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Month: July 2017

Apostasy in the provinces by @BloggersRUs

Apostasy in the provinces
by Tom Sullivan


Kansas State Capitol, Topeka. Photo via National Park Service.

Cutting “wasteful spending” (waste, fraud and abuse, to be more precise) has long been the perpetual motion machine of American conservatism. If only it could only be harnessed, it could power virtually the entire government, a political version of “zero-point energy.” The latter is pseudo-science. The former we might call pseudo-economics — along with trickle-down theory. It seems a few Republican leaders out in the provinces belatedly have arrived at that conclusion. Or at least, they have begun to question their faith. The same cannot be said for their colleagues inside the Village.

The New York Times reports:

Conservative lawmakers in Kansas, South Carolina and Tennessee have agreed to significant tax increases in recent weeks to meet demands for more revenue. They are challenging what has become an almost dogmatic belief for their party, and sharply diverging from President Trump as he pushes for what his administration has billed as the largest tax cut in at least a generation.

It seems you can’t pay for something with nothing. States with constitutional obligations to provide for public education are finding starving it both unpopular and illegal. Waste, fraud and abuse don’t fill potholes or build new roads.

The debate promises to test the enduring relevance of one of the most fundamental principles of modern conservatism — supply side economics, the idea that if you cut taxes far enough, the economy will expand to the point that it generates new tax revenue.

With the federal deficit growing and economic growth sputtering along in the low single digits, the Republican Party is facing questions from within over what many see as a blind faith in the theory that deep tax cuts are the shot of economic adrenaline a languid economy needs.

Leeching and bloodletting worked on the same principle. Recognizing that after years of crushing budget deficits, last month the Kansas legislature overrode Governor Sam Brownback’s veto and raised taxes by $1.2 billion. Brownback’s experiment in trickle-down economics has trickled out.

Stephanie Clayton, a Republican legislator from the Kansas City area, had advice for colleagues in Washington eager to cut federal taxes even more: Don’t do it. Clayton wasn’t through:

She criticized what she said was a desire by her party to be more faithful to the principle than to the people Republicans were elected to help. Mr. Brownback and many conservatives, she said, overpromised on the tax cuts as a “sort-of Ayn Rand utopia, a red-state model,” citing the author whose works have influenced the American libertarian movement.

“And I loved Ayn Rand when I was 18 — before I had children and figured out how the world really works,” Ms. Clayton added. “That’s not how it works, as it turns out.”

A lot of people read Ayn Rand in high school. Most of them grow up.

The current Speaker of the House is not one of them. Rep. Paul Ryan would do well to listen to Clayton’s advice when he’s not at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue holding the hand of another elected official who never grew up.

The evil eye

The evil eye

by digby

The best one you will ever see in your life:

Thank God for adorable kids and cute animals or I would lose my ever-lovin’ mind. That, and gardening, are all that is keeping me going …

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Another hysteric chimes in

Another hysteric chimes in

by digby

Nervous Nellie’s like me have been freaking out over the fact that Donald Trump’s election represents an abrupt change in the world order that might just result in something catastrophic and we are generally being dismissed and silly old fools who are just trying to justify Clinton’s loss … or something. Whatever. I see what I see.

Anyway, here’s another old biddy with some similar concerns:

America led by Donald Trump is the greatest menace facing the world today, Sir John Sawers, a former head of MI6, has declared, warning the policies being pursued by the divisive US President are “going to have a major disruptive effect” globally.

Sir John was speaking at the annual Herzliya security conference in Israel where senior public figures from the field of politics, military, and intelligence were asked who, in their view, presented the greatest threat to international security.

Some said it was Isis, others Islamist terrorists and North Korea with its nuclear capabilities. Others, perhaps mindful of where they were, talked of Iran and the Lebanese Shia militia, Hezbollah, both considered mortal enemies by the Jewish state.

But Sir John, who was the last chief of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, stated: “I have got serious reservations about Donald Trump as President of the United States.”

He continued: “The biggest threat the world faces is how we all adjust to the progressive withdrawal of responsible American leadership and the network of alliances that America maintained with Europe, with Asian countries and the partnerships they had across the region.”

The chaotic presidency of Mr Trump has been mired in controversy with investigations into his secret links with Russia; his attempts to ban travel to the US from a number of Muslim countries; fractious relations with Nato and EU; the US pulling out of the Paris climate agreement; threats of a trade war; threats to dismantle the Iran nuclear accord and contradictory and confusing  positions in the current confrontation between Qatar and the Saudi led Gulf Sunni states.

The coming to power of Mr Trump was, Sir John acknowledged, a manifestation of the populist and isolationist mood in America exacerbated by military failures in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But the consequences said Sir John, were “now having a major impact in the security world, the behaviour of countries trying to take advantage of it, and I think how we adjust to that, the behaviour of other countries trying to take advantage of it, which poses the biggest threat in the world.”

During an arms-selling trip to Saudi Arabia, Mr Trump had accused Iran of fermenting terrorism, and, going on to Israel, he has called for an alliance of Saudi Arabia and other Sunni states against Shia Iran.

But Sir John, who had also served as the UK’s ambassador to the UN, pointed out that Iran is “an emerging country that is becoming the most powerful in the region” and “enjoys better prospects than Saudi Arabia”.

The US and the West, he argued, needed to be careful to form an alliance with Riyadh, which has failed to carry out essential reforms, against Iran.

The issue of alliances was also crucial for post-Brexit Britain, Sir John maintained after his appearance at the conference forum.

There was a danger that Britain would be an outsider with “nose pressed to the window” of the EU while international decisions are being made.

“We will be part of Nato, yes. But as the US withdraws from global leadership,” he asked, “can we rely on the alliance for anything more than territorial defence? The regions the US has protected since 1945 have to determine their own defence and security: that includes Europe”.

Maybe after Trump  blows the whole global security umbrella up the world will evolve a different system that will benefit everyone. That would be nice. But at this moment we have no idea what’s going to happen and it could very easily go sideways. We managed to avoid another worldwide conflagration in the nuclear age for 60 years. Maybe that was the best we could hope for. Electing Trump certainly proves the adage “history repeat, the first time as tragedy the second as farce.”

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QOTD: Modo

QOTD: Modo

by digby

I think most women picked this up with no problem:

I gave Trump the benefit of the doubt after his comment on Megyn Kelly about “blood coming out of her wherever” when he claimed he meant her nose. But later, a longtime Trump associate told me that Trump had practiced that line before he said it on CNN and that it was meant to evoke an image of Kelly as hormonal.

Of course he practiced it. He had to clean that up for public consumption. If he hadn’t he would have said “she was such a bitch she must have been on her period.” We’ve all heard that.

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Politics and Reality Radio w/Joshua Holland: Digby on Trump’s Assault on Democracy; David Dayen on CA’s SIngle-Payer Debacle

Politics and Reality Radio: Digby on Trump’s Assault on Democracy; David Dayen on CA’s Single-Payer Debacle


with Joshua Holland

This week, we’ll be joined by OG blogger and Salon columnist Heather “Digby” Parton to talk about Kansas’ AG Kris Kobach and what looks like the beginning of a nationwide campaign of voter suppression and intimidation. We have an authoritarian in the White House, but this is how we risk becoming an authoritarian country.

Then David Dayen will talk about his Intercept piece about how single-payer advocates — and a few Democrats trying to ride their energy to greater prominence — introduced an unpassable single-payer bill and then blamed the Speaker of the Assembly for not forcing his caucus to vote on it. It’s all pretty dispiriting.

Playlist:
Prince Buster: “Shaking up Orange Street
Old 97s: “Stoned”
TLC: “Intermission-lude”

As always, you can also subscribe to the show on iTunes, Soundcloud or Podbean.

Fake, fake fakey

Fake, fake fakey

by digby

Trump’s tweeting his silly wrestling footage and calling CNN fake. I guess he thinks that’s clever. To me, it just exposes him as fake since he’s the guy pretending to be a wrestler. But whatever. It’s juvenile and stupid just like all of his statements. It’s who he is.

Now watch this:

He was the youngest president in history but he was a hundred times wiser than the old one we have now.

Like every political pundit in the world, I wrote about Trump’s love affair with wrestling many times during the campaign It the perfect metaphor for him: violent, phony and immature. This one was after the inauguration:

So President Donald Trump is taking his act on the road again. Apparently being president isn’t nearly as much fun as running for president and he needs to cut loose in front of an adoring crowd to charge up his batteries. So he’s having one of his victory rallies in Florida on Saturday. And yes, they’re calling it a campaign rally so stock up on the Stoli and Beluga caviar, because that means Trump is already running for re-election.

On Thursday he gave his followers a little teaser by holding his first real press conference since the inauguration. It was what professional presidential scholars refer to as “a doozy.” The press was more pungent in its criticism. CNN’s Jake Tapper called it “unhinged” and “wild” and a “Festivus airing of grievances.” MSNBC’s Chris Hayes tweeted, “We can agree across all ideological, political and partisan divisions that this is a deranged performance, right?” Even Shep Smith of Fox News seemed shell-shocked, saying, “It is crazy what we are watching every day; it is absolutely crazy.” CBS News’ Scott Pelley said, “Today we learned the length of the president’s fuse.” (Which unfortunately brought to mind what my great-aunt used to say about her first husband: “He was a 6-foot, 3-inch stick of dynamite with a little bitty fuse.”)

That was just the tip of the iceberg. The Daily Beast reported:

[A]s the official White House press conference disintegrated further into unhinged criticism and belligerent sniping, reporters seated in the East Room could hardly contain themselves. There was an awkward mix of laughing with Trump, and chuckling at him as the president kept venting and sneering. The reporters present couldn’t stop quietly gossipping about Trump. “What is going on?” one journalist whispered to another. “This is insane” and “What the hell?” were other popular refrains in the room.

There have been dozens of articles and listicles already published about this inane and surreal event, so I won’t go through the whole litany again. If you’ve got the time, it’s worth watching the whole press conference just to bear witness to the wholesale destruction of what we used to call the dignity of the office. Trump makes George W. Bush look like George Washington by comparison, and Bush was the guy who spit a wad of chewing gum into his hand before signing the Treaty of Moscow.

Trump mostly concentrated on how much he loathed the lyin’ press and despised all the fake news, oddly insisting that it’s nothing more than a cover-up for Hillary Clinton’s “terrible loss.” In fact, he just can’t quit her, which presidential historians note is very odd:

I think there’s a good reason Trump does this and it’s related to why he needs to get in front of his cheering followers. He is obviously in over his head and cannot deal with the complexity of the task he has been elected to perform. If anyone watching the campaign thought he must have hidden depths he or she has been disabused of that by now. His full range of talents were on display on stage in those rallies.

Trump told us during the campaign, “I yam what I yam,” and so he is. He is a trash-talker. But unlike the trash-talking master of all time, boxer Muhammad Ali, who pretty much invented the form, Trump is a Wrestlemania political performance artist who unfortunately believed his own hype. Ali talked trash, but he also had the goods. Trump does not.

During the GOP primary he took out one rival after another by bestowing them with puerile nicknames and hurling nasty insults in their faces. They didn’t know what hit them. When he got to Hillary Clinton, it was also no holds barred. He said to her face that she was filled with hate, called her the devil and paraded women who had accused her husband of assaulting them in front of her. He made barely restrained cracks about her looks and insisted over and over again that she was weak and didn’t “look like a president.” He played the crude, aggressive wrestling “heel” throughout the campaign, and his supporters roared with pleasure as he took down his opponents one by one.

Trump participated in professional wrestling storylines for years. He loves it. Indeed, the press conference on Thursday showed that he’s lost without it. He needs a rival, a real opponent. He doesn’t have one at the moment, so his shtick just seems wild and unfocused, as if he were flailing at phantoms. Douglas Brinkley, a historian at Rice University, described it as “bizarre theater,” saying “he turned a presidential press conference into a reality TV show in which he can be the star and browbeat anyone who objects to him with the power of his office.”

Of course, Trump has always used “the media” as a foil, and since he assumed office and no longer has a specific opponent to spar with, consigliere Steve Bannon has tried to make the press corps into the rival at whom Trump can swing his bat and keep his show going. Bannon has called the media “the opposition” and clearly pumps up Trump, not that it’s hard to do that since the president spends inordinate amounts of time assessing his image on television and clearly doesn’t like what he sees.

But it won’t work. The press isn’t “the opposition” and the presidency isn’t a competition or even a phony wrestling match. If you want to compare it to a form of entertainment, it’s a drama — often a tragedy — and the press is the Greek chorus. It makes no sense to turn media commentators and reporters into key players, particularly when there are real political adversaries out there jockeying for position. But Trump seems to not be interested in fighting real battles or even engaging in genuine politics. It’s all a pageant to him, a fixed narrative, a rigged game in which he’s is supposed to be the big winner in the end, with the cheering and the booing just being all in good fun. But nobody’s having any fun, least of all him. And putting on a show is all he knows how to do.

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The only good local democracy by @BloggersRUs

The only good local democracy
by Tom Sullivan


Laurens County Confederate Monument. Photo by Bill Fitzpatrick via Creative Commons.

Last weekend, I attended the funeral of a climber friend in the small South Carolina city of Laurens. The confederate monument in front of the courthouse celebrates “The Boys in Gray,” and below in larger letters, “OUR HEROES.” The spirit behind those monuments still pertains in legislatures across the South.

The landing page headline at the Washington Post this morning declares “Texas is at the epicenter of an expanding red-state, blue-city divide.” The article examines the growing hostility between Austin, the state’s artsy, blue capitol and the legislators from redder districts who come there to govern Texas. Those legislators do not take to well to the people of Austin passing ordinances to protect their trees, their canopy and their quality of life. Developers gotta develop, you know:

Texas presents perhaps the most dramatic example of the increasingly acrimonious relationship between red-state leaders and their blue city centers, which have moved aggressively to expand environmental regulations and social programs often against the grain of their states.

Republican state leaders across the country have responded to the widening cultural gulf by passing legislation preempting local laws. The best-known example is North Carolina’s “bathroom bill,” which was partially reversed this year. It was originally aimed at undercutting Charlotte’s efforts to expand civil rights laws to include LGBT people and to prevent cities from setting their own minimum wage.

But states also have gone after cities in more subtle ways. Ohio’s legislature last year attempted to block a Cleveland regulation that requires certain city contractors to hire local residents. A new Arizona law threatens to cut off funding to cities that take actions state officials deem to be in violation of state law.

Like the monument in Laurens, confederate monuments installed across the South after Reconstruction “were erected purposefully to send a strong message to all who walked in their shadows about who was still in charge…” A century later, those monuments have finally begun coming down even as preemption laws are going up. But the message to liberalizing cities in red states is the same: white conservatives are in charge here, and don’t you forget it.

“These preemption laws are designed to intimidate and bully local officials into doing the bidding of a smaller group of folks,” said Michael Alfano of the Campaign to Defend Local Solutions, a new nonprofit organization aimed at fending off state efforts to undermine local power.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) provides a sense of the attitudes in play:

“Once you cross the Travis County line, it starts smelling different,” Abbott joked at a recent gathering of Republicans, referring to the county that includes Austin. “And you know what that fragrance is? Freedom. It’s the smell of freedom that does not exist in Austin, Texas.”

As for Texas being the epicenter of this retrograde movement, get in line.

The oft-repeated, “The government closest to the people serves the people best” is deployed just for show. Repeated losses in court have not dissuaded North Carolina’s GOP-led legislature in the capitol from passing laws to target blue cities, Charlotte being just one. Republican legislators introduce preemption laws both to show who’s boss and to weaken cities financially. And where their candidates cannot win elections, to forcibly redistrict so they might.

In 2015, a Republican legislator introduced a bill to redistrict city council elections for Greensboro. A federal judge later declared the scheme unconstitutional. A plan to impose county commission districts for my county still stands. This week, the legislature did the same thing with city council elections. Fixing judicial elections too is in the works, according to a local editorial today:

And now, in a move that defies all logic, a bill in the House would split Buncombe into two districts for election of District Court and Superior Court judges. The line would be drawn so as to maximize the chances of Republicans being elected.

Splitting a county for judicial elections is rare as far as we know, at least since the demise of city courts in many states. It suggests the General Assembly is more concerned with partisan advantage than with the fair administration of justice.

The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Justin Burr of Albermarle, has withdrawn the bill for now, but he promises to bring it back when the General Assembly goes into special session to fix gerrymandered legislative districts that have been thrown out by the courts.

“I will continue to welcome feedback from those interested in the common sense and badly needed judicial district reforms I am proposing,” Burr said. “The General Assembly has a responsibly to fix the gerrymandered and disproportionate judicial districts crafted by the Democrat Party, and I fully expect this fix to happen before the 2018 election.”

On what planet is this man living? Since when does keeping counties intact within the same district constitute gerrymandering?

Fair is not their plan. Like Texas Republicans with Austin, Tar Heel Republicans seem to direct particular animus towards Asheville, another blue city. They mean to show just who is in charge.

Incense and liniment: Monterey Pop (****) turns 50 by Dennis Hartley @denofcinema5

Saturday Night at the Movies




Incense and liniment: Monterey Pop (****) turns 50

By Dennis Hartley

Back in my stand-up comedy days, I once had the pleasure of opening for Eric Burdon and Brian Auger in Fairbanks, Alaska (1991…I think). The promoter was kind enough to take me backstage for a brief meet and greet with Mr. Burdon before the gig. Eric immediately struck me as a warm and sincere individual (only rock star I ever met who gave me the sustained two-handed “bro” handshake with full eye contact combo platter).

This makes me sound like a fucking loon, but it felt like I was shaking hands with The Sixties. I remember thinking that sharing a bill with him placed me only one degree of separation from The Who, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Otis Redding, and the other artists he shared the bill with at the legendary 1967 Monterey Pop Festival. Okay, I may have been high. But it was enough to make my ganglia twitch. I mean, it blew my mind, man!

The Byrds and the Airplane did fly
Oh, Ravi Shankar’s music made me cry
The Who exploded into fire and light
Hugh Masekela’s music was black as night
The Grateful Dead blew everybody’s mind
Jimi Hendrix, baby, believe me,
set the world on fire, yeah

–from “Monterey”, by Eric Burdon & The Animals

The three day music festival was the brainchild of longtime Beatles publicist Derek Taylor, John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas, record producer Lou Adler, and entrepreneur/Delaney and Bonnie manager Alan Pariser (who figured prominently during early planning stages but ceded control to his higher-profile partners Phillips and Adler). With a stage banner that read “love, flowers, and music”, it was (and remains) the embodiment of the counterculture’s ephemeral yet impactful “Summer of Love” in 1967.

That said, while the festival itself generally went as well or perhaps even better than its organizers could have ever hoped, it wasn’t necessarily all peace, love, and good vibrations during the organizational process. As rock journalist Michael Lydon (who covered music for Newsweek, The New York Times, and the Boston Globe from the 60s to the 70s) writes in a contemporaneous piece included in his 2003 anthology, Flashbacks:

The Festival was incorporated with a board of governors that included Donovan, Mick Jagger, Andrew Oldham, Paul Simon, Phillips, Smokey Robinson, Roger McGuinn, Brian Wilson, and Paul McCartney. “The Festival hopes to create an atmosphere wherein persons in the popular music field from all parts of the world will congregate, perform, and exchange ideas concerning popular music with each other and with the public at large,” said a release. After paying the entertainers’ expenses, the profits from ticket sales (seats ranged from $3.50 to $6.50; admission to the grounds without a seat was $1) were to go to charities and to fund fellowships in the pop field. […]

This vagueness and the high prices engendered charges of commercialism—“Does anybody really know where these L.A. types are at?” asked one San Francisco rock musician. And when the list of performers was released there was more confusion. Where were the Negro stars, the people who began it all, asked some. Where were The Lovin’ Spoonful, the Stones, the Motown groups; does a pop festival mean anything without Dylan, the Stones, and The Beatles? […] 

Smokey Robinson and Berry Gordy were enthusiastic about the Festival at first, John Phillips said, “then they never answered the phone. Smokey was completely inactive as a director. I think it might be a Jim Crow thing. A lot of people put Lou Rawls down for appearing. ‘You’re going to a Whitey festival, man,’ was the line. There is tension between the white groups who are getting their own ideas and the Negroes who are just repeating theirs. The tension is lessening all the time, but it did crop up here, I am sure.”

As we now know, any “tension” behind the scenes lessened considerably by the time the gates opened to let the crowds (and the sunshine) in, and the rest, as they say, is History.

Luckily, for those of us who were too young and/or blissfully unaware to attend (or not even born yet), the zeitgeist of the event was captured for posterity by music documentary maestro D.A. Pennebaker (Don’t Look Back). His film, simply entitled Monterey Pop, originally opened in 1968; and now, to commemorate the festival’s 50th anniversary this month, it is in limited re-release in theaters (featuring a 4K restoration).

Shot in his signature cinema-verite style, Pennebaker’s film distills the 3 days of “love, flowers and music” into a concise 78-minute document of the event. Granted, by its very nature such brevity comes with great sacrifice; not all the artists on the festival’s roster are onscreen. In the director’s statement that prefaces the booklet included with The Complete Monterey Pop Festival, Pennebaker writes:

There is never enough time to just put in everything you want. In fact, that’s what filmmaking is about, making the best stuff count for what you leave out.

And so it is that The Association, Lou Rawls, The Butterfield Blues Band, Quicksilver Messenger Service, The Byrds, The Steve Miller Band, Laura Nyro, The Electric Flag, Moby Grape, Al Kooper, Buffalo Springfield, Johnny Rivers and the Grateful Dead are nowhere to be seen. But the performances that made the final cut are, in a word, amazing.

Introduce yourself to Pennebaker’s film. It will feel like shaking hands with The Sixties.

[“Monterey Pop: the Re-release” is now playing in Seattle and other select cities.]

Previous posts with related themes:

Star-spangled ban: Thoughts on the 1970 Atlanta Pop Festival
Taking Woodstock
Deconstructing Sgt. Pepper/Top 10 rock albums of 1967
Jimi: All Is By My Side
Janis Joplin: Little Girl Blue
Magic Trip: Ken Kesey’s Search for a Kool Place
Don’t Look Back

More reviews at Den of Cinema

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–Dennis Hartley

Objectively Pro-ISIS

Objectively Pro-ISIS

by digby

This rejection of Afghan girls is undoubtedly welcomed by the Taliban and ISIS. They hate smart, educated women almost as much as the Trump administration:

Their robot may have permission to travel, but six teenage Afghan inventors are staying put this summer.

They’ve been rejected for a one-week travel visa to escort their robot to the inaugural FIRST Global Challenge – an international robotics competition happening in Washington DC in mid-July.

The all-girl team representing Afghanistan hails from Herat, a city of half a million people in the western part of the country. To interview for their visas, the girls risked a 500 mile trek cross-country to the American embassy in Kabul – the site of several recent suicide attacks and one deadly truck bomb in early June that killed at least 90 people. Despite the recent violence, the teenagers braved the trip to the country’s capital not once, but twice, hoping a second round of interviews might help secure their 7-day visas after the team was rejected on its first try. But no luck.

Roya Mahboob, who founded Citadel software company in Afghanistan, and was the country’s first female tech CEO, brought the group of girls together for the project.

“It’s a very important message for our people” Mahboob says. “Robotics is very, very new in Afghanistan.”

She says when the girls first heard the bad news about their visas, “they were crying all the day.”

While the State Department won’t comment on the visa denials (those records are confidential), recent numbers suggest it’s pretty tricky to get a travel visa from Afghanistan to the U.S. According to State Department records, in April 2017, the country gave out just 32 of the B1/B2 brand of business travel visas the girls were trying for. Compare that to Baghdad’s 138 B1/B2s issued that same month, or the 1,492 issued at the same time in neighboring Pakistan, and the records suggest the girls’ try was a long shot. Still, they persisted.

Back home in Herat, Team Afghanistan is racing against the clock, putting the final touches on their ball-sorting robot that will travel to the U.S. to compete against 163 other machines from around the globe. The students are screwing together joints, programming the machine’s sensors, and still trying to find one chain. The six haven’t had much time to put this contraption together: their raw materials were held up in customs for months this spring, amid fears over ISIS’ use of robots on the battlefield. But instead of giving up, the girls took matters into their own hands, and designed their own homemade motorized robotic machines while they waited for customs to clear their parts. Just three weeks ago, those supplies cleared customs, and the team finally started working on their official FIRST robot, with remote programming help from a few robotics grad students at Carnegie Mellon.

Newsweek has more:

First Global President Joe Sestak, a former Navy admiral and former member of Congress, told Mashable that he had not been told the reason for the denial of the girls’ visa request, and said that a team from Sudan and a Syrian refugee team had been granted visas to attend.

The girls’ robot will now travel to the U.S. without them, where they hope to watch it compete against hundreds of others via Skype. A video celebrating the team will reportedly be played at the competition.

Mahboob said that the team’s success was a hugely important symbol in Afghanistan’s patriarchal society.

“In Afghanistan, as you know it’s a very man-dominated industry,” she told Express Tribune. “The girls, they’re showing at a young age that they can build something.”

Yeah well, that’s the problem isn’t it. We can’ have that.

Maybe those girls should have thought before being born of those parents and living in Afghanistan, huh? Maybe they should have become Baptists instead of Muslims. Needless to say they should have been born male.

I’m guessing that some Trump toadie saw that some Afghan girls had knowledge of electronics and decided they must be terrorists smuggling in a dirty bomb to kill us all in our beds and turn the few survivors into slaves for Islam under Sharia law. After all Donald Trump repeated said on the campaign trail that you have to go after the families and said “the wives know, they always know.” That’s how these people think.

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Can we call it a third rate cyber-burglary now?

Can we call it a third rate cyber-burglary now?

by digby

I have been skeptical of the Russia collusion charges assuming that Trump was more likely to have been soft on Russia because he has some sleazy business dealings in the region he’s trying to hide and assumes that the Russian government is aware and could blackmail him with it. And I still think that’s probably his main motivation in soft peddling the interference.

However, the story from the Wall Street Journal alleging that an old Clinton foe Peter Smithmay have been working behind the scenes with members of the campaign including Flynn and his son (both dyed in the wool Clinton character assassins, even pushing that Pizzagate pedophile bullshit) Conway (whose husband worked secretly with Smith to push the Paula Jones story) and Bannon I’m beginning to think there’s more here than what I thought.

It could all be just coincidence. But the fact that Trump publicly invited the Russians to release the “missing” Clinton emails certainly suggests that it might not be — and that this thing went to the top. It certainly would explain Trump’s desperation to save Flynn and stop the investigation.

Anyway, here’s the backstory that Lawfare posted last night with a cybersecurity expert Matt Tait who was a source for the story. If you are a person who followed the ins and outs of the “Vast Right Wing Conspiracy” you will not find this to be unbelievable. (Well, except for the fact that they hate Hillary Clinton so much they were even willing to work with a foreign government to undermine American elections on behalf of a incompetent imbecile. My God.)

I’m just going to republish the whole thing here for posterity:

I read the Wall Street Journal’s article yesterday on attempts by a GOP operative to recover missing Hillary Clinton emails with more than usual interest. I was involved in the events that reporter Shane Harris described, and I was an unnamed source for the initial story. What’s more, I was named in, and provided the documents to Harris that formed the basis of, this evening’s follow-up story, which reported that “A longtime Republican activist who led an operation hoping to obtain Hillary Clinton emails from hackers listed senior members of the Trump campaign, including some who now serve as top aides in the White House, in a recruitment document for his effort”:

Officials identified in the document include Steve Bannon, now chief strategist for President Donald Trump; Kellyanne Conway, former campaign manager and now White House counselor; Sam Clovis, a policy adviser to the Trump campaign and now a senior adviser at the Agriculture Department; and retired Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn, who was a campaign adviser and briefly was national security adviser in the Trump administration.

I’m writing this piece in the spirit of Benjamin Wittes’s account of his interactions with James Comey immediately following the New York Timesstory for which he acted as a source. The goal is to provide a fuller accounting of experiences which were thoroughly bizarre and which I did not fully understand until I read the Journal’s account of the episode yesterday. Indeed, I still do not fully understand the events I am going to describe, both what they reflected then or what they mean in retrospect. But I can lay out what happened, facts from which readers and investigators can draw their own conclusions.


For the purpose of what follows, I will assume readers are already familiar with the Wall Street Journal’s reporting on this matter.

My role in these events began last spring, when I spent a great deal of time studying the series of Freedom of Information disclosures by the State Department of Hillary Clinton’s emails, and posting the parts I found most interesting—especially those relevant to computer security—on my public Twitter account. I was doing this not because I am some particular foe of Clinton’s—I’m not—but because like everyone else, I assumed she was likely to become the next President of the United States, and I believed her emails might provide some insight into key cybersecurity and national security issues once she was elected in November.

A while later, on June 14, the Washington Post reported on a hack of the DNC ostensibly by Russian intelligence. When material from this hack began appearing online, courtesy of the “Guccifer 2” online persona, I turned my attention to looking at these stolen documents. This time, my purpose was to try and understand who broke into the DNC, and why.

A few weeks later, right around the time the DNC emails were dumped by Wikileaks—and curiously, around the same time Trump called for the Russians to get Hillary Clinton’s missing emails—I was contacted out the blue by a man named Peter Smith, who had seen my work going through these emails. Smith implied that he was a well-connected Republican political operative.

Initially, I assumed the query must have been about my work on the DNC hack; after all, few people followed my account prior to the DNC breach, whereas my analysis of the break-in at the DNC had received considerably more coverage. I assumed his query about the “Clinton emails” was therefore a mistake and that he meant instead to talk to me about the emails stolen from the DNC. So I agreed to talk to him, thinking that, whatever my views on then-candidate Trump, if a national campaign wanted an independent non-partisan view on the facts surrounding the case, I should provide it to the best of my ability.

Yet Smith had not contacted me about the DNC hack, but rather about his conviction that Clinton’s private email server had been hacked—in his view almost certainly both by the Russian government and likely by multiple other hackers too—and his desire to ensure that the fruits of those hacks were exposed prior to the election. Over the course of a long phone call, he mentioned that he had been contacted by someone on the “Dark Web” who claimed to have a copy of emails from Secretary Clinton’s private server, and this was why he had contacted me; he wanted me to help validate whether or not the emails were genuine.

Under other circumstances, I would have gone no further. After all, this was occurring in the final stretch of a U.S. presidential election, and I did not feel comfortable, and had no interest in, providing material help to either of the campaigns beyond merely answering questions on my already public analysis of Clinton’s emails, or of the DNC hack. (I’m not a U.S. citizen or resident, after all.) In any case, my suspicion then and now was that Hillary Clinton’s email server was likely never breached by Russia, and moreover that if Russia had a copy of Clinton’s emails, they would not waste them in the run-up to an election she was likely to win. I thus thought Smith’s search for her emails was in vain.

But following the DNC hack and watching the Russian influence campaign surrounding it unfold in near real-time, Smith’s comment about having been contacted by someone from the “Dark Web” claiming to have Clinton’s personal emails struck me as critically important. I wanted to find out whether this person was merely some fraudster wanting to take Smith for a ride or something more sinister: that is, whether Smith had been contacted by a Russian intelligence front with intent to use Smith as part of their scheme by laundering real or forged documents.

I never found out who Smith’s contact on the “Dark Web” was. It was never clear to me whether this person was merely someone trying to dupe Smith out of his money, or a Russian front, and it was never clear to me how they represented their own credentials to Smith.

Over the course of our conversations, one thing struck me as particularly disturbing. Smith and I talked several times about the DNC hack, and I expressed my view that the hack had likely been orchestrated by Russia and that the Kremlin was using the stolen documents as part of an influence campaign against the United States. I explained that if someone had contacted him via the “Dark Web” with Clinton’s personal emails, he should take very seriously the possibility that this may have been part of a wider Russian campaign against the United States. And I said he need not take my word for it, pointing to a number of occasions where US officials had made it clear that this was the view of the U.S. intelligence community as well.

Smith, however, didn’t seem to care. From his perspective it didn’t matter who had taken the emails, or their motives for doing so. He never expressed to me any discomfort with the possibility that the emails he was seeking were potentially from a Russian front, a likelihood he was happy to acknowledge. If they were genuine, they would hurt Clinton’s chances, and therefore help Trump.

When he first contacted me, I did not know who Smith was, but his legitimate connections within the Republican party were apparent. My motive for initially speaking to him was that I wondered if the campaign was trying to urgently establish whether the claims that Russia had hacked the DNC was merely “spin” from the Clinton campaign, or instead something they would need to address before Trump went too far down the road of denying it. My guess was that maybe they wanted to contact someone who could provide them with impartial advice to understand whether the claims were real or just rhetoric.

Although it wasn’t initially clear to me how independent Smith’s operation was from Flynn or the Trump campaign, it was immediately apparent that Smith was both well connected within the top echelons of the campaign and he seemed to know both Lt. Gen. Flynn and his son well. Smith routinely talked about the goings on at the top of the Trump team, offering deep insights into the bizarre world at the top of the Trump campaign. Smith told of Flynn’s deep dislike of DNI Clapper, whom Flynn blamed for his dismissal by President Obama. Smith told of Flynn’s moves to position himself to become CIA Director under Trump, but also that Flynn had been persuaded that the Senate confirmation process would be prohibitively difficult. He would instead therefore become National Security Advisor should Trump win the election, Smith said. He also told of a deep sense of angst even among Trump loyalists in the campaign, saying “Trump often just repeats whatever he’s heard from the last person who spoke to him,” and expressing the view that this was especially dangerous when Trump was away.

Over the course of a few phone calls, initially with Smith and later with Smith and one of his associates—a man named John Szobocsan—I was asked about my observations on technical details buried in the State Department’s release of Secretary Clinton’s emails (such as noting a hack attempt in 2011, or how Clinton’s emails might have been intercepted by Russia due to lack of encryption). I was also asked about aspects of the DNC hack, such as why I thought the “Guccifer 2” persona really was in all likelihood operated by the Russian government, and how it wasn’t necessary to rely on CrowdStrike’s attribution as blind faith; noting that I had come to the same conclusion independently based on entirely public evidence, having been initially doubtful of CrowdStrike’s conclusions.

Towards the end of one of our conversations, Smith made his pitch. He said that his team had been contacted by someone on the “dark web”; that this person had the emails from Hillary Clinton’s private email server (which she had subsequently deleted), and that Smith wanted to establish if the emails were genuine. If so, he wanted to ensure that they became public prior to the election. What he wanted from me was to determine if the emails were genuine or not.

It is no overstatement to say that my conversations with Smith shocked me. Given the amount of media attention given at the time to the likely involvement of the Russian government in the DNC hack, it seemed mind-boggling for the Trump campaign—or for this offshoot of it—to be actively seeking those emails. To me this felt really wrong.

In my conversations with Smith and his colleague, I tried to stress this point: if this dark web contact is a front for the Russian government, you really don’t want to play this game. But they were not discouraged. They appeared to be convinced of the need to obtain Clinton’s private emails and make them public, and they had a reckless lack of interest in whether the emails came from a Russian cut-out. Indeed, they made it quite clear to me that it made no difference to them who hacked the emails or why they did so, only that the emails be found and made public before the election.

In the end, I never saw the actual materials they’d been given, and to this day, I don’t know whether there were genuine emails, or whether Smith and his associates were deluding themselves.

By the middle of September, all contact between us ended. By this time, I had grown extremely uncomfortable with the situation, so when Smith and his colleague asked me to sign a non-disclosure agreement, I declined to do so. My suspicion was that the real purpose of the non-disclosure agreement was to retrospectively apply confidentiality to the conversations we had already had before that point. I refused to sign the non-disclosure and we went our separate ways.

As I mentioned above, Smith and his associates’ knowledge of the inner workings of the campaign were insightful beyond what could be obtained by merely attending Republican events or watching large amounts of news coverage. But one thing I could not place, at least initially, was whether Smith was working on behalf of the campaign, or whether he was acting independently to help the campaign in his personal capacity.

Then, a few weeks into my interactions with Smith, he sent me a document, ostensibly a cover page for a dossier of opposition research to be compiled by Smith’s group, and which purported to clear up who was involved. The document was entitled “A Demonstrative Pedagogical Summary to be Developed and Released Prior to November 8, 2016,” and dated September 7. It detailed a company Smith and his colleagues had set up as a vehicle to conduct the research: “KLS Research”, set up as a Delaware LLC “to avoid campaign reporting,” and listing four groups who were involved in one way or another.

The first group, entitled “Trump Campaign (in coordination to the extent permitted as an independent expenditure)” listed a number of senior campaign officials: Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, Sam Clovis, Lt. Gen. Flynn and Lisa Nelson.

The largest group named a number of “independent groups / organizations / individuals / resources to be deployed.” My name appears on this list. At the time, I didn’t recognize most of the others; however, several made headlines in the weeks immediately prior to the election.

My perception then was that the inclusion of Trump campaign officials on this document was not merely a name-dropping exercise. This document was about establishing a company to conduct opposition research on behalf of the campaign, but operating at a distance so as to avoid campaign reporting. Indeed, the document says as much in black and white.

The combination of Smith’s deep knowledge of the inner workings of the campaign, this document naming him in the “Trump campaign” group, and the multiple references to needing to avoid campaign reporting suggested to me that the group was formed with the blessing of the Trump campaign. In the Journal’s story this evening, several of the individuals named in the document denied any connection to Smith, and it’s certainly possible that he was a big name-dropper and never really represented anyone other than himself. If that’s the case, Smith talked a very good game.

I’m sure readers are wondering: why did I keep quiet at the time? Actually, I didn’t. In the fall, prior to the election, I discussed the events of the story first with a friend, and secondly with a journalist. The trouble was that neither I nor the reporter in question knew what to make of the whole operation. It was certainly clear that the events were bizarre, and deeply unsettling. But it wasn’t reportable.

After all, Clinton’s private emails never materialized. We couldn’t show that Smith had been in contact with actual Russians. And while I believed—as I still do—that he was operating with some degree of coordination with the campaign, that was at least a little murky too. The story just didn’t make much sense—that is, until the Journal yesterday published the critical fact that U.S. intelligence has reported that Russian hackers were looking to get emails to Flynn through a cut-out during the Summer of 2016, and this was no idle speculation on my part.

Suddenly, my story seemed important—and ominous.