monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Didn't the financial rating agencies rigged the system by under-estimating the liability involved?

Hasn't big oil bought 'scientific' articles against GW and promoted doubt about GW?

Don't the Koch brothers rig the system?

Didn't the DNC rigged the primaries?

Maybe it's not technically "rigging" but it looks much like "milking" the system for personal advantage...

Did you even read the complete article?

Yeah, did you? Did you read the Nation article and/or google the experts behind it? Did you read the government ICA report? Did you watch the video by John McAfee, the cyber-security expert? Do you have anything to offer other than the rank assertions of amateur journalists who say what you want to hear?

As editor of The Nation, my purpose in publishing Patrick Lawrence’s article was to make more widely known the VIPS critique of the January ICA assertions, the questions VIPS raised, and their counter-thesis that the disseminated DNC e-mails resulted from a leak, not a hack. Those questions remain vital.

Subsequently, Nation editors themselves raised questions about the editorial process that preceded the publication of the article. The article was indeed fact-checked to ensure that Patrick Lawrence, a regular Nation contributor, accurately reported the VIPS analysis and conclusions, which he did. As part of the editing process, however, we should have made certain that several of the article’s conclusions were presented as possibilities, not as certainties. And given the technical complexity of the material, we would have benefited from bringing on an independent expert to conduct a rigorous review of the VIPS technical claims.

We have obtained such a review in the last week from Nathan Freitas of the Guardian Project. He has evaluated both the VIPS memo and Lawrence’s article. Freitas lays out several scenarios in which the DNC could have been hacked from the outside, although he does not rule out a leak. Freitas concludes that all parties “must exercise much greater care in separating out statements backed by available digital metadata from thoughtful insights and educated guesses.” His findings are published here.

Forensic investigators, intelligence analysts, system designers, program architects, and computer scientists of long experience and strongly credentialed are now producing evidence disproving the official version of key events last year. Their work is intricate and continues at a kinetic pace as we speak. But its certain results so far are two, simply stated, and freighted with implications:

There was no hack of the Democratic National Committee’s system on July 5 last year—not by the Russians, not by anyone else. Hard science now demonstrates it was a leak—a download executed locally with a memory key or a similarly portable data-storage device. In short, it was an inside job by someone with access to the DNC’s system. This casts serious doubt on the initial “hack,” as alleged, that led to the very consequential publication of a large store of documents on WikiLeaks last summer. [tons omitted]....

I concluded each of the interviews conducted for this column by asking for a degree of confidence in the new findings. These are careful, exacting people as a matter of professional training and standards, and I got careful, exacting replies.

All those interviewed came in between 90 percent and 100 percent certain that the forensics prove out. I have already quoted Skip Folden’s answer: impossible based on the data. “The laws of physics don’t lie,” Ray McGovern volunteered at one point. “It’s QED, theorem demonstrated,” William Binney said in response to my question. “There’s no evidence out there to get me to change my mind.” When I asked Edward Loomis, a 90 percent man, about the 10 percent he held out, he replied, “I’ve looked at the work and it shows there was no Russian hack. But I didn’t do the work. That’s the 10 percent. I’m a scientist.”

All this was set in motion when the DNC’s mail server was first violated in the spring of 2016 and by subsequent assertions that Russians were behind that “hack” and another such operation, also described as a Russian hack, on July 5. These are the foundation stones of the edifice just outlined. The evolution of public discourse in the year since is worthy of scholarly study: Possibilities became allegations, and these became probabilities. Then the probabilities turned into certainties, and these evolved into what are now taken to be established truths. By my reckoning, it required a few days to a few weeks to advance from each of these stages to the next. This was accomplished via the indefensibly corrupt manipulations of language repeated incessantly in our leading media.

Weren't they encouraged to make more loans to minorities by federal regulators?

Haven't those articles been exposed repeatedly as bad science?

when business lobbies and large corporations can afford to hire armies of lawyers and tax specialists — and when the party in power is blatantly opposed to regulation — the system will continue to reward the rich and powerful.

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The pre-Trump Republican Party is dead; The zombie Trump party now lives in its stead, devoid of principle, feasting on fear and rage, foreign to moral framing.

I think this is sort of half true. There's no question that the party and the modern right are now more corrupted morally and financially than at any point in my life. Pretty much everything we are witnessing with Trump's administration are just the continuation of growing extremism evident since Goldwater. Or more likely, even earlier.

The point being that getting rid of Trump doesn't fix things.

I can understand why Trump defenders would be excited about this story. But it's been around since August. If it were true don't you think the whole Russia investigation would have been turned upside down by now? Why hang onto conspiracy claims?

If you were paying attention, you would know that the "whole russia investigation" has been turned upside down.

* ‘AUTHORITARIAN’ TRUMP WANTS TO DESTROY ‘OBJECTIVE TRUTH’: Indira Lakshmanan, who holds the Newmark chair in journalism ethics at the Poynter Institute, offers a good assessment of Trump’s nonstop lying and relentless attacks on the news media:

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“It is a common thing in the authoritarian playbook to discredit the media so that they are the only source that can be trusted. Making it so there is no objective truth is the most dangerous thing of all of this.”

The real goal is to render factual reality irrelevant and to collapse public faith in the very idea that legitimate empirical and journalistic inquiry can help establish something approximating the truth.

Goldwater plus the change of the racist southern democrats to the Repubs started by Strom Thurman in 1948 and completed by Nixon in 1972.

Of course, I was in 9th grade then and didn't fully understand the dynamics of Racism and politics.

layman wrote:

If you were paying attention, you would know that the "whole russia investigation" has been turned upside down.

Trump has hacked the Kremlin? Wow!

Walter Hinteler wrote:

layman wrote:

If you were paying attention, you would know that the "whole russia investigation" has been turned upside down.

Trump has hacked the Kremlin? Wow!

You made me laugh out loud.

Bombing suspect's family faces backlash after chastising authorities

“We are heartbroken by the violence that was targeted at our city today, and by the allegations being made against a member of our family,” the family statement released by CAIR legal director Albert Fox Cahn said.

It added: “But we are also outraged by the behavior of the law enforcement officials who have held children as small as four years old out in the cold and who held a teenager out of high school classes to interrogate him.

The statement prompted almost immediate outrage on social media, with several users saying the tone was “offensive” in the midst of an attempted terrorist attack that could have killed dozens of people if the bomb detonated like planned.

Talk show host Montel Williams tweeted: “This moronic, offensive, morally indefensible statement by CAIR lawyer @CahnLawNY just cost @CAIRNational my support. I’m done.”

“I don’t understand this...the guy tried to kill innocent people with no regard and the family is now upset at some inconveniences?? Would they have felt bad if there were “inconvenient” funerals! #usa this insanity has to stop,” Twitter user @RealityBeaker wrote.

“Rude? Attempting to murder innocent Americans, while your family and son are privileged guests, entitles you to be handled with kid gloves? REALLY? You haven't anything worthy of sympathy, America wants and deserves the answers,” @CindySm92914679 tweeted.

Wrote @SkipTerrio: "The only thing the 'Ullah family" should be saying is, "We are profoundly sorry for unleashing a psychopath into your midst.'