Political Irony

There’s an article going around by Josh Marshall titled “Trump & Putin. Yes, It’s Really a Thing“.

People, including comedians, have made jokes about the seeming bromance between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. While it is scary enough that equal-opportunity-attacker Trump has nothing but good things to say about autocrat Putin, Marshall’s article points out that there is plenty of evidence that we should be even more worried. Mind you, we don’t have any direct, solid evidence that Trump is a “Manchurian Candidate” whose strings (at least his purse strings) are pulled by Putin, but there is plenty of evidence that something underhanded and potentially disastrous is going on.

In particular, there is far more evidence that Putin is trying to manipulate a US election than there ever was that Obama was not born in the US and is some kind of foreign agent, something that Trump himself promoted strongly.

Substantiating evidence can be found all over the place. First of all, there is a large amount of Russian money flowing into Trump’s coffers. According to an article in the Washington Post, “Since the 1980s, Trump and his family members have made numerous trips to Moscow in search of business opportunities, and they have relied on Russian investors to buy their properties around the world.” Indeed, in 2008, Trump’s son Donald Jr. told a real estate conference “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets.” And “We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

The article goes on to give examples where Trump has taken money from foreigners with close ties to the Russian criminal underworld. Or where Trump projects “received unexplained infusions of cash from accounts in Kazakhstan and Russia.”

Bottom line is that since his bankruptcy a decade ago, Trump has had trouble finding investment money. All major US banks have blackballed him, with the exception of Deutschebank (which is of course a foreign bank, albeit one with a big US presence). Increasingly, Trump has gotten investment from people with close ties to Vladimir Putin.

Then there is the fact that before he became Trump’s campaign manager and top advisor, Paul Manafort’s job was working for Viktor Yanukovych, the former Prime Minister and then President of the Ukraine, who is a close ally of Putin (until his subjects deposed him). Coincidence?

Other Trump advisors have extremely close ties to governmental entities in Russia.

Looking from the other side, Putin has aligned all Russian state controlled media with Trump. Putin is known to support and fund right-wing nationalist politicians across Europe, whether to try to win influence in those countries or just to stir up instability in their governments. Why not the same thing in the US? Indeed, there is evidence that Russians were involved in the release of the DNC emails this last weekend, which is stirring up Sanders supporters against Clinton.

Putin has never been shy about expressing his hatred of Hillary Clinton. He has publicly blamed her for the 2011 protests in Russia against him. The protestors were accusing Putin of rigging his reelection.

But the thing that made people really suspicious was that Donald Trump’s entire campaign didn’t seem to care about the Republican Party Platform; they completely ignored it, except for one thing. Trump’s team insisted on, “changing the party platform on assistance to Ukraine against Russian military operations in eastern Ukraine.” Before that, the Republican platform called for heavily arming Ukraine against the Russians. That’s right, even if Trump loses, he’s already done a big favor for the Russians.

And then there was Trump’s statement that maybe the US (and thus NATO) should not come to the defense of NATO member states in case of a Russian invasion, which was too much even for many of his strongest Republican supporters.

Let’s put this in perspective. One of the major complaints against Hillary Clinton is that she accepted money from Wall Street for some speeches she gave, and so is too much in bed with them. But Trump has accepted far more money from the Russians, and isn’t even waiting for the election to start giving them quid pro quo.

Lastly, could this be why Trump refuses to release his tax returns? Would it show him hugely in debt to Russians? In the last year alone, we do know that Trump’s debt has grown from $350 million to $630 million.

This isn’t a single article. The Atlantic has noticed this as well. And we also heard from Paul Krugman, and he agrees that there is something going on. Republican Erick Erickson believes that Russians are working to influence our election. And of course the Clinton campaign is starting to pick this up.

At the very least, Trump has a YUUUGE conflict of interest. At worst, the unthinkable is happening — a foreign country is covertly sabotaging a US election for their own gain, and Trump is the traitorous agent. The only question may be whether Trump is doing this willingly, is being pressured to do it against his will, or is simply too stupid to know that he is being manipulated.

Shouldn’t Congress put as much effort into investigating this as they did on, say, Benghazi (including Clinton’s email server)?

© John Deering

UPDATE: More details from the NY Times.

Does anyone really believe that it is the job of political parties to be fair? It is the job of the political party to elect as many candidates from their party as possible. Nothing more.

Why is the media holding the Democratic party to a different standard than other parties? Where are the leaked emails from the Republican National Committee? Does anyone have any doubts that such a release would be full of emails critical of Donald Trump, and trying to figure out ways to derail his campaign?

As far as anyone can tell, the very worst email was one where the DNC’s CFO suggested that someone ask Sanders if he believed in God (in order to expose him as an atheist). But even that was never done. I’m sure there was much more skullduggery among the Republicans.

As they say, “politics ain’t beanbag”.

And the smaller political parties are even worse — they don’t even pretend to be fair. Did anyone even pay attention to how Gary Johnson was nominated by the Libertarian Party? It wasn’t very pretty; you can read about it here. Was that fair?

Or the Green Party, where Jill Stein offered to give the Green nomination to Sanders and step aside herself. Would that be “fair” to anyone else who wanted the Green nomination, to just hand it to someone who wasn’t even a member of the Green Party?

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Political parties are inherently unfair, and complaining about that misses the point. The only way to make political parties fair is to take away their main event and have a nonpartisan blanket primary, which already works in several states.

I’m also suspicious of this email leak. As we’ve already seen, it doesn’t really matter what is in the emails, this will just be used by the Republicans to attack Hillary Clinton. And according to experts, it was the Russians who did the hacking. Do the Russians have something to gain if Trump gets elected?

Things you should read:

Bernie Sanders live-tweeted during Trump’s acceptance speech at the RNC. A few samples:

Those who voted for me will not support Trump who has made bigotry and divisiveness the cornerstone of his campaign.

Trump’s big economic plans: Give trillions in tax breaks to millionaires, refuse to raise the federal minimum wage.

Trump is wrong. The real cause of instability in the Middle East was the Bush-Cheney invasion of Iraq. By the way, where is President Bush?

What a hypocrite! If Trump wants to “fix” trade he can start by making his products in the US, not low-wage countries abroad.

Trump: “I alone can fix this.”
Is this guy running for president or dictator?

Hillary Clinton also live-tweeted Trump’s speech, and with a sense of humor even.

Electoral Vote has a short and to-the-point summary of the acceptance speech, titled “Trump Swings and Misses“.

If you want a summary of the whole convention, even Politico calls it “Trump’s four dysfunctional days in Cleveland“, and giggles that after Trump’s speech the loudspeakers played “You can’t always get what you want” by the Rolling Stones.

Speaking of fear, gloom and doom, Ezra Klein says “Donald Trump’s nomination is the first time American politics has left me truly afraid“. And then he clearly and succinctly explains why. It is useless to summarize something that is already the perfect length, so go read it.

UPDATE: Fortune points out the 8 ton elephant on the convention floor — the fact that during the entire convention (including the day supposedly about the economy), Republicans never once mentioned Governor Sam Brownback and his conservative revolution in Kansas (the state that is home to the Koch brothers). Why? Because Kansas is an utter mess, with their economy in a shambles. And yet the Republicans are still promoting the trickle-down economics that are such a disaster in Kansas.

As an added ironic twist, when the roll-call vote happened — which is when each state extolls their own virtues — the most prominent thing from the Kansas delegation was the Kansas City Royals baseball team, with the delegation wearing Royals T-shirts. As some of you may know, the Royals (as is Kansas City itself) is actually in the neighboring state of Missouri.

Jon Stewart can’t help himself, and takes over Stephen Colbert’s desk at the Late Show for a delicious rant:

God I miss him.

Tony Award winning actress Laura Benanti is brilliant as Melania Trump on Stephen Colbert’s Late Show:

But plagiarism isn’t the only scandal around the potential first lady. According to CBS news, Melania Trump’s bio on the RNC website lies when it says that she graduated from college. As does her website. And Snopes looked into it, and couldn’t find any evidence that she had ever received any degree.

But wait, there’s more! The Trump campaign finally came up with someone to blame for the plagiarism. It only took them three days, which is suspicious enough. They claim that Melania Trump enlisted help writing her speech from a Trump employee who is not connected with the campaign. According to their story, Melania read that person some passages over the phone that she liked, including lines from Michelle Obama’s 2008 speech at the DNC, but that she only meant them as examples. Of course, when Melania saw those quotes in the final speech, didn’t she even notice?

But the bigger problem is that if this story is true, then it reveals criminal activity. It is a federal crime for corporations to contribute cash, products, or services to political campaigns, but the Trump campaign seems completely unconcerned about the law. So why am I not surprised?

© Steve Breen

The Republican National Convention has been hacked by security researchers. This despite the fact that the GOP keeps hammering Hillary Clinton about the insecurity of her private email server.

How did they do it? In this case, it was amazingly simple. They simply set up some WiFi access points. You know the same thing that most of us have done when we set up wireless access for our homes. For fun, they gave those access points names like “Google Starbucks”, “Trump free Wifi”, and even “Hillary Free Wifi”.

Of course, more than 1,200 people attending the convention connected to those WiFi access points. But the bad part is that of those who connected, 68% of them did so with no security in place, leaving their personal information completely exposed. So it would be trivial for anyone to access their “online bank accounts, emails, dating and messaging apps, even ‘Pokemon Go’.” Those people didn’t use encryption, or virtual private networks, or any of the common techniques of protecting your data when connecting to a public shared WiFi network.

Meanwhile, the convention itself is fending off hacking attacks from Asia and Russia. Indeed, the GOP convention was described as “a bulls-eye for hackers”. But no amount of security deployed by the GOP can protect someone who connects to a network that is not under their control. And without any security on their device, they are totally exposed.