TBR News November 4, 2018
The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Isaiah 40:3-8
Washington, D.C. November 4, 2018:” Beginning on September 29, the Jews of Kiev were assembled and marched to the vicinity of the ravine. Not far from its edge they were told to strip off their clothes and remove their valuables. In groups of ten they were marched to to the edge, whereupon they were shot and fell into the Yar. The accepted estimate is that 33,771 Jews were executed in this manner.
Babi Yar continued to be an execution spots for many months subsequently. Jews from other parts of the Ukraine were brought there for execution. So to were Roma and Sinti, and Soviet prisoners of war. The Soviet authorities estimated that approximately 100,000 corpses lay strewn across the bed of Babi Yar. Beginning in July 1943 SS personnel were given the task of eliminating all evidence of the massacre. To achieve this the corpses were exhumed and burnt. The task of exhumation, moving and burning the corpses, was forced on inmates of the concentration camp Syretsk, 100 of whom were Jewish. Aided by land moving machinery, the task was completed in six weeks. No trace, apparently, was left. With the exception of fifteen prisoners who new what their ultimate fate was likely to be, and who escaped, the concentration camp inmates who had carried out this work were executed by the SS.
Although this method of eliminating Jews in areas occupied by the Germans post-June 22, 1941, was repeated on a massive scale by personnel of the Einsatzgruppen, various auxiliary forces, and police battalions in the occupied areas of the USSR, resulting in some 1.5 million Jewish dead, as well as the dead of members of other ethnic and national groups, the destruction of Kiev Jews at Babi Yar has come to symbolise the methods and incomprehensible barbarity of this phase of the Final Solution of the Jewish Question in Europe.” Guest editorial by Ernst Gauss, PhD
The Table of Contents
- Donald Trump has said 2291 false things as U.S. president: No. 70
- Rigging the vote: how the American right is on the way to permanent minority rule
- Republican ‘mini-Trumps’ echo US president to woo midterm voters
- The Post’s View• Opinion
- Exclusive: Twitter deletes over 10,000 accounts that sought to discourage U.S. voting
- The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations
- Fox News Is Poisoning America. Rupert Murdoch and His Heirs Should Be Shunned.
Donald Trump has said 2291 false things as U.S. president: No. 70
August 8, 2018
by Daniel Dale, Washington Bureau Chief
The Toronto Star, Canada
The Star is keeping track of every false claim U.S. President Donald Trump has made since his inauguration on Jan. 20, 2017. Why? Historians say there has never been such a constant liar in the Oval Office. We think dishonesty should be challenged. We think inaccurate information should be corrected
If Trump is a serial liar, why call this a list of “false claims,” not lies? You can read our detailed explanation here. The short answer is that we can’t be sure that each and every one was intentional. In some cases, he may have been confused or ignorant. What we know, objectively, is that he was not teling the truth.
Last updated: Aug 8, 2018
- Apr 30, 2018
“And it’s a horrible agreement for the United States, including the fact, Mr. President, that we gave Iran $150 billion and $1.8 billion in cash. Nigeria would like some of that. One point eight billion in cash and $150 billion.”
Source: Joint press conference with Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari
in fact: The “$150 billion” figure has no basis. Experts said Iran had about $100 billion in worldwide assets at the time; after the nuclear deal unfroze Iranian assets, Iran was able to access a percentage of that $100 billion, but not all of it. PolitiFact reported: “The actual amount available to Iran is about $60 billion, estimates Garbis Iradian, chief economist at the Institute of International Finance. U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew pinned it at $56 billion, while Iranian officials say $35 billion, according to Richard Nephew, an expert on economic sanctions at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy.”
Trump has repeated this claim 19 times
“You know, in seven years that deal will have expired and Iran is free to go ahead and create nuclear weapons. That’s not acceptable. Seven years is tomorrow. That’s not acceptable.”
Source: Joint press conference with Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari
in fact: The nuclear deal with Iran, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), does not expire in seven years; while some provisions elapse in 2025, others remain in effect long after that. Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia nonproliferation program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, told the Washington Post that Trump’s claim is “completely false”: “Many measures associated with the JCPOA sunset later than seven years, and others do not sunset at all,” he said. Alexandra Bell, senior policy director at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, told the Post: “President Trump’s statement indicates either abject confusion over the parameters of the JCPOA or a willful misinterpretation of that deal.”
“But we give Nigeria well over $1 billion in aid every year.”
Source: Joint press conference with Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari
in fact: As the Washington Post notes: “The United States is planning to give Nigeria about $419 million in aid in 2018, an amount that is due to drop to $350 million in 2019, according to government statistics. In 2014, the high point for aid to the country, the United States gave about $700 million.”
“The Fake News is going crazy making up false stories and using only unnamed sources (who don’t exist).”
Source: Twitter
in fact: There is simply no evidence that major U.S. media outlets have made up fake sources in their reporting on Trump.
Trump has repeated this claim 12 times
- May 1, 2018
“So disgraceful that the questions concerning the Russian Witch Hunt were ‘leaked’ to the media. No questions on Collusion.”
Source: Twitter
in fact: The leaked list of possible questions to Trump was compiled by Trump’s own lawyers — apparently based on some sort of information from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigators, but this was not a leak from the special counsel’s office itself. Moreover, the list included several questions on the subject of potential collusion between Trump’s campaign and Russia. Among them: “During the campaign, what did you know about Russian hacking, use of social media or other acts aimed at the campaign?”; “What knowledge did you have of any outreach by your campaign, including by Paul Manafort, to Russia about potential assistance to the campaign?”; and “What did you know during the transition about an attempt to establish back-channel communication to Russia, and Jared Kushner’s efforts?” All of these questions are part of an effort to determine if Trump and his campaign were involved in Russian efforts to interfere with the election.
“Oh, I see…you have a made up, phony crime, Collusion, that never existed, and an investigation begun with illegally leaked classified information. Nice!”
Source: Twitter
in fact: The opening of the Russia investigation had nothing to do with classified information. The FBI opened an investigation into whether people affiliated with the Trump campaign were assisting Russian efforts after receiving a tip that campaign foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos had boasted to an Australian diplomat that Russia had obtained damaging information on Clinton, before this was publicly known. Trump appeared to be referring to a memo former FBI director James Comey gave to a friend to leak to the media with the intenton of pressuring the Justice Department to appoint a special counsel; that memo, however, was never classified.
- May 2, 2018
“As everybody is aware, the past Administration has long been asking for three hostages to be released from a North Korean Labor camp, but to no avail. Stay tuned!”
Source: Twitter
in fact: Two of the three prisoners were taken by North Korea during Trump’s presidency, so it is obviously nonsensical to claim the Obama administration had “long been asking” for all three to be released.
- May 4, 2018
“Right? We all know what’s going on in Chicago. But Chicago has the toughest gun laws in our country. They’re so tough. But you know what’s happening?”
Source: Speech to the National Rifle Association
in fact: Chicago does not have the country’s toughest gun laws. Trump’s claim is common, but it is outdated: Chicago’s ban on handguns was struck down by the Supreme Court in 2010, and Illinois allowed people to carry concealed weapons across the state in 2013. While Chicago retains some restrictions many other states do not have, New York City and San Francisco are significantly tougher. In New York City, for example, the police department interviews all applicants for a handgun license.
Trump has repeated this claim 3 times
“They’re saying Death to America, and we have the former administration, as — as represented by John Kerry — not the best negotiator we’ve ever seen — he never walked away from the table, except to be in that bicycle race, where he fell and broke his leg…At 73 years old, you never go into a bicycle race, OK? Just — you just don’t do that. I’m not 73; he was, OK?”
Source: Speech to the National Rifle Association
in fact: John Kerry was 71, not 73, when he broke his leg cycling (not in a bicycle race) in 2015.
“They’re saying Death to America, and we have the former administration, as — as represented by John Kerry — not the best negotiator we’ve ever seen — he never walked away from the table, except to be in that bicycle race, where he fell and broke his leg… At 73 years old, you never go into a bicycle race, OK?”
Source: Speech to the National Rifle Association
in fact: John Kerry was not in a bicycle race when he broke his leg in 2015. He was simply riding a bicycle.
“And — and by the way, you just saw the recent poll? It came out, the Rasmussen, 51 or 52. It’s the highest level I’ve ever been at.”
Source: Speech to the National Rifle Association
in fact: Leaving aside Rasmussen’s tendency to be much more favourable toward Republicans than other polls are, this 51 per cent approval rating was not the highest level Trump had ever been at. He was at 56 per cent approval in Rasmussen on the day of his inauguration, quickly rose to 59 per cent, and was at 53 per cent as late as early March 2017.
“And by the way, Kanye West must have some power because you probably saw, I doubled my African-American poll numbers. We went from 11 to 22 in one week. Thank you, Kanye, thank you.”
Source: Speech to the National Rifle Association
in fact: Trump wrongly described this polling data: his poll numbers jumped from 11 per cent to 22 per cent for African-American men only, not African-Americans in general. (In addition, the jump occurred only in a single poll, by Reuters, in which the African-American sample size was very small. PolitiFact reported: “The surveys were based, respectively, on feedback from 118 and 171 respondents. According to Reuters’ own polling editor, the sample sizes for this particular poll ‘were too small to reliably suggest any shift in public opinion.'”)
“Because since the election, we’ve created 3.2 million jobs, unthought-of. If we would have said that three years ago, during the campaign, people would have said, ‘What a horrible exaggeration.’ That’s so terrible. They wouldn’t have believed it.”
Source: Speech to the National Rifle Association
in fact: Trump’s number is basically correct, though he is giving himself credit for jobs created during the last three months of Obama’s presidency. But it is not true that nobody would have believed 3.2 million jobs could be created over this period. The actual number of jobs added in the 18 months from November 2016, the month of the election, and April 2018, the last month for which data was available, was 3.3 million; over the previous 18 months, under Obama, the number was 3.9 million.
Trump has repeated this claim 16 times
“And we haven’t been asked to (withdraw troops from South Korea). Now, I have to tell you, at some point into the future, I would like to save the money. You know, we have 32,000 troops there.”
Source: Remarks before Air Force One departure to Dallas
in fact: The U.S. does not have 32,000 soldiers in South Korea. According to the most recent statistics from the military’s Defense Manpower Data Center, issued in Sept. 2017, the U.S. has 23,635 active duty personnel in South Korea, 27,123 military personnel in total.
Trump has repeated this claim 5 times
“When Rudy (Giuliani) made the statement — Rudy is great — but Rudy had just started, and he wasn’t totally familiar with every — you know, with everything…Excuse me, excuse me. But Rudy — Rudy understands this better than anybody. But when he made a certain statement — he just started yesterday. So that’s it.”
Source: Remarks before Air Force One departure to Dallas
in fact: Trump was trying to do damage control over to Giuliani’s claim, on Fox News two days prior, that Trump had reimbursed lawyer Michael Cohen for a $130,000 hush-money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels, which contradicted Trump’s own assertions. By saying Giuliani “started yesterday,” Trump was trying to bolster his claim that Giuliani didn’t know all the facts of the case. But it wasn’t true: Giuliani joined Trump’s legal team two weeks prior, on April 19, 2018.
Trump has repeated this claim 2 times
“Wait, wait. I have to find that we’re going to be treated fairly, because everybody sees it now, and it is a pure witch hunt. Right now, it’s a pure witch hunt. Why don’t we have Republicans looking also? Why aren’t we having Republican people doing what all these Democrats are doing? It is a very unfair thing.”
Source: Remarks before Marine One departure
in fact: Most of the lawyers hired by special counsel Robert Mueller appear to be Democrats. But Mueller himself is a Republican; his investigation is overseen by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, a Trump appointee who is also a Republican.
Trump has repeated this claim 2 times
“We ran a great campaign. We won easily. We won that easily: 306 to — I think, it was 223. We won it easily.”
Source: Remarks before Marine One departure
in fact: Hillary Clinton earned 232 electoral votes, not 223. This was not a one-time minor error: it was the ninth time Trump said “223.”
Trump has repeated this claim 12 times
“In all fairness, Bob Mueller worked for Obama for eight years.”
Source: Remarks before Marine One departure
in fact: Mueller served under Obama for less than five years. Mueller, a Republican, was appointed to a 10-year term as FBI director by George W. Bush. That term ran from 2001 to 2011. Obama, a Democrat who took office in 2009, then asked Mueller to stay in the job for an additional two years. Mueller was replaced by James Comey in 2013.
Trump has repeated this claim 3 times
“I tell you what — Rudy is a great guy, but he just started a day ago. But he really has his heart into it. He’s working hard. He’s learning the subject matter…So Rudy knows it’s a witch hunt. He started yesterday. He’ll get his facts straight.”
Source: Remarks before Marine One departure
in fact: Trump was trying to do damage control over to Giuliani’s claim, on Fox News two days prior, that Trump had reimbursed lawyer Michael Cohen for a $130,000 hush-money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels, which contradicted Trump’s own assertions. By saying Giuliani “started yesterday,” Trump was trying to bolster his claim that Giuliani didn’t know all the facts of the case. But it wasn’t true: Giuliani joined Trump’s legal team two weeks prior, on April 19, 2018.
Trump has repeated this claim 2 times
Rigging the vote: how the American right is on the way to permanent minority rule
Underhand Republican tactics – gerrymandering, voter suppression, more – underpin a vice-like grip on power
November 4, 2018
by Ian Samuel
The Guardian
The American right is in the midst of a formidable project: installing permanent minority rule, guaranteeing control of the government even as the number of actual human beings who support their political program dwindles.
Voter suppression is one, but only one, loathsome tactic in this effort, which goes far beyond just winning one election. Minority rule is the result of interlocking and mutually reinforcing strategies which must be understood together to understand the full picture of what the American right wants to achieve.
Examples are everywhere. Take North Dakota. In 2012, Heidi Heitkamp, a Democrat, won a surprise victory in a Senate race by just 2,994 votes. Her two largest county wins were in the Standing Rock and Turtle Mountain Reservations, where she won more than 80% of the vote. Her overall vote margin in counties containing Native reservations was more than 4,500 votes.
Observing that Heitkamp literally owed her seat to Native voters, North Dakota’s Republican legislature enacted a voter ID law that requires voters to present identification showing their name, birth date and residential address. There’s the rub: many Native voters do not have traditional residential addresses, so this law effectively disenfranchises them.
Or take Georgia, where the Republican nominee for governor, Brian Kemp, is the secretary of state and in that capacity has placed more than 50,000 voter registrations on hold, many from urban areas with high black populations. That is in keeping with Kemp’s privately expressed “concern” that high voter turnout will favor his opponent – Stacey Abrams, running strongly to be the first black female governor in US history.
Exacerbating voter suppression is the ongoing partisan gerrymandering effort – the redrawing of electoral maps to favor one party over another. After the 2010 census, the Wisconsin legislature (controlled by Republicans) drew a map for the state’s legislative districts explicitly designed to ensure they would retain control of the legislature even if they received a minority of votes. It worked: in 2012, despite receiving only 48.6% of the vote, they won 60 of 99 seats. Democrats won an outright majority of votes cast but secured just 39 seats.
To this, Wisconsin added a voter ID requirement designed to make it harder to vote at all. Voila: voter turnout in the 2016 presidential election was the lowest since 2000 and Donald Trump carried the state. (To be sure, there were other factors at work.) The combined, national effect of partisan gerrymandering is such that in the 2018 midterms, the Democrats might win the popular vote by 10 points and still not control the House.
Legislative maps designed to promote minority rule plus voter suppression of the constituencies opposed to it is a potent combination. And there’s more.
The two most recent Republican presidents have entered office despite receiving fewer votes than their opponent in a national election, thanks to the electoral college, which systematically over-represents small states. (California gets one electoral vote per 712,000 people; Wyoming gets one per 195,000.) With the presidency in hand in the run-up to the 2020 census, minority rule will be further entrenched by adding a citizenship question to the census. This will result in systematic undercounting of the population in heavily Democratic areas, which will in turn further reduce their influence as legislatures draw maps based on the data.
Then there’s the Senate. Because of its bias toward smaller, rural states, a resident of Wyoming has 66 times the voting power in Senate elections as one in California. Thus, in 2016, the Democratic party got 51.4 million votes for its Senate candidates. The Republicans got 40 million. And despite losing by more than 11 million votes, the Republicans won a supermajority (22 of 36) of the seats up for election, holding their majority in the chamber.
The hideously malapportioned Senate and electoral college permit the last piece of the minority rule puzzle to snap into place: the supreme court. In 2016, after losing the contest for the presidency and the Senate by millions of votes, the Republicans were able to install two supreme court justices. There may be more.
In fact, when the Senate confirmed Trump’s first nominee, Neil Gorsuch, it was a watershed moment in American history. For the first time, a president who lost the popular vote had a supreme court nominee confirmed by senators who received fewer votes – nearly 22 million fewer – than the senators that voted against him. And by now, it will not surprise you to discover that the senators who voted for the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh represent 38 million fewer people than the ones who voted no.
With the supreme court in hand, all those other tactics – partisan gerrymandering, voter ID and the rest – are protected from the only institution that could really threaten them. But it doesn’t stop there. The supreme court can be used to do more than approve the minority rule laws that come before it. It can further the project on its own.
In 2015, the court came within one vote of holding that independent redistricting commissions (which reduce partisan gerrymandering) are actually unconstitutional. The swing vote in that case, Anthony Kennedy, is gone. And the court in 2013 famously invalidated a major portion of the Voting Rights Act which put checks on voter-suppression efforts of the kind now taking place all over the country.
Taken together, this is a powerful set of tools. Draw maps that let you win even when you lose. Use the resulting power to enact measures to suppress the vote of the other side further. Count on a minority rule president to undercount your opponents in the census, and a minority-rule Senate to confirm justices who will strike down any obstacles to the plan.
With the deck this stacked, it isn’t enough to win. Wresting control back from the entrenched minority will take overwhelming victory. It may take, in other words, a genuine political revolution.
Republican ‘mini-Trumps’ echo US president to woo midterm voters
In a party that belongs to Trump, Republican candidates in the midterm elections are ultimately just sideshows — even those that mimic the president.
November 4, 2018
by Michael Knigge
DW
Days before the US midterm elections, an evening with a Republican Senate candidate in rural Virginia showed how nationalized and centered on US President Donald Trump these elections are. Just four years after entering the national political stage, he has made the Republican Party his own and has firmly ensconced himself as the point around which the rest of the right rotates.
A rally for Republican candidate for Senate Corey Stewart this week in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, three hours from Washington, proved that point.
In front of an all white, mostly middle-aged-and-up group of about 100, Stewart, flanked by banners bearing his name below a red emblazoned “Support Trump” slogan, entered the room in the Augusta County government building to the “USA, USA” chants that have become a staple of Trump rallies.
All about immigration
Like his party’s leader, Stewart hammered home the president’s central campaign theme of illegal immigration
Whether he applied it to undocumented immigration, human trafficking, gang violence, the opioid epidemic or what he called depressed wages for blue collar workers, the audience approved Stewart’s oft-repeated refrain, “We must build the wall.” Stewart — who once called himself “Trump before Trump” for the hard line he took on immigration, and was endorsed by the president after winning a bruising primary battle against Virginia’s Republican establishment candidate — went on to echo Trump in other ways as well: blaming Democrats for standing in the way of curbing undocumented immigration, attacking liberal billionaire George Soros for funding so-called left protesters, praising divisive Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, castigating Democrats for allegedly trying to exploit the tragedy of the recent synagogue shooting, and calling for more armed guards at places like schools and houses of worship.
The ‘mini-Trumps’
While Stewart’s earlier campaigns for state-wide office fizzled out and he currently trails in the polls behind the Democratic Party candidate and 2016 candidate for vice president, Tim Kaine, Trump’s ascent buoyed Stewart, which is especially remarkable in a swing state like Virginia that has traditionally elected moderate Democrats or Republicans with broad appeal, such as longtime Republican Senator John Warner.
But at least for now — in 2018 — in Virginia and in other parts of the country, a different cast of Republicans, sometimes called the “mini-Trumps” for their efforts to mimic the original, represent the new face of the GOP. According to the most recent Gallup poll, 89 percent of Republicans approve of Trump’s performance, only two points below his all-time high of 91 in the same survey.
Choosing Trump a no-brainer
“We could all do with less tweets, we could all do with less outspoken crude, coarse comments, but I think he is a man who is willing to listen and willing to adjust,” said Martha Waltz, a retired educator from Augusta County who attended the Stewart rally. “I was completely against Trump in the beginning, but when it came down to him being the candidate for the Republicans or when it came to a choice between Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, it was a no-brainer.”
Many gathered on this Thursday night don’t condone everything Trump says or does, but are willing to look the other way because they are convinced he is putting the country back on the right course.
The Democrats are becoming a mob,” said Jesse Hancock, a soft-spoken retired electrical engineer. “They are fighting authority. It doesn’t work in this country.”
While he acknowledges that Trump is “sort of controversial figure,” he said he thinks Trump will restore the United States to being the great nation it was when Hancock, now 83, grew up, “I think the country was founded on Christian beliefs and over time we strayed from those.”
‘Judeo-Christian principles’
What are commonly called Christian values are also a key reason why Sharon Griffin, a retired educator, backs Trump and the Republicans
“We are pro-life, we want reasonable immigration, not this insanity at the border, and are pro-religious liberty,” she said. “Under Obama things really went downhill, and there was hostility towards religion, particular towards Christianity. And that’s not right. Our country was founded on principles of the Judeo-Christian world and it’s the end of our country if we abandon that.”If Stewart, who originally hails from the Midwest state of Minnesota, does not feature prominently in the minds of rally-goers, it is for a simple reason: He has portrayed himself as a local extension of Trump. It’s a move the president himself approved of, recently telling Republican voters to pretend he was on the ballot.
“I think Corey and other Republicans that I know in our area are supporting Trump’s effort to restore the country,” said Hancock.
“The scary thing is, if Congress shifts,” said Griffin, “Trump can’t get anything done. And the truth is he has been getting things done like a bulldozer. It’s amazing.”
The Post’s View• Opinion
Why this election matters so much
by Editorial Board
November 3, 2018
Washington Post
We’ve said it before, but it bears repeating, and with emphasis: The stakes are higher than usual, much higher, in next Tuesday’s election. At issue is not simply the future of federal legislation on health care, taxes and many other policy matters, important as they are. Rather, the pivotal question this November is whether the American electorate will reward a campaign based on divisiveness and dishonesty.
The president of the United States, campaigning on behalf of the Republican Party, is, in effect, betting heavily that voters can be swayed by appeals to their worst instincts: anger, hatred and fear. Contrary to the practice of all previous recent occupants of his office — including those who might have dabbled in similar politics but, at least, employed euphemisms and intermediaries — he has delivered this divisive message in his own voice from his own bully pulpit.
Characterizing a caravan of Central American migrants moving through Mexico toward the United States as “an invasion,” President Trump has stood in the White House and suggested gunfire would be the right response to migrants if they should throw stones — at the American soldiers he has made into political props by ordering them to patrol the southern border. And on his own Twitter account, the president has posted a video ad that depicts a Mexican who murdered two U.S. policemen while in the country illegally and that claims “Democrats let him into our country. Democrats let him stay.”
This ad’s message would be inflammatory and repugnant even if it were strictly true, which it is not. At least one of the man’s illegal re-entries to this country took place after the Democratic administration of President Bill Clinton had deported him in 1997. And it would be inappropriate even if it were not being pitched to voters just days after an anti-Semitic madman had massacred 11 innocent Jewish worshipers in Pittsburgh which, in turn, followed a series of bomb threats against leading Democrats by a Florida man who festooned his van with pro-Trump stickers and posters.
Mr. Trump thus seeks not to soothe a troubled populace but to exploit its anxiety. It certainly is a bold gambit. His first goal, albeit unstated, is to finalize his capture of the Republican Party by showing that his incendiary brand of politics works. Conversely, his second, and broader objective, is to demonstrate that his opponents’ insistence upon more decent political discourse does not work.
That is where the voters, and their sense of integrity, come in. They have an opportunity to reject those politicians who support, or even countenance, Mr. Trump’s deeply cynical campaign. They have an opportunity to reward those — of either party — who stand up against it.
Exclusive: Twitter deletes over 10,000 accounts that sought to discourage U.S. voting
November 2, 2018
by Christopher Bing
Reuters
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Twitter Inc (TWTR.N) deleted more than 10,000 automated accounts posting messages that discouraged people from voting in Tuesday’s U.S. election and wrongly appeared to be from Democrats, after the party flagged the misleading tweets to the social media company.
“We took action on relevant accounts and activity on Twitter,” a Twitter spokesman said in an email. The removals took place in late September and early October.
Twitter removed more than 10,000 accounts, according to three sources familiar with the Democrats’ effort. The number is modest, considering that Twitter has previously deleted millions of accounts it determined were responsible for spreading misinformation in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Yet the removals represent an early win for a fledgling effort by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, or DCCC, a party group that supports Democrats running for the U.S. House of Representatives.
The DCCC launched the effort this year in response to the party’s inability to respond to millions of accounts on Twitter and other social media platforms that spread negative and false information about Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and other party candidates in 2016, three people familiar with the operation told Reuters.
While the prevalence of misinformation campaigns have so far been modest in the run-up to the Congressional elections on Nov. 6, Democrats are hoping the flagging operation will help them react quickly if there is a flurry of such messages in the coming days.
The Tweets included ones that discouraged Democratic men from voting, saying that would drown out the voice of women, according to two of the sources familiar with the flagging operation.
The DCCC developed its own system for identifying and reporting malicious automated accounts on social media, according to the three party sources.
The system was built in part from publicly available tools known as “Hoaxley” and “Botometer” developed by University of Indiana computer researchers. They allow a user to identify automated accounts, also known as bots, and analyze how they spread information on specific topics.
“We made Hoaxley and Botometer free for anyone to use because people deserve to know what’s a bot and what’s not,” said Filippo Menczer, professor of informatics and computer science at the University of Indiana.
The Democratic National Committee works with a group of contractors and partners to rapidly identify misinformation campaigns.
They include RoBhat Labs, a firm whose website says it has developed technology capable of detecting bots and identifying political-bias in messages.
The collaboration with RoBhat has already led to the discovery of malicious accounts and posts, which were referred to social media companies and other campaign officials, DNC Chief Technology Officer Raffi Krikorian said in email.
Krikorian did not say whether the flagged posts were ultimately removed by Twitter.
“We provide the DNC with reports about what we’re seeing in terms of bot activity and where it’s being amplified,” said Ash Bhat, co-founder of RoBhat Labs.
“We can’t tell you who’s behind these different operations, Twitter hides that from us, but with the technology you known when and how it’s happening,” Bhat said.
Reporting by Chris Bing in Washington; Editing by Jim Finkle, Dan Grebler and Diane Craft
The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations
November 4, 2018
by Dr. Peter Janney
On October 8th, 2000, Robert Trumbull Crowley, once a leader of the CIA’s Clandestine Operations Division, died in a Washington hospital of heart failure and the end effects of Alzheimer’s Disease. Before the late Assistant Director Crowley was cold, Joseph Trento, a writer of light-weight books on the CIA, descended on Crowley’s widow at her town house on Cathedral Hill Drive in Washington and hauled away over fifty boxes of Crowley’s CIA files.
Once Trento had his new find secure in his house in Front Royal, Virginia, he called a well-known Washington fix lawyer with the news of his success in securing what the CIA had always considered to be a potential major embarrassment.
Three months before, on July 20th of that year, retired Marine Corps colonel William R. Corson, and an associate of Crowley, died of emphysema and lung cancer at a hospital in Bethesda, Md.
After Corson’s death, Trento and the well-known Washington fix-lawyer went to Corson’s bank, got into his safe deposit box and removed a manuscript entitled ‘Zipper.’ This manuscript, which dealt with Crowley’s involvement in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, vanished into a CIA burn-bag and the matter was considered to be closed forever.
The small group of CIA officials gathered at Trento’s house to search through the Crowley papers, looking for documents that must not become public. A few were found but, to their consternation, a significant number of files Crowley was known to have had in his possession had simply vanished.
When published material concerning the CIA’s actions against Kennedy became public in 2002, it was discovered to the CIA’s horror, that the missing documents had been sent by an increasingly erratic Crowley to another person and these missing papers included devastating material on the CIA’s activities in South East Asia to include drug running, money laundering and the maintenance of the notorious ‘Regional Interrogation Centers’ in Viet Nam and, worse still, the Zipper files proving the CIA’s active organization of the assassination of President John Kennedy..
A massive, preemptive disinformation campaign was readied, using government-friendly bloggers, CIA-paid “historians” and others, in the event that anything from this file ever surfaced. The best-laid plans often go astray and in this case, one of the compliant historians, a former government librarian who fancied himself a serious writer, began to tell his friends about the CIA plan to kill Kennedy and eventually, word of this began to leak out into the outside world.
The originals had vanished and an extensive search was conducted by the FBI and CIA operatives but without success. Crowley’s survivors, his aged wife and son, were interviewed extensively by the FBI and instructed to minimize any discussion of highly damaging CIA files that Crowley had, illegally, removed from Langley when he retired. Crowley had been a close friend of James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s notorious head of Counterintelligence. When Angleton was sacked by DCI William Colby in December of 1974, Crowley and Angleton conspired to secretly remove Angleton’s most sensitive secret files out of the agency. Crowley did the same thing right before his own retirement, secretly removing thousands of pages of classified information that covered his entire agency career.
Known as “The Crow” within the agency, Robert T. Crowley joined the CIA at its inception and spent his entire career in the Directorate of Plans, also know as the “Department of Dirty Tricks,”: Crowley was one of the tallest man ever to work at the CIA. Born in 1924 and raised in Chicago, Crowley grew to six and a half feet when he entered the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in N.Y. as a cadet in 1943 in the class of 1946. He never graduated, having enlisted in the Army, serving in the Pacific during World War II. He retired from the Army Reserve in 1986 as a lieutenant colonel. According to a book he authored with his friend and colleague, William Corson, Crowley’s career included service in Military Intelligence and Naval Intelligence, before joining the CIA at its inception in 1947. His entire career at the agency was spent within the Directorate of Plans in covert operations. Before his retirement, Bob Crowley became assistant deputy director for operations, the second-in-command in the Clandestine Directorate of Operations.
Bob Crowley first contacted Gregory Douglas in 1993 when he found out from John Costello that Douglas was about to publish his first book on Heinrich Mueller, the former head of the Gestapo who had become a secret, long-time asset to the CIA. Crowley contacted Douglas and they began a series of long and often very informative telephone conversations that lasted for four years. In 1996, Crowley told Douglas that he believed him to be the person that should ultimately tell Crowley’s story but only after Crowley’s death. Douglas, for his part, became so entranced with some of the material that Crowley began to share with him that he secretly began to record their conversations, later transcribing them word for word, planning to incorporate some, or all, of the material in later publications.
Conversation No. 117
Date: Tuesday, December 16, 1997
Commenced: 1:17 PM CST
Concluded: 1:50 PM CST
RTC: It really is amazing, Gregory, the number of my old friends, and I put quotes around that phrase, who somehow forget to call me or stop by.
GD: But you aren’t in power any more, Robert, are you? The moment you left the CIA, they forgot about you and rushed to embrace your successor. It’s always been that way. Some person asked me recently how they could be more popular and have more friends.
RTC: And you told them…?
GD: Why, I said to tell everyone their uncle Waldo had died and the lawyers said they inherited all of his estate. I said that this ought to be a hundred thousand dollars or more. Then, I said, they would flock to your door, waving their hands and reminding you they had shared a sandwich with you in Kindergarten. Oh yes, armies of the eager, the worshipful, seeking the warmth of your presence and hopeful of your generosity. There is the matter of little Timmy and his earwax problem. The doctors said that after the delicate operation, Timmy could hear again. Of course all it would really take to clean out the wax and the spiderwebs would be a five dollar little bulb with a bit of liquid, available from any drug store for less than ten dollars, but no, according to your new friends, a delicate operation. Possibly at the Mayo Clinic. Modestly turned down eyes and a brief, tragic, snort into a handkerchief while thinking of poor, deaf, Timmy once again able to hear the morning song of the birdies or his Grandma’s cries of pain as she sits down on Timmy’s toy fire engine on the couch. And just think, Robert, you could prevent all of that and bring joy into their home once again!
RTC: Joy who, Gregory?
GD: Joy Pavelic, the social worker, Robert. The one who comes by to make sure they are feeding little Timmy. Social workers do not approve of feeding deaf little angels on a diet of moldy cat food. And as others join in the chorus of supplications, and as your bank account shrinks accordingly, so also does your popularity. And when the account is empty, your front porch is also empty again and the horde of leeches is seen scampering down the street to the home of the next inheritor.
RTC: Are people really that obvious? Yes, they are. Greedy and stupid.
GD: Don’t forget vicious while you’re at it.
RTC: If Hitler had done away with idiots, eastern Europe would be a desert. My God, as a Chicago boy, I learned to love the Polacks, believe me.
GD: You heard about the Russian woman who recently gave birth to a wooden baby?
RTC: No, actually I didn’t. Won’t you tell me?
GD: Certainly. She had been raped by a Pole.
RTC: (laughter) Point well taken.
GD: And Hitler never did away with people.
RTC: The Jews certainly want you to believe he did.
GD: Do you know how Hitler actually died? No? He had a heart attack when he got the gas bill.
RTC: (laughter) Well, after all, didn’t they gas a hundred million Jews?
GD: Of course they did. And they also got the cats and the parrots at the same time.
GD: Out in LA, in a really expensive art gallery in Beverly Hills, I can just her some old cow braying to her husband, ‘Myron, let’s buy the Picasso. It matches the drapes.’
RTC: The art market is pretty much filled with phonies.
GD: Oh my God, it is. Jackson Pollack used to get up on a ladder with cans of paint, toss the contents all over a big canvas he spread out on the floor of his garage and then the paint dribblings dried, cut up the canvas and made many pictures out of it. Jesus, the idiot people actually pay money for them. Their taste is obviously up their ass along with a dead baby, a beach sandal and two cans of sauerkraut.
RTC: But the art dealers must be happy.
GD: Yes, and rich.
RTC: Gregory, when you are in Washington, be careful with anti Jewish remarks. The city is packed with Hebrews.
GD: So is Beverly Hills.
RTC: No, they have power there so watch what you say. It never used to be that way but ever since Roosevelt’s long reign, the Hebrews have made a home inside the Beltway. And don’t forget that Roosevelt himself was Jewish. His biographers, most of whom are also Hebrews, speak of an aristocratic Dutch background but Franklin’s forebears came from Holland second. In Germany, where they had been living in the Rhineland, they were the Rosenfeld familiy and then when they ran to Holland with the local police after them, they changed the name to ‘Roosevelt.’ That name is not Dutch and when one of them came to New Amsterdam, he married a Samuels whose papa was in the fur trade. Why when old Franklin croaked in ’45, he had a cousin who was an Orthodox rabbi. And the Delano famlly were Italian Jews. And Franklin’s material grandfather was an opium smuggler.
GD: But Eleanor was of the same family.
RTC: Oh Jesus, don’t bring up that ugly old dyke. Crazy as a bedbug and had a face that would curdle milk.
GD: My, the Jews must have had a field day then.
RTC: Oh, they did indeed. Franklin’s top people were either rabid Jews or Communist spies. Or both. Why Harry Hopkins and Wallace were both taking money from Joe Stalin. And Morgenthau and Harry White were out to kill all the Germans and turn the country over to Stalin.
GD: Quite a few Jewish spies, weren’t there?
RTC: Many.
GD: Would you consider them traitors, Robert?
RTC: They should have hung the lot of them from trees in Rock Creek park when Franklin hit the floor.
(Concluded at 1:50 PM CST)
Fox News Is Poisoning America. Rupert Murdoch and His Heirs Should Be Shunned.
November 4, 2018
by Peter Maass
The Intercept
In the early 1990s, some of the smartest people resisting Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic worked out of a chaotic office in the center of Belgrade. The office was filled with a haze of cigarette smoke, ringing phones answered with shouts, off-kilter desks scarred by abuse, and half-empty bottles of liquor. This was the nerve center of Vreme, an opposition magazine presided over by the wise-cracking Milos Vasic.
A cross between Seymour Hersh and Ida Tarbell, Vasic saw beneath the surface of things. He realized that his small magazine made little difference to Milosevic, who had instigated and fueled the brutal wars in neighboring Bosnia and Croatia. There was just one media platform that mattered, state-controlled Radio Television Serbia, which was a relentless promoter of the Serbian strongman and his eliminationist agenda.
Vasic had a sharp analysis of how Serbs, in their susceptibility to indoctrination, were not unique. “All it took was a few years of fierce, reckless, chauvinist, intolerant, expansionist, war-mongering propaganda to create enough hate to start the fighting among people who had lived together peacefully for forty-five years,” Vasic said. “You must imagine a United States with every little TV station everywhere taking exactly the same editorial line — a line dictated by David Duke. You, too, would have war in five years.”
Instead of a former grand wizard of the KKK, we have Rupert Murdoch as the founder of Fox News, which for years – starting long before Trump’s presidency — injected racist, anti-Semitic and anti-liberal tropes into the American mainstream (remember the war on Christmas?). Fox isn’t watched by everyone, but for those who do watch, Fox is everything. As my colleague Jon Schwarz wrote the other day, it’s possible to imagine the political violence of the past weeks occurring even if Hillary Clinton had been elected president — we can take Donald Trump out of the equation and we still might have crazed Americans trying to kill other Americans because of their religion, skin color or party affiliation. But it’s impossible to imagine these attacks occurring without years of Fox News spreading the ideology of white nationalism. The network promotes conspiracy theories that begin in the bowels of the internet, and it feeds into those bowels an army of converts willing to go further than Fox & Friends dares.
The latest terror attacks in America have provoked a new wave of indignation against the network, culminating in a widely-noted call by the U.S. editor of the Financial Times, Edward Luce, for an advertiser boycott. “The most effective thing Americans can do is boycott companies that advertise on Fox,” Luce tweeted. “They bankroll the poison that goes from the studio into Trump’s head.” It’s a worthwhile idea but its impact will be limited, because as a Bloomberg article pointed out, the network’s main source of revenue is from cable subscribers, not advertisers. Some sponsors, heeding public pressure, have withdrawn from Laura Ingraham’s show after she mocked a survivor of the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, but the show’s ratings have surged since then – a condition that can lead, theoretically, to more subscriber revenue.
How can Fox News be pressured?
The Murdoch family is absolutely central — without their support, and particularly Rupert Murdoch’s support, Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson would be off the air. The curious and condemnable thing, however, is that whereas Steve Bannon became persona non-grata in polite society for his role in spreading far-right ideas, Rupert Murdoch and his heirs are welcomed into the halls of power and money even though their network has done irreparably more damage to America than Breitbart News, the media platform Bannon once controlled. Few doors (if any) are closed to the Murdochs, with little questioning of whether they should be shunned rather than solicited by the various non-profit organizations they patronize and support.
This point was highlighted in a recent exchange in which NBC reporter Ben Collins pointed out that “extremist talking points may get workshopped on fringe sites, but they’re platformed on and reach the most dupes on Fox News. Never forget that Sean Hannity was literally tying Hillary Clinton to actual Satanism three days before the 2016 election.” Bill Grueskin, a journalism professor at Columbia University, aptly responded on Twitter, “As so often, it returns to the toxicity of Rupert Murdoch, and the complicity of his heirs.”
The key heirs are Murdoch’s sons, Lachlan and James. Each of them have held senior positions in the Murdoch empire in recent years, though James has been edged aside in a restructuring that leaves Lachlan with direct control over the news side, albeit under his father’s eye. The other Murdoch children — Prue, Elisabeth, Grace, Chloe — are not involved in managing the empire (Grace and Chloe are minors), though they are beneficiaries of a family trust that holds an estimated $12 billion in Murdoch assets.
Media coverage of the Murdoch sons has been inexcusably indulgent. Lachlan was a featured guest at the New York Times DealBook conference in New York on Thursday, where he was welcomed with applause and had a generally amiable chat with Andrew Ross Sorkin. This is in contrast to what happened when it was merely announced that Steve Bannon would appear at the New Yorker Festival not long ago – after a surge of protests, editor David Remnick was forced to withdraw the invitation.
In a lengthy article in 2017, the Times reported that while Rupert Murdoch remained in control, the sons “seem determined to rid the company of its roguish, old-guard internal culture and tilt operations toward the digital future. They are working to make the family empire their own, not the one the elder Murdoch created to suit his sensibilities.” This friendly narrative bends reality. While shedding itself of Bill O’Reilly and Roger Ailes due to their sexual harassment of women, Fox News has not throttled back its xenophobic content. Indeed, it’s actually gotten worse (just watch Tucker Carlson’s show). Lachlan Murdoch even refuted the Times’s reformist narrative when he was asked at the DealBook conference — held in the Times headquarters — whether he was embarrassed by Fox News. “I’m not embarrassed by what they do at all,” he replied.
Moreover, the don’t-worry-we’ve-got-this narrative hinges on the notion that the elder Murdoch, now 87, won’t be around much longer – that his sons will be in charge soon and things will get better. But guess what, Rupert Murdoch’s mother lived until she was 103 years old. If he lasts that long — and he appears to be in good health right now — he’ll be calling the shots until 2034. We can’t wait until then for the younger Murdochs to make their move, if they even want to make a move. The emergency, and the time for action, is now.
What would ostracism of the Murdochs look like? To begin with, it would probably involve the rescinding of invitations to all the conferences and galas they regularly attend. They would become as toxic to business-as-usual as Bannon has become. Their presence and their money would not be accepted by any organization that aspires to stand against the poison that Fox News continues to unleash on the country, including the Democratic Party, which has reportedly received a number of contributions from James Murdoch and his wife, Kathryn.
Here’s one potential scenario.
After neo-Nazis marched in Charlottesville last year and one of them drove a car into a crowd of pro-democracy protesters, killing Heather Heyer, James Murdoch wrote in an email to a group of friends that “vigilance against hate and bigotry is an eternal obligation … I can’t believe I have to write this: standing up to Nazis is essential; there are no good Nazis.” He announced that he and his wife would donate $1 million to the Anti-Defamation League. The ADL confirmed that it received the donation.
But should organizations dedicated to fighting hatred accept money from the owners of a company uniquely guilty of spreading hatred?
Here’s another potential scenario for ostracism.
Kathryn and James Murdoch have established a foundation, Quadrivium, that provides funding to organizations that are involved in, among other issues, environmental protection. Kathryn Murdoch is also on the board of trustees of the Environmental Defense Fund, which fights climate change. Yet Fox News is the only major media institution that regularly expresses skepticism about the science of climate change (it told one guest, an editor from Scientific American, to not discuss it), and the network cheered the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris climate accord.
Should organizations dedicated to fighting climate change accept money from the owners of a company that’s uniquely devoted to lying about it?
James and Kathryn Murdoch are akin to the Javanka of the Murdoch family – the supposedly reasonable (or not reactionary) ones who do what they can to quietly rein in their bigoted patriarch. Kathryn Murdoch, in fact, has a Twitter account that is decidedly liberal. “Literally the only consistency that Trump has shown is to be against all forms of evidence-based or even rational thinking,” she tweeted last year, just before Trump’s inauguration. Earlier this year, she shared an anti-Trump story from the New York Times and wrote, “Worth reading.”
But there are only two tweets in her account that mention the word “Fox,” and they date from 2016. In both, she shared Fox stories that were abnormal for the network – one that admitted climate change posed a big risk, and an opinion piece arguing for Hillary Clinton’s election. It does not appear that she or her husband or any other member of the Murdoch family has publicly criticized the 800-pound gorilla of hate that has helped turn them into billionaires.
The question now is whether America’s great and good, having deplored the rising tide of far-right violence, are willing to confront the family that controls the largest platform of intolerance.
Here’s another potential scenario for ostracism.
Kathryn and James Murdoch have established a foundation, Quadrivium, that provides funding to organizations that are involved in, among other issues, environmental protection. Kathryn Murdoch is also on the board of trustees of the Environmental Defense Fund, which fights climate change. Yet Fox News is the only major media institution that regularly expresses skepticism about the science of climate change (it told one guest, an editor from Scientific American, to not discuss it), and the network cheered the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris climate accord.
Should organizations dedicated to fighting climate change accept money from the owners of a company that’s uniquely devoted to lying about it?
James and Kathryn Murdoch are akin to the Javanka of the Murdoch family – the supposedly reasonable (or not reactionary) ones who do what they can to quietly rein in their bigoted patriarch. Kathryn Murdoch, in fact, has a Twitter account that is decidedly liberal. “Literally the only consistency that Trump has shown is to be against all forms of evidence-based or even rational thinking,” she tweeted last year, just before Trump’s inauguration. Earlier this year, she shared an anti-Trump story from the New York Times and wrote, “Worth reading.”
But there are only two tweets in her account that mention the word “Fox,” and they date from 2016. In both, she shared Fox stories that were abnormal for the network – one that admitted climate change posed a big risk, and an opinion piece arguing for Hillary Clinton’s election. It does not appear that she or her husband or any other member of the Murdoch family has publicly criticized the 800-pound gorilla of hate that has helped turn them into billionaires.
The question now is whether America’s great and good, having deplored the rising tide of far-right violence, are willing to confront the family that controls the largest platform of intolerance.