Tag Archives: nsa

You Think the NSA Is Bad? Meet Former CIA Director Allen Dulles.

by RainaGlasfurd Posted on October 10, 2015

Mother Jones

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“What follows,” David Talbot boasts in the prologue to his new book The Devil’s Chessboard, “is an espionage adventure that is far more action-packed and momentous than any spy tale with which readers are familiar.” Talbot, the founder of Salon.com and author of the Kennedy clan study Brothers, doesn’t deal in subtlety in his biography of Allen Dulles, the CIA director under presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy, the younger brother of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, and the architect of a secretive national security apparatus that functioned as essentially an autonomous branch of government. Talbot offers a portrait of a black-and-white Cold War-era world full of spy games and nuclear brinkmanship, in which everyone is either a good guy or a bad guy. Dulles—who deceived American elected leaders and overthrew foreign ones, who backed ex-Nazis and thwarted left-leaning democrats—falls firmly in the latter camp.

Mother Jones chatted with Talbot about the reporting that went into his 704-page doorstop, the controversy he invited with his discussion of Kennedy-assassination conspiracy theories, and the parallels he sees in today’s government intelligence overreach.

Mother Jones: You seem to have a thing for brothers—particularly for younger brothers in the shadow of their more prominent older brothers. As it happens, you yourself have a successful older brother—former child actor and Emmy Award-winning broadcast journalist Stephen Talbot. Do you see yourself in Allen Dulles or in Bobby Kennedy?

David Talbot: No one has pointed that particular analogy out before. But definitely it’s there. I had a very close relationship and still do with my older brother. We both went into progressive media work, and live in the same city still, San Francisco, and have worked together off and on over the years. So I guess I have a feel for what that chemistry is like between brothers.

MJ: Given that Allen Dulles isn’t exactly a household name these days, did you feel the need to inject your book with extra drama?

DT: No, because I actually do think the history is so epic that it actually kind of writes itself. Dulles is not a household name anymore. He was at the time, though, particularly as part of this two-brother team. He was on the cover of all the magazines. For a spy, he was kind of a glory hog.

But what I was really trying to do was a biography on the American power elite from World War II up to the 60s. That was the key period when the national security state was constructed in this country, and where it begins to overshadow American democracy. It’s almost like Game of Thrones to me, where you have the dynastic struggles between these power groups within the American system for control of the country and the world.

MJ: Is that why you chose not to include much about Dulles’ childhood or his internal strife or the other types of things that tend to dominate biographies?

DT: I focused on those elements that I thought were important to understanding him. I thought other books covered that ground fairly well before me. But what they left out was the interesting nuances and shadow aspects of Dulles’s biography. I think that you can make a case, although I didn’t explicitly say this in the book, for Allen Dulles being a psychopath.

They’ve done studies of people in power, and they all have to be, to some extent, on the spectrum. You have to be unfeeling to a certain extent to send people to their death in war and take the kind of actions that men and women in power routinely have to take. But with Dulles, I think he went to the next step. His own wife and mistress called him “the Shark.” His favorite word was whether you were “useful” to him or not. And this went for people he was sleeping with or people he was manipulating in espionage or so on. He was the kind of man that could cold-bloodedly, again and again, send people to their death, including people he was familiar with and supposedly fond of.

There’s a thread there between people like Dulles up through Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld—who was sitting at Dulles’s knee at one point. I was fascinated to find that correspondence between a young Congressman Rumsfeld and Allen Dulles, who he was looking to for wisdom and guidance as a young politician.

MJ: I’m interested to hear you mention Rumsfeld. Do you think the Bush years compared in ruthlessness or secrecy to what was going on under Dulles?

DT: Definitely. That same kind of dynamic was revived or in some ways expanded after 9/11 by the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld administration. Those guys very much were in keeping with the sort of Dulles ethic, that of complete ruthlessness. It’s this feeling of unaccountability, that democratic sanctions and regulations don’t make sense in today’s ruthless world.

MJ: And do you see echoes of the apparatus that Dulles created in some of the debates today over spying on allies and collection of cellphone records?

DT: Absolutely. The surveillance state that Snowden and others have exposed is very much a legacy of the Dulles past. I think Dulles would have been delighted by how technology and other developments have allowed the American security state to go much further than he went. He had to build a team of cutthroats and assassins on the ground to go around eliminating the people he wanted to eliminate, who he felt were in the way of American interests. He called them communists. We call them terrorists today. And of course the most controversial part of my book, I’m sure, will be the end, where I say there was blowback from that. Because that killing machine in some way was brought back home.

MJ: Let’s talk about that. For 500 pages of the book you lay out Dulles’s acquisition and use and abuse of power in and out of the CIA. And then at the end you take a deep dive back into some of the Kennedy assassination conspiracy ideas that you explored in Brothers. It’s not an uncontroversial subject. Did you worry that including that might color the reaction to the rest of the book?

DT: Yeah, you always worry, because unfortunately this climate has been created over the years that discourages and intimidates scholars and journalists and investigators from looking into these dark corners in American life that should be examined. Poll after poll for the last 50 years has shown that most American people don’t accept the official version. The only people who do are the media establishment and the political establishment, at least in public.

To me it’s one of the greatest examples of media incompetence and negligence in American history. I even confronted Ben Bradlee about this, who was probably JFK’s closest friend in the Washington press corps and wrote a book all about JFK and their close friendship. “Why didn’t you, with your investigative resources, try to get to the bottom of it?” You should read what he says in Brothers, but basically it came down to, “Well, I thought it would ruin my career.”

I think I have studied this about as much as anyone in my generation at this point, and my final conclusion after 50 years was we have to go there, we have to look at the fact that there’s a wealth of circumstantial evidence that says not only was there, at the highest level, CIA involvement. Probably in the assassination cover-up. But beyond the CIA, because the CIA wouldn’t have acted on its own.

During the Kennedy period, there was a sense that he’d broken from the Cold War hegemony and that he was putting the country at risk, and that he was a young, untested president. He was maybe cowardly. He was physically not fit. So they just felt, for the good of the nation, that as painful as it probably was to do, he had to be removed. That’s what I think the consensus finally was about him. And Dulles would have been the person, as the executor of this kind of security wing of the American establishment, who would have been given this job.

MJ: Given that exploring these theories has been perceived as a career-killer, did you not have those same fears yourself?

DT: If you have fears at 63 after a career in journalism like I have, taking the risks I have, then you don’t belong in journalism. That’s what journalism should be all about: taking risks and asking the questions that no one else is.

MJ: Alright, last question for you. Connection cuts out. MJ calls DT back.

DT: Aaron? There you are. They’re fucking with us again! The NSA!

MJ: The NSA, of course. Okay, so: When the Devil’s Chessboard movie comes out, who should play Allen Dulles?

DT: Laughs. That’s a very good question. In fact, the book is being read widely in Hollywood now, and I have no idea. But there have been some interesting suggestions. One is William Hurt, who kind of looks like him now in his older age. You know, to tell you the truth, we’ll see if Hollywood will be willing to take this on. Brothers had a long and winding road in Hollywood. And it was about to go many different times and then the plug was pulled on it. I still think this is kind of a verboten subject in Hollywood, particularly the Kennedy stuff. But, you know, we’ll see. We’ll see if they’re braver with this one.

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You Think the NSA Is Bad? Meet Former CIA Director Allen Dulles.

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Judges Give NSA More Time to Suck Up Your Data

by AEDUlrikewv Posted on August 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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A federal appeals court in Washington, DC, on Friday tossed out an injunction over the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of millions of American’s phone records, but left open the question of whether the program itself is legal.

From Politico:

The three appeals court judges assigned to the case splintered, with each writing a separate opinion. But they overturned a key ruling from December 2013 that critics of the NSA program had used to advance their claims that the collection of information on billions of calls made and received by Americans was illegal.

That ruling, issued by Judge Richard Leon in Washington, sent shockwaves across the legal landscape because it was the first in which a federal court judge sided with critics who questioned the legality of sweeping up data on vast numbers of phone calls–nearly all of them completely unrelated to terrorism.

The new decision Friday from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit did not kill the lawsuit brought by conservative gadfly Larry Klayman. The appeals court voted, 2-1, to allow the lawsuit to proceed in the district court, but the judges left doubts about whether the case will ever succeed.

In June, Congress phased out the NSA’s controversial program with the passing of the USA Freedom Act. The new law forced the NSA to obtain private phone records for counterterrorism investigations on a case-by-case basis through a court order. After the law mandated a six-month transition program for the new program, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ruled that the NSA could continue its existing bulk collection program through November.

The American Civil Liberties Union has also filed an injunction to block the program, arguing that the surveillance court should not have reinstated the program after a federal appeals court in New York found it to be illegal.

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Judges Give NSA More Time to Suck Up Your Data

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AT&T Is the NSA’s Best Friend

by MarlonArchuleta Posted on August 15, 2015

Mother Jones

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New Snowden documents indicate that AT&T has been the biggest and most cooperative supplier of internet and phone data to the NSA:

AT&T has given the N.S.A. access, through several methods covered under different legal rules, to billions of emails as they have flowed across its domestic networks. It provided technical assistance in carrying out a secret court order permitting the wiretapping of all Internet communications at the United Nations headquarters, a customer of AT&T.

….In September 2003, according to the previously undisclosed N.S.A. documents, AT&T was the first partner to turn on a new collection capability that the N.S.A. said amounted to a “ ‘live’ presence on the global net.” In one of its first months of operation, the Fairview program forwarded to the agency 400 billion Internet metadata records — which include who contacted whom and other details, but not what they said — and was “forwarding more than one million emails a day to the keyword selection system” at the agency’s headquarters in Fort Meade, Md.

….In 2011, AT&T began handing over 1.1 billion domestic cellphone calling records a day to the N.S.A. after “a push to get this flow operational prior to the 10th anniversary of 9/11,” according to an internal agency newsletter. This revelation is striking because after Mr. Snowden disclosed the program of collecting the records of Americans’ phone calls, intelligence officials told reporters that, for technical reasons, it consisted mostly of landline phone records.

US spying on the UN was stopped in 2013 after it was first reported, but it was never clear just exactly how much spying had gone on in the first place. We still don’t know, but one of the documents in this new collection says the NSA was authorized to conduct “full-take access,” and that the amount of data was so large that it flooded the NSA’s technical capability unless a “robust filtering mechanism” was put in place. Sounds like a lot of spying.

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AT&T Is the NSA’s Best Friend

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Rand Paul’s Latest Fundraiser Now Underway

by SteveBorrie Posted on May 20, 2015

Mother Jones

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I see from the intertubes that Sen. Rand Paul has begun another talking filibuster. This time it’s to protest any legislation that extends the NSA’s ability to access metadata from phone calls, even if the data is held by the phone companies and available only by court order. Paul’s filibuster will annoy a lot of people, but in the end I think I agree, for once, with John McCain: “He’ll get his headline and then we’ll move on.”

That’s pretty much the lay of the land. Paul will chew up some floor time, which might end up eating into Memorial Day weekend for the Senate, but since virtually no one agrees with his position, it’s simply not going to accomplish anything. I’m even a little skeptical about the headlines. Frankly, once you’ve done the Jimmy Stewart bit once, its entertainment value starts to plummet.

On the other hand, Paul seems to be mostly treating this as another great fundraising opportunity, and it might very well be. But that’s probably all it will be.

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Rand Paul’s Latest Fundraiser Now Underway

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How Humans Can Keep Superintelligent Robots From Murdering Us All

by OscarWynne Posted on May 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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While Kevin Drum is focused on getting better, we’ve invited some of the remarkable writers and thinkers who have traded links and ideas with him from Blogosphere 1.0 to this day to contribute posts and keep the conversation going. Today, we’re honored to present a post from Bill Gardner, a health services researcher in Ottawa, Ontario, and a blogger at The Incidental Economist.

This weekend, you, I, and about 100 million other people will see Avengers: Age of Ultron. The story is that Tony Stark builds Ultron, an artificially intelligent robot, to protect Earth. But Ultron decides that the best way to fulfill his mission is to exterminate humanity. Violence ensues.

You will likely dismiss the premise of the story. But in a book I highly recommend, Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom argues that sometime in the future a machine will achieve “general intelligence,” that is, the ability to solve problems in virtually all domains of interest. Because one such domain is research in artificial intelligence, the machine would be able to rapidly improve itself.

The abilities of such a machine would quickly transcend our abilities. The difference, Bostrom believes, would not be like that between Einstein and a cognitively disabled person. The difference would be like that between Einstein and a beetle. When this happens, machines can and likely would displace humans as the dominant life form. Humans may be trapped in a dystopia, if they survive at all.

Competent people—Elon Musk, Bill Gates—take this risk seriously. Stephen Hawking and physics Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek worry that we are not thinking hard enough about the future of artificial intelligence.

So, facing possible futures of incalculable benefits and risks, the experts are surely doing everything possible to ensure the best outcome, right? Wrong. If a superior alien civilization sent us a text message saying, “We’ll arrive in a few decades,” would we just reply, “OK, call us when you get here—we’ll leave the lights on”? Probably not—but this is more or less what is happening with AI…little serious research is devoted to these issues…All of us…should ask ourselves what can we do now to improve the chances of reaping the benefits and avoiding the risks.

There are also competent people who dismiss these concerns. University of California-Berkeley philosopher John Searle argues that intelligence requires qualities that computers lack, including consciousness and motivation. This doesn’t mean that we are safe from artificially intelligent machines. Perhaps in the future killer drones will hunt all humans, not just Al Qaeda. But Searle claims that if this happens, it won’t be because the drones reflected on their goals and decided that they needed to kill us. It will be because human beings have programmed drones to kill us.

Searle has made this argument for years, but has never offered a reason why it will always be impossible to engineer machines with autonomy and general intelligence. If it’s not impossible, we need to look for possible paths of human evolution in which we safely benefit from the enormous potential of artificial intelligence.

What can we do? I’m a wild optimist. In my lifetime I have seen an extraordinary expansion of human capabilities for creation and community. Perhaps there is a future in which individual and collective human intelligence can grow rapidly enough that we keep our place as free beings. Perhaps humans can acquire cognitive superpowers.

But the greatest challenge of the future will not be the engineering of this commonwealth, but rather its governance. So we have to think big, think long-term, and live in hope. We need to cooperate as a species and steer our technological development so that we do not create machines that displace us. At the same time, we need to protect ourselves from the expanding surveillance of our current governments (such as China’s Great Firewall or the NSA). I doubt we can achieve this enhanced community unless we also find a way to make sure the superpowers of enhanced cognition are available to everyone. Maybe the only alternative to dystopia will be utopia.

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How Humans Can Keep Superintelligent Robots From Murdering Us All

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Look At the Stuff You Can Buy in Rand Paul’s Online Store

by JurgenCisco Posted on April 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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While GOP presidential candidate Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has a tough road to the nomination, in one area, he may already be the winner: campaign merchandise. Today, the Paul campaign unveiled an expansive online store with a variety of items, ranging from the goofy to the inspired to the downright hideous. There is no denying it: Rand Paul means business. Here’s the best of what he has to offer:

Eye Chart

Rand Paul Store

Rand Paul is an eye doctor by training, and he’s continued to practice since becoming a senator. This sign, retailing for $20.16, should be a hit with Rand fans. “Professionally, he has corrected the vision of thousands and now will do the same thing in the White House,” the page says. “And we’re not talking about a new prescription for President Obama.” (Burn!)

Bag Toss Game

Rand Paul Store

“Bag toss game,” also known as cornhole, is a treasured past-time among the collar-popping College Republicans who are some of Paul’s most enthusiastic supporters. Look for this soon on a college campus near you. Boat shoes apparently not included, though you can score Rand beer koozies to go with it—six for $25!

Ladies Constitution Burnout Tee

Rand Paul Store

“Every fashionable Constitutional conservative needs this ladies fashion burnout tee,” the site proclaims. Good luck getting burned out on the Constitution if you’re wearing it. Unless you burn the shirt. But you shouldn’t do that. (It’s $40.)

Rand Paul Beats Headphone Skins

Rand Paul Store

Beats by Rand: No need to know what the kids are listening to when you are what the kids are listening to. With these $20 headphone “skins,” Paul may have just won the vote of every conservative with a $300 pair of headphones.

The Real Rand Woven Blanket

Rand Paul Store

This could be perceived as a craven play to stake out the GOP’s cuddle caucus. “It might be fun to have Rand in your living room at night engaging in deep discussions about objectivism, libertarianism, conservatism and a few other isms,” the site says. (Easy now, tiger.) For $75, you’ll have to settle for this.

NSA Spy Cam Blocker

Rand Paul Store

Admittedly, this is an extremely on-brand item for Rand. He will literally shield you from the prying eyes of the NSA while you “browse Facebook.” Of course, there is a very low chance the NSA is using your webcam to spy on you, unless you’ve ordered an Islamic State travel guide or have a few too many Yemeni passport stamps. Also to consider: the “spy cam blocker” has already been endorsed by InfoWars.

Rand Macbook Skin

Rand Paul Store

So you have a MacBook—congratulations. You are very cool. For $20, though, you can be even cooler. With this.

Stand With Rand Car Mats

Rand Paul Store

Stand With Rand is all over the Rand store, and this is a nice application of the clever slogan. But the suggestion that one stand with both feet on the mat, while driving, is a dangerous one. If you must, you should Sit with Rand.

Whether or not anyone actually buys any of these things, it’s pretty clear the Rand Paul merchandise team’s launch was a slam dunk compared to the Rand Paul digital strategy team’s launch. Check out some of the banners they made for people to use as avatars on Facebook:

Get those guys a bag toss set, stat.

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Look At the Stuff You Can Buy in Rand Paul’s Online Store

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Russians Dismantle Steve Jobs Memorial After Tim Cook Comes Out as Gay

by DominikTreasure Posted on November 3, 2014

Mother Jones

Russian media is reporting that a memorial to Steve Jobs in St. Petersburg was dismantled on Friday, one day after current Apple CEO Tim Cook came out as gay.

A group of Russian companies called the Western European Fiscal Union (ZEFS) erected the more than six-foot tall monument, shaped like an iPhone and featuring an interactive screen that showed information about the Apple founder, in January of 2013, outside of an IT research university in St. Petersburg.

The ZEFS press office said the monument was taken down in order to comply with Russia’s law prohibiting “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations to minors” a broadly-worded law passed in June 2013 that effectively criminalizes most LGBT expression.

ZEFS noted in their statement that the memorial had been “in an area of direct access for young students and scholars.”

“After Apple CEO Tim Cook publicly called for sodomy, the monument was taken down to abide by the Russian federal law protecting children from information promoting denial of traditional family values.”

Shortly after Cook wrote publicly about being gay, famously anti-gay St. Petersburg legislator Vitaly Milonov suggested that Cook be banned from Russia forever, because he might bring Ebola, AIDs, and gonorrhea into the country.

According to Russian media reports, ZEFS gave a second reason for the monument’s removal: revelations by Edward Snowden that Apple sends information about its users to America’s National Security Agency. (When these revelations first came to light, Apple denied having knowledge of the NSA’s surveillance.)

Russian media also reported that the head of ZEFS said he wouldn’t be opposed to re-installing the monument, provided that it had the capability to send a message to the US rejecting all Apple products.

So the next logical step here would be for Russia’s elite to give up their personal iPhones, right? Well, fat chance.

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Russians Dismantle Steve Jobs Memorial After Tim Cook Comes Out as Gay

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Unredacted Court Docs Reveal Yahoo’s Name and Other Top-Secret Stuff

by Jeff Howard Posted on September 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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Yahoo has just released 1,500 pages of previously classified documents relating to its legal challenge to the government’s warrantless wiretapping program. Yahoo lost the case in 2008 and was ordered to cooperate with National Security Agency or face a $250,000 fine for every day that it withheld its customers’ data. The ruling in Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which was released to the public only in heavily redacted form, became a legal precedent for the warrantless wiretapping program that was later revealed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Today, based on a successful appeal by Yahoo, a slightly less redacted version of that court ruling finally became public.

Below, I’ve posted the more lightly redacted version released today as well as the redacted version of the ruling released in 2008. A side-by-side reading of the two documents may offer some insight into how the government has sought to cover up the true nature of its surveillance activities, or it might just be an example of how little has changed.

The new version of the ruling is notable for what it doesn’t disclose: Key evidence presented by the government. A block of text that had previously been removed from the ruling still does not fully explain why warrantless searches are necessary to thwart terrorists:

Scanning the 1,500 pages of newly unsealed documents will take a while. Here are few examples of new information contained in the partially unredacted ruling:

The name of the plaintiff (Yahoo) and its law firm
A footnote defining the term “surveillance” to mean “acquisitions of foreign intelligence information.” But part of the definition of the term still remains redacted.
The date when the government moved to force Yahoo to comply with the order (November 21, 2007)
A mention of “linking procedures” (defined as “procedures that link redacted targets.”) as a one of the safeguards against unreasonable searches

You can help us out by pointing out any other interesting tidbits in the comments; we’ll note additional highlights here if we find anything worth noting.

The slightly less redacted ruling released today:

DV.load(“//www.documentcloud.org/documents/1301184-11-yahoo702-fisc-merits-opinion-1.js”,
width: 630,
height: 800,
sidebar: false,
text: false,
pdf: false,
container: “#DV-viewer-1301184-11-yahoo702-fisc-merits-opinion-1”
);

The original redacted court ruling:

DV.load(“//www.documentcloud.org/documents/1300547-fiscr082208-2.js”,
width: 630,
height: 800,
sidebar: false,
text: false,
pdf: false,
container: “#DV-viewer-1300547-fiscr082208-2”
);

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Unredacted Court Docs Reveal Yahoo’s Name and Other Top-Secret Stuff

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How Hackable Are Your Security Questions?

by Gabrielle Hartzog Posted on September 3, 2014

Mother Jones

Kevin Roose writes today that security questions are ridiculously easy to hack and we should get rid of them:

There are all kinds of ways to lock down your most important accounts — Gizmodo’s guide is a good place to start….Eventually, some advanced form of biometric authentication (fingerprints, retina scans) may become standard, and security questions may get phased out altogether.

But until then, when so many better options exist, there’s no reason a company like Apple should be relying on questions like “What was the model of your first car?” for password recovery in 2014. If that’s the best way we have of making sure a user is legit, we might as well change all of our passwords to “1234” and hope for the best.

All kinds of ways? I was intrigued. So I clicked on the Gizmodo link and found….two suggestions. The first is two-step authentication, which is a fine idea for anyone with a cell phone. The second is encrypting all your data. But like it or not, this is much too hard for most people to implement. There’s just no way it’s going to become widespread anytime in the near future.

So, basically, there aren’t all kinds of ways to lock down your most important accounts. There’s one. And even it only works on some accounts. If my bank doesn’t offer it, then I can’t use it.

I’d offer a different perspective. First, the level of security you need depends on who you are. If you think the NSA is after you, then your security better be pretty damn good. If you’re a celebrity, then it needs to be pretty good. If you’re just some regular guy, then the truth is that fairly ordinary measures are adequate. You should use decently secure passwords, but that’s probably about all you need to do for most of your accounts. Two-step authentication is a good idea for cloud accounts.

As for security questions, I suppose I’m on Roose’s side. Just get rid of them. They’re too easy to guess, especially for friends and family. Instead, either use a password manager or else create random passwords for your accounts and write them down on a piece of paper that you hide somewhere. I know you’ve been told forever to never write down your passwords, but the truth is that low-tech paper is actually pretty damn secure compared to anything digital.

Still, I can’t help but take Roose’s post as something of a challenge. Can we come up with security questions that don’t suck? At a minimum they need two characteristics. First, the answers have to be clear and distinct. I’ve never been able to use “first pet,” for example, because that’s a little fuzzy. I can think of several possibilities. Second, the answers need to be genuinely hard to guess, even for family and friends—but still easy to remember for you. They don’t need to be perfect, but they should certainly be better than “first car.” Any ideas?

UPDATE: Also, I’m curious about something. For us ordinary mortals, there has to be some way to recover lost passwords. What should it be?

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How Hackable Are Your Security Questions?

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Hitler Comparisons, Santa Impersonators, and “Al Qaeda’s Best Friend”: Highlights From Tuesday Night’s GOP Primaries

by KelleyCooley Posted on August 6, 2014

Mother Jones

The Obama Cousin Who Compared Obama to Hitler Just Lost His Kansas GOP Primary

Fred Blocher/Kansas City Star/ZumaPress.com

Unseating an incumbent senator is always difficult, but Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kansas) presented an enticing challenge. In an interview with the New York Times, Roberts said he sleeps on a friend’s recliner on the rare occasions he returns to Kansas. Later, in a radio interview, he admitted that he tries to return to Kansas “every time I get an opponent.” Roberts might have been in trouble against a serious challenger. Instead he faced political newcomer Milton Wolf, whom he dispatched by seven points on Tuesday.

Wolf’s qualifications as a Kansas tea party activist began with his family tree. He is a second cousin of President Barack Obama—whom he compared to Hitler—and a doctor, qualifications that earned him invitations to appear on cable news and talk radio to critique the Affordable Care Act as an unconstitutional attack on Americans’ liberties. But Wolf’s hopes of becoming the next great conservative insurgent candidate died in February at a Topeka diner, where a reporter from the Topeka Capital-Journal confronted him about images on his Facebook page (deleted before the campaign) of x-rays he’d taken of gunshot victims. Although billed as a tea party vs. establishment showdown, the Roberts-Wolf race was more of a referendum on social media protocol. And in Kansas, the verdict is clear: You shouldn’t post x-rays of gunshot victims on Facebook. —TM

GOP Rebel Justin Amash Just Beat a Guy Who Called Him “Al Qaeda’s Best Friend”

Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) AP

The GOP’s business establishment talked openly about making conservative hardliners pay for pushing Washington toward a debt ceiling crisis last fall. But that wave of Chamber of Commerce-funded primary challengers to conservative incumbents never materialized. The Chamber settled on trying to take out Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.), a second term congressman and Ron Paul disciple famous for voting on no on pretty much everything—even the Paul Ryan budget—and for cobbling together a bipartisan coalition to rein in the NSA’s domestic surveillance programs. It was the first part that drew the ire of business interests in his district, and the second part that made him the villain in one of the year’s nastiest campaign ads. Amash, challenger Brian Ellis warned, was “Al Qaeda’s best friend” in Congress.

Ellis received a rare primary endorsement from an incumbent member of Amash’s Michigan delegation, GOP Rep. Mike Rogers, an NSA defender. But we’re not in 2002 anymore; it turns out Amash’s civil libertarianism plays pretty well in the western Michigan district that gave America Gerald Ford. Boosted by deep-pocketed donors of his own (including the DeVos family), Amash eased past Ellis, making him a sure-thing to win a third term in November. —TM

Michigan GOP Primary Results: “Foreclosure King” Beats Santa Impersonator

Trott for Congress; Kerry Bentivolio/Facebook

The War on Christmas seems to comes earlier every year: Rep. Kerry Bentivolio (R-Mich.), a Santa impersonator who was elected to Congress by accident in 2012, was defeated in a 30-point landslide on Tuesday, becoming this year’s first (and probably only) victim of the Republican establishment’s dissatisfaction with congressional tea partiers.

Bentivolio won his party’s nomination two years ago in a fluke after the incumbent, Rep. Thad McCotter, failed to qualify for the ballot and abruptly resigned. (A high school teacher and reindeer rancher, Bentivolio was the only Republican left on the ballot.) Bentivolio never fully sold himself as a serious congressman—he once promised to hold a hearing on chemtrails, the conspiracy theory that airplanes are brainwashing Americans with poison—making him an obvious target, despite winning the backing of Speaker of the House John Boehner.

More interesting than Bentivolio, who always had a placeholder feel to him, is the man who trounced him the primary—David Trott, a high-powered Republican donor whose law firm happens to process most of Michigan’s foreclosures. As one registrar of deeds in southeast Michigan put it in December, Trott & Trott “made a living off of monetizing human misery.” A big donor to the pro-Romney super-PAC Restore Our Future, and a member of the 2012 GOP presidential nominee’s Michigan finance committee, Trott is an archetypal establishment Republican.

But he’ll still have his work cut out for him: Romney won the 11th district by just four points in 2012. He’ll take on the winner of the Democratic race between former CIA analyst Bobby McKenzie (backed by national Democrats) and urologist Anil Kumar. —TM

Tea Partier Staves Off Primary Challenge in Koch Country

Todd Tiahrt (left) and Rep. Mike Pompeo (right) at a July debate in Wichita. Mike Hutmacher/AP

Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.) withstood a challenge from his predecessor, former Rep. Todd Tiahrt, in a battle for the House district that’s home to Charles Koch, the billionaire GOP donor and industrialist, and his company, Koch Industries. Tiahrt was a close ally of Koch Industries during his House tenure in the ’90s and 2000s, taking in more than $329,000 from the company’s PAC and employees over the course of his career. But Pompeo—whom Tiahrt handpicked to replace him when he ran for US Senate (and lost) in 2010—has since become Koch’s favorite son. The company endorsed Pompeo this time around. Koch’s backing boosted the incumbent’s monetary advantage. As of July 16, Pompeo had raised a little over $2 million, while Tiahrt had only drawn $155,000 (with just $65,000 left in the bank).

Pompeo was the incumbent, but his success is actually a win for the tea party. As a congressman, Tiahrt was a founding member of the House tea party caucus. But for his comeback attempt, he ditched his prior conservative persona and ran as a moderate, even populist Republican, arguing for the reinstatement of earmarks and questioning Pompeo’s support for NSA spying. Conservative groups, including the Club for Growth, FreedomWorks, and Americans for Prosperity lined up to support Pompeo, a tea party favorite since he joined the House in 2011. There won’t be a revival of moderate conservatism in Kochland anytime soon. —PC

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Hitler Comparisons, Santa Impersonators, and “Al Qaeda’s Best Friend”: Highlights From Tuesday Night’s GOP Primaries

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