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Month: July 2017

“Naive” is being too kind by @BloggersRUs

“Naive” is being too kind
by Tom Sullivan


U.S. embassy in Moscow. Public domain via Wikipedia.

America broke ground in 1979 on a new embassy complex in Moscow. The deal was signed in 1972 “during the heady days of detente” despite reservations from the State Department, according to a 1988 New York Times account. Negotiations had dragged on for years, but Nixon wanted to close the deal. In a “crucial blunder,” the U.S. gave the Soviets control of design and construction. By late 1979, precast elements for the structure had arrived on site. Since the U.S. would be doing all the interior finish work, American officials assumed they would easily detect any eavesdropping devices. Not until 1982 did a team of security experts arrive to closely examine the structure itself:

The team was stunned when over the course of a few months, they discovered that the Soviets had put permanent eavesdropping systems into the actual structure of the building.

“We found things that didn’t belong there based on shop drawings,” said Frank Crosher, a security engineer who worked on the site from 1980 to 1982 and managed the embassy security team from Washington until 1986. “We found cables in the concrete as well as design discrepancies, millions of bits of data.”

Along the way, they discovered interconnecting systems so sophisticated that they could not be removed from the steel and concrete columns, the beams, the pre-cast floor slabs and sheer walls between the columns. They found electronic “packages” where a piece of steel reinforcement in the flooring should have been, and resonating devices that allowed the Russians to monitor precisely both electronic and verbal communications.

Their job was made more difficult by decoys made to look like bugs and garbage from the construction process.

The bugging as far more sophisticated than the experts thought capable of the Soviets. Americans ceased construction in 1985 and, after over a decade of recriminations, finger-pointing, and three administrations, agreed to “top hat” the structure rather than tear it all down and start again from scratch. The new structure finally opened in July 2000.

After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, then-KGB head Vadim Bakatin presented the U.S. ambassador the blueprint for the embassy bugs:

Until that moment, the Soviet Union had steadfastly denied the bugging.

It was a gesture of friendship, Bakatin said. And he hoped the United States would be able to debug the building and move in, he said.

The United States, however, was afraid of being tricked again.

Against that backdrop, and with Russian hacking of the American election systems in 2016 still under investigation, President Trump yesterday morning proposed working with Russian President Vladimir Putin on election security:

Trump’s proposal endured a torrent of ridicule from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham told NBC’s “Meet the Press” it was “not the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard, but it’s pretty close.” Representative Adam Schiff, the Democrats’ senior member of the House Intelligence Committee, appeared on CNN’s “State of the Union,” saying, “If that’s our best election defense, we might as well just mail our ballot boxes to Moscow.” By last night, Trump was backing off:

On top of Trump’s widely panned performance at the G20 meeting comes news that two weeks after Trump’s nomination last summer, Donald Trump Jr., then-campaign chairman Paul J. Manafort, and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner met at Trump Tower with a “Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer” who promised compromising information about Hillary Clinton. In exchange for what, we still do not know. But essentially, the Trump camp signaled to Moscow that Trump could be bought.

Even people who voted for him knew Trump was hopelessly unsuited to the job he now holds. The fact that “three advisers to the White House briefed on the meeting and two others with knowledge of it” provided information to the Times was not lost on columnist Will Bunch. “In horror movie parlance, ‘the calls are coming from inside the house’ … the White House, in this case.” They know. Bunch continues:

If there was nothing underhanded about these meetings between Trump officials and various Russians close to Putin — including his U.S. ambassador, a state banker, and now a lawyer working aggressively to end American sanctions on Moscow — then why have so many high-ranking people risked their reputation and possibly their career to lie about them? The growing list of people who’ve lied about their Russian contacts and what was talked about now includes the U.S. attorney general (Jeff Sessions), Trump’s original national security adviser (Michael Flynn), arguably Trump’s closest West Wing adviser (Kushner, his son-in-law) and now the president’s son. They always say it’s not the crime but the cover-up. What else besides a cover-up can this be called at this stage of the game?

To call Trump hopelessly naive is being too kind. The man is a threat to national security.

Trump is not alt-right, he’s ain’t-right.

A poignant reminder

A poignant reminder

by digby

It makes me feel a little bit sick to think that Donald Trump is representing the US at the G20 while this guy is sitting in the Anchorage Airport taking pics with babies, but that’s where we are.

An Alaska mother is cherishing cellphone photos she snapped of her wide-eyed 6-month-old baby in the arms of former President Barack Obama.

Jolene Jackinsky was at Anchorage International Airport on Monday looking for an airline when she ended up in a waiting area for private flights where a man she thought looked like Obama was sitting.

“As I got closer, I thought: Oh my God, it is Obama,” she recalled Friday from Newhalen, a small Alaska village where she’s vacationing.

Obama then walked up to her and asked “Who is this pretty girl?”

They chatted about how fast children grow while Obama carried baby Giselle. Jackinsky took a few photos of a smiling Obama carrying Giselle, who was wearing a straw hat with a white ribbon.

Obama told them he was headed home from a vacation, Jackinsky said.

Airport officials were not immediately available Friday evening after work hours to confirm that Obama had stopped there.

When Giselle’s father approached, Obama joked, “I’m taking your baby,” Jackinsky said.

Giselle was calm and content during the brief encounter, Jackinsky said. “It was only five minutes but it was a moment that will last forever,” she said.

She posted the photos on Facebook.

“I think it’s unreal and pretty exciting that I get to have a picture with him and my baby,” she said. “Not a lot of people get to meet him.”

I was never among those who worshiped the guy, although I always appreciated his intelligence and maturity. But he looks like a combination of Gandhi, Washington, Einstein and Jesus Christ compared to our current leader.

How low we have sunk.

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QOTD: Corey Lewandowsky

QOTD: Corey Lewandowsky

by digby

On Fox News

The president took this issue directly to Vladimir Putin, questioned him if they were involved in meddling in the election in any way, shape or form … pressed him very tough to find out if Russia had anything to do with the outcome of the US election. And from what Vladimir Putin has said, the answer is no. So I don’t know what else the mainstream media can talk about, other than the fact that there was no collusion, there was no coordination. Now the president has taken this issue directly to the president of Russia and raised it. So now I think the issue is officially dead.

Well ok then. Never mind …

Worth a thousand words

Worth a thousand words

by digby

This is a photo shop. The real picture doesn’t include Putin. Some people allege it was created by Russian agents. 


The new White Nationalist alliance:

The West is a racial and religious term. To be considered Western, a country must be largely Christian (preferably Protestant or Catholic) and largely white. Where there is ambiguity about a country’s “Westernness,” it’s because there is ambiguity about, or tension between, these two characteristics. Is Latin America Western? Maybe. Most of its people are Christian, but by U.S. standards, they’re not clearly white. Are Albania and Bosnia Western? Maybe. By American standards, their people are white. But they are also mostly Muslim.

Steve Bannon, who along with Stephen Miller has shaped much of Trump’s civilizational thinking, has been explicit about this. In a 2014 speech, he celebrated “the long history of the Judeo-Christian West struggle against Islam” and “our forefathers” who “bequeathed to use the great institution that is the church of the West.”

During the Cold War, when the contest between Soviet and American power divided Europe along geographic lines, American presidents sometimes contrasted the democratic “West” with the communist “East.” But when the Cold War ended, they largely stopped associating America with “the West.” Every president from George H.W. Bush to Barack Obama emphasized the portability of America’s political and economic principles. The whole point was that democracy and capitalism were not uniquely “Western.” They were not the property of any particular religion or race but the universal aspiration of humankind.


Go watch this to see how the Russian government is appealing to the gun-loving, evangelical American right.
These Christian NRA folk are particularly taken with the fact that Russians look just like them.

In other words, they’re white.

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The Magnitsky Act

The Magnitsky Act

by digby

This story from the Daily Beast back in May of 2016 goes into the details of the Magnitsky Act, which was the subject of the previously undisclosed meeting between Donald Trump Jr, Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort during the campaign:

The Russian government and its sympathizers have embarked on a concerted campaign to keep ill-gotten Russian money, and the crooks behind it, in business in the United States.

To do that, they want to rewrite the history of one of the most notorious corruption scandals of the Putin era. And, strangely, some members of the U.S. Congress and European Parliament seem to be playing along.

It all dates back to the passage of the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act on Dec. 14, 2012. This landmark piece of U.S. legislation, named for a tax lawyer in Moscow who uncovered massive corruption and allegedly died for that sin, sought to sanction and bar from entry into the United States dozens of Russian officials and mobsters implicated in a $230 million tax fraud and its murderous cover-up.

Since then, the Kremlin has tried every trick in its playbook to have the law repealed.

Early on, it promoted a series of “counter-Magnitsky” measures. One of these was a vindictive satire on the original law, barring certain U.S. citizens from traveling to Russia (not that the blacklisted U.S.
senators or federal prosecutors of Russian arms traffickers had much of a desire to visit in the first place).
Another, crueler “counter-Magnitsky” measure prevented Americans from adopting Russian orphans, many of whom are disabled or stricken with debilitating illnesses and languishing in substandard state institutions.

Jo Becker, the children’s-rights advocacy director for Human Rights Watch, denounced the anti-adoption law for making “vulnerable children pawns in a cynical act of political retribution.”

But to the Kremlin’s enormous frustration, the U.S. law stayed on the books.

In four years, the Magnitsky Act has not been repealed. The Obama administration, which treats Russia as a kind of frenemy that’s potentially useful in some areas even when it’s criminal in others, has enforced the law only fitfully, but a handful of Russian officials have been publicly named and shamed by Congress.

Meanwhile, efforts to have the law replicated in other democratic jurisdictions, including the European Parliament, have gained momentum, thanks largely to the relentless activism of one American financier.

William Browder is the CEO of the Hermitage Fund, a onetime Moscow-based investment firm whose offices were raided and whose subsidiaries were stolen and reregistered for use in dummying up tax liabilities in 2007.

Sergei Magnitsky was Browder’s tax lawyer, a Russian everyman who uncovered the fraud and took his findings to the authorities, expecting them to be relieved at the prospect of recovering money effectively stolen from the state.

Instead, Magnitsky was accused of being a tax fraudster himself. He was arrested by some of the same Interior Ministry officials he’d implicated in the Hermitage fraud, and there is strong evidence—corroborated by Russia’s Presidential Council on Human Rights, no less—to suggest that he was deprived of life-saving medical treatment for gallstones and acute pancreatitis while in pretrial detention.

There is further evidence that Magnitsky was handcuffed to a bed and beaten by truncheon-wielding guards who left him to die in an isolation cell in Matrosskaya Tishina prison in Moscow.

Browder has spent nearly a decade promoting Magnitsky’s investigative work about the fusion between organized crime and the state in Putin’s Russia. Burdened by an enormous sense of guilt about the death of his attorney, Browder has become a full-time flame tender for the Magnitsky legacy, vowing to bring to justice those who took part in the frame-up job of an innocent man.

Now permanently based in London, Browder has come under unremitting vilification and legal attack from Moscow.

In 2013, a Moscow court put Browder on trial in absentia alongside the dead Magnitsky in the first posthumous prosecution in the history of Russia.

Browder has since defeated efforts to use an Interpol Red Notice to have him extradited back to Russia to face trial for what he insists are bogus tax-evasion charges.

Since the passage of the Magnitsky Act, much of the looted $230 million has been found or frozen. Some was in Swiss and Latvian bank accounts; some was in offshore companies technically “owned” by Russian concert cellist Sergei Roldugin (who happens to be Putin’s best friend), and some was even in six-figure condos in Manhattan.

About $14 million of these assets, including cash deposited in U.S. bank accounts controlled by a Cyprus-registered company called Prevezon Holdings, Ltd., was confiscated by the U.S. Department of Justice.

As the investigations and asset seizures have begun to bite, a lobbying effort has gotten under way to try once again to have the Magnitsky Act repealed.

As before, disadvantaged Russian children are being dangled as bait, with a wink-and-a-nudge promise to have the Russian law rescinded if the American law is taken off the books.

As one U.S. official put it privately, the current messaging is being “led by ogres out of central casting. They’re saying, ‘You repeal Magnitsky and we’ll let go of the kids.’ And it’s not even American kids. It’s their own. And they’re kids with Down syndrome and spina bifida.”

In February, an organization calling itself the Human Rights Accountability Global Initiative Foundation, an obvious echo of the full name of the Magnitsky Act, was registered in Delaware. Little trace of the activities or provenance of this organization exist online, apart from its “under construction” website, whose homepage is written in ungrammatical English.

HRAGIF claims to be “working on analyzing legal and legislative options to help overturn this adoption ban,” according to its site. “We would like to present our findings to the members of U.S. Congress, Administration and U.S. public and is planning to brief them on possible ways of resolution of this stalemate on adoptions.”

The Daily Beast has seen an email sent to the Open Dialog Foundation, a Poland-based NGO, from a man named Anatoli Samochornov, who claimed to “represent” HRAGIF along with Natalia Veselnitskaya, identified in the email as “a Russian lawyer who conducted an extensive investigation of the Magnitsky case.”

Both Samochornov and Veselnitskaya were seeking press accreditation to attend an event last month at the Open Dialog Foundation where Browder was slated to speak.

They were denied accreditation.

The Russian-born, partly U.S.-educated Samochornov is a former project manager at the Meridian International Center, a subcontracted nonprofit hired by the U.S. State Department where, according to his LinkedIn profile, he worked on programs to “establish an understanding of U.S. foreign policy goals and objectives for current and future international leaders,” and served as an interpreter at “high level UN and private sector meetings for the Secretary of State and other VIPs.”

Samochornov was also apparently a “program officer” at the FBI’s field office in New York, according to an FBI press release.

The Daily Beast spoke briefly to Samochornov last week. He confirmed the authenticity of his email to the Open Dialog Foundation and his and Veselnitskaya’s involvement in the setting up of HRAGIF. But he asked to be interviewed on the record alongside his colleague, who was not, at the time of the call, available to speak.
Then, after agreeing to such an interview, neither Samochornov nor Veselnitskaya responded to The Daily Beast’s follow-up inquiries, and neither was available in time for the publication of this story.

Their silence may owe to the fact that, unmentioned in Samochornov’s email to the Open Dialog Foundation and nowhere apparent on HRAGIF’s website, is Veselnitskaya’s role as the family attorney for the owner of Prevezon Holdings, Ltd., the company accused in U.S federal court of money-laundering.

Veselnitskaya is not shy about her opinions of the Magnitsky Act, about Browder, or about journalism aimed at uncovering Russian corruption. Her Twitter feed and interviews on Russian state television reveal her to be a staunch adherent of the Kremlin’s position on all of the above.

For instance, after the so-called Panama Papers disclosures about Putinist cronies stashing billions in offshore companies, Veselnitskaya tweeted that the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, one of the partner organizations investigating the leaks, is a “cistern earning serious investments from Western investors in the sewer wars.”

In an appearance on Russia’s RBK TV on Dec. 12, 2014, Veselnitskaya said “there is no Magnitsky case, as such. There is Mr. Browder’s case who used the death of this poor boy in his own personal interests.” And: “Sergei Magnitsky did not uncover any theft referred to in the Magnitsky Act…No one tortured him and no one killed Sergei Magnitsky as it is stated in the Magnitsky Act.”

HRAGIF was founded in February. Two months later, when four U.S. representatives took part in a congressional delegation to Moscow, they were given a letter marked “confidential” that makes much the same case as Veselnitskaya does about this notorious affair.

The delegation featured Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, a longtime admirer of Putin (they once arm-wrestled in a Washington, D.C., bar), an opponent of U.S. sanctions on Russia, and an outspoken advocate of closer bilateral cooperation between the two former Cold War enemies, particularly in the realm of combating Islamic terrorism.

The confidential letter given to Rohrabacher, a copy of which The Daily Beast has reviewed, carries a litany of serious allegations against Browder, Magnitsky, the Hermitage Fund, and one of its U.S. investors, which the letter accuses of committing securities and tax fraud in the United States.

Browder, the letter states, is guilty of “an illegal scheme of buying up Gazprom shares without permission of the Government of Russia” between 1999 and 2006, Gazprom being Russia’s state-owned gas company. “There is not a jot of truth in Browder’s story, but this is the doctrinal essence of the story known as the ‘Magnitsky case’ put in as a basis for the U.S. Act that caused the most severe damage to the U.S.-Russian relations in recent years,” the letter reads. Then its authors offer to bring the “collected evidence” before the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations and “other concerned U.S. government agencies.”

The document ends with a conspicuous quid pro quo enticement: “Changing attitudes to the Magnitsky story in the Congress, obtaining reliable knowledge about real events and personal motives of those behind the lobbying of this destructive Act, taking into account the pre-election political situation may change the current climate in interstate relations. Such a situation could have a very favorable response from the Russian side on many key controversial issues and disagreements with the United States, including matters concerning the adoption procedures.” (Emphasis added.)

Rohrabacher’s press secretary, Ken Grubbs, told The Daily Beast that the letter “came from the Russian government itself, as indeed most information from Russia comes from the government itself,” but declined to specify who, exactly, in the Russian government presented the document to the California congressman and his colleagues.

As for the letter’s contents, wherein a U.S. company is implicated in securities and tax crimes and the founding premise for a four-year-old U.S. law is deemed illegitimate, Grubbs did not wish to comment beyond saying: “The congressman simply wants to give [the document] careful consideration. He recognizes that various partisans are impatient for a conclusion, but he wants intellectual honesty to prevail, which requires some patience.”

Careful consideration of these accusations was the stated reason for Rohrabacher’s participation, three weeks ago, in temporarily deferring the markup of a new and expanded draft bill that would apply the economic measures of the Magnitsky Act on a global scale, making gross human-rights abusers from any country susceptible to U.S. asset freezes and visa bans.

That deferral more or less coincided with the scheduled debut in the European Parliament of a two-hour documentary, The Magnitsky Affair—Behind the Scenes, reiterating many of the accusations made in the Russian government letter Rohrabacher received.

The documentary was directed by famed Russian filmmaker Andrei Nekrasov, who has a reputation as a critic of the Russian government. The documentary’s debut was canceled at the last minute, however, owing to legal pressure brought by Browder, who considers it morally squalid in tone and libelously wrong on the facts, and also by the public outcry of several MEPs who agree with him.

But how did Nekrasov’s work get to be slated for exhibition in Europe’s legislature? Here the story gets even weirder. Heidi Hautala, a Finnish MEP from the Greens voting bloc whom Browder once considered to be a stalwart proponent of Magnitsky sanctions in Europe, hosted the abortive screening. (She is reportedly dating Nekrasov.)

Also in attendance were two invited guests whose presence raised eyebrows among those familiar with the real Magnitsky affair. The first was Maj. Pavel Karpov, one of the Interior Ministry policemen the lawyer identified as an accomplice to the Hermitage fraud and one of the first state officials to be sanctioned under the U.S. law.

The second was Natalia Veselnitskaya, who told state-controlled Russian television channel NTV from Brussels: “We have not yet unraveled the chain of all those nuances with which Mr. Browder has lived and keeps living. He alone knows for sure the reason for Magnitsky’s death.”

When the film was ultimately yanked, Veselnitskaya was incensed: “We are deeply outraged and…feel a sense of disgust. Withdrawal of the film from the premiere shows that freedom of speech in the European Parliament is granted only to one side.”

Browder believes that Veselnitskaya played an integral role in the Nekrasov documentary. “The Russian press referred to her as one of its organizers and the person who provided input for this anti-Magnitsky film,” he said. “It is certainly consistent with their own anti-Magnitsky sentiments.”

Among the more contentious claims in The Magnitsky Affair is the suggestion that the lawyer was not really a lawyer (despite the fact that even Putin’s presidential website describes him as such) and was never beaten by prison guards, despite postmortem photographs showing bruises about his arms and legs, an official death certificate that refers to a suspected cerebral cranial injury, and a Russian government forensic team’s findings that he suffered from blunt force trauma consistent with that inflicted by rubber truncheons.

Nekrasov also claims that Magnitsky never uncovered any involvement by Russian Interior Ministry officers in the theft of Hermitage subsidiaries and the subsequent tax heist, despite complaints that Magnitsky prepared and testimonyhe personally gave to Russia’s FBI-like Investigative Committee outlining his findings in great detail.

Nekrasov’s film, following the Kremlin’s line, also blames Magnitsky and Browder for stealing the $230 million.

Rohrabacher appears to find that allegation persuasive. On May 4, the congressman tweeted: “Don’t ignore courageous Ru journalist who exposes Putin’s sins, Andrei Nekrasov. He reports Magnitsky case is a lie. Open Ur mind.”

Many more tweets in a similar vein preceded and followed this one.

Curiously enough, as this article was being edited Tuesday, The Daily Beast learned about a further development in the the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act, which is due to be marked up Wednesday in the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

According to a U.S. congressional staffer, former California Rep. Ron Dellums and someone named Rinat Akhmetshin showed up Tuesday without an appointment.

“They said they were lobbying on behalf of a Russian company called Prevezon and asked us to delay the Global Magnitsky Act or at least remove Magnitsky from the name,” the staffer said. “Mr. Dellums said it was a shame that this bill has made it so Russian orphans cannot be adopted by Americans.”

Rinat Akhmetshin was identified in February 2015 by The New York Times as the “director of a Washington think tank called the International Eurasian Institute.”

Late Tuesday evening, The Daily Beast obtained a copy of Rep. Rohrabacher’s proposed amendment to the bill for Wednesday’s markup session. On Page 2, line 2, the congressman instructed the Foreign Affairs Committee, “Strike Magnitsky.”

Just a month after this was written, Veselnitskaya met with Trump Jr, Kushner and Manafort. And they all forgot to mention it. Now that it’s been revealed, they’saying it was a set-up by the Democrats and even so it was all about orphans, which apparently they all care deeply about.

And, by the way, according to all the Republicans on TV this morning, as well as a few left wingers, Trump’s G20 was a triumph because he’s working with our strongest ally Vladimir Putin to avert a nuclear war between the two countries. They didn’t discuss human rights because both countries beat lawyers to death in prison for exposing their political corruption. After all, Trump has always defended Vladimir Putin’s policies by saying that “we kill plenty too” so he’s really the honest truth teller who’s going to bring peace. Or something.

The message I get these days is that the US and every other country’s governments are authoritarian killers and that’s just the way it is so there’s no point in anyone complaining about it. We are all sinners so until the US is perfect in every way we need to shut up about others.

Ok, then.

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Integrity shmegrity by @BloggersRUs

Integrity shmegrity
by Tom Sullivan

When it comes to elections, Republicans are all about election integrity. Except when they’re not.

“There was not a lot of re-litigating of the past,” Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told reporters Friday after President Trump’s first meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Tillerson referred to Russian hacking of U.S. election databases and other interference in the 2016 elections:

“I think both of the leaders feel like there’s a lot of things in the past that both of us are unhappy about. We’re unhappy, they’re unhappy,” he said. “What the two Presidents, I think rightly, focused on is how do we move forward. How do we move forward from here, because it’s not clear to me that we will ever come to some agreed-upon resolution of that question between the two nations.”

Integrity shmegrity. 2016 is ancient history.

Putin told reporters in December the hubbub about Russian hacking was simply Democrats looking to blame someone else for their losing. “You have to know how to lose with dignity,” he said. On Friday, a U.S. president who doesn’t know how to win with dignity seemed to concur. Russia may very well have meddled in our elections, Trump told reporters in Warsaw on Thursday, “but I think it could well have been other countries. Nobody really knows … Nobody really knows for sure.” After speaking with Putin, Trump was moving on.

But while the Trump administration talks about getting over it out of one side of its mouth, its Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity continues to press states for detailed voter roll information. Much on its wish list states are prohibited by law from handing over. Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, as vice chair of the commission, is tasked with proving Trump’s unsubstantiated claim that three million Americans voted illegally and denied him the popular vote in November. Already the commission faces multiple lawsuits from privacy and government ethics watchdogs.

A hostile state mucking about in U.S. elections? Fugetaboutit! But rumors of millions of imaginary phantom voters require a presidential commission.

The New York Times Editorial Board is not so muddled as Trump about the lack of election security:

The question is this: Can the system be strengthened against cyberattacks in time for the 2018 midterms and the 2020 presidential race? The answer, encouragingly, is that there are concrete steps state and local governments can take right now to improve the security and integrity of their elections. A new study by the Brennan Center for Justice identifies two critical pieces of election infrastructure — aging voting machines and voter registration databases relying on outdated software — that present appealing targets for hackers and yet can be shored up at a reasonable cost.

Last year, Russian hackers tried to break into voter databases in at least 39 states, aiming to alter or delete voter data, and also attempted to take over the computers of more than 100 local election officials before Election Day. There is no evidence that they infiltrated voting machines, but they have succeeded in doing so in other countries, and it’s only a matter of time before they figure it out here. R. James Woolsey, the former C.I.A. director, wrote in an introduction to the Brennan Center report, “I am confident the Russians will be back, and that they will take what they have learned last year to attempt to inflict even more damage in future elections.”

America’s decentralized election system makes it difficult to hack a national election. That doesn’t mean Russia or other might try to flip local or state elections. The Brennan assessment suggests replacing software and upgrading voting machines to make them auditable might take a few hundred million dollars. “A pittance considering the stakes,” says the Times.

Actual in-person voter fraud looks like people getting caught, writes David Atkins, citing a recent guilty plea by a Trump voter in Iowa:

“Voter fraud” is a term used to scare racist whites by conjuring images of urban minorities coming into their precious bedroom communities en masse by busloads, voting multiple times for fake and deceased people on the rolls. This doesn’t happen, of course, but try telling that to the legions of loyal Fox News watchers. “Voter fraud” is then used as an excuse to ramp up ID and other requirements that disenfranchise the poor, the young and the otherwise disadvantaged to benefit Republican constituencies. It’s no surprise that minorities who get caught voting innocently face far harsher penalties than white conservatives committing knowing fraud.

Which raises the question of how Trump and his colleagues would respond if Vladimir Putin were black?

Nasty habits: “The Little Hours” **½ By Dennis Hartley @denofcinema5

Saturday Night at the Movies




Nasty habits: The Little Hours **½

By Dennis Hartley

So when was the last time you saw a “ribald romp” at the multiplex? For that matter, when’s the last time you can even remember reading a film review that used descriptive phrases like “ribald romp”? How about “bawdy period piece”? Or “saucy yarn” (my favorite). I’m sure that readers of a certain age remember the cheekiest bodice-ripper of them all, Tony Richardson’s Tom Jones (1963) which ignited a slew of imitators like The Amorous Adventures of Moll Flanders, Lock Up Your Daughters, Joseph Andrews, et.al.

A close cousin is the costume spoof; beginning with The Court Jester (1955), which was the antecedent to Monty Python and the Holy Grail, The Princess Bride, and Robin Hood: Men in Tights. While all four films are genre parodies, the latter three are products of a more modern post-ironic sensibility (in contrast to The Court Jester, which is simply unselfconscious goofy fun). Which brings us to the age of the meta-ironic costume spoof, perhaps best represented by the wonderfully demented Comedy Central series Another Period (a clever mashup of Keeping Up With The Kardashians with Downton Abbey).

Fans of Another Period will likely be the most receptive audience for Jeff Baena’s The Little Hours, an irreverent, somewhat uneven, and occasionally hilarious reworking of The Decameron. For those unfamiliar, The Decameron (as I just learned on Wiki, for I am a Philistine), is a collection of novellas by the 14th-century Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio, structured as a frame story containing 100 tales. Obviously, all 100 tales are not contained within the film’s 90-minute frame (it would pose an interesting challenge).

So for out of what one assumes to be sheer practicality, Baena narrows it down to the one about the horny young nuns (those easily offended should probably leave the room now). Anyway, this bawdy period piece is a saucy yarn concerning three young nuns (Alison Brie, Aubrey Plaza, and Kate Micucci) who deal with their raging hormones and the crushing boredom of covenant life by taking out their frustrations on the hapless groundskeeper. “Why are you looking at us, you fucking pervert?” they scream at him (as medieval nuns do). One day, they gang up and poke him with sticks, sending him fleeing.

The resident Father (John C. Reilly) hires a hunky replacement (Dave Franco), a servant seeking asylum after getting caught in flagrante delicto with his lord’s lady. The Father advises the servant that it would be best if he posed as a deaf-mute (so as not to tempt the nuns into breaking their vows of chastity). You know where this story is heading, right?

What ensues is a cross between The Trouble With Angels with, erm, Ken Russell’s The Devils. The film is far from a classic, but the cast (also including Molly Shannon, Fred Armisen, Jemima Kirke, Nick Offerman and Paul Reiser) is fun, and Quyen Tran’s cinematography is lush. So if you seek asylum from the summer movie onslaught of pirates, comic book characters and aliens, the solution is obvious: get thee to a nunnery!

# # #

Alas, they don’t make perfect period romps like this one anymore:

Previous posts with related themes:


Black Death
The Princess of Montpensier
Farewell My Queen
Elizabeth: the Golden Age
Barry Lyndon

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–Dennis Hartley

So much winning

So much winning

by digby

This analysis of Trump’s triumph of the swill tour by Molly K McKew is enough to make you want to drink a whole lot of booze. So fill your glass:

President Donald Trump needed to accomplish two things this week during his visits to Poland and the G-20 Summit in Hamburg. First, he needed to reassure America’s allies that he was committed to collective defense and the core set of values and principles that bind us together. Second, he needed to demonstrate that he understands that the greatest threat to that alliance, those values, and our security is the Kremlin.

Trump delivered neither of these. In very concrete terms, through speech and action, the president signaled a willingness to align the United States with Vladimir Putin’s worldview, and took steps to advance this realignment. He endorsed, nearly in its totality, the narrative the Russian leader has worked so meticulously to construct.

The readout of Trump’s lengthy meeting with Putin included several key points. First, the United States will “move on” from election hacking issues with no accountability or consequences for Russia; in fact, the U.S. will form a “framework” with Russia to cooperate on cybersecurity issues, evaluating weaknesses and assessing potential responses jointly. Second, the two presidents agreed not to meddle in “each other’s” domestic affairs—equating American activities to promote democracy with Russian aggression aimed at undermining it, in an incalculable PR victory for the Kremlin. Third, the announced, limited cease-fire in Syria will be a new basis for cooperation between the U.S. and Russia; Secretary of State Rex Tillerson went so far as to say that the Russian approach in Syria—yielding mass civilian casualties, catastrophic displacement, untold destruction and erased borders—may be “more right” than that of the United States.

Each of these points represents a significant victory for Putin. Each of them will weaken U.S. tools for defending its interests and security from the country that defines itself as America’s “primary adversary.” Trump has ceded the battle space—physical, virtual, moral—to the Kremlin. And the president is going to tell us this is a “win.”

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Trump’s unusual speech in Warsaw earlier in the week foreshadowed this catastrophic outcome, despite some analysts’ wishful thinking to the contrary. The initial reaction to the speech was far more positive than to his previous attempt at NATO. After all, the president seemed to challenge Russia, acknowledge the importance of the alliance’s commitment to mutual defense, and mount a defense of Western democracies and values.

But this assessment missed the forest for the trees—and the fact that its intended audience was Russia, not Europe. In reality, Trump attacked NATO and the EU, the twin pillars of the post-World War II transatlantic architecture, again demonstrating he has no interest in being the leader of the free world, but rather its critic in chief.
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Trump did not express a clear commitment to Article 5: He said only that “the United States has demonstrated not merely with words but with its actions that we stand firmly behind it.” At a news conference with Polish President Andrzej Duda, he said he was not in a position to discuss guarantees for the U.S. troop presence in Poland. President Duda confirmed this, saying discussions would continue next year.

Trump did not defend Western democracies: In fact, he did not once mention democracy in his speech. As for values, he mentions them seven times: first, in the negative—immigrants who are against them—and second, in the context of traditionalism.

Trump’s challenge to Russia came with an olive branch, offering it a place in a “community of responsible nations in our fight against common enemies and in defense of civilization itself.” This signal to Putin that there is a common “civilization” to which the U.S., European nations and Russia all belong—absent the usual rhetoric of democracy or shared Western values—is a critical gesture. Previous U.S. presidents have said that Russia has a place in the community of democracies if it chooses to, but Trump’s approach was more in line with Putin’s own thinking, steeped in traditionalism and history and a narrative of a clash of civilizations.

In 2013 and 2014, Putin’s decade-long redrafting of Russia’s historical narrative culminated in a new definition of Russian exceptionalism. On March 18, 2014, he delivered a powerful speech to mark Russia’s annexation of Crimea, disavowing Soviet history and reaching back to Russian Orthodoxy to define modern Russian identity. He embraced the idea of “orthodox morality,” which rejects Western concepts like inclusivity and focuses on “traditionalism” as the foundation of national identity.

The themes of these speeches—speaking not of values but “civilization,” not of alliances but “sovereignty,” not of minority rights but the defense of the rights of the majority based on concepts of “traditional values”—were all central tenets of Trump’s speech in Warsaw, which was littered with illiberal buzzwords meant to catch the ear of those like-minded while simultaneously placating potential critics. Trump championed rhetoric and ideas that Putin had carefully crafted—ideas that some of Trump’s own advisers embrace.

“We celebrate our ancient heroes, embrace our timeless traditions and customs,” Trump said, echoing a consistent theme of Putin’s since 2013: that survival depends upon an identity based in “traditional” values. This fundamental identity is something both men define as inherently under attack from “outside forces”—perhaps terrorists, or immigrants, or George Soros, or maybe the Chinese. Trump asked “whether the West has the will to survive.” Putin defines the enemy as liberal Western values, like tolerance and inclusivity, which he views as the product of a West in decline—something the two leaders agree on.

Both leaders also refer to the need to “defend civilization”—but they mean a very specific concept of civilization defined not by values or governance, but by history and religion. This is the “blood and soil” nationalism of the 19th century—not the postwar liberal internationalism that American presidents of both parties have embraced for the past 70 years. Trump repeatedly spoke of souls and God—neither standard references in his speeches—going so far as to say: “We put faith and family, not government and bureaucracy, at the center of our lives.” Putin frequently refers to spiritual tradition as a core part of identity, and of the importance of the “ideals of family” as a bulwark against Western decadence. Trump’s diss of “bureaucracy” was an unmistakable code word for the European Union—the institution Putin seeks to dismantle—as was his reference to sovereignty as a core tenet of how he thinks the world should be ordered.

In stark terms, Trump’s speech was a pivot to illiberalism, and a tacit acknowledgement that, in his view, the U.S. has as much in common with Russia as any European ally. As President George W. Bush once said in an interview describing Putin, “It speaks volumes if you listen to what somebody says.” The same is now true of Trump. We need to evaluate what he is saying with clarity, rather than projecting upon it ideas and concepts we hope will be there.

This may be a shrill and hysterical view. But Trump Putin’s speeches about “traditional values” and “the West” send chills down my spine. Something is afoot.

Read the whole thing. It’s quite interesting, even if you don’t buy her whole thesis.

And if you think she’s just another McCarthyite smear artist, check out the first three segments Richard Engel’s first show from last night about Russia. Oh, and fill your glass again. In fact, grab the whole bottle. I suppose he might be a shrill McCarthyite too, but it’s worth watching.

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