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Russiagate Open Thread: Twelve Monkeys Spies

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There was a lot of testimony during this past week’s impeachment inquiry about foreign interference in our 2016 election, including the president’s assertion that Ukraine was involved. But the president’s own intelligence agencies say it was the Russians who “hacked” the 2016 elections. Special counsel Robert Mueller spelled it out in his report.

Now the Justice Department has at least two open cases against Russian citizens for interfering with our presidential and congressional races, we decided to take a closer look at one of them – the case against 12 Russian military officers accused of breaking into the Democratic Party’s computers, stealing compromising information, and selectively releasing it to undermine Democratic candidates. There’s no evidence of similar operations against Republicans in 2016. With the 2020 election approaching, the story of “The Russian Hack.”

Robert Anderson: The Russians never left. I can guarantee you in 2016 after this all hit the news, they never left. They didn’t stop doing what they’re doing.

Bill Whitaker: This wasn’t just a one-time thing?

Robert Anderson: No way. Russia doesn’t do it that way.

Robert Anderson should know. He spent 21 years inside the cloak and dagger world of spies and hackers overseeing the FBI’s counterintelligence and cyber Divisions and tracking Moscow’s spy agencies, an alphabet of artifice, the FSB, SVR, and, especially, the GRU.

Robert Anderson: The GRU is military intelligence. So when we look at the attacks that happened during our presidential races in 2016 you had military organizations inside of Russia attacking our infrastructure…

These are the hacker-soldiers from GRU unit 26165 who, according to the Justice Department, were responsible for “breaking and entering” into the Democratic Party’s computers remotely, from Moscow. Their names, ranks and faces are now on the FBI’s most wanted list for stealing, among other things, the Democrats’ strategic plans, detailed targeting data, and internal polling. GRU Colonel Aleksandr Osadchuk commanded a separate unit, 74455. One of his officers was in charge of spreading the stolen material to political operatives, bloggers and the media. Another hacked state election boards.

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Late Night Open Thread: Rich ‘Sparklepants’ Lowry Throws A Public Snit

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Not that I normally read anything by, or if I can help it about, the National Review editor who wrote the first public paean to Sarah Palin’s charms. But Mr. Boie’s tweet sent me in search of explication…

“You know what I am?” U.S. President Donald J. Trump said at a rally in October 2018. “I’m a nationalist.” Rich Lowry’s The Case for Nationalism can be seen as a way of working through, and defending, what the president meant. As the editor of National Review, the prominent conservative magazine, Lowry is an intellectual gatekeeper on the American right. He was one of the speakers at the National Conservatism conference in July 2019, an event that brought together such thinkers as J. D. Vance and Patrick Deneen, with keynotes by the billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel and the Fox News host Tucker Carlson, along with a notorious intervention on the perils of immigration by University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax.

Lowry’s central claim is that Americans are, and have been from their country’s founding, a nation and not a community of universal ideas. Although intellectuals and left-wing pundits are openly hostile to expressions of national sentiment, the United States has a unique national tradition that is today obscured by fissiparous identity politics. If Americans reacquaint themselves with their true national heritage, they will be better equipped to overcome dangerous tribalism, protect their borders, and make their country great again. To the degree that the United States has a global role, it should be as “vindicator of the prerogatives of other democratic nation-states”—in other words, a defender of the idea that a world of culturally defined nations is humanity’s state of nature…

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Late Night Open Thread: If Not for Hypocrisy, They’d Have No Standards At All

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The Little Princeling:

 
Also, may one introduce Breitbart’s newest contributors?

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President Fathead Has No Idea What the Fuck is Going On

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Awesome:

President Donald Trump falsely claimed on Thursday that the United States has no troops in Syria.
Trump was defending his decision to remove American troops from a part of northern Syria that Turkey wanted to attack. Speaking to reporters on the White House lawn, Trump asserted, “We have no soldiers in Syria.”

“We’ve won, we beat ISIS, and we beat ’em badly and decisively. We have no soldiers. The last thing I want to do is bring thousands and thousands of soldiers in and defeat everybody again. We’ve already done that,” Trump said.

Facts First: The US still has about 1,000 soldiers in Syria, military officials have told CNN and other news outlets, and the troops Trump removed from the area of the Turkish incursion offensive were not removed from the country
.
Jonathan Hoffman, chief Pentagon spokesman, said in a statement on Tuesday: “We have made no changes to our force presence in Syria at this time.”
Less than an hour after Trump made his Thursday claim that there are “no soldiers in Syria,” a senior State Department official told reporters that the US military mission in Syria is ongoing.

“We had and still have a significant military mission there to ensure the enduring defeat of ISIS, also to maintain the stability of northeast Syria and the region given our other critical missions in the Near East,” the official said on a conference call conducted on condition of anonymity.

Not only do we have troops in the region, but, well, the inevitable has happened:

A contingent of U.S. Special Forces has been caught up in Turkish shelling against U.S.-backed Kurdish positions in northern Syria, days after President Donald Trump told his Turkish counterpart he would withdraw U.S. troops from certain positions in the area.

Newsweek has learned through both an Iraqi Kurdish intelligence official and senior Pentagon official that Special Forces operating on Mashtenour hill in the majority-Kurdish city of Kobani fell under artillery fire from Turkish forces conducting their so-called “Operation Peace Spring” against Kurdish fighters backed by the U.S. but considered terrorist organizations by Turkey.

The senior Pentagon official said that Turkish forces should be aware of U.S. positions “down to the grid.” The official could not specify the exact number of personnel present, but indicated they were “small numbers below company level,” so somewhere between 15 and 100 troops.

Meanwhile:

Five Isis militants have broken out of a prison in northern Syria after Turkish shelling nearby, a spokesman in the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) has said.

The detainees escaped from a prison in Qamishli city, Marvan Qamishlo said.

In times like these I calm myself by chanting my favorite soothing mantras- “pallets of money on the airstrip” and “but her emails.”

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Wednesday Afternoon Open Thread: Mr. Klassy

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In response, Jake Tapper retweeted this 2016 clip:

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“Respite” Open Thread: Tucker Carlson on Unplanned Vacation

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IIRC, Bill O’Reilly went from ‘sudden vacation’ to ‘suspended’ to ‘Bill who?’ when he pushed the boundaries a little too far. One can hope that Carlson will also be forced into doing podcasts from his basement… assuming Tucker’s penthous *has* a basement…


Reference:

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Shameless & Stupid Open Thread: Hadn’t Dayton Suffered Enough?

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Wednesday Morning Open Thread: Now *We* Have “the Bigger Half”

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“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

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Late Night Open Thread: Much Ado, Weekend Roundup

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Since one of my self-imposed duties around here is finding the positive note… I did not foresee the Squatter-in-Chief and the Cosplay Socialists teaming up to convince wavering (non-‘base’) Republicans and ‘independents’ that Nancy Pelosi is Snake Plissken: A stone-cold killer, and yet their only real defense against the ravening hordes from urban hellholes like the Bronx, Detroit, Roxbury, and Minneapolis…

I personally suspect this slobbery beat-sweetner first originated in the Sanders’ campaign sagging poll numbers. Chakrabarti and his running buddies started the “Justice Dems” when it became obvious that Bernie would release control of “Our Revolution” approximately six weeks after his death (and that’s assuming Jane can’t find a way to continue the grift work as a memorial to the fallen martyr). They’re not Democrats and they’re not interested in actual grubby politics — it’s all about Move Fast, Break Stuff, (personal) Profit!

He got lucky when he ‘discovered’ Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — she was, as I remember it, the only one of last cycle’s 17 or 18 Democrat-challenging JD candidates who actually won. But if she’s half as smart as she seems to be, she’ll find a quiet way to get this guy out of her staff offices, because a Chief of Staff who considers himself the starmaker / puppeteer for somebody’s kid sister is hardly an asset:

… In the spring of 2016 — even before Sanders conceded the primary race — Chakrabarti, Exley and other Sanders organizers, including Alexandra Rojas and Corbin Trent, were thinking of next steps for the movement. To enact change, they reasoned, it was vital to transform Congress. They formed a group called Brand New Congress with the mission to recruit hundreds of community leaders and working-class candidates to run on a vision of getting corporate money out of politics, tackling climate change, transforming the economy, providing health care for all, standing for racial justice and stemming mass incarceration. They sifted through more than 10,000 nominations to find the best recruits. “Our biggest criteria was, basically, find someone who had a chance to sell out and didn’t,” Chakrabarti says.

Ocasio-Cortez, who was then a bartender from the Bronx, was nominated by her brother. It was Isra Allison, another member of Brand New Congress, not Chakrabarti, who had a key initial recruiting interview with her. But Chakrabarti drove the overall effort… Nasim Thompson, who also helped recruit candidates, told me: “It was clear from the very beginning that the ship was moving with his guidance. … He was so focused that it naturally created a gravitational pull. … He was sort of relentless in that, and simultaneously just so pleasant, it was shocking. Almost not human. I used to say, ‘How do you stay so Zen?’ ”…

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Waste of Resources Open Thread: Farewell, Ross Perot; Fvck Off, Tom Steyer

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De mortuis nil nisi bonum and all that, but I was paying attention to politics back in 1992. Ross Perot was a billionaire crank who considered Bush the Original a snotty rich kid who’d gotten into the White House on his family’s coattails, and Bill Clinton a dirtbag arriviste with ambitions above his station. Perot’s campaign was basically ‘Given the alternatives, why aren’t you Little People paying more attention to ME!?!‘

He announced his departure partway through the campaign because, hand to goddess, mysterious military teams aligned with the Bush campaign were threatening to ruin his daughter’s wedding — and then jumped back in again, because (as he more or less admitted, in the most self-flattering terms) he missed the media attention. And even in his failure, he inspired future more-money-than-sense vanity candidates… leading, inevitably, to the current Oval Office Squatter.

It’s Tom Steyer’s money! He’s free to flush it down whatever political-consulting toilets he chooses! But it’s like choosing to fuel a firepit with wood from an endangered species — he’s wasting irreplaceable media attention and funds for his own short-term enjoyment.

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Open Thread: Crown Princess Dunning-Kruger

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From the smirk on her face, absolutely. Eighteen months watching Daddy Dearest in the Oval Office, and she’s convinced she can finish off the important bits of the job — yelling at aides about their inadequate PowerPoint presentations, putting the arm on foreign dignitaries and potential celebrity donors — in an hour or two a day. So if she mindfully curates her twitter feed, she’ll be able to accomplish her “real” work (rigorous self-care, supervising the kids’ and Jared’s nannies) and still have plenty of time for celebrity tuft-hunting!

The Washington Post, “‘Surreal’: Ivanka Trump plays a prominent role in her father’s historic Korea trip”:

… The first daughter’s prominence in Japan and South Korea appeared to be by design — a sign of her influence with President Trump and the current absence of influential opponents within the administration.

It’s not clear, however, to what end.

Ivanka Trump shuttered her clothing business after joining the administration, although not right away, and has largely stepped away from her old life as an entrepreneur and social mainstay in New York. She and her husband, senior White House adviser Jared Kushner, let it be known last year that they would remain in Washington and in the White House indefinitely.

Her ambitions are unknown — she demurs on any desire for public office…

Mostly, her prominence on a major foreign trip sends a message about who other countries should listen to or court, said Christopher R. Hill, a former U.S. ambassador to South Korea and other nations.

“It looks to the rest of the world like we have a kind of a constitutional monarchy,” said Hill, who oversaw nuclear talks with North Korea at the close of the George W. Bush administration.

“It’s increasingly problematic in terms of our credibility,” Hill said. “It says to our allies, to everyone we do business with, that the only people who matter are Trump and his family members.”…

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Early Morning Sundae Sermons Open Thread

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This is true! Spare a single tiny tear for the professional Panglossians, paid by Our Betters to remind all ‘sensible’ readers that well-groomed center-right white men with the correct credentials are obviously the best people to lead us, that’s just science. The Oval Office Occupant has been almost as much a disaster for their quiet careers as he is for the rest of the world… a sloppy, shambling, semi-literate professional faker who continually demonstrates not only his own unfitness, but the general shoddiness of the Panglossians. One tear, maybe a swift kick, and move on without them.

When you’re a privileged white dude, not getting first chair (and right of refusal) feels like a demotion…

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Dispatches From Trumplandia- Still Dumb as Fuck and Proud of It

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There’s another one of those apparently weekly pieces in the WaPo about the plight of a bunch of salt of the earth morons who love them some Trump but are worried about what his tariffs are gonna do to them and whether or not they are going to make enough from the bailouts (I know, I know- they want handouts). This has the usual stuff in there about hating on the coastal elites and how the coasts should have their own country and golly gee they’ll all starve without us (hey you fucking morons your farm is dying because you can’t export to China and Mexico, California can feed itself, thank you, and this new Trump free coastal country won’t have trade wars and can grow or import what they need), and so on and so forth. I mean, you can read the whole thing yourself. But that’s not what caught my eye. These pictures of one of their living rooms did:

Anyone who decorates their living room like this doesn’t deserve the fucking franchise. And I have no idea what is going on with that drawing of Barry Gibb above the staircase.

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Election 2020 Open Thread: Redshirt Demands Dramatic Death Scene

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Never say never, in this debased world, but I personally estimate Steve Bullock’s chances of becoming our next President as roughly equal to my own — and I ain’t running. Histrionic proclamations from his devoted staff won’t improving his chances, IMO. But his public tantrum gives ‘conservative’ media guys another chance to bring out their favorite Dems in disarray! talking points…

… Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez is largely unmoved by these complaints.

In an interview with CNN Thursday here in Atlanta, Perez subtly knocked the candidates who have yet to meet the grassroots fundraising threshold and are publicly complaining.
“I think everybody has to be proficient,” he said when asked about complaints about the threshold. “If you want to be President of the United States, you have to develop a proficiency at grassroots fundraising.”

The three candidates at risk of missing the debates are Miramar, Florida, Mayor Wayne Messam, whose campaign has struggled to get any traction; Rep. Seth Moulton, who announced his campaign in late April and has yet to qualify on either threshold, and Montana Gov. Steve Bullock, who has currently not qualified for the debates by either committee standard and whose team is the angriest about the possible snub.

Bullock got into the race in mid-May, relatively late compared to other 2020 contenders. The governor has told CNN that he launched late because, as the governor of Montana, he had to oversee his state’s legislative session, which happens every two years. Bullock did that and the body passed Medicaid expansion. His advisers now believe that the DNC rules are punishing a candidate who stayed at work instead of running for President….

You did your job, Gov. Bullock. Waddya want, a cookie? Would neglecting your current responsibilities have made you a better contender for such a sought-after promotion?

And here I didn’t think it was possible for me to wholeheartedly approve of anything Tom Perez says.

Sidebar — I’m beginning to wonder whether Seth Moulton is hoping to be recruited by his natural allies in the anyone-but-Trump ‘sensible Republican’ demographic:

… The one candidate who is not antagonistic of the DNC despite finding himself on the verge of missing the first debate is [Seth] Moulton, who has publicly admitted he is likely to miss the event.

“No, I’m not going to make the first debate, but I knew that getting in so late,” the congressman told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt in an interview this week. “But I think that’s OK, that there’s, this first debate’s going to have 20 people. Folks are barely going to get a chance to speak. This is a long campaign. And it’s not going to be decided by the Democratic National Committee in their debates. It’s going to get decided by the American people. And that’s where the response to my campaign has been so positive so far.”…

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Late Night Cheap Mockery Open thread: Bill de Blasio Is A Schmuck

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Despite his (literally) lordly stature, he doesn’t rise even to the putz level.

His NYC subjects are sceptical! NYMag:

All that mayor of New York and presidential hopeful Bill de Blasio wanted to do on Monday was to travel by SUV caravan to a home of the current president and lambaste him for the steep emissions emanating from his buildings. But de Blasio’s conference at Trump Tower was derailed when a group of protesters counterprogrammed the mayor’s eight-minute speech by playing surprisingly loud music in the lobby, chanting “you suck” (the jack-of-all-trades of heckling phrases), and holding signs that read “Trump 2020” and “Worst Mayor Ever.”

It shouldn’t be surprising that the event was inundated with protesters, considering that three out of four New Yorkers don’t want the mayor to run for president and he held the speech at the historic capital of Trump World. But de Blasio held his ground: “This is a public space where people are allowed to express their views. In New York City, we’re perfectly tough. If people want to offer their opposition, it doesn’t change me one bit.”

On paper, de Blasio’s speech was meant to promote the NYC Green New Deal and publicize a City Council bill passed in April requiring buildings larger than 25,000 square feet to cut emissions. De Blasio, who has yet to sign the bill, said it’s a symbol of the city’s intention to hold all landlords accountable, “even the president of the United States.”…

Against all evidence, de Blasio remains convinced that, if the White House is to be occupied by a “brash, big-picture” New Yorker, it should be him — no matter what all those timid timeservers in his own inner circle may say behind his back. From the Atlantic, last week:

Multiple people close to New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio gave up trying to talk him out of running for president earlier this year. Now he’s reportedly going to try to win Iowa and New Hampshire without most of his friends—or even people on his payroll—supporting him…

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