The Russian patsies are and continue to be the public of the United States. I don’t know what Trump does or doesn’t know but all Russia ever did was put out misinformation and clever memes. People have consumed it all with no thought or remorse. I imagine the whole Ivermectin thing is all tied to Russian troll farms. Can’t you imagine Putin just saying hey, I bet we can get these idiots to start eating horse dewormer instead of getting vaccinated. They’ll be crapping their pants for several days thinking they’re accomplishing something.
Trump brought this shit on himself the day he hired Manafort. It was the stupidest decision in the world. He could have hired anybody else, but instead he stepped directly into a pile of shit. And it probably would have blown over, except of course he dug himself deeper, with countless other incredibly stupid decisions.
As usual, it’s hard to tell how much he was a patsy vs a troll vs tyrant vs something else.
All I can say is I’ve been glad he’s been mostly out of the news for a while.
This might help.
https://www.readtangle.com/the-durham-news-explained/
- First, a refresher: John Durham is the special counsel who was appointed by Bill Barr, the attorney general under former President Trump. Durham was appointed to investigate the investigations into Trump, and to determine if there was any foul play. In September, we covered Durham’s indictment alleging that Michael Sussmann, a high-profile cybersecurity lawyer, lied to the FBI by telling them he was not representing a client but coming forward as a citizen. According to the indictment, he was representing the Clinton campaign and a technology executive. During the meeting, Sussmann presented the FBI with evidence that a server belonging to the Russia-based Alfa Bank appeared to be communicating with Trump organization computers.*
I think it’s a little like if trump were to ask that teen girl from stranger things to sleep with him. Is he serious? Maybe not in the sense that he expects the answer to be “yes.” But that doesn’t mean that he wouldn’t take “yes” as an answer. I’m sure he would. And it doesn’t really change the moral context of the statement.
In all seriousness though, i’m not quite ready yet to worry about how the press reported on the russia stuff. I’m not saying i won’t be more concerned as more information comes out, but i think any conclusions right now are extremely premature. But i’m not exactly read up on it.
From the article:
“What Trump and some news outlets are saying is wrong,” attorneys Jody Westby and Mark Rasch told the Times. “The cybersecurity researchers were investigating malware in the White House, not spying on the Trump campaign, and to our knowledge all of the data they used was nonprivate DNS data from before Trump took office.”
I’m not exactly willing to hang my hat on this article. But another reason i’m suspending judgement until there is more information.
1 Like
If this article turns out to be true, it’ll be fun to hear the “FAKE NEWS” people justify themselves after promoting fake news.
Monitoring of Trump Internet Traffic Sparks New Dispute in Durham Probe
This is very complicated. I think i need to understand it better before deciding how ouraged i am at whom. It… sounds like both sides were behaving illegally at first blush.
2 Likes
“Bad behaivor all around” / “most politicians suck” sounds like a reasonable and plausible interpretation.
Hasn’t it always been about projection?
My impression (from before this latest wave of news) is that it is legal to sell DNS logs. That is one reason I’ve seen given for using VPNs, and there have been some stories recently speculating on whether or not Google tracks users even in Incognito mode using DNS logs. So other than lying about whether or not he was being doing the work for a client, I haven’t heard anything illegal that Sussman did. And most notably, Durham hasn’t charged him with anything else or even alleged that the data was inaccurate.
Having said that, I think selling data from DNS logs should be illegal, as there should be reasonable expectation of privacy on the internet. In a strange alternate reality, I’d like to think this news would result in legislation to that effect, don’t expect it to happen in our timeline.
2 Likes
Actually what bugs me the most about this is that the White House uses an independent contractor for their DNS server. That strikes me as a significant security risk.
This is where I’m at. I feel like both-sidism is often a cop out. But more and more I feel like neither side really wants to govern, they just want win elections and keep the gravy train that is Washington politics rolling. They have these armies of people who also profit off the whole thing by peddling their access and influence. It’s really getting hard to not look at everything with a very cynical outlook. Maybe we should be run by our corporations. At least we would know making money is their goal. It might be preferred to this false righteousness the politicians are constantly trying to peddle.
2 Likes
Part of what’s happened with the rise a largely private internet is that these large companies have all this data that the government wouldn’t be allowed to obtain directly. And they can give it to the government if they want.
1 Like
More like sell it to the gov’t.
It’s almost as if there is so much money sloshing around in Washington DC, that the only real way to reduce the corruption and greed is to reduce the size, scope and reach of the federal government.
Or we can hope that human nature has/will change, and “next time we’ll get it right”.
or, as you suggest, just turn things over to large corporations - but that’s already the theme of a classic '70s film staring James Caan. The 2002 remake sucked, the original was great.
1 Like
In my opinion, this solution searching for a problem is part of how we got here in the first place.
2 Likes
I agree. My sense is that there is even more corruption at the state level, in part because there’s less scrutiny at that level. And there are a LOT of advantages to having things like basic traffic laws and pollution regulation uniform across the country. (Heck, if we could have pollution regulation uniform across the world our labor would be more competitive in several sectors.)
There are some areas where it makes sense for the different cultures of the states to be reflected in their laws. For instance, it’s probably good that murder is defined separately by each state, and we aren’t having massive national fights about whether you have a duty to flee or whether you can kill the stranger in your home.
But attempts to “strangle the beast” just lead to deficits and poor service for basic federal functions, like the IRS not being able to process tax refunds due to being underfunded. That doesn’t help anyone but idealogues.
3 Likes
I’m not sure the definition or murder is one I’d pick that should logically differ by state. I mean, I’m pro-10th amendment so from that perspective yes, it should be regulated by the state. But why different states should land in different spots on what does and doesn’t constitute murder is something I can’t really logically justify.
Speed limits should certainly be set by the state. There’s a risk/reward tradeoff there that different states can reasonably view differently.
Also, it’s a heckuva lot safer to drive 80 mph in some states than it is in others. There’s probably zero places in Rhode Island where it would be reasonable to have an 80 mph speed limit. But several western states have an 80 mph speed limit in places that don’t seem to be causing particular problems.
1 Like
I think 11th, or in some cases 13th hour changes to tax law are causing bigger problems than the IRS’s funding level. Also throwing a crap-ton of extra work at them like 3 rounds of stimulus payments plus the Advanced Child Tax Credit are making their workload skyrocket. Even with unlimited money… the supply of knowledgeable potential employees is limited.
From the VITA perspective, this crap is causing a metric ton of problems.
Last February (2021) Congress declared that the first $10,200 of unemployment benefits paid in 2020 wasn’t taxable. This was well AFTER we’d started filing 2020 tax returns… many with unemployment benefits reported.
So everyone who’d already filed had to be amended by the IRS. Crap ton of extra work. Plus they had to scramble to amend a ton of forms and make decisions about stuff like whether the un-taxed income counts as income for stuff like taxation of Social Security and the EIC and stimulus and the deductibility of student loan interest and a ton of other stuff.
Meanwhile the tax preparers, who are normally required to file returns within 72 hours of having them completed, are collecting gobs and gobs and gobs of unemployment returns (more than a few people got unemployment in 2020) that can’t be filed because they are waiting on the IRS to fix the forms and their software vendor to update the software. This is all stuff that normally happens in October that got pushed to February and March.
Then when the forms and software were finally updated, WHAM!!! Here you go IRS… here’s 6 weeks of tax returns over the span of about 6 days.
On top of that, the stimulus meant that another metric ton of married couples who normally file jointly were suddenly better off filing separately so the sheer number of returns increased significantly.
And while they were laid off and collecting unemployment, everyone and their brother started a small business in 2020, so the average complexity went way up too. Everyone who had been sitting on an idea for a small business for years decided to go for it while collecting unemployment plus $600 a week. Perfect time to try…
I don’t think more money would have made an appreciable dent. Declaring that February 2021 is too late to make changes to 2020 tax rules would have.
2021 returns might be worse due to the Advanced Child Tax Credit. So far the VITA folks mostly seem to actually know what they received (which wasn’t true for the stimulus payments) so I’m cautiously optimistic. But we’ll see.