Hey Putin, Nice Hit in Salisbury and Congrats on Reelection!

[Deleted]

Trump congratulates Putin on winning reelection, gets slammed by McCain

Washington (CNN)President Donald Trump said Tuesday he congratulated Russian President Vladimir Putin for winning reelection earlier this month, provoking a strong rebuke from GOP Sen. John McCain.

www.cnn.com/2018/03/20/politics/donald-trump-vladimir-putin/index.html

I do not get this. I flashed back to this when I read the above: "I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy." Riiiiiight.

We can be so absolutely naive sometimes.

[TKennedy]

Six sigma genius. All part of a master plan that is beyond the understanding of mere mortals.

[aquaduct]

Now they're reaching. Trump's not supposed to be cordial to other world leaders because McCain is an idiot? I mean, it is a soveriegn nation and not the 51st state.

Why do we even care?

[james]

Things.

[james]

More things.

www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/3/18/1749880/-Abbreviated-Pundit-Round-up-This-is-that-constitutional-crisis-everyone-has-been-talking-about

Edit - Which includes Gary Younge's thoughts.....

"Witnessing Trump’s presidency unravel so spectacularly provokes a perverse joy. The venality is so baroque, the vulgarity so ostentatious, the inconsistencies so stark, the incompetence so epic and the lies so brazen, it leaves you speechless. His vanity is without guile and the scandals that embroil him without end. Almost everything he says and does has been publicly contradicted, by himself, usually on Twitter."

[james]

Quite interesting too...

www.wnycstudios.org/shows/trumpinc

www.npr.org/podcasts/510311/embedded

and Sarah Kendzior, Scott Dworkin, Seth Abramson etc. etc.

[jdd2]

I worked at Facebook. I know how Cambridge Analytica could have happened.
Sandy Parakilas was an operations manager on the platform team at Facebook in 2011 and 2012. He is an adviser to the Center for Humane Technology.

Last week, Facebook suspended data firm Cambridge Analytica and an associated researcher, Aleksandr Kogan, for violating its policies on data protection. This followed reports that Cambridge Analytica acquired data on more than 50 million users without their consent and used that data to help Donald Trump win the U.S. presidential election in 2016. (Cambridge Analytica denies any wrongdoing.)

In 2011 and 2012, I led the team responsible for data policy violations on Facebook App Platform, which included well-known games such as Farmville and Candy Crush as well as many others.. The company cared little about protecting users’ data then, and the Cambridge Analytica story shows that hasn’t changed.

Before we discuss how Facebook treats issues such as these, some background on how the platform works may be helpful. Whenever you authorize an app that connects to Facebook, you see a dialogue box that asks you for permission to grant the app access to data from your Facebook account. The app might just ask for the information listed on your public profile such as your name, or it might ask for more personal things such as your friend list, your “likes,” your photos or other data that isn’t publicly available.

At the time that Kogan was gathering data on behalf of Cambridge Analytica, Facebook also allowed developers to access your friends’ data, even though those friends had never agreed to connect to the app. This let developers quickly build giant data sets of many users’ information. There was a way to turn off this friend-based access deep in Facebook’s settings, and some language in the user terms of service that Facebook claims gave them the right to do this. But few users were aware of either.

Critically, once the data passed from Facebook’s servers to the developer, Facebook lost all insight into or control over how the data was used. To prevent abuse, Facebook created a set of platform policies that forbade certain kinds of activity, such as selling the data or passing it to an ad network or data broker such as Cambridge Analytica. However, Facebook had very few ways to discover abuse or act on it once discovered.

Here’s an example of how an investigation into one such issue played out during my time at the company: In late 2011, it was revealed that an app called Klout was creating “ghost” profiles of children. These public profiles were not created or authorized by the children and were reportedly based on friend data from adults who had authorized the Klout app. As the lead for platform data protection issues, I had to call the leadership of Klout and ask whether it was violating any Facebook policies, because we couldn’t see what it was actually doing with the data. The leadership swore it was not in violation. I reiterated the importance of following the policies, and that was the end of our call. Facebook took no further action, and Klout continued to access Facebook data, though it turned off the ghost profiles feature.

While Klout was an unusual case because the alleged violation was publicly visible, other less visible data protection issues happened regularly during my tenure. Facebook had the following tools to deal with these cases: It could call the developer and demand answers; it could demand an audit of the developer’s application and associated data storage, a right granted in the platform policies; it could ban the developer from the platform; it could sue the developer for breach of the policies, or it could do some combination of the above. During my 16 months at Facebook, I called many developers and demanded compliance, but I don’t recall the company conducting a single audit of a developer where the company inspected the developer’s data storage. Lawsuits and outright bans were also very rare. I believe the reason for lax enforcement was simple: Facebook didn’t want to make the public aware of huge weaknesses in its data security.

Concerned about the lack of protection for users, in 2012 I created a PowerPoint presentation that outlined the ways that data vulnerabilities on Facebook Platform exposed people to harm, and the various ways the company was trying to protect that data. There were many gaps that left users exposed. I also called out potential bad actors, including data brokers and foreign state actors. I sent the document to senior executives at the company but got little to no response. I had no dedicated engineers assigned to help resolve known issues, and no budget for external vendors. Facebook’s users were being protected by whatever external partnerships I was able to strike without having to pay those partners. The only time my team got any attention was when negative articles appeared in the press.

Facebook will argue that things have changed since 2012 and that the company has much better processes in place now. If that were true, Cambridge Analytica would be small side note, a developer that Facebook shut down and sued out of existence in December 2015 when word first got out that it had violated Facebook’s policies to acquire the data of millions. Instead, it appears Facebook used the same playbook that I saw in 2012. It took the developer’s word rather than conducting an audit, and it ignored press reports about Cambridge Analytica using Facebook data in violation of its terms during the election. It looks like they took no further action until Friday, when whistleblowers and news stories forced them to finally suspend Cambridge Analytica and Kogan from the platform.

In the wake of this catastrophic violation, Mark Zuckerberg must be forced to testify before Congress and should be held accountable for the negligence of his company. Facebook has systematically failed to enforce its own policies. The only solution is external oversight.

[jdd2]

John Bolton’s Cambridge Analytica Connection

The embattled data firm earned more than $1.1 million from Bolton’s super PAC.

Carrie Levine March 20, 20184:09 PM

If President Donald Trump taps John Bolton as his next national security adviser, the former U.N. ambassador will be forced to reckon with the fate of his political empire, which includes a super PAC that has spent heavily on the services of embattled voter profiling company Cambridge Analytica.

Bolton’s super PAC has paid Cambridge Analytica more than $1.1 million since 2014 for “research” and “survey research,” a Center for Public Integrity analysis of campaign finance filings shows.

So far during the 2018 election season, Bolton has announced his super PAC will spend $1 million boosting Republican Senate candidate Kevin Nicholson in Wisconsin. Nicholson is challenging incumbent Sen. Tammy Baldwin, a Democrat.

Bolton’s super PAC spent roughly $2.5 million during the 2016 election cycle to support the bids of Republican U.S. Senate candidates, according to Federal Election Commission filings. The press release announcing support for Nicholson said that “Ambassador Bolton looks to increase those contributions for the 2018 midterm elections.”

Bolton — eyed to replace Army Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster as national security adviser should McMaster step down or be fired — would be the latest in a string of Trump administration insiders with strong links to big-spending, conservative political groups largely funded by an elite group of megadonors. It’s a list that includes Kellyanne Conway, a counselor to the president; White House Director of Legislative Affairs Marc Short; and Nick Ayers, the vice president’s chief of staff.

Bolton, who visited the White House last week, would also be the latest Trump official with ties to GOP megadonor Robert Mercer, a key supporter of Trump’s presidential bid and investor in Cambridge Analytica who is also the largest donor to Bolton’s super PAC.

“All of this makes clear that the Supreme Court was wrong in Citizens United when it unleashed big money in our elections with the promise it would be independent of candidates and office holders,” said Paul Ryan, vice president for policy and litigation at the nonprofit watchdog group Common Cause.

Bolton’s super PAC was among the first political committees to report paying Cambridge Analytica, the voter profiling company in which Mercer is an investor.

Last week, the New York Times and the Observer of London jointly reported that Cambridge Analytica had misused data gleaned from the profiles of tens of millions of Facebook users.

Facebook suspended Cambridge Analytica and its parent company, citing concerns that it had failed to delete improperly obtained data. Cambridge Analytica said the data was improperly obtained by a contractor and has been deleted. It also said none of that data “was used by Cambridge Analytica as part of the services it provided to the Donald Trump 2016 presidential campaign.”

But the statement did not specifically address whether the data was used to provide services to other political committees that retained Cambridge Analytica, including Bolton’s super PAC.

In a related matter, Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating Russian involvement in the 2016 presidential election, in December asked Cambridge Analytica to turn over emails of any employees who worked on Trump’s presidential campaign.

Cambridge Analytica did not respond to questions from the Center for Public Integrity. Bolton did not respond to an interview request submitted through his PAC or to questions regarding whether he was investigating whether Cambridge Analytica used improperly obtained data in its work for his super PAC.

As of Feb. 28, Bolton’s two political groups — the John Bolton Super PAC and John Bolton PAC — reported $3.6 million in combined cash on hand, with roughly $3 million of that amount in the super PAC’s coffers, according to disclosures filed Tuesday with the FEC.

Super PACs may raise and spend unlimited amounts of money to advocate for or against political candidates.

Much of the super PAC’s money has come from a handful of political megadonors, and the group has supported candidates also favored by its benefactors.

Mercer has given $5 million to Bolton’s super PAC since 2013. He was the Bolton super PAC’s largest donor during the 2016 election cycle and so far is also the largest donor for the 2018 election cycle, an analysis of federal campaign finance filings show. Mercer has also financially backed Cambridge Analytica.

Eight federal political committees that have received contributions from Mercer or his daughter, Rebekah, have reported paying Cambridge Analytica in the past, including Sen. Ted Cruz’s presidential committee and the North Carolina Republican Party. None, including John Bolton Super PAC, have yet reported paying the company during the 2018 election cycle.

Bolton created the political action committee and super PAC that bear his name in 2013. During the past three election cycles, the super PAC poured six- and seven-figure sums into the bids of Republican politicians such as Sens. Richard Burr and Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Tom Cotton of Arkansas. Tills and Cotton’s campaigns have also reported paying Cambridge Analytica.

Mercer is by far the Bolton super PAC’s biggest donor, but it has also drawn money from a small pool of other Republican megadonors, including shipping supplies CEO Richard Uihlein, Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus, private equity magnate John W. Childs, and real estate developer Geoff Palmer.

Bolton’s foreign policy views have been controversial, with detractors citing his willingness to use military intervention. “It is perfectly legitimate for the United States to respond to the current ‘necessity’ posed by North Korea’s nuclear weapons by striking first,” he argued in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece last month.

The position of national security adviser doesn’t generally require Senate confirmation (although McMaster faced a Senate vote in order to keep his military rank while serving in the Trump White House).

Therefore, it’s unlikely Tillis, Cotton, Burr, and other senators Bolton has financially supported would be put in a position to vote on Bolton were Trump to select him as national security adviser. Bolton could, however, face a confirmation hearing were Trump to tap him for another administration post.

[brucemacneill]

Damn good thing Democrats don't have Super PACs.

[millring]

Someday Trump will no longer be president. I bet Putin outlasts him.

Trump will never stop saying stupid stuff. He's a bad person. He's old. Maybe he'll die soon.

[jdd2]

Mar 21, 2018 6:30:06 GMT -5 brucemacneill said:

Damn good thing Democrats don't have Super PACs.

Well, trump has said the iraq war was a mistake, and then there's talk that he might pick bolton--a guy who was involved in that and still seems to think that the iraq war was a good idea--for his national security advisor?

Maybe trump should also bring back hillary or kerry as secretary of state.

[jdd2]

Mar 21, 2018 6:49:55 GMT -5 millring said:

Someday Trump will no longer be president. ... Maybe he'll die soon.

But aren't big macs are impossible to poison?

[timfarney]

Mar 20, 2018 22:32:24 GMT -5 aquaduct said:

Now they're reaching. Trump's not supposed to be cordial to other world leaders because McCain is an idiot? I mean, it is a soveriegn nation and not the 51st state.

Why do we even care?

If you don’t get what’s wrong here, I’m not sure any explanation will help.

[jdd2]

Or, someone should develop an app that would invert your privacy settings--so that you would have to consciously opt in, instead of having to pursue Sisyphus in opting out.

[millring]

www.weeklystandard.com/obama-calls-to-congratulate-putin/article/633368

[aquaduct]

Mar 21, 2018 7:33:10 GMT -5 timfarney said:

Mar 20, 2018 22:32:24 GMT -5 aquaduct said:

Now they're reaching. Trump's not supposed to be cordial to other world leaders because McCain is an idiot? I mean, it is a soveriegn nation and not the 51st state.

Why do we even care?

If you don’t get what’s wrong here, I’m not sure any explanation will help.

No, I get what's wrong here. These squeaky wheels are asshats.

Nothing new in the DC universe.

[jdd2]

Cambridge Analytica is the new DC universe.

Trump's shallow state.

[Marshall]

Mar 21, 2018 7:39:14 GMT -5 millring said:

www.weeklystandard.com/obama-calls-to-congratulate-putin/article/633368

And Dubyah said he looked Putin in the eye and saw a man he could trust. The guy is a masterful conniver. Like all true megalomaniacs, he believes what he says.

[epaul]

To which John McCain said, "When I looked into his eyes, I saw KGB."

[aquaduct]

Mar 21, 2018 10:30:06 GMT -5 epaul said:

To which John McCain said, "When I looked into his eyes, I saw KGB."

John McCain said, "I never looked in his eyes because I lost to Obama."