Tag Archives: washington

In Israel, It’s Build, Build, Build

by GarryKellogg Posted on February 1, 2017

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

In Israel, it’s a new era:

Israel approved 3,000 more housing units in the occupied West Bank late Tuesday, the largest number in a wave of new construction plans that defy the international community and that open a forceful phase in the country’s expansion into land the Palestinians claim for a future state.

Emboldened by the new Trump administration and internal battles at home, Israel announced plans for the new units in about a dozen settlements a week after approving 2,500 homes in the West Bank and 566 in East Jerusalem.

….Mr. Trump seems not to share former President Barack Obama’s opposition to the settlements….Husam Zomlot, strategic affairs adviser to Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority said that Mr. Netanyahu was using this time of political transition in the United States to test how the new administration’s stance might differ from that of Mr. Obama. The Israeli prime minister is to meet with Mr. Trump in Washington on Feb. 15.

In return for Trump’s support, perhaps Netanyahu will loan him a few experts in wall building.

Visit source: 

In Israel, It’s Build, Build, Build

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on In Israel, It’s Build, Build, Build

Students With Valid Visas Are Trapped in Limbo Abroad

by TommieGrout Posted on January 30, 2017

Mother Jones

On Saturday morning, Niki Mossafer Rahmati got off her flight from Tehran in Doha, Qatar to board a connecting flight to Boston, when she got caught up in the chaos set off by President Trump’s immigration order.

Rahmati, an MIT junior studying mechanical engineering, had been home with her family for winter break when she received word Wednesday morning of the pending executive order. She changed her flight to return to Boston right away, only to find that order had gone into effect in the middle of her connecting flight to Doha. She and some 30 other Iranians with legal visas were blocked from boarding the plane and sent back to Tehran. Among them, Rahmati says, were two women traveling to their pregnant daughters to help them through their last trimester.

“Do any of the people sound like illegal immigrants?” Rahmati asked in a public Facebook post after arriving back home in Tehran. “This will not secure the borders from terrorism and illegal immigrants. It will only increase racism in the American society. The president is trying to make Islamophobia a norm and policy by which he wants to lead the country.”

“My inbox is flooded with messages and emails of love and support,” she also wrote. “But I cannot believe all this love is coming from the same country that banned me from entering its borders just a couple of hours ago.”

Rahmati is just one among many students from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen who have been barred from returning to school. MIT alone has 38 students from Iran, 1 from Iraq, 5 from Syria, 2 from Sudan, and 1 from Somalia; two, including Rahmati, were reportedly unable to board flights back to Boston. According to the New York Times, students from Stanford, Harvard, and Yale, among other universities, have also been affected.

Yesterday, after thousands of protesters stormed US airports to fight for the release of people detained upon arrival, a federal judge in Brooklyn blocked part of President Trump’s order by temporarily allowing valid visa holders who had landed in the US to stay. Federal judges in Massachusetts, Virginia, and Washington quickly followed suit, with the Massachusetts order additionally restraining enforcement of the order for visa holders traveling back to the US in the next seven days.

In response, MIT issued an statement urging students and staff to “fly back to Boston—directly to Logan Airport—as soon as possible, and before February 4.” Whether or not the court order will be respected by Custom and Border Protection officials abroad is unknown.

Rahmati is a member of the sorority Sigma Kappa and counselor for the MIT chapter of Camp Kesem, a national nonprofit that operates free summer camps for children whose parents have had cancer. For weeks before heading home for break, Rahmati had been fundraising for this summer’s camp. After the election, Rahmati encouraged her friends to keep an open mind to Trump supporters, according to her roommate.

As news of her situation has spread, the MIT community sprang into action, calling elected officials and circulating a White House petition. At this writing, her ability to return to MIT to finish her undergraduate remains uncertain.

See the original post:

Students With Valid Visas Are Trapped in Limbo Abroad

Posted in alo, FF, GE, LG, Mop, ONA, Radius, Safer, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Students With Valid Visas Are Trapped in Limbo Abroad

Here Comes The First Suit Challenging Trump’s "Muslim Ban"

by GaryBriscoe Posted on January 28, 2017

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Within hours of President Donald Trump signing his “Muslim ban” executive order Friday, the Council on American-Islamic Relations announced that it is about to file a lawsuit challenging the ban.

The order, called “Protection of the Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry Into the United States,” denies entry to the US to anyone from Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Syria, Libya, Somalia, and Yemen, according to CNN. The order also freezes refugee admissions for 120 days.

“There is no evidence that refugees—the most thoroughly vetted of all people entering our nation—are a threat to national security,” CAIR national litigation director Lena Masri said in a release. The group says it will announce details of the lawsuit Monday.

Demonstrators have been protesting the order ever since a draft was leaked on Wednesday.

Originally posted here:  

Here Comes The First Suit Challenging Trump’s "Muslim Ban"

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Here Comes The First Suit Challenging Trump’s "Muslim Ban"

Management Team at State Department Resigns En Masse

by LibbyEnnor Posted on January 26, 2017

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

WTF?

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s job running the State Department just got considerably more difficult. The entire senior level of management officials resigned Wednesday, part of an ongoing mass exodus of senior foreign service officers who don’t want to stick around for the Trump era.

…Patrick Kennedy and three of his top officials resigned unexpectedly, four State Department officials confirmed. Assistant Secretary of State for Administration Joyce Anne Barr, Assistant Secretary of State for Consular Affairs Michele Bond and Ambassador Gentry O. Smith, director of the Office of Foreign Missions, followed him out the door. All are career foreign service officers who have served under both Republican and Democratic administrations.

…In addition, Assistant Secretary of State for Diplomatic Security Gregory Starr retired Jan. 20, and the director of the Bureau of Overseas Building Operations, Lydia Muniz, departed the same day. That amounts to a near-complete housecleaning of all the senior officials that deal with managing the State Department, its overseas posts and its people.

…Several senior foreign service officers in the State Department’s regional bureaus have also left their posts or resigned since the election. But the emptying of leadership in the management bureaus is more disruptive…”Diplomatic security, consular affairs, there’s just not a corollary that exists outside the department, and you can least afford a learning curve in these areas where issues can quickly become matters of life and death.”

That’s from Josh Rogin of the Washington Post. Were these people pushed out? Did something happen that caused them to want nothing to do with the incoming regime? Nobody knows. This is very, very peculiar.

Read original article:

Management Team at State Department Resigns En Masse

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Management Team at State Department Resigns En Masse

Donald Trump’s Foreign Business Partners Got VIP Treatment During the Inauguration

by KOPManuela Posted on January 25, 2017

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Donald Trump vowed to wall himself off from his business interests when he became president—but at least two of his wealthy foreign business partners attended his inauguration as VIPs, where they watched the swearing-in from prime seats, partied with Trump insiders, and posed for pictures with Trump’s children and grandchildren. Here’s just one example of their incredible access during the inaugural festivities: The wife of one of Trump’s partners, Indonesian billionaire Hary Tanoesoedibjo, posted a video from inside a vehicle driving the locked-down parade route after the ceremony, as police officers stood at attention and spectators waited behind barricades for a glimpse of the new first family.

Penjagaan ketat dan ratusan ribu penonton memadati pinggir jalan protokoler untuk melihat “inaugural parade”

A video posted by liliana tanoesoedibjo (@liliana_tanoesoedibjo) on Jan 20, 2017 at 2:52pm PST

Despite repeated warnings from ethics experts that he needed to take dramatic steps to separate himself from his sprawling business empire, Trump entered the Oval Office with unprecedented conflicts of interest, including lucrative partnerships with a slew of rich foreign developers around the globe. At a press conference on January 11, Trump announced he would place his assets in a trust controlled by his sons—though not a blind trust, as experts had recommended—and that his company would cease cutting new deals with foreign interests during his time in office.

But Trump made clear that existing foreign deals would remain in place. Partners in two of those projects—Tanoesoedibjo, with whom Trump is developing a pair of luxury resorts in Indonesia, and Hussain Sajwani, a Dubai-based real estate developer who has licensed Trump’s name for luxury villas and lush desert golf courses—attended the inaugural festivities.

The conflict-of-interest laws that govern all other federal employees don’t apply to the president, but Trump’s foreign entanglements take him into ethically murky terrain. Some experts, including the lawyers who advised George W. Bush and Barack Obama, believe some of his dealings with foreign partners could violate the Constitution. Days into his presidency, in fact, Trump was hit with a lawsuit spearheaded by prominent ethics lawyers alleging that he is in breach of the Constitution’s emoluments clause, which prohibits federal officials from receiving financial benefits from foreign governments. The clause typically applies to payments or gifts from foreign officials and governments, but Tanoesoedibjo offers a good example of just how convoluted Trump’s conflict issues could become. Tanoesoedibjo, who has previously run for office in Indonesia, has formed his own political party and, in the wake of Trump’s victory, is contemplating his own presidential run.

Both Tanoesoedibjo and his wife, Liliana, documented their trip to the inauguration on Instagram, starting with a pre-inauguration visit to New York, where the couple met with Donald and Eric Trump at Trump Tower and then lunched with Donald Jr.

In Washington, the couple posted photos of themselves at their room at the Trump hotel, at a reception where they mingled with a Trump resort executive, and on the steps of the US Capitol at the inaugural ceremony, where Tanoesoedibjo gave an interview to Voice of America. In the interview, Tanoesoedibjo dismissed conflict-of-interest concerns over Trump’s business dealings with foreign partners.

Trump’s inaugural committee offered major perks to donors who contributed at least $100,000 toward the event, including a complimentary shuttle service to ferry them and their guests to and from events. But as foreign nationals, the Tanoesoedibjos—and the Sajwanis—are prohibited by law from contributing to this or other political committees. Neither the White House nor the Trump Organization responded to requests for comment about the Tanoesoedibjos’ and Sajwanis’ attendance at the inauguration.

After the swearing-in ceremony, the Tanoesoedibjos posted more photos of the festivities, including some showing them posing with the families of Eric and Donald Trump Jr.

The Tanoesoedibjos’ social-media posts also show that Hussain Sajwani attended Trump’s inauguration. Sajwani is a wealthy Middle Eastern businessman, based in Dubai, where he is the chairman of DAMAC Properties, a real estate development firm that has partnered with Trump to open Trump-branded golf courses and luxury villas in Dubai. The newest course is set to open early next month. At Trump’s New Year’s Eve celebration at Mar-a-Lago, he praised Sajwani, who he said was in attendance.

At his January 11 press conference, Trump said he was so committed to eliminating possible conflicts of interest that he had recently turned down a new deal with Sajwani.

“Over the weekend I was offered $2 billion to do a deal in Dubai with a very, very, very amazing man, a great great developer from the Middle East,” Trump said. “Hussein, DAMAC, a friend of mine, a great guy. I was offered $2 billion to do a deal in Dubai, a number of deals, and I turned it down. I didn’t have to turn it down because as you know I have a no-conflict situation because I’m president.”

But he didn’t address his ongoing deals with Sajwani. According to Trump’s last personal financial disclosure, filed in May, the president earns between $2 million and $10 million a year from his licensing deals with DAMAC.

Bersama Hussain Sajwani, Chairman & CEO Damac Group, perusahaan properti dari Dubai, partner Trump Organization

A photo posted by Hary Tanoesoedibjo (@hary.tanoesoedibjo) on Jan 21, 2017 at 1:38am PST

In an interview earlier this month, Sajwani reportedly said he thought Trump’s election would be good for his business. “Naturally, I think we will benefit from the strength of the brand going forward,” he told CNBC.

In an Instagram post just hours after the inauguration, Ali Sajwani, Hussain Sajwani’s son, was more effusive, writing that “the world is looking forward to a lucrative eight years ahead!”

With the man who will #MakeAmericaGreatAgain !

It’s not clear whether the younger Sajwani (who describes himself as an owner of DAMAC on his LinkedIn page and public bio) attended the inauguration or if the photo is from an earlier encounter. A spokesman for DAMAC did not return a request for comment.

Update: A third foreign business associate attended Trump’s inauguration and posted photographs of the festivities on Instagram. Joo Kim Tiah, the son of one of Malaysia’s wealthiest men, is Trump’s partner on his new Vancouver hotel tower, slated to open in early February.

A photo posted by Joo Kim Tiah (@jookimtiah) on Jan 20, 2017 at 9:39pm PST

Link – 

Donald Trump’s Foreign Business Partners Got VIP Treatment During the Inauguration

Posted in FF, GE, LG, Northeastern, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Donald Trump’s Foreign Business Partners Got VIP Treatment During the Inauguration

Donald Trump Demands an Apology From You

by ElvinEwers9297 Posted on January 16, 2017

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Just out of curiosity, I did a quick check to see how many people/organizations Donald Trump has demanded an apology from since he began his presidential campaign. The answer is 21:

Intelligence chiefs
Cast and producers of Hamilton
Mika Brzezinski
The media
Ruth Bader Ginsburg
CNN
Wall Street Journal
Vicente Fox
Mark Halperin
Hillary Clinton
Rachel Maddow
Chuck Todd
Chris Christie
The liberal media
The Washington Post
Carly Fiorina
Fox News
Tom Llamas
Charles Krauthammer
John McCain
Univision

For a guy who never apologizes himself, he sure does demand a lot of apologies from others, doesn’t he?

This article is from:  

Donald Trump Demands an Apology From You

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Donald Trump Demands an Apology From You

This Bumble Bee was Just Added to the Endangered Species List

by ClydeBrigstocke Posted on January 13, 2017

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Earlier this week, the rusty patched bumblebee became the first bee in the continental United States to be added to the endangered species list. The designation was one of the Obama Administration’s last environmental moves.

There’s good reason this bee is now on the list: Its population has plummeted by 87 percent since the 1990s. According to the Fish and Wildlife Service, the bee once inhabited two provinces of Canada as well as 28 states, and Washington DC. Today it’s found in only two of its original habitats.

Greg Hottman/Flickr

The combination of disease, climate change, and loss of habitat have contributed to the species’ decline. But perhaps the greatest threat to this and other bees is neonicotinoids, a type of insecticide that’s commonly used on farm crops, pets, and gardens. (My colleague Tom Philpott has written extensively on the subject.) Bumblebees are thought to be even more susceptible to pesticides than honey bees are.

Sadly, many other organisms rely on this species to reproduce: The rusty patched bumble is a pollinator for various plants, including peppers, cranberries, and tomatoes.

Though the insect is the first bee in the continental United States to be placed on the list, seven yellow-faced bees, found in Hawaii, were put on the endangered species list in September of last year.

While the rusty patched bumble bee enjoys more protection under the Endangered Species Act, please enjoy these photos of the fuzzy creatures.

Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry/Flickr

Smithsonian’s National Zoo

Dan Mullen/Flickr

USGS Bee Inventory and Monitoring Lab/Flickr

Jump to original – 

This Bumble Bee was Just Added to the Endangered Species List

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Smith's, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on This Bumble Bee was Just Added to the Endangered Species List

Should BuzzFeed Have Published the Trump Dossier?

by RosieYilbvfpn Posted on January 11, 2017

Mother Jones

Last night, BuzzFeed decided to publish a dossier of raw intelligence put together by a British former MI6 officer. Like most reports of this kind, it contains lots of tittle-tattle, and there’s a good chance that much of it is untrue. So should BuzzFeed have published? Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan makes the case against:

It’s never been acceptable to publish rumor and innuendo. And none of the circumstances surrounding this episode — not CNN’s story, not Trump’s dubious history with Russia, not the fact that the intelligence community made a report on it — should change that ethical rule.

Quite so, and virtually every mainstream media reporter seems to agree. And yet, I’m not so sure. Several things happened in the past couple of days that make this a trickier question:

The intelligence community briefed Obama, Trump, and several members of Congress about the contents of the dossier.

CNN reported that “US intelligence agencies have now checked out the former British intelligence operative and his vast network throughout Europe and find him and his sources to be credible enough to include some of the information in the presentations to the President and President-elect a few days ago.”

The Guardian reported that the FBI took these allegations seriously enough to apply for a wiretap warrant on several of Trump’s aides.

This is still a judgment call. But it’s not a judgment call about some random celebrity. It’s a judgment call about the soon-to-be president of the United States. And it’s about allegations that the intelligence community is taking very seriously.

What’s more, this dossier has apparently been seen or discussed by practically everyone in Washington DC. It has long annoyed me that things like this can circulate endlessly among the plugged-in, where it clearly informs their reporting unbeknownst to all the rest of us. At some point, the rest of us deserve to know what’s going on.

Put all that together—president, credibility among the intelligence community, and widespread dissemination—and I’m not at all sure that BuzzFeed did the wrong thing. Maybe this will all turn out to be the worst kind of made-up gossip, but at some point there’s enough reporting around it that it’s time to stop the tap dancing and let us know just what it is that has everyone so hot and bothered.

View original post here:  

Should BuzzFeed Have Published the Trump Dossier?

Posted in Everyone, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Should BuzzFeed Have Published the Trump Dossier?

Trump’s Business Plan Won’t Eliminate His Conflicts of Interest

by Isabelta5 Posted on January 11, 2017

Mother Jones

At a long-awaited press conference Wednesday, Donald Trump outlined an extensive list of steps he plans to take to separate himself from his business interests. But he stopped short of the one thing that ethics experts agree he needs to do to eliminate conflicts of interest: divest his billions in assets and debts and place the proceeds in a blind trust.

Standing in front of a large stack of papers and manila folders that he said represented agreements he has signed to separate himself from his businesses, Trump steadfastly insisted he did not have to take any measures to avoid conflicts because federal ethics rules do not apply to presidents or vice presidents. According to Trump and a lawyer he retained to devise a plan to limit his business conflicts, he was voluntarily taking steps to make sure there are no questions about whether he is acting in the public interest while in office. Under the plan detailed at the press conference, Trump’s assets will be placed into a trust that will be run by his sons and another Trump executive, and all of the Trump Organization’s deals will be vetted by an ethics adviser who will have the right to veto any new deals that might present a conflict.

But the Trump trust will not be a blind trust—that is, an entity run by an independent third party containing assets the beneficiary is unaware of. It will just be a trust. Many of Trump’s assets are already in a trust—the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust—but according to Trump and his attorney, Sheri Dillon, he won’t play a role in managing the new trust. Dillon said Trump will not be provided with detailed statements showing how his companies are performing. He will just receive updates showing the profits or losses of his assets.

Dillon also attempted to stave off concerns that Trump might violate the Constitution’s emoluments clause, which prohibits federal officials from receiving financial benefits from a foreign government. Ethics experts have pointed out that Trump’s financial entanglements may violate this provision. Among other things, he is part of a partnership that owes money to a government-owned Chinese bank. And foreign diplomatic delegations have rushed to book space at Trump’s new Washington, DC, hotel—seen by many as an attempt to curry favor. According to Dillon, Trump will donate all hotel profits connected to any foreign government to the US Treasury.

None of Trump’s proposals seemed to impress his critics. Norm Eisen, who served as a lead ethics attorney in Barack Obama’s administration, said the plan laid out by Trump and Dillon fails all five standards that he and Richard Painter, a former ethics attorney for the George W. Bush administration, laid out prior to the press conference.

“Tragically, the Trump plan to deal with his business conflicts announced today falls short in every respect,” Eisen said, calling it “an inadequate and scantily detailed ethics wall.”

“Mr. Trump’s ill-advised course will precipitate scandal and corruption,” Eisen added.

One of Trump’s most intractable conflicts of interest is the debt he owes to lenders around the globe. Trump has reported owing $713 million. His biggest lender is Deutsche Bank, the troubled German bank that recently agreed to a $7.2 billion settlement with the Justice Department for its role in the 2008 mortgage crisis. The bank remains under investigation by the Justice Department for possibly participating in an attempt to funnel money out of Moscow in defiance of international sanctions. Trump did not address the loans other than to say he believed his company has very little debt.

As he left the stage, Trump said he was happy to leave his sons in charge of his business empire and that he will judge how they have performed when he leaves the White House. “I hope they do a good job,” Trump said in closing, “but if they don’t a good job, I’ll say, ‘You’re fired!'”

Jump to original:  

Trump’s Business Plan Won’t Eliminate His Conflicts of Interest

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Trump’s Business Plan Won’t Eliminate His Conflicts of Interest

Did Putin Swing the Election to Trump? Of Course He Did.

by FannieCrabtree Posted on January 8, 2017

Mother Jones

Did Russian hacking during the 2016 campaign tip the election to Donald Trump? In the LA Times today, Noah Bierman and Brian Bennett have this to say:

The truth is no one knows for sure because the election was so close in so many states that no one factor can be credited or blamed, especially in last year’s highly combustible campaign.

This is exactly backward. The fact that the election was so close means that lots of things might have tipped the election all by themselves. The Russian hacking is one of them. Consider Bierman and Bennett’s own case:

Extensive news coverage of the how the leaked emails showed political machinations by Democratic Party operatives often drowned out Clinton’s agenda….English-language news channel Russia Today…posted a video on YouTube in early November, for example. Called “Trump Will Not Be Permitted to Win,” it featured Julian Assange, the fugitive founder of WikiLeaks, and was watched 2.2 million times….U.S. intelligence officials say anti-Clinton stories and posts flooded social media from the Internet Research Agency near St. Petersburg, which the report described as a network of “professional trolls” led by a Putin ally.

Putin’s most tangible victory may have come last summer. On the eve of the Democratic National Convention in July, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) was forced to quit her post as Democratic National Committee chairwoman after emails posted on Wikileaks showed that supposedly neutral DNC officials had backed Clinton over her rival, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, in the primaries.

….In October, Trump similarly seized on leaked emails from Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta. They showed that Donna Brazile, a former CNN commentator who replaced Wasserman Schultz at the DNC, had shared a pair of questions with Clinton’s team before a televised candidates’ forum and debate….The leak showed nothing illegal. But it bolstered the idea that Clinton was a Washington insider who benefited from fellow elites.

….The most damaging leaks for Clinton may have been transcripts of excerpts of her highly paid speeches to Wall Street bankers, released in October….There were no smoking guns in the leaks. But they included her admission that her growing wealth since she and Bill Clinton left the White House in 2001 had made her “kind of far removed” from the anger and frustration many Americans felt after the 2008 recession. She also called for “a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders, some time in the future, with energy that is as green and sustainable as we can get it.”

That’s a lot of stuff! Does it seem likely that all of this, plus the fact that it kept Clinton’s email woes front and center, made a difference of 1 percent in a few swing states? Sure, I’d say so. Did other things make a difference too? Yes indeed. But given how close the election was, there’s a pretty good chance that Putin’s campaign of cyber-chaos had enough oomph to swing things all by itself.

I’m a little surprised this hasn’t produced more panic. In the United States I understand why it hasn’t: Democrats don’t want to sound like sore losers and Republicans don’t care as long as their guy won. But what about the rest of the world? It’s been common knowledge for a while that Russia does this kind of stuff, but their actions in the US election represent a quantum leap in how far they’re willing to go. And there’s not much doubt that Putin will keep at it.

After all, it worked a treat. And thanks to a gullible press and normal partisan politics, it’ll keep working. The next leak will get as much attention as these did, and the one after that too. We have no societal defense against this stuff.

This article:  

Did Putin Swing the Election to Trump? Of Course He Did.

Posted in Anker, Cyber, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Did Putin Swing the Election to Trump? Of Course He Did.