Mourning in America - Trump Year One: November '16 to

the evidence that putin's government interfered with our election to some degree is pretty strong

I'd love to see it. But the board pro would chortle at my "naivete."

That's some catch, that Catch-22.

Absent evidence, how about the pretty clearly pro-Trump FBI eventually coming around to the CIA's take on the situation?

This Leonid Bershidsky piece is also useful on the lack of evidence:

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-12-22/why-i-still-don-t-buy-the-russian-hacking-story

The gist of his, Greenwald and Taibbi's positions is that it is entirely plausible that there was state-directed hacking but that the evidence released, which is largely from third-party commercial organisations and none of it slam-dunk, is not strong enough to support reporting it as fact. There is the separate question of whether, if there was state directed hacking, that was the breach that led to to Wikileaks having the info - which again is plausible but not proven. Bershidsky also believes, if the US has evidence, the response from Obama has been incredibly weak - both in not showing more of it and in the inept handling of the new sanctions.

The media throwing this into the mix with a bunch of stuff that is neither proven nor particularly plausible - Manafort worked for Russia! Russia hacked the voting machines (which Taibbi points out about half of Clinton voters believe, according to one poll)! Wikileaks is feeding info to Roger Stone!, etc, to strengthen the case is not helpful.

The problem with this story is that, like the Iraq-WMD mess, it takes place in the middle of a highly politicized environment during which the motives of all the relevant actors are suspect. Nothing quite adds up.

the iraq-wmd mess happened under an administration that was eager for an excuse to go to war in iraq. i don't see a clearcut motive for manipulating the evidence here -- who benefits? not obama, who was reluctant to even bring any of this up. not the fbi, whose director intervened in the election to hurt clinton. and, imo, not the cia -- trump's about to become their boss. it's not even clear what making up evidence about a trump-putin connection would really accomplish -- it's not going to stop him from taking office, and it doesn't seem to have changed the minds of anyone who voted for him. taibbi speculates that the whole thing might be "a cynical ass-covering campaign" by the democrats -- so the democrats somehow got the cia to do this? all of the objections strike me as really airy and way more speculative and grasping-at-straws than the actual allegations are.

The most common argument seems to be that the CIA / broader foreign policy establishment has a longstanding antipathy towards Russia (justifiably or otherwise) and wants to constrain Trump before he takes office in the belief that he will either be too weak or too favourable to deal with them strongly unless backed into a corner

i find it more than plausible that russian intelligence was behind the DNC/podesta leaks -- i've seen and will see no actual evidence but this is a mundane enough proposition for me to believe even from the dreaded cia, the motive is there on the surface, it didn't exactly take a neuromancer to accomplish (they won't believe "i meant to type illegitimate" when they read about it in the future, when they can read again; i don't even believe it now), etc

as far as i can tell that's all that's officially been alleged? yet there are these whispers everywhere, i can hear them even all the way out here, that something much more serious has happened, as the statistic SV quotes from taibbi makes clear -- there is not only no evidence for this but no real accusation at all right? yet everyone is talking about it -- friends both flesh and not tell me they're sure Something will Happen, that obama has put Things In Motion, behind the Scenes --

in the meantime the washington post -- which a moment ago i was actually looking forward to making a devil's bargain with, totally down w idea of dickens villain jeff bezos as khodorovskian opposition -- publishes a guide to Fake News from which we learn that content-farmed trump propaganda is exactly as Fake as just about anything to the left of the wapo? they've since walked this back a lil and admitted that they essentially just saw the list on their facebook feed and thought it was interesting -- but basically medialand this holiday season when not talking about russia has been talking about how you just Can't Trust anything you read outside of a small number of fragile and (in the grey lady's case) congenitally obsequious organs -- and at the same time it's true, every time i go to the supermarket for more pie i stand in the checkout line reading about the 500 muslim spies in obama's cia -- everything on all sides is confusion and paranoia and juicy signifiers and hints of some kind of occult interagency struggle, and meanwhile fascists are moving into the white house --

it's impossible for me not to think of the Russia Thing -- the fixation on the email leaks as the thing that brought trump, glommed quietly onto this weird amorphous but incredibly serious other suspicion nobody has any actual details about -- as a coping mechanism, and a dangerous one, because it so neatly extracts the single part of this disaster that's potentially not america's fault and blows it up into an unprecedented emergency that if real would have to immediately consume all the nation's attention and energy and render all other lenses thru which to view the election secondary yet would also be impossible to do anything about except click and stay informed

assuming trump takes office and nothing immediately comes of this stuff, i fear a nightmare mediascape where fact-light nationalist paranoia maneuvers the mainstream opposition into playing a weird kind of role in whatever fucked-up symbolic national psychodrama trump is about to try and replace reality with -- and anti-trumpists who don't play that role but instead blame america for what is happening will be portrayed as useful idiots if not actual traitors (cf the game theory guy on snowden, manning, every notable american dissident of the last decade: they're all kremlin assets whether they know it or not)--

the only thing that stops people from bewilderment in the next four years is organizing right? aside from its other virtues i mean. getting some collective sense of ground under yr feet. a localized sense that you can also extrapolate in2 a broader 1. because the national infosphere is going to be endless chaos.

as for the electoral college i guess others covered it but what received skepticism was not that america would be juster without the thing but the idea that this would be the issue to unite the country against fascism.

(when i say "blame america" i mean holistically, as a giant failing system, recognizing the dem party and bipartisan administrative/media class' contribution to this thru hubris and political decay and yes corruption, in addition to midwestern voters' thru succumbing to hate and the dang millennials thru not showing up and the gop thru being a nihilist death cult for 50odd years)

I'm sorry but your fugue appears to be full of straw men

i find it more than plausible that russian intelligence was behind the DNC/podesta leaks -- i've seen and will see no actual evidence but this is a mundane enough proposition for me to believe even from the dreaded cia, the motive is there on the surface, it didn't exactly take a neuromancer to accomplish (they won't believe "i meant to type illegitimate" when they read about it in the future, when they can read again; i don't even believe it now), etc

as far as i can tell that's all that's officially been alleged? yet there are these whispers everywhere, i can hear them even all the way out here, that something much more serious has happened, as the statistic SV quotes from taibbi makes clear -- there is not only no evidence for this but no real accusation at all right? yet everyone is talking about it -- friends both flesh and not tell me they're sure Something will Happen, that obama has put Things In Motion, behind the Scenes --

yeah i have to say i'm a bit confused about all this too -- maybe i've missed some reporting over the holidays when i haven't been paying as much attention but to my knowledge this was the extent of the accusations as well -- that they were behind the wikileaks stuff and the intention was to hurt HRC and help trump. and sure, if true that would be very bad, but that's not....hacking the election. people seem to be making all sorts of inferences that are not only not supported by evidence but not even supported by any reporting i've seen

Did any of you see the report that Russia for some reason hacked into Vermont's energy grid? https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/russian-hackers-penetrated-us-electricity-grid-through-a-utility-in-vermont/2016/12/30/8fc90cc4-ceec-11e6-b8a2-8c2a61b0436f_story.html

What's up with that?

wow leave vermont alone

dlh, the conclusion that many have come to is that it wasn't so much Russian hacking that got Trump elected as much as it was the presence of an extreme, tribal divisiveness in this country that has turned many people into credulous drones who happily slurp up whatever garbage they read or hear that buttresses their pre-existing worldview. I mean, da doy, but at least people are more seem to be appraising the situation more seriously now (even if it's maybe too little too late).

are more

The broader conclusion being that garbage news and propaganda/innuendo doesn't have to change the mind of millions, just a hundred thousand or so, to affect the outcome of our particular political system.

Anyway, this story is far from transparent. There could very well be more that Russia did than just propagate the wikileaks stuff, just like there could be more the US is doing in retaliation, or just like Russia could very well be retaliating despite claims to the contrary, plus ongoing cyber and counter cyber stuff, all stuff we may never know. The Vermont thing I found interesting, because it intimates Russian cyber interference has been going much deeper than just leaking emails. I wonder what else they've been up to.

they want to shut down kombucha production in the united states

The reporting in the Vermont thing hasn't been good (the original story was the grid had been hacked, which Burlington has denied) but it would be interesting to know what 'malware associated with Russia' means in practice. At least some of the tools supposedly used by 'Fancy Bear' are more or less in the public domain now afaict.

Happy New Year to all, including to my many enemies and those who have fought me and lost so badly they just don't know what to do. Love!

Love! Trumps Sad!

yeah "malware associated with Russia" is, like, most malware

Dlh makes good points. The focus on Russia is definitely being used as a way for Democrats to cope with their loss without having to grapple both with why their message failed and what it means about the health of the Republican that someone was able to bullshit his way to the presidency while behaving in a crude, thuggish manner. It's a way to depict Trump as a foreign invader rather than just a particularly toxic example of how our politics has worked forever. (Never forget: Rove convinced the nation that John Kerry willingly put troops in his battalion in danger in order to win a medal.)

So Russia as a meme is definitely a way of evading this stuff and Democrats are using it to champion a memory of a grand Republic that has been betrayed, a country that doesn't exist. But at the same time Trump's connections to the Kremlin seem obvious and bizarre. Whether it is that he has business ties there, or they are blackmailing him, or he wants to team up with Putin in order to form a grand alliance to mount a global conflict with Islam, idk, but I want answers on this.

*health of the Republic

I feel like I live on a different planet than you people

yeah "malware associated with Russia" is, like, most malware

also "malware found on a laptop that wasn't connected to the utility grid" is pretty far from "hacking"

no u wrong they hacked using 2 coordinated accounts pu✧✧✧@rus✧✧✧.c✧✧ and russiahacksthe✧✧✧@rus✧✧✧.r✧

anyone want to sum that article up? obviously i love great journalism but im not paying to read about some idiot giving his login password to a hacker pretending to be Comcast

I can cut back and paste.

nvmd, so yeah the laptop was not even connected. fake news

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — President-elect Donald J. Trump, expressing lingering skepticism about intelligence assessments of Russian interference in the election, said on Saturday evening that he knew “things that other people don’t know” about the hacking, and that the information would be revealed “on Tuesday or Wednesday.”

Speaking to a handful of reporters outside his Palm Beach, Fla., club, Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump cast his declarations of doubt as an effort to seek the truth.

“I just want them to be sure because it’s a pretty serious charge,” Mr. Trump said of the intelligence agencies. “If you look at the weapons of mass destruction, that was a disaster, and they were wrong,” he added, referring to intelligence cited by the George W. Bush administration to support its march to war in 2003. “So I want them to be sure,” the president-elect said. “I think it’s unfair if they don’t know.”

He added: “And I know a lot about hacking. And hacking is a very hard thing to prove. So it could be somebody else. And I also know things that other people don’t know, and so they cannot be sure of the situation.”

When asked what he knew that others did not, Mr. Trump demurred, saying only, “You’ll find out on Tuesday or Wednesday.”

Mr. Trump, who does not use email, also advised people to avoid computers when dealing with delicate material. “It’s very important, if you have something really important, write it out and have it delivered by courier, the old-fashioned way, because I’ll tell you what, no computer is safe,” Mr. Trump said.

“I don’t care what they say, no computer is safe,” he added. “I have a boy who’s 10 years old; he can do anything with a computer. You want something to really go without detection, write it out and have it sent by courier.”

I also know things that other people don’t know

Classic. No one can see inside this black box, so no one can contradict any assertions made about it.

It's like a variation on his favorite phrase: believe me!

https://twitter.com/mlcalderone/status/815597707733716993

it's amazing we're going through this again. waterboarding/"torture" all over again. like they never learn

that's what you get for dying and going to hell, which appears to be what happened to all of us.

He's seizing power in just under three weeks - let the fellatio begin!

Speaking of fellatio, Josh Marshall accidentally copied the URL of the lesbian porn he was watching instead of something else he meant to Tweet.

hahaha sorry I love when that happens

He didn't delete it for a long time, either!

He hasn't deleted it.

He did post this tho

https://www.twitter.com/joshtpm/status/815295971915694080

from the replies to that:

Eric Garland ‏@ericgarland 31 Dec 2016
@joshtpm Been reading you for 16 years since you were writing two blocks from my place on Q St, and looking forward to 16 more.

Ian Miller ‏@teen_archer 31 Dec 2016
@ericgarland @joshtpm it's time for some "i came" theory

hahaha

there will be another great recession, huh https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/claiming-mandate-gop-congress-lays-plans-to-propel-sweeping-conservative-agenda/2017/01/01/9840338a-ceee-11e6-b8a2-8c2a61b0436f_story.html?utm_term=.2884bae4b41a&wpisrc=nl_most-draw10&wpmm=1

Well, the super-rich think these recessions are pretty great. After all, they get to pick up a lot of cheap deals during the crash and come out smelling like a rose when, in order to "stimulate the economy and promote job growth" the Republicans will cut their taxes even more, while slashing safety net programs, and the Fed keeps interest rates at zero. Hand them another Great Recession and life's a bowl of cherries!

less "a great recession" and more "direct corporate rule", maintaining general prosperity is for regimes that think there should be restraints on the cops

amazing to be capable of surprise abt how cynical ppl can be right now but the ethics office bill is just luminously craven

it's stunning, yes

OCE gutting proposal withdrawn following public outcry

surprised tbh

it's important to remember that many of the things this congress is pursuing are deeply unpopular. Making sure that the public understands exactly what they are attempting to do may work as a powerful deterrent.

one hopes

OCE gutting proposal withdrawn following public outcry

Will be re-submitted, and pass overwhelmingly, over inauguration weekend, while press is busy talking about who did and didn't attend parties.