The_jackalope
The_jackalope's JournalWe now take you live to the White House press conference
NYT: "Mr. Scaramucci, will you be doing the fandango, and if so, when?"Anthony Scaramucci: "I'm just a dumb shit, nobody loves me."
WH press corps: "He's just a dumb shit, from a rich family..."
Ex-CIA Director Hayden: Russia election meddling most successful covert operation in history
“Frankly, [the Russian meddling] is the most successful covert operation in history,” Hayden (former director of the NSA and the CIA) told a national security panel in response to a question from moderator Yahoo News Chief Investigative Correspondent Michael Isikoff. Hayden said the original cyberattack on the Democratic National Committee was not that surprising — and even from an intelligence perspective, impressive.
“I just have to admit as a former director of NSA, Russia’s hack and theft of email is honorable state espionage,” Hayden said to audience laughter, speaking at the Aspen Security Conference. “If we as NSA could have an insight into … Russia through the same techniques, game on,” Hayden said. “But now you make the great distinction: What the Russians then did with the information. And then that turned it into what we call a covert influence operation.”
Hayden argued that the release of stolen Democratic emails on WikiLeaks was the Kremlin’s egregious act, not the hacks to obtain the information.
Former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, also on the panel, responded that the Defense Department had issued a guideline which said attacks warrant a response if they result in loss of life or serious economic damage.
“The truth is the technology and the techniques that can be used have actually evolved more rapidly than our thinking about it,” Chertoff said. “The value of norms would be it would start to create a basis for law-abiding countries to know when they can respond to a cyber act as if it were an act of war.”
Chertoff's last point, about the technology evolving faster than American thinking, is why the USA has lost the opening engagement of Cold War 2.0, and is now having to play catch-up to an enemy that has already taken the high ground.
Getting to First Base
Shot yesterday on my "caregiver respite" walk: two interpretations of "getting to first base." 
Russia scandal goes well beyond Trump: GOP leaders definitely knew about hacking
McClatchy also reported that the Justice Department is looking into “whether Trump’s campaign pointed Russian cyber operatives to certain voting jurisdictions in key states – areas where Trump’s digital team and Republican operatives were spotting unexpected weakness in voter support for Hillary Clinton.” That’s an issue I’ve written about previously here on Salon, based on some post-election investigative reporting by the New York Times.
This raises once again the question of just what was going on in the Republican Party during this period. After all, it wasn’t just Donald Trump who benefited from Russian hacking. The GOP-dominated House majority was a major beneficiary as well.
Remember, the congressional leadership knew in 2015 that it was happening. Reuters has reported that the so-called Gang of Eight (Republican leaders in Congress) was told that Russian hackers were attacking the Democratic Party but that the information was so top secret they could not share it. As we know, hackers attacked the Democratic National Committee and the personal email of Clinton campaign chair John Podesta. But they also hacked the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and information gleaned from that hack was put to use in some 2016 campaigns for Congress.
Also recall that one month before Donald Trump Jr. took that meeting with the Russian lawyer, House Majority Leader Kevin “loose lips” McCarthy was talking about Trump’s connections to Vladimir Putin in a room full of Republicans.
http://www.salon.com/2017/07/13/russia-scandal-goes-well-beyond-trump-gop-leaders-definitely-knew-about-it-and-went-along-did-they-benefit-too/
Everyone in the GOP organization deserves to be eviscerated. Literally. 
Justice Department Defies Court Deadline To Release Sessions' Contacts With Russians
Source: NPR
In defiance of a court order, the Justice Department is refusing to release part of a security form dealing with Attorney General Jeff Sessions' contacts with the Russian government.
On June 12, a judge had ordered the agency to provide the information within 30 days, a deadline that passed on Wednesday.
A recently launched ethics watchdog group called American Oversight filed a Freedom of Information Act request in March for sections of the Standard Form 86 relating to Sessions' contact "with any official of the Russian government."
"Jeff Sessions is our nation's top law enforcement officer, and it is shocking one of his first acts after being named Attorney General was to mislead his own agency about a matter of national security," the group's executive director, Austin Evers, said in a statement.
Read more: http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/07/13/536982193/justice-department-defies-court-deadline-to-release-sessions-contacts-with-russi
They're lookin' at you, Beauregard.
Don't fence me in
I hate Frost fencing. This is the first time I've ever used it successfully in an image.
Meditations with Light
Morning walks with my dog Buddha are a contemplative respite from the cares of the world. These are some of the images that moved past my inner lens this morning.
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