Friday, July 07, 2017 5:21:32 AM
Republicans condemn Trump for crude tweets about ‘Morning Joe’ host
I heard poorly rated @Morning_Joe speaks badly of me (don't watch anymore). Then how come low I.Q. Crazy Mika, along with Psycho Joe, came..
8:52 AM - 29 Jun 2017
[ https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/880408582310776832 (with (over 41,000} comments)]
...to Mar-a-Lago 3 nights in a row around New Year's Eve, and insisted on joining me. She was bleeding badly from a face-lift. I said no!
8:58 AM - 29 Jun 2017
[ https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/880410114456465411 (with (over 91,000} comments)]
'Your tweet was beneath the office,’ Lindsey Graham said about Trump’s message about a bleeding face-lift.
06/29/2017 Updated 06/29/2017
http://www.politico.com/story/2017/06/29/trump-targets-morning-joe-hosts-in-tweet-240085 [with embedded video, and comments]
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Principal Deputy Press Sec. Sarah Huckabee Sanders holds White House news briefing
Streamed live on Jun 29, 2017 by PBS NewsHour
White House Principal Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders holds a news briefing where Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.
Press Briefing by Principal Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Sanders and Treasury Secretary Mnuchin, 6/29/2017
James S. Brady Press Briefing Room
June 29, 2017
https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/06/29/press-briefing-principal-deputy-press-secretary-sarah-sanders-and [official transcript]
Has Donald Trump never 'promoted or encouraged violence,' as Sarah Huckabee Sanders said?
"The president in no way, form or fashion has ever promoted or encouraged violence."
— Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Thursday, June 29th, 2017 in a White House press briefing
July 5th, 2017
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/jul/05/sarah-huckabee-sanders/has-donald-trump-never-promoted-or-encouraged-viol/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uvt6RDjeWI [comments disabled] [official White House upload at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKGvpF2zTXA (with comments)]
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The White House’s defective, slippery-slope logic for defending Trump’s behavior
June 30, 2017
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/06/30/the-white-houses-defective-slippery-slope-logic-for-defending-trumps-ill-behavior/ [with (separate) embedded video, and comments], https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2eMN4UGHkjg [embedded; comments disabled]
Trump's Grudges Are His Agenda
The president’s personal attacks are not a distraction from his policy goals. They are his policy goals.
Jun 30, 2017
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/06/trumps-grudges-are-his-agenda/532395/ [with comments]
Who Likes Trump’s Tweets and Why
President Trump speaking to supporters in Iowa last week.
JUNE 29, 2017
Once again, President Trump has triggered a predictable wave of outrage, this time over his insulting tweets [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/29/business/media/trump-mika-brzezinski-facelift.html ] about the television host Mika Brzezinski’s bleeding face-lift. We know who he alienates by this behavior — and that includes many mainstream Republicans as well as Democrats. But who is the audience he is playing to? And what are the implications when the president flouts what used to be seen as taboos?
Mr. Trump and his die-hard followers delight in the shock value of violating social and political norms. They revel in the thumb in the eye. It’s intrinsic to the president’s appeal to his base, and it’s increasingly clear that either deliberately or impulsively, both his conduct and his policies are aimed at that base and not beyond it.
The president is an equal-opportunity insulter, but let’s just focus on his posture toward women — and the ecstatic response this evokes in some quarters. This was the week in which Mr. Trump called an Irish reporter to his desk while talking to her prime minister about her smile [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/28/us/trump-flirt-irish-reporter.html (excerpted above)] — only the latest of a stream of pronouncements about women’s appearance. His jab at Ms. Brzezinski echoed his comment that another television anchor, Megyn Kelly, had been bleeding from her wherever [ https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/09/us/politics/donald-trump-disinvited-from-conservative-event-over-remark-on-megyn-kelly.html ], that evocation of menstruation, so unclean, so embarrassing, so primal.
There is something about his swagger, his unabashed embodiment of a time when women were eye candy and arm candy. And there is something about the way he strikes back at women who anger him that seems to resonate for some men — and which, at least so far, has not cost him the support of the women who backed him. The uncomfortable larger question is whether this president’s behavior is encouraging and unmasking resentments about women’s place in society.
The women’s movement spent decades attempting to change attitudes among Americans so that tweets like Mr. Trump’s would be out of bounds. Even a year ago, the conventional wisdom was that comments like Mr. Trump’s taped boasts [ https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/08/us/donald-trump-tape-transcript.html ] about forcing himself on women were political suicide. That no longer appears to be true. And the fear is that much as President Barack Obama’s election seemed to ignite resentments about race that most people had been shy about expressing publicly, Mr. Trump’s election may be unleashing latent anger toward women.
Theda Skocpol [ https://sociology.fas.harvard.edu/people/theda-skocpol ], professor of government and sociology at Harvard, has been visiting eight counties around the country as part of her research to monitor developments in the Trump presidency. “There’s one example after another as if some button had been pushed and people were openly saying to each other the tensions you’ve been feeling about gender changes over the last 40 years — it’s just fine to uncork all those ambivalent and angry feelings,” she said.
Christine Matthews [ http://www.bellwether-research.com/about-us/ ], veteran strategist and president of Bellwether Research who has advised Republican campaigns, said that there is some polling data to suggest Mr. Trump is tapping into anger among some men. “A subset of men whom Trump appeals to is threatened by women in power,” she said. “They feel their dominance in society is threatened. This is not coming — generally — from college-educated men or those in suburban or urban centers with strong economic prospects.”
Joan C. Williams [ http://www.uchastings.edu/faculty/williams/index.php ], a law professor and author of “White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America,” said that unless other political leaders address class grievances, Mr. Trump’s appeal will continue to resonate.
“Trump’s persistent insults to high-profile women play to that part of his base that has long been incensed at a definition of political correctness that includes women, L.G.B.T.Q. people, immigrants and other groups — but leaves out working-class whites nursing the hidden injuries of class,” she said. “So long as class remains unacknowledged as a key source of social disadvantage, Trump’s insults will feel to some of his supporters like a delicious poke-in-the-eye of elites.”
Mr. Trump has in fact turned politics into performance art. Some have likened what he does to insult comedy of the type practiced by Don Rickles [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/06/arts/television/don-rickles-dead-comedian.html ]. But insult comics are quick to point out that there is a crucial difference. “Insult comedy underneath it all is about affection,” said Lisa Lampanelli [ http://www.insultcomic.com/ ], known for routines that both insult and reveal what it feels like to be insulted. “I saw Trump be a roastmaster at the Friars Club, but he doesn’t have the skill to do this kind of thing with the right intention underneath it. Is it entertaining to some? I don’t find these tweets entertaining in the least. It’s off-putting and it gets to a scary bully level.”
[...]
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/29/opinion/who-likes-trumps-tweets-and-why.html
White House Women Face Bigger Gender Pay Gap Than National Average
7/3/17
[...]
The total 377 staffers, who also include First Daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner who both receive nothing for their role of special advisors to the president, represent a “slimmer” White House than President Barack Obama’s final year staff of 472 (down from 487 in his first year).
But personnel in Trump’s White House generally cost more than those in Obama’s, with a median salary of $89,000 compared to the $73,051 earned by a White House staffer in 2016.
When it comes down to gender pay gap, Obama’s White House was not perfect but the difference was narrower: in 2014, the difference between the median salary of a male compared to a female staffer was 13 percent, lower than the then national average of 23.5 percent, the Washington Post reported [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/male-female-pay-gap-remains-entrenched-at-white-house/2014/07/01/dbc6c088-0155-11e4-8fd0-3a663dfa68ac_story.html ].
At the time, press secretary Josh Earnest admitted [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/08/white-house-gender-pay-gap_n_5568057.html ] there was space for improvement of female representation at the higher-salaried levels. “I wouldn’t hold up the White House as the perfect example here,” he said, “The White House has some improvement to make.”
The news of the wider gender pay gap in Trump's White House comes as his administration considers disbanding Obama's White House Council on Women and Girls [ https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/administration/eop/cwg ], responsible for monitoring the implementation of policy changes and liaising with women's groups, as reported by Politico [ http://www.politico.com/story/2017/06/30/donald-trump-white-house-council-for-women-and-girls-239979 ].
Tina Tchen, who was the council director under Obama, told the publication the office helped signalling the administration's concerned with gender inequality. "It shows the priority you place on the issues surrounding women and girls,” she said.
http://www.newsweek.com/white-house-women-suffer-wider-gender-pay-gap-national-average-631120 [with embedded video, and comments] [also at http://img.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/white-house-women-face-bigger-gender-pay-gap (with comments)]
Analysis Finds Women In The White House Are Making 80 Cents On The Dollar, Compared To Men
It’s 2017, and yet women are still fighting for equality. Data suggests it will take until 2152 to close the gender wage gap, but it shouldn’t take a century to get what we want. We want more [ http://www.refinery29.com/equal-pay-for-women-we-want-more ], and Refinery29 is here to help — because 135 years is too long to wait for what we deserve today.
July 03, 2017
Women currently working in the White House face a larger wage gap than the national average. As per a Congressional rule instated in 1995 [ http://www.newsweek.com/white-house-women-suffer-wider-gender-pay-gap-national-average-631120 ], the White House released salary information for its 377 staffers on June 30. A CNN analysis [ http://www.cnn.com/2017/07/02/politics/white-house-gender-pay-gap/index.html ] of the White House's annual report to Congress found that women on staff were paid an average of 80 cents for every dollar paid to men on staff. Currently, the national average is 82 cents for every dollar.
[...]
A wage gap in the White House is not a new phenomenon. A report by The Washington Post [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/male-female-pay-gap-remains-entrenched-at-white-house/2014/07/01/dbc6c088-0155-11e4-8fd0-3a663dfa68ac_story.html ] in 2014 showed that while the disparity was less when Barack Obama was president, there was still a 13% difference in annual salary between men and women. That was roughly 10% lower than the 23.5% national average at the time. That same year, Obama signed an executive order promoting fair pay which included a mandate for paycheck transparency. It also did away with forced arbitration in cases of sexual harassment and gender-based discrimination. Movement toward equal pay continued when according to a report by the Office of Personnel Management, the federal government pay gap had decreased to 11% by 2015.
In March, Trump revoked the Obama-era mandate [ http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/trump-pulls-back-obama-era-protections-women-workers-n741041 ] just days before Equal Pay Day on April 4. Data suggests [ http://www.aauw.org/aauw_check/pdf_download/show_pdf.php?file=The-Simple-Truth ] that pay parity will not be reached in the U.S. until 2152 given the current rate of change [ http://www.refinery29.com/2017/04/148232/women-wage-gap-facts ].
http://www.refinery29.com/2017/07/161829/white-house-staff-salaries-confirm-gender-pay-gap [with comments] [also at https://www.yahoo.com/style/analysis-finds-women-white-house-161500388.html (with comments)]
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Like His Father, Donald Trump Jr. Uses Twitter to Target the Media
Donald Trump Jr. took photos during an event at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J., last month.
HABERMANJUNE 30, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/30/us/politics/like-his-father-donald-trump-jr-uses-twitter-to-target-the-media.html
When Trump Tweets Sexist Remarks, It’s Hard To Take Melania’s Anti-Cyberbullying Initiative Seriously
Melania Trump has faced unique challenges in embracing her role as first lady.
06/29/2017 Updated June 30, 2017
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/melania-trump-cyberbullying_us_59550a93e4b02734df307d0e [with embedded video, and comments]
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Donald Trump is not well
MSNBC's Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski arrive for the annual White House Correspondents' Association dinner in Washington in 2015.
(Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)
Mika Brzezinski responds to Donald Trump's tweets about her
6/30/17
Mika Brzezinski responds to Donald Trump's tweets about her
Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough address President Trump's Thursday tweets about them, what it says about the president and the United States and the practical impact of his behavior. Duration: 32:37
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/morning-joe/watch/mika-fascinating-frightening-and-sad-for-the-us-980332099712 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTZOSBnYeE4 [with comments]
By Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough
June 30, 2017
President Trump launched personal attacks against us Thursday, but our concerns about his unmoored behavior go far beyond the personal. America’s leaders and allies are asking themselves yet again whether this man is fit to be president. We have our doubts, but we are both certain that the man is not mentally equipped to continue watching our show, “Morning Joe.”
The president’s unhealthy obsession with our show has been in the public record for months, and we are seldom surprised by his posting nasty tweets about us. During the campaign, the Republican nominee called Mika “neurotic [ http://money.cnn.com/2016/08/22/media/donald-trump-morning-joe-mika/index.html ]” and promised to attack us personally after the campaign ended. This year, top White House staff members warned that the National Enquirer was planning to publish a negative article about us unless we begged the president to have the story spiked. We ignored their desperate pleas.
The president’s unhealthy obsession with “Morning Joe” does not serve the best interests of either his mental state or the country he runs. Despite his constant claims that he no longer watches the show, the president’s closest advisers tell us otherwise. That is unfortunate. We believe it would be better for America and the rest of the world if he would keep his 60-inch-plus flat-screen TV tuned to “Fox & Friends.”
For those lucky enough to miss Thursday’s West Wing temper tantrum, the president continued a year-long habit of lashing out at “Morning Joe” while claiming to never watch it. During his early-morning tirade, Mr. Trump spit out schoolyard insults about “low I.Q. Crazy Mika,” “Psycho Joe” and much worse. He also fit a flurry of falsehoods in his two-part tweetstorm [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/06/29/trumps-very-bad-tweets-about-mika-brzezinski-are-the-epitome-of-his-struggling-presidency/ ].
Mr. Trump claims that we asked to join him at Mar-a-Lago three nights in a row. That is false. He also claimed that he refused to see us. That is laughable.
The president-elect invited us both to dinner on Dec. 30. Joe attended because Mika did not want to go. After listening to the president-elect talk about his foreign policy plans, Joe was asked by a disappointed Mr. Trump the next day if Mika could also visit Mar-a-Lago that night. She reluctantly agreed to go. After we arrived, the president-elect pulled us into his family’s living quarters with his wife, Melania, where we had a pleasant conversation. We politely declined his repeated invitations to attend a New Year’s Eve party, and we were back in our car within 15 minutes.
Mr. Trump also claims that Mika was “bleeding badly from a face-lift.” That is also a lie.
Putting aside Mr. Trump’s never-ending obsession with women’s blood, Mika and her face were perfectly intact, as pictures from that night reveal. And though it is no one’s business, the president’s petulant personal attack against yet another woman’s looks compels us to report that Mika has never had a face-lift. If she had, it would be evident to anyone watching “Morning Joe” on their high-definition TV. She did have a little skin under her chin tweaked, but this was hardly a state secret. Her mother suggested she do so, and all those around her were aware of this mundane fact.
More significant is Mr. Trump’s continued mistreatment of women. It is disturbing that the president of the United States keeps up his unrelenting assault on women. From his menstruation musings about Megyn Kelly [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/08/07/trump-says-foxs-megyn-kelly-had-blood-coming-out-of-her-wherever/ ], to his fat-shaming treatment of a former Miss Universe, to his braggadocio claims about grabbing women’s genitalia, the 45th president is setting the poorest of standards for our children. We were heartened to hear a number of Republican lawmakers call out [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2017/06/29/mr-president-please-grow-up-lawmakers-slam-trumps-shocking-mika-brzezinski-tweets/ ] Mr. Trump for his offensive words and can only hope that the women who are closest to him will follow their examples. It would be the height of hypocrisy to claim the mantle of women’s empowerment while allowing a family member to continue such abusive conduct.
We have known Mr. Trump for more than a decade and have some fond memories of our relationship together. But that hasn’t stopped us from criticizing his abhorrent behavior or worrying about his fitness. During the height of the 2016 presidential campaign, Joe often listened to Trump staff members complain about their boss’s erratic behavior, including a top campaign official who was as close to the Republican candidate as anyone.
We, too, have noticed a change in his behavior over the past few years. Perhaps that is why we were neither shocked nor insulted by the president’s personal attack. The Donald Trump we knew before the campaign was a flawed character but one who still seemed capable of keeping his worst instincts in check.
© 2017 The Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/donald-trump-is-not-well/2017/06/30/97759ee0-5d0f-11e7-9b7d-14576dc0f39d_story.html [with embedded videos, and (pver 6,000) comments]
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Kellyanne Conway reacts to Trump's 'Morning Joe' tweets
Published on Jun 30, 2017 by ABC News [ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBi2mrWuNuyYy4gbM6fU18Q / https://www.youtube.com/user/ABCNews , https://www.youtube.com/user/ABCNews/videos ]
The counselor to President Trump tells "GMA" she endorses his ability to connect to voters on social media, and claims the media are more focused on the president's tweets than policy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvWl3lkAwoM [with comments]
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When it comes to messaging, no, Trump cannot walk and chew gum at the same time
July 3, 2017
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/07/03/when-it-comes-to-messaging-no-trump-cannot-walk-and-chew-gum-at-the-same-time/ [with embedded video, and comments]
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This NRA Recruitment Video Is So Divisive, Even Gun Owners Are Angry
“They use their schools to teach children that their president is another Hitler.”
By Ron Dicker
06/29/2017 11:13 am ET | Updated June 29, 2017
A new National Rifle Association recruitment ad [ https://www.facebook.com/NRA/videos/1605896562755373 (embedded)] appears to have outraged both gun control advocates and gun owners alike, even leading critics to launch a petition [ http://www.thepetitionsite.com/875/997/392/facebook-remove-inflammatory-nra-video-for-inciting-violence/ ] urging Facebook to delete the “inflammatory” message for “inciting violence.”
The minute-long clip, posted on the NRA’s FB page earlier this month [the above YouTube of the ad, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtGOQFf9VCE (with comments), uploaded by the NRA on April 7, 2017], features Dana Loesch [ http://www.theblaze.com/dana-loesch/ ] of TheBlaze who begins: “They use their media to assassinate real news. They use their schools to teach children that their president is another Hitler. They use their movie stars and singers and comedy shows and award shows to repeat their narrative over and over again.”
The ad continues with Loesch declaring that “their” former president advocated resistance, leading to protests that “bully and terrorize the law-abiding.”
“The only way we stop this, the only way we save our country, and our freedom, is to fight this violence of lies with a clenched fist of truth,” the spokeswoman concludes. “I’m the National Rifle Association of America and I’m freedom’s safest place.”
Many commenters, including some who say they are gun owners, blasted the ad for being “incendiary” and “divisive” while “encouraging violence.”
A 50-year-old former Republican from the Midwest replied to the video on Facebook, calling it “Orwellian nonsense designed to make you cheer and fist pump for your ‘freedom’ like dogs drooling when the bell gets rung.”
The commenter, who asked not to be named because he feared for his safety, said he owns firearms for his own protection and for occasional target practice. He told HuffPost that despite the negative reaction to the video in some corners, he suspects it won’t damage the NRA.
“I don’t think much of anything can actually backfire on them, to be honest,” he said. “Much of their core membership seems impervious to logic and reason, sadly.”
The NRA did not immediately return a request for comment on the criticism.
©2017 Oath Inc. Part of HuffPost • HPMG News
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/this-nra-recruitment-video-is-so-divisive-even-gun-owners-are-angry_us_5954e6c2e4b0da2c73217669 [with comments]
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New NRA Ad Encourages Violence Against Political Protesters
Published on Jun 28, 2017 by CONTENT [ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCewIHE_qTt39EcXLrSk6nwg , https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCewIHE_qTt39EcXLrSk6nwg/videos ]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDa3FgEcpCk [with comments]
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He thought a book would stop a bullet and make him a YouTube star. Now he’s dead.
[...]
With one camera attached to a ladder and the other propped on the back of a car, the couple staged their stunt, according to authorities. Ruiz held the book to his chest and Perez held the gun, a gold Desert Eagle .50-caliber pistol considered [ http://www.cabelas.com/product/Magnum-Research-Desert-Eagle-Pistols/1327491.uts ] “one of the most powerful semiautomatic handguns in the world.”
From a foot away, court documents say, Perez fired.
[...]
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/06/29/he-thought-a-book-would-stop-a-bullet-and-make-him-a-youtube-star-now-hes-dead/ [with (separate) embedded video; no comments, comments closed], https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eL5DHvcrJEA [with comments]
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Doctor Opens Fire at Bronx Hospital, Killing a Doctor and Wounding 6
The AR-15 rifle used by Dr. Bello in Friday’s attack. Police officials said it was believed he sneaked it into the hospital under his lab coat.
JUNE 30, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/30/nyregion/bronx-hospital-shooting.html
Trump wants to keep terrorists out, but homegrown maniacs with guns are the real threat
July 1, 2017
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/stasi-maniacs-guns-henry-bello-real-terrorists-article-1.3294154
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Dozens Are Injured in Shooting at a Nightclub in Little Rock
An investigator collected evidence near an Arkansas nightclub where the police said dozens of people were shot early Saturday.
JULY 1, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/01/us/little-rock-club-shooting.html
PHOTOS, VIDEO: 28 revelers hurt in Little Rock shooting; nightclub became a 'war zone,' witness said
July 2, 2017
http://www.nwaonline.com/news/2017/jul/02/28-revelers-hurt-in-lr-shooting-2017070/ [with embedded video, and comments]
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5 found guilty in killing of Russian opposition leader
In this Saturday, Feb. 28, 2015 file photo Russian police investigate the lifeless body of Boris Nemtsov, a former Russian deputy prime minister and opposition leader just off Red Square, with St. Basil Cathidral in the background, in Moscow, Russia. A jury on Thursday June 29, 2017 have found five men guilty in the assassination of Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov. Nemtsov, a top opponent of President Vladimir Putin, was shot in 2015 as he was walking across a bridge just outside the Kremlin.
(AP Photo/Pavel Golovkin, file)
By NATALIYA VASILYEVA
Jun 29, 2017
MOSCOW (AP) — A jury convicted five men Thursday in the assassination of opposition leader Boris Nemtsov on a bridge near the Kremlin two years ago, ending a trial that his supporters said had failed to bring the true masterminds of the brazen killing to justice.
The shooting death so close to Red Square sent shockwaves through the Russian opposition, which had looked to the former deputy prime minister and fierce critic of President Vladimir Putin as a rising reformer who could negotiate with authorities.
After two days of deliberations at the end of a nine-month trial, the jury at a Moscow court found Zaur Dadayev guilty of killing Nemtsov. Dadayev was a former officer in the security forces of Chechnya’s leader, Ramzan Kadyrov.
Four other men were convicted of involvement in the killing.
Prosecutors said the four helped obtain the murder weapons and drove the shooter to the crime scene. Investigators said they never established who ordered Nemtsov’s assassination.
Prosecutors are expected to announce the sentences they are seeking at a hearing next week.
Nemtsov, 55, was shot late on the night of Feb. 27, 2015, as he was walking across the Bolshoy Moskovetsky Bridge just outside the Kremlin. A few hours before his death, he had conducted a radio interview in which he denounced Putin for his “mad, aggressive” policies in the Ukraine crisis.
The images of Nemtsov’s body lying on the sidewalk with the domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral towering behind sent a chilling message to many in the opposition, who had faced persecution and arrests, of just how precarious their position was.
Ilya Yashin, Nemtsov’s close ally, echoed that sentiment after the verdict.
“Political murders in Russia will continue if the masterminds of this attack are able to get away with this,” Yashin told reporters.
Nemtsov’s killing was the biggest political assassination in Russia since 2006, when another Kremlin foe, journalist Anna Politkovskaya, was shot to death in the elevator of her Moscow apartment building on Putin’s birthday. Five Chechens were convicted in the case but it has been unclear who ordered the killing.
The site on the bridge where Nemtsov was killed has become a shrine, with supporters placing candles, fresh flowers and framed photos of the politician on the sidewalk where he fell.
Following Putin’s call for a full probe, investigators quickly tracked down several people linked to the killing, all from Chechnya. The suspected triggerman was an officer in Kadyrov’s much-feared security force, and one of his suspected accomplices — another senior officer in the Chechen police — was related to some of Kadyrov’s top lieutenants.
Despite the mounting pressure to include Kadyrov in the investigation, Putin stood by him and the inquiry went nowhere. Key suspects have disappeared, reportedly whisked abroad, and the investigators have failed to identify the organizers.
Nemtsov’s allies and relatives criticized Russia’s Investigative Committee, which looks into high-profile crimes, for stopping short of studying any possible role by Kadyrov and top Chechen officers.
When Dadayev was arrested shortly after the killing, Kadyrov vehemently defended him as a “true patriot.”
Nemtsov’s allies have blamed the killing on Kadyrov, who has been accused in the southern republic of human rights violations, including torture and killings, saying the officers could not have acted without his explicit orders. Kadyrov denied any role in the assassination.
Nemtsov’s eldest daughter, Zhanna Nemtsova, said in a Facebook post after the verdict that “the case remains unsolved.”
“Investigators and the court clearly did not want to uncover the truth about this crime,” Nemtsova said, noting that no high-profile Chechen officials were even questioned.
“There was only one task: Find the triggerman and hold a trial. They did just that. But we will continue to fight for the truth by any means we have,” she said.
Nemtsov’s family petitioned investigators to look into Kadyrov’s possible involvement and to question Ruslan Geremeyev, commander of the police unit in which Dadayev served.
The commander was summoned to testify, but he failed to show up. Investigators told the court last year that they visited Geremeyev’s property in Chechnya but “no one opened the door.”
Dadayev and the other men confessed soon after they were arrested. They later retracted their confessions, saying they had been coerced.
Asked if the investigation should be resumed, Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov told Russian news agencies Thursday evening that “this is not the Kremlin’s issue.”
Dmitry Kozlov contributed to this report.
© Copyright 2017 Associated Press
https://www.apnews.com/b8b25f896ef04f50b1ddf87f5737f5d4/5-found-guilty-in-killing-of-Russian-opposition-leader [and see also in particular (linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=119496514 and preceding (and any future following)]
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Trump’s voter-fraud commission wants to know voting history, party ID and address of every voter in the U.S.
By Christopher Ingraham
June 29, 2017
The chair of President Trump's Election Integrity Commission has penned a letter to all 50 states requesting their full voter-roll data, including the name, address, date of birth, party affiliation, last four Social Security number digits and voting history back to 2006 of potentially every voter in the state.
In the letter, a copy of which was made public by the Connecticut secretary of state [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/files/2017/06/PEIC-Letter-to-Connecticut-1.pdf ], the commission head Kris Kobach said that “any documents that are submitted to the full Commission will also be made available to the public.”
On Wednesday, the office of Vice President Pence released a statement [ https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/06/28/readout-vice-presidents-call-presidential-advisory-commission-election ] saying “a letter will be sent today to the 50 states and District of Columbia on behalf of the Commission requesting publicly available data from state voter rolls and feedback on how to improve election integrity.”
States began reacting to the letter on Thursday afternoon. "I have no intention of honoring this request," said Governor Terry McAuliffe of Virginia in a statement. "Virginia conducts fair, honest, and democratic elections, and there is no evidence of significant voter fraud in Virginia."
Connecticut's Secretary of State, Denise Merrill, said she would "share publicly-available information with the Kobach Commission while ensuring that the privacy of voters is honored by withholding protected data." She added, however, that Kobach "has a lengthy record of illegally disenfranchising eligible voters in Kansas" and that "given Secretary Kobach's history we find it very difficult to have confidence in the work of this Commission."
Under federal law [ https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/PLAW-107publ252/html/PLAW-107publ252.htm ], each state must maintain a central file of registered voters. States collect different amounts of information on voters [ http://voterlist.electproject.org/ ]. While the files are technically public records [ https://sunlightfoundation.com/2016/06/16/publishing-voter-registration-data-must-balance-privacy-with-transparency/ ], states usually charge fees to individuals or entities who want to access them. Political campaigns and parties typically use these files to compile their massive voter lists [ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/word-on-voter-files/ ].
In May, Trump created a commission [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2017/05/11/white-house-to-launch-a-commission-to-study-voter-fraud-and-suppression/ , https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/05/11/presidential-executive-order-establishment-presidential-advisory ] to investigate alleged acts of voter fraud after he claimed, without evidence [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2017/01/23/at-white-house-trump-tells-congressional-leaders-3-5-million-illegal-ballots-cost-him-the-popular-vote/ ], that 3 million to 5 million undocumented immigrants voted illegally in the 2016 election. The commission is chaired by Kobach, who is the Kansas secretary of state and a voter-fraud hard-liner [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/13/magazine/the-man-behind-trumps-voter-fraud-obsession.html ].
Earlier this month, a federal judge fined Kobach $1,000 for “presenting misleading arguments in a voting-related lawsuit,” according to Politico [ http://www.politico.com/blogs/under-the-radar/2017/06/23/kris-kobach-fined-voting-lawsuit-trump-memo-239910 ].
Advocates for voting rights and civil liberties are also sounding alarms over the letter. “The concern is that this is going to be used to justify regressive and disenfranchising federal law,” Myrna Pérez, deputy director of the democracy program at New York University Law School's Brennan Center for Justice, said in an interview.
Vanita Gupta, chief executive of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and former head of the Justice Department's civil rights division, said on Twitter [ https://twitter.com/vanitaguptaCR/status/880479649817649152 ] that the letter is “laying the groundwork for voter suppression, plain & simple.”
The White House press office did not return a request for comment on this article. A spokesman for Kobach in the Kansas secretary of state's office referred an inquiry to an email address listed in the commission's letter. The commission did not return a request sent to that email address.
Trump and his allies have said the commission's work is necessary to prevent what they call widespread instances of voter fraud. But evidence for such fraud is exceedingly thin [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/02/13/the-white-house-tells-media-to-ask-kris-kobach-to-prove-theres-voter-fraud-they-do-he-doesnt/ ]. Kobach has made it a central issue of his tenure in Kansas and has secured nine voter-fraud convictions [ http://www.kssos.org/other/news_releases/PR_2017/NR_2017_5_3.pdf ]. Most were older Republican voters [ http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/05/21/kris-kobach-voter-fraud-investigation-prosecution-215164 ], and at least one claims he was targeted for an “honest mistake.”
Academics who have studied the issue for decades say that voter fraud — particularly of the type that strict voter-identification laws championed by Kobach and others are intended to combat — is vanishingly rare [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/08/06/a-comprehensive-investigation-of-voter-impersonation-finds-31-credible-incidents-out-of-one-billion-ballots-cast/ ] and that voter-ID requirements are a burdensome solution to a practically nonexistent problem. A federal judge ruled [ https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=16565308906894228234&hl=en&as_sdt=6&as_vis=1&oi=scholarr ] that some of Kobach's proposed ID requirements constituted a “mass denial of a fundamental constitutional right.”
While civil-liberties advocates are concerned with what Kobach might do with what would amount to a nationwide voter file, privacy advocates worry about the implications of making such data available to the public, as the commission says it intends to do. It hasn't specified how it would make the data available.
“Why does a random member of the public . . . need to know when you last voted and what your political party is?” asked the Brennan Center's Perez. “I think that access to this data in the wrong hands could always leave the opportunity for mischief. In this particular instance, I'm worried about harassment as well.”
States are “stewards of [this] public information,” Perez said. “Once it leaves their hands in this way, there's no telling whose going to get it, and how, and what they're using it for.”
Read more:
How Trump’s nationwide voter data request could lead to voter suppression
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/06/30/how-trumps-nationwide-voter-data-request-could-lead-to-voter-suppression/
Von Spakovsky riled Fairfax with voter fraud efforts; Trump just elevated him
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-politics/von-spakovsky-riled-fairfax-with-voter-fraud-efforts-trump-just-elevated-him/2017/06/30/9241ab70-5dab-11e7-9fc6-c7ef4bc58d13_story.html
Trump’s voting commission asked states to hand over election data. Some are pushing back.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/trumps-voting-commission-asked-states-to-hand-over-election-data-theyre-pushing-back/2017/06/30/cd8f812a-5dce-11e7-9b7d-14576dc0f39d_story.html
Kris Kobach says he can’t comply with Kris Kobach’s voter data request
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/06/30/kris-kobach-says-hes-cant-comply-with-kris-kobachs-voter-data-request/
Kris Kobach: The conservative gladiator from Kansas behind restrictive voting laws
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/the-conservative-gladiator-from-kansas-behind-restrictive-voting-laws/2016/04/06/57ad18d2-eaed-11e5-b0fd-073d5930a7b7_story.html
© 2017 The Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/06/29/trumps-voter-fraud-commission-wants-to-know-the-voting-history-party-id-and-address-of-every-voter-in-america/ [with embedded video, and (approaching 4,000) comments]
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Kris Kobach wants every U.S. voter’s personal information for Trump’s commission
“If Barack Obama tried to get all of this information from state election officials it would be front page news on Fox News for months and would prompt a congressional investigation of federal takeover of state election processes.”
June 29, 2017
http://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/article158871959.html [with embedded video. and comments]
Trump Wants All Your Voter Data. What Could Go Wrong?
06.30.17
The private ballot is tradition [ https://www.wired.com/2016/11/cops-probably-dont-time-arrest-taking-ballot-selfies/ ] in the United States. Now, President Trump’s voter fraud commission wants to collect every American’s voting history and make it available to the public—all in the name of “election integrity.”
This week, the newly formed Advisory Committee on Election Integrity asked secretaries of state across the country for their complete voter rolls, including people’s political parties, voting history, the last four digits of their social security numbers, felony history, and more. The request [ http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/06/29/534901343/white-house-panel-asks-states-for-their-voter-rolls ], submitted by committee vice chair Kris Kobach, has both voting rights advocates and privacy hawks on edge. It’s not just a violation of people’s voter privacy expectations, they say, but it also sets the government up to manipulate the often messy data contained in those voter rolls to give the impression that voter fraud is widespread when it isn't.
“There’s a never-ending amount of mischief that can be done with this data in the wrong hands,” says Myrna Perez, director of voting rights and elections at Brennan Center for Justice. “I think there’s going to be a lot of false positives about people voting when they’re ineligible.”
“There’s a never-ending amount of mischief that can be done with this data in the wrong hands,” says Myrna Perez, director of voting rights and elections at Brennan Center for Justice. ...
[...]
“You’re going to have a list of hundreds of millions of records, including many, many, many, many John Smiths, their addresses, and sometimes the year they were born,” Levitt says. He argues that trying to match that information up with, say, a list of people who immigration has flagged as being undocumented, would be "beyond sloppy and guaranteed to be riddled with errors."
“There’s a lot of worry to be had about garbage in-garbage out,” Levitt says.
Of course, the John Smiths may have an easier time than, say, the Jose Garcias. Rolling Stone investigated [ http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/the-gops-stealth-war-against-voters-w435890 ] one tool that aims to find fraudulent voters, called Crosscheck, which is used by more than two dozen states. It found that the system disproportionately flags Hispanic, black, and Asian-American voters. States can use this list to purge people from voter rolls, whether or not the system accurately pegged them as fraudsters. It’s not out of the question that Kobach is looking to do something similar nationwide. Kobach, in fact, is the person who started Crosscheck
[...]
https://www.wired.com/story/trump-wants-all-your-voter-data-what-could-go-wrong/ [with comments]
Kobach: Kansas won’t give Social Security info to Kobach-led voter commission at this time
June 30, 2017
Multiple states plan to buck Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach’s request for personal information on voters on behalf of a presidential commission.
Kobach said Friday that Kansas, at least for now, also won’t be sharing Social Security information with the commission, on which he serves as vice chairman. The state will share other information about the state’s registered voters, including names and addresses, which are subject to the state’s open records laws.
[...]
California and Kentucky’s Democratic secretaries of state said Thursday that they would not comply with the request. Virginia’s Democratic governor also said the state would not adhere to the request. Minnesota’s Democratic secretary of state followed suit on Friday.
Mississippi Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann, a Republican, also will not comply.
“They can go jump in the Gulf of Mexico and Mississippi is a great State to launch from,” Hosemann said in a statement. “Mississippi residents should celebrate Independence Day and our State’s right to protect the privacy of our citizens by conducting our own electoral processes.”
[...]
Kobach has bristled at the backlash to his request from Democratic leaders.
“They’re trying to use this as a soapbox to make some left-wing political statement,” he said.
http://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/article159113369.html [with embedded video. and comments]
Trump says states are ‘trying to hide’ things from his voter fraud commission. Here’s what they actually say.
July 1, 2017
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/07/01/trump-says-states-are-trying-to-hide-things-from-his-voter-fraud-commission-heres-what-they-actually-say/ [with embedded video, and comments]
Trump Just Undermined The Work Of His Own ‘Election Integrity’ Probe
Numerous states are refusing to give information to the very distinguished VOTER FRAUD PANEL. What are they trying to hide?
8:07 AM - 1 Jul 2017
[ https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/881137079958241280 (with {over 54,000} comments)]
The White House insisted it was a neutral effort. Trump cast doubt on that.
07/01/2017 Updated July 1, 2017
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-voter-fraud-investigation_us_5957c971e4b0da2c7323d93c [with embedded video, and comments]
A privacy group is suing Trump's election-integrity panel for trying to collect voter data
Jul. 3, 2017
http://www.businessinsider.com/trump-sued-election-voter-data-2017-7
Maryland official abruptly quits Donald Trump's controversial “voter fraud panel,” report said
July 3, 2017 Updated July 3, 2017
Maryland’s deputy secretary of state has quit a controversial presidential commission on election integrity, the Baltimore Sun [ http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/politics/bs-md-borunda-resigns-trump-20170703-story,amp.html ] reported on Monday.
Luis Borunda informed the administration of Gov. Larry Hogan that he had resigned from the panel, which is chaired by Vice President Mike Pence, according to a Hogan spokesman, the newspaper reported.
The White House announced [ https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/06/21/president-donald-j-trump-announces-intent-nominate-personnel-key ] President Donald Trump’s intent to appoint Borunda to the commission on June 21.
“Borunda’s appointment prompted some head scratching in Maryland,” the Sun reported. “Unlike in many other states, the secretary of state’s office in Maryland has no role in voter registration or the administration of elections.”
Secretaries of state, governors and other officials across the country have bucked a massive data solicitation from the panel’s vice-chairman, Kris Kobach.
[...]
https://mic.com/articles/181413/maryland-official-abruptly-quits-donald-trumps-controversial-voter-fraud-panel-report-said#.uDalEJ43O
Here's why watchdogs are worried about all that personal data the Trump election panel wants
July 3, 2017 Updated July 4, 2017
https://mic.com/articles/181376/heres-why-watchdogs-are-worried-about-all-that-personal-data-the-trump-election-panel-wants
Forty-four states have refused Kobach's request for voter information
Two states are still reviewing the commission's request and another two states have not returned CNN's request for comment
Six states are still awaiting a letter from the commission, but four of them have already pledged not to provide voters' private information
July 3, 2017 Updated July 4, 2017
http://www.cnn.com/2017/07/03/politics/kris-kobach-letter-voter-fraud-commission-information/index.html [with embedded videos]
Newspapers rip Trump voter fraud panel in July 4th editorials
07/04/17
http://thehill.com/homenews/news/340609-newspaper-editorial-boards-rip-trump-voter-fraud-panel-for-july-4 [with comments]
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Were Voting Machines Actually Breached? DHS Would Rather Not Know
TPM composite/Christine Frapech
By Sam Thielman
Published June 30, 2017 6:00 am
Pressure to examine voting machines used in the 2016 election grows daily as evidence builds that Russian hacking attacks were broader and deeper than previously known. And the Department of Homeland Security has a simple response:
No.
DHS officials from former secretary Jeh Johnson to acting Director of Cyber Division Samuel Liles may be adamant that machines were not affected, but the agency has not in fact opened up a single voting machine since November to check.
Asked about the decision, a DHS official told TPM: “In a September 2016 Intelligence Assessment, DHS and our partners determined that there was no indication that adversaries were planning cyber activity that would change the outcome of the coming US election.”
According to the most recent reports, 39 states were targeted [ https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-13/russian-breach-of-39-states-threatens-future-u-s-elections ] by Russian hackers, and DHS has cited–without providing details–domestic attacks in its own reports as well.
“Although we continue to judge all newly available information, DHS has not fundamentally altered our prior assessments,” the department told TPM.
Computer scientists have been critical of that decision. “They have performed computer forensics on no election equipment whatsoever,” said J. Alex Halderman, who testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee last week about the vulnerability of election systems. “That would be one of the most direct ways of establishing in the equipment whether it’s been penetrated by attackers. We have not taken every step we could.”
Voting machines, especially the electronic machines still used in several states, are so insecure that an attack on them is likely to be successful, according to a report from NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice out Thursday morning [ https://www.brennancenter.org/publication/securing-elections-foreign-interference ]. David Dill, a voting systems expert and professor of computer science at Stanford University quoted in the report, said hackers can easily breach election systems regardless of whether they’re able to coordinate widely enough to alter a general election result.
“I don’t know why they wouldn’t try to hack voting machines and I don’t know what would stop them,” Dill told TPM. “Any statement that says ‘We haven’t see evidence of X’ also means ‘We haven’t lifted a finger to investigate.’”
DHS told TPM Wednesday afternoon it was confident in “multiple checks and redundancies in US election infrastructure” and referred to the testimony of Liles and Jeannette Manfra, DHS undersecretary for cybersecurity, who said US electoral systems were fortified by “diversity of systems, non-Internet connected voting machines, pre-election testing, and processes for media, campaign, and election officials to check, audit, and validate results.”
The new Brennan Center report, however, details the dangers of voting machines that aren’t properly secured, particularly the effect on public confidence of a very public successful hack, whether or not it managed to swing an election. “In the current hyper-partisan environment,” the authors noted, “evidence of this kind of hack could lead to accusations by each side that the other is rigging the election.”
While forensic examinations would answer many questions vital to researchers trying to improve voting systems, the potential for eroded confidence in those systems may help to explain DHS’ reluctance to seek out hard evidence. The department said most attacks were simple scanning, rather than attempts to alter tallies or poll books.
Evidence always seems to stop with “we don’t know:” An NSA report leaked to The Intercept [ https://theintercept.com/2017/06/05/top-secret-nsa-report-details-russian-hacking-effort-days-before-2016-election/ ] in June detailed a phishing operation by the Russian military intelligence agency GRU on voting hardware maker VR Systems that in turn targeted voting officials. Like DHS, the NSA said it was unclear whether those officials’ machines had been compromised.
Some of the paralysis around how to move forward is a result of tensions between DHS and states angry about the designation of their election systems as “critical infrastructure [ http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/dhs-designates-election-systems-critical ]” in January, just before President Trump took office. Then-secretary Johnson even acknowledged [ https://www.dhs.gov/news/2017/01/06/statement-secretary-johnson-designation-election-infrastructure-critical ] at the time that the designation was controversial to many state election officials, who see the offer of federal assistance, often with strings attached, as an attempted takeover (Johnson testified last week that when a critical infrastructure designation was first floated to state officials in August, the reaction “ranged from neutral to negative”).
“They’re in this strange position where they had a lot of pushback from election officials over federal overreach and in some ways they’re in a little bit of a bind,” said the Brennan Center’s Larry Norden, one of the authors of its report.
Everyone knows what has to be fixed, Norden says, but no one wants to go first. “The states want the counties to act, the counties want the state to pay for things, the states may want the money but they don’t want any of the mandates that come with the money,” he says. “There are investigations but there are no positive solutions yet.”
Current auditing processes, which vary wildly from state to state, are frequently arduous and sometimes nonsensical. In Virginia, where the margin of victory is often very shallow, it is illegal to audit the vote except when the margin is more than 10 percent—and only then if the local election official agrees, and after the election has been certified. When that audit takes place, it can’t change the outcome of the election, even if the audit reveals a completely different tally.
Cybersecurity expert Jeremy J. Epstein says the Virginia rule illustrates why widespread changes to voting standards are so difficult: Every place has different rules. In many states, “localities have almost no ability to raise funds,” Epstein observes. “Even if the state wants to do something, getting 130 localities in Virginia to do something that requires action at a local level is very hard to do.”
The dangers are real: Some voting machines still use Windows XP, which Microsoft hasn’t updated in years. Epstein has personally demonstrated huge security flaws in others. In 2015, he successfully campaigned to decertify the AVS WinVote machine, a touchscreen device that used a woefully outdated and insecure wireless protocol called WEP, which can be hacked in three minutes [ http://www.zdnet.com/article/fbi-demonstrates-3-minute-wi-fi-hack/ ]. Epstein pulled off the hack successfully and was able to retrieve the WinVote’s factory-set passwords: “abcde” and “admin [ https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/apr/15/virginia-hacking-voting-machines-security ].”
Halderman, too, has dramatically demonstrated how easy it is to take over voting machines, in one case simply by loading a voting machine with a memory card filled with malicious software that can then hitch a ride on that machine back to the central location where the votes are tallied (Machines are left unguarded so often that Ed Felten, who worked in the Obama White House as a deputy chief technology officer, used to make a tradition of posting pictures of them to his and Halderman’s blog, Freedom to Tinker [ http://freedom-to-tinker.com/2010/11/02/e-voting-links-election-day/ ]).
In fact, Halderman testified before the Senate Intelligence panel that not only could he successfully breach voting machines himself, but he had made the process part of his assigned coursework.
“I know firsthand how easy it can be to manipulate computerized voting machines,” he told the Senate. “As part of security testing, I’ve performed attacks on widely used voting machines, and I’ve had students successfully attack machines under my supervision.”
These computer scientists agree the problem is urgent and nonpartisan, and no less a Trump ally than Rudy Giuliani said Wednesday that he believed the problem was serious, too. Even in the polarized post-election environment, Norden says he thinks legislators may be able to agree on the issue need to secure voting systems.
“The intelligence community has been pretty clear that while [the Russian hacking teams] may have favored Trump in the election, their interest is in undermining our democracy,” said Norden. “Regardless of party, I think we all share the idea that democracy is essential to the country.”
@ 2017 TPM Media LLC
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/dhs-doesnt-want-to-know-about-vote-hacks [with comments]
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Full Show - Elites Panic As Pope’s Right-Hand Man Indicted For Child Rape - 06/29/2017
Published on Jun 29, 2017 by The Alex Jones Channel
Thursday, June 29th 2017[, with an appearance by Robert David Steele, and Jon Rappoport hosting the fourth hour]: Robert David Steele #UNRIG Trump Winning Fight Against MSM - President Trump tweeted at MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough this morning, calling them crazy Mika and psycho Joe. Trump's travel ban is set to take effect tonight and protests are expected. Also, Russian Senator Alexei Pushkov warns that the United States is preparing a false flag “provocation” as a pretext to launch a military assault on Syria.
Nasa spokesperson forced to deny that space agency has put child sex slaves on Mars
The denial came in response to a guest featured on Alex Jones's Infowars programme
30 June 2017
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/nasa-mars-child-sex-slave-colony-space-agency-alex-jones-infowars-robert-david-steele-a7816371.html [with comments]
Alex Jones and the Pedophile Colony on Mars
July 2, 2017
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/dispatches/2017/07/02/alex-jones-pedophile-colony-mars/ [with comments]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luXQqmF72Hs [with comments] [also at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-nghe0CvAU (additional text adapted from; with comments)] [and see also in particular (linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=132586193 and preceding and following] [a must-watch]
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Clean Coal’s Flagship Project Has Failed
A plan to slash emissions from coal burning by 65 percent has proved too problematic at the beleaguered Kemper power plant.
by Jamie Condliffe
June 29, 2017
The Mississippi power plant widely regarded to be the biggest proof of concept yet for clean coal has failed to deliver on its promise. Its carbon capture technique has been declared too costly and problematic, and the facility will instead burn natural gas to create electricity.
The coal-fired power station in Kemper County had many hopes pinned to it since construction began in 2010. The theory was simple: if a plant could be built to cleanly burn nearby lignite coal reserves—the most heavily carbon-emitting of all coal types, per unit of heat extracted—then the fuel’s future in American energy production would be assured.
Sadly, things haven’t played out that way. The project has been mired in problems from the get-go [ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601840/a-mississippi-power-plant-highlights-all-thats-wrong-with-clean-coal/ ] and has run up a $7.5 billion tab—$4 billion over its planned budget—with the carbon capture scheme three years behind schedule. Now, the New York Times reports [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/28/climate/kemper-coal-mississippi-clean-coal-project.html ], the plant’s owner, Southern Company, has ditched its attempts to get it working as designed, following pressure from the Mississippi Public Service Commission to switch to natural gas and stop hemorrhaging money.
The plant was supposed to gasify the soft brown lignite coal to create a fuel that emits similar amounts of carbon dioxide as natural gas when burned. According to a description of the technology by Power magazine [ http://www.powermag.com/kemper-county-igcc-project-update/ ], that would in theory have reduced the carbon dioxide emissions associated with burning that coal by 65 percent.
But the gasification systems have not worked as planned, and the Kemper plant has instead been burning natural gas. Now, it will continue to do so. Southern says that it is “immediately suspending start-up and operations activities” for coal gasification at the plant.
It’s a huge blow for clean coal. Despite some successes [ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/602552/a-huge-carbon-capture-scheme-provides-new-hope-for-clean-coal/ ] in cutting carbon emissions from fossil-fuel power plants, by and large the process is still considered too costly to implement at scale. That’s especially true given that prices for renewable energy are continuing to decline swiftly [ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608114/clean-energy-prices-are-about-to-become-cheaper-than-coal/ ]. Indeed, a newly published analysis from the Global Warming Policy Foundation suggests [ https://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2017/06/CCS-Report.pdf ] that carbon capture schemes will always remain too expensive to be viable as the cost of clean energy drops.
As part of his push to reinvigorate the fossil-fuel industry, earlier this year President Donald Trump said [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-clean-coal_us_58dad105e4b054637062e61d ] that his administration was “putting an end to the war on coal,” providing America with “clean coal, really clean coal.” Now more than ever, that looks like an empty promise.
MIT Technology Review © 2017
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608191/clean-coals-flagship-project-has-failed/
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President Trump Speech at Unleashing American Energy Event 6/29/2017
Published on Jun 29, 2017 by The White House
In recent weeks, a new energy buzzword has taken flight from Washington, making stops in Alaska, North Dakota, Texas, Utah, and more: American energy dominance. Taking a cue from a 2016 speech by then-candidate Donald Trump, top federal officials including Energy Secretary Rick Perry and Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke have begun to trumpet the notion of energy “dominance.”
Although no Cabinet official has offered a precise definition, it’s a recurring theme in a set of administration events organized around energy policy, including a planned speech by Trump emphasizing exports of coal, natural gas, and oil.
For decades, U.S. politicians have trumpeted the notion of energy “independence,” focused primarily on the need to eliminate oil imports from OPEC nations and other countries that may not share U.S. interests. But as other energy policy experts have observed, “independence” was never a smart energy goal. Isolating the U.S. from global energy markets is neither in the interest of domestic consumers nor newly resurgent oil and gas producers in the U.S.
For consumers, access to international markets ensures energy supplies at more stable prices. For instance, consider what would happen if a hurricane shut down production and refining along the Gulf Coast, the hub of the U.S. oil and gas industry. Without access to global markets, prices for motor fuels, home heating fuels, and other products would be far more volatile.
As for producers, they have argued strongly for opening up, rather than sealing off, access to international energy markets. They’ve lobbied to lift restrictions on crude oil exports and encouraged exports of natural gas via new pipelines and liquefied natural gas, or LNG, terminals.
Spurred by increased oil and gas production as a result of the shale revolution, these policy changes have resulted in dramatic growth in U.S. energy exports. In fact, net energy exports (energy exports minus energy imports) have risen to their highest level in decades. The United States could even be a net energy exporter by 2020 under one optimistic scenario.
Remarks by Vice President Pence introducing President Trump at the Unleashing American Energy Event
U.S. Department of Energy
Washington, D.C.
June 29, 2017
https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/06/29/remarks-vice-president-pence-introducing-president-trump-unleashing [official transcript]
Remarks by President Trump at the Unleashing American Energy Event
U.S. Department of Energy
Washington, D.C.
June 29, 2017
https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/06/29/remarks-president-trump-unleashing-american-energy-event [official transcript]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MY1KV406tgw [with comments] [also at e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8asKA9_VFbY (text taken from; with comments)] [and see also in particular (linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=68574076 and preceding and following]
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Trump to Meet With Putin at G-20 Gathering Next Week
President Trump and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia will meet on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit meeting in Hamburg, Germany.
JUNE 29, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/29/world/europe/trump-puting-g-20.html [with comments]
Spies Fear Trump’s First Meeting With Putin
The Kremlin thinks Putin will eat Trump’s lunch at the G-20 summit, European intelligence agencies have learned.
06.29.17
Moscow believes its leader, ex-spy master Vladimir Putin [ http://www.thedailybeast.com/keyword/vladimir-putin ], can extract major concessions from President Donald Trump [ http://thedailybeast.com/keyword/donald-trump ] when the two meet for the first time next week, European officials tell The Daily Beast.
The officials say their intelligence indicates Putin thinks he can outmaneuver Trump at the G-20 summit, playing on promises of cooperation on areas like counterterrorism to win concessions like a reduction in the raft of sanctions against Russia [ http://thedailybeast.com/keyword/russia ].
“When you meet Russia, don’t give anything away for free,” one Western official warned, echoing the fears of many European diplomats ahead of next week’s Trump-Putin meeting on the fringes of the G-20 in Germany [ http://thedailybeast.com/keyword/germany ].
Their misgivings highlight concern that Trump’s inexperience and Putin’s ability to flatter will slowly degrade the U.S. alliance with Europe over time, and boost Moscow back to near-superpower status while extracting no changes to its aggressive, expansionist behavior.
[...]
http://www.thedailybeast.com/spies-fear-trumps-first-meeting-with-putin
Report: Trump Does Not See Russia As A Threat
June 29, 2017
http://www.opposingviews.com/i/world/trump-yet-publicly-condemn-russia-putin-meeting-looms [no comments yet]
White House could offer to roll back sanctions in first Trump-Putin meeting
A t-shirt featuring Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin on sale at a souvenir shop in St Petersburg.
G20 meeting of two presidents could see Russia regain access to diplomatic compounds blocked after interference in 2016 US election, say former officials
29 June 2017
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jun/29/white-house-sanctions-first-trump-putin-meeting
Trump has reportedly asked his aides to come up with 'deliverables' he can offer to Putin in their big meeting
Jun. 29, 2017
http://www.businessinsider.com/trump-putin-meeting-sanctions-russia-2017-6
Trump and Putin meet next week. Guess which one has an agenda?
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/55529221/12.12.1.0.jpg)
Putin will bring a specific list of demands. Trump, not so much.
Jun 30, 2017 Updated Jun 30, 2017
https://www.vox.com/world/2017/6/30/15904366/trump-putin-agenda-2016-election-interference-g20-comey
Putin is a phenomenon, Trump is a cartoon character – Maradona
Russian President Vladimir Putin is a phenomenon who can bring peace to many across the globe, football legend Diego Maradona told journalists in Moscow, adding that he views US leader Donald Trump as a cartoon character, who can’t be treated seriously.
1 Jul, 2017
https://www.rt.com/sport/394876-putin-trump-maradona-moscow/ [with comments]
Trump must join fight against disinformation
Vladimir Putin's Kremlin openly funds far-right and far-left political groups that are anti-American, anti-NATO, and anti-European Union.
July 2, 2017 Updated July 2, 2017
President Trump's twitter tirade against MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski last week revealed more than his continued willingness to demean his office - and women.
He lambasted Brzezinski, cohost of Morning Joe, as "low I.Q., Crazy Mika" claiming she'd been "bleeding badly from a face-lift" when she briefly attended a social gathering at Mar-a-Lago on New Year's Eve. On the surface, this was one more meltdown by a thin-skinned president who can't stand criticism from mainstream journalists - which he labels FAKE NEWS.
But this tawdry tweet points to a much more dangerous consequence of Trump's war on much of the media. His attacks on journalists blind him to the real onslaught of fake news.
I refer to the campaign of disinformation, propaganda, and cyberwar being waged by Russia to undermine U.S. and European democratic institutions. That includes covert, and overt, meddling in elections.
European leaders recognize the threat, U.S. intelligence agencies have described it, and U.S. senators, in rare bipartisan agreement, want to confront it. Yet, as Trump prepares to meet Vladimir Putin at the G-20 summit in Hamburg that begins Friday, he still denies that Russia's fake-news campaign is real.
That threat, and possible countermeasures, were detailed in a fascinating conference in Washington last week, part of a week-long series of events called "Disinfoweek" cosponsored by the Atlantic Council, Germany's Konrad Adenauer Foundation, and other U.S. and European organizations.
Sens. Chris Murphy (D., Conn.) and Rob Portman (R., Ohio), in a heartening display of bipartisanship, argued that Russia's disinformation campaign in 2016 election was about something much bigger than undermining Hillary Clinton.
"Vladimir Putin and his disinformation network are not Republicans, they are opportunists," Murphy said. "It is just a matter of time before they train their sights on the Republican Party."
The focus on day-to-day investigations into the Trump administration and Russia, said Murphy, distracts attention from the story of what actually happened. There were "rooms [in Russia] filled with hundreds and hundreds of Russian-paid trolls, troll factories, people that were every single day in enormous numbers standing up fake news, fake accounts inside the United States to try to spread a series of lies to influence our election," Murphy said.
"The threat is much bigger than one president," added Portman. "It is much broader than that."
Portman is correct. The use of disinformation as a KGB foreign-policy tool dates back to the Soviet Union, but has become more central to Russian foreign policy. The spread of social media platforms and technology means that misinformation can be spread like wildfire while covering up the original sources. Moreover, websites on the far left and far right often echo the antidemocratic themes promoted by the Kremlin.
[...]
With the help of Trump - who angrily disputes U.S. intel agencies' conclusions that Russian meddling is real - the Russians may be reaching that goal.
Europe is far ahead of the United States in confronting the Russian threat, because European leaders recognize the problem. On the continent, the Kremlin openly funds far-right and far-left political groups that are anti-American, anti-NATO, and anti-European Union. The Russians meddled in May French elections and in preparations for German elections in the fall.
The Kremlin has bought up European media, and contributed to anti-NATO candidates and nongovernmental organizations. Moscow spreads fake news via the Kremlin-owned RT (Russia Today) television network and Sputnik news service; both operate in multiple languages and are often confused with independent media outlets.
The Kremlin's goal, European participants said, is to undermine faith in democratic governments and promote anti-Americanism. It seeks to promote Putin's authoritarian model as a nationalist, religious conservative alternative to pluralist democracy. (Think this is nuts? Just read what key Trump adviser Steve Bannon has written praising Putin along these lines.)
However, many European leaders have fought back, organizing agencies to track Russian disinformation. When Putin visited Paris in May, new French President Emmanuel Macron bluntly denounced Russia Today and Sputnik as "organs of influence and propaganda that spread counterfeit truths about me." (Candidate Trump, on the other hand, did an interview on RT.)
Portman and Murphy believe the United States must fight back, too. They coauthored the 2016 Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act, now law, which will provide millions to counter propaganda from Russia and China, and help U.S. allies to do likewise. "This is about our democracy," Portman said. "It is about our shared values with democracies around the world, and it is about our values."
Amen.
Yet it is hard to see how the United States can expose Russian disinformation, and make the American public more aware, when the president refuses to confront that threat or even admit it exists. And when he continues to condemn legitimate U.S. media - not Sputnik or RT - as fake news.
When Trump meets Putin in Hamburg, he'll have the chance to do a Macron and tell the Russian president bluntly that the disinformation must stop.
Or he can ignore the subject, and keep on tweeting about Mika and FAKE NEWS. That will hand Putin a huge win in his disinformation wars.
http://www.philly.com/philly/columnists/trudy_rubin/20170702_Trump_must_join_fight_against_disinformation.html
Trump-Putin Will Talk Against Backdrop of Broader Russian Mischief
Debate over Russia’s role in 2016 election blurs larger picture
July 3, 2017
When President Donald Trump meets Russian leader Vladimir Putin late this week, many will be watching to see whether they discuss alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election.
That much is obvious. Less obvious, but more important, is how any Russian meddling in the American presidential-election season [ https://www.wsj.com/articles/democrat-questions-russia-link-as-comey-heads-to-hill-1496623494 ]—whatever form it may have taken—fits into a much larger tale. This is the tale of a systematic Russian effort to disrupt democratic and capitalist systems internationally, using an updated version of tactics Mr. Putin learned in the bad old days of the Soviet KGB.
In fact, one of the dangers in the current hyperpartisan American debate over Russia’s role in the 2016 presidential election is that it is blurring this larger picture. If the 2016 election was the tip of an iceberg, the rest of the iceberg warrants serious attention.
A useful reminder of the breadth of the problem comes in the form of “The Kremlin Playbook [ https://www.csis.org/analysis/kremlin-playbook ],” a publication released last October by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a centrist American think tank, and the Center for the Study of Democracy, a European public-policy institute. In retrospect, it was a remarkably prescient look at the controversies that have mushroomed since the American election that came a month later.
The Playbook is an in-depth study of Russian efforts to use overt and covert tactics over a period of a decade to expand its economic and political influence in five Central and East European nations. A group of regional leaders from such nations warned President Barack Obama in a 2009 letter—which also looks prescient now—that Russia was conducting “overt and covert means of economic warfare, ranging from energy blockades and politically motivated investments to bribery and media manipulation in order to advance its interests….”
The Russian strategy, the study finds, isn’t ad hoc. Rather, it is the implementation of a doctrine developed by Russian Gen. Valery Gerasimov called “new generation warfare.” One European analyst called that “primarily a strategy of influence, not of brute force” aimed at “breaking the internal coherence of the enemy system.”
The strategy, as it has unfolded in Central and Eastern Europe, proceeds along two parallel tracks, the study found. The first track is economic. Russia seeks to find business partners and investments that allow it to establish an economic foothold, which in turn produces economically influential patrons and partners who have a vested interest in policies friendly to the Kremlin. That is a particularly fruitful endeavor in Europe, where many nations depend on Russian energy supplies.
The goal on this track is to cultivate “a network of local affiliates and power-brokers who are capable of advocating on Russia’s behalf.”
The second track, perhaps more relevant to the U.S., is designed to disrupt prevailing democratic political patterns. The goal, the Playbook says, is “to corrode democracy from within by deepening political divides and cultivating relationships with aspiring autocrats, political parties (notably nationalists, populists and Euroskeptic groups), and Russian sympathizers.”
On this track, the effort is designed in part to advance parties and figures sympathetic to Russia. But the broader goal is simply to disrupt the process, create confusion and discord, and discredit democratic systems both in targeted countries and in the eyes of Russian citizens, who are told the chaos to their West shows they shouldn’t long for a Western-styled democratic system at home.
A key tool in this effort, the report says, is a “war on information” campaign that uses disinformation and propaganda to disable opponents and foment nationalist and anti-Western sentiment. “Toward this end, Russia exploits existing political pressure points such as migration and economic stagnation, blames Western and U.S. operations for all negative international dynamics (such as the attempted July 2016 coup in Turkey), and discredits the current state of Western democracy,” the report says.
Remember that this was written before Mr. Trump won the American presidency and the investigations into Russian influence went into high gear. The findings are about a broader pattern of Russian behavior, not about what it might have done in the U.S. political system.
Yet these findings present a backdrop for both the current debate over Russia’s 2016 U.S. activities, as well as Mr. Trump’s meeting with Mr. Putin on the sidelines of the G-20 meeting [ https://www.wsj.com/articles/no-thaw-likely-at-trump-putin-meeting-1498838730 ] in Germany this week.
Heather A. Conley, a senior vice president of CSIS and one of the authors of The Kremlin Playbook, says the months since its publication have brought “an acceleration” of Russian influence-seeking, ranging from a plot against the prime minister of Montenegro to interference in the French election to cyberattacks in Ukraine.
The goal, she says, “is disruption, to create governmental policies that accommodate Russian interests,” first in ending Western economic sanctions and then in building a broader sphere of influence. She adds: “We continue to be unprepared.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-putin-will-talk-against-backdrop-of-broader-russian-mischief-1499093947 [with emedded video, and comments] [also at http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/wall-street-journal/kremlins-trump-contacts-fit-into-a-larger-exkgb-tactic/news-story/09faadcc9bc598486bfbba0be0996971 (with comments)] [and see also in particular (linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=131110508 and preceding and following]
Russia Warns U.S.: Return Seized Diplomatic Compounds, or Else
A Russian compound in Long Island.
July 3, 2017
The Kremlin is running out of patience as it waits for the U.S. to return two diplomatic compounds shuttered in the waning days of the Obama administration, Vladimir Putin’s foreign affairs adviser said Monday [ http://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/kremlin-expects-us-to-quickly-return-russian-embassy-assets/ ].
Russia has displayed “unusual flexibility” on the issue, Yuri Ushakov said. But, he added, the Kremlin’s patience “has its limits” and it’s up to the U.S. to “free Russia from the need to take retaliatory moves.”
The compounds were seized from Russian control in December as a punishment for the Kremlin’s meddling in the 2016 presidential election. Located in Long Island, New York, and coastal Maryland, the properties were being “used by Russian personnel for intelligence-related purposes,” President Obama said at the time.
In early June, the Trump administration was reportedly considering handing the properties back [ http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/06/trump-considers-returning-moscows-facilities-in-the-u-s.html ] to Moscow in exchange for lifting a ban on building a new U.S. consulate in St. Petersburg. Since then, new details have emerged about what those compounds were used for. Despite Russia’s claim that they’re just giant rec rooms for its diplomats, U.S. officials discovered some disconcerting items when the properties were vacated last year, CBS News reported last month [ http://www.cbsnews.com/news/russians-destroyed-and-removed-material-from-shuttered-compounds-officials-say/ ].
Among the destroyed materials discovered at the compounds were antennas, electronics, computers, file cabinets and other gear, according to a former official. Other material was missing.
Officials also told CBS news that the compounds were “significant listening posts and centers of intelligence gathering” — not crash pads filled with foosball tables.
Russia has grown increasingly annoyed with the U.S. for its refusal to return the compounds, and last week a Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson said [ https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-usa-idUSKBN19J2LP ], “Retaliatory measures are being prepared.” The topic is expected to be on the agenda [ http://www.cnn.com/2017/07/03/politics/trump-putin-meeting-syria-ukraine/index.html ] for President Trump’s meeting with Putin later this week on the sidelines of the G20 summit.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/russia-to-u-s-return-seized-diplomatic-compounds-or-else.html [with comments]
Trump expected to bring up Syria and Ukraine in Putin meeting, but not Russian election hacking
A demonstrator holds up a sign of Vladimir Putin during an anti-Trump 'March for Truth' rally on June 3, 2017 in New York City.
The White House has been tight-lipped about what Mr Trump will discuss with the Russian President in Germany
4 July 2017
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-putin-meeting-g20-syria-ukraine-russian-hacking-election-meddling-a7821966.html [with comments]
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U.S. no longer a 'friend' in Merkel election program
The change in wording underscores how relations between Berlin and Washington have deteriorated since U.S. President Donald Trump entered the White House in January.
Jul 3, 2017
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-election-merkel-usa-idUSKBN19O1NS
Angela Merkel no longer considers America a friend, election material reveals
The two leaders disagreed strongly on several issues - particularly climate change.
Mr Trump has repeatedly criticised the German Chancellor
4 July 2017
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/merkel-trump-america-germany-friends-election-campaign-material-friendship-over-a7823716.html [with comments]
Europe’s fixer, Merkel faces test in preparing the continent to confront Trump
Activists disguised as Theresa May, Angela Merkel and Vladimir Putin squeeze a big inflated rubber globe during an event organized by the activist group Attac to protest against globalisation in advance of this week’s G20 summit in Hamburg, Germany.
July 4, 2017
BERLIN — German Chancellor Angela Merkel goes north this week to Hamburg, the port city where she was born, to defend principles of economic and political integration, whose critics include not just the leaders of Russia and Turkey but also the American president.
It is an unsettling scenario for Germany, a nation that owes its modern existence to transatlantic ties. Merkel remains committed to working with President Trump when she can, her associates say. But she also recognizes that the United States now stands apart from Europe on multilateral cooperation, particularly when it comes to the environment [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/inside-trumps-climate-decision-after-fiery-debate-he-stayed-where-hes-always-been/2017/06/01/e4acb27e-46db-11e7-bcde-624ad94170ab_story.html ].
This dilemma will be on display in Hamburg, where Merkel is hosting the Group of 20 summit Friday and Saturday.
To make the European Union strong enough to stand on its own is among the main reasons she is asking German voters for a fourth term in a September election. Once considered vulnerable to the wave of right-wing populism surging through the West, Merkel now leads her left-wing rival [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/heres-why-germanys-left-has-dwindling-hopes-of-unseating-merkel/2017/06/23/f6ed5042-576b-11e7-840b-512026319da7_story.html ] — who poses a more credible threat to her than does the far-right Alternative for Germany [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/germanys-far-right-preaches-traditional-values-can-a-lesbian-mother-be-its-new-voice/2017/05/12/3388e06a-34cc-11e7-ab03-aa29f656f13e_story.html ] — by double digits.
But achieving her ambition, and fortifying Europe in the face of a combative Russia and inward-looking United States, will be a new challenge for the unassuming tactician who disclaims grand visions.
When she announced last year [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/merkel-announces-re-election-bid-in-insecure-times/2016/11/20/13294dbc-ad97-11e6-8f19-21a1c65d2043_story.html ] that she would stand again for reelection, she called it “grotesque” to suggest that she, on her own, could safeguard Western liberalism. But she also leads Europe’s most powerful economy, and she struck out on her own in opening her country’s doors to more than a million asylum seekers in 2015. This record sets her up to counter Trump, whose intransigence on trade, immigration and climate she has pledged to meet with a show of European unity.
Merkel is scheduled to meet with Trump on Thursday, the eve of the summit, in a tete-a-tete that could be a chance to reset relations after several cold encounters that led the German leader to conclude that Europe could no longer fully rely on the United States. On the campaign trail, Trump called her refugee policy “insane,” and as president, he has scolded the Germans for running a trade surplus with the United States. After transatlantic talks in Europe laid bare the distance between the two leaders on trade, the environment and collective defense [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/nato-allies-boost-defense-spending-in-the-wake-of-trump-criticism/2017/06/28/153584de-5a8c-11e7-aa69-3964a7d55207_story.html ], Merkel returned to Germany to report that Europe had to “take our fate into our own hands.”
“It’s a very difficult situation,” said Hans Eichel, a former German finance minister and a founder of the Group of 20. “Incredibly, the United States has decided to be outside the liberal mainstream of the world, and you see signs that China, especially, is trying to fill this gap.”
The question, Eichel said, will be who manages this uncertainty. When Merkel presides over negotiations among leaders of the world’s major economies, she is the natural answer.
“People are expecting her to stop the world from moving in this protectionist direction and to stand up for democracy,” said Hans Kundnani, a senior transatlantic fellow at the German Marshall Fund. “But the idea that the German chancellor can replace the president of the United States is nonsense.”
If Merkel is not the new leader of the free world, what is she?
“She is a doctor of nuclear physics,” said Elmar Brok, a member of the European Parliament and a close ally of Merkel’s. Merkel studied physics at Leipzig University in what was then East Germany, where her father, a Protestant pastor, had moved the family shortly after Merkel was born.
Since taking office in 2005, Merkel has managed one crisis after another, including the failure of the European Constitution, the euro zone emergency and the rush of migrants fleeing Syria’s civil war.
Behind Merkel’s resolve has been a sense that something bigger was at stake, according to people who have worked with her for years.
“Coming from East Germany, she is absolutely convinced — it’s in her bones — that systems can fail,” said Mariam Lau, a political correspondent for Die Zeit, a German weekly newspaper.
The fact that “Europe could have imploded” if the German chancellorship were on the line led Merkel to seek a fourth term, said Stefan Kornelius, international editor of the daily Süddeutsche Zeitung and a biographer of the chancellor.
[...]
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/europes-fixer-merkel-faces-test-in-preparing-the-continent-to-confront-trump/2017/07/04/dcd35e04-6044-11e7-80a2-8c226031ac3f_story.html [with comments]
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GOP Operative Sought Clinton Emails From Hackers, Implied a Connection to Flynn
Retired Gen. Michael Flynn, right, at the White House shortly before his dismissal as national security adviser.
Photo: Chip Somodevilla/European Pressphoto Agency
Peter W. Smith portrayed the former general as an ally in an effort, independent of the Trump campaign, to find personal emails deleted by Hillary Clinton
By Shane Harris
June 29, 2017 5:14 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON—Before the 2016 presidential election, a longtime Republican opposition researcher mounted an independent campaign to obtain emails he believed were stolen from Hillary Clinton’s private server, likely by Russian hackers.
In conversations with members of his circle and with others he tried to recruit to help him, the GOP operative, Peter W. Smith, implied he was working with retired Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn, at the time a senior adviser to then-candidate Donald Trump.
“He said, ‘I’m talking to Michael Flynn about this—if you find anything, can you let me know?’” said Eric York, a computer-security expert from Atlanta who searched hacker forums on Mr. Smith’s behalf for people who might have access to the emails.
Emails written by Mr. Smith and one of his associates show that his small group considered Mr. Flynn and his consulting company, Flynn Intel Group, to be allies in their quest.
What role, if any, Mr. Flynn may have played in Mr. Smith’s project is unclear. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Smith said he knew Mr. Flynn, but he never stated that Mr. Flynn was involved.
Mr. Flynn didn’t respond to requests for comment.
A Trump campaign official said that Mr. Smith didn’t work for the campaign, and that if Mr. Flynn coordinated with him in any way, it would have been in his capacity as a private individual. The White House declined to comment.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller is investigating Russian attempts to sway the U.S. election and whether there was collusion between Russians and the Trump campaign. President Trump has denied any collusion and called the investigation a “witch hunt.” The Russian government has denied it interfered in the election.
Mr. Smith died at age 81 on May 14, which was about 10 days after the Journal interviewed him. His account of the email search is believed to be his only public comment on it.
The operation Mr. Smith described is consistent with information that has been examined by U.S. investigators probing Russian interference in the elections.
Those investigators have examined reports from intelligence agencies that describe Russian hackers discussing how to obtain emails from Mrs. Clinton’s server and then transmit them to Mr. Flynn via an intermediary, according to U.S. officials with knowledge of the intelligence.
It isn’t clear who that intermediary might have been or whether Mr. Smith’s operation was the one allegedly under discussion by the Russian hackers. The reports were compiled during the same period when Mr. Smith’s group was operating, according to the officials.
Peter W. Smith.
Mr. Smith said he worked independently and wasn’t part of the Trump campaign.
His project began over Labor Day weekend 2016 when Mr. Smith, a private-equity executive from Chicago active in Republican politics, said he assembled a group of technology experts, lawyers and a Russian-speaking investigator based in Europe to acquire emails the group theorized might have been stolen from the private server Mrs. Clinton used as secretary of state.
Mr. Smith’s focus was some 33,000 emails Mrs. Clinton said were deleted because they were deemed personal. Mr. Smith said he believed that the emails might have been obtained by hackers and that they actually concerned official matters Mrs. Clinton wanted to conceal—two notions for which he offered no evidence. Mrs. Clinton gave the State Department tens of thousands of emails related to official business.
Former Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey said in July 2016 there was no evidence the private server had been hacked but held out the possibility it could have been.
In the interview with the Journal, Mr. Smith said he and his colleagues found five groups of hackers who claimed to possess Mrs. Clinton’s deleted emails, including two groups he determined were Russians.
“We knew the people who had these were probably around the Russian government,” Mr. Smith said.
U.S. intelligence agencies have accused the Russians of stealing emails from the Democratic National Committee and Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, and providing them to WikiLeaks last summer as part of a multifaceted operation to interfere with the election and help Mr. Trump’s campaign. Mr. Trump on July 27 publicly encouraged Russia to go further and find [ https://www.wsj.com/articles/donald-trump-invites-russia-to-find-missing-hillary-clinton-emails-1469638557 ] the Clinton “emails that are missing.” Asked about that on Monday, White House press secretary Sean Spicer said Mr. Trump was joking.
Hillary Clinton checking her phone in March 2012, when she was secretary of state.
Photo: Richard Drew/Associated Press
Mr. Smith said after vetting batches of emails offered to him by hacker groups last fall, he couldn’t be sure enough of their authenticity to leak them himself. “We told all the groups to give them to WikiLeaks,” he said. WikiLeaks has never published those emails or claimed to have them.
Mr. Smith and one of his associates said they had a line of communication with Mr. Flynn and his consulting company.
In one Smith email reviewed by the Journal, intended to entice outside experts to join his work, he offered to make introductions to Mr. Flynn’s son, Michael G. Flynn, who worked as chief of staff in his father’s company. Mr. Smith’s email mentioned the son among a small number of other people he said were helping.
Michael G. Flynn didn’t respond to a request for comment.
In another recruiting email seen by the Journal, Jonathan Safron, a law student Mr. Smith described as a close colleague, included links to the websites and LinkedIn profiles of people purportedly working with the Smith team. At the top of the list was the name and website of Flynn Intel, which Mr. Flynn set up after his 2014 firing as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.
Mr. Safron declined to comment on his email or Mr. Smith’s project.
In phone conversations, Mr. Smith told a computer expert he was in direct contact with Mr. Flynn and his son, according to this expert. The person said an anti-Clinton research document prepared by Mr. Smith’s group identified the younger Mr. Flynn as someone associated with the effort. The expert said that based on his conversations with Mr. Smith, he understood the elder Mr. Flynn to be coordinating with Mr. Smith’s group in his capacity as a Trump campaign adviser.
The senior Mr. Flynn was fired as national-security adviser [ https://www.wsj.com/articles/donald-trump-s-national-security-adviser-mike-flynn-resigns-1487045703 ] in February after misleading administration officials about his conversations with the Russian ambassador concerning sanctions. Those conversations put Mr. Flynn under scrutiny by the FBI and then the special counsel, according to U.S. officials.
Mr. Smith said in the interview he supported Mr. Flynn’s efforts during the presidential transition to establish relations with Russian officials.
Mr. Smith said he never intended to pay for any emails found by hackers.
He said he understood the risk in publishing the emails himself. If, under public scrutiny, they proved not to be genuine, “people would say we made them up,” he said, and the whole project would be dismissed as a Republican hit job on the Clinton campaign. In the early 1990s, Mr. Smith helped publicize Arkansas state troopers’ claims that then-Gov. Bill Clinton had enlisted them to arrange trysts with women, an unproven allegation denied by the Clinton White House.
Mr. Smith’s views on Russian hacking were complex. While he said he believed Russians were likely among those who tried to steal Mrs. Clinton’s emails, he dismissed intelligence agencies’ conclusion that the Russia’s government meddled in the election to discredit Mrs. Clinton and to help Mr. Trump.
Mr. Smith was himself once a hacking victim. Emails he wrote about the 2015 contest to fill former House Speaker John Boehner’s seat were stolen from the Illinois Republican Party and then made public, in a campaign U.S. intelligence officials attributed to Russian actors. Mr. Smith didn’t dispute that Russia might have been to blame. He said he was unconcerned about his messages being exposed.
Appeared in the June 30, 2017, print edition as 'Operative Claiming Flynn Tie Sought Clinton Emails.'
Copyright ©2017 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/gop-operative-sought-clinton-emails-from-hackers-implied-a-connection-to-flynn-1498770851 [with comments]
--
Infowars Nightly News LIVE - Liberal Meltdown! Trump's Travel Ban Begins Tonight
Streamed live on Jun 29, 2017 by The Alex Jones Channel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UkC7WAe2NY [with comments]
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Report links GOP operative to Flynn, Russian hackers
All In with Chris Hayes
6/29/17
The Wall Street Journal reports that GOP operative Peter Smith sought stolen Clinton emails from Russian hackers - and intimated he was working with Michael Flynn. Duration: 1:55
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/report-links-gop-operative-to-flynn-russian-hackers-979998787668 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Du-7te--BlA [with comments]
*
Why the GOP owns Donald Trump, tweets and all
All In with Chris Hayes
6/29/17
Republicans may condemn the president's latest tweets, but Joy Reid and Dan Rather argue they won't have the courage to disavow him as long as they stand to gain from his presidency. Duration: 13:47
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/why-the-gop-owns-donald-trump-tweets-and-all-980005443580
*
CBO: Republican health care bill will get worse with age
All In with Chris Hayes
6/29/17
Senator Bernie Sanders joins All In as Senate Republicans scramble to revise their health care bill, on the day the CBO says that bill will be even worse than previously thought. Duration: 6:48
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/cbo-republican-health-care-bill-will-get-worse-with-age-979997251998
*
Chris Hayes really loves pro wrestling’s newest villain
All In with Chris Hayes
6/29/17
Thing 1/Thing 2: Watch Chris Hayes lose it over 'The Progressive Liberal,' the newest villain on Kentucky’s Appalachian Mountain wrestling circuit. Duration: 2:03
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/chris-hayes-really-loves-pro-wrestling-s-newest-villain-980004931988
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GOP operative sought Russian hacker help against Clinton: WSJ
The Rachel Maddow Show
6/29/17
Shane Harris, national security reporter for the Wall Street Journal, talks with Rachel Maddow about his new reporting about Peter Smith, a Republican activist who sought the help of Russian hackers who may have found Hillary Clinton's e-mails, and implied he was working with Donald Trump aide Mike Flynn. Duration: 22:44
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/gop-operative-sought-russian-hacker-help-against-clinton-wsj-980053059798 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQnJolG97-g [with comments]
*
Trump allies work to smear FBI, discredit Russia investigation
The Rachel Maddow Show
6/29/17
Matthew Miller, former chief spokesman for the Justice Department, talks with Rachel Maddow about Donald Trump allies going on offense to discredit the FBI officials and the Trump Russia investigation. Duration: 10:52
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/trump-allies-work-to-smear-fbi-discredit-russia-investigation-980070979714
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Repeal of 2001 Authorization of Force makes surprising progress
The Rachel Maddow Show
6/29/17
Rachel Maddow reports on an unexpected bit of progress in Rep. Barbara Lee's years-long effort to narrow the scope of the post-9/11 Authorization for the Use of Force with the passage of her amendment in the House Appropriations Committee. Duration: 5:34
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/repeal-of-2001-authorization-of-force-makes-surprising-progress-980084291710
*
Rep Lee sees Authorization of Force repeal take a step forward
The Rachel Maddow Show
6/29/17
Congresswoman Barbara Lee talks with Rachel Maddow about her years-long effort to get Congress to reconsider its authorization of the use of force finally seeing some significant bipartisan support with the passage of her amendment in the House Appropriations Committee today. Duration: 3:25
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/rep-lee-sees-authorization-of-force-repeal-take-a-step-forward-980105795960
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Lawrence on Trump and 'the women he hates'
The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell
6/29/17
President Donald Trump once again showed his true character in a vulgar attack on Morning Joe's Mika Brzezinski, another self-inflicted problem as he struggles to implement his agenda. Duration: 9:09
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/the-last-word/watch/lawrence-on-trump-and-the-women-he-hates-980073539893 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKoLxyk0Q2Y [with comments]
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Fmr. Amb.: Trump hasn't claimed the 'dignity of the presidency'
The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell
6/29/17
Ambassador Wendy Sherman tells Lawrence O'Donnell that Donald Trump's latest Twitter attack proves he is not ready to represent America on the world stage. Annie Karni and Ana Marie Cox also join. Duration: 9:11
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/the-last-word/watch/fmr-amb-trump-hasn-t-claimed-the-dignity-of-the-presidency-980074051641
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Nixon, Trump and 'how a presidency ends'
The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell
6/29/17
The investigation into Donald Trump is often compared to Watergate, but Pres. Nixon proved surprisingly resilient… until he was forced to resign. New York Magazine's Frank Rich joins Lawrence O'Donnell to discuss how long it took, and how Trump compares to Nixon. Duration: 5:47
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/the-last-word/watch/nixon-trump-and-how-a-presidency-ends-980077635800 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JF2ehEBmxY [with comments]
--
Will there be consequences for Trump after his Twitter attacks?
The 11th Hour with Brian Williams
6/29/17
Trump's tweets attacking MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski got widespread condemnation from both parties. But will there be any real consequences? Shannon Pettypiece, Kimberly Atkins & Katy Tur join. Duration: 12:38
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/brian-williams/watch/will-there-be-consequences-for-trump-after-his-twitter-attacks-980121155777
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Katy Tur on covering Trump: No journalist wants to be the story
The 11th Hour with Brian Williams
6/29/17
MSNBC's Katy Tur, who was targeted by many of Candidate Trump's attacks on the media, responds to his latest attacks on MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski. Duration: 1:17
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/brian-williams/watch/katy-tur-on-covering-trump-no-journalist-wants-to-be-the-story-980120643969 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tvwhmip325o [with comments]
*
Fmr. GOP Rep: Trump is 'small & weak,' has 'hate in his heart'
The 11th Hour with Brian Williams
6/29/17
Saying he's 'looking for leadership' within the GOP, Florida Republican and former member of Congress David Jolly blasts Donald Trump for his attacks on MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski. Duration: 1:20
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/brian-williams/watch/fmr-gop-rep-trump-is-small-weak-has-hate-in-his-heart-980128323596 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlvgRaC1EqU [with comments]
*
Biographer Walter Isaacson: Republicans will be judged by history
The 11th Hour with Brian Williams
6/29/17
Award-winning biographer Walter Isaacson joins to discuss just how far away from 'normal' things have gotten under the Trump presidency. Duration: 1:00
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/brian-williams/watch/biographer-walter-isaacson-republicans-will-be-judged-by-history-980134979853
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Historian Jon Meacham on Trump: We're in 'uncharted waters'
The 11th Hour with Brian Williams
6/29/17
Pulitzer Prize winning presidential biographer Jon Meacham reacts to the dark rhetoric of Pres. Trump saying he hopes it's not a sign things will continue to get worse. Duration: 1:20
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/brian-williams/watch/presidential-biographer-on-trump-we-re-in-uncharted-waters-980131395942 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9wv9ms7KwM [with comments]
--
Proof That Trump 'Fights Fire With Fire'
Published on Jun 30, 2017 by The Late Show with Stephen Colbert
The White House Press Corps' substitute teacher had a flaming hot take on Trump's tweets about Mika Brzezinski.
[originally aired June 29, 2017]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJ5VcrqtfUI [with comments]
*
Stephen: 'This Is What's Wrong With The American President'
Published on Jun 30, 2017 by The Late Show with Stephen Colbert
Stephen's monologue begins with a look at the President's shocking and vicious Twitter cyberbullying of Mika Brzezinski.
[originally aired June 29, 2017]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7YrTk-Y0a0 [with comments]
*
What Is A 'Bona Fide Relationship,' Anyway?
Published on Jun 30, 2017 by The Late Show with Stephen Colbert
Trump's administration is only allowing certain family members with a 'bona fide relationship' to visit the U.S. from the six majority-Muslim countries on the travel ban.
[originally aired June 29, 2017]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kkf0GIQIIiU [with comments]
*
Here's What God Thinks About Fidget Spinners
Published on Jun 30, 2017 by The Late Show with Stephen Colbert
So, apparently, each of the three prongs of a fidget spinner represents an arm of the holy trinity. Stephen reaches out to God for a comment.
[originally aired June 29, 2017]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=in0O_Un3Xuw [with comments]
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Trump Doesn't Seem to Know Anything About Health Care: A Closer Look
Published on Jun 29, 2017 by Late Night with Seth Meyers
Seth takes a closer look at Republicans frantically working behind closed doors to win enough votes for their Senate health care bill and how President Trump is complicating their efforts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GO9JMR2m8O0 [with comments]
--
this is part 13 of a 17-part post which proceeds (point arising on the given) day by (point arising on the given) day from June 17, 2017 through July 3, 2017 -- the preceding part is the post to which this is a reply; the next part is a reply to this post -- the following 'see also (linked in)' listing, updated for intervening posts along the way, is common to all 17 parts
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in addition to (linked in) the post to which this is a reply and preceding and (any future other) following, see also (linked in):
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=3967329 and preceding and following;
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=54833454 and preceding and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=6645910 and [receding and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=13088854 and preceding and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=39471610 and preceding and following;
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=132516987 (and any future following)
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=46115445 and preceding and following;
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=60991208 (and any future following);
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=65727055 and preceding and following;
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=111993093 (and any future following);
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=117093220 and following (and further in that regard, "The Shady Anti-Choice Actors Behind The Deceptive Video Accusing Planned Parenthood Of "Selling Aborted Baby Parts"", https://www.mediamatters.org/research/2015/07/15/the-shady-anti-choice-actors-behind-the-decepti/204431 {with comments});
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=117212063 and preceding and following;
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http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=132583354 and preceding and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=60232115 and (the many) following;
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=123731767 and preceding (and any future following);
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http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=131488509 and preceding (and any future following);
earlier this string, http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=131914404 and preceding and following,
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=132042257 and preceding and following,
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I heard poorly rated @Morning_Joe speaks badly of me (don't watch anymore). Then how come low I.Q. Crazy Mika, along with Psycho Joe, came..
8:52 AM - 29 Jun 2017
[ https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/880408582310776832 (with (over 41,000} comments)]
...to Mar-a-Lago 3 nights in a row around New Year's Eve, and insisted on joining me. She was bleeding badly from a face-lift. I said no!
8:58 AM - 29 Jun 2017
[ https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/880410114456465411 (with (over 91,000} comments)]
'Your tweet was beneath the office,’ Lindsey Graham said about Trump’s message about a bleeding face-lift.
06/29/2017 Updated 06/29/2017
http://www.politico.com/story/2017/06/29/trump-targets-morning-joe-hosts-in-tweet-240085 [with embedded video, and comments]
*
Principal Deputy Press Sec. Sarah Huckabee Sanders holds White House news briefing
Streamed live on Jun 29, 2017 by PBS NewsHour
White House Principal Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders holds a news briefing where Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.
Press Briefing by Principal Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Sanders and Treasury Secretary Mnuchin, 6/29/2017
James S. Brady Press Briefing Room
June 29, 2017
https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/06/29/press-briefing-principal-deputy-press-secretary-sarah-sanders-and [official transcript]
Has Donald Trump never 'promoted or encouraged violence,' as Sarah Huckabee Sanders said?
"The president in no way, form or fashion has ever promoted or encouraged violence."
— Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Thursday, June 29th, 2017 in a White House press briefing
July 5th, 2017
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/jul/05/sarah-huckabee-sanders/has-donald-trump-never-promoted-or-encouraged-viol/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uvt6RDjeWI [comments disabled] [official White House upload at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKGvpF2zTXA (with comments)]
*
The White House’s defective, slippery-slope logic for defending Trump’s behavior
"I won. I won."
June 30, 2017
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/06/30/the-white-houses-defective-slippery-slope-logic-for-defending-trumps-ill-behavior/ [with (separate) embedded video, and comments], https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2eMN4UGHkjg [embedded; comments disabled]
Trump's Grudges Are His Agenda
The president’s personal attacks are not a distraction from his policy goals. They are his policy goals.
Jun 30, 2017
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/06/trumps-grudges-are-his-agenda/532395/ [with comments]
Who Likes Trump’s Tweets and Why
President Trump speaking to supporters in Iowa last week.
JUNE 29, 2017
Once again, President Trump has triggered a predictable wave of outrage, this time over his insulting tweets [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/29/business/media/trump-mika-brzezinski-facelift.html ] about the television host Mika Brzezinski’s bleeding face-lift. We know who he alienates by this behavior — and that includes many mainstream Republicans as well as Democrats. But who is the audience he is playing to? And what are the implications when the president flouts what used to be seen as taboos?
Mr. Trump and his die-hard followers delight in the shock value of violating social and political norms. They revel in the thumb in the eye. It’s intrinsic to the president’s appeal to his base, and it’s increasingly clear that either deliberately or impulsively, both his conduct and his policies are aimed at that base and not beyond it.
The president is an equal-opportunity insulter, but let’s just focus on his posture toward women — and the ecstatic response this evokes in some quarters. This was the week in which Mr. Trump called an Irish reporter to his desk while talking to her prime minister about her smile [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/28/us/trump-flirt-irish-reporter.html (excerpted above)] — only the latest of a stream of pronouncements about women’s appearance. His jab at Ms. Brzezinski echoed his comment that another television anchor, Megyn Kelly, had been bleeding from her wherever [ https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/09/us/politics/donald-trump-disinvited-from-conservative-event-over-remark-on-megyn-kelly.html ], that evocation of menstruation, so unclean, so embarrassing, so primal.
There is something about his swagger, his unabashed embodiment of a time when women were eye candy and arm candy. And there is something about the way he strikes back at women who anger him that seems to resonate for some men — and which, at least so far, has not cost him the support of the women who backed him. The uncomfortable larger question is whether this president’s behavior is encouraging and unmasking resentments about women’s place in society.
The women’s movement spent decades attempting to change attitudes among Americans so that tweets like Mr. Trump’s would be out of bounds. Even a year ago, the conventional wisdom was that comments like Mr. Trump’s taped boasts [ https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/08/us/donald-trump-tape-transcript.html ] about forcing himself on women were political suicide. That no longer appears to be true. And the fear is that much as President Barack Obama’s election seemed to ignite resentments about race that most people had been shy about expressing publicly, Mr. Trump’s election may be unleashing latent anger toward women.
Theda Skocpol [ https://sociology.fas.harvard.edu/people/theda-skocpol ], professor of government and sociology at Harvard, has been visiting eight counties around the country as part of her research to monitor developments in the Trump presidency. “There’s one example after another as if some button had been pushed and people were openly saying to each other the tensions you’ve been feeling about gender changes over the last 40 years — it’s just fine to uncork all those ambivalent and angry feelings,” she said.
Christine Matthews [ http://www.bellwether-research.com/about-us/ ], veteran strategist and president of Bellwether Research who has advised Republican campaigns, said that there is some polling data to suggest Mr. Trump is tapping into anger among some men. “A subset of men whom Trump appeals to is threatened by women in power,” she said. “They feel their dominance in society is threatened. This is not coming — generally — from college-educated men or those in suburban or urban centers with strong economic prospects.”
Joan C. Williams [ http://www.uchastings.edu/faculty/williams/index.php ], a law professor and author of “White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America,” said that unless other political leaders address class grievances, Mr. Trump’s appeal will continue to resonate.
“Trump’s persistent insults to high-profile women play to that part of his base that has long been incensed at a definition of political correctness that includes women, L.G.B.T.Q. people, immigrants and other groups — but leaves out working-class whites nursing the hidden injuries of class,” she said. “So long as class remains unacknowledged as a key source of social disadvantage, Trump’s insults will feel to some of his supporters like a delicious poke-in-the-eye of elites.”
Mr. Trump has in fact turned politics into performance art. Some have likened what he does to insult comedy of the type practiced by Don Rickles [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/06/arts/television/don-rickles-dead-comedian.html ]. But insult comics are quick to point out that there is a crucial difference. “Insult comedy underneath it all is about affection,” said Lisa Lampanelli [ http://www.insultcomic.com/ ], known for routines that both insult and reveal what it feels like to be insulted. “I saw Trump be a roastmaster at the Friars Club, but he doesn’t have the skill to do this kind of thing with the right intention underneath it. Is it entertaining to some? I don’t find these tweets entertaining in the least. It’s off-putting and it gets to a scary bully level.”
[...]
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/29/opinion/who-likes-trumps-tweets-and-why.html
White House Women Face Bigger Gender Pay Gap Than National Average
7/3/17
[...]
The total 377 staffers, who also include First Daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner who both receive nothing for their role of special advisors to the president, represent a “slimmer” White House than President Barack Obama’s final year staff of 472 (down from 487 in his first year).
But personnel in Trump’s White House generally cost more than those in Obama’s, with a median salary of $89,000 compared to the $73,051 earned by a White House staffer in 2016.
When it comes down to gender pay gap, Obama’s White House was not perfect but the difference was narrower: in 2014, the difference between the median salary of a male compared to a female staffer was 13 percent, lower than the then national average of 23.5 percent, the Washington Post reported [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/male-female-pay-gap-remains-entrenched-at-white-house/2014/07/01/dbc6c088-0155-11e4-8fd0-3a663dfa68ac_story.html ].
At the time, press secretary Josh Earnest admitted [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/08/white-house-gender-pay-gap_n_5568057.html ] there was space for improvement of female representation at the higher-salaried levels. “I wouldn’t hold up the White House as the perfect example here,” he said, “The White House has some improvement to make.”
The news of the wider gender pay gap in Trump's White House comes as his administration considers disbanding Obama's White House Council on Women and Girls [ https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/administration/eop/cwg ], responsible for monitoring the implementation of policy changes and liaising with women's groups, as reported by Politico [ http://www.politico.com/story/2017/06/30/donald-trump-white-house-council-for-women-and-girls-239979 ].
Tina Tchen, who was the council director under Obama, told the publication the office helped signalling the administration's concerned with gender inequality. "It shows the priority you place on the issues surrounding women and girls,” she said.
http://www.newsweek.com/white-house-women-suffer-wider-gender-pay-gap-national-average-631120 [with embedded video, and comments] [also at http://img.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/white-house-women-face-bigger-gender-pay-gap (with comments)]
Analysis Finds Women In The White House Are Making 80 Cents On The Dollar, Compared To Men
It’s 2017, and yet women are still fighting for equality. Data suggests it will take until 2152 to close the gender wage gap, but it shouldn’t take a century to get what we want. We want more [ http://www.refinery29.com/equal-pay-for-women-we-want-more ], and Refinery29 is here to help — because 135 years is too long to wait for what we deserve today.
July 03, 2017
Women currently working in the White House face a larger wage gap than the national average. As per a Congressional rule instated in 1995 [ http://www.newsweek.com/white-house-women-suffer-wider-gender-pay-gap-national-average-631120 ], the White House released salary information for its 377 staffers on June 30. A CNN analysis [ http://www.cnn.com/2017/07/02/politics/white-house-gender-pay-gap/index.html ] of the White House's annual report to Congress found that women on staff were paid an average of 80 cents for every dollar paid to men on staff. Currently, the national average is 82 cents for every dollar.
[...]
A wage gap in the White House is not a new phenomenon. A report by The Washington Post [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/male-female-pay-gap-remains-entrenched-at-white-house/2014/07/01/dbc6c088-0155-11e4-8fd0-3a663dfa68ac_story.html ] in 2014 showed that while the disparity was less when Barack Obama was president, there was still a 13% difference in annual salary between men and women. That was roughly 10% lower than the 23.5% national average at the time. That same year, Obama signed an executive order promoting fair pay which included a mandate for paycheck transparency. It also did away with forced arbitration in cases of sexual harassment and gender-based discrimination. Movement toward equal pay continued when according to a report by the Office of Personnel Management, the federal government pay gap had decreased to 11% by 2015.
In March, Trump revoked the Obama-era mandate [ http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/trump-pulls-back-obama-era-protections-women-workers-n741041 ] just days before Equal Pay Day on April 4. Data suggests [ http://www.aauw.org/aauw_check/pdf_download/show_pdf.php?file=The-Simple-Truth ] that pay parity will not be reached in the U.S. until 2152 given the current rate of change [ http://www.refinery29.com/2017/04/148232/women-wage-gap-facts ].
http://www.refinery29.com/2017/07/161829/white-house-staff-salaries-confirm-gender-pay-gap [with comments] [also at https://www.yahoo.com/style/analysis-finds-women-white-house-161500388.html (with comments)]
*
Like His Father, Donald Trump Jr. Uses Twitter to Target the Media
Donald Trump Jr. took photos during an event at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J., last month.
HABERMANJUNE 30, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/30/us/politics/like-his-father-donald-trump-jr-uses-twitter-to-target-the-media.html
When Trump Tweets Sexist Remarks, It’s Hard To Take Melania’s Anti-Cyberbullying Initiative Seriously
Melania Trump has faced unique challenges in embracing her role as first lady.
06/29/2017 Updated June 30, 2017
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/melania-trump-cyberbullying_us_59550a93e4b02734df307d0e [with embedded video, and comments]
*
Donald Trump is not well
MSNBC's Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski arrive for the annual White House Correspondents' Association dinner in Washington in 2015.
(Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)
Mika Brzezinski responds to Donald Trump's tweets about her
Morning Joe
6/30/17
Mika Brzezinski responds to Donald Trump's tweets about her
Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough address President Trump's Thursday tweets about them, what it says about the president and the United States and the practical impact of his behavior. Duration: 32:37
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/morning-joe/watch/mika-fascinating-frightening-and-sad-for-the-us-980332099712 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTZOSBnYeE4 [with comments]
By Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough
June 30, 2017
President Trump launched personal attacks against us Thursday, but our concerns about his unmoored behavior go far beyond the personal. America’s leaders and allies are asking themselves yet again whether this man is fit to be president. We have our doubts, but we are both certain that the man is not mentally equipped to continue watching our show, “Morning Joe.”
The president’s unhealthy obsession with our show has been in the public record for months, and we are seldom surprised by his posting nasty tweets about us. During the campaign, the Republican nominee called Mika “neurotic [ http://money.cnn.com/2016/08/22/media/donald-trump-morning-joe-mika/index.html ]” and promised to attack us personally after the campaign ended. This year, top White House staff members warned that the National Enquirer was planning to publish a negative article about us unless we begged the president to have the story spiked. We ignored their desperate pleas.
The president’s unhealthy obsession with “Morning Joe” does not serve the best interests of either his mental state or the country he runs. Despite his constant claims that he no longer watches the show, the president’s closest advisers tell us otherwise. That is unfortunate. We believe it would be better for America and the rest of the world if he would keep his 60-inch-plus flat-screen TV tuned to “Fox & Friends.”
For those lucky enough to miss Thursday’s West Wing temper tantrum, the president continued a year-long habit of lashing out at “Morning Joe” while claiming to never watch it. During his early-morning tirade, Mr. Trump spit out schoolyard insults about “low I.Q. Crazy Mika,” “Psycho Joe” and much worse. He also fit a flurry of falsehoods in his two-part tweetstorm [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/06/29/trumps-very-bad-tweets-about-mika-brzezinski-are-the-epitome-of-his-struggling-presidency/ ].
Mr. Trump claims that we asked to join him at Mar-a-Lago three nights in a row. That is false. He also claimed that he refused to see us. That is laughable.
The president-elect invited us both to dinner on Dec. 30. Joe attended because Mika did not want to go. After listening to the president-elect talk about his foreign policy plans, Joe was asked by a disappointed Mr. Trump the next day if Mika could also visit Mar-a-Lago that night. She reluctantly agreed to go. After we arrived, the president-elect pulled us into his family’s living quarters with his wife, Melania, where we had a pleasant conversation. We politely declined his repeated invitations to attend a New Year’s Eve party, and we were back in our car within 15 minutes.
Mr. Trump also claims that Mika was “bleeding badly from a face-lift.” That is also a lie.
Putting aside Mr. Trump’s never-ending obsession with women’s blood, Mika and her face were perfectly intact, as pictures from that night reveal. And though it is no one’s business, the president’s petulant personal attack against yet another woman’s looks compels us to report that Mika has never had a face-lift. If she had, it would be evident to anyone watching “Morning Joe” on their high-definition TV. She did have a little skin under her chin tweaked, but this was hardly a state secret. Her mother suggested she do so, and all those around her were aware of this mundane fact.
More significant is Mr. Trump’s continued mistreatment of women. It is disturbing that the president of the United States keeps up his unrelenting assault on women. From his menstruation musings about Megyn Kelly [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/08/07/trump-says-foxs-megyn-kelly-had-blood-coming-out-of-her-wherever/ ], to his fat-shaming treatment of a former Miss Universe, to his braggadocio claims about grabbing women’s genitalia, the 45th president is setting the poorest of standards for our children. We were heartened to hear a number of Republican lawmakers call out [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2017/06/29/mr-president-please-grow-up-lawmakers-slam-trumps-shocking-mika-brzezinski-tweets/ ] Mr. Trump for his offensive words and can only hope that the women who are closest to him will follow their examples. It would be the height of hypocrisy to claim the mantle of women’s empowerment while allowing a family member to continue such abusive conduct.
We have known Mr. Trump for more than a decade and have some fond memories of our relationship together. But that hasn’t stopped us from criticizing his abhorrent behavior or worrying about his fitness. During the height of the 2016 presidential campaign, Joe often listened to Trump staff members complain about their boss’s erratic behavior, including a top campaign official who was as close to the Republican candidate as anyone.
We, too, have noticed a change in his behavior over the past few years. Perhaps that is why we were neither shocked nor insulted by the president’s personal attack. The Donald Trump we knew before the campaign was a flawed character but one who still seemed capable of keeping his worst instincts in check.
© 2017 The Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/donald-trump-is-not-well/2017/06/30/97759ee0-5d0f-11e7-9b7d-14576dc0f39d_story.html [with embedded videos, and (pver 6,000) comments]
*
Kellyanne Conway reacts to Trump's 'Morning Joe' tweets
Published on Jun 30, 2017 by ABC News [ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBi2mrWuNuyYy4gbM6fU18Q / https://www.youtube.com/user/ABCNews , https://www.youtube.com/user/ABCNews/videos ]
The counselor to President Trump tells "GMA" she endorses his ability to connect to voters on social media, and claims the media are more focused on the president's tweets than policy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvWl3lkAwoM [with comments]
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When it comes to messaging, no, Trump cannot walk and chew gum at the same time
July 3, 2017
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/07/03/when-it-comes-to-messaging-no-trump-cannot-walk-and-chew-gum-at-the-same-time/ [with embedded video, and comments]
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This NRA Recruitment Video Is So Divisive, Even Gun Owners Are Angry
“They use their schools to teach children that their president is another Hitler.”
By Ron Dicker
06/29/2017 11:13 am ET | Updated June 29, 2017
A new National Rifle Association recruitment ad [ https://www.facebook.com/NRA/videos/1605896562755373 (embedded)] appears to have outraged both gun control advocates and gun owners alike, even leading critics to launch a petition [ http://www.thepetitionsite.com/875/997/392/facebook-remove-inflammatory-nra-video-for-inciting-violence/ ] urging Facebook to delete the “inflammatory” message for “inciting violence.”
The minute-long clip, posted on the NRA’s FB page earlier this month [the above YouTube of the ad, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtGOQFf9VCE (with comments), uploaded by the NRA on April 7, 2017], features Dana Loesch [ http://www.theblaze.com/dana-loesch/ ] of TheBlaze who begins: “They use their media to assassinate real news. They use their schools to teach children that their president is another Hitler. They use their movie stars and singers and comedy shows and award shows to repeat their narrative over and over again.”
The ad continues with Loesch declaring that “their” former president advocated resistance, leading to protests that “bully and terrorize the law-abiding.”
“The only way we stop this, the only way we save our country, and our freedom, is to fight this violence of lies with a clenched fist of truth,” the spokeswoman concludes. “I’m the National Rifle Association of America and I’m freedom’s safest place.”
Many commenters, including some who say they are gun owners, blasted the ad for being “incendiary” and “divisive” while “encouraging violence.”
A 50-year-old former Republican from the Midwest replied to the video on Facebook, calling it “Orwellian nonsense designed to make you cheer and fist pump for your ‘freedom’ like dogs drooling when the bell gets rung.”
The commenter, who asked not to be named because he feared for his safety, said he owns firearms for his own protection and for occasional target practice. He told HuffPost that despite the negative reaction to the video in some corners, he suspects it won’t damage the NRA.
“I don’t think much of anything can actually backfire on them, to be honest,” he said. “Much of their core membership seems impervious to logic and reason, sadly.”
The NRA did not immediately return a request for comment on the criticism.
©2017 Oath Inc. Part of HuffPost • HPMG News
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/this-nra-recruitment-video-is-so-divisive-even-gun-owners-are-angry_us_5954e6c2e4b0da2c73217669 [with comments]
*
New NRA Ad Encourages Violence Against Political Protesters
Published on Jun 28, 2017 by CONTENT [ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCewIHE_qTt39EcXLrSk6nwg , https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCewIHE_qTt39EcXLrSk6nwg/videos ]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDa3FgEcpCk [with comments]
*
He thought a book would stop a bullet and make him a YouTube star. Now he’s dead.
June 29, 2017
[...]
With one camera attached to a ladder and the other propped on the back of a car, the couple staged their stunt, according to authorities. Ruiz held the book to his chest and Perez held the gun, a gold Desert Eagle .50-caliber pistol considered [ http://www.cabelas.com/product/Magnum-Research-Desert-Eagle-Pistols/1327491.uts ] “one of the most powerful semiautomatic handguns in the world.”
From a foot away, court documents say, Perez fired.
[...]
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/06/29/he-thought-a-book-would-stop-a-bullet-and-make-him-a-youtube-star-now-hes-dead/ [with (separate) embedded video; no comments, comments closed], https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eL5DHvcrJEA [with comments]
*
Doctor Opens Fire at Bronx Hospital, Killing a Doctor and Wounding 6
The AR-15 rifle used by Dr. Bello in Friday’s attack. Police officials said it was believed he sneaked it into the hospital under his lab coat.
JUNE 30, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/30/nyregion/bronx-hospital-shooting.html
Trump wants to keep terrorists out, but homegrown maniacs with guns are the real threat
July 1, 2017
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/stasi-maniacs-guns-henry-bello-real-terrorists-article-1.3294154
*
Dozens Are Injured in Shooting at a Nightclub in Little Rock
An investigator collected evidence near an Arkansas nightclub where the police said dozens of people were shot early Saturday.
JULY 1, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/01/us/little-rock-club-shooting.html
PHOTOS, VIDEO: 28 revelers hurt in Little Rock shooting; nightclub became a 'war zone,' witness said
July 2, 2017
http://www.nwaonline.com/news/2017/jul/02/28-revelers-hurt-in-lr-shooting-2017070/ [with embedded video, and comments]
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5 found guilty in killing of Russian opposition leader
In this Saturday, Feb. 28, 2015 file photo Russian police investigate the lifeless body of Boris Nemtsov, a former Russian deputy prime minister and opposition leader just off Red Square, with St. Basil Cathidral in the background, in Moscow, Russia. A jury on Thursday June 29, 2017 have found five men guilty in the assassination of Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov. Nemtsov, a top opponent of President Vladimir Putin, was shot in 2015 as he was walking across a bridge just outside the Kremlin.
(AP Photo/Pavel Golovkin, file)
By NATALIYA VASILYEVA
Jun 29, 2017
MOSCOW (AP) — A jury convicted five men Thursday in the assassination of opposition leader Boris Nemtsov on a bridge near the Kremlin two years ago, ending a trial that his supporters said had failed to bring the true masterminds of the brazen killing to justice.
The shooting death so close to Red Square sent shockwaves through the Russian opposition, which had looked to the former deputy prime minister and fierce critic of President Vladimir Putin as a rising reformer who could negotiate with authorities.
After two days of deliberations at the end of a nine-month trial, the jury at a Moscow court found Zaur Dadayev guilty of killing Nemtsov. Dadayev was a former officer in the security forces of Chechnya’s leader, Ramzan Kadyrov.
Four other men were convicted of involvement in the killing.
Prosecutors said the four helped obtain the murder weapons and drove the shooter to the crime scene. Investigators said they never established who ordered Nemtsov’s assassination.
Prosecutors are expected to announce the sentences they are seeking at a hearing next week.
Nemtsov, 55, was shot late on the night of Feb. 27, 2015, as he was walking across the Bolshoy Moskovetsky Bridge just outside the Kremlin. A few hours before his death, he had conducted a radio interview in which he denounced Putin for his “mad, aggressive” policies in the Ukraine crisis.
The images of Nemtsov’s body lying on the sidewalk with the domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral towering behind sent a chilling message to many in the opposition, who had faced persecution and arrests, of just how precarious their position was.
Ilya Yashin, Nemtsov’s close ally, echoed that sentiment after the verdict.
“Political murders in Russia will continue if the masterminds of this attack are able to get away with this,” Yashin told reporters.
Nemtsov’s killing was the biggest political assassination in Russia since 2006, when another Kremlin foe, journalist Anna Politkovskaya, was shot to death in the elevator of her Moscow apartment building on Putin’s birthday. Five Chechens were convicted in the case but it has been unclear who ordered the killing.
The site on the bridge where Nemtsov was killed has become a shrine, with supporters placing candles, fresh flowers and framed photos of the politician on the sidewalk where he fell.
Following Putin’s call for a full probe, investigators quickly tracked down several people linked to the killing, all from Chechnya. The suspected triggerman was an officer in Kadyrov’s much-feared security force, and one of his suspected accomplices — another senior officer in the Chechen police — was related to some of Kadyrov’s top lieutenants.
Despite the mounting pressure to include Kadyrov in the investigation, Putin stood by him and the inquiry went nowhere. Key suspects have disappeared, reportedly whisked abroad, and the investigators have failed to identify the organizers.
Nemtsov’s allies and relatives criticized Russia’s Investigative Committee, which looks into high-profile crimes, for stopping short of studying any possible role by Kadyrov and top Chechen officers.
When Dadayev was arrested shortly after the killing, Kadyrov vehemently defended him as a “true patriot.”
Nemtsov’s allies have blamed the killing on Kadyrov, who has been accused in the southern republic of human rights violations, including torture and killings, saying the officers could not have acted without his explicit orders. Kadyrov denied any role in the assassination.
Nemtsov’s eldest daughter, Zhanna Nemtsova, said in a Facebook post after the verdict that “the case remains unsolved.”
“Investigators and the court clearly did not want to uncover the truth about this crime,” Nemtsova said, noting that no high-profile Chechen officials were even questioned.
“There was only one task: Find the triggerman and hold a trial. They did just that. But we will continue to fight for the truth by any means we have,” she said.
Nemtsov’s family petitioned investigators to look into Kadyrov’s possible involvement and to question Ruslan Geremeyev, commander of the police unit in which Dadayev served.
The commander was summoned to testify, but he failed to show up. Investigators told the court last year that they visited Geremeyev’s property in Chechnya but “no one opened the door.”
Dadayev and the other men confessed soon after they were arrested. They later retracted their confessions, saying they had been coerced.
Asked if the investigation should be resumed, Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov told Russian news agencies Thursday evening that “this is not the Kremlin’s issue.”
Dmitry Kozlov contributed to this report.
© Copyright 2017 Associated Press
https://www.apnews.com/b8b25f896ef04f50b1ddf87f5737f5d4/5-found-guilty-in-killing-of-Russian-opposition-leader [and see also in particular (linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=119496514 and preceding (and any future following)]
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Trump’s voter-fraud commission wants to know voting history, party ID and address of every voter in the U.S.
By Christopher Ingraham
June 29, 2017
The chair of President Trump's Election Integrity Commission has penned a letter to all 50 states requesting their full voter-roll data, including the name, address, date of birth, party affiliation, last four Social Security number digits and voting history back to 2006 of potentially every voter in the state.
In the letter, a copy of which was made public by the Connecticut secretary of state [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/files/2017/06/PEIC-Letter-to-Connecticut-1.pdf ], the commission head Kris Kobach said that “any documents that are submitted to the full Commission will also be made available to the public.”
On Wednesday, the office of Vice President Pence released a statement [ https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/06/28/readout-vice-presidents-call-presidential-advisory-commission-election ] saying “a letter will be sent today to the 50 states and District of Columbia on behalf of the Commission requesting publicly available data from state voter rolls and feedback on how to improve election integrity.”
States began reacting to the letter on Thursday afternoon. "I have no intention of honoring this request," said Governor Terry McAuliffe of Virginia in a statement. "Virginia conducts fair, honest, and democratic elections, and there is no evidence of significant voter fraud in Virginia."
Connecticut's Secretary of State, Denise Merrill, said she would "share publicly-available information with the Kobach Commission while ensuring that the privacy of voters is honored by withholding protected data." She added, however, that Kobach "has a lengthy record of illegally disenfranchising eligible voters in Kansas" and that "given Secretary Kobach's history we find it very difficult to have confidence in the work of this Commission."
Under federal law [ https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/PLAW-107publ252/html/PLAW-107publ252.htm ], each state must maintain a central file of registered voters. States collect different amounts of information on voters [ http://voterlist.electproject.org/ ]. While the files are technically public records [ https://sunlightfoundation.com/2016/06/16/publishing-voter-registration-data-must-balance-privacy-with-transparency/ ], states usually charge fees to individuals or entities who want to access them. Political campaigns and parties typically use these files to compile their massive voter lists [ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/word-on-voter-files/ ].
In May, Trump created a commission [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2017/05/11/white-house-to-launch-a-commission-to-study-voter-fraud-and-suppression/ , https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/05/11/presidential-executive-order-establishment-presidential-advisory ] to investigate alleged acts of voter fraud after he claimed, without evidence [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2017/01/23/at-white-house-trump-tells-congressional-leaders-3-5-million-illegal-ballots-cost-him-the-popular-vote/ ], that 3 million to 5 million undocumented immigrants voted illegally in the 2016 election. The commission is chaired by Kobach, who is the Kansas secretary of state and a voter-fraud hard-liner [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/13/magazine/the-man-behind-trumps-voter-fraud-obsession.html ].
Earlier this month, a federal judge fined Kobach $1,000 for “presenting misleading arguments in a voting-related lawsuit,” according to Politico [ http://www.politico.com/blogs/under-the-radar/2017/06/23/kris-kobach-fined-voting-lawsuit-trump-memo-239910 ].
Advocates for voting rights and civil liberties are also sounding alarms over the letter. “The concern is that this is going to be used to justify regressive and disenfranchising federal law,” Myrna Pérez, deputy director of the democracy program at New York University Law School's Brennan Center for Justice, said in an interview.
Vanita Gupta, chief executive of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and former head of the Justice Department's civil rights division, said on Twitter [ https://twitter.com/vanitaguptaCR/status/880479649817649152 ] that the letter is “laying the groundwork for voter suppression, plain & simple.”
The White House press office did not return a request for comment on this article. A spokesman for Kobach in the Kansas secretary of state's office referred an inquiry to an email address listed in the commission's letter. The commission did not return a request sent to that email address.
Trump and his allies have said the commission's work is necessary to prevent what they call widespread instances of voter fraud. But evidence for such fraud is exceedingly thin [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/02/13/the-white-house-tells-media-to-ask-kris-kobach-to-prove-theres-voter-fraud-they-do-he-doesnt/ ]. Kobach has made it a central issue of his tenure in Kansas and has secured nine voter-fraud convictions [ http://www.kssos.org/other/news_releases/PR_2017/NR_2017_5_3.pdf ]. Most were older Republican voters [ http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/05/21/kris-kobach-voter-fraud-investigation-prosecution-215164 ], and at least one claims he was targeted for an “honest mistake.”
Academics who have studied the issue for decades say that voter fraud — particularly of the type that strict voter-identification laws championed by Kobach and others are intended to combat — is vanishingly rare [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/08/06/a-comprehensive-investigation-of-voter-impersonation-finds-31-credible-incidents-out-of-one-billion-ballots-cast/ ] and that voter-ID requirements are a burdensome solution to a practically nonexistent problem. A federal judge ruled [ https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=16565308906894228234&hl=en&as_sdt=6&as_vis=1&oi=scholarr ] that some of Kobach's proposed ID requirements constituted a “mass denial of a fundamental constitutional right.”
While civil-liberties advocates are concerned with what Kobach might do with what would amount to a nationwide voter file, privacy advocates worry about the implications of making such data available to the public, as the commission says it intends to do. It hasn't specified how it would make the data available.
“Why does a random member of the public . . . need to know when you last voted and what your political party is?” asked the Brennan Center's Perez. “I think that access to this data in the wrong hands could always leave the opportunity for mischief. In this particular instance, I'm worried about harassment as well.”
States are “stewards of [this] public information,” Perez said. “Once it leaves their hands in this way, there's no telling whose going to get it, and how, and what they're using it for.”
Read more:
How Trump’s nationwide voter data request could lead to voter suppression
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/06/30/how-trumps-nationwide-voter-data-request-could-lead-to-voter-suppression/
Von Spakovsky riled Fairfax with voter fraud efforts; Trump just elevated him
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-politics/von-spakovsky-riled-fairfax-with-voter-fraud-efforts-trump-just-elevated-him/2017/06/30/9241ab70-5dab-11e7-9fc6-c7ef4bc58d13_story.html
Trump’s voting commission asked states to hand over election data. Some are pushing back.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/trumps-voting-commission-asked-states-to-hand-over-election-data-theyre-pushing-back/2017/06/30/cd8f812a-5dce-11e7-9b7d-14576dc0f39d_story.html
Kris Kobach says he can’t comply with Kris Kobach’s voter data request
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/06/30/kris-kobach-says-hes-cant-comply-with-kris-kobachs-voter-data-request/
Kris Kobach: The conservative gladiator from Kansas behind restrictive voting laws
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/the-conservative-gladiator-from-kansas-behind-restrictive-voting-laws/2016/04/06/57ad18d2-eaed-11e5-b0fd-073d5930a7b7_story.html
© 2017 The Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/06/29/trumps-voter-fraud-commission-wants-to-know-the-voting-history-party-id-and-address-of-every-voter-in-america/ [with embedded video, and (approaching 4,000) comments]
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Kris Kobach wants every U.S. voter’s personal information for Trump’s commission
“If Barack Obama tried to get all of this information from state election officials it would be front page news on Fox News for months and would prompt a congressional investigation of federal takeover of state election processes.”
June 29, 2017
http://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/article158871959.html [with embedded video. and comments]
Trump Wants All Your Voter Data. What Could Go Wrong?
06.30.17
The private ballot is tradition [ https://www.wired.com/2016/11/cops-probably-dont-time-arrest-taking-ballot-selfies/ ] in the United States. Now, President Trump’s voter fraud commission wants to collect every American’s voting history and make it available to the public—all in the name of “election integrity.”
This week, the newly formed Advisory Committee on Election Integrity asked secretaries of state across the country for their complete voter rolls, including people’s political parties, voting history, the last four digits of their social security numbers, felony history, and more. The request [ http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/06/29/534901343/white-house-panel-asks-states-for-their-voter-rolls ], submitted by committee vice chair Kris Kobach, has both voting rights advocates and privacy hawks on edge. It’s not just a violation of people’s voter privacy expectations, they say, but it also sets the government up to manipulate the often messy data contained in those voter rolls to give the impression that voter fraud is widespread when it isn't.
“There’s a never-ending amount of mischief that can be done with this data in the wrong hands,” says Myrna Perez, director of voting rights and elections at Brennan Center for Justice. “I think there’s going to be a lot of false positives about people voting when they’re ineligible.”
“There’s a never-ending amount of mischief that can be done with this data in the wrong hands,” says Myrna Perez, director of voting rights and elections at Brennan Center for Justice. ...
[...]
“You’re going to have a list of hundreds of millions of records, including many, many, many, many John Smiths, their addresses, and sometimes the year they were born,” Levitt says. He argues that trying to match that information up with, say, a list of people who immigration has flagged as being undocumented, would be "beyond sloppy and guaranteed to be riddled with errors."
“There’s a lot of worry to be had about garbage in-garbage out,” Levitt says.
Of course, the John Smiths may have an easier time than, say, the Jose Garcias. Rolling Stone investigated [ http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/the-gops-stealth-war-against-voters-w435890 ] one tool that aims to find fraudulent voters, called Crosscheck, which is used by more than two dozen states. It found that the system disproportionately flags Hispanic, black, and Asian-American voters. States can use this list to purge people from voter rolls, whether or not the system accurately pegged them as fraudsters. It’s not out of the question that Kobach is looking to do something similar nationwide. Kobach, in fact, is the person who started Crosscheck
[...]
https://www.wired.com/story/trump-wants-all-your-voter-data-what-could-go-wrong/ [with comments]
Kobach: Kansas won’t give Social Security info to Kobach-led voter commission at this time
June 30, 2017
Multiple states plan to buck Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach’s request for personal information on voters on behalf of a presidential commission.
Kobach said Friday that Kansas, at least for now, also won’t be sharing Social Security information with the commission, on which he serves as vice chairman. The state will share other information about the state’s registered voters, including names and addresses, which are subject to the state’s open records laws.
[...]
California and Kentucky’s Democratic secretaries of state said Thursday that they would not comply with the request. Virginia’s Democratic governor also said the state would not adhere to the request. Minnesota’s Democratic secretary of state followed suit on Friday.
Mississippi Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann, a Republican, also will not comply.
“They can go jump in the Gulf of Mexico and Mississippi is a great State to launch from,” Hosemann said in a statement. “Mississippi residents should celebrate Independence Day and our State’s right to protect the privacy of our citizens by conducting our own electoral processes.”
[...]
Kobach has bristled at the backlash to his request from Democratic leaders.
“They’re trying to use this as a soapbox to make some left-wing political statement,” he said.
http://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/article159113369.html [with embedded video. and comments]
Trump says states are ‘trying to hide’ things from his voter fraud commission. Here’s what they actually say.
July 1, 2017
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/07/01/trump-says-states-are-trying-to-hide-things-from-his-voter-fraud-commission-heres-what-they-actually-say/ [with embedded video, and comments]
Trump Just Undermined The Work Of His Own ‘Election Integrity’ Probe
Numerous states are refusing to give information to the very distinguished VOTER FRAUD PANEL. What are they trying to hide?
8:07 AM - 1 Jul 2017
[ https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/881137079958241280 (with {over 54,000} comments)]
The White House insisted it was a neutral effort. Trump cast doubt on that.
07/01/2017 Updated July 1, 2017
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-voter-fraud-investigation_us_5957c971e4b0da2c7323d93c [with embedded video, and comments]
A privacy group is suing Trump's election-integrity panel for trying to collect voter data
Jul. 3, 2017
http://www.businessinsider.com/trump-sued-election-voter-data-2017-7
Maryland official abruptly quits Donald Trump's controversial “voter fraud panel,” report said
July 3, 2017 Updated July 3, 2017
Maryland’s deputy secretary of state has quit a controversial presidential commission on election integrity, the Baltimore Sun [ http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/politics/bs-md-borunda-resigns-trump-20170703-story,amp.html ] reported on Monday.
Luis Borunda informed the administration of Gov. Larry Hogan that he had resigned from the panel, which is chaired by Vice President Mike Pence, according to a Hogan spokesman, the newspaper reported.
The White House announced [ https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/06/21/president-donald-j-trump-announces-intent-nominate-personnel-key ] President Donald Trump’s intent to appoint Borunda to the commission on June 21.
“Borunda’s appointment prompted some head scratching in Maryland,” the Sun reported. “Unlike in many other states, the secretary of state’s office in Maryland has no role in voter registration or the administration of elections.”
Secretaries of state, governors and other officials across the country have bucked a massive data solicitation from the panel’s vice-chairman, Kris Kobach.
[...]
https://mic.com/articles/181413/maryland-official-abruptly-quits-donald-trumps-controversial-voter-fraud-panel-report-said#.uDalEJ43O
Here's why watchdogs are worried about all that personal data the Trump election panel wants
July 3, 2017 Updated July 4, 2017
https://mic.com/articles/181376/heres-why-watchdogs-are-worried-about-all-that-personal-data-the-trump-election-panel-wants
Forty-four states have refused Kobach's request for voter information
Two states are still reviewing the commission's request and another two states have not returned CNN's request for comment
Six states are still awaiting a letter from the commission, but four of them have already pledged not to provide voters' private information
July 3, 2017 Updated July 4, 2017
http://www.cnn.com/2017/07/03/politics/kris-kobach-letter-voter-fraud-commission-information/index.html [with embedded videos]
Newspapers rip Trump voter fraud panel in July 4th editorials
07/04/17
http://thehill.com/homenews/news/340609-newspaper-editorial-boards-rip-trump-voter-fraud-panel-for-july-4 [with comments]
*
Were Voting Machines Actually Breached? DHS Would Rather Not Know
TPM composite/Christine Frapech
By Sam Thielman
Published June 30, 2017 6:00 am
Pressure to examine voting machines used in the 2016 election grows daily as evidence builds that Russian hacking attacks were broader and deeper than previously known. And the Department of Homeland Security has a simple response:
No.
DHS officials from former secretary Jeh Johnson to acting Director of Cyber Division Samuel Liles may be adamant that machines were not affected, but the agency has not in fact opened up a single voting machine since November to check.
Asked about the decision, a DHS official told TPM: “In a September 2016 Intelligence Assessment, DHS and our partners determined that there was no indication that adversaries were planning cyber activity that would change the outcome of the coming US election.”
According to the most recent reports, 39 states were targeted [ https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-13/russian-breach-of-39-states-threatens-future-u-s-elections ] by Russian hackers, and DHS has cited–without providing details–domestic attacks in its own reports as well.
“Although we continue to judge all newly available information, DHS has not fundamentally altered our prior assessments,” the department told TPM.
Computer scientists have been critical of that decision. “They have performed computer forensics on no election equipment whatsoever,” said J. Alex Halderman, who testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee last week about the vulnerability of election systems. “That would be one of the most direct ways of establishing in the equipment whether it’s been penetrated by attackers. We have not taken every step we could.”
Voting machines, especially the electronic machines still used in several states, are so insecure that an attack on them is likely to be successful, according to a report from NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice out Thursday morning [ https://www.brennancenter.org/publication/securing-elections-foreign-interference ]. David Dill, a voting systems expert and professor of computer science at Stanford University quoted in the report, said hackers can easily breach election systems regardless of whether they’re able to coordinate widely enough to alter a general election result.
“I don’t know why they wouldn’t try to hack voting machines and I don’t know what would stop them,” Dill told TPM. “Any statement that says ‘We haven’t see evidence of X’ also means ‘We haven’t lifted a finger to investigate.’”
DHS told TPM Wednesday afternoon it was confident in “multiple checks and redundancies in US election infrastructure” and referred to the testimony of Liles and Jeannette Manfra, DHS undersecretary for cybersecurity, who said US electoral systems were fortified by “diversity of systems, non-Internet connected voting machines, pre-election testing, and processes for media, campaign, and election officials to check, audit, and validate results.”
The new Brennan Center report, however, details the dangers of voting machines that aren’t properly secured, particularly the effect on public confidence of a very public successful hack, whether or not it managed to swing an election. “In the current hyper-partisan environment,” the authors noted, “evidence of this kind of hack could lead to accusations by each side that the other is rigging the election.”
While forensic examinations would answer many questions vital to researchers trying to improve voting systems, the potential for eroded confidence in those systems may help to explain DHS’ reluctance to seek out hard evidence. The department said most attacks were simple scanning, rather than attempts to alter tallies or poll books.
Evidence always seems to stop with “we don’t know:” An NSA report leaked to The Intercept [ https://theintercept.com/2017/06/05/top-secret-nsa-report-details-russian-hacking-effort-days-before-2016-election/ ] in June detailed a phishing operation by the Russian military intelligence agency GRU on voting hardware maker VR Systems that in turn targeted voting officials. Like DHS, the NSA said it was unclear whether those officials’ machines had been compromised.
Some of the paralysis around how to move forward is a result of tensions between DHS and states angry about the designation of their election systems as “critical infrastructure [ http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/dhs-designates-election-systems-critical ]” in January, just before President Trump took office. Then-secretary Johnson even acknowledged [ https://www.dhs.gov/news/2017/01/06/statement-secretary-johnson-designation-election-infrastructure-critical ] at the time that the designation was controversial to many state election officials, who see the offer of federal assistance, often with strings attached, as an attempted takeover (Johnson testified last week that when a critical infrastructure designation was first floated to state officials in August, the reaction “ranged from neutral to negative”).
“They’re in this strange position where they had a lot of pushback from election officials over federal overreach and in some ways they’re in a little bit of a bind,” said the Brennan Center’s Larry Norden, one of the authors of its report.
Everyone knows what has to be fixed, Norden says, but no one wants to go first. “The states want the counties to act, the counties want the state to pay for things, the states may want the money but they don’t want any of the mandates that come with the money,” he says. “There are investigations but there are no positive solutions yet.”
Current auditing processes, which vary wildly from state to state, are frequently arduous and sometimes nonsensical. In Virginia, where the margin of victory is often very shallow, it is illegal to audit the vote except when the margin is more than 10 percent—and only then if the local election official agrees, and after the election has been certified. When that audit takes place, it can’t change the outcome of the election, even if the audit reveals a completely different tally.
Cybersecurity expert Jeremy J. Epstein says the Virginia rule illustrates why widespread changes to voting standards are so difficult: Every place has different rules. In many states, “localities have almost no ability to raise funds,” Epstein observes. “Even if the state wants to do something, getting 130 localities in Virginia to do something that requires action at a local level is very hard to do.”
The dangers are real: Some voting machines still use Windows XP, which Microsoft hasn’t updated in years. Epstein has personally demonstrated huge security flaws in others. In 2015, he successfully campaigned to decertify the AVS WinVote machine, a touchscreen device that used a woefully outdated and insecure wireless protocol called WEP, which can be hacked in three minutes [ http://www.zdnet.com/article/fbi-demonstrates-3-minute-wi-fi-hack/ ]. Epstein pulled off the hack successfully and was able to retrieve the WinVote’s factory-set passwords: “abcde” and “admin [ https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/apr/15/virginia-hacking-voting-machines-security ].”
Halderman, too, has dramatically demonstrated how easy it is to take over voting machines, in one case simply by loading a voting machine with a memory card filled with malicious software that can then hitch a ride on that machine back to the central location where the votes are tallied (Machines are left unguarded so often that Ed Felten, who worked in the Obama White House as a deputy chief technology officer, used to make a tradition of posting pictures of them to his and Halderman’s blog, Freedom to Tinker [ http://freedom-to-tinker.com/2010/11/02/e-voting-links-election-day/ ]).
In fact, Halderman testified before the Senate Intelligence panel that not only could he successfully breach voting machines himself, but he had made the process part of his assigned coursework.
“I know firsthand how easy it can be to manipulate computerized voting machines,” he told the Senate. “As part of security testing, I’ve performed attacks on widely used voting machines, and I’ve had students successfully attack machines under my supervision.”
These computer scientists agree the problem is urgent and nonpartisan, and no less a Trump ally than Rudy Giuliani said Wednesday that he believed the problem was serious, too. Even in the polarized post-election environment, Norden says he thinks legislators may be able to agree on the issue need to secure voting systems.
“The intelligence community has been pretty clear that while [the Russian hacking teams] may have favored Trump in the election, their interest is in undermining our democracy,” said Norden. “Regardless of party, I think we all share the idea that democracy is essential to the country.”
@ 2017 TPM Media LLC
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/dhs-doesnt-want-to-know-about-vote-hacks [with comments]
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Full Show - Elites Panic As Pope’s Right-Hand Man Indicted For Child Rape - 06/29/2017
Published on Jun 29, 2017 by The Alex Jones Channel
Thursday, June 29th 2017[, with an appearance by Robert David Steele, and Jon Rappoport hosting the fourth hour]: Robert David Steele #UNRIG Trump Winning Fight Against MSM - President Trump tweeted at MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough this morning, calling them crazy Mika and psycho Joe. Trump's travel ban is set to take effect tonight and protests are expected. Also, Russian Senator Alexei Pushkov warns that the United States is preparing a false flag “provocation” as a pretext to launch a military assault on Syria.
Nasa spokesperson forced to deny that space agency has put child sex slaves on Mars
The denial came in response to a guest featured on Alex Jones's Infowars programme
30 June 2017
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/nasa-mars-child-sex-slave-colony-space-agency-alex-jones-infowars-robert-david-steele-a7816371.html [with comments]
Alex Jones and the Pedophile Colony on Mars
July 2, 2017
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/dispatches/2017/07/02/alex-jones-pedophile-colony-mars/ [with comments]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luXQqmF72Hs [with comments] [also at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-nghe0CvAU (additional text adapted from; with comments)] [and see also in particular (linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=132586193 and preceding and following] [a must-watch]
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Clean Coal’s Flagship Project Has Failed
A plan to slash emissions from coal burning by 65 percent has proved too problematic at the beleaguered Kemper power plant.
by Jamie Condliffe
June 29, 2017
The Mississippi power plant widely regarded to be the biggest proof of concept yet for clean coal has failed to deliver on its promise. Its carbon capture technique has been declared too costly and problematic, and the facility will instead burn natural gas to create electricity.
The coal-fired power station in Kemper County had many hopes pinned to it since construction began in 2010. The theory was simple: if a plant could be built to cleanly burn nearby lignite coal reserves—the most heavily carbon-emitting of all coal types, per unit of heat extracted—then the fuel’s future in American energy production would be assured.
Sadly, things haven’t played out that way. The project has been mired in problems from the get-go [ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601840/a-mississippi-power-plant-highlights-all-thats-wrong-with-clean-coal/ ] and has run up a $7.5 billion tab—$4 billion over its planned budget—with the carbon capture scheme three years behind schedule. Now, the New York Times reports [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/28/climate/kemper-coal-mississippi-clean-coal-project.html ], the plant’s owner, Southern Company, has ditched its attempts to get it working as designed, following pressure from the Mississippi Public Service Commission to switch to natural gas and stop hemorrhaging money.
The plant was supposed to gasify the soft brown lignite coal to create a fuel that emits similar amounts of carbon dioxide as natural gas when burned. According to a description of the technology by Power magazine [ http://www.powermag.com/kemper-county-igcc-project-update/ ], that would in theory have reduced the carbon dioxide emissions associated with burning that coal by 65 percent.
But the gasification systems have not worked as planned, and the Kemper plant has instead been burning natural gas. Now, it will continue to do so. Southern says that it is “immediately suspending start-up and operations activities” for coal gasification at the plant.
It’s a huge blow for clean coal. Despite some successes [ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/602552/a-huge-carbon-capture-scheme-provides-new-hope-for-clean-coal/ ] in cutting carbon emissions from fossil-fuel power plants, by and large the process is still considered too costly to implement at scale. That’s especially true given that prices for renewable energy are continuing to decline swiftly [ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608114/clean-energy-prices-are-about-to-become-cheaper-than-coal/ ]. Indeed, a newly published analysis from the Global Warming Policy Foundation suggests [ https://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2017/06/CCS-Report.pdf ] that carbon capture schemes will always remain too expensive to be viable as the cost of clean energy drops.
As part of his push to reinvigorate the fossil-fuel industry, earlier this year President Donald Trump said [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-clean-coal_us_58dad105e4b054637062e61d ] that his administration was “putting an end to the war on coal,” providing America with “clean coal, really clean coal.” Now more than ever, that looks like an empty promise.
MIT Technology Review © 2017
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608191/clean-coals-flagship-project-has-failed/
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President Trump Speech at Unleashing American Energy Event 6/29/2017
Published on Jun 29, 2017 by The White House
In recent weeks, a new energy buzzword has taken flight from Washington, making stops in Alaska, North Dakota, Texas, Utah, and more: American energy dominance. Taking a cue from a 2016 speech by then-candidate Donald Trump, top federal officials including Energy Secretary Rick Perry and Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke have begun to trumpet the notion of energy “dominance.”
Although no Cabinet official has offered a precise definition, it’s a recurring theme in a set of administration events organized around energy policy, including a planned speech by Trump emphasizing exports of coal, natural gas, and oil.
For decades, U.S. politicians have trumpeted the notion of energy “independence,” focused primarily on the need to eliminate oil imports from OPEC nations and other countries that may not share U.S. interests. But as other energy policy experts have observed, “independence” was never a smart energy goal. Isolating the U.S. from global energy markets is neither in the interest of domestic consumers nor newly resurgent oil and gas producers in the U.S.
For consumers, access to international markets ensures energy supplies at more stable prices. For instance, consider what would happen if a hurricane shut down production and refining along the Gulf Coast, the hub of the U.S. oil and gas industry. Without access to global markets, prices for motor fuels, home heating fuels, and other products would be far more volatile.
As for producers, they have argued strongly for opening up, rather than sealing off, access to international energy markets. They’ve lobbied to lift restrictions on crude oil exports and encouraged exports of natural gas via new pipelines and liquefied natural gas, or LNG, terminals.
Spurred by increased oil and gas production as a result of the shale revolution, these policy changes have resulted in dramatic growth in U.S. energy exports. In fact, net energy exports (energy exports minus energy imports) have risen to their highest level in decades. The United States could even be a net energy exporter by 2020 under one optimistic scenario.
Remarks by Vice President Pence introducing President Trump at the Unleashing American Energy Event
U.S. Department of Energy
Washington, D.C.
June 29, 2017
https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/06/29/remarks-vice-president-pence-introducing-president-trump-unleashing [official transcript]
Remarks by President Trump at the Unleashing American Energy Event
U.S. Department of Energy
Washington, D.C.
June 29, 2017
https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/06/29/remarks-president-trump-unleashing-american-energy-event [official transcript]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MY1KV406tgw [with comments] [also at e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8asKA9_VFbY (text taken from; with comments)] [and see also in particular (linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=68574076 and preceding and following]
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Trump to Meet With Putin at G-20 Gathering Next Week
President Trump and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia will meet on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit meeting in Hamburg, Germany.
JUNE 29, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/29/world/europe/trump-puting-g-20.html [with comments]
Spies Fear Trump’s First Meeting With Putin
The Kremlin thinks Putin will eat Trump’s lunch at the G-20 summit, European intelligence agencies have learned.
06.29.17
Moscow believes its leader, ex-spy master Vladimir Putin [ http://www.thedailybeast.com/keyword/vladimir-putin ], can extract major concessions from President Donald Trump [ http://thedailybeast.com/keyword/donald-trump ] when the two meet for the first time next week, European officials tell The Daily Beast.
The officials say their intelligence indicates Putin thinks he can outmaneuver Trump at the G-20 summit, playing on promises of cooperation on areas like counterterrorism to win concessions like a reduction in the raft of sanctions against Russia [ http://thedailybeast.com/keyword/russia ].
“When you meet Russia, don’t give anything away for free,” one Western official warned, echoing the fears of many European diplomats ahead of next week’s Trump-Putin meeting on the fringes of the G-20 in Germany [ http://thedailybeast.com/keyword/germany ].
Their misgivings highlight concern that Trump’s inexperience and Putin’s ability to flatter will slowly degrade the U.S. alliance with Europe over time, and boost Moscow back to near-superpower status while extracting no changes to its aggressive, expansionist behavior.
[...]
http://www.thedailybeast.com/spies-fear-trumps-first-meeting-with-putin
Report: Trump Does Not See Russia As A Threat
June 29, 2017
http://www.opposingviews.com/i/world/trump-yet-publicly-condemn-russia-putin-meeting-looms [no comments yet]
White House could offer to roll back sanctions in first Trump-Putin meeting
A t-shirt featuring Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin on sale at a souvenir shop in St Petersburg.
G20 meeting of two presidents could see Russia regain access to diplomatic compounds blocked after interference in 2016 US election, say former officials
29 June 2017
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jun/29/white-house-sanctions-first-trump-putin-meeting
Trump has reportedly asked his aides to come up with 'deliverables' he can offer to Putin in their big meeting
Jun. 29, 2017
http://www.businessinsider.com/trump-putin-meeting-sanctions-russia-2017-6
Trump and Putin meet next week. Guess which one has an agenda?
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/55529221/12.12.1.0.jpg)
Putin will bring a specific list of demands. Trump, not so much.
Jun 30, 2017 Updated Jun 30, 2017
https://www.vox.com/world/2017/6/30/15904366/trump-putin-agenda-2016-election-interference-g20-comey
Putin is a phenomenon, Trump is a cartoon character – Maradona
Russian President Vladimir Putin is a phenomenon who can bring peace to many across the globe, football legend Diego Maradona told journalists in Moscow, adding that he views US leader Donald Trump as a cartoon character, who can’t be treated seriously.
1 Jul, 2017
https://www.rt.com/sport/394876-putin-trump-maradona-moscow/ [with comments]
Trump must join fight against disinformation
Vladimir Putin's Kremlin openly funds far-right and far-left political groups that are anti-American, anti-NATO, and anti-European Union.
July 2, 2017 Updated July 2, 2017
President Trump's twitter tirade against MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski last week revealed more than his continued willingness to demean his office - and women.
He lambasted Brzezinski, cohost of Morning Joe, as "low I.Q., Crazy Mika" claiming she'd been "bleeding badly from a face-lift" when she briefly attended a social gathering at Mar-a-Lago on New Year's Eve. On the surface, this was one more meltdown by a thin-skinned president who can't stand criticism from mainstream journalists - which he labels FAKE NEWS.
But this tawdry tweet points to a much more dangerous consequence of Trump's war on much of the media. His attacks on journalists blind him to the real onslaught of fake news.
I refer to the campaign of disinformation, propaganda, and cyberwar being waged by Russia to undermine U.S. and European democratic institutions. That includes covert, and overt, meddling in elections.
European leaders recognize the threat, U.S. intelligence agencies have described it, and U.S. senators, in rare bipartisan agreement, want to confront it. Yet, as Trump prepares to meet Vladimir Putin at the G-20 summit in Hamburg that begins Friday, he still denies that Russia's fake-news campaign is real.
That threat, and possible countermeasures, were detailed in a fascinating conference in Washington last week, part of a week-long series of events called "Disinfoweek" cosponsored by the Atlantic Council, Germany's Konrad Adenauer Foundation, and other U.S. and European organizations.
Sens. Chris Murphy (D., Conn.) and Rob Portman (R., Ohio), in a heartening display of bipartisanship, argued that Russia's disinformation campaign in 2016 election was about something much bigger than undermining Hillary Clinton.
"Vladimir Putin and his disinformation network are not Republicans, they are opportunists," Murphy said. "It is just a matter of time before they train their sights on the Republican Party."
The focus on day-to-day investigations into the Trump administration and Russia, said Murphy, distracts attention from the story of what actually happened. There were "rooms [in Russia] filled with hundreds and hundreds of Russian-paid trolls, troll factories, people that were every single day in enormous numbers standing up fake news, fake accounts inside the United States to try to spread a series of lies to influence our election," Murphy said.
"The threat is much bigger than one president," added Portman. "It is much broader than that."
Portman is correct. The use of disinformation as a KGB foreign-policy tool dates back to the Soviet Union, but has become more central to Russian foreign policy. The spread of social media platforms and technology means that misinformation can be spread like wildfire while covering up the original sources. Moreover, websites on the far left and far right often echo the antidemocratic themes promoted by the Kremlin.
[...]
With the help of Trump - who angrily disputes U.S. intel agencies' conclusions that Russian meddling is real - the Russians may be reaching that goal.
Europe is far ahead of the United States in confronting the Russian threat, because European leaders recognize the problem. On the continent, the Kremlin openly funds far-right and far-left political groups that are anti-American, anti-NATO, and anti-European Union. The Russians meddled in May French elections and in preparations for German elections in the fall.
The Kremlin has bought up European media, and contributed to anti-NATO candidates and nongovernmental organizations. Moscow spreads fake news via the Kremlin-owned RT (Russia Today) television network and Sputnik news service; both operate in multiple languages and are often confused with independent media outlets.
The Kremlin's goal, European participants said, is to undermine faith in democratic governments and promote anti-Americanism. It seeks to promote Putin's authoritarian model as a nationalist, religious conservative alternative to pluralist democracy. (Think this is nuts? Just read what key Trump adviser Steve Bannon has written praising Putin along these lines.)
However, many European leaders have fought back, organizing agencies to track Russian disinformation. When Putin visited Paris in May, new French President Emmanuel Macron bluntly denounced Russia Today and Sputnik as "organs of influence and propaganda that spread counterfeit truths about me." (Candidate Trump, on the other hand, did an interview on RT.)
Portman and Murphy believe the United States must fight back, too. They coauthored the 2016 Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act, now law, which will provide millions to counter propaganda from Russia and China, and help U.S. allies to do likewise. "This is about our democracy," Portman said. "It is about our shared values with democracies around the world, and it is about our values."
Amen.
Yet it is hard to see how the United States can expose Russian disinformation, and make the American public more aware, when the president refuses to confront that threat or even admit it exists. And when he continues to condemn legitimate U.S. media - not Sputnik or RT - as fake news.
When Trump meets Putin in Hamburg, he'll have the chance to do a Macron and tell the Russian president bluntly that the disinformation must stop.
Or he can ignore the subject, and keep on tweeting about Mika and FAKE NEWS. That will hand Putin a huge win in his disinformation wars.
http://www.philly.com/philly/columnists/trudy_rubin/20170702_Trump_must_join_fight_against_disinformation.html
Trump-Putin Will Talk Against Backdrop of Broader Russian Mischief
Debate over Russia’s role in 2016 election blurs larger picture
July 3, 2017
When President Donald Trump meets Russian leader Vladimir Putin late this week, many will be watching to see whether they discuss alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election.
That much is obvious. Less obvious, but more important, is how any Russian meddling in the American presidential-election season [ https://www.wsj.com/articles/democrat-questions-russia-link-as-comey-heads-to-hill-1496623494 ]—whatever form it may have taken—fits into a much larger tale. This is the tale of a systematic Russian effort to disrupt democratic and capitalist systems internationally, using an updated version of tactics Mr. Putin learned in the bad old days of the Soviet KGB.
In fact, one of the dangers in the current hyperpartisan American debate over Russia’s role in the 2016 presidential election is that it is blurring this larger picture. If the 2016 election was the tip of an iceberg, the rest of the iceberg warrants serious attention.
A useful reminder of the breadth of the problem comes in the form of “The Kremlin Playbook [ https://www.csis.org/analysis/kremlin-playbook ],” a publication released last October by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a centrist American think tank, and the Center for the Study of Democracy, a European public-policy institute. In retrospect, it was a remarkably prescient look at the controversies that have mushroomed since the American election that came a month later.
The Playbook is an in-depth study of Russian efforts to use overt and covert tactics over a period of a decade to expand its economic and political influence in five Central and East European nations. A group of regional leaders from such nations warned President Barack Obama in a 2009 letter—which also looks prescient now—that Russia was conducting “overt and covert means of economic warfare, ranging from energy blockades and politically motivated investments to bribery and media manipulation in order to advance its interests….”
The Russian strategy, the study finds, isn’t ad hoc. Rather, it is the implementation of a doctrine developed by Russian Gen. Valery Gerasimov called “new generation warfare.” One European analyst called that “primarily a strategy of influence, not of brute force” aimed at “breaking the internal coherence of the enemy system.”
The strategy, as it has unfolded in Central and Eastern Europe, proceeds along two parallel tracks, the study found. The first track is economic. Russia seeks to find business partners and investments that allow it to establish an economic foothold, which in turn produces economically influential patrons and partners who have a vested interest in policies friendly to the Kremlin. That is a particularly fruitful endeavor in Europe, where many nations depend on Russian energy supplies.
The goal on this track is to cultivate “a network of local affiliates and power-brokers who are capable of advocating on Russia’s behalf.”
The second track, perhaps more relevant to the U.S., is designed to disrupt prevailing democratic political patterns. The goal, the Playbook says, is “to corrode democracy from within by deepening political divides and cultivating relationships with aspiring autocrats, political parties (notably nationalists, populists and Euroskeptic groups), and Russian sympathizers.”
On this track, the effort is designed in part to advance parties and figures sympathetic to Russia. But the broader goal is simply to disrupt the process, create confusion and discord, and discredit democratic systems both in targeted countries and in the eyes of Russian citizens, who are told the chaos to their West shows they shouldn’t long for a Western-styled democratic system at home.
A key tool in this effort, the report says, is a “war on information” campaign that uses disinformation and propaganda to disable opponents and foment nationalist and anti-Western sentiment. “Toward this end, Russia exploits existing political pressure points such as migration and economic stagnation, blames Western and U.S. operations for all negative international dynamics (such as the attempted July 2016 coup in Turkey), and discredits the current state of Western democracy,” the report says.
Remember that this was written before Mr. Trump won the American presidency and the investigations into Russian influence went into high gear. The findings are about a broader pattern of Russian behavior, not about what it might have done in the U.S. political system.
Yet these findings present a backdrop for both the current debate over Russia’s 2016 U.S. activities, as well as Mr. Trump’s meeting with Mr. Putin on the sidelines of the G-20 meeting [ https://www.wsj.com/articles/no-thaw-likely-at-trump-putin-meeting-1498838730 ] in Germany this week.
Heather A. Conley, a senior vice president of CSIS and one of the authors of The Kremlin Playbook, says the months since its publication have brought “an acceleration” of Russian influence-seeking, ranging from a plot against the prime minister of Montenegro to interference in the French election to cyberattacks in Ukraine.
The goal, she says, “is disruption, to create governmental policies that accommodate Russian interests,” first in ending Western economic sanctions and then in building a broader sphere of influence. She adds: “We continue to be unprepared.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-putin-will-talk-against-backdrop-of-broader-russian-mischief-1499093947 [with emedded video, and comments] [also at http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/wall-street-journal/kremlins-trump-contacts-fit-into-a-larger-exkgb-tactic/news-story/09faadcc9bc598486bfbba0be0996971 (with comments)] [and see also in particular (linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=131110508 and preceding and following]
Russia Warns U.S.: Return Seized Diplomatic Compounds, or Else
A Russian compound in Long Island.
July 3, 2017
The Kremlin is running out of patience as it waits for the U.S. to return two diplomatic compounds shuttered in the waning days of the Obama administration, Vladimir Putin’s foreign affairs adviser said Monday [ http://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/kremlin-expects-us-to-quickly-return-russian-embassy-assets/ ].
Russia has displayed “unusual flexibility” on the issue, Yuri Ushakov said. But, he added, the Kremlin’s patience “has its limits” and it’s up to the U.S. to “free Russia from the need to take retaliatory moves.”
The compounds were seized from Russian control in December as a punishment for the Kremlin’s meddling in the 2016 presidential election. Located in Long Island, New York, and coastal Maryland, the properties were being “used by Russian personnel for intelligence-related purposes,” President Obama said at the time.
In early June, the Trump administration was reportedly considering handing the properties back [ http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/06/trump-considers-returning-moscows-facilities-in-the-u-s.html ] to Moscow in exchange for lifting a ban on building a new U.S. consulate in St. Petersburg. Since then, new details have emerged about what those compounds were used for. Despite Russia’s claim that they’re just giant rec rooms for its diplomats, U.S. officials discovered some disconcerting items when the properties were vacated last year, CBS News reported last month [ http://www.cbsnews.com/news/russians-destroyed-and-removed-material-from-shuttered-compounds-officials-say/ ].
Among the destroyed materials discovered at the compounds were antennas, electronics, computers, file cabinets and other gear, according to a former official. Other material was missing.
Officials also told CBS news that the compounds were “significant listening posts and centers of intelligence gathering” — not crash pads filled with foosball tables.
Russia has grown increasingly annoyed with the U.S. for its refusal to return the compounds, and last week a Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson said [ https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-usa-idUSKBN19J2LP ], “Retaliatory measures are being prepared.” The topic is expected to be on the agenda [ http://www.cnn.com/2017/07/03/politics/trump-putin-meeting-syria-ukraine/index.html ] for President Trump’s meeting with Putin later this week on the sidelines of the G20 summit.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/russia-to-u-s-return-seized-diplomatic-compounds-or-else.html [with comments]
Trump expected to bring up Syria and Ukraine in Putin meeting, but not Russian election hacking
A demonstrator holds up a sign of Vladimir Putin during an anti-Trump 'March for Truth' rally on June 3, 2017 in New York City.
The White House has been tight-lipped about what Mr Trump will discuss with the Russian President in Germany
4 July 2017
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-putin-meeting-g20-syria-ukraine-russian-hacking-election-meddling-a7821966.html [with comments]
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U.S. no longer a 'friend' in Merkel election program
The change in wording underscores how relations between Berlin and Washington have deteriorated since U.S. President Donald Trump entered the White House in January.
Jul 3, 2017
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-election-merkel-usa-idUSKBN19O1NS
Angela Merkel no longer considers America a friend, election material reveals
The two leaders disagreed strongly on several issues - particularly climate change.
Mr Trump has repeatedly criticised the German Chancellor
4 July 2017
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/merkel-trump-america-germany-friends-election-campaign-material-friendship-over-a7823716.html [with comments]
Europe’s fixer, Merkel faces test in preparing the continent to confront Trump
Activists disguised as Theresa May, Angela Merkel and Vladimir Putin squeeze a big inflated rubber globe during an event organized by the activist group Attac to protest against globalisation in advance of this week’s G20 summit in Hamburg, Germany.
July 4, 2017
BERLIN — German Chancellor Angela Merkel goes north this week to Hamburg, the port city where she was born, to defend principles of economic and political integration, whose critics include not just the leaders of Russia and Turkey but also the American president.
It is an unsettling scenario for Germany, a nation that owes its modern existence to transatlantic ties. Merkel remains committed to working with President Trump when she can, her associates say. But she also recognizes that the United States now stands apart from Europe on multilateral cooperation, particularly when it comes to the environment [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/inside-trumps-climate-decision-after-fiery-debate-he-stayed-where-hes-always-been/2017/06/01/e4acb27e-46db-11e7-bcde-624ad94170ab_story.html ].
This dilemma will be on display in Hamburg, where Merkel is hosting the Group of 20 summit Friday and Saturday.
To make the European Union strong enough to stand on its own is among the main reasons she is asking German voters for a fourth term in a September election. Once considered vulnerable to the wave of right-wing populism surging through the West, Merkel now leads her left-wing rival [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/heres-why-germanys-left-has-dwindling-hopes-of-unseating-merkel/2017/06/23/f6ed5042-576b-11e7-840b-512026319da7_story.html ] — who poses a more credible threat to her than does the far-right Alternative for Germany [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/germanys-far-right-preaches-traditional-values-can-a-lesbian-mother-be-its-new-voice/2017/05/12/3388e06a-34cc-11e7-ab03-aa29f656f13e_story.html ] — by double digits.
But achieving her ambition, and fortifying Europe in the face of a combative Russia and inward-looking United States, will be a new challenge for the unassuming tactician who disclaims grand visions.
When she announced last year [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/merkel-announces-re-election-bid-in-insecure-times/2016/11/20/13294dbc-ad97-11e6-8f19-21a1c65d2043_story.html ] that she would stand again for reelection, she called it “grotesque” to suggest that she, on her own, could safeguard Western liberalism. But she also leads Europe’s most powerful economy, and she struck out on her own in opening her country’s doors to more than a million asylum seekers in 2015. This record sets her up to counter Trump, whose intransigence on trade, immigration and climate she has pledged to meet with a show of European unity.
Merkel is scheduled to meet with Trump on Thursday, the eve of the summit, in a tete-a-tete that could be a chance to reset relations after several cold encounters that led the German leader to conclude that Europe could no longer fully rely on the United States. On the campaign trail, Trump called her refugee policy “insane,” and as president, he has scolded the Germans for running a trade surplus with the United States. After transatlantic talks in Europe laid bare the distance between the two leaders on trade, the environment and collective defense [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/nato-allies-boost-defense-spending-in-the-wake-of-trump-criticism/2017/06/28/153584de-5a8c-11e7-aa69-3964a7d55207_story.html ], Merkel returned to Germany to report that Europe had to “take our fate into our own hands.”
“It’s a very difficult situation,” said Hans Eichel, a former German finance minister and a founder of the Group of 20. “Incredibly, the United States has decided to be outside the liberal mainstream of the world, and you see signs that China, especially, is trying to fill this gap.”
The question, Eichel said, will be who manages this uncertainty. When Merkel presides over negotiations among leaders of the world’s major economies, she is the natural answer.
“People are expecting her to stop the world from moving in this protectionist direction and to stand up for democracy,” said Hans Kundnani, a senior transatlantic fellow at the German Marshall Fund. “But the idea that the German chancellor can replace the president of the United States is nonsense.”
If Merkel is not the new leader of the free world, what is she?
“She is a doctor of nuclear physics,” said Elmar Brok, a member of the European Parliament and a close ally of Merkel’s. Merkel studied physics at Leipzig University in what was then East Germany, where her father, a Protestant pastor, had moved the family shortly after Merkel was born.
Since taking office in 2005, Merkel has managed one crisis after another, including the failure of the European Constitution, the euro zone emergency and the rush of migrants fleeing Syria’s civil war.
Behind Merkel’s resolve has been a sense that something bigger was at stake, according to people who have worked with her for years.
“Coming from East Germany, she is absolutely convinced — it’s in her bones — that systems can fail,” said Mariam Lau, a political correspondent for Die Zeit, a German weekly newspaper.
The fact that “Europe could have imploded” if the German chancellorship were on the line led Merkel to seek a fourth term, said Stefan Kornelius, international editor of the daily Süddeutsche Zeitung and a biographer of the chancellor.
[...]
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/europes-fixer-merkel-faces-test-in-preparing-the-continent-to-confront-trump/2017/07/04/dcd35e04-6044-11e7-80a2-8c226031ac3f_story.html [with comments]
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GOP Operative Sought Clinton Emails From Hackers, Implied a Connection to Flynn
Retired Gen. Michael Flynn, right, at the White House shortly before his dismissal as national security adviser.
Photo: Chip Somodevilla/European Pressphoto Agency
Peter W. Smith portrayed the former general as an ally in an effort, independent of the Trump campaign, to find personal emails deleted by Hillary Clinton
By Shane Harris
June 29, 2017 5:14 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON—Before the 2016 presidential election, a longtime Republican opposition researcher mounted an independent campaign to obtain emails he believed were stolen from Hillary Clinton’s private server, likely by Russian hackers.
In conversations with members of his circle and with others he tried to recruit to help him, the GOP operative, Peter W. Smith, implied he was working with retired Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn, at the time a senior adviser to then-candidate Donald Trump.
“He said, ‘I’m talking to Michael Flynn about this—if you find anything, can you let me know?’” said Eric York, a computer-security expert from Atlanta who searched hacker forums on Mr. Smith’s behalf for people who might have access to the emails.
Emails written by Mr. Smith and one of his associates show that his small group considered Mr. Flynn and his consulting company, Flynn Intel Group, to be allies in their quest.
What role, if any, Mr. Flynn may have played in Mr. Smith’s project is unclear. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Smith said he knew Mr. Flynn, but he never stated that Mr. Flynn was involved.
Mr. Flynn didn’t respond to requests for comment.
A Trump campaign official said that Mr. Smith didn’t work for the campaign, and that if Mr. Flynn coordinated with him in any way, it would have been in his capacity as a private individual. The White House declined to comment.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller is investigating Russian attempts to sway the U.S. election and whether there was collusion between Russians and the Trump campaign. President Trump has denied any collusion and called the investigation a “witch hunt.” The Russian government has denied it interfered in the election.
Mr. Smith died at age 81 on May 14, which was about 10 days after the Journal interviewed him. His account of the email search is believed to be his only public comment on it.
The operation Mr. Smith described is consistent with information that has been examined by U.S. investigators probing Russian interference in the elections.
Those investigators have examined reports from intelligence agencies that describe Russian hackers discussing how to obtain emails from Mrs. Clinton’s server and then transmit them to Mr. Flynn via an intermediary, according to U.S. officials with knowledge of the intelligence.
It isn’t clear who that intermediary might have been or whether Mr. Smith’s operation was the one allegedly under discussion by the Russian hackers. The reports were compiled during the same period when Mr. Smith’s group was operating, according to the officials.
Peter W. Smith.
Mr. Smith said he worked independently and wasn’t part of the Trump campaign.
His project began over Labor Day weekend 2016 when Mr. Smith, a private-equity executive from Chicago active in Republican politics, said he assembled a group of technology experts, lawyers and a Russian-speaking investigator based in Europe to acquire emails the group theorized might have been stolen from the private server Mrs. Clinton used as secretary of state.
Mr. Smith’s focus was some 33,000 emails Mrs. Clinton said were deleted because they were deemed personal. Mr. Smith said he believed that the emails might have been obtained by hackers and that they actually concerned official matters Mrs. Clinton wanted to conceal—two notions for which he offered no evidence. Mrs. Clinton gave the State Department tens of thousands of emails related to official business.
Former Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey said in July 2016 there was no evidence the private server had been hacked but held out the possibility it could have been.
In the interview with the Journal, Mr. Smith said he and his colleagues found five groups of hackers who claimed to possess Mrs. Clinton’s deleted emails, including two groups he determined were Russians.
“We knew the people who had these were probably around the Russian government,” Mr. Smith said.
U.S. intelligence agencies have accused the Russians of stealing emails from the Democratic National Committee and Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, and providing them to WikiLeaks last summer as part of a multifaceted operation to interfere with the election and help Mr. Trump’s campaign. Mr. Trump on July 27 publicly encouraged Russia to go further and find [ https://www.wsj.com/articles/donald-trump-invites-russia-to-find-missing-hillary-clinton-emails-1469638557 ] the Clinton “emails that are missing.” Asked about that on Monday, White House press secretary Sean Spicer said Mr. Trump was joking.
Hillary Clinton checking her phone in March 2012, when she was secretary of state.
Photo: Richard Drew/Associated Press
Mr. Smith said after vetting batches of emails offered to him by hacker groups last fall, he couldn’t be sure enough of their authenticity to leak them himself. “We told all the groups to give them to WikiLeaks,” he said. WikiLeaks has never published those emails or claimed to have them.
Mr. Smith and one of his associates said they had a line of communication with Mr. Flynn and his consulting company.
In one Smith email reviewed by the Journal, intended to entice outside experts to join his work, he offered to make introductions to Mr. Flynn’s son, Michael G. Flynn, who worked as chief of staff in his father’s company. Mr. Smith’s email mentioned the son among a small number of other people he said were helping.
Michael G. Flynn didn’t respond to a request for comment.
In another recruiting email seen by the Journal, Jonathan Safron, a law student Mr. Smith described as a close colleague, included links to the websites and LinkedIn profiles of people purportedly working with the Smith team. At the top of the list was the name and website of Flynn Intel, which Mr. Flynn set up after his 2014 firing as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.
Mr. Safron declined to comment on his email or Mr. Smith’s project.
In phone conversations, Mr. Smith told a computer expert he was in direct contact with Mr. Flynn and his son, according to this expert. The person said an anti-Clinton research document prepared by Mr. Smith’s group identified the younger Mr. Flynn as someone associated with the effort. The expert said that based on his conversations with Mr. Smith, he understood the elder Mr. Flynn to be coordinating with Mr. Smith’s group in his capacity as a Trump campaign adviser.
The senior Mr. Flynn was fired as national-security adviser [ https://www.wsj.com/articles/donald-trump-s-national-security-adviser-mike-flynn-resigns-1487045703 ] in February after misleading administration officials about his conversations with the Russian ambassador concerning sanctions. Those conversations put Mr. Flynn under scrutiny by the FBI and then the special counsel, according to U.S. officials.
Mr. Smith said in the interview he supported Mr. Flynn’s efforts during the presidential transition to establish relations with Russian officials.
Mr. Smith said he never intended to pay for any emails found by hackers.
He said he understood the risk in publishing the emails himself. If, under public scrutiny, they proved not to be genuine, “people would say we made them up,” he said, and the whole project would be dismissed as a Republican hit job on the Clinton campaign. In the early 1990s, Mr. Smith helped publicize Arkansas state troopers’ claims that then-Gov. Bill Clinton had enlisted them to arrange trysts with women, an unproven allegation denied by the Clinton White House.
Mr. Smith’s views on Russian hacking were complex. While he said he believed Russians were likely among those who tried to steal Mrs. Clinton’s emails, he dismissed intelligence agencies’ conclusion that the Russia’s government meddled in the election to discredit Mrs. Clinton and to help Mr. Trump.
Mr. Smith was himself once a hacking victim. Emails he wrote about the 2015 contest to fill former House Speaker John Boehner’s seat were stolen from the Illinois Republican Party and then made public, in a campaign U.S. intelligence officials attributed to Russian actors. Mr. Smith didn’t dispute that Russia might have been to blame. He said he was unconcerned about his messages being exposed.
Appeared in the June 30, 2017, print edition as 'Operative Claiming Flynn Tie Sought Clinton Emails.'
Copyright ©2017 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/gop-operative-sought-clinton-emails-from-hackers-implied-a-connection-to-flynn-1498770851 [with comments]
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Infowars Nightly News LIVE - Liberal Meltdown! Trump's Travel Ban Begins Tonight
Streamed live on Jun 29, 2017 by The Alex Jones Channel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UkC7WAe2NY [with comments]
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Report links GOP operative to Flynn, Russian hackers
All In with Chris Hayes
6/29/17
The Wall Street Journal reports that GOP operative Peter Smith sought stolen Clinton emails from Russian hackers - and intimated he was working with Michael Flynn. Duration: 1:55
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/report-links-gop-operative-to-flynn-russian-hackers-979998787668 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Du-7te--BlA [with comments]
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Why the GOP owns Donald Trump, tweets and all
All In with Chris Hayes
6/29/17
Republicans may condemn the president's latest tweets, but Joy Reid and Dan Rather argue they won't have the courage to disavow him as long as they stand to gain from his presidency. Duration: 13:47
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/why-the-gop-owns-donald-trump-tweets-and-all-980005443580
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CBO: Republican health care bill will get worse with age
All In with Chris Hayes
6/29/17
Senator Bernie Sanders joins All In as Senate Republicans scramble to revise their health care bill, on the day the CBO says that bill will be even worse than previously thought. Duration: 6:48
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/cbo-republican-health-care-bill-will-get-worse-with-age-979997251998
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Chris Hayes really loves pro wrestling’s newest villain
All In with Chris Hayes
6/29/17
Thing 1/Thing 2: Watch Chris Hayes lose it over 'The Progressive Liberal,' the newest villain on Kentucky’s Appalachian Mountain wrestling circuit. Duration: 2:03
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/chris-hayes-really-loves-pro-wrestling-s-newest-villain-980004931988
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GOP operative sought Russian hacker help against Clinton: WSJ
The Rachel Maddow Show
6/29/17
Shane Harris, national security reporter for the Wall Street Journal, talks with Rachel Maddow about his new reporting about Peter Smith, a Republican activist who sought the help of Russian hackers who may have found Hillary Clinton's e-mails, and implied he was working with Donald Trump aide Mike Flynn. Duration: 22:44
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/gop-operative-sought-russian-hacker-help-against-clinton-wsj-980053059798 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQnJolG97-g [with comments]
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Trump allies work to smear FBI, discredit Russia investigation
The Rachel Maddow Show
6/29/17
Matthew Miller, former chief spokesman for the Justice Department, talks with Rachel Maddow about Donald Trump allies going on offense to discredit the FBI officials and the Trump Russia investigation. Duration: 10:52
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/trump-allies-work-to-smear-fbi-discredit-russia-investigation-980070979714
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Repeal of 2001 Authorization of Force makes surprising progress
The Rachel Maddow Show
6/29/17
Rachel Maddow reports on an unexpected bit of progress in Rep. Barbara Lee's years-long effort to narrow the scope of the post-9/11 Authorization for the Use of Force with the passage of her amendment in the House Appropriations Committee. Duration: 5:34
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/repeal-of-2001-authorization-of-force-makes-surprising-progress-980084291710
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Rep Lee sees Authorization of Force repeal take a step forward
The Rachel Maddow Show
6/29/17
Congresswoman Barbara Lee talks with Rachel Maddow about her years-long effort to get Congress to reconsider its authorization of the use of force finally seeing some significant bipartisan support with the passage of her amendment in the House Appropriations Committee today. Duration: 3:25
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/rep-lee-sees-authorization-of-force-repeal-take-a-step-forward-980105795960
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Lawrence on Trump and 'the women he hates'
The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell
6/29/17
President Donald Trump once again showed his true character in a vulgar attack on Morning Joe's Mika Brzezinski, another self-inflicted problem as he struggles to implement his agenda. Duration: 9:09
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/the-last-word/watch/lawrence-on-trump-and-the-women-he-hates-980073539893 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKoLxyk0Q2Y [with comments]
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Fmr. Amb.: Trump hasn't claimed the 'dignity of the presidency'
The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell
6/29/17
Ambassador Wendy Sherman tells Lawrence O'Donnell that Donald Trump's latest Twitter attack proves he is not ready to represent America on the world stage. Annie Karni and Ana Marie Cox also join. Duration: 9:11
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/the-last-word/watch/fmr-amb-trump-hasn-t-claimed-the-dignity-of-the-presidency-980074051641
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Nixon, Trump and 'how a presidency ends'
The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell
6/29/17
The investigation into Donald Trump is often compared to Watergate, but Pres. Nixon proved surprisingly resilient… until he was forced to resign. New York Magazine's Frank Rich joins Lawrence O'Donnell to discuss how long it took, and how Trump compares to Nixon. Duration: 5:47
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/the-last-word/watch/nixon-trump-and-how-a-presidency-ends-980077635800 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JF2ehEBmxY [with comments]
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Will there be consequences for Trump after his Twitter attacks?
The 11th Hour with Brian Williams
6/29/17
Trump's tweets attacking MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski got widespread condemnation from both parties. But will there be any real consequences? Shannon Pettypiece, Kimberly Atkins & Katy Tur join. Duration: 12:38
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/brian-williams/watch/will-there-be-consequences-for-trump-after-his-twitter-attacks-980121155777
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Katy Tur on covering Trump: No journalist wants to be the story
The 11th Hour with Brian Williams
6/29/17
MSNBC's Katy Tur, who was targeted by many of Candidate Trump's attacks on the media, responds to his latest attacks on MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski. Duration: 1:17
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/brian-williams/watch/katy-tur-on-covering-trump-no-journalist-wants-to-be-the-story-980120643969 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tvwhmip325o [with comments]
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Fmr. GOP Rep: Trump is 'small & weak,' has 'hate in his heart'
The 11th Hour with Brian Williams
6/29/17
Saying he's 'looking for leadership' within the GOP, Florida Republican and former member of Congress David Jolly blasts Donald Trump for his attacks on MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski. Duration: 1:20
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/brian-williams/watch/fmr-gop-rep-trump-is-small-weak-has-hate-in-his-heart-980128323596 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlvgRaC1EqU [with comments]
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Biographer Walter Isaacson: Republicans will be judged by history
The 11th Hour with Brian Williams
6/29/17
Award-winning biographer Walter Isaacson joins to discuss just how far away from 'normal' things have gotten under the Trump presidency. Duration: 1:00
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/brian-williams/watch/biographer-walter-isaacson-republicans-will-be-judged-by-history-980134979853
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Historian Jon Meacham on Trump: We're in 'uncharted waters'
The 11th Hour with Brian Williams
6/29/17
Pulitzer Prize winning presidential biographer Jon Meacham reacts to the dark rhetoric of Pres. Trump saying he hopes it's not a sign things will continue to get worse. Duration: 1:20
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/brian-williams/watch/presidential-biographer-on-trump-we-re-in-uncharted-waters-980131395942 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9wv9ms7KwM [with comments]
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Proof That Trump 'Fights Fire With Fire'
Published on Jun 30, 2017 by The Late Show with Stephen Colbert
The White House Press Corps' substitute teacher had a flaming hot take on Trump's tweets about Mika Brzezinski.
[originally aired June 29, 2017]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJ5VcrqtfUI [with comments]
*
Stephen: 'This Is What's Wrong With The American President'
Published on Jun 30, 2017 by The Late Show with Stephen Colbert
Stephen's monologue begins with a look at the President's shocking and vicious Twitter cyberbullying of Mika Brzezinski.
[originally aired June 29, 2017]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7YrTk-Y0a0 [with comments]
*
What Is A 'Bona Fide Relationship,' Anyway?
Published on Jun 30, 2017 by The Late Show with Stephen Colbert
Trump's administration is only allowing certain family members with a 'bona fide relationship' to visit the U.S. from the six majority-Muslim countries on the travel ban.
[originally aired June 29, 2017]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kkf0GIQIIiU [with comments]
*
Here's What God Thinks About Fidget Spinners
Published on Jun 30, 2017 by The Late Show with Stephen Colbert
So, apparently, each of the three prongs of a fidget spinner represents an arm of the holy trinity. Stephen reaches out to God for a comment.
[originally aired June 29, 2017]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=in0O_Un3Xuw [with comments]
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Trump Doesn't Seem to Know Anything About Health Care: A Closer Look
Published on Jun 29, 2017 by Late Night with Seth Meyers
Seth takes a closer look at Republicans frantically working behind closed doors to win enough votes for their Senate health care bill and how President Trump is complicating their efforts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GO9JMR2m8O0 [with comments]
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this is part 13 of a 17-part post which proceeds (point arising on the given) day by (point arising on the given) day from June 17, 2017 through July 3, 2017 -- the preceding part is the post to which this is a reply; the next part is a reply to this post -- the following 'see also (linked in)' listing, updated for intervening posts along the way, is common to all 17 parts
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in addition to (linked in) the post to which this is a reply and preceding and (any future other) following, see also (linked in):
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=3967329 and preceding and following;
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=54833454 and preceding and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=6645910 and [receding and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=13088854 and preceding and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=39471610 and preceding and following;
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=132516987 (and any future following)
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=46115445 and preceding and following;
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=60991208 (and any future following);
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=65727055 and preceding and following;
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=111993093 (and any future following);
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=117093220 and following (and further in that regard, "The Shady Anti-Choice Actors Behind The Deceptive Video Accusing Planned Parenthood Of "Selling Aborted Baby Parts"", https://www.mediamatters.org/research/2015/07/15/the-shady-anti-choice-actors-behind-the-decepti/204431 {with comments});
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=117212063 and preceding and following;
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http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=132583354 and preceding and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=60232115 and (the many) following;
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=123731767 and preceding (and any future following);
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=123777222 and preceding and following;
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http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=131488509 and preceding (and any future following);
earlier this string, http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=131914404 and preceding and following,
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earlier this string, http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=131110508 and preceding and following
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http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=132487560 and preceding and following,
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http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=132777786 and preceding (and any future following)
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Greensburg, KS - 5/4/07
"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790
F6
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