Russia-sponsored troll networks still operating, targeting America

WASHINGTON — The number of networks of Russian-sponsored trolls spreading propaganda to the United States and Europe may number in the hundreds, including the one team drawing wide attention for blitzing American social media outlets last year with divisive information in a bid to tip voter sympathies to Donald Trump, according to an Obama administration Pentagon official.

Were The Clintons Paid By Russia?

Fact-Check: Were The Clintons Paid By Russia?

President Donald Trump kicked off Thursday with a series of tweets that all but accused Hillary and Bill Clinton of corruption and accepting of millions of dollars from Russia. He also slammed his predecessor, Barack Obama, for knowing about a deal that gave a Russian state-run company control of 20 percent of the uranium in the United States, but not shutting it down. “.

Putin Tells U.S. to Stop Making Fun of Trump

Russian President Vladimir Putin has called on U.S. citizens to stop disrespecting President Donald Trump, a trend that the Russian leader called a symptom of a poor political system in the U.S. Putin, who U.S. officials have accused of swaying the 2016 U.S. presidential race in Trump's favor, broke a streak of hostile diplomatic exchanges between…

Army Reserve green card ban “sends chilling message” to immigrants, veterans group says

U.S. Army Reserve Lt. Krzysztof Misiura (left) and Army Reserve Specialist Christian Joy Tecson, formerly of the Philippines, are sworn in as U.S. citizens in 2008. Source: M. Spencer Green/AP

The head of a group supporting immigrant veterans is condemning the Army Reserve’s temporary ban on green card holders as a “chilling” signal to permanent residents that they are not welcome in the U.S. military.   “I think it’s inconsistent with our military values and inconsistent with what America stands for,” Nathan Fletcher, chairman of the Honorably Discharged, Dishonorably Deported Coalition, said in a phone interview Thursday.   Mic reported Wednesday that the U.S. Army Reserve will not allow green card holders to enlist “for the time being” because of new background screening measures announced Friday. Under the new policy, which is effective immediately, permanent residents must complete a background check before entering basic training.   Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, called the move “ridiculous” in a recent interview with Mic. “It would cut down on a very valuable sector of men and women who are willing to serve our country,” he said.   Read more here.

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New York Attorney General’s Lawsuits Against Trump

According to The Observer, New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has been making waves in recent months for taking on President Trump with various lawsuits seeking to block the president’s moves in areas such as immigration, health care, education and LGBTQ rights, among other issues.

He has sued the president over everything from his executive orders barring entry to people from Muslim-majority countries, to his attempts to repeal former President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, to his decision to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program for undocumented youths brought to the United States in their early childhood and what he has described as Trump’s “campaign of climate change denial.”

Amy Spitalnick, a spokeswoman for Schneiderman, said that it has always been “fundamental” to his job to protect New Yorkers when the federal government undermines their health and safety and New York State’s best interests — and that the courts agree.

“Under the Constitution, the states have broad powers to protect their residents and their best interests,” Spitalnick said. “This office did not hesitate to act under prior federal administrations to protect New Yorkers – such as challenging the Obama administration over greenhouse gas regulations, which ultimately led to the Clean Power Plan. Now, with New Yorkers’ health, safety, constitutional rights — and very lives — in the balance thanks to the many dangerous policies coming out of Washington, we’ll continue to do what’s necessary to protect New York’s families and our state.”

She added that they have seen “significant success,” noting that they beat back the travel bans, blocked the EPA’s rollback of methane regulations and forced the administration to reverse course on smog regulations and energy efficiency standards

Source Observer.com

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McCain Unloads on Steve Doocy’s Son: ‘Why Would You Say Something That Stupid?’

Sen. John McCain, never known to suffer foolish questions, unloaded on Fox News correspondent Peter Doocy after the young reporter asked a question the lawmaker deemed stupid.

“Has your relationship with the president frayed to the point that you are not going to support anything that he comes to you and asks for?” Steve Doocy’s son asked McCain in the halls of the Senate.

“Why would you say something that stupid?” McCain replied, staring intensely into Doocy’s eyes. “Why would you ask something that dumb? Huh?”

“My job as a United States senator, is a senator from Arizona which I was just re-elected to. You mean that I am somehow going to behave in a way that I’m going to block everything because of some personal disagreement?”

“That’s a dumb question,” he concluded.

The frayed relationship Doocy referred to between McCain and President Trump ratcheted up a notch this week, after the Arizona senator delivered a scathing rebuke of “half-baked nationalism” in a speech accepting the Liberty Medal Monday night.

In a radio interview on Tuesday, Trump replied ominously, “at some

point I fight back and it won’t be pretty.”

Is the GOP having A Identity Crises

Politico reports, “Republicans’ unified control of Washington is triggering an identity crisis within the party over what it means to be a fiscal conservative in the age of Donald Trump: Do deficits even matter, or do tax cuts trump all?”

Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) slammed budget director Mick Mulvaney for morphing into a fiscal Judas, telling Politico, “Our OMB guy, I say this with humor, what happened to him? Do you understand what I’m saying? He used to be the fiscal hawk.” Mulvaney responded in kind during an interview last week, accusing Corker of “ignoring reality.”

The war of words among GOP budget hawks and their deficit-loving counterparts is not rooted in whether they want more tax cuts for the rich, which is what the Trump plan is really all about, but whether it should be paid for by slashing spending on things like Social Security, Medicare, and any other We the People programs the GOP can rob from.

There is evidence to suggest that the whole conservative deficit hawk persona has always been a farce.

The Intercept reports,

The billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch spent much of the eight years of the Obama presidency stoking fears about the budget deficit… Now that Republicans control all levers of power in Washington and the Koch brothers are poised to reap a windfall of billions of dollars through tax cuts, they have a new message: Don’t worry about the deficit.

You don’t need a masters degree in economics to see what’s going on here. The donor class sees Trump as a senile puppet who will sign anything to claim a victory and complete Republican control as their route to bankrupt the country for personal profit.

As for Trump’s claims that his massive tax cuts for corporations will be so ‘amazing’ that they’ll pay for themselves, there is zero historical evidence to support that. The 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts blew a hole in the deficit that America still hasn’t fully recovered from, and they did almost nothing to spur economic growth, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

If that were not enough proof that nothing trickles down in trickle-down economics, Kansas is a living laboratory of failure. As the New York Times points out, Republican Gov. Sam Brownback enacted a corporate tax cut scheme similar to Trump’s back in 2012, that quickly devolved into a fiscal disaster that had to be reversed by the Republican controlled state legislature. In just a few short years, the deficit skyrocketed and the state economy tanked, despite massive spending cuts in education and other essential programs.

This is not about fiscal responsibility – or doing anything else intended to help most Americans. It’s about an increasingly corrupt system devoid of any moral standards. As Charles P. Pierce put it in Esquire, “McConnell and his supporters among the country’s ownership classes don’t care if the president* turns up naked one day on the Truman balcony with his body painted blue. They can still get what they want while the madness unfolds. Nothing matters until they have re-established Gilded Age economics married to Jim Crow social policy.”

And we all know how that worked out.

Be part of the solution. Call Congress at (202) 224-3121, or contact your representative online at www.house.gov and www.senate.gov.

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The Trump-Russia Probe Could Make Clinton President

Sure, it's been more than 340 days since Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton, but there's still one very narrow, highly unlikely and entirely unprecedented way that Clinton could become president. And it has some Democratic die-hards dreaming again. Harvard University professor Lawrence Lessig offered a Clinton path to the presidency on Medium, putting forward a series…

Astronomers for the first time have captured images of "the greatest fireworks show in the universe," the collision of two neutron stars

This is the story of a gold rush in the sky.

Astronomers have now seen and heard a pair of dead stars collide, giving them the first glimpse of what they call a “cosmic forge,” where the world’s jewels were minted billions of years ago.

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Russia Didn't need help hacking Election 2016

U.S. investigators are probing whether Russia relied on clandestine American help to identify political soft spots and pressure points in its campaign to disrupt the 2016 election. But experts tell Axios Future editor Steve LeVine that, even without local assistance, Russia's own history of exploiting animosities and jealousies across its empire gave it unusual know-how to stir up existing American tensions:

• What happened: Russia targeted America's soft underbelly. Data collated by Columbia University's Jonathan Albright shows a Russian social media campaign apparently designed to inflame some of America's greatest national sensitivities.
• The hot buttons: Facebook pages that turned into hundreds of millions of interactions combined the subjects of nationalism, Trump, illegal immigration, and law.
• See what Russia experts told Steve.

P.S. The Trump campaign "spent more than $1.1 million on legal fees over the last three months — a sharp increase that coincided with the escalation of investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 election." (N.Y. Times)

Source Axios

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