Trump and Putin, behind the scenes

[Admin]

Mr. Trump, we’ll keep it simple enough for a picture — if your currency loses 70% of its value on your watch, as Putin’s has, you are neither “brilliant” nor a “strong leader.” Putin’s currency is galloping toward being wallpaper. And if the Tax Policy Center is right, your tax plan would do the same for the dollar. But who’s counting?

To hear Trump tell it, Putin has pushed around presidents since George W. Bush and the invasion of Georgia. Trump has proposed a $450 billion military buildup to scare Putin, as well as drop more bombs on ISIS, a group already so pinned down that it’s reduced to begging for truck bombers on social media.


Trouble is, the U.S. military budget is nine times Russia’s — in fact, it’s bigger than Russia’s entire budget, meaning that Russia literally couldn’t come near matching U.S. military spending if it tried. The U.S. spends more than the next seven nations put together, in fact. Ergo, the U.S. topples governments, while Russia struggles to control eastern Ukraine.

Read: This is the reason Putin is even more dangerous than you thought

Why isn’t Russia a world power? Putin blew the winnings from $100 oil on the Sochi Winter Olympics (where it didn’t snow) and a whole lotta steroids for his manly, manly (especially the women) Olympians. When things went to number two, he invaded Ukraine, a bread-and-circuses trick to distract the populace borrowed from ancient Rome. John McCain had it right: Putin’s Russia is a gas station dressed as a superpower..

These 4 charts show why Trump is an idiot about Putin - MarketWatch

[Admin]

What is it with right-wingers and Putin? This is amazing. First Trump (see earlier entries in this thread), now the new Ukip leader (the right-wing anti-EU party in the UK):

The new Ukip leader had revealed that she counts Vladimir Putin, Margaret Thatcher and Winston Churchill as her political heroes. Diane James, who was elected to replace Nigel Farage last week, was asked on BBC1’s Sunday Politics who “other than Vladimir Putin” were her political heroes. After naming Thatcher and Churchill, James was asked to confirm that she also considered the Russian president among her top three, and she responded that she did. The line of questioning followed comments she made in a 2015 radio interview when she was Ukip’s foreign affairs spokesperson. During the LBC interview, she described Putin as a strong leader who stands up for Russia. “I admire him from the point of view that he’s standing up for his country. He is very nationalist,” she said.

Ukip's new leader says she counts Vladimir Putin as a political hero | Politics | The Guardian

So Putin stands up for Russia, but what has that achieved??

• The economy is a mess, Putin failed to capitalize on an erstwhile good education system to diversify the economy away from resource extraction, which now brought the country into a deep recession.
  
• The economy is dominated by capital intensive resource extraction owned by billionaire oligarchs depending on the regime.
  
• Civil liberties and democracy have seriously deteriorated under Putin.
  
• Instead of developing the domestic economy and improving the living standard of Russians, Putin embarked on foreign adventures, first snatching Crimea, then messing in Ukraine, which got him international sanctions, then embarking on propping up the regime of a mass murderer in Syria. What good is that bringing for Russians, apart from dead soldiers??
  

Do these right-wingers, who purportedly care about the forgotten masses, ever wonder what the Putin regime has brought for ordinary Russians, besides a lot of flag waving?

Doesn't this show this standing up for the forgotten masses, the so called victims of the elites is all show and the real driving forces are nefarious nationalism combined with authoritarian impulses? 

[Martin K]

So.. The guy who Trump so admires just bombarded an aid convoy from the air, whilst they also bomb hospitals, and their cronies shot a passenger plane from the air, etc. etc..

And how is any of this benefiting Russians?

[Admin]

At least they're investigating it now, although the media silence is once again deafening..

On Friday, investigative reporter Michael Isikoff dropped a bombshell story: U.S. officials are investigating secret meetings between a Trump campaign advisor and Russian officials suspected of trying to influence the presidential election. 

U.S. intelligence officials are seeking to determine whether an American businessman identified by Donald Trump as one of his foreign policy advisers has opened up private communications with senior Russian officials — including talks about the possible lifting of economic sanctions if the Republican nominee becomes president, according to multiple sources who have been briefed on the issue. 

The activities of Trump adviser Carter Page, who has extensive business interests in Russia, have been discussed with senior members of Congress during recent briefings about suspected efforts by Moscow to influence the presidential election, the sources said. 

Representatives from the Trump campaign — Vice Presidential Nominee Mike Pence, campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, adviser Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn — appeared on all five major Sunday shows. Only CNN’s Jake Tapper asked about Isikoff’s report, directing several questions to Conway.

Virtual media blackout on emerging Trump campaign scandal with Russia

Meanwhile, the "strong leader" is bombing help convoys and civilians to pieces, and how that helps Russians is something we would like to have explained..

[Admin]

Brought to you, straight from Sputnik TV..

Even if they actually withdrew the story!

At an October 10 campaign rally, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump claimed Clinton family friend and adviser Sidney Blumenthal told Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, that “one important point has been universally acknowledged by nine previous reports about Benghazi: The attack was almost certainly preventable.” Trump alleged Blumenthal said that “if the GOP wants to raise that as a talking point against her, it is legitimate”:

However, Newsweek reporter Kurt Eichenwald found the alleged Blumenthal comments “really, really familiar.” Eichenwald found the comments “so familiar” because, in fact, “they were something I wrote.”

In an October 10 article, Eichenwald revealed that Sputnik, a news organization “established by the [Russian] government controlled news agency, Rossiya Segodnya,” discovered in a WikiLeaks dump of Podesta’s hacked emails “a purportedly incriminating email from Blumenthal” calling the Benghazi attacks a “legitimate” talking point against Clinton.

In reality, Sputnik’s declared “‘October surprise’” quoted “two sentences from a 10,000 word piece” Eichenwald wrote for Newsweek “which apparently Blumenthal had emailed to Podesta.” Contrary to the lies from Sputnik and Trump, Eichenwald’s article is not about how the Benghazi attacks are Hillary Clinton’s fault, but rather “the obscene politicization of the assault that killed four Americans” and “the Republican Benghazi committee which was engaged in a political show trial disguised as a Congressional investigation.” 

Even though “once they realized their error, Sputnik took the article down,” Trump continued to use Russian state media’s lie as a weapon against his political opponent. This fits Trump and his campaign’s pattern of questionable relations with Russia, including calls for the Kremlin to commit a cyberattack against Hillary Clinton. 

Trump’s Latest Lie Comes Straight From State-Owned Russian Media

[Admin]

The longer Donald Trump is the center of American discourse, the more we sound like Russians. Our news sounds more Russian, the way we think about our government is more Russian, and what we accept as fact starts to slip away. Trump is fomenting conspiracy theories and delegitimizing the media and the government. 

Russia watchers know well that that's a Kremlin tactic. The way the Russian government maintains control of information is not by forcing a story down its peoples' throats, but by spreading a million stories everywhere so no one believes anything. The Kremlin maintains control by destroying trust in institutions until there's nothing left to have faith in. 

So when Melania Trump says that the discovery of her husband's disgusting comments about women to Billy Bush a decade ago were part of a left-wing conspiracy, we're becoming more Russian. When Trump says that Hillary Clinton is part of an international conspiracy of bankers, we're becoming more Russian. When Trump embraces conspiracy theories championed by the permanently paranoid radio host Alex Jones, we're becoming more Russian.

Trump conspiracy theories are a Kremlin tactic - Business Insider

And it's not only the US who's suffering from this..

Sitting in his office in the government palace - built for Russia's Grand Duchy of Finland - Markku Mantila leads a network of officials who monitor attempts to influence the country. He says Finland is facing intensifying media attacks led by Kremlin. "We believe this aggressive influencing from Russia aims at creating distrust between leaders and citizens, and to have us make decisions harmful to ourselves," he said. "It also aims to make citizens suspicious about the European Union, and to warn Finland over not joining NATO."

Finland won independence during Russia's revolution of 1917 but nearly lost it fighting the Soviet Union in World War Two. It kept close to the West economically and politically during the Cold War but avoided confrontation with Moscow. Mantila, who is also the head of government communications, says Russian media last month reported on "cold-blooded" Finnish authorities taking custody of children from a Russian family living in Finland "due to their nationality".

The Finnish government denied the reports, while declining to comment on an individual case due to the legal procedure. However, the story has been replicated hundreds of times in Russia over the past few weeks. A report by Kremlin-led NTV said "even the locals call Finland a land of ruthless and irrational child terror."

Finland is accusing Russia of questioning its independence - Business Insider

[Admin]

But of course they now delivered and we know it were Russian hackers

Throughout the meandering presentation, the audience—including the hundreds of thousands watching Alex Jones and readers of the Drudge Report, which had promoted the event at the top of its homepage—impatiently waited for the promised blow to Clinton. “I understand there’s enormous expectation in the United States,” Assange said with a chuckle. He promised that WikiLeaks would indeed release information about the election, just not yet. "If we’re going to make a major publication in relation to the United States, we don’t do it at 3 a.m,” he said. By this point, it was around 4 a.m. in New York. The drawn-out nonrevelation instantaneously reverberated across the Atlantic, where Jones interrupted his livestream and broke into verse, quoting the rapper Ludacris as he urged Assange to, “Move, bitch, get out the way / get out the way, bitch / get out the way.” Later, when a Bloomberg Businessweek reporter asked about Assange’s apparent affinity for Trump, he smirked.

How Julian Assange Turned WikiLeaks Into Trump’s Best Friend - Bloomberg

[Admin]

Hmm, from Business Insider:

But Reid's comments may be the fiercest condemnation yet of Comey. The outgoing Senate minority leader said Comey's actions may have violated the Hatch Act, a federal law that ensures "that federal programs are administered in a nonpartisan fashion."

Reid argued that Comey has demonstrated a double standard, making an explosive claim that the FBI director was withholding information about Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump's alleged ties to Russia.

"In my communications with you and other top officials in the national security community, it has become clear that you possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisors, and the Russian government — a foreign interest openly hostile to the United States, which Trump praises at every opportunity," Reid said.

He continued:
"The public has a right to know this information. I wrote to you months ago calling for this information to be released to the public. There is no danger to American interests from releasing it. And yet, you continue to resist calls to inform the public of this critical information."

"By contrast, as soon as you came into possession of the slightest innuendo related to Secretary Clinton, you rushed to publicize it in the most negative light possible."

Reid echoed the frustrations of several of Clinton's surrogates, who have insisted that the newly discovered messages may very well be duplicates of ones already reviewed by the FBI.

"The clear double-standard established by your actions strongly suggests that your highly selective approach to publicizing information, along with your timing, was intended for the success or failure of a partisan candidate or political group."

Comey was a registered Republican for most of his life, although he said in July that he is no longer registered with any party.
Reid, who is not seeking reelection in November, ended his letter to Comey bluntly.

"Please keep in mind that I have been a supporter of yours in the past. When Republicans filibustered your nomination and delayed your confirmation longer than any previous nominee to your position, I led the fight to get you confirmed because I believed you to be a principled public servant," he said.
"With the deepest regret, I now see that I was wrong."

[Admin]

More on the Reid accusations (see directly above), from Mother Jones (where the whole story can be read):

At the end of August, Reid had written to Comey and demanded an investigation of the "connections between the Russian government and Donald Trump's presidential campaign," and in that letter he indirectly referred to Carter Page, an American businessman cited by Trump as one of his foreign policy advisers, who had financial ties to Russia and had recently visited Moscow. Last month, Yahoo News reported that US intelligence officials were probing the links between Page and senior Russian officials. (Page has called accusations against him "garbage.")

On Monday, NBC News reported that the FBI has mounted a preliminary inquiry into the foreign business ties of Paul Manafort, Trump's former campaign chief. But Reid's recent note hinted at more than the Page or Manafort affairs. And a former senior intelligence officer for a Western country who specialized in Russian counterintelligence tells Mother Jonesthat in recent months he provided the bureau with memos, based on his recent interactions with Russian sources, contending the Russian government has for years tried to co-opt and assist Trump—and that the FBI requested more information from him.

Does this mean the FBI is investigating whether Russian intelligence has attempted to develop a secret relationship with Trump or cultivate him as an asset? Was the former intelligence officer and his material deemed credible or not? An FBI spokeswoman says, "Normally, we don't talk about whether we are investigating anything." But a senior US government official not involved in this case but familiar with the former spy tells Mother Jones that he has been a credible source with a proven record of providing reliable, sensitive, and important information to the US government.

A Veteran Spy Has Given the FBI Information Alleging a Russian Operation to Cultivate Donald Trump | Mother Jones

And, as a side note, normally is only when it doesn't involve Hillary..

[Admin]

Trump, Alfa bank, and Putin.. From Slate, long article, some excerpts

Cyberexperts stumble upon logs of communication between an odd server from the Trump campaign (which isn't used for any other purpose) and Alfa bank in Moskou 

The researchers quickly dismissed their initial fear that the logs represented a malware attack. The communication wasn’t the work of bots. The irregular pattern of server lookups actually resembled the pattern of human conversation—conversations that began during office hours in New York and continued during office hours in Moscow. It dawned on the researchers that this wasn’t an attack, but a sustained relationship between a server registered to the Trump Organization and two servers registered to an entity called Alfa Bank.

Researchers were ultimately convinced that the server indeed belonged to Trump. (Click here to see the server’s registration record.) But now this capacious server handled a strangely small load of traffic, such a small load that it would be hard for a company to justify the expense and trouble it would take to maintain it. “I get more mail in a day than the server handled,” Davis says. That wasn’t the only oddity. When the researchers pinged the server, they received error messages. They concluded that the server was set to accept only incoming communication from a very small handful of IP addresses.

Earlier this month, the group of computer scientists passed the logs to Paul Vixie. In the world of DNS experts, there’s no higher authority. Vixie wrote central strands of the DNS code that makes the internet work. After studying the logs, he concluded, “The parties were communicating in a secretive fashion. The operative word is secretive. This is more akin to what criminal syndicates do if they are putting together a project.” Put differently, the logs suggested that Trump and Alfa had configured something like a digital hotline connecting the two entities, shutting out the rest of the world, and designed to obscure its own existence. Over the summer, the scientists observed the communications trail from a distance.

While the researchers went about their work, the conventional wisdom about Russian interference in the campaign began to shift. There were reports that the Trump campaign had ordered the Republican Party to rewrite its platform position on Ukraine, maneuvering the GOP toward a policy preferred by Russia, though the Trump campaign denied having a hand in the change. Then Trump announced in an interview with the New York Times his unwillingness to spring to the defense of NATO allies in the face of a Russian invasion.

Trump even invited Russian hackers to go hunting for Clinton’s emails, then passed the comment off as a joke. (I wrote about Trump’s relationship with Russia in early July.) In the face of accusations that he is somehow backed by Putin or in business with Russian investors, Trump has issued categorical statements. “I mean I have nothing to do with Russia,” he told one reporter, a flat denial that he repeated over and over. Of course, it’s possible that these statements are sincere and even correct. The sweeping nature of Trump’s claim, however, prodded the scientists to dig deeper. They were increasingly confident that they were observing data that contradicted Trump’s claims.

Tea Leaves and his colleagues plotted the data from the logs on a timeline. What it illustrated was suggestive: The conversation between the Trump and Alfa servers appeared to follow the contours of political happenings in the United States. “At election-related moments, the traffic peaked,” according to Camp. There were considerably more DNS lookups, for instance, during the two conventions.

The computer scientists believe there was one logical conclusion to be drawn: The Trump Organization shut down the server after Alfa was told that the Times might expose the connection. Weaver told me the Trump domain was “very sloppily removed.” Or as another of the researchers put it, it looked like “the knee was hit in Moscow, the leg kicked in New York.” Four days later, on Sept. 27, the Trump Organization created a new host name, trump1.contact-client.com, which enabled communication to the very same server via a different route.

When a new host name is created, the first communication with it is never random. To reach the server after the resetting of the host name, the sender of the first inbound mail has to first learn of the name somehow. It’s simply impossible to randomly reach a renamed server. “That party had to have some kind of outbound message through SMS, phone, or some noninternet channel they used to communicate [the new configuration],” Paul Vixie told me. The first attempt to look up the revised host name came from Alfa Bank. “If this was a public server, we would have seen other traces,” Vixie says. “The only look-ups came from this particular source.”

Was a server registered to the Trump Organization communicating with Russia’s Alfa Bank?

The response from the Trump campaign seems particularly non-nonsensical. It doesn't quite amount to an irrefutable smoking gun, but together with other info, it's rather concerning.