BBO Discussion Forums: Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped? - BBO Discussion Forums

I think we are arguing over semantics.

An agent is a person or thing that acts on behalf of another or acts a proxy of another. Official awareness or scienter of this relationship is not necessary. Someone can be fooled into acting as an agent of another.

The quote is worded to suggest the American intelligence community believes Wikileaks was chosen by the Russian government to disseminate information it had hacked.

This means Wikileaks became either an active agent or an unwitting agent of the principal, the Russian government.

At the end of the day, the article and the American intelligence communities believes Wilileaks is working to further Russian interests.

Whether the exact nature of that relationship is agreed-upon collusion or as an unwitting dupe in an international spy vs. spy game -- I'll let the espionage experts decide.

2) If Russia is guilty of election meddling, what is the cure aside from removing Trump from office?

3) Did our nation pay a penalty of equal measure when we meddled in foreign elections to protect American interests or did we assume American exceptionalism provided us diplomatic immunity from such transgressions?

John Oliver did a long piece about how Trump and the GOP frequently makes use of the "what about xxx?" method of diverting attention away from their own failings.

Not really likely. Unless they actually cast thousands of fraudulent votes in the swing states, it's impossible to say that their meddling really swung the election. Social media posts and fake ads and news can influence voters, but in the end they still made up their own minds, and those votes are legitimate.

So what? Does hypocracy excuse other misbehavior?

John Oliver did a long piece about how Trump and the GOP frequently makes use of the "what about xxx?" method of diverting attention away from their own failings.

Hypocrisy does not absolve one of punishment for his own transgressions; however, it does make one an awful judge of character in evaluating other's wrongdoing.

America has to demonstrate the moral superiority it claims it has. Hypocrisy fuels resentment, undermines our credibility, and destroys our reputation. And without credibility, it's hard for us to build trust and build consensus and negotiate in good faith with our neighbors (and our enemies).

That's one of the reasons North Korea won't negotiate with us. They can smell our hypocrisy from a mile away.

Hypocrisy is the scarlet letter in politics.

Hypocrisy makes us as guilty as the bad actor we are punishing.

Hypocrisy is the ugliness we vividly see in others yet conveniently ignore in ourselves.

It's the social mask we refuse to remove because protecting our reputation is more important than repairing our character flaws. Hypocrisy provides fertile ground to cultivate the weeds of arrogance and complacency.

And that, my friend, is where we are as a nation. We are stuck in our own quicksand of hypocrisy. Our neighbors see this moral failing and whisper behind our backs. They know the truth but we remain defensive, blanketed in denial, and dependent on propaganda, military might, and bravado to artificially inflate our self-worth and distract others from our own shortcomings and insecurities.

Attorney General frowns on GOP calls for special counsel to probe Hillary Clinton
"I have always told the truth" on Russia: Sessions

Addressing calls by conservative Republicans in the Congress for the appointment of a special counsel to probe Hillary Clinton over the sale of a company during the Obama Administration with American uranium reserves, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions told lawmakers on Tuesday that there would need to be facts to support such a high profile investigation, giving no indication that such a probe has been authorized by the Justice Department.

“What’s it going to take to actually get a special counsel?” asked Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), who repeatedly pressed Sessions on the need for a probe to look at the Uranium One matter, the Clinton Foundation and more.

“It would take a factual basis,” the Attorney General replied, in an extended back and forth with the Ohio Republican.

“The only thing I can tell you Mr. Jordan, you can have your idea, but sometimes we have to study what the facts are.”

The call by Jordan and other conservative GOP lawmakers for a full review of the Uranium One story has been supported publicly by President Donald Trump, as some Republicans argue there is more than enough evidence to support a broader investigation.

But in his testimony before the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, Sessions seemed to indicate otherwise.

“I would say, ‘looks like’ is not enough basis to appoint a special counsel,” the Attorney General said, weighing in more directly than before on an issue that has drawn repeated public interest from President Donald Trump, who has often argued that Clinton’s ties to Russia need more investigation than questions of Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. elections, and any ties to the Trump campaign.


Sessions was asked about the same issue four weeks ago during an appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee; that time, he gave more of an extended ‘no comment’ response on whether there was even an ongoing investigation of the Uranium One matter.

“The Department of Justice will take such actions as appropriate,” Sessions said, as he seemed to take pains to say his answer should be taken “without confirming or denying the existence of any such investigation.”

Today was much different.

Republicans in October announced that a pair of committees in the House would investigate the issue, hoping to hear from an FBI informant who reportedly brought information of possible wrongdoing to the feds during the Obama Administration’s decision-making on whether to allow the sale of a company with U.S. uranium reserves to a Russian government business.

“The American people deserve answers,” Rep. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) said at the time.

No schedule has been given for any hearings into the case.

Maybe but I think in this case the semantics are important. An agent by definition implies that the body under discussion is acting on behalf of another. Thus if I host controversial material on a website the ISP is not acting as my agent even though I have chosen them to disseminate my information. If on the other hand I go to a web company and ask them to create a website putting across my ideas then they are indeed acting on my behalf. Do you understand the difference?

In this case, we know that WikiLeaks was acting in the same way as an ISP. It might be the case that their involvement was greater but at present that seems like nothing more than conjecture and the quote from Winston's article does not suggest this closer connection is being put forward by the intelligence agencies. Not yet anyway, give them time...

So at present it seems like a more accurate term would be conduit rather than agent. Of course people wanting to make a point can use any term they choose but if they want to give the impression that WikiLeaks (or anyone/anything else for that matter, including DT) is essentially an arm of the Russian government, they will get fairly short shrift from me unless they have something to back their claims up with. Let us be clear here - you are making this claim; the intelligence communities are not. Time to back it up!

https://www.usatoday...sues/853131001/

Say what? Something ain't right! Something ain't right!

We do a disservice to our military families when we lower our admission standards for mission-ready recruits. What is going on here? Are we forsaking our current admissions standards and jeopardizing the safety, security, and lives of our existing troops for the primary purpose of bolstering headcount and meeting overly aggressive recruitment and retention goals?

Last week Danica Roem made history, winning election to Virginia’s House of Delegates as an openly transgender woman. She’ll be the only openly transgender person in a state legislature anywhere in America. And the man she defeated had held his seat for more than a quarter-century.

So when I was watching CNN a few days later and she popped up, I perked up. I realized that I somehow hadn’t caught her other media appearances since her sign-of-the-times triumph.

The CNN anchor, Kate Bolduan, invited her to reflect on it.

And Roem talked about … traffic.

Before using the word transgender, without draping herself in the glory of a trailblazer, she mentioned the awful congestion on Route 28 in Fairfax County, especially “through Centreville and part of Yorkshire,” and her determination to follow through on her central campaign promise “to replace traffic lights with overpasses where possible.”

Traffic lights. Overpasses. My jaw hit the ground, because she knew full well that Bolduan was after something juicier than a local-infrastructure tutorial. Then my eyes gleamed with admiration, because she had nonetheless delivered that tutorial — and with it, a crucial message:

Being transgender isn’t the whole of her identity, the extent of her purpose or the crux of her mission. The obstacles in her life are particular, but the hell of rush hour is universal. And her job as a lawmaker is to attend to the nitty-gritty that has an immediate, measurable impact on all of her constituents. When circumstances warrant it, she can be every bit as boring as the next politician.

This approach wouldn’t be praiseworthy if Roem seemed in any way to be hiding a part of herself or ashamed of it. But that’s not the case at all.

She campaigned frequently with her long dark hair under a rainbow scarf. She cooperated with local and national journalists who wrote about her candidacy in the context of strides by transgender people. “I understand the national implications of my race,” she told Time magazine. “I mean, I’m not stupid.”

She clearly stated her belief that insurance should cover hormone therapy and other treatments that transgender people seek. She just as clearly communicated her affinity with society’s underdogs.

Then she swerved, ceaselessly, to the problem of inadequate teacher pay, the importance of Medicaid expansion and Route 28, Route 28, Route 28. Traffic knows no color, creed or gender. It gave her both a mantra and a metaphor.

When she rallied campaign workers before Election Day, she told them to focus voters’ attention on three aspects of her biography. “I’m a 33-year-old stepmom,” she said, referring to her boyfriend and his child. That was the first aspect. Second was that she’d lived in the district almost her whole life. Third was that she’d worked there for many years as a journalist. “I know about public policy issues, because I covered them,” she said.

She wasn’t making a deeply personal appeal and imploring voters to affirm her. She was making a broadly public one and encouraging them to include her, lest her talents go untapped and her potential contributions unrealized. Her opponent, a Republican, was the one who made a big issue of her gender identity. Roem, a Democrat, let his cruelties roll off her, went back to knocking on doors, defined her common ground with fellow Virginians and planted herself there.

“When people see me doing this, they’re going to be, like, ‘Wow, she’s transgender, I don’t get that,’ ” she told Time, imagining voters’ response to her presence on the political scene. “ ‘But she’s really, really focused on improving my commute, and I do get that.’ ”

She avoided vocabulary that might be heard as the argot of an unfamiliar tribe. When I looked back at her campaign, I found plenty of “stepmom” but not “gender binary,” “gender fluidity” and such. As relevant as those concepts are, they’re questionable bridges to people who aren’t up to speed but are still up for grabs, in terms of fully opening their minds and hearts to us L.G.B.T. Americans. Sometimes you have to meet them where they live to enlist them on a journey to a fairer, better place.

In a perfect world, such caution and cunning wouldn’t be necessary. In this one, it’s not the only strategy, but it can be an effective one.

Roem dedicated her victory speech last week “to every person who’s ever been singled out, who’s ever been stigmatized, who’s ever been the misfit, who’s ever been the kid in the corner.” Those were her opening words, which poetically universalized her experience as a transgender woman without explicitly invoking it.

Then it was quickly back to prose and an exhortation that Virginians “fix the existing infrastructure problems.”

“I know this sounds like boring stuff,” she conceded. Indeed it does — boring and brilliant and a lesson to us all.

Have I lost my mind? Having sex with 14 year olds is not OK. Why do I keep reading things about people defending having sex with 14 year olds? Have we really sunk this low?

In late 2015 the British eavesdropping agency, GCHQ, was carrying out standard “collection” against Moscow targets. These were known Kremlin operatives already on the grid. Nothing unusual here – except that the Russians were talking to people associated with Trump. The precise nature of these exchanges has not been made public, but according to sources in the US and the UK, they formed a suspicious pattern. They continued through the first half of 2016. The intelligence was handed to the US as part of a routine sharing of information.

The FBI and the CIA were slow to appreciate the extensive nature of these contacts between Trump’s team and Moscow. This was in part due to institutional squeamishness – the law prohibits US agencies from examining the private communications of US citizens without a warrant.

But the electronic intelligence suggested Steele was right. According to one account, the US agencies looked as if they were asleep. “‘Wake up! There’s something not right here!’ – the BND [German intelligence], the Dutch, the French and SIS were all saying this,” one Washington-based source told me.

That summer, GCHQ’s then head, Robert Hannigan, flew to the US to personally brief CIA chief John Brennan. The matter was deemed so important that it was handled at “director level”, face-to-face between the two agency chiefs. James Clapper, director of national intelligence, later confirmed the “sensitive” stream of intelligence from Europe. After a slow start, Brennan used the GCHQ information and other tip-offs to launch a major inter-agency investigation. Meanwhile, the FBI was receiving disturbing warnings from Steele.

At this point, Steele’s Fusion material was unpublished. Whatever the outcome of the election, it raised grave questions about Russian interference and the US democratic process. There was, Steele felt, overwhelming public interest in passing his findings to US investigators. The US’s multiple intelligence agencies had the resources to prove or disprove his discoveries. He realised that these allegations were, as he put it to a friend, a “radioactive hot potato”. He anticipated a hesitant response, at least at first.

In June, Steele flew to Rome to brief the FBI contact with whom he had co-operated over Fifa. His information started to reach the bureau in Washington. It had certainly arrived by the time of the Democratic National Convention in late July, when WikiLeaks first began releasing hacked Democratic emails. It was at this moment that FBI director James Comey opened a formal investigation into Trump-Russia.

In September, Steele went back to Rome. There he met with an FBI team. Their response was one of “shock and horror,” Steele said. The bureau asked him to explain how he had compiled his reports, and to give background on his sources. It asked him to send future copies.

Steele had hoped for a thorough and decisive FBI investigation. Instead, it moved cautiously. The agency told him that it couldn’t intervene or go public with material involving a presidential candidate. Then it went silent.

Winston, the Magic R.

So mentally unstable soldiers are preferable to transgender? Sheesh!

This, from PBS, offers an understanding of the steps taken over the years with North Korea.

This article from The Atlantic starts to peel back the curtain in Oz.

Russia-Wikileaks-Trump

Will the circle be unbroken, by and by, Lord, by and by...

Have I lost my mind? Having sex with 14 year olds is not OK. Why do I keep reading things about people defending having sex with 14 year olds? Have we really sunk this low?

Only a few actually say that it doesn't matter (like the one who compared it to Joseph and Mary -- never mind that things were very different 2000 years ago, when life was shorter and it was routine to marry off daughters one they went through puberty and could start having babies).