Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from> around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
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Barbara Mcquade: The Strategy Mueller Is Using to Protect His Investigation
By farming out cases, Rosenstein and Mueller may have built a structure that cannot be felled by one political axe.
The indictment against alleged Russian agent Maria Butina appears to be part of a strategy often associated with investment advice – diversify your assets.
The announcement Tuesday that Butina had been indicted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia brings to three the number of different Department of Justice components working on cases relating to Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
First, of course, is the investigation led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller into links between Russian interference and the Trump campaign. Since his appointment in May 2017, Mueller has charged 35 individuals and entities, including Trump campaign members and Russian nationals and intelligence officers.
Then came the spinoff investigation of former Trump attorney Michael Cohen that is being led by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. Search warrants have been executed at Cohen’s office, hotel room, and hotel, but no charges have yet been filed. [..]
By assigning these cases to various different DOJ offices, Rosenstein and Mueller may be protecting them from being destroyed. Think of the way the Internet was developed as a network of networks, so that it could not be taken down by one attack. Even if a portion of the Internet were compromised, the theory goes, the remaining networks would survive.
Andrew Binns: Memo to 2020 Democrats: The Time To Start Prepping For Russian Hacking Is Now.
As our country struggles to piece together what happened in the 2016 election, the harsh reality is that the 2020 campaign is already under attack. Russia continues to hack, probe, and meddle and they’re not going to quit anytime soon.
And here’s something even more sobering to consider: our elected officials are not up the task to stop it.
The President has sided with Vladimir Putin. His enablers in Congress are too frightened of a presidential Twitter lashing to push back, and the rest of the federal government, including the FBI, CIA, and NSA, are focused on intelligence gathering and reactionary investigations.
Those running for office have been left on their own when it comes to combating foreign nation-state attacks, which are happening every single day in the form of phishing scams, DDOS attacks, network probes, social engineering schemes, and brute force intrusions. Indeed, on Thursday, Microsoft’s VP of Customer Security said the company had already intercepted attacks on three high-profile 2018 candidates that had been launched by the same Russian group that hacked the DNC. [..]
The most powerful tool in a hacker’s arsenal, in the end, is human error. And the best way to guard against human error is to start thinking critically about these issues now, before they became major problems down the road.
Campaigns need to recognize what’s at stake, or 2020 will turn into the Wild Wild West where Russia, China, Iran, or North Korea throw everything they have at attacking our democracy. After all, these countries know the current U.S. President may end up siding with them.
Michael H. Fuchs: Trump’s Putin summit: a slippery slope to a violent, darker world
Vladivostok, Russia – Emboldened by re-election, US president Donald Trump landed in Russia today for the first meeting of the newly formed Group of 3 (G3) with President Vladimir Putin of Russia and President Xi Jinping of China to carve up spheres of influence in Europe and Asia.
Meanwhile, Nato limped along as a shell of its former self, with the US only still technically a member because Congress will not allow Trump to withdraw. Japan had recently announced its nuclear weapons program in the wake of the United States withdrawing from the Korean peninsula after a peace treaty was signed to end the Korean war, even though North Korea maintained its nuclear weapons. The rest of Asia raced to secure the best terms possible with China, the new regional hegemon.
It was a series of summits in June and July 2018 – the G7, Nato and Trump’s meetings with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and Putin – that began the great unraveling of global stability and America’s position in the world.
– 16 July 2021
If you think that this hypothetical future news story is hyperbolic, then that’s because America and the world must wake up to the dangerous events happening right before our eyes.
Charles M. Blow: Trump, ‘He’s Like a Rapper’
Some people are baffled by Donald Trump’s fawning admiration of the world’s strongmen. I am not.
If you know anything about Donald Trump’s formative years in his native New York, you know that this has been part of his life since the beginning.
In particular, he was a young man in the city when the hip-hop cultural movement was born here in the 1970s. He witnessed the birth and ascendancy of hip-hop in the city, the moguls it made, the bravado it brandished.
He liked it, envied it, aped it. He created of it something all his own: He learned to assert white privilege and emulate black power.
There have always been white people like Trump who fetishize black culture — thrill seekers who want to dip their toes into what they view as exotic, but also want to stay dry and removed from it.
Jessica Valenti: The ‘pro-life’ conservatives’ hypocrisy over children makes me sick
As children continue to be detained – imprisoned, really – across the country without their parents, I can’t help but think of the conservatives’ insistence that they’re “pro-life”. Let’s not even get into the women that will die should abortion become illegal; let’s talk about the children who are already here, who are suffering, whom Republicans have abandoned.
Reports have come out of children with lice, bed bug bites, and emotional trauma. Children who haven’t been bathed in weeks or more. Children who are being forcibly injected with drugs to keep them docile.
Do the so-called “pro-lifers” only care about potential children – not actual children? Because I’m ill over the rightwing hypocrisy that claims to care about families as this sort of torture continues.
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