The Preds got the result that their effort deserved in Game 3 unlike in Game 1 and 2. The Penguins need to create more traffic and chaos in front of the net and not be stupid off the puck.
No politics open thread.
by David Anderson| 51 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads, Sports
The Preds got the result that their effort deserved in Game 3 unlike in Game 1 and 2. The Penguins need to create more traffic and chaos in front of the net and not be stupid off the puck.
No politics open thread.
This post is in: Foreign Affairs, Open Threads, Republican Venality, Russiagate, All we want is life beyond the thunderdome, Riveted By The Sociological Significance Of It All
No, srsly…
NBC News: Senior federal official says that Reality Leigh Winner, age 25, has been arrested & charged with leaking document to The Intercept
— Tom Winter (@Tom_Winter) June 5, 2017
Per Buzzfeed:
A federal contractor in Georgia has been charged with leaking classified material to an online news outlet, the Justice Department announced Monday.
Reality Leigh Winner, 25, was arrested by the FBI at her home on Saturday and appeared in federal court in Augusta on Monday afternoon, DOJ said in a statement.
Winner is a contractor with Pluribus International Corporation who held top secret clearance, according to the statement.
“Winner printed and improperly removed classified intelligence reporting, which contained classified national defense information from an intelligence community agency, and unlawfully retained it,” DOJ said in the statement. “Approximately a few days later, Winner unlawfully transmitted by mail the intelligence reporting to an online news outlet.”…
“Releasing classified material without authorization threatens our nation’s security and undermines public faith in government,” Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein said in a statement.
This story is developing. Please check back for updates.
Reality Leigh Winner. Because we’re living in a Pynchon novel, now.
Russiagate Open Thread: “Reality Winner” Leaks to the InterceptPost + Comments (349)
This post is in: Hail to the Hairpiece
"Russia didn't happen. Russia didn't happen. Russia didn't happen. Russia didn't– holy crap it did." – The Intercept pic.twitter.com/KPaCYAxZFs
— Craig Harrington (@Craigipedia) June 5, 2017
Russian military intelligence executed a cyberattack on at least one U.S. voting software supplier and sent spear-phishing emails to more than 100 local election officials just days before last November’s presidential election, according to a highly classified intelligence report obtained by The Intercept.
The top-secret National Security Agency document, which was provided anonymously to The Intercept and independently authenticated, analyzes intelligence very recently acquired by the agency about a months-long Russian intelligence cyber effort against elements of the U.S. election and voting infrastructure. The report, dated May 5, 2017, is the most detailed U.S. government account of Russian interference in the election that has yet come to light.
There is speculation that this arrest is related to the leaked document:
DOJ just announced charges against someone who gave classified intel to a news outlet. Description matches 5/5/17 NSA report… pic.twitter.com/4gioMhFKJn
— Eric Geller (@ericgeller) June 5, 2017
That should make this week’s Rogers and Comey testimony interesting, to say the least.
Greetings, Comrades, from the HeartlandPost + Comments (140)
This post is in: Foreign Affairs, When Everything Changed
Last night, stinger asked for more information on the causes of the breakup of the Soviet Union. Here’s a short summary of my understanding, with some references, not all (sorry!) links.
The Soviet economic system was faltering from the sixties on. The First Secretaries during that period were slow-moving, sick, and in no way capable of innovating out of that situation. It may have been inherently impossible in any case. Manufacturing of anything but weapons never was a significant part of the economy, which depended on oil exports.
The Soviet Union was made up of 15 Union republics. Some of those republics became part of the Soviet Union after World War II but had fought civil wars for independence from the Russian empire during and after the Russian Revolution in 1917. The Baltic States in particular, but other republics as well, were not happy members of the Union. Moscow went through waves of Russification, in which the Russian language was forced on populations for which it was not native. Social restrictions sometimes accompanied the language crackdowns.
Most of the rest of the world refused to recognize the Baltic republics as part of the Soviet Union. Token embassies were maintained in Washington and London.
By the 1980s, even the Soviets were beginning to realize they had a problem. The arms race with the United States had been partly tamed by the SALT arms control agreements, but an intermediate-missile race was burning. Building armaments was bleeding money and industrial capacity out of the economy. Mikhail Gorbachev, a newcomer with promise, was made First Secretary in March 1985.
Reactor #4 at Chernobyl blew up as a result of a poorly planned and executed safety experiment in April 1986, contaminating chunks of Ukraine and Belarus in particular. The secrecy and slowness of the Soviet system to respond convinced Gorbachev that something needed to be done quickly. That something included both industrial reform and increased transparency.
Industrial reform came first and was called perestroika. A little later came glasnost, openness. Opening up to criticism of industrial practices was necessary to build a better-working economy. Integrating that economy with the rest of the world after several decades of isolation was also necessary. Neither would be easy. Arguably, Gorbachev moved too fast, without sufficient planning.
Besides the republics, several countries were satellites of the Soviet Union: Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, and East Germany. Their governments were nominally independent, but in reality heavily directed from Moscow. With the Soviet Union, they made up the Warsaw Pact, a response to NATO. Hungary and Czechoslovakia had staged revolts in 1956 and 1968 but were harshly put down. Poland was engaged in a slow-motion revolt throughout the 1980s via the Solidarity organization, which had characteristics of both a labor organization and political party.
Political parties were banned within the Soviet Union, but once perestroika was announced, nationalists in the Baltic republics began organizing perestroika groups. For improving industry, they said, but those groups contained, deliberately, the seeds of political parties. The Baltic states had strong expatriate groups in Europe, the United States, Canada, and Australia that were willing to help.
Something that remains a mystery to me is how the Baltic republics managed to stack their Supreme Soviets with nationalists. But they did. After 1985, the Supreme Soviets began to legislate the primacy of local laws over Union laws, the legitimacy of national symbols like their flags, and eventually called themselves parliaments instead of Supreme Soviets. Demonstrations alternated with bursts of legislation. People were jailed.
Moscow had never bothered to understand what they called “the nationalities,” all those Soviet people who were not Russian. So the leadership missed a lot of what was going on in the satellites and republics. They paid more attention when secession was openly spoken of.
Gorbachev recognized that Moscow could no longer support the satellites, and their restlessness presaged a possible need for military action that he could not afford financially or in its public fallout. So in October 1989, he dissolved the Warsaw Pact and said that the satellites could go their own way in what he humorously called the Sinatra Doctrine. Additionally, he renounced the doctrine of proletarian revolution, which had underpinned Soviet expansionism.
Gorbachev felt that this, along with the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, would allow him to concentrate on reforming the Soviet economy. But he was not fully aware of the rebellions brewing in the republics.
In one of the internal moves toward reform, Boris Yeltsin was elected president of the Russian Federated Soviet Republic, the largest of the Soviet republics. Yeltsin spent time with Baltic politicians to learn their tactics. Discussions continued with the republics on their constitutional duties toward the Union. Lithuania declared independence in March 1990. Soviet militia were sent in. Estonia and Latvia had come up to the edge of independence legislatively, but did not declare. Lithuania cooled its rhetoric but did not repudiate the declaration. In January 1991, Gorbachev insisted that Lithuania repudiate the declaration, sent in the military, and fourteen civilians were killed.
In August, a group of former military officers who felt that Gorbachev must be overthrown to preserve the Union held him prisoner at a Crimean resort. Boris Yeltsin took advantage of this to look powerful in Moscow. The plotters were turned back. Estonia and Latvia took the opportunity to declare independence. Moscow sent troops to seize television towers in Tallinn and Vilnius, and a press building in Riga, but they were withdrawn after confrontations with civilians.
A conference among the leaders of the Russian, Belarusian, and Ukrainian republics in Belarus produced a document dissolving the Soviet Union in early December. The remaining republics signed on, and the Soviet Union ended on December 25, 1991.
Was the missile race part of what took the Soviet Union down? It was one more straw in a succession of them. It played a part. But Ronald Reagan’s and Margaret Thatcher’s rhetoric was a much smaller part.
Reading:
Jack Matlock, Autopsy on an Empire. Matlock was the US ambassador to the Soviet Union as it broke apart. His view tends to be Moscow-centric and shares the Kremlin’s vague point of view of the nationalities. But a good guide to what was going on in Moscow.
Anatol Lieven, The Baltic Revolution. Probably the best book available on the Baltic republics/states as they broke away from the Soviet Union.
As I write this, I am realizing how much of my information has been gained piecemeal from various sources, mainly Estonian ones. I thought for a while about writing a book about the process in Estonia, and maybe I still should.
The Singing Revolution is a film about some of the history and the role of culture in Estonia’s revolution. I’m in the photo of the audience at the 2004 Song Festival, if you can find me! It has some footage of protests that I didn’t realize exists.
The Estonica encyclopedia has a number of helpful articles in its history section.
A Brief History of the Breakup of the Soviet UnionPost + Comments (106)
by Betty Cracker| 112 Comments
This post is in: Domestic Politics, Nature, Open Threads
We went hiking yesterday in a swampy preserve. There were signs posted at the gate warning visitors that it’s black bear mating season. We didn’t see any bears but did see suspected bear poop:
Yeah, they shit in the woods.
We came upon a wooden bridge, and while I was leaning on it and sighting an alligator for a photo, something stung the ever-loving crap out of my right thumb.
I didn’t see what bit me, but my thumb immediately swelled up. Over the past 24 hours, I’ve taken antihistamines, put ice on it, etc., but when I got up this morning, it was even worse. I can’t bend it at all now, and it’s so swollen it feels like my skin will split.
I may have to break down and go see a doctor, which will cost a lot of money because my insurance sucks donkey balls. Fucking venomous creepy crawlies!
Hope you’re having a better day. Open thread!
This post is in: Dolt 45
Oh ffs:
When President Donald Trump addressed NATO leaders during his debut overseas trip little more than a week ago, he surprised and disappointed European allies who hoped—and expected—he would use his speech to explicitly reaffirm America’s commitment to mutual defense of the alliance’s members, a one-for-all, all-for-one provision that looks increasingly urgent as Eastern European members worry about the threat from a resurgent Russia on their borders.
That part of the Trump visit is known.
What’s not is that the president also disappointed—and surprised—his own top national security officials by failing to include the language reaffirming the so-called Article 5 provision in his speech. National security adviser H.R. McMaster, Defense Secretary James Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson all supported Trump doing so and had worked in the weeks leading up to the trip to make sure it was included in the speech, according to five sources familiar with the episode. They thought it was, and a White House aide even told The New York Times the day before the line was definitely included.
It was not until the next day, Thursday, May 25, when Trump started talking at an opening ceremony for NATO’s new Brussels headquarters, that the president’s national security team realized their boss had made a decision with major consequences—without consulting or even informing them in advance of the change.
“They had the right speech and it was cleared through McMaster,” said a source briefed by National Security Council officials in the immediate aftermath of the NATO meeting. “As late as that same morning, it was the right one.”
Added a senior White House official, “There was a fully coordinated other speech everybody else had worked on”—and it wasn’t the one Trump gave. “They didn’t know it had been removed,” said a third source of the Trump national security officials on hand for the ceremony. “It was only upon delivery.”
The president appears to have deleted it himself, according to one version making the rounds inside the government, reflecting his personal skepticism about NATO and insistence on lecturing NATO allies about spending more on defense rather than offering reassurances of any sort; another version relayed to others by several White House aides is that Trump’s nationalist chief strategist Steve Bannon and policy aide Stephen Miller played a role in the deletion. (According to NSC spokesman Michael Anton, who did not dispute this account, “The president attended the summit to show his support for the NATO alliance, including Article 5. His continued effort to secure greater defense commitments from other nations is making our alliance stronger.”)
All the best people. So he can ignore them and listen to the nazis. At any rate, with the Middle East blowing up, sure is good to know we have a steady hand in the WH and a first rate team in charge.
* I may be dating myself with the younger crowd (do we have a younger crowd?), but this was the GOP refrain when Bush and Cheney were elected in 2000 after the horrible no good Clenis years.
Thank Goodness the Adults Are In Charge*Post + Comments (302)
by Betty Cracker| 285 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads, Politics, Republican Stupidity, Trump Crime Cartel, Assholes
Lately, it seems like leaks and/or effective reporting offer a scoop on the Trump-Russia story or general Team Trump incompetence and infighting on a daily basis, with stories coming out just in time to dominate the evening news cycle. Trump himself has settled into a pattern of undermining his own team and/or generally confirming that he’s an incompetent boob via morning tweets. Today was no exception:
There’s so much wrong here. First, Trump flacks have spent weeks trying to tamp down the “ban” talk since characterizing the Muslim ban as a “Muslim ban” is a loser in court. Their boss just made liars of them by using the word “ban” and implying that it’s targeting Muslims by invoking “political correctness.”
Trump further undermined his own people by dissociating himself from the “politically correct” document he signed. And he’s undercut his pending SCOTUS case by saying the courts are compromised and hinting that it would be better if his decrees could be enacted immediately as if he were Vladimir Putin, a Saudi prince or a Turkish or Filipino strongman. All in the space of about seven minutes.
Meanwhile, my Twitter feed tells me Kellyanne Conway is on TV this morning admonishing journalists for covering Trump’s tweets and basically implying that the so-called president doesn’t speak for his own administration.
It’s entirely possible this is all a cynical ploy: Maybe the Trumpsters know the SCOTUS will strike down the ban anyway and are doubling down on anti-Muslim hysteria so they can use the next terrorist incident here as a Reichstag fire moment. It honestly would not surprise me.
Welcome to Crazytown, folks. Every day, it feels more and more like something has to give, that we can’t go on this way for another three years, seven months and 16 days.