Author Archives: TyreeKruse

Clapper: Election Cyber Attacks Were Directed By the Kremlin

by TyreeKruse Posted on January 5, 2017

Mother Jones

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Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said today that the intelligence community believed “more resolutely” than it did three months ago that Russia was behind a campaign of cyberattacks during the presidential election. The LA Times reports on his testimony before Congress:

Three U.S. spy chiefs testified publicly for the first time Thursday that the Kremlin’s most senior leaders approved a Russian intelligence operation aimed at interfering in the U.S. presidential race, a conclusion that President-elect Donald Trump has repeatedly challenged.

….“We assess that only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized the recent election-focused data thefts and disclosures, based on the scope and sensitivity of the targets,” they wrote in joint remarks submitted for the hearing.

….U.S. intelligence analysts have concluded that the Russian cyber operation sought to damage Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and to help Trump’s bid for the White House. Clapper did not confirm that judgment Thursday, although he indicated it would be included in the classified report. “Yes, we will ascribe a motivation,” he said. “I’d rather not preempt the report.”

The full House and the full Senate will be briefed on a classified version of the review next week, Clapper said. After those briefings, a declassified version will be made public, he said….“I intend to push the envelope as much as we can in the unclassified version because I think the public should know as much about this as possible,” Clapper said. “There are some fragile sources and methods.”

I don’t have anything to say about this since, obviously, I don’t know any more than what Clapper told us. We’ll just have to wait for the unclassified report and see what it says.

But I will comment on one thing: aren’t liberals supposed to be the ones who are skeptical of the intelligence community? Are we suddenly defending them just because it’s politically convenient?

There’s some of that going on, I’m sure. But the real reason is a lot simpler: the intelligence community doesn’t really have any motivation to make this stuff up aside from a generalized dislike of Russia. They are interested in keeping everyone on edge about cyberattacks, but that doesn’t require Russia to be involved in what happened. In fact, doubling down on the Russia story even after Trump won is nothing but bad for the CIA. All they’re doing is pissing off the incoming president, something they could easily avoid by keeping the cyberattack story but downplaying the Russia angle.

So this is sort of an admission against interest. The CIA’s interest is in getting more money for cyber security and cultivating a strong relationship with a new president. The fact that they’re doing just the opposite suggests pretty strongly that they believe in no uncertain terms that Russia really is behind this.

Continued here – 

Clapper: Election Cyber Attacks Were Directed By the Kremlin

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President Obama Just Made a Passionate Appeal to the Cuban People to Embrace Democracy

by TyreeKruse Posted on March 22, 2016

Mother Jones

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Just hours after terrorist attacks in Brussels left dozens dead or wounded, President Barak Obama spoke directly to the Cuban people Tuesday morning. He condemned the violence saying, “We must unite, we must be together regardless of race, nationality, or faith,” and then shifted his focus to US Cuban relations.

In the televised broadcast from the Gran Teatro in Havana, he urged the citizens of Cuba to embrace American democracy, outlining the steps he believes they should take in order to ease the path to normalization of relations between the two neighboring countries.

“I have come here to bury the last remnants of the Cold War in the Americas,” Obama said.

Since Obama announced the historic move to restore relations in December of 2014, questions have repeatedly arisen concerning the timing of this reconciliation after more than five decades of hostilities. On Tuesday, Obama said that the approach employed by the United States since the Cold War was no longer working and that “we have to have the courage to acknowledge that truth.”

He also called on Congress to lift the embargo to help expedite the normalization process.

Donald Trump, the Republican front-runner, took no time to respond to Obama’s speech, slamming the president for being in Havana at all.

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President Obama Just Made a Passionate Appeal to the Cuban People to Embrace Democracy

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Newt Gingrich Says Elizabeth Warren’s Signature Program Is "Dictatorial." This Is What It Really Has Done.

by TyreeKruse Posted on December 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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“Today, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is so far outside the historic American model of constitutionally limited government and the rule of law that it is the perfect case study of the pathologies that infect our bureaucracies at the federal level,” former House Speaker Newt Gingrich solemnly intoned in his opening statement as an expert witness at a congressional hearing on December 16. “It is dictatorial. It is unaccountable. It is practically unrestrained in expanding on its already expansive mandate from Congress. And it is contemptuous of the rights, values, and preferences of ordinary Americans.”

Republicans and outside conservative groups spent much of 2015 attacking the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB)—the federal financial regulator that opened in 2011, conceived and launched by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) after it was included in the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform law.

This month’s hearing, where conservatives on the House Financial Services Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee lambasted the CFPB for collecting data on credit card usage, was just the latest in a string of attacks against the consumer agency. Gingrich is a paid adviser to a corporate-funded group, the US Consumer Coalition, that doesn’t disclose the identities of its donors and was founded by a PR firm to attack the agency. In November, a conservative group ran an ad during Republican debates attacking the CFPB and Warren as Soviet operators trying to shut down regular borrowers. Republicans in Congress have consistently introduced bills that would hamper the CFPB’s ability to function by restricting its budget or weighing down its decision-making process with extra bureaucratic layers. Ted Cruz, the senator from Texas and Republican presidential candidate, has gone even further, introducing legislation to eradicate the agency.

But amid the attacks, it’s been easy to lose sight of what the CFPB has actually been up to. Earlier this month, the CFPB released a report examining how one part of its financial regulation has unfolded. The CARD Act, passed in 2010 and overseen by the CFPB, aimed to clean up the credit card industry by eliminating hidden fees that hurt consumers.

According to the CFPB, the CARD Act’s changes saved consumers from $16 billion in these sorts of hidden fees between 2011 and 2014. Most of those savings have been paid for with higher upfront interest rates. Still, the total cost of credit cards declined in the first few years after the law’s enactment and has held steady since then at about 2 percent less than before the CARD Act.

The banking industry has argued that further regulations along these lines would constrict the availability of credit, since companies might decide it is no longer worth offering cards when they won’t reap as much profit off their customers. But the CFPB found that, in fact, approval rates for credit cards are rising, with lines of credit growing as well.

The CFPB plays a broad watchdog role, keeping an eye on financial institutions to see if they’re ripping off consumers. When the for-profit school group Corinthian Colleges closed this year, the CFPB set up $480 million in loan forgiveness for indebted students. In March, the agency issued a set of proposed rules to place new checks on payday lending. (The rules have yet to be finalized.) The agency has also been looking to tackle subprime auto loans and the prevalence of arbitration clauses in contracts in order to make it easier for consumers to file class action lawsuits.

Are these actions against the “preferences of ordinary Americans,” as Gingrich said? It’s hard to say, since most people have little knowledge of the CFPB. When two liberal-leaning groups—Americans for Financial Reform and the Center for Responsible Lending—explained what the CFPB was up to while polling people, they found that 75 percent of respondents supported the agency. Even when the US Consumer Coalition, the industry group Gingrich advises, ran a poll on the CFPB, it found that people generally have a favorable view. Only 19 percent of respondents could identify the CFPB, but of those who were familiar with it, 31 percent had a favorable view, compared with 14 percent who viewed it negatively.

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Newt Gingrich Says Elizabeth Warren’s Signature Program Is "Dictatorial." This Is What It Really Has Done.

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