Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Fear or fury? The choice is ours.

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

Welcome to day five of every-bit-as-bad-as-you-thought-it-would-be.

This isn’t Democrats spending madly. This is government catching up.

The gop is a fucking disgrace.

This is dead girl, live boy, a goat, two wetsuits and a dildo territory.  oh, and pink furry handcuffs.

Shut up, hissy kitty!

Compromise? There is no middle ground between a firefighter and an arsonist.

It is not hopeless, and we are not helpless.

“In this country American means white. everybody else has to hyphenate.”

I’m more christian than these people and i’m an atheist.

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

If you are still in the gop, you are either an extremist yourself, or in bed with those who are.

You passed on an opportunity to be offended? What are you even doing here?

The revolution will be supervised.

Following reporting rules is only for the little people, apparently.

“Can i answer the question? No you can not!”

Polls are now a reliable indicator of what corporate Republicans want us to think.

The Giant Orange Man Baby is having a bad day.

The arc of history bends toward the same old fuckery.

People are weird.

People really shouldn’t expect the government to help after they watched the GOP drown it in a bathtub.

Balloon Juice, where there is always someone who will say you’re doing it wrong.

Usually wrong but never in doubt

You are here: Home / Elections / Election 2016 / Russiagate Open Thread: The Facebook Conundrum(s)

Russiagate Open Thread: The Facebook Conundrum(s)

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Until Adam or Cheryl can post more expert information, I’m just gonna toss out some links that seem like they might be important. Per CNN:

… Facebook did not give copies of the ads to members of the Senate and House intelligence committees when it met with them last week on the grounds that doing so would violate their privacy policy, sources with knowledge of the briefings said. Facebook’s policy states that, in accordance with the federal Stored Communications Act, it can only turn over the stored contents of an account in response to a search warrant.

“We continue to work with the appropriate investigative authorities,” Facebook said in a statement to CNN.

Facebook informed Congress last week that it had identified 3,000 ads that ran between June 2015 and May 2017 that were linked to fake accounts. Those accounts, in turn, were linked to the pro-Kremlin troll farm known as the Internet Research Agency.

In those briefings, Facebook spoke only in generalities about the ad buys, leaving some committee members feeling frustrated with Facebook’s level of cooperation.

Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, told CNN last week that Facebook had not turned over the ads to Congress. Warner has also called Facebook’s review “the tip of the iceberg,” and suggested that more work needs to be done in order to ascertain the full scope of Russia’s use of social media…

Are those “contents” significant? This guy — “Former federal prosecutor. Legal expert for TV and print” — thinks so:



(Click on any of the tweets to see the complete thread, much more detail)

In related news, here’s Sarah Posner, at the Washington Post — “Will America finally wise up to the Russian media war on our democracy?”:

… This propaganda war, Rutenberg reports, is a different sort of attack on our democracy from the Russian cyber-attacks and computer hacking we’ve heard so much about. It demonstrates how the Russian assault is multi-faceted and often opaque to American news consumers. By injecting a barrage of “news” into the social media ecosystem, the goal is to manipulate and confuse American viewers and readers, sowing division and chaos in American politics and society.

Rutenberg’s piece reaches the stark conclusion that Russia “has built the most effective propaganda operation of the 21st century so far, one that thrives in the feverish political climates that have descended on many Western publics.” Here’s how it works:

– Elevate the extremes to undermine the center…
– Aim to go viral…
– Exploit American free press protections while subverting the American press…
– Foster Americans’ distrust in their own institutions. Sowing doubt and confusion among its Western viewers is not just RT’s mission, it’s the network’s stated goal. Its slogan: “Question more.”

Putin’s spokesman Dmitri Peskov admitted to Rutenberg that “war” is an appropriate characterization of Kremlin efforts. And even though the American public has known about this self-described “war” for at least the last eight months, if not longer, it nonetheless remains a subject difficult to grasp, or to prove to a skeptical Facebook friend or relative…

Back on September 7, Brian Feldman, at NYMag, posted “Four Important Questions About Russia, Facebook, and the 2016 Election”

…[T]he breathless reaction to the Facebook news isn’t necessarily matched by the facts — yet. Before we can draw any real conclusions, there are several very important questions we need to answer.

– How much impact did these ads and fake accounts have?…
– What did these ads look like?…
– Who was targeted?…
– Is there more bad news coming?…

Well, seems like Mr. Mueller has some of that information now, along with some other names:

… Mapping the full Russian propaganda effort is important. Yet investigators in the House, Senate, and special counsel Robert Mueller’s office are equally focused on a more explosive question: did any Americans help target the memes and fake news to crucial swing districts and wavering voter demographics? “By Americans, you mean, like, the Trump campaign?” a source close to one of the investigations said with a dark laugh. Indeed: probers are intrigued by the role of Jared Kushner, the now-president’s son-in-law, who eagerly took credit for crafting the Trump campaign’s online efforts in a rare interview right after the 2016 election. “I called somebody who works for one of the technology companies that I work with, and I had them give me a tutorial on how to use Facebook micro-targeting,” Kushner told Steven Bertoni of Forbes. “We brought in Cambridge Analytica. I called some of my friends from Silicon Valley who were some of the best digital marketers in the world. And I asked them how to scale this stuff . . . We basically had to build a $400 million operation with 1,500 people operating in 50 states, in five months to then be taken apart. We started really from scratch.”

Bigger questions, however, revolve around Cambridge Analytica. It is unclear how Kushner first became aware of the data-mining firm, but one of its major investors is billionaire Trump backer Robert Mercer. Mercer was also a principal patron of Breitbart News and Steve Bannon, who was a vice president of Cambridge Analytica until he joined the Trump campaign. “I think the Russians had help,” said Congresswoman Jackie Speier, a California Democrat who is a member of the House Intelligence Committee. “I’ve always wondered if Cambridge Analytica was part of that.” (Cambridge Analytica did not respond to a request for comment.)

Kushner’s chat with Forbes has provided a veritable bakery’s worth of investigatory bread crumbs to follow. Brad Parscale, who Kushner hired to run the campaign’s San Antonio-based Internet operation, has agreed to be interviewed by the House Intelligence Committee….

As Benjamin Wittes might say: Tick… tick… tick…

Reader Interactions

154Comments

  1. 1.

    Davis X. Machina

    It’s not collusion until The Nation says it’s collusion.

    Until then, it’s just a few overzealous functionaries who got carried away by their desire to promote peace and freedom between our two great peoples.

  7. 7.

    SFAW

    Fake news! Why, Jared is no more disloyal than a patriot like Kim Philby. Or Anthony Blunt. Or Aldrich Ames. Or Robert Hanssen.

    Lying Littledick has only the best!!! зять son-in-law!

  8. 8.

    HRA

    I have a friend from Toronto who sent at least 4 or 5 messages daily from sites I never heard or seen before. I began looking them up since the writings were odd, strange and mostly targeting Democrats. I was also alerted when those Macedonian guys were cited for what they were sending along with knowing Macedonia was once ruled under Communism by Tito.
    My friend and his friends are more aware now.

  9. 9.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Another Scott: it just makes no sense to me that an obscure crank like Jill Stein got invited to sit at a table with Vladimir Putin and Mike Flynn, but there was nothing else to that invitation. Maybe they sussed her out that weekend and concluded that she was too dumb and loopy to even qualify as a useful idiot

  13. 13.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    Edward-Isaac Dovere‏Verified account @ IsaacDovere
    The president started his Sunday on Twitter taunting a nuclear threat, fantasizing about hitting Clinton & retweeting what may be a sex bot.

    a sex bot retweet?

  19. 19.

    danielx

    Interference in our election processes is reprehensible and should not be allowed; so far I think we can all agree.

    However…

    Considering the ways in which various state organs (ours) have interfered in the elections of other countries over the years, it’s more than a little hypocritical for us to be saying “omigod, this is intolerable!” NOT saying that Russia or any other country should interfere in ours – far from it! – but perhaps we should remove the log from our collective eye, etc….

  20. 20.

    Kay

    Trump’s Ohio job numbers are really bad. I don’t credit or blame the President with all job gains or losses, but Donald Trump does and so does national political media.

    They might want to keep an eye on this. Michigan is stalling too- not as bad as Ohio yet they’ll follow.

    If Democrats are smart they’ll hammer this. Nothing gets Donald Trump’s goat like criticism on jobs. If they want to drive him nuts they should hit it over and over and over.

    Obama was better than Trump for the white working class in the rust belt. On everything from health care to jobs he was simply better for them, and not in some attenuated theoretical way- not bullshit about their “culture”- but in very specific and practical ways.

    As Cleveland research analyst George Zeller explained, this pace puts Ohio on track to perform even slower than it did last year, when Kasich spent a third of the year selling himself as a GOP hopeful for president who promised to do for the nation what he’s done in Ohio.
    The 2017 rate of job creation, if it continues, will mark an even slower growth performance than Ohio had during 2016, a presidential year in which the great swing state produced the smallest yearly job increase since the Great Recession in 2009.

  22. 22.

    West of the Rockies (been a while)

    I hope that some agency somewhere is doing the same thing to Putin:

    You won’t believe how tiny Putin’s piece is!

    What Putin looks like now is amazing (and it’s not good).

    You can eliminate Putin just by avoiding these five foods.

  23. 23.

    ThresherK

    @Juice Box: There’s a magic combination of words that would work, if Hillary said them. But Chris Cillizza and Chuck Todd aren’t giving her any hints what they are.

    Cracking Enigma was easier than figuring out this code.

  24. 24.

    proportionwheel

    @danielx: I’m betting that most if not all of the readers of this blog have opposed such efforts by the US in other nations for years or decades.

  25. 25.

    germy

    “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”

    And he’s right. Might be the only thing I agree with.

  26. 26.

    Petorado

    Putin is well known for his love of judo, the martial art whose chief principle is to use an opponent’s actions against them. It seems very much a Putin plan to subvert his NATO nemeses not through overt military action, but to use their own institutions and freedoms against themselves.

    I can’t wait for Mueller-mas to arrive to see how wide a web of bad actors will be taken down by his revelations.

  27. 27.

    Repatriated

    @danielx: Yeah, not unique.

    That said, should they not have had the right to do something about it (to the extent they had the ability to do so)?

    If so — and they did, despite the inability to retaliate, and in many cases even undo it — why should we forego those options?

  29. 29.

    Kay

    If Democrats tie Trump to rising unemployment in Ohio they don’t really have to do anything else. They could literally put all their eggs in that basket in this state and if it’s effective he’ll be harmed. Other states may be more complicated but not this one. It’s both a “safe” strategy and the best one :)

    Over and over and over. One theme for this one state.

  32. 32.

    debit

    I don’t know what our next political cycle is going to be like, but I’m apprehensive. Trump and his endless scandals are now the norm. The press will go nuts trying to keep up this level of “guess what s/he did now!” with whoever inherits this shitshow no matter how vanilla and boring they may actually be. Our next candidate is going to have to have Obama levels of preparedness and background checking for not only themselves, but everyone down to the kid who takes out the recycling. I don’t have a a lot of faith in such a person even existing, let alone winning the nomination.

  33. 33.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    David Frum doesn’t know how to thread tweets (I don’t know how to tweet at all), but he’s posting some trump’s greatest cognitive stalls from the past few months

    David Frum‏Verified account @ davidfrum 36m36 minutes ago
    Rematching the POTUS-FLOTUS handshake clip, it looks to me as if for 2-3 seconds, he forgot who she was – and so went into auto-greet mode
    Notice how remote and distracted POTUS is while FLOTUS is speaking. Then takes his brain a few beats to reactivate its recognition function
    Once Trump does recognize FLOTUS, he put his hand on her back for an intimate little shove and to order her off his stage.

    @SiubhanDuinne: I will not adjust my antenna

  35. 35.

    Kay

    I sometimes wonder if anyone is ever going to tell us what the Russian government wanted from Trump and Republicans. The problem with all the theories so far is congressional races. They wanted Republicans in Congress. Any Republican. There’s a specific set of reasons for that. This “chaos” theory is way too easy. There’s a kind of wackiness about it- like zebras rather than horses- Comey said Putin “hates” Clinton. Our elaborate multi-billion dollar spy agencies and that’s what we get? We’ll just lay it all at the feet of some personal beef with Hillary Clinton? I just flat-out do not believe that.

  36. 36.

    Shalimar

    The Russian “propaganda war” on the US seems very similarly designed to parts of the Republican billionaire-backed propaganda effort aimed at many of the same consumers. Good luck trying to figure out which is which.

  38. 38.

    Kay

    @debit:

    It could go the other way, too, though. They lowered the standards for Trump. I still think the most likely outcome of that is lower standards across the board. They could hold the Democrat to pre-Trump standards but they also could not. I don’t think we know yet.

    The “self enrichment” charge frame should be fascinating. How do they implicate the Democrat for possible self-enrichment when the Trump Family bills the federal government every day to benefit their family business?

  45. 45.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Kay: my understanding is he really wants the Magnitsky Act repealed, both because of the threat to his own personal fortune and, I suspect even more so, the threat to his alliances with oligarchs who help him hold power. Also seeing a passive response to his expansion of the Russian sphere of influence in Ukraine, the Baltics, maybe even the Balkans and Turkey. I read an essay a coupe years back, pure speculation, that argued that Putin’s ultimate pipe dream is to bring Russian Orthodoxy to Constantinople, not Istanbul, and the Hagia Sophia
    edited for spelling

  46. 46.

    germy

    @Roger Moore:

    it was as much a reward for services rendered as a feeling out of how much she’d do for them in the future.

    One of the criticisms she got from the Serious People was that she was a blank slate on foreign policy. She sat and grinned through the whole dinner because she thought she was somehow building credibility as a world player. “I met with foreign leaders!” she envisioned herself saying to chuck todd or whoever during a debate.

  50. 50.

    Kay

    @schrodingers_cat:

    I don’t feel like I know enough, so my theories are probably half-baked but I’m not satisfied with what the experts are saying.

    I think it’s bad reasoning to attribute all concrete Russian actions to “sow chaos”. NONE of this is substantive? Really? There is no possible reason the Russian government opposes immigration other than this vague idea that’s a means to another goal? Why wouldn’t that be the goal? Does the Russian government have an interest in stopping labor from crossing borders? That seems like the question one would ask, rather than saying they DON’T have an interest in that but instead have some secret attenuated plan. What if what they do is the plan?

    Say the Russian government wants to influence US (and worldwide, actually) immigration policy. Give them that- say it’s a real policy goal. Why? That’s what I want answered. For the head of the FBI to say it’s based on “hating” Hillary Clinton seems lame as hell to me. They can’t do better than that? We’re all satisfied with this kind of People Magazine analysis that is based on the personalities of the actors?

  52. 52.

    gene108

    @Petorado:

    Even if Mueller gets all the evidence, who will prosecute the case? Will Mueller go before the judge arguing the case?

    Otherwise does it fall to Sessions’ DOJ attorneys?

    If given a chance, Republicans will ratfuck Mueller somewhere along the line, undoing all his work.

  53. 53.

    Jinchi

    @Kay:

    I sometimes wonder if anyone is ever going to tell us what the Russian government wanted from Trump and Republicans.

    They want the same things that they want when they support the breakup of the EU, NATO, Brexit, Greater Russia, as well as Calexit and Texas secession groups. Russia is a weak power and they want to undermine their adversaries.

    They wanted to sow chaos in the American political society. They want to divide communities and have us fighting each other.

    They have in Trump the same thing they had in Ukraine’s Victor Yanukovych, a corruptible leader of a country who will act as a Russian agent. Trump is attempting to strip the West of its most powerful counter to Putin’s power. He wants to disband NATO, undermine the UN, break up the EU, and separate the US from its closest allies.

    Putin knows that the American State Department is a powerful antagonist. Trump has appointed a Putin-certified Friend of Russia to head the department with the explicit task of stripping the agency of expertise. Tillerson is fully on board with the Department being cut by 30% and has cut democracy promotion and human rights from it’s mission. Putin’s Russia is a kleptocracy and he is seething at sanctions that have cost him and his cronies billions of dollars. He won’t have to worry about that again while Trump and Tillerson are in charge.

    Lifting the Magnitsky Act sanctions was priority number one for the incoming Trump administration for a reason.

  54. 54.

    schrodingers_cat

    @Kay: Revenge, they want their former foe humbled like they were on the world stage in the early 1990s when the Soviet Union collapsed. They want the United States to lose power and prestige on the world stage. Immigration, alliances, sensible economics, scientific research is what kept the United States on the top of the heap post WWII. R plan is to take down everyone of the advantages one by one until United States is minor player on the global stage just like it was before the 20th century.

  55. 55.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    ugh… just saw Nikki Haley talking about NORK and saying if it comes to war, “General Mattis will take care of it”. I wonder how Secretary (Goddammit) Mattis reacted to that.

  56. 56.

    Kay

    @schrodingers_cat:

    Immigration is a lot of things but one of them is trade. Immigration is trade in labor. Looser borders mean it’s easier for labor to move. If skills or labor are a product the Russian government doesn’t want that product to move freely (more or less) cross border. Why not? It isn’t because they’re worried about “middle class wages”. Ordinary people in Russia have a horribly low standard of living.

    Because of where our law office is located we get a lot of calls from truckers who get tickets on the interstate. This is anecdotal of course but I’m not kidding- 90% of these callers are from that part of the world. They’re ALL out of Chicago. They’re LEAVING their home countries. I don’t know if they’re legal or illegal and I don’t care- I’m not the immigration police, but I have to wonder why so many young men from these places are fleeing to what are relatively low paying jobs as drivers because they don’t drive for the big companies- they’re not UPS drivers. They drive for rinky dink low pay companies. They’re desperate to get out of Russia.

  57. 57.

    Corner Stone

    @Kay: And again, if the nation had learned a big chunk of what our govt knew in late 2015 or early 2016 we would already be so much farther along in putting this together. The people that wanted to believe, or be fooled, would have shrugged it off and kept clicking those FB “news” links. But the small margins of targeted populations may have sat up a little straighter and been pulled through to the finish line on the right side.

  59. 59.

    Alternative Fax, a hip hop artist from Idaho

    @schrodingers_cat: My hypothesis is that VVP has observed how eager GOP officials are to limit freedoms when in office. Reliably, and regularly. If there’s a marker for GOP leadership, it’s control – of women’s autonomy (TVG ultrasounds prior to legal abortions; access to contraception), of employees’ rights to remain employed absent specific workplace violations(right to work = right to be fired arbitrarily), and dissent about government policies. Plus of course minorities, from selective law enforcement to frank and open terrorism from law enforcement. A controlled population is more easily manipulated, by inside or outside actors.

    As for Russian demonizing immigrants, it seems that Russians are kind of the apex white supremacists and Xian fundamentalists. Dark and/or non-Xian people are not tolerated. Period. In fact Russia seems to be straight white Xian male xenophobes as no kind of LGBQT folks are permitted either. That’s a big theme of Russian history, I think.

    Those are my thoughts, FWIW.

  60. 60.

    Chris T.

    @Kay:

    They wanted Republicans in Congress. Any Republican. There’s a specific set of reasons for that. This “chaos” theory is way too easy. There’s a kind of wackiness about it- like zebras rather than horses- Comey said Putin “hates” Clinton. Our elaborate multi-billion dollar spy agencies and that’s what we get? We’ll just lay it all at the feet of some personal beef with Hillary Clinton? I just flat-out do not believe that.

    It’s multi-layered. Here are the three obvious layers:

    1. They have more hold over existing Republicans. More R(ebpulican) power = more R(ussian) influence.
    2. Repubs in general tend to view oil & gas as good and solar as bad. This means more money for Russia.
    3. Yes, it’s personal.

    Any one of these reasons alone would suffice.

  61. 61.

    germy

    While sending Trump packing remains an abstraction with so few congressional Republican having the guts to stand up to his treason, I am uncharacteristically optimistic that he will be taken down for two reasons:

    First, the size of the Putin-Trump conspiracy.

    Conspiracies with only a few closed-lipped actors have a much better chance of succeeding, but there are literally dozens of people in and beyond Trump’s inner circle who participated in or have intimate knowledge of how the Putin-Trump conspiracy worked.

    It will only take a few of them to buckle under Mueller’s steely grip and conclude that ratting out a man for whom loyalty always is a one-way street is preferable to prison time. And while Trump can pardon family members and close aides in the face of federal prosecution, they remain vulnerable to criminal charges at the state level, where Trump has no power to pardon.

  62. 62.

    gene108

    @Kay:

    They lowered the standards for Trump. I still think the most likely outcome of that is lower standards across the board. They could hold the Democrat to pre-Trump standards but they also could not. I don’t think we know yet.

    1. Republicans are sick and tired of their Presidents being deemed as corrupt. This includes the vast right-wing media machine. They will push the MSM to go after the next Democratic President with a fury that makes Whitewater, or wearing tan suites to a press briefing, look like a walk in the park.

    2. Therefore the next Democratic President will be held to standards that are impossible to meet, but will constantly be shifted, should he or she come close to meeting them.

    The media is not very good at self-reflection and considering, if they did something wrong. As far as the media goes, they are perfect, their coverage is perfect, and the only problem is readers are too stupid to understand how perfect they are.

  63. 63.

    Corner Stone

    We’re sitting here for months, trying to figure out why not a damn thing makes sense. Still looking for the corner edge pieces on a jigsaw puzzle. Now we get to see what the govt always knew and some clearly suspected, aka penetration at all levels.
    IMO they are performing a sort of slow rolling because they don’t want to have to admit that, at the very least, they can not prove the voting booth was not hacked. And at worst, they know it was and are scared to death we’re going to find out.

  64. 64.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Kay: Believe it.

    I will state this again, here, as I have done multiple times on the front page and in comments. Please print this out and refer to it as necessary.
    Putin wants the following:
    1) The post Cold War global system in which the US, the EU, and NATO emerged as the victors rolled back.
    2) This roll back would allow Russia to retake its rightful place as one of the two superpowers as the inheritor of both the Soviet Union and imperial Russia.
    3) This roll back would provide Russia with both its historic near abroad and its historic sphere of influence in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.
    4) To do this Russia, through its assets – Russian Intelligence Services, Russian oligarchs, Russian organized crime (all three often the same thing), etc – must make liberal democracy in general look unappealing and no better than the managed democracy that Putin allows at home and the US’s version in particular look like a sucker’s game.
    5) To do this Russia has embarked on a hybrid (Russian Intelligence Service driven, Russian organized crime driven, Russian oligarch business driven cyber, information, economic, and intelligence) warfare campaign of active measures, utilizing maskirovka principles to enflame domestic political, social, economic, and religious divisions in the US and its European and non-European NATO and non-NATO partners and allies. In order to achieve this we’ve seen very obvious, and successful, Russian efforts to penetrate American and partner/allied organizations, movements, and groups. For instance, the NRA, the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, the Texas and California secession movements, the organization behind the National Prayer Breakfast, one of the largest Evangelical/Conservative Christian organizations leading to a Russian led conference in DC earlier this year, martial arts organizations through the Russian spetznatz (special forces) derived Systema, several white supremacist, neo-NAZI, and Klan groups, the alt-right overall, both far right and far left media and social media.
    6) All of this penetration, all of the information operations and cyber warfare and the maskirovka is intended to create a significant portion of the US citizenry, as well as the citizenry in our partners and allies, that cannot and will not agree on basic facts and truth claims. That cannot and will not even acknowledge that there is an acceptable way to validate basic facts and truth claims. And to promote extreme anti-democratic, anti-liberal ideas and then utilize social media to inject them into the mainstream in order to achieve its objectives.
    7) All of this then leads to the emergence of social, political, religious, and economic concepts that can be utilized to build movements and parties that will support and elect candidates that will take or accept ever more authoritarian positions and reject the small d and small l democratic and liberal ideas that are necessary for the US to function and to move towards improving the Republic.

  65. 65.

    msdc

    @Kay: Why are we assuming that Putin’s goal is to oppose immigration to the US at all? It seems to me that he’s using the hatred for immigrants as the most obvious tool for mobilizing Trump’s base. (IOW, he is a sharper and more clear-eyed observer of US politics than most of our journalists are.) The goal was to install Trump (or, initially, to weaken Clinton) and now to keep him in power. The racism and xenophobia are just the easiest means to that end.

    As for why, it seems like the answers are fairly obvious–reducing US influence, weakening NATO, forcing his opponents into self-destructive spasms of nativism, saddling the free world with a mentally unstable incompetent in the White House. Adam has written before about Putin’s doctrine of “all against all,” a multipolar world in which Russia can exert outsized influence despite their long-term structural decline. There’s no big secret here, no grand conspiracy at the geopolitical level. (The local political level is another matter.) He is exactly who we think he is.

  66. 66.

    Mary G

    HA HA HA. Darrell Issa sued Doug Applegate for defamation over a campaign ad from last year. Not only did he lose, the judge required Darrell to pay Doug $45,000 for attorney fees. Applegate quoted an NYT story that had a few problems (4 corrections). Even the San Diego Union-Tribune, one of the wingnuttiest papers in California, issued an editorial smacking Darrell down:

    The former Vista electronics tycoon’s anger over what he sees as a smear seems genuine. But his beef is with The New York Times, which stands by its corrected reporting. Applegate’s attempt to use negative coverage of Issa against him in a campaign is standard hardball that Issa can expect so long as he seeks re-election in California’s 49th District, one of the most closely split in the nation.

    When — not if — Issa faces such TV ads in fall 2018, he can feel aggrieved all over again. But what he shouldn’t do is file another pique-driven lawsuit.

    @Kay: Democratic failure at messaging is just epic. James Pethokoukis at AEI, another hard right place, printed a column in June talking about the California economy:

    The California economy got hit harder than the rest of the country in the last recession. After a sluggish initial recovery, the nation’s largest state hit its stride by the end of 2011 and in the ensuing five years has grown at a 3.5% annual rate—a respectable pace even by pre-secular stagnation standards. Meanwhile, the rest of the country grew at a pokier 1.7% rate over that same period

    and

    For example, although California accounts for 14% of the country’s GDP, it is where 29% of business R&D is spent, more than the next six largest states combined. Overseas investors also have taken notice: 29% of inbound foreign direct investment (FDI) in the most recent data was destined for California. And in the year ending 3Q16 (the most recent data), 33% of the country’s net new business formation occurred in California.

    Could not the DNC or whoever put out a comparison between California & Kansas and say, look, our ideas work and the Republicans’ don’t?

  67. 67.

    schrodingers_cat

    @Kay: Russia is bleeding population according to my Russian friend who abhors T. She has taken all this Russian collusion business personally and become heavily involved in the resistance. She has been to two marches in DC and before this election was a passive observer at best.

  68. 68.

    debbie

    @Kay:

    Kay, do you have a link for the Ohio numbers you cite? I got a bunch of FB people who need their noses rubbed in it.

  69. 69.

    gene108

    @schrodingers_cat:

    R plan is to take down everyone of the advantages one by one until United States is minor player on the global stage just like it was before the 20th century.

    Republicans don’t want to take America off the world stage. They just do not understand or care that their policies are fueling a world, in which America will not be the leader it has been.

  70. 70.

    Adam L Silverman

    @schrodingers_cat: Putin has made himself into the protector of white European Christendom against secularism, degeneracy (homosexuality), immigration from outside of Europe, and non-Christian religion. Within Russia this means specifically promoting, privileging, and elevating the Russian Orthodox Church over all other Christian denominations and all other religions. Outside of Russia it means promoting, privileging, and elevating the most politically, socially, and religiously conservative versions of Christianity in each state and society he’s targeting.

  71. 71.

    GregB

    One very interesting thing I have noticed is that the specific talking among the right is that the efforts at propagandizing and influencing Americans prior to the election didn’t sway the outcome. They talk as though they haven’t spent the last 50’s demonizing the corrosive influence of media and the effects that has on swaying opinion.

    Now they deem media propagandizing a totally inconsequential issue.

  73. 73.

    Aleta

    @Kay: My guess is they might want things like unimpeded (w/o money laundering charges) investment in the US, no interference with development of black market opportunities here, no interference with arctic tanker routes, hulls and and spills, a share in arctic drilling in the US w/o environmental restrictions, cooperation w/ US equipment for mining ventures in the soviet far north, inspection/regulation-free trade, including weapons of course. And they want kickbacks.

  74. 74.

    debit

    @gene108:

    1. Republicans are sick and tired of their Presidents being deemed as corrupt. This includes the vast right-wing media machine. They will push the MSM to go after the next Democratic President with a fury that makes Whitewater, or wearing tan suites to a press briefing, look like a walk in the park.

    2. Therefore the next Democratic President will be held to standards that are impossible to meet, but will constantly be shifted, should he or she come close to meeting them.

    The media is not very good at self-reflection and considering, if they did something wrong. As far as the media goes, they are perfect, their coverage is perfect, and the only problem is readers are too stupid to understand how perfect they are.

    I had to quote the whole thing because you articulated so perfectly my worst fears.

  77. 77.

    Jinchi

    @gene108:

    2. Therefore the next Democratic President will be held to standards that are impossible to meet, but will constantly be shifted, should he or she come close to meeting them.

    Wow, a commenter from 2006!

  78. 78.

    Angrifon

    @Kay:

    Obama was better than Trump for the white working class in the rust belt. On everything…

    Okay, yes. That may be true. But have you considered the fact that Obama is black?

  83. 83.

    Adam L Silverman

    @gene108: Mueller will be working through the career prosecutors who are part of the dedicated National Security section at DOJ. Because of how Mueller’s office is stood up, this goes through Rosenstein not Sessions and Rosenstein has made it clear that his job is to 1) make sure Mueller has what he needs to conduct his inquiry and 2) make sure that it is within his remit based on the memorandum that Rosenstein issued appointing Mueller as special counsel. Additionally, we know from the reporting that Mueller is sharing information with NY state AG Schneiderman. So if there is something that cannot be pursued at the Federal level for whatever reason, Schneiderman will have full awareness so he can go forward at the state level.

  84. 84.

    debbie

    @Kay:

    I believe it. No one is pettier than politicians. Putin’s whole life has been wrapped up in ego and power. He wants Russia to be preeminent, and that also results in bringing down the U.S., then WINNING!

  86. 86.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist: It’s Sunday morning. He’s doing his laundry in the laundromat in the Pentagon basement. I am not kidding. This is not sarcasm. He is most likely reading a book while his stuff is on the spin cycle.

  91. 91.

    Adam L Silverman

    @schrodingers_cat: Remember what we learned in December: Republican organizations and officials and campaigns were also hacked. That material, with the exception of two minor releases – one involving Senator Graham – has never seen the light of day. This is important to remember.

  92. 92.

    Roger Moore

    @Kay:

    There is no possible reason the Russian government opposes immigration other than this vague idea that’s a means to another goal?

    I think the answer to that is entirely straightforward: Putin allied himself with racist bigots throughout the West because he is a racist bigot. He has allied himself with oligarch-friendly parties in other countries because he’s an oligarch and wants to make the world safe for oligarchy. Putin has allied himself with the Republican party because they’re ideologically compatible. I think he’s helped Wilmer and Jill Stein in an attempt to sow chaos and boost the Republicans’ chances, but that he has a genuine desire to see the Republicans win.

  94. 94.

    Chet Murthy

    @danielx: *NO* Are you a patriot, or not? The sins of our body politic are *irrelevant* when it comes to defending our country. Yeah yeah, I also want Kissinger in the dock at the Hague. But that doesn’t mean I’ll tolerate foreigners meddling in my country’s government and elections. Fuck that. It’s *our* job to clean up our country, not some furriner’s, to point it out for us or god forbid fix it.

  95. 95.

    Adam L Silverman

    @West of the Rockies (been a while): Yes, but… Our counterintelligence folks are very good, but we don’t have enough to face this. Our national security conceptualization of cyber as a domain for intelligence and war is still in its infancy. As I wrote in June 2016 (and I was one of the first people anywhere to do so) we are at war. We have been attacked, multiple times, by a hostile foreign power. Have you seen anything that indicates that we are or have mobilized to fight that war? No. Unless or until that happens we are in for a rough ride and a world of hurt.

  96. 96.

    Adam L Silverman

    @West of the Rockies (been a while): His actual nickname among the troops is the Warrior Monk. His preferred nickname that he’ll refer to himself as is CHAOS – colonel has another outstanding suggestion. That’s a left over from when he was Commander, 7th Marine Regiment. He hates the Mad Dog moniker.

  97. 97.

    schrodingers_cat

    @Adam L Silverman: Republicans may be being blackmailed but their goals, Christian theocracy, animus against minorities including women, allergy towards science and multilateral treaties are Republican goals too, at least since W’s administration if not before.

  99. 99.

    Roger Moore

    @Kay:

    Immigration is a lot of things but one of them is trade. Immigration is trade in labor. Looser borders mean it’s easier for labor to move. If skills or labor are a product the Russian government doesn’t want that product to move freely (more or less) cross border. Why not?

    Part of it is because they’re facing a population crisis themselves. The Russian birth rate has been below replacement rate since the fall of the USSR, so they’re facing a long-term demographic crisis. Emigration of anyone in the country with gumption is exacerbating that problem. And, given that Putin is a racist, immigration from countries with high birth rates is not an acceptable solution because it would sap and impurify Russia’s bodily fluids destroy their racial purity*. The only solution to the issue of immigration and emigration is to block it.

    *How they can square this with a desire for empire is another question. Empires have always tended to mix populations up and undermined racial purity.

  100. 100.

    Formerly disgruntled in Oregon

    @Mary G: Two problems to solve: 1) The DNC doesn’t produce messaging, and there doesn’t appear to be any national org whose job it is to effectively market the Democratic Party as a brand. 2) Even if there was, it would probably be dominated by too much conventional wisdom, be too centralized, too risk-averse, etc. But maybe it wouldn’t have to be. We need an effective micro-targeting marketing operation to counter the Rs and the Rs.

  103. 103.

    Amir Khalid

    @danielx:
    The logical conclusion to that line of thought is apathy in the face of a clear and present danger to your democracy. You cannot want that.

  104. 104.

    Chyron HR

    @Mary G:

    Could not the DNC or whoever put out a comparison between California & Kansas and say, look, our ideas work and the Republicans’ don’t?

    No, because people would howl that it’s an elitist attack on the glorious white working master race.

    And that’s just the (alleged) progressives.

  105. 105.

    Ruckus

    @Kay:
    I think it’s reasonably easy to understand why vlad wanted republicans in office.
    1. They can’t/won’t/don’t know how to govern. Enough of that and we don’t do anything.
    2. To me it looks like a lot of republicans have been bought, even if they don’t know it.
    3. General chaos, especially in place of a world superpower, which he isn’t any longer.
    4. I’d bet the cold war isn’t over in Russia, at least not in the Kremlin. And this is a cold war that he might actually win at.
    5. Republicans are the party of hate and hate is very malleable emotion. If he can get that directed inward in his lifelong nemesis, he can destroy that nemesis.
    6. Democrats have shown that they are the party of country rather than hate. We are stronger, better people with democrats in charge. Exactly the opposite of what vlad wants – see #5.

  106. 106.

    Roger Moore

    @schrodingers_cat:

    Republicans may be being blackmailed but their goals, Christian theocracy, animus against minorities including women, allergy towards science and multilateral treaties are Republican goals too

    This. My guess is that the blackmail stuff is much more implicit than explicit. As long as they have major shared goals, the Republicans will work happily with the Russians, and Putin will keep any available blackmail material as a remote threat. It will only get pulled out if anyone starts to think about backing out.

  107. 107.

    Another Scott

    @Adam L Silverman:

    Have you seen anything that indicates that we are or have mobilized to fight that war? No. Unless or until that happens we are in for a rough ride and a world of hurt.

    Haha. Good one.

    Mobilizing is old thinking. We have to shop and conduct business, just like W said.

    :-/

    Seriously, as usual, there’s lots of arguing about what sort of “Cyber Command” is needed and which service should run it. GovExec:

    […]

    The Start of a Process

    The move announced on Friday fulfills a mandate in the National Defense Authorization Act of 2017. Former Defense Secretary Ash Carter hinted at the split back in May 2016. But it won’t happen immediately.

    Instead, Defense Secretary James Mattis and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Joe Dunford will nominate a flag officer to take over the new Cyber Command as well as the NSA. That person could be Adm. Michael Rogers, who currently heads both, or someone else. Trump has reportedly asked Mattis to give him the name of a nominee. Speculation has focused on Army Lt. Gen. William Mayville as the nominee to head Cyber Command.

    Once that new person is nominated and confirmed and once Mattis and Dunford are satisfied that splitting the two entities will not hamper the ability of either Cyber Command or the NSA to conduct their missions independently, only then will Cyber Command and the NSA actually split.

    […]

    What It Means for Cyber Command, the NSA, and Cyber Operations

    The elevation of Cyber Command represents a big step forward for the military’s cyber ability, but it has yet to be catch up to the NSA in terms of collecting signals intelligence or creating network accesses, according to Bill Leigher, who as a rear admiral helped stand up Navy Fleet Cyber Command. Leigher, who now directs government cyber solutions for Raytheon, applauds the split because the NSA, which collects foreign intelligence, and Cyber Command, a warfighting outfit, have fundamentally different missions.This caused tension between the two organizations under one roof. Information collected for intelligence gathering may be useful in a way that’s fundamentally different from intelligence for military purposes, he says. “If you collecting intelligence, it’s foreign espionage. You don’t want to get caught. The measure of success is: ‘collect intelligence and don’t get caught.’ If you’re going to war, I would argue that the measure of performance is’ what we do has to have the characteristics of a legal weapon in the context of war and the commander has to know what he or she uses it.”

    This puts the agencies in disagreement about how to use intel and tools that they share. “From an NSA perspective, cyber really is about gaining access to networks. From a Cyber Command point of view, I would argue, it’s about every piece of software on the battlefield and having the means to prevent that software from working the way it was intended to work [for the adversary],” he said.

    The split will allow the agencies to pursue the very different tools, operations, and rules each of their missions requires, he said. Expect NSA to intensify its focus on developing access for intelligence, and Cyber Command to prepare to rapidly deploy massive cyber effects at scale during military operations and shut down the enemy. Both of this will likely leverage next-generation artificial intelligence but in very different ways said Leigher.

    It seems to me to be a nearly hopeless battle – protecting our critical infrastructure, etc. – because too much of the stuff is out of government hands and too many companies (cough Equifax cough) have no financial interest in protecting their information. Cui bono?

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  108. 108.

    Patricia Kayden

    @Kay:

    Obama was better than Trump for the white working class in the rust belt. On everything from health care to jobs he was simply better for them, and not in some attenuated theoretical way- not bullshit about their “culture”- but in very specific and practical ways.

    And President Obama was repaid for this by the White Working Class electing Trump instead of Secretary Clinton who would have continued his policies. Huge sigh.

    Dem lawmaker warns of ‘political and moral limitations’ to working with Trump. Yeah, let’s roll him when we can but he’s so toxic that Chuck and Nancy have to be careful.

  110. 110.

    scav

    Immigration as a subject also has a few benefits for manipulation. It’s an easy sell: people under economic stress usually tend to fission and contract into competative groups, against minorities, against foreigners, the wrong tribe / caste or religion, against any other easily available (visible even better) target that is suddenly discovered as the problem, moreover a problem that is easily fixed. Get the foreigners out! Historically, the Jews were handy. Immigrants a given everywhere, women should get back in the kitchen, blah blah blah. I stll also think immigration as topic served the Russians well as it directly impacts the US’s iconic standing in the world. Beyond the simple image hit of being an ugly and hypocritical destination, there used to be a lot of competition over client states (or whatever the term was) in Africa or elsewhere. I’m sure Pututie would like that part of Russia’s former glory back as well.

  111. 111.

    Roger Moore

    @Patricia Kayden:

    Dem lawmaker warns of ‘political and moral limitations’ to working with Trump.

    He’s not the only one:

    The President's outreach to Democrats on #DACA is purely transactional. Where it makes sense for the country though we should not reject it. pic.twitter.com/5pgpRATjMr— Adam Schiff (@RepAdamSchiff) September 17, 2017

    But we must do so with eyes wide open, and not lose sight of fact that as a businessman, Trump stiffed everyone he came into contact with.— Adam Schiff (@RepAdamSchiff) September 17, 2017

  112. 112.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @Formerly disgruntled in Oregon:
    We run into two further problems if we try. First, Democrats actually care about good governance. Indelibly embedded in this, we disagree about exactly what constitutes good governance. Parroting a catchy line, which is almost impossible to make compatible with good governance, is antithetical to our best traits. Maybe not an impossible obstacle, but a major one. Second, the sad fact of the matter is that the national press are Republicans themselves. They mock Democratic branding and praise Republican branding. That is, when they’re willing to admit Democrats have branding at all. Most of the time, they refuse to report anything we say, and speculate instead on whatever Republican-friendly meme they’re enjoying today. See: Obama’s entire presidency, and Hillary’s campaign.

    I’m not sure the centralized branding approach can work for us. Being the party of nihilism is a much easier course, unfortunately.

  113. 113.

    PhoenixRising

    @Corner Stone:

    they are performing a sort of slow rolling because they don’t want to have to admit that, at the very least, they can not prove the voting booth was not hacked. And at worst, they know it was and are scared to death we’re going to find out.

    This is the winning answer to a more complex question: Why is the investigation moving so meticulously and delicately toward indicting campaign workers/volunteers* who knew or should have known etc.?

    Why is Russia doing this? Because it gives them the opportunity to achieve longstanding strategic goals, most relevant selling ‘the last hours of ancient sunlight’ at a price that they like very much to people they hate and despite (US and EU markets).

    *I’m unconvinced by the stated reasons that Little Fingers and his family have given for avoiding taking a paycheck. I believe that they think they can steal anything that isn’t nailed down, and participate in treason, as long as they aren’t drawing a paycheck, and that their initial responses to anything short of a subpeona duces tecum will be ‘so fire me! I didn’t even work there!’

  115. 115.

    Ruckus

    @Another Scott:
    And light vehicle sales will always go through cycles anymore. First a lot more people have cars and those cars last longer than cars did decades ago. Second we have been building, at least in most big cities, rapid transit so people are less dependent on cars. Third, because of the way they are built these days there are less differences between cars, so I believe there is less reason for some people to purchase a new car every couple of years. IOW cars are/have become a commodity item for most of us rather than a status symbol. Commodity items you buy when you need them rather than when you want them. You use them till they are gone, then replace them.
    The cycle will stabilize at some market size (not withstanding an economic crash) in relation to the economy, the cost of the commodity, the size of the population, of which growth is not progressing like it was.

  118. 118.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Another Scott: We need a Manhattan Project or NASA moon shot equivalent type of endeavor. It needs not only the technical specialists in programming and coding and IT, but also counterintelligence specialists, as well as national security strategy and policy specialists. All pulled together to get us safe in as short a time as possible and then establish and maintain the processes and systems to keep us safe going forward.

  119. 119.

    Ruckus

    @Kay:
    It may be difficult to lay out vlad’s goals re: immigration.
    Vlad may not have a fully laid out plan other than to sow chaos.
    But if he does my first answer to you is a very plausible one, he’s still in a cold war mentality. He sure acts like it. He doesn’t have the military means to carry that out any longer even if they really didn’t have that back when we engaged in the cold war, which is why they lost then. But cyber war is, I would think, easier and cheaper. And BTW we don’t have the military to carry out cold war either. Our navy is just over half the size it was then and really in no better physical shape, possibly worse, although that’s hard to imagine.
    Think about this from his angle, not yours. Vlad wants power and money. How can he gain that? What tools does he have to use? He doesn’t have to go about this the way we would and in fact that specifically hasn’t worked for his side before. From his angle he doesn’t have to make any sense to us because he’s not doing this from a country angle, he’s doing this from his angle and the country is just a tool to use to get there. Think, vlad is a selfish bastard, see if that works better.

  122. 122.

    Formerly disgruntled in Oregon

    @Frankensteinbeck: Re: the national press – we’re talking micro-targeted marketing via social media and new media to a new generation of low-information voters, so national press is bypassed and/or irrelevant. And policy is irrelevant too – values and emotions are where it’s at for this kind of effort.

  125. 125.

    JoeSo

    @Kay: I think the endgame is to render the U.S. so weak as to no longer be a credible military threat. Russia would never confront the U.S. militarily, cause that would inevitably lead to Armageddon, and that’s not what they want. They don’t want to destroy the world, they want to open up the world to their criminal organization. To do that they need to rid themselves of the U.S. and the European Union. So they start sowing chaos and eroding the institutions of these democracies with the hope that it will eventually render these nations impotent and unable to resist Russia’s efforts to expand its influence. In the U.S., they found natural allies in the Republican Party, a party that nowadays is pretty open about its opposition to the American ideas of freedom and equality. They greeted Putin with open arms because he seemed like a savior to them after the double humiliation they suffered at the hands of Barack Obama’s election and re-election. They saw in him someone who shared their values: persecution and oppression of minority groups, persecution (and for some the eventual extermination) of homosexuals, opposition to the idea of equality between the sexes, hatred of Muslims and Middle-Easterners, blind allegiance to government (when its their people in charge of course), ultra-nationalism, support for the idea of a ruling elite (like the oligarchs), opposition to the idea of natural and human rights, Christianity infused with far-right ideology, and the promotion of Western Civilization as by-Whites, for-Whites. Plus with Citizens United, the gutting of the Civil Rights Act, and Voter Suppression laws, half of Russia’s work in undermining American democracy was already done for them. Now add to that Russia finding allies on the (far) left like Jill Stein, Oliver Stone, and others (maybe Tad Divine, Amy Goodman, Susan Saradon?) with their naive understanding of world politics (that the world would be better if the U.S. stopped being so mean to Russia) and their hatred of Democrats undermining any attempt for more rational lefties to speak out again this, or even to be in any position to stop it. Oh and don’t forget RT and Sputnik doing their part. Incompetent leaders making bad decisions at home and abroad, civil unrest, pro-Russian and anti-Democrat voices obfuscating the truth: you have a recipe for America’s death in a thousand cuts.

  126. 126.

    Millard Filmore

    @PhoenixRising:

    anything short of a subpeona duces tecum will be ‘so fire me! I didn’t even work there!’

    What side effects does that have legally? Does the lack of a paycheck have any impact on whether the president can claim any executive privilege over their work product? Their testimony?

  127. 127.

    PhoenixRising

    @Matt: My guess, based on FB’s TOS, is that revealing the user data allowing investigators to prove that accounts are fake in an admissible way requires a warrant.

    Otherwise anyone who wanted to make a user prove identity for whatever reason could demand that FB verify that the user exists. Think of all the ways ‘real ID’ is misused for harassment, and make it the platform’s problem…nah. Get a warrant if you think this fake user is both fake and anyone gives a damn for a legitimate reason.

  128. 128.

    tobie

    @Jinchi: Lifting the Magnitsky Act and other sanction would mean Russian oil and gas exports and leasing could be renewed, bringing hard currency back to a cash-strapped nation. That’s why Tillerson’s appointment as SoS was so much in their interest and so disturbing for us/U.S.

  129. 129.

    Matt

    @Baud: Here might be a relevant exception, from Facebook’s privacy policy

    We may also access, preserve and share information when we have a good faith belief it is necessary to: detect, prevent and address fraud and other illegal activity; to protect ourselves, you and others, including as part of investigations; or to prevent death or imminent bodily harm.

  130. 130.

    Ruckus

    @Kay:
    Russia and quite a few other countries as well are in a labor way, similar. You want a job you don’t apply for it, you buy it. You don’t have enough to do that? You don’t get the job. IOW graft is strong in a lot of places in the world. In Russia graft is the grease that makes most every thing work. It may be changing a bit but it’s been that way for a very long time so it will take a long time and a reformer to change that. Vlad is not a reformer. You talk of immigration, what does it take to immigrate to this country? That’s right it’s money. On this blog, in the last week, we’ve had people who have discussed that they don’t have the money to apply to be citizens so they can stay here. What does it cost to get here in the first place? How does that young person from Russia get here in the first place? Money. Now it sounds like I’m dissing the US, but it’s the same if you want to immigrate to most other countries, some cost far more than what it costs to come here. Or there are no jobs when you get to those countries so why bother. It isn’t easy to make that decision for most people but if you are looking for a chance to have a reasonable life, that can be done here and easier than a lot of places. That’s why they do it.

  131. 131.

    PhoenixRising

    @Millard Filmore: Of course not. Otherwise, any corruption could take place under the guise of a voluntary association with POTUS and the only necessary defense would be ‘I’m a volunteer’.

    But my hypothesis, which G-d willing will be tested by Mueller soon, is that *they don’t know that* and those who have tried to explain it to them have been unsuccessful.

  132. 132.

    Formerly disgruntled in Oregon

    @Frankensteinbeck: Marketing can/should be more sophisticated than parroting a single catchy line. Social media marketing in particular can be infinitely more subtle.

    Our political marketing assumptions and methods are dangerously outdated, our institutions stuck in the past. Who’s got the vision to win the hearts and minds of the next generation? Who’s got the money to fund it? (Should be a bargain compared with traditional media consultants and TV ads…)

  133. 133.

    tobie

    @Formerly disgruntled in Oregon:

    The DNC doesn’t produce messaging

    One of the reasons they don’t, I suspect, is because we spit on it when they do. The snorts and snark from the left when they rolled out “A Better Deal” were pretty astounding.”MAGA” and “Feel the B*rn” said nothing. They were marketing gimmicks like the Nike swoosh. But evidently in our tribal age politics is all about branding. “Stronger Together” and “A Better Deal” are just too sanctimonious, suggestive of a stance–no one wants a group based on shared principles. I hate this state of affairs and would love to be shown I’m wrong.

  136. 136.

    Millard Filmore

    @tobie:

    The snorts and snark from the left when they rolled out “A Better Deal” were pretty astounding.”MAGA” and “Feel the B*rn” said nothing.

    “Vote GOP, the treason party!”

  138. 138.

    Formerly disgruntled in Oregon

    @tobie: The marketing (which is hopefully more sophisticated that a catch phrase or two) shouldn’t be aimed at us – but at “low-information voters”. Who cares what we think about it? We’re already persuaded.

    Last year, I was impressed by how effective the Clinton campaign was at appealing to me, and fellow juicers – high-information voters who genuinely care about our country and our neighbors. I joked that it was a little concerning at the time, since the people the campaign was reaching so well were the ones who needed the least persuasion to get out and vote Hillary. I should have been much more concerned.

  139. 139.

    Corner Stone

    @rikyrah: I agree. IMO J Kush is in a world of hurt that he somehow thought would never catch up to him. Of course, he learned his ethics from the best, Dad and Dad In Law.

  140. 140.

    The Pale Scot

    @Kay: I meet a remarkable number of people from Belarus at the food bank I volunteer at. Some Chechens too come to think about it

  141. 141.

    Corner Stone

    @The Pale Scot: Are the men from Belarus just as I expect? Pale, slight of build but with a full head of curly black hair and thick mustaches so full you could twirl the ends if you had the right wax?

  142. 142.

    Dave

    @JoeSo: Of course this is a high risk endeavour on Vlad’s part. This sort of thing invites blowback. It may take longer to occur than is ideal but to prevent it he pretty kuch needs to run the table. In the US he nearly did but even that’s tranistory and may, heaven help me this about to end up in heighten the cobtradictions territory, even result in a significantly more energized US in the coming decades than would have been. In Europe he didn’t come close,Russia isn’t strong enough to win if it’s on the receiving end, and he may end up energizing European opposition. Best case reasonably possible scenario is that he weakens Europe’s/US sufficiently that China becomes the dominant power and they don’t care enough about his regional crap ik Europe and Central Asia to bother interfering much. I’m absolutely worried this is decidely Pollyanish.

  143. 143.

    efgoldman

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist:

    Also seeing a passive response to his expansion of the Russian sphere of influence in Ukraine, the Baltics, maybe even the Balkans and Turkey.

    That implies a purposeful strategy and a vision, however distorted, of the future. Only, Henna Hairshirt doesn’t have the knowledge, capability, or learning capacity to do any of those things

  146. 146.

    The Pale Scot

    @Dave: China’s looks at western Russia as its future breadbasket. Vlad should know this. I figure he thinks if he can sabotage the western economies that will hamstring Chinese actions

  147. 147.

    efgoldman

    @Ruckus:

    cars are/have become a commodity item for most of us rather than a status symbol.

    Yes, but…
    Toyota’s advertising strategy for the Camry this fall sells it as a sporty, powerful, aggressive car. Until now, they’ve sold it (correctly, I think) as a generic, reliable family car – the functional equivalent of a ’67 Chevy in our misspent yout’s

    There’s a reason that my Dad’s last car purchase was a ’96 Camry – which is still on the road in my son-in-law’s family.

  148. 148.

    No Drought No More

    Generally speaking, today’s congress is a contemptible bunch that all but invites such displays of contempt by any American worth their salt. On the other hand, Mueller reputation proceeds him, and, having a clean slate with the American people, is taken a tad more seriously by the very same Americans. Generally speaking and unlike with congress, they respect both his integrity and power to indict and hold law breakers to account (albeit not necessarily in that order).

  149. 149.

    Roger Moore

    @efgoldman:
    The thing Detroit needs to be really worried about is that the way cars could stop being a commodity is when electric and self-driving cars really break into the market. I don’t believe the hype that Detroit has completely ignored the area, but it’s clear that the most exciting work is happening in Silicon Valley, not the upper Midwest.

  150. 150.

    Another Scott

    @Formerly disgruntled in Oregon: I was terribly annoyed by the Ready for Hillary PAC that was formed in January 2013 and seemed to bombard me with donation requests every week until I told them to stop. It was a huge waste of money, IMO, and fed the meme that she thought she was somehow “inevitable” – 2+ years before she even announced she was running!

    I haven’t started on her book yet – it’ll be interesting to see if she says anything about the pre-announcement efforts…

    Agreed – the HRC campaign was great at addressing the vast majority of my concerns (I still think she was wrong about “no-fly zones” in Syria and stuff like that), but what about the loosely-connected voters? She did well, but not well enough for Comey not to throw the election to Donnie.

    Grr…

    We need to do better. And part of that is not pissing off people on your team before the candidates even announce…

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  151. 151.

    Ruckus

    @efgoldman:
    Two things. First Toyota has a problem. They’ve sold the Camry as a family car for over two decades now. It has a name, like Mustang, that is recognizable in a lot of the world. And their other cars have gotten bigger and like everything else, more expensive and probably also, it’s at it’s sell by date, they need something new or to change it’s image. Good luck with that. We had a 93 Camry, which was rubbish, but my ex liked it so she kept it. She drove that thing for at least 10 yrs and in LA that’s a lot of miles. Just for the record I’ve owned 2 Toyota vehicles and they were both rubbish. I’ve also known a lot of people who have driven theirs with very few problems and hundreds of thousands of miles. My luck continues to shine on me.
    Second, I see all car mfg as seeing falling sales as a need to do the things that they have always done, add power, add doodads, add styling that isn’t, all in trying to maintain sales. But if I’m correct that for a lot of people a car is a commodity, all that does is make them look for a better value. And when their current car still works, why replace it. Look at me for an example, I bought my first new car in 13 yrs last yr. I didn’t do this because I wanted to my last car had major issues. It would cost more to keep it than it was worth. I used to buy/lease cars every 2-3 yrs. I’m hoping this one will last till I can no longer drive, IOW I’m thinking this is my last car. Because in the not too distant future I won’t be able to purchase any car, my income when I retire won’t allow it. And I sure as hell don’t want to buy a car just to drive to work to pay for it. And I’m not alone in that thinking. The generation I belong to, as you well know, is rapidly getting to the age where driving is like many other parts of our lives, a thing of the past. And the current generation, the new driver age generation, don’t seem to have either the ability or nearly the desire to purchase a new car for $20K or up and the used car market is much more expensive to get into than what we saw at their age. Big business has screwed itself with holding down wages, people can and will forgo purchasing those big ticket items because wages have not kept up with costs.

  152. 152.

    Ruckus

    @The Pale Scot:
    I actually disagree here. Vlad is a pragmatist if nothing else. He will do what works when it works. For Vlad. Russia is a big country but it is not a wealthy country in the traditional sense. And all or at least most of it’s wealth has been transferred to private hands, two of the largest belonging to vlad. He can still make war noises but he doesn’t have the traditional war power that has been attributed to Russia, mainly by us, in order to keep the MIC at peak speed and power. Vlad wants money and power, in that order. He is at heart a massive capitalist. But he needs customers and his money comes from oil. The rest of the world is trying to cut back oil usage. Some parts are being very successful. A lot of them are his customers. I think he’d like us to be one of them, and with the current crop of republicans he can get that. That’s why he’s protecting his flanks to the degree he is and why he is here. This is not the old Russian order, it’s not my fathers or my Russia, this is modern day Russia, sell oil to make Vlad rich. Sure we know he is a racist, he is a misogynist, he is a dictator in all but title, we should expect nothing less. But we should also look at modern Russia, and what it is, not only what it was decades ago.

  153. 153.

    J R in WV

    @Kay:

    Perhaps the Russian government fears wholesale flight of all skilled persons, to flee the kleptocracy for anywhere else? If that isn’t really legal internationally, they won’t have to build a fortified border, with the rifles aimed at Russians.

  154. 154.

    barb 2

    @Ruckus: yep!!

    Grifters all Republicans & Russian bad boys.

    Russians (leadership) are not our friends. We have proof — Trump.

    The International Corporations that are not really part of any country — as in separate, above different from countries have slowly been taking over governments. Putin seems to be a hybrid — but not really — he is the CEO of an International corporation with fingers in governments where his Corporate form of grifting enriches his gang. The 1% of the 1% don’t care if people need more than a living wage to purchases what the corporations produce — their bottom line for the short-term gain is all they care about. Profits aren’t going into R & D and infrastructure — Putin/Russian leadership, the GOP, International (no country loyalty) Corporations just want the fast money.

    The Environment, Global Warming — the future generations are of no concern to the unholy triad — not unless there is an immediate profit.

    Follow the money.

    Adam says this is war — WWIII — fought with different weapons. We are at war.

    Something is up (for real) the Navy jets from Whidbey Island were flying very low, barely above the trees. These are the jets from the aircraft carriers — I know I grew up on Navy air bases and recognize the blast of the engines as they flew overhead. This has never happened before here in 40 years — Sunday, direct low passes over the area where I live. Normally the airspace overhead is for the Civilian general aviation — Navy jets fly elsewhere. Something is going to change. Trump ordering attacks to draw attention away from the fact that he is an active traitor against the USA????

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