July 12, 2017

Dan Rather on Chris Hayes: "The hot breath of truth is coming down heavy on their necks right now."

Rather on Hayes now. Brilliant as usual.
"The game is closing in on them."

July 11, 2017

Dont Forget Kushner Also At Meeting With Russian Lawyer; "raises even graver questions" than Jr.

snip

The meeting with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya is the first confirmed sit-down between members of Trump’s inner circle and Russians during the campaign. And while the younger Trump’s participation in the meeting merits immense scrutiny, the encounter raises perhaps even graver questions about Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner, who also attended ― particularly given his outsized role in the White House.

On Monday night, The New York Times reported that Donald Trump Jr. knew the information he was being promised prior to the meeting was part of a Russian government effort to help his father win the 2016 election. The younger Trump says he asked Kushner and then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort to join the meeting, yet claims he “told them nothing of the substance” about it beforehand.

It was Kushner’s initial failure to disclose the meeting that led the Times to report on it in the first place. Kushner had filled out a form to receive the highest level government security clearance and had later revised it to include the previously undisclosed meeting.

It’s not the first time Kushner has omitted meetings with Russian officials on government forms, which is illegal. The national security form requires that applicants list “any contact with a foreign government” over the last seven years. Knowingly concealing or failing to disclose that information is a federal felony.

Snip

Donald Trump Jr. can attempt to distance himself from the White House, given that he does not have a role in his father’s administration.

snip

But Kushner is a senior White House adviser with a security clearance that grants him access to top-secret information, raising the stakes far higher.

snip

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/jared-kushner-donald-trump-jr-meeting_us_5964c430e4b03f144e2da78f?y17&ncid=inblnkushpmg00000009

July 11, 2017

43 of the best Twitter reactions to Jr.'s damning emails

"Reactions to Trump Jr.'s decision to publish the emails ranged from face-palms to questions about where his lawyers are to hoots of glee. Here are 43 of the best."

Go to the link - it's 43 tweets. I copied the link to three:

https://twitter.com/KenTremendous/status/884792101145161729
https://twitter.com/aseitzwald/status/884793467745992704
https://twitter.com/MartinBelam/status/884796683267305472
http://theweek.com/articles/711236/43-stunned-reactions-donald-trump-jrs-damning-emails?utm_campaign=newsletter&utm_source=afternoon&utm_medium=07_11_17-article_2-711236

July 11, 2017

Schiff on Rachel for extended interview - NYT just broke a new development in Russia/Jr. mtg

NYT just published in last few minute: Russian govt. sought to aid Trump's candidacy

Before mtg happened Jr. was told there would be compromising material offered about Hillary and was part of Russian govt. helping Trump. They have email to that effect. He absolutely knew why he was going

July 10, 2017

Liberals Have Turned Trump Into a Gay Villain Because Our Worst Villains Must Be Gay (Slate)

"Now that Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin have met in the flesh, our obsession with imagining the president as a gay man has reached a climax. Frank Bruni used his Thursday column in the New York Times to publish a work of fan fiction, “Donnie and Vlad: A Love Story,” about the “irrepressible,” unrequited, and ultimately “gross” affection of the commander in chief for the leader of Russia. As the men talked behind closed doors for over two hours at the G-20 summit, Twitter got to work:

The joke is not that old, but it feels ancient. The Lithuanian mural atop Bruni’s piece of Trump and Putin kissing went viral over a year ago; Trump smooched a shirtless Putin on Saturday Night Live in November; and Stephen Colbert was assailed for calling Trump Putin’s “cock holster” in May. In the press, where it’s generally untoward to tease a president in explicitly sexual terms, Trump is said to have many “bromances”—attempted, “budding,” ongoing, and failed: with Tom Brady, with James Comey, with Rodrigo Duterte, with Andrew Jackson (d. 1845), with Morning Joe, with Kim Jong-un, with Narendra Modi (actually a romance, no b), with Rupert Murdoch, with Elon Musk, with Benjamin Netanyahu, with Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi, with Xi Jinping. And with Qatar Airways CEO Akbar El-Baker. And, of course, with Putin. (Trump has not, according to the press, had a ro- or bromance with Peter Thiel, who is gay and just his “tech pal.”) These references occur regularly in straight news coverage as ostensibly neutral descriptions. They’re also very, very popular with political cartoonists.
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The trope is deployed not because it is novel but because it is not. It is hammered like a schoolyard taunt, with a smug assurance that Trump has been duly “trolled.” Like a lot of liberal comedy right now, it serves a fantasy of resistance through snark. (Think of Seth Rogen’s dumb Twitter messages to Donald Jr., recently glorified on Colbert’s show, or the news—ecstatically received in February and then chronicled as legend only three months later—that Melissa McCarthy had humiliated Sean Spicer.) Sexual politics aside, our glee in calling Trump gay says more about us than it does about him.

As for the sexual politics: The joke is a caricature of homoeroticism, descended from century-old stereotypes about gay men and power. Yes, most of the participants are angry liberals, idly imagining how cool it would be to make Trump sad—but Trump is not in the audience (most of the time), and he doesn’t seem to care a whole lot about homosexuality anyway. So why is this particular image the weapon of choice?

American homophobia has gone through multiple stages, each leaving a lasting mark on the culture. When we encounter homophobia today, it’s often in the form of undisguised, visceral disgust: at anal sex, at promiscuity, at disease, at gender nonconformity in general and effeminacy in particular. Sometimes, that disgust is swaddled in religion, as warnings against deviancy from nature and the breakdown of the family unit. In the political sphere, these religious ideas are—usually—defended without reference to their content, on the abstract basis of religious freedom or “tradition.”

More:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2017/07/10/jokes_about_trump_being_gay_draw_on_deep_rooted_stereotypes_about_gay_men.html?wpsrc=newsletter_tis&sid=589dfd6ebcb59c58118b45d5

July 8, 2017

Anyone watching MSNBC? Richard Engel doing a phenomenial job on Russia criminal history, dead

Russians - many more of them than we ever knew - how the country became the Russian mob; just getting into stolen money hidden in US and used to buy property here. I can see it leading right to Trump. Yeah, i love Rachel, but Richard is doing amazing work here.

Edited to add: doing a segment now on how Christian conservatives are falling in love with Russia - his words! because they consider Putin's values to be their values!!! "He is an honest person."
49% of repub voters consider Russia friendly or an ally!!!

July 6, 2017

When will Dems tire of analyzing their message & deal with the real reason they "lose"?

Dems seem to be endlessly obsessed with analyzing how they need to fix their message while ignoring the real reason they "lose". I have never been able to figure this out when computer security experts have been screaming about this since 2000.
(and this doesn't even take into account factors like Kobach's Interstate Crosscheck voter suppression system.) And yes, the Electoral College needs to be gone!

Elections officials outgunned in Russia’s cyberwar against America:

Detailed breakdown of the vulnerabilities of our election systems with a lot of data about specific states from 2016 - it's not just the Russians, and yes, voting machines can be compromised even if not connected to the internet. Hopefully all this info coming out will get Dem leadership to make the leap that if the Russians can do it, so can the GOP.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/article157039299.html
*****
A computer science professor told the Senate Intelligence Committee Wednesday that voting machines that create an electronic record of the voters' decisions are open to fraud and computer hacking, vulnerabilities that are big enough to potentially change the outcome of some elections.

J. Alex Halderman: Our voting structure is vulnerable to sabotage, even to attacks that can change votes Computer science professor whose research focuses on computer security and privacy has (with colleagues) studied voting machines and tested and verified that they can be hacked by foreign actors. "The key lesson from 2016 is that these threats are real." What needs to happen: * Upgrade old voting machines to new ones that have optical character recognition to recognize votes made on paper ballots. * Use those paper backups to verify the ballot count is accurate. * Harden voting systems against sabotage by applying cybersecurity best practices. We can upgrade our election infrastructure by 2018.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4674512/j-alex-halderman-voting-structure-vulnerable-sabotage-even-attacks-can-change-votes

J. Alex Halderman, professor of computer science at Michigan University, said he and his team began studying "direct-recording electronic" (DRE) voting machines 10 years ago and found that "we could reprogram the machine to invisibly cause any candidate to win. We also created malicious software — vote-stealing code — that could spread from machine-to-machine like a computer virus, and silently change the election outcome."

Halderman's testimony comes as the committee is trying to assess the scope of Russia's attempts to not only spread disinformation in the 2016 elections, but also its efforts to hack into U.S. voting systems.

As a computer science professor, Halderman has not only run academic trials on hacking voting machines, he has also run real-time examples.

"The one instance when I was invited to hack a real voting system while people were watching was in Washington D.C in 2010, and in that instance it took less than 48 hours for us to change all the votes and we were not caught," Halderman said about the experiment.

More:
Computer expert: Some voting machines can be directly hacked:
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/computer-expert-some-voting-machines-can-be-directly-hacked/article/2626633

At least he is saying it CAN be upgraded by 2018. At least the Russia hacks are bringing awareness to just how vulnerable our election technology is. Many have been trying to call attention for years...it is good that finally this is coming out in hearings.

It would, however, take the political will of those in power to do it.

July 6, 2017

Betsy DeVos Heads to North Korea to Reverse Its Progress in Math and Science (Borowitz)

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is being dispatched to Pyongyang in what the White House is calling a high-stakes mission to reverse North Korea’s years of progress in math and science.

DeVos, who is expected to arrive in Pyongyang later this week, plans to throw a monkey wrench in North Korea’s swiftly advancing nuclear program by replacing its current system of training scientists with a dizzying array of vouchers, sources said.

According to the White House, it is hoped that, after a few weeks in North Korea, DeVos will succeed in returning that nation’s nuclear program to pre-1970 levels.

At a press briefing announcing the mission, the White House deputy press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, called DeVos “our nation’s best bet to stop North Korea.”

“If anyone can get North Korea’s missiles to start blowing up on the launchpad again, it’s Betsy,” Sanders said.

Andy Borowitz is the New York Times best-selling author of “The 50 Funniest American Writers,” and a comedian who has written for The New Yorker since 1998. He writes the Borowitz Report, a satirical column on the news, for newyorker.com.

https://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/betsy-devos-heads-to-north-korea-to-reverse-its-progress-in-math-and-science

July 5, 2017

Trump-Endorsed Media Outlet Accuses NASA of Operating Child Slave Colony on Mars (No, not satire)

From Slate. Okay, guys, as near as I can tell, this is not satire. I know, it's getting harder every day to tell the difference.

"President Trump conducted an interview in December 2015 with noted conspiracy theorist Alex Jones during which he praised Jones' reputation as "amazing," and the two reportedly remain in touch. (Jones' site InfoWars has reported, among other things, that the U.S. government planned 9/11 and that the Sandy Hook massacre was staged.) Trump's administration, meanwhile, appears to have distributed a February press release to InfoWars, and in May, the White House gave a press pass to an InfoWars "reporter." Trump's 2020 campaign organization also cited the publication in a mass email earlier this month, and Trump's son Donald Jr. has said that another well-known conspiracist (Mike Cernovich) now employed by the site deserves a Pulitzer Prize.

Unfortunately, the cozy relationship between Jones' operation and the current administration may now be in jeopardy: On Thursday, InfoWars accused NASA—which is part of the executive branch!—of running a slave colony for kidnapped children on Mars. From the Daily Beast's writeup of Jones' interview with an individual named Robert David Steele:

“We actually believe that there is a colony on Mars that is populated by children who were kidnapped and sent into space on a 20-year ride,” said Steele. “So that once they get to Mars they have no alternative but to be slaves on the Mars colony.”

Jones echoed Steele, saying “clearly they don’t want us looking into what is happening” because “every time probes go over they turn them off. Look, I know that 90 percent of the NASA missions are secret and I’ve been told by high level NASA engineers that you have no idea. There is so much stuff going on,” Jones said.

NASA has denied the allegations, which means Trump is now faces the classic political dilemma of having to take sides in a fight between the government agency he supervises and the friendly media outlet which is accusing that agency of kidnapping children in order to enslave them in space."

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2017/06/30/alex_jones_trump_endorsed_infowars_site_exposes_nasa_s_martian_slave_colony.html

July 5, 2017

Where is the first place Rachel is posted after airing if we miss it live?

It's awhile after airing before it's posted on MSNBC. Is you tube faster? Any other tips for quickest access for us Rachel addicts who can't always catch it live?

Thanks!