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Today in our ongoing national embarrassment…

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Election 2020 Open Thread: Steyer REALLY Needs to Go Away, Now

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Maybe Steyer had no idea what his top advisor was doing behind his back! Quite possibly he didn’t know his deputy SC state director was going to steal the Kamala Harris campaign’s volunteer data, either. Which means that Steyer isn’t sufficiently in charge of his own campaign to keep his paid employees honest… and that some of those employees are desperate enough to ‘cut corners’ even this early. TAKE THE HINT, Tom… Get out while you can still save your reputation, and spend your millions on something that might actually accomplish something more useful than getting your emu-oid face on TV.

… The overtures from Pat Murphy, a former state House speaker who is serving as a top adviser on Steyer’s Iowa campaign, aren’t illegal — though payments for endorsements would violate campaign finance laws if not disclosed. There’s no evidence that any Iowans accepted the offer or received contributions from Steyer’s campaign as compensation for their backing.

But the proposals could revive criticism that the billionaire Steyer is trying to buy his way into the White House. Several state lawmakers and political candidates said they were surprised Steyer’s campaign would think he could purchase their support…

As Steyer met with voters in Bluffton, South Carolina, on Thursday, the first question posed to him was about the AP report. He said that he learned about the allegations while driving to the event and that no payments had gone to officials in Iowa.

“We haven’t given any money to anyone in Iowa, nor are we planning to,” he said. “There’s no way we would ever do that.”…

Steyer has largely self-funded his presidential campaign, spending $47.6 million of his own money in the first three months since launching his bid, much of that on online fundraising and advertising. Steyer has qualified for the November debate, but he remains at the back of the pack in early-state and national polls…

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Friday Morning Open Thread: Thick Mick Mulvaney Knows What His President Likes

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… Pre-sorted Starbursts, free money, and the wholehearted defense of even his dumbest moves.

Problem is, the guy with this kind of single-minded dedication to Lord Smallgloves’ whims is not necessarily an intellectual heavyweight.

Everyone’s free to choose the name by which they’re known, but as I have been pointing out for some time, Mick is generally not the cognomen of someone renowned for his wisdom.

Voiceover: Later, that same day…

SRSLY?

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Late Night Horrorshow Open Thread: Rallying His Base Rallying Him

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Like any other addict, an adulation junkie needs to keep upping his dosage to get the same boost. Trump’s recent rallies just haven’t been doing the job for him — even the LameStream Media is bored watching the same MAGAt DeadBrainHeads yowl LAWKERUP like it was a prayer. So he’s flailing around, looking for that special attention-getting message that will make him feel alive again.

His handlers had him all set up for a good time in Minneapolis — where people vote for Muslim immigrants who are also Black, and even female! — but the natives didn’t take the bait:

Friday night, he was shipped to Louisiana to bath in some old-fashioned hardcore racist GOTV… but ended up spending most of the evening angrily defending himself against the morgue’s worth of still-rotting corpses falling out of various Trump closets.

So for his weekend retreat, he dropped in on the hardest of the hardcore — the “Values Voters Summit” evangelical beanfest / witch hunt, where those media representatives not of the body can be barred from spoiling the ‘where we go one, we go all’ happytimes…

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Repubs in Disarray!.. Open Thread: Peter Thiel, Would-Be Supervillain, Resurfaces in Kansas

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I’d seen rumors on multiple sites that the Permanent GOP Party was ‘encouraging’, or at least hoping, Mike Pompeo to run for the Senate in Kansas. Suddenly, a powerful counterinterest emerges… just as Mike Pompeo finds himself under the spotlight in DC. Brian Lowry, at the Kansas City Star:

Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, who believes Google should be investigated for treason and once wrote that American democracy has been in decline since women won the right to vote, is investing heavily in two of the Kansas City region’s most ambitious political startups.

Thiel steered six figures into a dark money group that backed Republican Kris Kobach’s failed campaign for Kansas governor, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the matter.

And now that Kobach is running for U.S. Senate, the PayPal co-founder is upfront about his financial support. Last week at his New York City apartment, Thiel and conservative pundit Ann Coulter co-hosted a fundraiser for the former Kansas secretary of state…

One of Thiel’s companies, the data mining firm Palantir, has provided software supporting ICE’s case management system since 2014. The company has faced criticism from immigration activists because of the software’s reported use in deportations.

Two sources familiar with the inner workings of Kobach’s 2018 campaign said Thiel gave a contribution worth six figures to Per Aspera Policy, a 501(c)4 organization that paid for digital and television ads.

Both of the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Thiel’s previously undisclosed contributions to the dark money group occurred after Kobach and Thiel discussed the race on the phone. One source said Kobach was giddy when Thiel agreed to spend money in the race.

Kobach did not consent to an interview about his relationship with Thiel. His campaign declined to answer any questions, including about whether Thiel and Kobach had discussed the race for governor.

Brendan Fischer, director of federal reform at the Washington-based Campaign Legal Center, said at a minimum the situation “sounds like an illustration of the problems with dark money. Dark money is often only dark when it comes to the public’s knowledge—the candidates who benefit often know where the money is coming from.”…

It’s impossible to have any sympathy for Pompeo, who’s done his best to earn all the opprobrium now being aimed his way. Another interesting data point, however, that the other rightwing authoritarians see an opening to exploit in the flailing Trump 2020 campaign…

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Thursday Morning Open Thread: No-Neck Deep

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(Tom Toles via GoComics.com)
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And per CNN, the rest of the Republican party is less than thrilled:

What you most hear from congressional Republicans on impeachment this week is the sound of silence.

GOP sources tell CNN they have a good reason for that fear. They have no idea what else House Democrats’ investigation will uncover or what comes next.

Along with that fear is frustration with President Donald Trump: his ranting in performances full of false claims, like Wednesday in the Oval Office and White House East Room, and stream of consciousness rapid-fire tweets — curse words and all — are not exactly an anti-impeachment road map for his fellow Republicans…

And although phrases like “witch hunt” and “hoax” worked for the President politically during the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller, concerned GOP sources — more than half a dozen, including some in leadership who are talking to and hearing from the rank and file — tell CNN that they worry the President isn’t comprehending what they believe to be true, that this is different…

Several congressional Republicans tell CNN that their concern is exacerbated by getting very little guidance from the White House. CNN reported last week that, despite an initial flirtation with setting up an impeachment war room in the mold of Bill Clinton’s White House during his impeachment, the Trump team is not going there now.

“There is no White House war room. Why are we the ones who have to defend him?” asked one congressional GOP source.

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Late Night Open Thread: A Moat, With Snakes & Possibly Alligators

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It was funny as a Simpsons gag, but coming from the Oval Office places this squarely in Caligula territory. The NYTimes chooses to file the story under ‘Decision Points’:

The Oval Office meeting this past March began, as so many had, with President Trump fuming about migrants. But this time he had a solution. As White House advisers listened astonished, he ordered them to shut down the entire 2,000-mile border with Mexico — by noon the next day…

Mr. Trump’s order to close the border was a decision point that touched off a frenzied week of presidential rages, round-the-clock staff panic and far more White House turmoil than was known at the time. By the end of the week, the seat-of-the-pants president had backed off his threat but had retaliated with the beginning of a purge of the aides who had tried to contain him.

Today, as Mr. Trump is surrounded by advisers less willing to stand up to him, his threat to seal off the country from a flood of immigrants remains active. “I have absolute power to shut down the border,” he said in an interview this summer with The New York Times.

This article is based on interviews with more than a dozen White House and administration officials directly involved in the events of that week in March. They were granted anonymity to describe sensitive conversations with the president and top officials in the government.

In the Oval Office that March afternoon, a 30-minute meeting extended to more than two hours as Mr. Trump’s team tried desperately to placate him.

“You are making me look like an idiot!” Mr. Trump shouted, adding in a profanity, as multiple officials in the room described it. “I ran on this. It’s my issue.”

Among those in the room were Kirstjen Nielsen, the homeland security secretary at the time; Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state; Kevin K. McAleenan, the Customs and Border Protection chief at the time; and Stephen Miller, the White House aide who, more than anyone, had orchestrated Mr. Trump’s immigration agenda. Mick Mulvaney, the acting chief of staff was also there, along with Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, and other senior staff…

Mr. Trump had routinely berated Ms. Nielsen as ineffective and, worse — at least in his mind — not tough-looking enough. “Lou Dobbs hates you, Ann Coulter hates you, you’re making me look bad,” Mr. Trump would tell her, referring to the Fox Business Network host and the conservative commentator.

The happiest he had been with Ms. Nielsen was a few months earlier, when American border agents had fired tear gas into Mexico to try to stop migrants from crossing into the United States. Human rights organizations condemned the move, but Mr. Trump loved it. More often, though, she drew the president’s scorn…

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Late Night Open Thread: New Winner in the All-time ‘Worst 9/11 Take EVAR’ Sweeps

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And I, for one, sincerely hope this remains the worst take!

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The Impact of Fracking on Daily Lives

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For the last couple of months, SWN energy has been developing a new pad about a mile away from town as the bird flies, but about 3-4 miles by road. The pad is at a high point on what is known as Marlborough spur, and basically overlooks the town of Bethany. The sound from the pad rolls down the valley and bombards the town:

The sound has been absolutely out of control, and goes on all day and all night. Here are two videos showing what it is like, but they really do not do it justice because you also get the vibrations and grinding sound. If I put my hand against the wall of my house, I can feel it. The only way I can really describe it is that when I am not able to block it out, I feel like I am living through the seen in the Lord of the Rings when the Orcs are tearing down Fangorn Forest. Here is a video at 1 am:

And here it is at 9 am in the morning:

And it goes on like this all night. Some days it stops. And then it just starts right back up again. None of us know what the sound is- whether it is drilling, sandblasting, compressors, some combination of the above. But it is soul-crushing and keeping people up all night long. You have to sometimes shout to people outside to be heard. I know one person who took her hearing aids out and was still kept up to 3 am.

Before I go on, let me state that ALL of this could be mitigated. They could spend a little bit of money and erect a sound barrier. But they won’t, because they claim they did sound studies and it was not a problem. Were they to erect a barrier, it would stop all that from rolling down the valley and blasting the town.

Yesterday morning, immediately after recording that video, I got in the family truckster and drove up to the pad. Once there, I recorded the sound from the pad. Now to understand where I was when I recorded this, I was on the OTHER side of the pad, with the pad between me and Bethany.

Here is the sound from the pad on that side:

As you can see, less of the grinding and more of a white noise.

Sidebar- Apparently on top of the noise pollution, pumping toxic chemicals into the earth, destroying the roads, and running everyone off the road, SWN also seems to run unsecure drilling operations, because I was able to just drive right on up to the pad. There was a little shack at the fork, but no gate, no one told me to stop (there was a guy there and we just waved at each other as I drove on in), and no signage or anything to tell me to not enter or hardhat area or anything. Awesome.

At any rate, after weeks of complaints, they decided they would grace us with another sound study to see if they needed to do anything. They placed sound meters in a neighbors yard, and would monitor it for 72 hours, then run the data. You all know what happens next, right?

THE MOTHERFUCKERS STOPPED WORK FOR LABOR DAY WEEKEND.

The sound meters were put in Friday afternoon, and there was not a peep all weekend. Monday night at 6, the meters came out, and by 7 pm they were drilling again. The report will come back showing no sound issues, because of course it will.

Finally, the town had enough and it was announced that SWN reps would be coming to town council last night. This was arranged at around noon yesterday. The drilling sounds I recorded yesterday morning? They stopped at noon.

So they know what they are doing, and they just don’t give a shit. I did not go to the town council meeting because I did not trust myself around them and the local tv station was there filming, and I did not want to become a viral sensation. I had already had a run-in with one of the SWN reps, this crapweasel who is doing their bidding. I’ll share that with you:

You see what he is doing there, right? It’s the equivalent of a gun humper saying “HA IT’S A MAGAZINE NOT A CLIP MY HUNTING RIFLE IS A SEMI-AUTO.” We don’t know what the actual source of the noise is at the pad. Like I said, it may be fracking, it may be sandblasting, it may be compressors and a whole bunch of other stuff. But he’s claiming that the place wasn’t shut down, which means it might have been passively collecting natural gas, and hence technically still running.

But since I swore at him, he had his out. Like everyone in the media and political establishment who thinks swearing while protesting something is worse than the actual violence you are swearing about, he tried to take his ball and go home:

And then I let him know I knew exactly what they were up to:

And then I hit him in the masculinity (all these roughneck pricks get off on thinking they are badass- they run around in large trucks with “pipeline trash” decals), calling him out for being a delicate flower:

At any rate, I did not go because I have anger issues, but my friends did, and here is the write-up in the local media:

A community is outraged with the effects they say fracking is having in Bethany, WV.

“This is absurd. This is the United States, but no, it’s still West Virginia, so we’re the lowest of the low and our voice is never heard,” said one community member.

“When’s it going to end? When is there going to be the next pad? Are you just going to destroy all the hilltops?”

While the room packed with citizens presented many concerns and questions, one reoccurring theme was the noise that the community members call unbearable to live with.

“I kept thinking to myself, ‘Is this anything close to freeway noise I had to deal with in LA?’ And, I’m here to tell you there is no comparison. This is worse than anything I’ve experienced,” said another community member.

And the impact it is having on their physical and mental health: “The first days we were doing outside activities and I couldn’t hear them because of the drill, and I am like; when are they all going to all start going crazy?”

We’ll see what happens. My guess is nothing.

Oh, and btw, SWN CEO William Way made $8 million dollars last year ruining our lives.

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The President’s Operational Security Failure

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I want to just follow on to Cheryl’s post about the President’s operational security failure on Twitter earlier today. What the President did today, despite his standing outside the White House and saying to a reporter that he had a right to tweet out the imagery, was not declassification of the geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) imagery that he tweeted out. If that had been the case, then the original classification markers would be visible, they’d be struck through, and there would be a time and date stamp along with standardized language that the imagery had been declassified as of X time today. Instead, as you can see in the image in Cheryl’s post, there is a black rectangle in the upper left hand corner, which is most likely covering the classification code. In this case that is most likely TS/SCI/NOFORN – Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information/No Foreign Distribution. Though it could just as easily be UNCLASS/FOUO  – Unclassified/For Official Use Only. We know some of the provenance of the GEOINT the President tweeted, because everyone in the Intel Community began scrambling to cover their tuchases, which the President had exposed and hung way out the window for everyone to see. The President received the imagery during a briefing earlier today.

What Cheryl described is clearly what happened here. The President had someone on his staff, most likely his caddie Dan Scavino, who is currently serving as the Assistant to the President-Director of White House Social Media Communications and tweets as/for the President, bring an unsecure smart phone into a sensitive compartmented information facility (SCIF) and take a picture of this classified information so he could tweet it out. Whomever took the picture, either at the President’s direction or their own initiative because they realized what they were doing was sketchy, placed a black bar over the classification markings, then loaded the image up so it could be tweeted out. Bringing an unsecure phone into a SCIF and taking pictures of anything in the SCIF is the type of thing that gets one suspended, one’s clearance stripped, and one prosecuted for stealing classified information.

As I stated above, this is not actually declassification. Here’s Brad Moss, whose law practice focuses on national security, clearance, and classification issues:

So what we have here is data spillage (emphasis mine):

Data spillage is the transfer of classified or sensitive information to unaccredited or unauthorized systems, individuals, applications, or media. A spillage can be from a higher level classification to a lower one. The data itself may be residual (hidden) data or metadata. Spillage may result from improper handling of compartments, releasability controls, privacy data, or proprietary information.The trend towards increased information sharing has weakened access controls, giving users without a need-to-know access to large volumes of sensitive or classified data. Malware that propagates via removable media has increased the risk of large data transfers outside the network. The risk of data spillage is a problem largely because of inadequate end user security awareness, unmanageable networks, and poorly implemented data policies.

The bigger issue is that anyone who has a clearance (hello!) and encounters this information (hello!) is, unlike the President, potentially liable for accessing compartmented information that they do not have a need to know. Unlike the President, no one else in the US has an Office of Legal Council memo from 1973 that places them above the law.

If you’re wondering how this could be the case, how someone with a clearance who was just scrolling through Twitter, reading Balloon Juice, or watching the news when this comes up can get in trouble, but the President can just put classified information out there, claim he has the right to do it, even if it hasn’t been formerly and properly declassified, and he faces no jeopardy and the rest of us with clearances do, it is because THE RULES WERE NOT CONCEIVED OF AND WRITTEN WITH THE CURRENT PRESIDENT IN MIND!!!!! NOT A SINGLE ONE OF THEM!!!! The assumption was, based on historic performance of previous presidents, that NO FUTURE PRESIDENT WOULD BE THIS STUPID AND CARELESS!!!!

As Cheryl indicated, what the President tweeted out was the good stuff. No one is supposed to know we have that good of resolution wherever and whenever we want. And because the Iranians and others – friends and foes alike – know when the test failed, combined with the shadows and other static imagery in the GEOINT, they’ll be able to work out where we were looking from.

This is not just a major Operational Security (OPSEC) failure by the President, it is also a major counterintelligence (CI) breach by the President.

As we have been since November of 2016, we are off the looking glass and through the map!

Open Thread!

* Just a quick note, because I was actually getting caught up on the news shortly after the President tweeted this out, I saw it. I then sent an email to my company’s security officer to inform him that I’d seen data spillage, that it was inadvertent, and provided the context. This was done to cover myself.

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Annals of the Horrible

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Thought I’d share some (late) lunch joy by cleaning out a couple of browser tabs I’ve been meaning to share with the Jackaltariat.

First up in the catalogue of awful…

Nothing says more about a society than how it treats its most vulnerable.  Which is why this, from Pennsylvania coal country last month, says all you need to know about a certain kind of Republican* values:

Wyoming Valley West School District, one of the poorest districts in the state as measured by per-pupil spending, is located in a former coal mining community in Northeastern Pennsylvania, known affectionately by locals as “The Valley.”

When officials there noticed that families owed the district around $22,000 in breakfast and lunch debt…

…school council president Joseph Mazur thought that this would be a good next move:

…the now-infamous letter to about 40 families deemed to be the worst offenders in having overdue cafeteria bills — those were children with meal debt of $10 or more.

“Your child has been sent to school every day without money and without a breakfast and/or lunch,” said the letter signed by Joseph Muth, director of federal programs for the Wyoming Valley West School District. “This is a failure to provide your child with proper nutrition and you can be sent to Dependency Court for neglecting your child’s right to food. If you are taken to Dependency court, the result may be your child being removed from your home and placed in foster care.”

That this was about performative cruelty, and not fiscal prudence can be shown with two facts. The $22,ooo in arrears comes to about 1/4 of one percent of the district budget; you gotta know that if this was about keeping the school doors open, proposing a (surely) expensive round of child theft would not be the first move the financial folks would make.


Just to drive the point home, the guy behind the move, school council president Mazur went on to refuse an offer from a guy in Philadelphia who wanted to pay off the whole debt.  Mazur was eventually forced to reverse course.

Next up, an even more grotesque example of cruelty for cruelty’s sake from July.  I believe some commenters pointed out this incident, and I’ve been meaning to vent rage about it ever since, but here it is:

At a Border Patrol holding facility in El Paso, Texas, an agent told a Honduran family that one parent would be sent to Mexico while the other parent and their three children could stay in the United States, according to the family. The agent turned to the couple’s youngest daughter — 3-year-old Sofia, whom they call Sofi — and asked her to make a choice.

“The agent asked her who she wanted to go with, mom or dad,” her mother, Tania, told NPR through an interpreter. “And the girl, because she is more attached to me, she said mom. But when they started to take [my husband] away, the girl started to cry. The officer said, ‘You said [you want to go] with mom.’ “

 

I rate that child abuse, and those who did the crime should be in prison, as far as I am concerned. Een if the family separation followed the letter of the law, putting the kid in that position was gratuitous immiseration, and will deliver lasting trauma, doled out, it seems, for the agent’s amusement.

 

There is a word to describe such behavior and such people:  evil.  This was evil.  I say this as one with more memory of than current participation in organized religion, but it seems to me that those who welcome evil into our republic commit a grievous sin.

 

Happy lunch!  Open thread.

*Luzerne County, in which the relevant school district operates, went 58-39% for Trump in 2016.

 

Image: Pieter Breughel the Elder, The Massacre of the Innocents, c. 1565-7

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Emergency And Medical Personnel Speak Out On The Nyonoksa Explosion

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Two accounts of caring for the victims of the accident at Nyonoksa on August 8 were published Wednesday, August 21, in Meduza (English version) and Novaya Gazeta. The sources are an emergency responder and two doctors. The emergency responder was not on duty that day and relies on the reports of co-workers. The sources want to remain anonymous for obvious reasons.

I have questions about these accounts and a Washington Post account that seems to refer to another Novaya Gazeta article without linking. But first, let’s see what can reasonably be gleaned from the accounts.

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Disinformation Watch: The Open Skies Treaty

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Some weird stuff has popped up in my Twitter feed this week. Fortunately, I follow experts who are trying to figure it out.

Steffan Watkins is a Canadian who follows ships and planes via the internet. If you like that sort of thing, I recommend you follow him. He is also very sensitive to disinformation and occasionally given to lectures about it. He is very knowledgeable about the Open Skies Treaty.

The Open Skies Treaty (text, fact sheet) allows the nations that have signed it to fly observation planes over other signatories’ territory. It’s an arms control treaty in that it allows nations to follow up on suspicions or just keep an eye on each other. It says nothing about numbers of weapons. The simple fact that nations are open to each other in this way builds trust, which is needed to negotiate on more difficult subjects.

Every arms control treaty has an information side to it: inspections may be requested, or numbers and types of weapons are reported to the other parties regularly. When the US government abrogates a treaty, we lose a window into what the other side is doing. Of course, they get to see the equivalent of what we’re doing.

The Open Skies Treaty, like all well-made treaties, has very specific provisions for what kinds of aircraft, cameras, and routes may be flown. Arrangements must be made to schedule the flights. For flights over the United States, the airplane must be inspected by Americans, an American is on board, and the photos are shared after the flight. Other nations have the same rights for flights over their territory.

Russia does several flights a year over the US, and we reciprocate with flights over Russia. Watkins follows those flights and others that interest him. Last year and this, he told me when the Russian plane was in my area. I think I saw it last year, but this year it didn’t come close enough to Santa Fe.

This week, Michael Carpenter tweeted that the Russians were up to nefarious activities, FLYING OVER CHICAGO AND TAKING PICTURES! This is precisely the kind of thing Watkins likes to debunk, and he did, with places and times for the Open Skies flight. What is surprising is that Carpenter was in charge of the Open Skies program under President Barack Obama and is associated with the Penn-Biden Center. When he was questioned by Watkins and others knowledgeable about the program, he insulted them and cited an old New York Times article containing Republican propaganda. Republicans don’t like this treaty, along with all other arms control treaties. Watkins debunked that article here.

Tom Moore also got into the act. He is a former professional staff member on the Senate Foreign Relations committee. He didn’t believe what Carpenter was tweeting either.

Here’s Carpenter retweeting his first tweet that got the reaction.

And Moore’s reply

https://twitter.com/PaperMissiles/status/1162564914671751168

https://twitter.com/PaperMissiles/status/1162565720926052352

https://twitter.com/PaperMissiles/status/1162569114738708481

There’s more in the thread with others chiming in.

And this morning,

https://twitter.com/PaperMissiles/status/1162779545747021825

That’s RT, the Russian propaganda network, gloating that Americans are overreacting to an agreed flight. Watkins also identified Russian bots that were pushing Carpenter’s claims.

It’s not clear to me why Carpenter would do this. It’s the kind of thing that can be exploited by Russian propaganda all too easily, and they are going with it. They are both happy to spread Carpenter’s misinformation and to sneer at American overreaction.

So if you run into someone claiming that the Russians are sending spy flights in, now you know how to debunk that. And please do. The disinformation is only going to get worse in the leadup to the election.

Top photo: Defense One

Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner

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Gradually, Then Suddenly: Losing Control of the Narrative

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As we have often lamented, one of the factors behind Trump’s “victory” was the complicity of so much of the major media. No matter how badly the Oval Office Occupant disgraced himself and our suffering nation, the Media Village Idiots made excuse ranging from ‘he’s playing a multi-dimensional chess game whose final move is hidden from his critics’ to ‘he relies an expansive sense of what will please his base, regardless of outsiders’ opinions’. But the horrors of last week, and the complete inability of the Squatter-in-Chief to demonstrate even the most basic human emotions in the face of its victims, seem to be piercing the bubble…

From Trump’s staunchest “nonpartisan” defender, the NYTimes, “Trump Uses a Day of Healing to Deepen the Nation’s Divisions”:

… Mr. Trump’s schedule was meant to follow the traditional model of apolitical presidential visits with victims, law enforcement officials and hospital workers after calamities like the mass shootings that resulted in 31 deaths in Dayton and El Paso and that created a new sense of national crisis over assault weapons and the rise of white supremacist ideology.

That plan went awry even before Mr. Trump, who has acknowledged his discomfort with showing empathy in public, departed Washington…

The result was the latest example of Mr. Trump’s penchant for inflaming divisions at moments when other presidents have tried to soothe them, and further proof of his staff’s inability to persuade him to follow the norms of presidential behavior…

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Late Night Open Thread: The Trump / A$AP Rocky Conundrum

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Normally I would have been relieved not to be required to have an opinion on rapper A$AP Rocky’s innocence or guilt. But I did wonder, as a very white person and an old one at that, if Trump’s indignant ‘appeals’ to the Swedish justice system went beyond You don’t understand our folkways! He’s a celebrity! He has money! Eugene Scott’s report at the Washington Post was illuminating:

… A$AP Rocky, whose legal name is Rakim Mayers, has been accused of beating a man in the street on June 30 in central Stockholm.

In a video of the alleged assault, the rapper and those with him apparently threw a man to the ground before kicking and punching him.

Another video posted to A$AP Rocky’s Instagram account claims that the men followed him for four blocks and had repeatedly been asked to leave the artist alone…

Trump, a celebrity before he was a politician, appears to give more credence to the words of black musicians than he does black people working in policy and advocacy. He tweeted that he got involved with the effort to release A$AP Rocky after a request from Kanye West. Last year, he demonstrated his commitment to sentencing reform by commuting the sentence of Alice Marie Johnson after Kim Kardashian West advocated for that.

He views entertainers as the most influential voices in black America. That could be in part because Trump does not have a black person working in a senior position in his White House. Some of the people the president mentions most when addressing issues like criminal justice reform and the black unemployment rate are hip-hop artist Kanye West and conservative activist Candace Owens, supporters of the president with no expertise in these areas…

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Late Night Open Thread: The Trump / A$AP Rocky ConundrumPost + Comments (52)