Month: November 2017

Where did the Pizzagate conspiracy come from?by digby

This is the best article I’ve read about the propaganda/fake news phenomenon I’ve seen yet. It attempts to unravel the inane Pizzagate conspiracy and it’s fascinating. The article talks about the first twitter message about the conspiracy and traces it back to a right wing nut in Joplin Missouri who unconvincingly claims her account was hacked. She’s a piece of work but it’s pretty clear that the whole thing didn’t originate with her.That’s where the story really begins:

On a pair of anonymous message boards, we found several possible seeds of Pizzagate. On July 2nd, 2016, someone calling himself FBIAnon, who claimed to be a “high-level analyst and strategist” for the bureau, hosted an Ask Me Anything forum on 4chan. He claimed to be leaking government secrets – á la Edward Snowden – out of a love for country, but it wasn’t always clear which country he meant. At various times, he wrote, “Russia is more a paragon of freedom and nationalism than any other country” and “We are the aggressors against Russia.” FBIAnon’s secrets were about the Department of Justice’s inquiry into the Clinton Foundation, which federal prosecutors never formalized. “Dig deep,” he wrote. “Bill and Hillary love foreign donors so much. They get paid in children as well as money.”

“Does Hillary have sex with kidnapped girls?” a 4channer asked.

“Yes,” FBIAnon answered.

Another possible germ of Pizzagate appeared online about 10 hours before Katz posted her story on Facebook. TheeRANT describes itself as a message board for “New York City cops speaking their minds.” Virtually everyone on the site uses an identity-masking screen name. Favorite topics include police body cameras (bad) and George Soros (worse). On October 29th, 2016, someone calling himself “Fatoldman” posted that he had a “hot rumor” about the FBI investigation.
“[T]he feds were forced to reopen the hillary email case [because] apparently the NYPD sex crimes unit was involved in the weiner case,” Fatoldman wrote. “On his laptop they saw emails. [T]hey notified the FBI. Feds were afraid that NYPD would go public so they had to reopen or be accused of a coverup.”

Someone posted the news to a law enforcement Facebook group. From there, a user called Eagle Wings (@NIVIsa4031) posted it to Twitter. Eagle Wings’ profile picture shows a smiling middle-aged woman above the description “USAF Vet believes Freedom Soars.” Among her more influential followers are former deputy assistant to President Trump Sebastian Gorka and former national security adviser Gen. Michael Flynn, who actually shared a separate Eagle- Wings tweet last year. Eagle Wings’ enthusiastic following likely has something to do with membership in “Trumps WarRoom,” a private group of online activists who share and amplify political messages. Participants told Politico’s Shawn Musgrave that hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of pro-Trump rooms coalesced during the campaign. “The members aren’t stereotypical trolls,” Musgrave tells me. “Most are baby boomers.” A lot are women from the Midwest.

But Eagle Wings is not a typical political enthusiast, says Woolley, who directs research at the Institute for the Future’s Digital Intelligence Lab. She tweets too often (more than 50,000 times since November 2015) to too many followers (120,000 as of November 2017). “Without a shadow of a doubt,” he says, “Eagle Wings is a highly automated account [and] part of a bot network” – a centrally controlled group of social-media accounts. To explain how they work, Ben Nimmo, a fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, uses a shepherding analogy. “A message that someone or some organization wants to ‘trend’ is typically sent out by ‘shepherd’ accounts,” he says, which often have large followings and are controlled by humans. The shepherds’ messages are amplified by ‘sheepdog’ accounts, which are also run by humans but can be default-set “to boost the signal and harass critics.” At times, the shepherds personally steer conversations, but they also deploy automation, using a kind of Twitter cruise control to retweet particular keywords and hashtags. Together, Nimmo says, the shepherds and sheepdogs guide a herd of bots, which “mindlessly repost content in the digital equivalent of sheep rushing in the same direction and bleating loudly.”

Whether Katz repeated something a herd of bots was bleating, or repackaged tidbits found on other parts of the Internet, her Facebook post was the “human touch” that helped the fake news story go viral. The “tell,” says Watts, was what happened next. Most of us post into Internet oblivion. But about 12 hours after Katz shared her story, a Twitter user named @DavidGoldbergNY tweeted a screenshot of her post, twice – adding, “I have been hearing the same thing from my NYPD buddies too. Next couple days will be -interesting!”

It’s literally unbelievable and yet we know what eventually happened. Aside from that cretinous moron getting elected, some kook took his AR-15 and went to the Pizza parlor looking for Hillary Clinton’s kidnapped kids and shot the lock off of a storage door.

The fact that millions of people are trafficking in theselies is a huge problem and I haven’t got the faintest idea about how to fix it. People believe what they want to believe and there are some actors in this world who are ready to give them what they want in order to advance their own agenda. Indeed, a whole population has been primed by talk radio and right wing media to accept a certain kind of propaganda with no questions asked. We are all susceptible to confirmation bias but this is on a level that approaches brainwashing.It’s very, very disturbing.

Read the whole thing or listen to the Reveal podcast discussing it here.

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Chris Hayes lays out the sexual harassment and assault evidence against Donald Trumpby digby

It’s just a helpful little reminder of all the women who came forward to accuse Donald Trump on camera:

And that doesn’t even include his ex-wife who said he raped her when he was angry that the plastic surgeon she’d sent him to botched his scalp reduction hair transplant surgery in 1989.

This was all aired just a year ago. 63 million people didn’t care. I doubt they care now.

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Ivanka’s Law is toxicby digby

But get this:

Republicans really can’t afford to give up on the tax bill, after suffering an embarrassing defeat on their health care effort. But when something is as central to their agenda as the tax rewrite, they’re going to have serious headaches if they can’t win more support with the public.

Uhm, maybe these serious headaches might be worse than being “embarrassed?” Like the fact that they are going to cause millions of people to pay more in taxes, critically degrade higher education and health care so that Ivanka gets a tax break? Those kind of “headaches?”

We know that their donors are demanding that they deliver and that’s why they’re doing this. So, let’s not pretend it’s anything other than that. Many of them realize that Donald Trump has destroyed their party and this is their last chance to pay back their rich benefactors and perhaps secure a future for themselves outside of politics.

This is a political crisis. But you knew that.

So himby digby

Charles Blow found this video of Trump that illustrates his future presidency so perfectly:

This is the whole Donald Trump presidency in one short video: Incompetent, has no idea what he’s doing, making a mess, cheating, thinking about his own money, breaking things, being a sexist creep! #boom #Repost @squat.cobbler ・・・ An advert that really caught the essence of #trumpsky #pussygrabber #creepy #socalledpresident

A post shared by Charles M. Blow (@charlesmblow) on Nov 18, 2017 at 8:47am PST

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When party becomes religion
by Tom Sullivan

“This is what happens when party becomes almost a religion,” MSNBC’s Joy Reid told Chris Hayes last night on “All In.” Reid was commenting on the GOP’s defense of Alabama’s Roy Moore and acceptance of a Republican president with a lengthy history of sexual misconduct. “We don’t care how low he takes this country, how low he takes our party,” she said, or “what a scoundrel he is, what a scam artist he is, what a con man. And literally, it can be a child molester as long as it’s a Republican … Nothing comes before party ever. Ever.”

The Republican Party and the country didn’t sink to these depths overnight. The right has, over decades, acculturated its base to lies as one of the basic food groups. Our sitting president is simply the main course.

Fear has been a conservative staple from the early days of the Cold War, the Birchers, and before. Robert Kagan noted before the election last year how “resentment and disdain, intermingled with bits of fear, hatred and anger,” the core of the now-president’s message, had incubated inside the party for years.

I recounted how creepy the appearance of “Rush rooms” was in the early 1990s, and how the dittoheads at work marinated their brains in his toxic message all day, every day.

As Rush faded, Fox News ascended. Fox News has been a propaganda channel for decades now. The “Fair and Balanced” network has dropped that branding and, with few exceptions, any pretension that what it presents is news. Where once there were Rush Rooms at lunch, now every other bar, restaurant, and public space has a telescreen broadcasting the message approved by Minitrue and News Corp.

Conservative chain emails have faded as well, replaced by Facebook. Through the Cold War years, we’d been warned that the communists would try to undermine America from within using propaganda and disinformation. With the emails, fathers and uncles were trafficking in it, passing them on to family and friends as instructed at the bottom of each. What made chain emails popular was they maligned people senders hated. With forward after forward, they built a discomforting community of resentment. I have a collection:

Now, out of those 200 chain emails, maybe three or four are not outright lies, distortions, and smears. Easily debunked on Google in the time it takes to attach your email list and forward to all your friends. They are lies and, deep down, right wingers know it. Yet they pass them along dutifully, almost gleefully. They know it’s wrong and they don’t care.

Their purpose was to get people angry and keep them angry about real and imagined slights committed against them by political enemies. After last year’s election and the revelations about Russian ads on Facebook, one wonders if some weren’t once drafted in St. Petersburg. The First Amendment has been weaponized and used against us.

Mr. “And when you’re a star, they let you do it” is simply a walking, talking, tweeting version of the conservative chain email. His fans don’t care if what he says is true so long as he attacks the people they hate and gives them approval to do the same.

David Brooks argued the other day that “naked liberalism” has undermined the social contract. He defines naked liberalism as an assumption shared by both right and left that “if you give people freedom they will use it to care for their neighbors, to have civil conversations, to form opinions after examining the evidence.” The right wants to maximize economic choice while the left hopes to maximize lifestyle choice (in which Brooks glosses over both positions). This position, “all freedom and no covenant,” he believes, maximizes personal freedom while undercutting the bonds that hold a society together:

Freedom without covenant becomes selfishness. And that’s what we see at the top of society, in our politics and the financial crisis. Freedom without connection becomes alienation. And that’s what we see at the bottom of society — frayed communities, broken families, opiate addiction. Freedom without a unifying national narrative becomes distrust, polarization and permanent political war.

Or worse. “[P]eople will prefer fascism to isolation, authoritarianism to moral anarchy.” In pursuing individual and economic freedom, we have sacrificed the bonds that held human society together for millennia. “Congressional Republicans think a successful tax bill will thwart populism,” he writes. “Mainstream Democrats think the alienation problem will go away if we redistribute the crumbs a bit more widely.” These band-aids aren’t likely to hold back the erosion.

People under 40 get that these aren’t solutions, Brooks writes. I must agree. Steve Bannon wants to tear down the entire edifice and start from scratch, an answer not so different from one we heard from certain quarters on the left last fall. So far, Democrats haven’t offered a more compelling, healing narrative.

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Request a copy of For The Win, my county-level election mechanics primer, at tom.bluecentury at gmail.

Friday Night Soother: Bearcats!by digby

Perth Zoo is celebrating the birth of the first Binturong cubs in the Zoo’s 119-year history.
Two cubs, a male and a female, were born September 6 to mother, Selasa, and father, Rabu. The parents arrived at the Zoo from Singapore Zoological Gardens, in 2016, to establish a Perth Zoo Binturong family.

Perth Zoo Keeper, Marty Boland, said, “It’s very exciting to welcome two rare Binturong cubs, less than 12 months after their parent’s arrival in Australia.”

“Binturongs are capable of delaying their pregnancy after mating until they feel the environmental conditions are favourable. So, it’s great to see that Selasa is feeling secure and content here in WA!”

“She is a first time Mum, but has been lovingly tending to her offspring in the nest box and also allowing us to photograph the cubs’ progression. She’s even trusted us to handle her cubs to quickly weigh them.”

“They tip the scales just over one kilogram, a good weight for Binturong infants,” said Marty.

The new arrivals recently opened their eyes, and they are beginning to take in the world around them. Zoo Keepers expect they will start exploring their exhibit in coming weeks and become more visible to the public.

Marty continued, “Visitors who are unsure of where to catch a glimpse of the Binturong family may smell them first. They are famous for their strong odor, which is often likened to popcorn!”

The Binturong (Arctictis binturong), also known as a Bearcat, is a viverrid that is native to South and Southeast Asia.

Binturongs are omnivorous, feeding on small mammals, birds, fish, earthworms, insects and fruits.

The estrous period of the Binturong is 81 days, with a gestation of 91 days. The average age of sexual maturation is 30.4 months for females and 27.7 months for males. The Binturong is one of approximately 100 species of mammal believed by many experts to be capable of embryonic diapause, or delayed implantation, which allows the female of the species to time parturition to coincide with favorable environmental conditions. Typical litters consist of two offspring, but up to six may occur.

It is uncommon in much of its range, and has been assessed and classified as “Vulnerable” on the IUCN Red List due to a declining population trend that is estimated at more than 30% over the last three decades. The main threat to the species is severe destruction of habitats in their native parts of the world.

Those wanting to help save Binturong from extinction are encouraged to “adopt” one of Perth Zoo’s cubs. Zoo adoption packages ensure more funds are poured into giving wildlife a chance of survival. More information can be found at: www.perthzoo.com.au

Oh Godby digby

Politico says that we should all enjoy November because December is going to be a living hell:

DECEMBER is going to be really, really, really brutal. Spending caps deal. Government funding. Potential legislation to deal with the expiration of DACA. Action to prop up the health care law. And now, we hear that THE DEBT CEILING could be part of the mix in the final month of the year, as well. Treasury says Congress has until January to lift the debt limit, but some say if Congress is going to slap together a big package, the debt limit might as well be included. No one really wants to raise the debt limit in an election year, anyway. But the negotiations have to be going really well for the debt limit to be included. It’s not a must-pass at the end of the year, and it could just as easily slip to 2018. In other words, Republicans tell us they won’t let the debt limit be a bargaining chip for Democrats who are trying to get a DACA deal.

WE ALSO HEAR Congress will pass a short-term government funding bill in time for the Dec. 8 deadline, kicking the deadline toward the end of the month in time for a large spending deal. OH YEAH — THE WHITE HOUSE has made it clear they want tax reform done in December as well. Whoever wins the Alabama Senate race will join the chamber toward the end of December, too. THIS COULD EASILY BE the most consequential legislative month in years.

And that’s just the legislative stuff. We’ve also got Roy Moore and whatever freakshow Donald Trump puts on on a daily basis.

I’m so tired.

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Jared needs some Gingkoby digby

Jared has a real memory problem. Seriously. A bad one. He should have some tests. But not by this guy:

Mother Jones reports:

Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, was aware of a “Russian backdoor overture and dinner invite” but failed to provide that information to the Senate Judiciary Committee, the leaders of that committee said in a letter Thursday to Kushner’s lawyer. The reported overture is one of multiple revelations about Trump campaign contacts with Russia that Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) disclosed in their letter accusing Kushner of improperly withholding information about the communications.

The letter marks the resumption of a joint Russia investigation led by Grassley and Feinstein. The two senators had stopped cooperating last month due to a disagreement about the scope of the probe.

The senators said they know Kushner withheld the information because people questioned separately by the committee disclosed emails detailing contacts with Russia on which Kushner was copied. “Other parties have produced documents concerning a ‘Russian backdoor overture and dinner invite’ that Kushner forwarded to others,” the senators wrote. Kushner is one of several Trump associates who reportedly had multiple contacts with Russians during the 2016 presidential campaign and subsequent transition period. Those include a November 16, 2016, meeting in which Kushner reportedly requested Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak’s help in setting up back-channel communications between Trump and the Kremlin. Kushner claims that he was responding to Kislyak’s request to set up a secure line to convey sensitive information on Syria. It is not clear if that meeting represented the “overture and dinner invite” the senators cited or if the overture is a newly disclosed contact between the Trump camp and Russia

Grassley and Feinstein also said that their committee has obtained communications, on which Kushner was copied, with Sergey Millian, a Belarusian-American businessman with multiple ties to Trump and his campaign. Millian, the president of the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce in the United States and the owner of a translation service, once described himself as the Trump Organization’s “exclusive broker” helping Russians buying apartments in Trump buildings. Millian is also reportedly one of the key sources whose claims about Russian attempts to cultivate Trump were cited in the set of memos compiled by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele. The Washington Post has reported that Millian last year told associates he was in touch with George Papadopolous, the Trump campaign foreign policy adviser who has pleaded guilty to lying to FBI agents about his contacts with Russians. Papadopolous and Millian were Facebook friends, the Post noted.

We are insanely stupidby digby

No civilization where this happens can be expected to survive. It’s people are just too stupid:

A man accidentally shot himself and his wife at an East Tennessee church on Thursday while he was showing off his gun during a discussion on recent church shootings, police said.

Elder members of First United Methodist Church in Tellico Plains were cleaning up about 1 p.m. after enjoying a luncheon held to celebrate Thanksgiving. They began talking about guns in churches, according to Tellico Plains Police Chief Russ Parks.

A man in his 80s pulled out a .380 caliber Ruger handgun and said, “I carry my handgun everywhere,” according to Parks.

He removed the magazine, cleared the chamber, and showed the gun to some of the men in the church. He put the magazine back in, apparently loaded a round in the chamber, and returned the gun to its holster, Parks said.

“Somebody else walked up and said, ‘Can I see it?’ ” Parks said. “He pulled it back out and said, ‘With this loaded indicator, I can tell that it’s not loaded.’ “

He pulled the trigger.

“Evidently he just forgot that he re-chambered the weapon,” Parks said.

The gun was lying on its side on a table. The bullet sliced the palm of the man’s upward-facing hand, then entered the left side of his wife’s abdomen and exited the right side, Parks said.

Both the husband and wife, who is also in her 80s, were flown to the University of Tennessee Medical Center with injuries that police said didn’t appear to be life-threatening. Their names had not been released as of Thursday evening.

Charges will not be filed, Parks said.

It’s hard to believe a bullet in the abdomen isn’t life-threatening to a woman in her 80s but that’s good news.

Meanwhile, it great that this man will be allowed to keep his guns. What could go wrong?

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Sherrod Brown takes Hatch downtownby digby

Sherrod Brown really upset Orrin Hatch last night when he correctly described the tax plan as a giveaway to the rich. Hatch, a millionaire, says that he comes from “the poor” and he resents the implication.

The truth hurts:

Greg Sargent explains:

Late last night, just before the Finance Committee passed the Senate’s version of the tax bill slashing taxes on corporations and the rich, a remarkable moment unfolded that perfectly captured the GOP’s whole handling of the tax debate — in all its dishonesty, misdirection and bottomless bad faith.

Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) engaged in extended sparring with committee chairman Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) over who would benefit from the Senate bill, with Brown insisting that it fundamentally represents a tax cut for the rich and not the middle class. This drew an enraged response from Hatch, even though Brown’s argument was 100 percent correct:

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) and Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) had a tense exchange during a markup of the GOP tax bill on Nov. 16. (Senate Finance Committee)
Brown’s reference to an amendment offered by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) at the beginning of the exchange is crucial to what transpired. That amendment would undo the tax cuts on corporations if wages don’t grow. The Senate bill would cut the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 20 percent — permanently — and one of President Trump’s and the GOP’s chief stated rationales is that the move will unleash massive wage growth. The amendment called the GOP’s bluff for messaging purposes.

And it worked. Indeed, Brown’s questioning of this Republican argument is exactly what ticked Hatch off. Brown claimed that “this tax cut really is not for the middle class, it’s for the rich,” and that the GOP argument about tax cuts on corporations leading to higher wages is just a “good selling point.” Brown pointed out: “Companies don’t just give away higher wages just because they have more money. Corporations are sitting on a lot of money now. They’re sitting on a lot of profits now. I don’t see wages going up. Just spare us the bank shots.”

All this made Hatch angry. “I come from the poor people,” Hatch said. “And I’ve been here working my whole stinkin’ career for people who don’t have a chance. And I really resent anybody saying that I’m just doing this for the rich. Give me a break. I think you guys overplay that all the time, and it gets old. And frankly, you ought to quit it.” When Brown pushed back by suggesting that previous tax cuts for the rich haven’t produced the results Republicans are once again predicting, Hatch silenced him.

Now, Hatch was probably angered by the questioning of his motive — the idea that Republicans are disingenuously packaging a tax cut for the wealthy and corporations as a tax cut for the middle class. But whatever is in Hatch’s heart, this is exactly what the Senate bill does. It front-loads the benefits for non-wealthy people by making its various tax preferences and its cuts to individual income tax rates temporary and subject to expiration while making the corporate rate cuts permanent. It also ties tax brackets to an alternative inflation measure in a way that will result in out-year tax increases for everyone but the top 1 percent. The nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation has concluded that in 2027, most poor and working-class people will see a tax hike, while upper-income earners (who benefit from corporate tax cuts) continue to pay less.

Hatch, as other Republicans, claims to have “no intention” of raising taxes on lower-income people, meaning Congress will renew their tax cuts later. The suggestion otherwise got Hatch angry. But there is zero guarantee that this will happen, and indeed, this claim actually ratifies the objections of Brown and Democrats. It reveals in a backdoor way that the whole reason for making all these provisions temporary is to pay for permanent tax cuts on corporations, which is necessary to comply with the procedural need to avoid raising the deficit later. Indeed, the bill’s repeal of the individual mandate is also designed to cut health spending on less-fortunate people precisely to fund those corporate tax cuts — which shows, as Brian Beutler points out, that this bill partly represents another version of the massively regressive Obamacare repeal efforts that have already been defeated, this one just in a new packaging of grift.

As it happens, there is good reason to doubt Hatch’s motives — or, at least, those of the GOP more broadly. Multiple Republicans have admitted on the record that if Republicans don’t pass these tax cuts, their donors will stop giving them money. If Republicans wanted to cut taxes for the middle class, they could cut taxes for the middle class and remain within deficit and procedural constraints by limiting the bill’s massive giveaway to their corporate donors, which would not necessitate hiking middle-class taxes later. Yet Republicans aren’t doing that. Hatch claimed that pointing this out “gets old.” But this week’s Quinnipiac poll finds that Americans say by 59 percent to 33 percent that the GOP plan favors the rich at the expense of the middle class, which means they are on to the GOP game.

Click over to read the rest. This bill is an atrocity. The donors want it and the people hate it.

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