Month: March 2018

Enough is enough

by digby

It appears that the turnout is huge for the March For Our Lives today, all over the globe.

In New York, marchers bundled in bright orange — the official color of a gun control advocacy group — charged toward Central Park. In Washington, protesters held signs with the messages “Arms Are for Hugging” and “Never Again.” And in Parkland, Fla., less than a mile from where the shooting took place, one protester’s eyes brimmed with tears, surrounded by the echoing chant, “Enough is enough!”

By late morning, counterprotests were also gaining steam. In Salt Lake City, demonstrators carried pistols, flags and toddlers swaddled in blankets. One of their signs read: “What can we do to stop mass shootings? SHOOT BACK.” In Boston, opposing groups of protesters shouted at one another before the police intervened.

Here’s what we’re watching as protests unfurl around the globe:

• More than 800 protests are planned in every American state and on every continent except for Antarctica, according to a website set up by organizers. Check out photos from around the world, and a map of planned protests.

• The National Park Service has approved a permit for the Washington march that estimates 500,000 people could attend. Called March for Our Lives, the main event there kicks off around midday, and some of the most prominent student activists from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., where a shooting left 17 dead last month, will speak.

• The student leaders who organized the day’s events, many of them sharp-tongued and defiant in the face of politicians and gun lobbyists, have kept attention on the issue in a time of renewed political activism on the left, as they helped lead a national school walkout and pushed state officials in Florida to enact gun legislation. The effectiveness of the students’ efforts will be measured, in part, on the success of the demonstrations.

• On Saturday, the White House said in a statement, “We applaud the many courageous young Americans exercising their First Amendment rights today.” On Friday, the Justice Department proposed banning so-called bump stocks, but President Trump signed a spending bill that included only some background check and school safety measures.

• Counterprotests in support of gun rights were planned in cities including Salt Lake City, Greenville, S.C., and Helena, Mont.

The student organizers want action in a midterms year.

The student activists want to emphasize they are are a group that will soon have access to the ballot box, as they hope to build support for candidates who support universal background checks and bans on assault-style weapons.

Huge majorities of Americans say they support gun control measures like universal background checks. Yet when put directly to the people in a referendum in recent years, the results have been mixed. Here is a look at what polling, and recent referendums, reveal about the political challenges that face the student-led activists.

“What we’re doing is because we’re not scared of these adults,” said Jaclyn Corin, 17, a Stoneman Doulgas junior and lead organizer, “because we have nothing to lose, we don’t have an election to lose, we don’t have a job to lose — we just have our lives to lose.”

She compared the march to protests against the Vietnam War and rallies for civil rights. She recently spoke with Representative John Lewis, a key player during the civil rights era. “He said he saw himself and his friends and his movement in us, in our movement,” she said.

In Parkland on Saturday, Sari Kaufman, a Stoneman Douglas sophomore, urged everyone to “turn this moment into a movement” that would toss out of office any politician who took money from the National Rifle Association.

“They think we’re all talk and no action,” she said to loud applause and cheers, and urged the crowd to prove politicians wrong by voting in huge numbers.

“Remember that policy change is not nearly as difficult as losing a loved one,” she said. “Don’t just go out and vote: Get 17 other people to go out and vote.”

The Washington march also drew people like Dantrell Blake, 21, and his cousin Deshon Hannah, 20. Both were shot as teenagers in Chicago, and they said they hoped their visit to Washington would bring attention to the plight of their city’s many shooting victims.

“When something like that happens,” Mr. Blake said of Parkland, “it’s like, ‘It’s a massacre.’ But it’s a massacre in Chicago every day — and this definitely can be talked about.”

Jodi Klein, whose oldest daughter, Jessica, graduated from the high school in 2008, said she was “pumped” by the crowds.

Asked what was different about the Parkland shooting, Ms. KleinKlein, 58, of Coral Springs, Fla. said: “They went after educated kids that can fight back. My daughter was on the debate team. They taught these kids to speak out.”
[…]
Ms. Jacobs was a library clerk during the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School. She barricaded herself in the school’s library, “in a closet hidden behind file cabinets” along with 18 fourth-graders.

“In the months after the shooting it took 100 percent of my personal focus to get up and go to work every day to take care of my surviving students,” she said. “One of the things that happens in our communities is that the survivors of gun violence have zero help.”

Mara Kleinberg, a high school senior at Churchill Center and School in Manhattan, wore an orange quilted parka and camouflage pants, and carried a sign asking why she should be protesting for her safety instead of learning.

Ms. Kleinberg, 17, said she was looking forward to voting so she could back elected officials who support gun control. “I’m happy that I can vote finally and I hope this movement brings a lot more voters into American politics,” she said.

She added that she had first become aware of the issue after Sandy Hook. As a voter, she said, “I’ll be looking for a lot more regulation: raising the age limit, making sure the kids can’t get guns. It’s kids’ brains that are still developing.”

Sayem Hussein, an 18-year-old high school senior at the Manhattan Center for Science and Mathematics, said that he had woken up at 2 a.m. and traveled an hour and a half by subway and Uber to get to East Harlem, where he was waiting on a street corner for his classmates and a bus that would drive them to Washington.

“I am a firm believer of constitutional rights,” said Mr. Hussein, who had a small copy of the Constitution in his jacket pocket. “I completely understand the Second Amendment and why people are so defensive about it, but gun regulation is totally different from taking away someone’s gun.”

There is another side which hasn’t shown up today in most places which is nice. But they are out there and they did make themselves known in some places:

Tensions over guns seemed to converge in Salt Lake City, where a gun rights march kicked off just minutes before a gun control march.

The gun rights rally drew hundreds of people, many carrying signs — “AR-15s EMPOWER the people,” one said.

Brandon McKee was one of the many people with pistols on their hips. His daughter Kendall, 11, held a sign: “Criminals love gun control.” Mr. McKee said of the Washington marchers: “I believe it’s their goal to unarm America, and that’s why we’re here today. We’re not going to stand idly by and let them tell us what we can and cannot do.”

As the gun rights advocates set off toward the Capitol, some began to heckle a gun control advocate, Linda Peer, 67, who had infiltrated the march line.

“She’s not a true American!” one man yelled. “Shame on you!” the group chanted at her.

At the Capitol, a man in camouflage shouted at another woman who appeared to be part of the gun-restriction group. “You don’t even know what you’re talking about,” he said. “Are you even from this country?”

In Boston, Second Amendment supporters gathered in front of the statehouse with signs that said, “Come and take it.”

“We believe in the Second Amendment,” said Paul Allen, 62, a retired construction worker who lives in Salisbury, Mass. “You people will interpret it the way you want and we’ll interpret it for what it is — that law-abiding citizens who are true patriots have the right to bear arms.”

Mr. Allen described supporters of gun control as “ignorant sheep who are being spoon-fed by liberal teachers.”

“They haven’t read the Constitution and they don’t know what it means,” he said.
Perhaps the most formidable political foe the students face? The N.R.A.

The leaders of the National Rifle Association have questioned whether the students were mature enough to lead a discussion about national policy, and representatives have also accused the movement of being backed by “radicals with a history of violent threats,” a claim that the fact-checking website PolitiFact deemed untrue.

And then you have the cretinous moron:

The president has grappled publicly with how to respond after the Parkland shooting.

A week after the Parkland shooting, President Trump emerged from an emotionally raw meeting with students, as well as parents of those who were killed, appearing moved. Days later, he declared: “We have to have action. We don’t have any action.”

But in March, he quickly abandoned a brief promise to work for gun control measures opposed by the N.R.A. He has also discussed measures such as arming teachers and reopening mental institutions to prevent school shootings.

On Friday, he criticized Mr. Obama over bump stocks, an accessory that can make a semiautomatic weapon fire more rapidly, in tweeting about the Justice Department’s move.

I think we may truly be seeing the first real signs that the mass movement on the left inspired by the horrific ascension of Donald Trump, gathering peacefully in the streets on a regular basis and organizing electorally as well, might just succeed. The Womens Marches and this demonstration show that a large cross section of the population, young and old, small towns and large cities, are actually leaving their couches and taking time out of their busy lives to make a political statement.

And they are not rejecting the idea of running for office and voting which means they aren’t going to forget about one of the most powerful tools we still have available to us to make change — the US government. Indeed, the Indivisible-style groups are campaigning for office all over the country and these young activists are all talking about voting and organizing.

This is a very good sign. Mass movement + government is very powerful. And that’s what it’s going to take to reset from our current horror.

The other side is not going to give up. They are very angry as you can see from some of the quotes above. Nobody should be sanguine that just because these large numbers of people are coming out to protest that there is no opposition. There’s plenty. This is fight.

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He’s going to the mattresses

Trump and Cambridge Analytica – MFEO
by Tom Sullivan

Still from Goldeneye (1995).

We did all the research, all the data, all the analytics, all the targeting. We ran all the digital campaign, the television campaign, and our data informed all the strategy.

Maybe it’s the Eton styling. Or maybe simply his confidence. But in the secret Channel 4 videos of suspended Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix hawking his company’s “psychographic” services, his pitch bears a certain resemblance to Donald Trump’s overselling of his own properties, steaks, and fraudulent university. Only Nix was boasting of the firm’s alleged pivotal role in electing Donald Trump president of the United States.

“If it’s what you say I love it,” Don Jr. famously wrote Rob Goldstone, publicist for Russian pop star Emin Agalarovof. The prospect of the Trump campaign getting its mitts on a thick bundle of purloined Hillary Clinton emails was too delicious. Nix seems just as eager in discussing entrapping clients’ political rivals in political bribes or in blackmailing them via Ukrainian sex workers. The Trumps and Cambridge Analytica were made for each other.

The biggest outrages over CA have been its use of 50 million stolen Facebook profiles to construct its voter-targeting algorithms and reports that Nix attempted to obtain hacked Democratic emails from Julian Assange and Wikileaks, who in turn got them from hackers in Russian intelligence. Facebook’s stock value has plummeted. CA faces multiple investigations.

Mother Jones, however, exposes CA itself as largely a vaporware outfit promoting a product it doesn’t yet have to clients it hopes will pay them to build it. Steve Bannon, still a board member, seems to have hoped CA’s Jedi mind tricks would help him hasten the revolution.

Accounts by CA’s former clients — most notably the Sen. Ted Cruz campaign for president — suggest the firm that billed itself as a kind of James Bond villain capable of manipulating whole countries was as authentic as Trump University’s syllabus. Earlier this month, the Guardian reported that the Jakarta ops center of CA’s predecessor, Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL), not only looked like the villain’s computer-filled lair from the Bond film Goldeneye (1995), but the same firm that built the Goldeneye set built one for SCL when it exhibited at the Defence and Security Equipment International show. An Indonesian source told the Independent in 2000, the Jakarta ops center’s purpose seemed mostly cosmetic, “a movie set to impress the clients.”

Vison 360 “ops center” built for Strategic Communication Laboratories’ 2005 exhibit at Defence Systems & Equipment International show.

CA’s business model resembles Trump’s branding model: lots of hype with little to back it up. As much hot water as CA now finds itself in, their reputation among prospective clients was already in serious decline, writes Mother Jones‘ Andy Kroll:

In reality, Cambridge Analytica’s reputation for spotty work had circulated widely among Democratic and Republican operatives, who were also put off by Nix’s grandstanding and self-promotion. Mark Jablonowski, a partner at the firm DSPolitical, told me that there was “basically a de facto blacklist” of the firm and “a consensus Cambridge Analytica had overhyped their supposed accomplishments.”

Kroll’s lengthy expose concludes:

By most accounts, Cambridge Analytica’s main feat of political persuasion was convincing a group of Republican donors, candidates, and organizations to hand over millions of dollars. (A company called Emerdata that lists Nix as a director recently added Rebekah Mercer and another Mercer daughter to its board, suggesting that Nix hasn’t fallen out with all his GOP patrons.) But Cambridge’s controversial foray into US politics spawned larger questions about how our social-media habits can be turned against us, and how companies such as Facebook hold more power over our lives—the ability to shape public conversation, even political outcomes—than many people are comfortable with.

* * * * * * * *

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

Turning the country into an armed camp

by digby

I had a feeling this would be the outcome. Ever since Newtown, the “solution” for gun violence from the NRA has been to arm more people, particularly teachers, and put all public building under lockdown conditions. They want to turn the whole country into a prison.

Down in Florida, it’s already happening. Matthew Rosza at Salon writes:

David Hogg, a Parkland survivor who has since become an activist for the #NeverAgain movement supporting gun control, described his high school as “like a prison,” to Axios’ Mike Allen on Friday. Hogg also expressed concern that, because of the “racial disparity between black and white students,” the increased number of school resource officers could make life even worse for students of color. Hogg also criticized the media for “not giving black students a voice . . . My school is about 25% black, but the way we’re covered doesn’t reflect that.”

This wasn’t the first time that the Parkland student activists drew attention to the racial disparity in how gun control is covered. They made that point as well during a rally at Thurgood Marshall Academy in Southeast Washington, D.C. on Thursday, according to The Washington Post. That event occurred prior to the March for Our Lives rally that is planned for this weekend, during which hundreds of thousands of students and their families are expected to convene on Washington to press Congress for stricter gun laws.

The March for Our Lives rally is merely the latest example of a major protest in reaction to outrage from “the mass shooting generation,” as Hogg put it earlier this week. A number of the Parkland shooting survivors have made media appearances and appeared at protests in the month since the shooting, drawing the anger and ridicule of conservatives and even humiliating Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., during a highly publicized town hall event last month.

Yet the fact that the Parkland school has been turned into a prison-like environment, and meaningful gun control legislation is still verboten by the Republican Party (as most recently evidenced by the failure to include anything substantial on the issue in the new budget), reinforces an important point — namely, that opponents of gun control are willing to try just about anything they can think of to avoid even modest increases of gun regulations.

Perhaps the most controversial idea to come from the “anything but guns” crowd is the notion that we should arm teachers. It’s an idea that has been supported by President Donald Trump and a number of other prominent conservatives, even though it wouldn’t work and is likely to lead to racial profiling. There have even been two incidents this month in which personnel on school grounds accidentally discharged guns, underscoring the absurdity of that proposal.

It would be one thing if policymakers were proposing beefing up security at our schools in addition to strengthening gun control laws; while this could still be considered excessive and unfair to the students, at least no one would question that they’re trying everything possible to protect America’s children. The problem, though, is that ideas like spending more money on security guards, arming teachers and improving America’s mental health care system (which has merit) aren’t being offered by the anti-gun control movement in good faith. They’re being suggested because that movement’s primary objective is to prevent any legislation from passing that regulates guns.

The goal, then, isn’t to protect children, but to see if any solution to the problem of mass shootings at schools exists which won’t require conservatives to give an inch to gun control proponents.

This is correct. Sadly, the perverse result of the massive new gun control movement is to make school more like jails and the teachers more like prison guards. But that’s what Wayne LaPierre said had to happen. I wrote about it for Salon after one of the earlier mass murders:

We can thank one man who runs one powerful lobbying group, Wayne LaPierre of the NRA. According to the Frontline documentary “Gunned Down” it was clear that the NRA was thrown by the Newtown massacre and there was personal pressure on board members to accede to some kind of gun safety regulation to appease the national sense of horror over the event. At the very least, they thought it would be wise for the organization to keep a low profile in the aftermath. But without telling anyone LaPierre staged a press conference in Washington DC and came out swinging. He said in no uncertain terms that there would be no compromise, no negotiation. He doubled down on the vacuous, insincere NRA logic that the reason those tiny children were gunned down in their 1st grade classrooms was the fact that there weren’t enough guns there. He infamously declared:

“The only way — the only way — to stop a monster from killing our kids is to be personally involved and invested in a plan of absolute protection. The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun… What if, when Adam Lanza started shooting his way into Sandy Hook elementary school last Friday, he’d been confronted by qualified armed security?

“Our children— we as a society leave them every day utterly defenseless, and the monsters and the predators of the world know it and exploit it.

The best they can do is to say that if we had sharp-shooters stationed in classrooms all over the country we could maybe cut the death toll. There would still be dead kids, of course. Maybe even more would die. But it is simply inconceivable to them that we might seek ways to end this violence in the first place. They say the world is full of monsters and predators. But just as we cannot hold back the tides it is impossible to keep deadly weapons out of their hands.


…

You might think this is good news but …

by digby

Politico analysis of the omnibus spending bill:

President Donald Trump’s budget proposals have taken a hatchet to President Barack Obama’s top priorities. They’ve called for deep cuts in renewable energy, medical research and nonmilitary spending in general. They’ve eliminated TIGER, a grant program for innovative transportation projects created by Obama’s stimulus bill; ARPA-E, an energy research agency launched by the stimulus; and CDBG, a community development program many Republicans consider an urban slush fund.

Now the Republicans who control Congress have passed a $1.3 trillion omnibus spending bill, and it not only protects Obama’s priorities, it expands them. It does far less for Trump’s stated priorities, and while his administration endorsed the bill Thursday, he tweeted a veto threat and expressed some apparent buyer’s remorse Friday after it passed.

The omnibus—Capitol Hill jargon for a single spending bill that funds most government functions—does not kill any of the programs or agencies Trump’s budget proposed to kill; it triples funding for TIGER, nearly doubles CDBG, and boosts ARPA-E’s budget by 16 percent. Trump wanted to slash the Energy Department’s renewables budget 65 percent; instead, Congress boosted it 14 percent. Trump proposed to keep nonmilitary spending $54 billion below the congressional budget cap; the omnibus spends right up to the cap, a $63 billion increase from last year.

This is why the conservative National Review denounced the omnibus as “the sort of legislation that would have been right at home in the Obama administration,” while Democratic congressional leaders Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer gloated in a statement that its “job-creating, life-saving investments stand in sharp contrast to the Trump budget.” It basically extends the fiscal status quo that has prevailed since the start of Obama’s second term—plus a sizable chunk of new deficit spending—even though Republicans now control the legislative and executive branches.

“Throughout the Obama presidency, the Republican Party at least gave lip service to the need to restore fiscal sanity in Washington,” says Michael Needham, head of the conservative policy group Heritage Action. “It is now clear just how many in the GOP are willing to engage in profligate spending when they control the levels of power.”

Republicans are pleased that the omnibus hikes defense spending 10 percent, even more than Trump requested, including a 2.6 percent military pay raise Trump has already bragged about on Twitter. The White House also got $1.6 billion for border security, although the bill specifies it cannot be spent on the concrete wall the president wants. There’s a 6 percent cut in foreign aid and other State Department programs, less than the 25 percent cut in the Trump budget written by Office of Management and Budget chief Mick Mulvaney but still a significant rollback. And the omnibus did not include a specific line item for the Gateway rail tunnel project in New York City that Trump had called a deal-breaker, although Democrats are confident that Gateway will still get plenty of cash from the bill.

This is good news for many people who depend upon the programs they have funded. But it is beyond cynical.

Republicans spend and spend when they have the power of the purse so the country is more prosperous when they are in power. Inevitably their laissez-faire regulatory program tanks the economy and they lose power. The Democrats come in and have to clean up their mess and the Republicans blame them for the misery they themselves brought about. Rinse, repeat.

Sure there are some Republicans wringing their hands about deficits but that will not cost them one single vote. It is a weapon that is only effective against Democrats.

So enjoy the funding while you can. Once Democrats take over the congress trump will turn into the most vociferous deficit hawk we’ve ever seen. He telegraphed his intentions today when he pretended he was going to veto a bill that his White House helped write.

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Pray that moustache becomes just too much for Trump to bear

by digby

This article by someone who has worked with John Bolton is truly terrifying considering that Bolton is a monster who seeks world dominance:

Here are three things to know about what Bolton brings to this job.

First, he’s a masterful bureaucratic tactician. Unlike his predecessors, Michael Flynn and H.R. McMaster, Bolton is a very experienced and adept creature of Washington institutions. Similar to former Vice President Dick Cheney, he knows the levers and knobs of the vast national security and foreign policy machinery: how they work, who works them, and how to exert control over them. He’ll work to put loyalists in key vantage points and marginalize those he distrusts (both of which I watched him do as undersecretary of state for arms control and international security). In particular, he has the already-weakened State Department, now lacking a secretary, especially mapped out for further hostile takeover.

Second, he’s a crafty negotiator. I’ve never believed that Donald Trump is the artful dealmaker he pretends to be; he has a few plays that he just runs again and again. But Bolton is truly clever. He picks his battles much more carefully than Trump does. As U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Bolton is mostly remembered for his hostility to the institution and for his coarse bluntness. Yet in that multilateral diplomatic maze, he often delivered for the administration, including on North Korea at the U.N. Security Council.

Third, he’s thorough and methodical. Most senior policymakers simply cannot keep up with the details across so many issues. I watched Bolton dominate ICC policy meetings with mastery of the minute particulars, preserving a strategy that was more hardline—and unnecessarily costly—than I think even the president would have wanted (though I’d note that Bolton’s early victories on this issue didn’t last into Bush’s second term). Expect the same diligent readiness from him on issues like Iran and North Korea, but with the added advantage that he’ll face less pushback than he might otherwise because of the fact that so many senior diplomatic posts remain unfilled. His ability to be meticulous and bombastic will probably serve him very well in this White House.

It’s anyone’s guess whether the relationship between Bolton and President Trump will last. The president is, of course, a wild card. My best guess is that Bolton will be effective at managing his relationship with Trump and will be far more influential than Flynn or McMaster ever could have been. But, maybe the president will quickly turn on him as well, or just decide he hates mustaches. What’s more, John Bolton doesn’t suffer fools gladly—and that’s bad news for Trump.

For now, the key takeaway is that Bolton brings to the president’s national security agenda a competence that this White House has lacked. I generally agree with Benjamin Wittes that some of the president’s worst instincts have often been tempered by sheer ineptitude. What makes Bolton dangerous is his capacity to implement those instincts effectively.

I guess I’m going to have to root for Trump to do what he always does and for Bolton to be unable to set his own ego aside enough to give the King his required blow jobs on a regular basis.

It’s not much but I think it’s all we’ve got.

Stormy has been a film director since 2004

by digby

I’m just going to throw this out there:

If “a picture is worth a thousand words,” how many words is this worth?????#60minutes #pleasedenyit #basta pic.twitter.com/eCkU0JBZaR— Michael Avenatti (@MichaelAvenatti) March 23, 2018

She has directed 78 films. She knows her way around a camera. Just saying.

The Cambridge Analytica blueprint

by digby

The Guardian got a hold of the Cambridge Analytica sales pitch:

The blueprint for how Cambridge Analytica claimed to have won the White House for Donald Trump by using Google, Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube is revealed for the first time in an internal company document obtained by the Guardian.

The 27-page presentation was produced by the Cambridge Analytica officials who worked most closely on Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

A former employee explained to the Guardian how it details the techniques used by the Trump campaign to micro-target US voters with carefully tailored messages about the Republican nominee across digital channels.

Intensive survey research, data modelling and performance-optimising algorithms were used to target 10,000 different ads to different audiences in the months leading up to the election. The ads were viewed billions of times, according to the presentation.

The document was presented to Cambridge Analytica employees in London, New York and Washington DC weeks after Trump’s victory, providing an insight into how the controversial firm helped pull off one of the most dramatic political upsets in modern history.

“This is the debrief of the data-driven digital campaign that was employed for Mr Trump,” said Brittany Kaiser, 30, who was Cambridge Analytica’s business development director until two weeks ago, when she left over a contractual dispute.

She is the second former employee to come forward in less than a week, talking exclusively to the Guardian about the inner workings of the firm, including the work she said it conducted on the UK’s EU membership referendum.

She said she had access to a copy of the same document now obtained by the Guardian, and had used it to showcase the campaign’s secret methods to potential clients of Cambridge Analytica.

“There was a huge demand internally for people to see how we did it,” Kaiser said of the 2016 race. “Everyone wanted to know: past clients, future clients. The whole world wanted to see it. This is what we were allowed to confidentially show people if they signed a non-disclosure agreement.”

It’s interesting, but there is this as well:

Cambridge Analytica has a reputation among political operatives for exaggerating its role in campaigns. A senior Trump campaign official who said they saw the document about a year ago claimed it took credit for some work that was done by the Republican national committee and Trump’s digital director, Brad Parscale.

I’m not sure that the RNC or Parscale deserve credit either. Trump “won” through TV, in my opinion, backed by the relentless negative messages about Clinton coming through the press and social media.

But what do I know? The fact remains that these people are assholes.

Check this out:

One of the most effective ads, according to Kaiser, was a piece of native advertising on the political news website Politico, which was also profiled in the presentation. The interactive graphic, which looked like a piece of journalism and purported to list “10 inconvenient truths about the Clinton Foundation”, appeared for several weeks to people from a list of key swing states when they visited the site. It was produced by the in-house Politico team that creates sponsored content.

The Cambridge Analytica presentation dedicates an entire slide to the ad, which is described as having achieved “an average engagement time of four minutes”. Kaiser described the ad as “the most successful thing we pushed out”.

Drudge played a role in that too. I wrote about this for Salon in 2016. Politico was right in the middle of it:

Mainstream publications have fed the notion with click-bait stories like this slide-show from Politico which sat at the top of their “most-read” list for months this year despite having been originally published back in 2013. As it turned out Drudge had been up to his old tricks. He had linked to a British tabloid story in which Abedin was quoted saying that she thought Clinton was beautiful which led to millions of drooling Drudge readers searching for “Clinton Huma lesbian.”

Trump and Bolton: soulmates

by digby

I wrote about the worst hire in history for Salon this morning:

Ever since Nicolle Wallace reported for NBC News that national security adviser H.R. McMaster would be leaving the White House by the end of the month, the rumor that he’d be replaced by hardline hawk John Bolton has been rampant. I’ve mentioned it more than once over the last couple of weeks myself. So I must confess that I’m a bit surprised at the shock that seemed to reverberate throughout Washington on Thursday evening when Trump tweeted this out:

I am pleased to announce that, effective 4/9/18, @AmbJohnBolton will be my new National Security Advisor. I am very thankful for the service of General H.R. McMaster who has done an outstanding job & will always remain my friend. There will be an official contact handover on 4/9.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 22, 2018

Of course it’s terrifying. John Bolton is a certifiable loon and everyone knows it. But then, so was Michael Flynn, who briefly served as the president’s first national security adviser before tumbling into disgrace, guilty pleas and a deal to cooperate with special counsel Robert Mueller. Both of them reflect Donald Trump’s temperament and worldview, which despite the insistence of many on both the right and the left has nothing to do with withdrawing from the world or “realism” or isolationism.

Bolton has always been seen as a neocon, but that’s not quite right. During the George W. Bush years he was an insider in the crowd that included Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, the guys who wrote the manifesto for the Project for a New American Century ,which served as the theoretical basis for the Iraq war. The idea was that America would be a benevolent unitary global superpower, spreading democracy and capitalism across the world and taking down “bad guys” two at a time so “freedom and liberty” would prevail. It was a Hollywood style starry-eyed utopianism, at the point of a gun, that allowed a lot of hawks to sing “Kumbaya” as they marched us off to war. We know how that turned out.

But Bolton wasn’t one of those guys, not really. He ran with that crowd, but was never a believer in the freedom-and-democracy agenda. He’s always been a straight-up warmonger who believes the United States is the only relevant power in the world. It’s pretty simple, and he’s been saying it straightforwardly for years:

There is no United Nations. There is an international community that occasionally can be led by the only real power left in the world, and that’s the United States, when it suits our interests and when we can get others to go along. … The United States makes the UN work when it wants it to work, and that is exactly the way it should be, because the only question, only question, for the United States is what’s in our national interest. And if you don’t like that, I’m sorry, but that is the fact.
— Speech before the Global Structures Convocation in New York, Feb. 3, 1994 

If I were redoing the Security Council today, I’d have one permanent member, because that’s the real reflection of the distribution of power in the world — the United States.
— Interview with Juan Williams on NPR, June 6, 2000

On another occasion, Bolton declared that it was “a big mistake” for the U.S. “to grant any validity to international law even when it may seem in our short-term interest to do so — because over the long term, the goal of those who think that international law really means anything are those who want to constrain the United States.”

You can see that it’s not even a question of world leadership or political hegemony for him, still less about spreading democracy and capitalism. It’s about total domination. Does that sound like someone else we know?

To that end, Bolton is a big proponent of pre-emptive war, including nuclear war. Back in 2009, he said that “unless Israel is prepared to use nuclear weapons against Iran’s program, Iran will have nuclear weapons in the very near future.” Just last month he published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal arguing that it was “perfectly legitimate for the United States to respond to the current ‘necessity’ posed by North Korea’s nuclear weapons by striking first.”

Bolton is a willing conspiracy theorist in the Fox News mode, and can often be seen holding forth on that channel. Most recently he shared his suspicions that the apparent Russian interference in the 2016 election was actually a “false flag” operation staged by the Obama administration to cast doubt on Trump’s legitimacy, a thesis sure to warm Trump’s heart. One can only imagine what this moonbat will do with a top security clearance.

But let’s not make the mistake of thinking that Bolton is the real problem here. He’s a disastrous choice for national security adviser, for all the reasons laid out above. But he was chosen because his ideas dovetail perfectly with the president’s worldview, not in spite of them. Trump doesn’t have one-tenth of Bolton’s erudition, or a well thought-out national security ideology. But he has projected his own personal insecurities onto the nation as a whole, believing that everyone else is “taking advantage” of us and “laughing at us.” Now he wants to hit back at the whole world and make it pay. As I wrote last year after his “American carnage” inaugural address:

When Donald Trump says “America First,” he really means “We’re No. 1.” He talks incessantly about “winning,” so much we’ll be begging him to stop. He openly declares that he believes in the old saying “to the victors belong the spoils,” either suggesting that he has no clue about the West’s colonial past and how that sounds to people around the world or simply doesn’t care. He’s not talking about isolationism but the exact opposite — American global dominance without all those messy institutions and international agreements standing in the way of taking what we want.

Bolton couldn’t agree more. Trump has found his national security soulmate.
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