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Month: November 2016

Gracias mi amigos!

Gracias mi amigos!

by digby

Thank you for helping to save America from fascism.

If you weren’t on twitter (or in Las Vegas) last night you didn’t get to experience this beautiful sight: thousands and thousands of Latinos lining up to vote on the last night of early voting. They had to keep the polling place open until 10 to accommodate them all:

Nevada’s election guru Jon Ralston:

Donald Trump will be in Reno on Saturday, but the Republicans almost certainly lost Nevada on Friday.

Trump’s path was nearly impossible, as I have been telling you, before what happened in Clark County on Friday. But now he needs a Miracle in Vegas on Election Day — and a Buffalo Bills Super Bowl championship is more likely — to turn this around. The ripple effect down the ticket probably will cost the Republicans Harry Reid’s Senate seat, two GOP House seats and control of the Legislature.

How devastating was it, epitomized by thousands of mostly Latino voters keeping Cardenas market open open in Vegas until 10 PM? This cataclysmic:

—-The Democrats won Clark County by more than 11,000 votes Friday (final mail count not posted yet), a record margin on a record-setting turnout day of 57,000 voters. The Dems now have a firewall — approaching 73,000 ballots — greater than 2012 when Barack Obama won the state by nearly 7 points. The 71,000 of 2012 was slightly higher in percentage terms, but raw votes matter. The lead is 14 percentage points — right at registration. You know what else matters? Registration advantages (142,000 in Clark). Reminder: When the Clark votes were counted from early/mail voting in 2012, Obama had a 69,000 vote lead in Clark County. Game over.

—-The statewide lead (some rurals not posted) will be above 45,000 — slightly under the 48,000 of 2012, but still robust. That’s 6 percentage points, or right about at registration. The GOP turnout advantage was under a percent, worse than 2012 when it was 1.1 percent.

—-The Dems eked out a 200-vote win in Washoe and lead there by 1,000 votes. It was even in 2012. The rural lead, before the stragglers come in, is 27,500. It probably will get above 28,000.

—-Total turnout without those rurals: 768,000, or 52.5 percent. If overall turnout ends up being 80 percent, that means two thirds of the vote is in — close to 2012. Republicans would have to not only win Election Day by close to double digits to turn around the lead Hillary Clinton almost surely has in early voting, but they would have to astronomically boost turnout. The goal for the Dems during early voting was to bank votes and to boost turnout as high as possible to minimize the number of votes left on Election Day to affect races. Folks, the Reid Machine went out with a bang.

As an exclamation point to a historic night in Nevada, in which Clinton essentially locked up the state and Hispanics, insulted all cycle by Trump, streamed into the market, here is what the final Cardenas numbers showed (tallied by an on-the-ground activist):

1,904 voted
1,258: Ds, 66%
165: Rs, 9%
481: NPs, 25%

So Cardenas was responsible for adding 1,000 to the Democratic lead.

Trump has almost no path to the presidency without Nevada. He can say whatever he wants in Reno on Saturday and boost rural turnout a lot, but he made his own bed when he announced his candidacy.

I’ll dive deeper into the numbers later to show just how deep the wave could be Tuesday.

Look at all those Latinos standing in the line in that picture. They know what the stakes are. The election of Trump will say that they and their culture are unwelcome in this country. And they are Americans.

Oh, and by the way, Latino early vote turnout all over the country is through the roof too.  (And this may not be showing up in the polling at all since the major polling outfits are notoriously bad at polling this electorate.)

Might I just point out that the rest of us liberals who say we care about our fellow man need to vote for Clinton to make sure the message gets through to these cretins loud and clear that the majority of Americans won’t stand for this racist, xenophobic bullshit? It’s the only thing that will.

This is the future people:

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Focus, people, focus by @BloggersRUs

Focus, people, focus
by Tom Sullivan


Election Day precinct packages arrayed for deployment in North Carolina.

At a Fayetteville, NC campaign rally with President Obama yesterday, the crowd booed when a Donald Trump supporter stood up. Obama called them down for losing focus. Once they quieted, Obama said:

“If we lose focus, we’re gonna have Donald,” he said.

Amber Coleman, a Raleigh resident and junior at Fayetteville State, said she appreciated Obama’s efforts to stay positive.

“I was one of the ones encouraging everybody to boo, and then I listened to what he said,” Coleman said. “We do lose focus sometimes and focus on the negatives instead of the positives … We need to pay more attention to what we’re saying about Hillary than the negatives about Trump.”

“Don’t boo. VOTE!” has been a staple of Obama’s campaign appearances. Early voting ends at 1 p.m. today in North Carolina.

An experienced campaign manager posted to Facebook last night an admonishment to skittish Democrats:

“Everyone with the debbie-downer and sky is falling stuff: Stuff it. Science says you get more voters to cast their ballots when they perceive your side to be winning. They want to be a part of the winning team, not be begged to use their vote to stave off disaster.”

David Atkins counters the downers with reasons for optimism:

First, Democrats and liberal constituencies are trouncing Republicans in the early vote. Latino turnout in Georgia, North Carolina and Florida is well beyond 2012 and 2008 benchmarks. In Nevada Democrats lead the statewide early vote by over 45,000, with a whopping 72,000 vote lead in Clark County. Over 30 million Americans have already voted early–and in most of the states (Ohio excepted) the numbers seem to favor Democrats.

Besides, he writes, it is not just “missing” white voters showing up at the polls, but nonwhite ones as well.

On the ground in North Carolina, Democrats are outvoting Republicans by over a quarter of a million votes. But Republicans here tend to bat last. Keep Calm and Carry Someone to the Polls.

Friday Night Soother

Friday Night Soother

by digby

We’re just going to go straight up cute tonight. Because we need to smile so badly.

Here are some baby elephants playing in the water:

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Cutting to the chase

Cutting to the chase

by digby

It’s times like this when you need political cartoonists the most:



I love baseball and I love the fact that the Cubs finally won but this … oh yes. For some of us, this is a big fucking deal.

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This is the email primer you’ve been waiting for http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/11/4/13500018/clinton-email-scandal-bullshit

This is the email primer you’ve been waiting for

by digby

You need to read this piece about “the bullshit email scandal” from Matt Yglesias and then send it around to your social media feeds and Clinton skeptics. Maybe a member of the media might even read it and learn something.

It’s really important, not just going into the election but for what comes after if she manages to pull off the win. This is a patented “Clinton scandal” and in order to fight them you have to understand the underlying facts. Here they are:

Some time ago, Hillary Clinton and her advisers decided that the best course of action was to apologize for having used a personal email address to conduct government business while serving as secretary of state. Clinton herself was, clearly, not really all that remorseful about this, and it showed in her early efforts to address it. Eventually aides prevailed upon her to express a greater degree of regret, which they hoped would lay the issue to rest.

It did not. Instead, email-related talk has dogged Clinton throughout the election and it has influenced public perceptions of her in an overwhelmingly negative way. July polling showed 56 percent of Americans believed Clinton broke the law by relying on a personal email address with another 36 percent piling on to say the episode showed “bad judgments” albeit not criminality.

Because Clinton herself apologized for it and because it does not appear to be in any way important, Clinton allies, surrogates, and co-partisans have largely not familiarized themselves with the details of the matter, instead saying vaguely that it was an error of judgment and she apologized and America has bigger fish to fry.

This has had the effect of further inscribing and reinscribing the notion that Clinton did something wrong, meaning that every bit of micro-news that puts the scandal back on cable amounts to reminding people of something bad that Clinton did. In total, network newscasts have, remarkably, dedicated more airtime to coverage of Clinton’s emails than to all policy issues combined.

This is unfortunate because emailgate, like so many Clinton pseudo-scandals before it, is bullshit. The real scandal here is the way a story that was at best of modest significance came to dominate the US presidential election — overwhelming stories of much more importance, giving the American people a completely skewed impression of one of the two nominees, and creating space for the FBI to intervene in the election in favor of itsapparently preferred candidate in a dangerous way.

Why Hillary Clinton used a personal email account

When Hillary Clinton took office as secretary of state, she, like most people, already had a personal email account. Like most people who started a federal job in 2009, she was also disheartened to learn that the then-current state of federal IT departments was such that she could not connect her personal smartphone to a State Department email address. If she wanted ready access to both her email accounts, she would need to carry twosmartphones.

As any reporter in Washington knows, this indignity was in fact visited upon a huge number of DC denizens for many years. Everyone working in government felt that this was kinda bullshit, but nobody could really do anything about it. (Meanwhile, Chief Justice John Roberts has opined that carrying two phones could be reasonable grounds to suspect someone is a drug dealer.)

Clinton decided to do something about it. Namely, she told her top aides to just email her at her personal address so she could keep using whichever devices she wanted. This violated an internal State Department policy directive, known as a Foreign Affairs Manual, which stated that while it was okay to use personal digital devices to do work occasionally, “normal day-to-day operations” should be conducted on standard State Department equipment. Clinton chose to ignore this guideline and because she was the boss nobody could stop her. Career foreign service officers and other State personnel have every right to be peeved that Clinton opted out of an annoying policy rather than fixing the underlying issue, but it’s hardly a matter of overwhelming public concern.

And, indeed, it turns out Colin Powell also used a private email address for routine work.Condoleezza Rice and Madeleine Albright didn’t use email, and back before Albright only weird nerds even knew what email was. So at the time Clinton took office, only one previous secretary of state had ever faced the question of what email account to use, and he reached the exact same conclusion Clinton did — just use your personal email address.
Why Hillary used a private email server

When Hillary tried the eminently sensible “I was following precedent” defense, Politifact dinged her answer as “mostly false” on the grounds that while Powell did use a personal email account, he didn’t use a private email server.

This distinction has attracted a lot of attention. And it’s proven politically damaging — because while lots of people maintain two email addresses and sometimes do work stuff on their personal email, very few Americans use a private email server as opposed to relying on a commercial email service. But legally speaking, this is completely irrelevant.As the State Department inspector general concluded in its report on Clinton’s conduct, the guideline Clinton violated was a principle that “normal day-to-day operations should be conducted on an authorized Automated Information System.”

Using a private server violates that rule, but so would using a Gmail address or simply checking your State.gov email address from your personal laptop rather than a Department-issue one.

But while the use of a private server is legally irrelevant, it’s certainly unusual. And it leaves people wondering: Why did Clinton go out of her way to set up a private server?

Clinton, as you may have heard, is married to former president Bill Clinton, who stepped down from office in January of 2001. Clinton was in the White House throughout the 1990s when the rest of us were being bombarded with AOL signup CD-ROMs, so he didn’t have a personal email when he left. Gmail didn’t exist back then, and his new job was, in effect, running a Bill Clinton startup. He launched a charitable foundation, he established his presidential library, and he made big bucks on speaking tours. He had a staff and he needed IT infrastructure and support. So he paid a guy to set up an email server that he could use.

Hillary Clinton — who is, again, his wife — also set herself up with an account on the same server. This is a bit unusual, but a lot about being married to a former president is unusual. What it’s not is suspicious.
The private server was not a transparency dodge

It’s become a bit of an article of faith among journalists frustrated with public officials’ constant FOIA-dodging that this is all obviously dissimulation and Clinton was really trying to evade the Freedom of Information Act.

Many people, for example, point to the fact that Clinton would routinely travel withmultiple digital devices as debunking her supposed convenience argument. But this is silly. I’ve been known to travel with an iPhone, an iPad, a Kindle, and a laptop all at once. That doesn’t mean needing to carry two separate iPhones (one to check my work email and one to check my personal email) wouldn’t be inconvenient. After all, what if I was replying to a work email while a text came in to my personal phone and I wanted to check it.

I’d be left juggling phones and looking like an idiot, exactly how federal employees tended to look in the heyday of the double-fisting phones era.

I would not want to do that. Colin Powell did not want to do that. Hillary Clinton did not want to do that. Because that would be terrible.

By contrast, it’s a terrible solution to a desire to avoid having your emails disclosed to the public via FOIA. One way you can tell it’s a terrible solution is that Hillary Clinton’s work emails have been disclosed to the public. You can read them right here.

The specific timeline is that the House Select Committee on Benghazi requested Clinton’s emails in the summer of 2014, at which point the relevant State Department personnel realized they did not have the emails because Clinton had been using her personal address. State asked Clinton for the emails, and she handed them over later that year. It was only in March of 2015 that the New York Times broke the story of Clinton’s private server in a scoop by Michael Schmidt, which reported that the emails had been handed over to the State Department “two months ago.”

This is fairly clearly not an optimal approach to government record-keeping, as Thomas Blanton of the National Security Archive at George Washington University told Schmidt at the time:

It’s a shame it didn’t take place automatically when she was secretary of state as it should have. Someone in the State Department deserves credit for taking the initiative to ask for the records back. Most of the time it takes the threat of litigation and embarrassment.

According to the Inspector General’s report, Clinton “should have preserved any Federal records she created and received on her personal account by printing and filing those records with the related files in the Office of the Secretary.”

There are two possible interpretations here. One is that Clinton hatched the private email account plan as an elaborate dodge of federal record-keeping laws, but then months before the public became aware of the server’s existence complied with requests to turn them over. The other is that the federal records rule on the book was antiquated and a bit absurd, requiring officials to turn over paper copies of emails for no good reason, and simply got ignored out of sloppiness.
But she deleted 33,000 emails!

Suspicion at this point is then supposed to focus on the fact that she had her lawyers delete more than 30,000 emails from her server.

After Hillary left office, the State Department told her she had to turn all her work-related emails over to them, so she tasked a legal team with determining which emails were work emails and which were not. She turned the work emails over because that’s what she was legally required to do. She deleted the others, presumably because she did not want Trey Gowdy and Jason Chaffetz to rummage through her inbox leaking whatever they happened to find amusing to area journalists.

Now, is it possible that Clinton’s legal team simply decided to entirely disregard the law and delete work-related emails?

In some sense, sure. But there’s no evidence that this happened. Generally speaking, in life we assume it would be moderately difficult to hire a well-known law firm to destroy evidence for you without someone deciding to do the right thing and squeal.

Besides which, it would be almost comically easy to catch Clinton in the act of systematically destroying relevant emails. The vast majority of the work-related email correspondence of an incumbent secretary of state, after all, is going to be correspondence with other government employees. Maybe she shoots a note to the Pentagon about Benghazi, or circulates ideas for a speech draft with her communications team. Any message like that, by definition, would exist on a government server as well as on her private one. This means it would be fully accessible via FOIA and also means that if Clinton’s copy were found to not be in the pile of emails she turned over, she’d be caught red handed.
The available FOIA workarounds are available to everyone

Now what’s true is that Clinton could, in theory, have conducted work-related email conversations using another person’s personal email address.

She could, for instance, have emailed Jake Sullivan on his Gmail address then deleted the email from her private server. We’d be in the dark and she’d get away with it.

The key thing to note here, however, is that the availability of this option has nothing to do with Clinton’s decision to use a personal account as her exclusive account and also has nothing to do with her decision to host her personal email on a private server.

At any given time, any federal employee can use her personal account to email any other federal employee at his personal account. If they receive a Freedom of Information Act request, they are legally obligated to hand that correspondence over. But in a practical sense, if they want to break the law they can probably get away with it. And as Ezra Klein has noted, there are a lot of workarounds here:

As every reporter knows, when official sources want to tell you something particularly delicate, they email you from a personal account — or, much more often, they call.

A lot of my reporting happens by email. But virtually none of my reporting with the White House happens by email. There, emails for clarification, or comment, quickly lead to phone calls. The reason — unsaid but obvious — is that phone calls don’t leave an official record. White House officials can talk freely on the phone in a way they can’t over email.

Similarly, the White House keeps a visitor’s log. If you make an appointment to meet with someone, your entrance and point of contact are recorded for posterity and searchable online. When someone who shouldn’t be meeting with you wants to meet with you, they tend to suggest an off-site location: a restaurant downtown, or a nearby coffee shop. Peet’s Coffee doesn’t keep a list of everyone who walks in or out.

We do not, however, generally treat all federal employees as having a massive ethical cloud over their heads just because they could probably use this workaround to break the law. There is zero reason to apply heightened scrutiny to Clinton just because she alsocould break the law.

Besides which, when you are secretary of state there is a much simpler and easier way to mask your correspondence: classification.

Here, for example, is an email Sullivan sent to Clinton on June 4, 2011, that was duly handed over to the State Department and made available by the FOIA office:

I’m not saying the contents of that message don’t deserve to be redacted for security purposes. The fact is that I have no idea. But the reality is the American national security state is really, really good at using official channels to avoid disclosure of information. Nobody needs a private email server to pull that off.

Indeed, the allegation that the server setup was an elaborate con to evade transparency law is doubly ridiculous. On the one hand, a private server would not be necessary to carry it out. (All you need is to have a private email address on the side, which everyone does.) While on the other hand, the exclusive use of a personal email account means that Clinton’s personal account has come under an exceptional level of security.
The classification thing is a red herring

It’s precisely because nothing about the basic setup of the email account was in any way wrong that the investigation ended up focusing on the question of mishandling classified information.

The key point here is that using a State.gov email account would not have changed anything. When US government officials have conversations about classified matters, they are not supposed to use email. They are supposed to use special secure channels.

Nonetheless, mistakes happen in part because classification standards are vague and ever-changing. Technically speaking, forwarding a Washington Post article detailing things revealed by Edward Snowden could constitute an improper discussion of classified matters.

As FBI Director James Comey concluded, “no reasonable prosecutor” would bring a case against Clinton over this matter. Almost all of the relevant statutes require an intent to mishandle classified information in order to bring a prosecution, a standard that Clinton’s conduct clearly does not meet. Critics have thus chosen to focus on 18 USC § 793, a statute that sets a lower “gross negligence” standard.

However, as Jack Goldsmith, one of the top lawyers in George W. Bush’s administration explains, such a prosecution “would be entirely novel, and would turn in part on very tricky questions about how email exchanges fit into language written with physical removal of classified information in mind.”

Ben Wittes, a veteran legal journalist and Brookings fellow who has spent the past several years specializing in national security law, wrote that Comey’s characterization was clearly correct:

For the last several months, people have been asking me what I thought the chances of an indictment were. I have said each time that there is no chance without evidence of bad faith action of some kind. People simply don’t get indicted for accidental, non-malicious mishandling of classified material. I have followed leak cases for a very long time, both at the Washington Post and since starting Lawfare. I have never seen a criminal matter proceed without even an allegation of something more than mere mishandling of sensitive information. Hillary Clinton is not above the law, but to indict her on these facts, she’d have to be significantly below the law.

It’s true that to a layman the Espionage Act’s reference to “gross negligence” sounds similar to Comey’s characterization of Clinton’s actions as “extremely careless.” But as Philip Zelikow, a counselor to Condoleezza Rice during the Bush administration and currently the Director of the Miller Center at the University of Virginia explains, they only sound alike “unless you do a tiny bit of homework” on the history and caselaw of the Statute.

As the Cato Institute’s Julian Sanchez writes, attempting a prosecution for non-malicious mishandling would likely result in the statute being held unconstitutional: “the Supreme Court’s opinion in Gorin v. United States (1941), which suggests that the Espionage Act’s intent requirements are an important feature that save it from unconstitutional vagueness.”

This legal analysis is important because it makes it clear that even if the Weiner laptop emails aren’t simply client-side copies of the exact emails the FBI already has, there is essentially no chance it will change the ultimate verdict. The reason Clinton isn’t getting locked up is that there was no malign intent. Finding another email with classified information on it won’t change that conclusion.
A bullshit scandal amidst a serious election

Network newscasts have, remarkably, dedicated more airtime to coverage of Clinton’s emails than to all policy issues combined.

Cable news has been, if anything, worse, and many prestige outlets have joined the pileup. One malign result of obsessive email coverage is that the public is left totally unaware of the policy stakes in the election. Another is that the constant vague recitations of the phrase ‘‘Clinton email scandal’’ have firmly implanted the notion that there is something scandalous about anything involving Hillary Clinton an email, including her campaign manager getting hacked or the revelation that one of her aides sometimes checked mail on her husband’s computer.

But none of this is true. Clinton broke no laws according to the FBI itself. Her setup gave her no power to evade federal transparency laws beyond what anyone who has a personal email account of any kind has. Her stated explanation for her conduct is entirely believable, fits the facts perfectly, and is entirely plausible to anyone who doesn’t simply start with the assumption that she’s guilty of something.

Given Powell’s conduct, Clinton wasn’t even breaking with an informal precedent. The very worst you can say is that, faced with an annoying government IT policy, she used her stature to find a personal workaround rather than a systemic fix that would work for everyone. To spend so much time on such a trivial matter would be absurd in a city council race, much less a presidential election. To do so in circumstances when it advances the electoral prospects of a rival who has shattered all precedents in terms of lacking transparency or basic honesty is infinitely more scandalous than anything related to the server itself.

I put the whole thing here for your convenience to read it. But please, please, please, if you are going to post this anywhere,  use the Vox url so they get the traffic:

http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/11/4/13500018/clinton-email-scandal-bullshit

The Second Luckiest Guy in the World May be Runnin’ Out of Luck by tristero

The Second Luckiest Guy in the World May be Runnin’ Out of Luck 

by tristero

And who’s the Second Luckiest Guy in the World? That would be Chris Christie, because if it wasn’t for the armageddon-level distraction of this season’s national nightmare, Bridgegate would be a top of the line, lead-the-news-off-every-single-day scandal.

But today’s results – his underlings found guilty on all counts – might mean Christie’s luck is finally running out. Because the trail of corruption and criminally childish retribution leads only higher up.

And you can hear the rejoicing from Cape May to Fort Lee and beyond.

Adding: If you have to ask who’s the luckiest guy in the world, you’re not a musician.

UPDATED: What’s Obama’s Response to Pre-Election Cyber Attacks? @spockosbrain

UPDATED: What’s Obama’s Response to Pre-Election Cyber Attacks?

by Spocko

UPDATED: I wrote this yesterday with the title What’s Obama’s Response to Pre-Election Cyber Attacks?

This evening MSNBC’s exclusive came out:

U.S. Govt. Hackers Ready to Hit Back If Russia Tries to Disrupt Election

It’s a nice saber rattling piece by the Obama administration, short on details or analysis, but I’m glad it came out. But there are still a lot of questions to be asked about what has happened already and future responses– which I detail below. Also, I want a cookie for predicting the future – Spocko]

Let’s say the Obama administration has read and believed the intelligence agencies briefs about cyber attacks from state actors.  We know Hillary has.

“We have 17 intelligence agencies, civilian and military, who have all concluded that these espionage attacks, these cyber attacks, come from the highest levels of the Kremlin, and they are designed to influence our election.”  — Hillary Clinton on 10/19/16 the third presidential debate

What is the Obama administration doing about this now? Hopefully something good. It’s probably classified.

Visualization of Mairi Attack Source Hackread

But I have another question. Were these cyber attacks, identified as coming from Russia, part of Donald Trump’s national security briefs? At the time of the debate Trump was getting national security briefings. Here is what he had to say about Clinton’s comment.

Trump: She has no idea whether it is Russia, China or anybody else.
Clinton: I am not quoting myself.
Trump: You have no idea.
Clinton: I am quoting 17, 17 — do you doubt?
Trump: Our country has no idea.
Clinton: Our military and civilian –
Trump: Yeah, I doubt it, I doubt it.
Clinton: He would rather believe Vladimir Putin than the military and civilian intelligence professionals who are sworn to protect us. I find that just absolutely —
Trump: She doesn’t like Putin because Putin has outsmarted her at every step of the way.  (Debate Transcript)

Did his briefings include what the US will do in the event of attacks before the election? Or that are happening now.  Trump is not supposed to talk about what he learns from those briefings. Can he be trusted to keep that classified information to himself? Did he have to sign anything to hear it? Wouldn’t Trump’s connections with Russia be relevant to the people briefing him? Wouldn’t they need to know just how in hock to Russia he is?

We know how the right loves to project what they do onto the left. What are the odds Trump will remember what he learned that was classified vs unclassified? So what happens if he mentions something to oligarchs about what US intelligence agencies know about who is behind them?

Also, what happens when he loses? Will he keep that classified information to himself? Did he have to sign anything to  hear it? I don’t casually throw around the word treason, but.. According to Annenberg’s guide to the Constitution, in Article III, Section 3, a person is guilty of treason if he or she goes to war against the United States or gives “aid or comfort” to an enemy. He or she does not have to physically pick up a weapon and fight in combat against U.S. troops. Actively helping the enemy by passing along classified information or supplying weapons, for example, can lead to charges of treason. )

I’m not bringing this up as yet another reason Trump should not be elected. I’m bringing it up because this is something the Obama administration should be on top of.

It would also be nice if the political media would see what a big f-ing deal these attacks are. Maybe they think all the influencing of the elections consists of leaking documents.

At least the outstanding political comedy news media have covered the Russian trolls. Check out this hilarious piece from Samantha Bee’s Full Frontal.

There are tools in hacking toolkits that major foreign countries could still unleash. Later in the debate after Wallace prompting Trump begrudgingly agreed to condemn the attacks then said, “if the United States got along with Russia, it wouldn’t be so bad.”  (“If their attacks get me elected I won’t investigate. If they don’t I’ll demand they investigate how they helped Hillary.”)

I’m sick and tired of waiting until after massive damage is done to our democracy to act. Now is a good time to be proactive.

We are getting the equivalent of Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US every day in the computer attacks from foreign state actors.

Allow me to make a suggestion to the political media. Ask Trump about it. How about you get his attention with the ol’ switcheroo? “Mr. Trump, our intelligence agencies have found that a foreign power is interfering with our election. They are testing our limits in ways that could impact the election. You said you didn’t believe it was Russia behind it. That said, what should President Obama be doing about whomever is behind it?”

He will go on about how weak Obama is on “the cyber” about Hillary and the emails. He will assume it is all about him. It might seem to be  a waste of their time, because of the non-answers.

But bringing it up with Trump will give Obama a way to talk about it without having to ask him first. Then it will give Clinton an issue to discuss as well since they must have both sides. Experts can weigh in and the next time the American people are hit by a cyber attack we will demand an investigation and not assume good intentions of the Russians, the Chinese or other nation states.

Yes there are “400 lbs hackers sitting on their mother’s bed” in located in Milpitas California. I’ve met a few, some are really nice people, smart curious people and don’t deserve to be blamed for crap they didn’t cause.

What is happening with Russia and the election is an opportunity to talk about other vulnerabilities in our networks and computer infrastructure with some real life examples.

I Didn’t Notice Your Hair was on Fire Until After the Blackout

Remember the largest blackout in North American history? Most people don’t know  it, but two major attacks on our power grid can be traced to the Chinese in 2003 and 2008.

In Shane Harris’ excellent book @War he details how 2003 hack was connected to China. When Obama talked about cyber attacks in 2009 he revealed that “cyber intruders have probed our electrical grid and that in other countries cyber attacks have plunged entire cities into darkness.” What he didn’t say was some of those cities were in the US.

50 million people were affected by the Northeast Blackout. There were 12 fatalities. Officially it was blamed on failures by FirstEnergy, headquartered in Akron, Ohio and “overgrown trees.”

But in 2003 nobody wanted to say who was behind it. Especially not when it meant calling one of our biggest trading partners a terrorist. (George W. Bush went on TV and said it was “not a terrorist action” You can bet that if he could make it look like it came from Iraq he would have. )

In the book Harris also discusses the Tuesday February 26, 2008 attack that hit Florida and blacked out Miami. It impacted 4 million customers.  Imagine an attack next Tuesday in a state like Florida. I’m sure the timing of these Internet of Things bot attack is just a coincidence. /snark

The companies that operated these plants and networks vehemently denied any accusations of foreign involvement. But while the energy companies might want to keep pretending that it’s “overgrown trees” and failed switches, there is evidence that proves otherwise. Obama has this evidence and now so does Clinton and Trump.

Trump ignoring Hillary’s remark about Russia trying to influence the election means that either he is lying, or he wasn’t informed.  My Quatloos are on lying. But trying to get a straight answer out of Trump is like trying to nail fog.

A few people, in the tech press, like Kelly Jackson Higgins at Dark Reading have brought this up.”How Clinton, Trump Could Champion Cybersecurity tech press addresses this issue? There even have been commissions on what to do, US Should Help Private Sector ‘Active Defense,’ But Outlaw Hacking Back, Says Task Force

The media needs to catch up on this issue, because it’s huge. If they don’t want to be another person with an ID-10-T  problem they could read Sean Gallagher’s great piece at Arstechnica How DNC, Clinton campaign attacks fit into Russia’s cyber-war strategy.
And if we can’t get the candidates to talk about this, maybe the actual current president could be asked about it.
I’m hoping the right would understand how easily the attacks on Clinton could be used against them, but I don’t expect that to happen since they live under Fox News’ Reality Gem (The Reality Gem allows its user to alter reality to what one wants or break the laws of reality and logic such as making 2 + 2 = 5.)

It is bizarre to think that defending our computer and network infrastructure is partisan. It’s not. We don’t need to wait until election day to remind people it isn’t.

The FBI, foreign actors and Clinton hating. Deja vu all over again.

The FBI, foreign actors and Clinton hating. Deja vu all over again.

by digby

I wrote about the FBI’s history of Clinton hating for Salon this morning:

For those who have been following the fraught relationship between the FBI and Hillary Clinton for a couple of decades, the revelations that rank-and-file agents are selectively leaking like a sieve in hopes of derailing her campaign in favor of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump comes as no big surprise. If there is such a thing as an institutional memory, then the FBI has one with an antipathy for Hillary Clinton that’s downright pathological.

The fact that the selective leaking for maximum effect hadn’t started earlier should have tipped off us old-timers that there was a plan for a late surprise. Having the FBI director himself send a vague letter filled with innuendo and suspicion to the House Oversight Committee chairman, Republican Jason Chaffetz, was a nice touch, though. It got the final week’s smear campaign off to a roaring start.

It’s now taken as a given by a large portion of the country that Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton will be indicted for . . . something. But again, what else is new? During the witch hunts of the 1990s, the goal of right-wingers was to drive president Bill Clinton from office one way or the other. They first planned to destroy his reputation and turn him out of office after his first term, which didn’t work. Then they tried to get him to resign and finally impeached him over a consensual sexual affair but failed to convict him, mostly because his approval ratings were sky-high.

Then the American people punished the Republicans at the polls instead of the president. Throughout all that, they also pursued the first lady with a shocking viciousness. From the moment she came to Washington, Hillary Clinton was loathed by the right with such intensity it was frightening. While they fully intended to chase Bubba out of town, their intention from the beginning was to throw Hillary Clinton behind bars.

Then, as today, there was a Republican FBI director, Louis Freeh, allowing his agents to run wild whispering in the ears of willing reporters that an indictment was imminent. And there were always reporters willing to breathlessly report the scoop. Take for example, the role of New York Times columnist and former Nixon henchman William Safire, as reported by CNN on January 1997:

BATON ROUGE, La.(AllPolitics) — Hillary Clinton will be indicted on Whitewater charges but not convicted, according to a prediction by the first lady’s preeminent press antagonist. New York Times columnist William Safire, who last January called the first lady a “congenital liar,” conjectured Thursday in a speech before the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry that Mrs. Clinton would face charges but that the president “will not give her a pardon. Instead, he will let the wheels of justice turn and sit by her in the courtroom, holding her hand when appropriate.”

That was just one of many occasions when Safire “reported” erroneously that an indictment was coming down any day.

It’s hard to know how many of those FBI sources might still be around, but according to a Daily Beast article by Wayne Barrett, the current torrent of selective leaks is being funneled through a retired New York FBI agent named James Kallstrom and coordinated by former federal prosecutor and New York mayor Rudy Giuliani.

Two days before James Comey sent his letter, Giuliani was on Fox, grinning like a fool,telegraphing the plan:

I think he’s [Donald Trump] got a surprise or two that you’re going to hear about in the next few days. I mean, I’m talking about some pretty big surprises. . . . We’ve got a couple of things up our sleeve that should turn this thing around.

Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara, also said, “We’ve got some stuff up our sleeves” on Fox the same day. Recall that Trump himself has been crowing on the trail that he’s heard that FBI agents were unhappy with the decision not to indict Clinton, notably during the second presidential debate when he said, “the people that have been longtime workers at the FBI are furious.” Let’s just say there is more than a little evidence that some members of the FBI are actively hostile to Clinton and have been “helpful” to the Trump campaign.

It’s ironic that there are also reportedly investigations into the possibility that the Russian government is interfering in the election on Trump’s behalf. When that story was leaked, it was immediately shot down, and it’s not hard to understand why the FBI would be very reluctant to discuss that subject. After all, the single greatest embarrassment to the bureau in recent years was the revelation that the agent assigned to the Russian desk had actually been a Russian spy for 20 years. That agent’s name was Robert Hanssen, and he’s now serving life in prison for espionage.

One of the stunning side stories of that saga was the admission by conservative columnist Robert Novak that Hanssen had been one of his FBI sources for damaging information about the Clintons. Novak, also known as the Prince of Darkness, innocently wondered if the man who had betrayed dozens of American intelligence assets in Russia, at least three of whom were executed, had really used him for nefarious purposes or if he really cared. Perhaps Novak wanted to believe that Hanssen was truly a patriot. Some reporters believe what they want to believe.

There’s obviously no connection between the Hanssen case and today’s Russian investigation(s). But there are still too many people in the intelligence business who think it’s acceptable to interfere in the political business of the country when they disapprove of a leader. And there are still far too many credulous reporters willing to help them do it.

The good news for all the Trump supporters in law enforcement is that if their man wins he has promised to let them take the gloves off, which is likely one of the major reasons they like him so much. Journalists should probably be a little more concerned about being used by this authoritarian partnership, however. Neither the FBI nor Donald Trump have much respect for democratic principles, including the First Amendment (as anyone can see by the crude insults hurled at the press by Trump and his followers every day.) It won’t end well for the country to empower these people and it certainly won’t end well for the press.

Update: Jesus H. Christ:
Rudy Giuliani said Friday that he knew the FBI planned to review more emails tied to Hillary Clinton before a public announcement about the investigation last week, confirming that the agency leaked information to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.  

“I did nothing to get it out, I had no role in it,” he said. “Did I hear about it? You’re darn right I heard about it, and I can’t even repeat the language that I heard from the former FBI agents.”  

Giuliani also said he expected Comey’s announcement to come weeks before it did.  

“I had expected this for the last, honestly, to tell you the truth, I thought it was going to be about three or four weeks ago, because way back in July this started, they kept getting stymied looking for subpoenas, looking for records,” he said.  

FBI officials knew about the newly discovered emails weeks before Comey’s announcement, according to multiple reports.
Giuliani insisted he had nothing to do with Comey’s decision to announce the probe prior to Election Day ― a move that both Republicans and Democrats have condemned. He also insisted his information comes from “former FBI agents.”  

“I’m real careful not to talk to any on-duty, active FBI agents. I don’t want to put them in a compromising position. But I sure have a lot of friends who are retired FBI agents, close, personal friends,” he said. “All I heard were former FBI agents telling me that there’s a revolution going on inside the FBI and it’s now at a boiling point.”

If you like the idea that federal government employees are choosing your president for you, you’re going to love living in Donald Trump’s America. Just be sure to salute smartly when you see one at your door.

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Brian Williams with the best left-handed compliment ever

Brian Williams with the best left-handed compliment ever

by digby

economically anxious Real Americans

He is so right. Halperin has been pimping Trump from the beginning.

But check out Chris Matthews:

CHRIS MATTHEWS: A lot of this support for Trump with all his flaws which he displays regularly is about the country. Patriotic feelings people have. They feel the country has been let down. They feel that our elite leaders on issues like immigration, they don’t regulate any immigration it seems, they don’t regulate trade to our advantage, to the working man’s or working woman’s advantage, they take us into stupid wars. Their kids don’t fight but our kids do. It’s patriotic. They believe in their country.

When I was a Capitol policeman, I worked with an old guy named Leroy Taylor, a country boy from West Virginia, a guy that had been in the military, he’d been a MP. He pulled me aside, a college kid… he said, ‘Let me tell you why the little man loves this country– because it’s always God.’ And there’s a deep sense of the country has been taken away and betrayed. And I think that is so deep with people that they are looking at a guy that is flawed as hell like Trump. And at least it is a way of saying I am really angry about the way the elite has treated my country. And it is so deep it overwhelms all the bad stuff from Trump. It is that strong. It’s a strong force, a wind of anger about the way the country has been betrayed.

They think he has a great sensory nerve that knows what works with people. He may not care for a second when he goes to bed at night, if he does go to bed at night, about immigration. He may not care about trade at all. He may not care about these stupid wars because his record is very mixed on that to say the least but he knows that the average guy out there, the average joe, the regular guy and woman, is very angry about the way this country — and Hillary is the symbol of the establishment. She is the symbol of the way things are headed… and they don’t like that. They are trying to ring the bell and say, ‘No!’ And Trump is the only way to ring it… If Trump is even smart enough to know this, it would be really dangerous.

MIKA BRZEZINSKI: But what if he continues to double down on things like [Former Miss Universe Alicia Machado]?

CHRIS MATTHEWS: Irrelevant. Machado has nothing to do with what I just said. It’s a totally immoral perhaps distraction from this whole thing because it takes away from a serious question in front of the American people: Do you like the leadership of this country or don’t you? And that should be the question that rings through the election booths….

JOE SCARBOROUGH: If we’re talking about what’s going to impact a race, and you look at past being prologue after Khan, after Khan, look at Colorado. Trump drew even in Colorado. He drew close to being even in Virginia. Which means there is a constant reset, Chris Matthews. A constant reset to make people say we’re offended by him. We can’t vote for him. There’s no way. It’s just never going to happen. And then they go back to the reset, which is what you’re talking about. Change, change, change.

CHRIS MATTHEWS: The force is so strong.

JOE SCARBOROUGH: The call for change obviously is more powerful than everybody being offended.

CHRIS MATTHEWS: And it’s a particular kind of change. It is America first. It is looking out for our country instead of getting involved in stupid Middle East wars that have never made us stronger. Trade deals that seem to have hallowed out most of the Midwest and Northeast. If you go to Scranton you know what the average parent up there thinks? I want my kids to stay here. I don’t want them to travel away beyond driving distance to get a job. They just want their kids to come home for weekends or sometime. They’re losing what they had. They like Social Security. The like Medicare. They’re not right wingers. They like the America they had and want to hold onto that. Trump says I can give it back.

How women are treated is irrelevant. It’s just a distraction. His racism and xenophoboia are a distraction. He’s talking about change. Not progress, mind you, change. He wants to “change” this country back to a place where all those blacks, browns and bitches back in their proper places — as second class citizens so these people can feel like they’ve still got something.

And yes they certainly are fucking right wingers.

Chris Matthews, the “former Capitol Hill Policeman” who is channeling the real American guys in Scranton reportedly makes more than five million dollars a year.

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Within the ballpark, time moves differently, by @Gaius_Publius

Within the ballpark, time moves differently

by Gaius Publius

August 1, 1910. New York Giants centerfielder Fred Snodgrass, whose
10th-inning error in the 1912 World Series shadowed him for the rest of
his life, and beyond. Headline of his obituary in the New York Times:
“Fred Snodgrass, 86, Is Dead; Ball Player Muffed 1912 Fly.” (Source)

On baseball and time, the great sport writer (and writer) Roger Angell:

The last dimension is time. Within the ballpark, time moves differently, marked by no clock except the events of the game. This is the unique, unchangeable feature of baseball, and perhaps explains why this sport, for all the enormous changes it has undergone in the past decade or two, remains somehow rustic, unviolent, and introspective. Baseball’s time is seamless and invisible, a bubble within which players move at exactly the same pace and rhythms as all their predecessors. This is the way the game was played in our youth and in our fathers’ youth, and even back then—back in the country days—there must have been the same feeling that time could be stopped. Since baseball time is measured only in outs, all you have to do is succeed utterly; keep hitting, keep the rally alive, and you have defeated time. You remain forever young. Sitting in the stands, we sense this, if only dimly. The players below us—Mays, DiMaggio, Ruth, Snodgrass—swim and blur in memory, the ball floats over to Terry Turner, and the end of this game may never come.

You remain forever young. The players below us — Mays, DiMaggio, Ruth, Snodgrass — swim and blur in memory, the ball floats over to Terry Turner, and the end of this game may never come.

Poetry. Also, baseball exactly.

GP