Your Once and Final Supreme Double Impeachee

[kladner]

https://consortiumnews.com/2018/01/1...elsea-manning/

It is not the least surprising that the official attack line on Manning from Dems is, "Russian Stooge."

The top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Ben Cardin [Md.], has become a big star in national media by routinely denouncing Russia as a dire threat to American democracy. The senior senator from Maryland personifies the highly dangerous opportunism that has set in among leading Democrats on the subject of Russia.

Chelsea Manning confirmed on Sunday that she is challenging Senator Cardin’s re-election effort in the Democratic primary this June. Her campaign has real potential to raise key issues. One of them revolves around the kind of bellicose rhetoric that heightens the dangers of conflict between the world’s two nuclear superpowers.

[kladner]

Whoda thunkit?

[wombatman]

https://www.volkskrant.nl/media/dutc...ions~a4561913/

That's how the AIVD becomes witness to the Russian hackers harassing and penetrating the leaders of the Democratic Party, transferring thousands of emails and documents. It won't be the last time they alert their American counterparts. And yet, it will be months before the United States realize what this warning means: that with these hacks the Russians have interfered with the American elections. And the AIVD hackers have seen it happening before their very eyes.

The Dutch access provides crucial evidence of the Russian involvement in the hacking of the Democratic Party, according to six American and Dutch sources who are familiar with the material, but wish to remain anonymous. It's also grounds for the FBI to start an investigation into the influence of the Russian interference on the election race between the Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and the Republican candidate Donald Trump.

Some Tom Clancy shit going on around here it seems...

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by wombatman

https://www.volkskrant.nl/media/dutc...ions~a4561913/

Was unable to access the article - got a "you need cookies" message in Dutch, but neither clicking the "ja, Ich akzepten der Kookies, d00d" button nor manually adding volkskrant.nl to my Firefox allow-cookies exception list works. Interestingly, I get the same error message in my Safari browser, which I fall back on on the rare occasions I decide to view an article that needs my browser in "all orifices wide open" lack-of-privacy mode.

Can you possibly post the full translated text here? Thanks.

[S485122]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

...
Can you possibly post the full translated text here? Thanks.

The article was already translatedand readable from Belgium with a Firefox 27 fork (pale moon) and uBlockOrigin active.

Jacob

[wombatman]

Thanks. I had just used the auto-translate Chrome offers. Sorry about that!

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by S485122

The article was already translatedand readable from Belgium with a Firefox 27 fork (pale moon) and uBlockOrigin active.

Jacob

Thanks, Jacob - I'm still using FF v22 because it was the last version in which Mozilla gave the user easy control over image-display in webpages - v23 and n they removed that checkbox from the User Preferences menu. My Safari is similarly old because I need a version which runs under Mac OS 10.6.8, the last really fast lean-and-mean version of the OS before Apple started a steady iOS-domnated process of crapfication. (For example, 10.7.5 running on my sae Core2Duo hardware is virtually unusable, it's so grindingly slow and needing of frequent reboots). Perhaps that oder-version-ness is behind the cookies issue.

As the article, Interesting if true, but lots of caveats:

o It smacks of 'heroic Dutch hackers foil evil Russians' propaganda-for-domestic-consumption, right down to the gratuitous references to MH17, which 'heroic Dutch air safety experts' were oh-so-very-quick to blame on the Russians, conveniently exonerating the West's Ukro-nazi 'allies' who took power after the US-orchestrated Maidan Spring coup in Ukraine, and who had access both to the same anti-aircraft missile batteries and a much greater motive for such a shootdown, in form of a false-flag attack.

o The leaked DNC e-mails showed that the real 'interfering with democratic elections' that occurred was by Clintonite insiders in the DNC, who blatantly rigged the primary process in favor of their preferred candidate. Moreover, the veracity of the leaked e-mails has never been questioned. Do you not think the American people have the right to know about such anti-democratic manipulations on part of one of the 2 major establishment parties, irrespective of its source?

o The woe-is-us pearl clutching by the US-side spooks is hilariously melodramatic, e.g. "The Americans were taken completely by surprise by the Russian aggression, says Chris Painter in Washington. For years, Painter was responsible for America's cyber policy. He resigned last August. 'We'd never expected that the Russians would do this, attacking our vital infrastructure and undermining our democracy.' " As if every major global power doesn't try to snoop one every other one 24/7, and as if the US weren't far and away the worst of the lot, in terms of hacking, election-rigging and spying not only on its enemies but on its allies? And the attempted State Department penetration being the worst hack ever', really? What secret material was really stolen, and how does its seriousness compare with that of this recent hack by our Chinese 'allies'? Oddly, I haven't heard any 'act of war' verbiage from our politicians and MSM with regard to the massive secret-personnel-database hack by the Chinese - rather a glaring double standard, don't you think?

[wombatman]

Honestly, I shared it because I found the "hackers hacking hackers" bit to be interesting. The details about the back-and-forth between the NSA and the Russians is fascinating too--very movie-like in description.

And I put a bit more weight on this story b/c it seems to stem from the Dutch hackers being pissed that their ongoing operation was revealed so that the US political parties (Democrats, primarily, obviously) and the FBI/CIA/NSA could go "RUSSIANS!".

[only_human]

The White House asked to borrow a van Gogh. The Guggenheim offered a gold toilet instead.

The emailed response from the Guggenheim’s chief curator to the White House was polite but firm: The museum could not accommodate a request to borrow a painting by Vincent van Gogh for President and Melania Trump’s private living quarters.

Instead, wrote the curator, Nancy Spector, another piece was available, one that was nothing like “Landscape With Snow,” the 1888 van Gogh rendering of a man in a black hat walking along a path in Arles, France, with his dog.

The curator’s alternative: an 18-karat, fully functioning, solid gold toilet — an interactive work titled “America” that critics have described as pointed satire aimed at the excess of wealth in this country.

For a year, the Guggenheim had exhibited “America” — the creation of contemporary artist Maurizio Cattelan — in a public restroom on the museum’s fifth floor for visitors to use.

But the exhibit was over and the toilet was available “should the President and First Lady have any interest in installing it in the White House,” Spector wrote in an email obtained by The Washington Post.

The artist “would like to offer it to the White House for a long-term loan,” wrote Spector, who has been critical of Trump. “It is, of course, extremely valuable and somewhat fragile, but we would provide all the instructions for its installation and care.”

Sarah Eaton, a Guggenheim spokeswoman, confirmed that Spector wrote the email Sept. 15 to Donna Hayashi Smith of the White House’s Office of the Curator. Spector, who has worked in various capacities at the museum for 29 years, was unavailable to talk about her offer, Eaton said.

The White House did not respond to inquiries about the matter.

“More than one hundred thousand people” had “waited patiently in line for the opportunity to commune with art and with nature,” Spector wrote in a Guggenheim blog post last year. The museum posted a uniformed security guard outside the bathroom. Every 15 minutes or so, a crew would arrive with specially chosen wipes to clean the gold.

[kladner]

Originally Posted by only_human

The White House asked to borrow a van Gogh. The Guggenheim offered a gold toilet instead.

ROFLMAO!!!!!

What an utterly appropriate response. A solid gold toilet sounds like something from the Needless Markup Neiman Marcus catalog. Just the sort of thing that would appeal to the pResident's tawdry tastes.

[LaurV]

Bwaaaa haaa ha haha!
The perfect answer indeed. Can't stop laughing.

We had a guy with gold toilets, gold door knobs, forks, knives, and with a daughter with a solid gold scale to weigh the food for her dog...

A pity we lost him, they shot him in December '89...