in control

It seems our little techie devices are easily assimilated and turned against us. Security researcher Brian Krebs has had his blog taken down before. On Friday, he wrote:

The size of these DDoS attacks has increased so much lately thanks largely to the broad availability of tools for compromising and leveraging the collective firepower of so-called Internet of Things devices — poorly secured Internet-based security cameras, digital video recorders (DVRs) and Internet routers. Last month, a hacker by the name of Anna_Senpai released the source code for Mirai, a crime machine that enslaves IoT devices for use in large DDoS attacks. The 620 Gbps attack that hit my site last month was launched by a botnet built on Mirai, for example.

That day Chinese and Russian hackers made America's smart refrigerators rise up against their owners.

[Yes, I know it wasn't fridges]— emptywheel (@emptywheel) October 22, 2016

Is there a BorgWarner in your hybrid vehicle?

Friday Night Soother

by digby

In honor of the Chicago Cubs!

Red panda cubs at Lincoln Park Zoo are named in honor of the other Cubs who call Chicago home. The cubs are named Sheffield and Waveland, the streets on each side of Wrigley Field.

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by digby

From Vox:

In 2016, we’ve seen hundreds of mass shootings. We’ve watched the gap between rich and poor Americans widen. We’ve witnessed the fulminant rise of Donald Trump, whose nomination left Vox editor in chief Ezra Klein “truly afraid” for the first time in American politics.
But in the eyes of our citizens, there is a graver threat at hand: clowns.
In a poll we conducted with Morning Consult last week, 42 percent of Americans said they were, in some capacity, afraid of clowns. Among voters ages 18 to 29, nearly one in three admitted to at least a minor case of coulrophobia — fear of clowns.

Apparently people are more  scared of clowns than they are of terrorism. I can understand that. But not because of the silly clown sightings around the country.

This:

A normal reaction to Trump

by digby

His terrible performance at the Al Smith dinner is legendary. So is this reaction:

America in this whole election pic.twitter.com/igXGdWgQ9S

— Dan Eggen (@DanEggenWPost) October 21, 2016

Meanwhile, America’s mayor pouted:

The other member of the Bad Hombres, Chris Christie, didn’t show up. But then he’s got big, big problems of his own…

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What could go wrong?

by digby

Via the Guardian:

Donald Trump loyalists will attempt to conduct their own crowd-funded exit polling on election day, ostensibly due to fears that electronic voting machines in certain areas may have been “rigged”, the Guardian has learned.

But the effort, led by Trump’s notorious informal adviser Roger Stone, will focus on 600 different precincts in nine Democrat-leaning cities with large minority populations, a tactic branded highly irregular by experts, who suggested that organizers could potentially use the polling as a way to intimidate voters.

Stone told the Guardian that around 1,300 volunteers from the controversial Citizens for Trump grassroots coalition would conduct exit polling in Cleveland, Detroit, Philadelphia, Las Vegas, Milwaukee, Fort Lauderdale, Charlotte, Richmond and Fayetteville – all locations in pivotal swing states.

I’m actually skeptical that this will amount to much. Stone likes to promise stuff like this and it never amounts to much.

But that doesn’t mean some nut isn’t going to take things into his own hands and decide he needs to protect the integrity of the election using his second amendment remedy. Trump’s certainly ginning up his craziest crazies with all this talk of a rigged election.

I think most Trumpies are more mouthy than dangerous. But there are so many guns in this country and at least a few of them are in the hands of fanatics. It’s worrying.

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Powerful messaging FTW

by digby

I know it’s conventional wisdom that Clinton’s campaign has been so terrible that it’s only the miracle of Trump that’s keeping the Republicans from decimating her. But the truth is that her campaign has been exceptionally good in a polarized electorate running against an alien from outer space who is unpredictable and dangerous. That’s not easy. Just ask Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio.

Anyway, the latest ads are really good. They’ve all been really good:

Update: I just saw Krugman’s column today. He writes about the Villager conventional wisdom that Clinton is a terrible candidate who’s squeaking into office on a fluke. And he rips it to shreds.

I have no problem with people being suspicious of her positions on issues. We should be suspicious of all politicians. But I’m increasingly irked by the Villager CW that she’s a shitty politician. It’s just not true. She won the NY Senate seat twice, she almost tied Barack Obama, one of the most gifted politicians of this era, and she won the primary handily despite a strong challenge from the left. Her convention was very well executed and her debate performances were nearly flawless. In fact, considering the cretinous freak she’s been up against, her GE campaign has been terrific. Credit where credit is due.

If she gets in we’ll all be watching her like a hawk as we did with Obama and every other president. But it’s time to put to rest this ridiculous notion that she’s a terrible candidate.

Oh, and if it were easy for a woman to do this surely someone would have done it before.

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Trump’s taking the brand down with him

by digby

I wrote about it for Salon this morning:

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Turning “wooden” into a plus
by Tom Sullivan

Hillary Clinton’s critics from the beginning of her campaign have panned her for being wonky and wooden in public. People who know and have worked with her insist she’s warm and engaging in small groups. Public speaking is not one of her strong suits, Clinton admits. Plus, Barack Obama and husband Bill are two hard acts to follow.

A Republican Travis County, Texas County Commission candidate has found a way to turn wonky and wooden into selling points.

It doesn’t hurt that this ads runs in progressive Austin, Texas. Ashley Lopez of NPR station KUT writes:

There’s a lot to like here. For one, throughout the ad Daugherty is nerding-out pretty hard about local transportation issues and the county jail — and he can’t seem to notice that no one else cares that much about what he’s talking about, which is pretty endearing.

But the real star is Daugherty’s wife, Charlyn Daugherty. Her dead-pan “get me out of here” looks into the camera are a thing of beauty. She’s the Jim Halpert of political ads, and it doesn’t get any better than that.

Hillary Clinton could use a self-effacing ad like this to break the ice with enough Hillary haters to turn a win over Donald Trump into a rout. At this point in a long, nasty campaign, we could all use the relief. But Clinton would need a spouse less wonky than she is to pull it off. And deadpanning as the long-suffering husband would be as much a stretch for Bill Clinton to pull off as it would be for audiences to believe it.

Clinton did not give an Obama-level speech last night at the Al Smith dinner. But with her polling lead over Donald Trump widening and prospects of Democrats winning the Senate climbing too, she was looser than ever and even in a mood to laugh at a few of Donald Trump’s jokes, however woodenly delivered through a chorus of boos.

(h/t SBS)