Standing against the War on Truth

Time has announced its Persons of the Year. They are The Guardians standing against the War on Truth. The magazine created four covers for the four groups of honorees. Time displayed the covers in a Twitter thread, but didn’t explain who these people are. For some of them I went to Daily Kos.

* Jamal Kashoggi, murdered for his coverage of the crown prince of Saudi Arabia.

* The Capital Gazette, attacked with four reporters and a sales associate killed.

* Maria Ressa, a critic of Filipino President Rodrigo Duterte, under indictment supposedly for tax fraud.

* Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, sentenced to seven years in prison for reporting on the massacre of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar.

Kos quotes Time’s actual article for several other journalists threatened or in jail in Bangladesh, Sudan, Brazil, and Hong Kong.



The news out of the Russian collusion investigation last Friday was mostly about Michael Cohen. But that news means the Department of Justice has credibly accused the nasty guy of committing a felony.

The reaction from the GOP was such things as these comments from Sen. Rand Paul:

It’s just like a lot of other things that we’ve done in Washington. We’ve over criminalized campaign finance. … I don’t think campaign violations should be criminal.

Comments like that prompted Catherine Rampell of The Washington Post (quoted in a Daily Kos collection of similar statements) to write:

For a party that claims to be “tough on crime,” Republicans seem pretty confused by what it means to hold criminals to account.

Particularly when it comes to white-collar crimes, or really any crimes committed by rich people.

And Paul Krugman of the New York Times to write

For whatever may happen to Donald Trump, his party has turned its back on democracy. And that should terrify you.

Zev Shalev of CBC’s The Weekly and a blogger about Russia, notes in a Twitter thread that

Thousands of of Russian tanks and trucks have amassed on Crimea/Ukraine border. … More than 80,000 Russian troops in the area.

And it looks like Russia is waiting for an excuse to invade. Then Shalev adds a link to a story in Wired with this comment:

Experts warn cyber attacks may cripple parts of Ukraine during any attack. Ukraine, like The U.S., has booby-trapped electricity grids.

A summary of that Wired article says:

Blackouts in Ukraine were just a trial run. Russian hackers are learning to sabotage infrastructure – and the US could be next.

Though Russia may be experimenting with sabotaging our infrastructure, we don’t have to help them. From Ruth Clegg and Manveen Rana at the BBC:

A technology company bidding for a Pentagon contract to store sensitive data has close partnerships with a firm linked to a sanctioned Russian oligarch, the BBC has learned.

The Jedi project, a huge cyber-cloud which could ultimately store nuclear codes, has already sparked security fears.

That prompted Melissa McEwan of Shakesville to respond:

Setting aside for the moment that a company with ties to a sanctioned oligarch who's pally with Putin was even allowed to bid on the contract, what in god's teeth is the Pentagon doing proposing to keep military secrets on a cloud?!
…
And as incredible as it seems, it might not even matter — because there's a good possibility Russia already has access to our nuclear codes.

As I mentioned in October, a Government Accountability Office report found that U.S. weapons systems are stunningly vulnerable to hackers, many of whom can hack our systems without alerting the military teams who manage them.

Russia may not need to loft their nukes at us. They’ll use our own.



Nah, you wouldn’t think the Pentagon is don’t that because the nasty guy told them to share info with the Russians? Couldn’t be. He wouldn’t be that brazen.

McEwan has been saying for the last three years that the collusion is right there in the open. Much of the stuff that Special Counsel Robert Mueller has been putting on court papers, has long been known.

Over and over, people have argued with me that what I was saying about collusion couldn't possibly be true, because no one would be so stupid as to be that brazen.

But the brazenness wasn't stupidity. It was calculated. Trump and his co-conspirators knew damn well that there would be people lining up to argue that what they were seeing with their own eyes couldn't actually be what they were seeing with their own eyes, because no one would be stupid enough to be that brazen.

And here we are.

Maria Butina got cozy with the NRA and various conservatives during the 2016 election. She has been arrested and accused of being a Russian spy of using that coziness to allow Russia to influence the election by funneling money through the NRA. Five months later she is reaching a plea deal. Such a deal could bring down nasty junior.

But McEwan notes that Putin’s traitors tend to end up dead. Butina is either taking a big risk or has Putin’s blessing. And what might that mean? Perhaps that task that Putin has given the nasty guy is complete and Putin has no more need of him? Would Putin rather have the vice nasty guy instead? This is definitely speculation.

That prompted aphra_behn to comment:

In the end, I'm not sure it matters much to Vladimir Putin whether he has a compliant Pence leading an evangelical theocracy that's actually run by corporations, or whether the Democrats clamber back into the seat of governance.

Because even if the Dems were to re-take some branches of government, they can't fix everything quickly or easily. And that will, in turn, be fodder for propaganda inflaming both the far right and left to further attack democratic government and human rights, as the Russians exploit our diversity as well as our divisions.

Russian operatives aren’t waiting around to see what happens. They are still actively working their propaganda machines, with one group saying they are taking fresh aim at America. A Western security official said, “It's about undermining key pillars of democracy and the rule of law.”