20 thoughts on “No Kidding”

  1. craig, it’s Halloween season and the ghost of Lee Atwater stalks the land

    the guardian: 

    Two young Arizona Republicans tried to make a donation to a Democratic congressman as members of the Communist party in an apparent attempt to tie him to the far left.

     
    On Friday afternoon, two men who called themselves Jose Rosales and Ahmahd Sadia walked into the campaign office of first-term Democrat Tom O’Halleran with $39.68 and an urgent desire for the Northern Arizona University Communist party to be given a receipt for the donation.
     
    The pair initially walked in to sign up to volunteer but had brought along a jar full of money that they wished to donate. After being directed to a finance staffer, they were told to fill out paperwork. In doing so, they identified themselves as members of the Northern Arizona University Communist party. They made clear they were not an official group but were holding meetings. But they also insisted upon a receipt.
     
    When told they get only an emailed receipt, Rosales immediately scratched out one email and wrote another. The entire process raised eyebrows among O’Halleran’s staff.
     
    Lindsey Coleman, the finance director for the campaign, then drove to the local Republican field office to return the money. Almost immediately, the man who identified himself as Rosales appeared from a room inside the office and was identified as Oscar. He accepted the money from Coleman.
     
    Speaking to the Guardian, Coleman identified the second man as a field organizer for the Arizona Republican party and said Ahmahd Sadia was not his real name. Neither the Arizona Republican party nor Wendy Rogers, O’Halleran’s Republican opponent for Congress, responded to requests for comment.

    Making federal campaign contributions under a false identity is a crime. However, as a dirty trick, the attempt to smear opponents by linking them to unsavory political groups has a long history. In 1972, Roger Stone, then a young campaign staffer for Richard Nixon’s re-election campaign, sent a donation to Nixon’s anti-war primary opponent in the name of the Young Socialist Alliance. Stone went on to serve as Donald Trump’s longtime political adviser, a role he left early in Trump’s presidential campaign.

    The rural Arizona district was narrowly won by both Donald Trump in 2016 and Mitt Romney in 2012. However, the non-partisan Cook Political Report classifies the race as Likely Democratic.

  2. spam or sham or free speech?

    wapo:
    Facebook said on Thursday it purged more than 800 U.S. publishers and accounts for flooding users with politically-oriented spam, reigniting accusations of political censorship and arbitrary decision-making.
     
    In doing so, Facebook demonstrated its increased willingness to wade into the thorny territory of policing domestic political activity. Some of the accounts had been in existence for years, had amassed millions of followers, and professed support for conservative or liberal ideas, such as one page that billed itself as “the first publication to endorse President Donald J. Trump.” Facebook’s ability to monitor manipulation of users is under an intense spotlight in the weeks ahead of the U.S. midterm elections.
     
    But Facebook only named five of the hundreds of pages it removed. Two of the page operators said that they were legitimate political activists, not profit-driven operators of clickbait “ad farms,” as Facebook claimed in a blog post. They said were still unsure which Facebook rules they had violated or why they had been singled out for behavior that is standard in online organizing.

    “I would gladly abide by Facebook’s terms if I understood what they were,” said Chris Metcalf, the publisher of the left-leaning “Reasonable People Unite” which was shut down along with eight additional Facebook pages, which he said had a total of 2.25 million followers. “I am a legitimate political activist. I don’t have a clickbait blog. I don’t have a fake news website. And I haven’t been doing anything that all the other pages in this space aren’t doing.”

    In its post, Facebook described the pages, with names like “Nation in Distress” and “Reverb Press,” as largely domestic actors using clickbait headlines and other spam tactics to drive users to websites where they could target them with ads. The company said it was not taking issue with the nature of the content posted by the pages, but with the behaviors of the accounts, which used inappropriate tactics to artificially inflate their influence. Some of the pages and accounts had millions of followers.

    Facebook said it shut down the accounts for having “consistently broken our rules against spam and coordinated inauthentic behavior.” “People will only share on Facebook if they feel safe and trust the connections they make here.”
    Facebook for years has tried to squeeze spam and clickbait from its platform because it can irritate users. But Facebook has usually applied a softer punishment, downranking the sites in its newsfeed so fewer people see them – but not shutting them down altogether.
     
    But ever since Russian operatives used Facebook to target American voters ahead of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the company has been on a crusade to demonstrate that its platform won’t be used to disrupt the democratic process. False information peddled by foreign actors was clear-cut manipulation. But the same content, when spread by domestic actors, could be considered free speech — and a crackdown on it would be contrary to a principle social media embraces.
    [….continues…]

  3. NY Times:  Amy McGrath Is Avoiding Attack Ads. Can a Congressional Candidate Win Without Them?

    […]
    The race for Kentucky’s Sixth Congressional District between the Republican incumbent, Andy Barr, and his Democratic challenger, Amy McGrath, has featured one of the highest concentration of political ads in the country — almost 7,000 airings — in one of the most fiercely fought races.
    But there is a twist. The contest also has one of the most lopsided ratios of negative-to-positive ads, with Mr. Barr and aligned Republican groups spending more than $3 million in the relatively inexpensive Lexington media market in the past six weeks, overwhelmingly on spots attacking Ms. McGrath.
    Ms. McGrath, so far, has not run attack ads against Mr. Barr, an approach that makes this contest a laboratory to test the long-held proposition that while voters find negative ads distasteful, candidates use them because they work.

    “Voters universally decry negative ads,” said Erika Franklin Fowler, the director of the Wesleyan Media Project, which analyzes political advertising. “But we are biologically attuned to pay more attention to negative information. It is the same reason that loud sounds or other things will draw our attention. We remember negativity more.”

    […]

    Mr. Barr’s campaign is not so sure his opponent has been all positive. In her latest ad, for instance, Ms. McGrath, who played college soccer at the Naval Academy, bats away shots on goal as she tries to rebut Mr. Barr’s attacks. But she also lodges a late shot of her own: “You’re the one who’s doubling the national debt.”

    […]
    Ms. McGrath’s strategy puts her in the decided minority this election cycle, which that has featured record spending on negative ads by outside groups in both parties, along with the candidates’ own attacks. Hundreds of millions of dollars are flowing into the midterm campaigns, with Republicans relying heavily on huge donors like Sheldon Adelson writing checks worth tens of millions to “super PACs,” while Democrats are flooded with small donations. Representative Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico, the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, told reporters last week that more than 82 Democratic House candidates had raised over $500,000 in the third quarter — and 60 of those had raised over $1 million, 30 had raised over $2 million and eight had raised over $3 million.
    Among those leading the pack: Ms. McGrath’s $3.65 million, a stunning sum for a first-time candidate running in a relatively small state.
    With that money, she has focused her ads on her biography as a retired Marine combat aviator, with others that respond to Mr. Barr directly.
    Late last week, she put up a 25-foot billboard in rural Mount Sterling that said, “Remember when you swore you’d stop supporting candidates who only run negative campaigns?” She hopes to drive that home on Friday when former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. campaigns with her in nearby Owingsville just a day before President Trump holds a rally to support Mr. Barr.

  5. Yup…  if the democrats say it’s up…  trump will say it’s down and accuse them of hating up.  I’ve stopped paying attention to anything he says.

    KGC…  that article to which you linked from Forbes on Kavanaugh is very, very interesting.  Hope it gets more attention from reporters….    although not holding my breath as it apparently is not the shiny object du jour.

  6. RR

    I hope the 10th Circuit pays close attention

    the media sucks – not fake news but not what’s important either

     

  7.  

    Virtually every word out of Trump’s mouth is a confession as he charges others with the sins he knows he has committed.  His major credo seems to be that if he did something horrid, then everyone opposed to him must be doing the same.

     

  8. Nice picture — do you think SFB knows what he is doing or it’s just a natural reaction for a big giant asshole

  9. Beto   our next senator from Texas   goodbye Ted Cruz  absolutely no one will miss you

  10. bbronc, did you get a chance to read and if so what did you think of dexter filkins article this week in

    the new Yorker   Was There a Connection Between a Russian Bank and the Trump Campaign?

     

    A team of computer scientists sifted through records of unusual Web traffic in search of answers.

    […]

    “We were watching this happen in real time—it was like watching an airplane fly by,” Max said. “And we thought, Why the hell is a Russian bank communicating with a server that belongs to the Trump Organization, and at such a rate?”

    Only one other entity seemed to be reaching out to the Trump Organization’s domain with any frequency: Spectrum Health, of Grand Rapids, Michigan. Spectrum Health is closely linked to the DeVos family; Richard DeVos, Jr., is the chairman of the board, and one of its hospitals is named after his mother. His wife, Betsy DeVos, was appointed Secretary of Education by Donald Trump. Her brother, Erik Prince, is a Trump associate who has attracted the scrutiny of Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating Trump’s ties to Russia. Mueller has been looking into Prince’s meeting, following the election, with a Russian official in the Seychelles, at which he reportedly discussed setting up a back channel between Trump and the Russian President, Vladimir Putin. (Prince maintains that the meeting was “incidental.”) In the summer of 2016, Max and the others weren’t aware of any of this. “We didn’t know who DeVos was,” Max said.

    The D.N.S. records raised vexing questions. Why was the Trump Organization’s domain, set up to send mass-marketing e-mails, conducting such meagre activity? And why were computers at Alfa Bank and Spectrum Health trying to reach a server that didn’t seem to be doing anything? After analyzing the data, Max said, “We decided this was a covert communication channel.”

    [….long, but very very interesting article continues…]

    The enigma, for now, remains an enigma. The only people likely to finally resolve the question of Alfa Bank and the Trump Organization are federal investigators. Max told me that no one in his group had been contacted. But, he said, it wasn’t necessary for anyone in the F.B.I. to talk to him, if the agents gathered the right information from other sources, like Listrak and Cendyn. “I hope Mueller has all of it,” he said. ♦

     

  11. speaking of beto

    the guardian:
    Beto O’Rourke, the charismatic Democrat who is stirring things up in Texas with his attempt to turf Ted Cruz out of the US Senate, is famous for leaving no stone unturned.
     
    He has visited all of Texas’s 254 counties this past year. That’s a lot of shoe leather in a state larger than France.
    But just how far O’Rourke is prepared to go in trying to wrest the state from being Republican stranglehold (the last time Texas sent a Democrat to the US Senate was in 1993) only became clear after the Guardian published an article on his campaign last week.
     
    The end of the piece described a 21-year-old Latino man called Sebastian Esquivel who works in his family’s restaurant, Milupita Taco House, in Gonzales, a small cowboy town south of Austin. Some level of detachment from Esquivel was perhaps to be expected, given the low level of political engagement and turnout among Hispanic Texans.
     
    But Esquivel revealed that only one member of his 20-strong extended Hispanic family had ever voted. Having been ignored for so long by politicians of all colors, what was the point?
     
    “To be honest, to me it doesn’t really matter,” Esquivel said.
    It turns out that O’Rourke – having read the Guardian story – was shocked by that comment. He discussed it with his senior staffers, and decided something had to be done.
     
    “We all agreed that this November is too important for Sebastian and any Texan not to know what we’re fighting for,” Chris Evans, the campaign’s communications manager, posted on Medium. “But we also agreed that it’s not on Sebastian to reach out to us. It’s on us to reach out to him.”
     
    So what did they do? From his car as he was travelling to Houston for a campaign event, O’Rourke tracked down the phone number of the restaurant and cold called Esquivel.
     
    With the Hispanic cook on the line, the candidate outlined his progressive policies, which include a commitment to immigration reform, universal healthcare and gun control, and asked Esquivel in return about his concerns. Esquivel said that not only had he never voted, he wasn’t even registered to vote.
    O’Rourke used his network of fired-up young volunteers to send a field worker to Gonzales, some 70 miles away, to persuade Esquivel to register. The cook duly did so, and the O’Rourke volunteer then drove him to the post box to mail it – this on the final day of registration allowed in Texas.
     
    To keep the story in perspective, one vote in a state with 28 million people is but a drop in the ocean. Though important tracking polls have O’Rourke and Cruz essentially tied, a new poll from Quinnipiac University gives a more sober assessment with Cruz up by nine points.
     
    But what it does underline are the exceptional lengths to which O’Rourke is willing to go to engage people normally excluded from the political process. That’s how he thinks he can win back his state from the rightwing Tea Party fanatics who he believes currently control it (last year Tea Party Republicans introduced a law permitting open carry of swords on Texan sidewalks).
     
    It’s not clear that he’s going to pull it off. But no one can question how hard he’s trying.

  13. I just hope all the Texan women who couldn’t bring themselves to vote for Hillary have come to their senses enough under Trump to vote for Beto.

     

  14. patd – interesting article.  The white hats are very good at things.  Some of the most interesting work we will never hear about.  I sometimes think that if I ever retire and decide to spend my days and nights in my recliner chasing ones and zeroes being a white hat is worth considering.

  15. Craig,

    Just noticed you put Romeo and Juliet up on the right.  They are a lovely couple and this is their 10th year on the nest.

     

     

  17. wapo:
    Native American voting rights activists in North Dakota have launched an audacious plan aimed at pushing back against a Supreme Court ruling that threatens the reelection of Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.) — and that could decide the fate of the Senate in the process.
     
    The high court decided 6 to 2 Tuesday to leave in place a state law that requires residents to provide an ID displaying a residential address rather than a P.O. box number to vote. Republican lawmakers who pushed for the measure say the rule is designed to combat voter fraud.
     
    But tribal officials and Democrats say it appears aimed at making it harder for thousands of Native Americans to vote, particularly those who live on reservations without conventional street names. The law specifically bans the use of P.O. boxes as an alternative form of address, rendering many tribal ID cards invalid.
    Native American activists have responded with plans to create addresses on the spot for those who need them on Election Day.
     
    Tribal officials will stand outside polling stations on Nov. 6 with laptops and access to rural addressing software and a shared database of voter names. North Dakota is the only state that does not require voter registration, meaning eligible voters can generally show up at the polls and cast a ballot so long as they have proper identification.
     
    O.J. Semans, chief executive of Four Directions, a national Native American voting rights group, said the strategy was “legally watertight” and necessary to counter the “devastating” court ruling.
     
    “Even if it doesn’t change the overall result, it’s about fighting back,” Semans said. “We have to fight back.”
     
    In one of the country’s least-populous states — and where Heitkamp, one of the Senate’s most endangered Democratic incumbents, eked out a victory of fewer than 3,000 votes in 2012 — the Supreme Court ruling could prove decisive.
    Native Americans were widely credited with delivering Heitkamp’s last win, which set in motion a six-year legal war of attrition pitting the GOP-run statehouse in Bismarck against tribal leaders and voting rights groups. Census Bureau records show 46,000 Native Americans live in North Dakota, including 20,000 on tribal reserves. According to court filings, at least 5,000 of those on reservations do not have conventional addresses.

    [,,,continues…]

  18. One HUGE difference between Democrats and the scum of the earth – is Dems want people to vote

    the scum wants to bring back poll taxes

  19. Mrs. P & LP & I went to see Kevin Eubanks and his band tonight. Terrific show. Best left hand I’ve seen in a verrrrry lonnnnng time.

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