"The Great Hack"

Over the weekend I watched the new Netflix documentary The Great Hack. It tells the story of the rise and fall of Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting company that married big data with military-grade psychological operations to deliver the White House for Trump in the 2016 presidential election.

The documentary is less than stunning as it follows whistle-blower Brittany Kaiser from Burning Man to a resort in Thailand and then on to London and New York as she explains her role in Cambridge Analytica.

The film works in that it convincingly shows that Trump likely won in 2016 by spending heavily on Facebook ads that were minutely targeted in key swing states thanks to data that Cambridge Analytica mined with the help of Facebook (the root cause of Facebook's $5 billion fine). Trump was spending $1 million per day on Facebook ads; in comparison, Hillary's social media advertising was a pittance.

At the end of the documentary reporter Carole Cadwalladr grafts Russiagate onto the Cambridge Analytica story by falsely attributing a political motive to a meeting that Kaiser had with Julian Assange.

The real story is that the Hillary campaign got its clock cleaned by Cambridge Analytica. (Brad Parscale, Trump's 2016 campaign’s digital director, is running his re-election.) Russian interference is just a cover created to shield blame for the Democrats' shockingly poor performance.

Russiagate is an Excuse for the U.S. to Interfere in Elections at Home and Abroad

UPDATE: Here's how my hipster hometown weekly encapsulates the Senate Intelligence Committee report:

A Senate Intelligence Report confirms "extensive" Russian election interference: The bipartisan report, issued a day after Mueller warned the Russians are currently working to interfere with our 2020 election, found that our nation's election infrastructure is unprepared to deal with the "extensive activity" by Russia.

Note how "extensive activity" becomes "extensive interference" in the header. The putative "underground" press operates almost completely in the orbit of mainstream politics. Since Russiagate is a mainstream political construct, it's no wonder that the urban elite are busy tub thumping about the Russia menace.

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The headline is breathtaking -- "Russia Targeted Elections Systems in All 50 States, Report Finds" -- but the accompanying story by David Sanger and Catie Edmondson about the Senate Intelligence Committee's release yesterday of the first volume of its report on Russian election interference is more of the same: More hype, more obfuscation and misdirection, more fear and loathing; all heavily redacted, with no guidelines offered in conclusion.

As to the hype, Sanger and Edmondson report that

The report — the first volume of several to be released from the committee’s investigation into Russia’s 2016 election interference — came 24 hours after the former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III warned that Russia was moving again to interfere “as we sit here.”

While details of many of the hackings directed by Russian intelligence, particularly in Illinois and Arizona, are well known, the committee described “an unprecedented level of activity against state election infrastructure” intended largely to search for vulnerabilities in the security of the election systems.

It concluded that while there was no evidence that any votes were changed in actual voting machines, “Russian cyberactors were in a position to delete or change voter data” in the Illinois voter database. The committee found no evidence that they did so.

Aaron Mate's  point about Mueller's team being rebuked by a federal judge for conflating the Russian government with the Saint Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency is worth mentioning here. "Russian cyberactors" could be anyone. We know from WikiLeaks' release of Vault 7, the treasure trove of CIA hacking tools, that planting false flags in code is pro forma in cyber warfare. This speaks to the report's misdirection.

As Sanger and Edmondson note, the report, given the enormous existential threat to American democracy, can only list recommendations, not guidelines:

The committee’s recommendations ranged from the concrete — ensure a paper trail for voter machines and paper backups for registration systems — to the strategic, like adopting a doctrine of how to deter different kinds of cyberattacks.

While the committee suggested holding “a discussion with U.S. allies and others about new cybernorms,” it did not say what those norms should be — nor did it say election manipulation should be off limits for all nations. One reason for that hesitance, some government officials acknowledge, is the debate inside the administration over how much the United States itself is willing to forgo the option of using its own cyberabilities abroad.

[snip] 

But Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, appended an impassioned dissent to the report, arguing that the committee did not go far enough. “The committee report describes a range of cybersecurity measures needed to protect voter registration databases,” he wrote, “yet there are currently no mandatory rules that require states to implement even minimum cybersecurity measures. There are not even any voluntary federal standards.”

The committee found that the Department of Homeland Security and the F.B.I. warned states in the late summer and fall of 2016 of the threat of Russian interference. But they did not provide election officials with “a clear reason” to take the threat more seriously than other warnings that are regularly issued, the report said.

Basically all of Russiagate is a farce. The Russians actually want to sign an international cyber agreement. But as The Nation pointed out this spring, the U.S. has refused, not wanting to blunt its attack capabilities: "[T]he Bush and Obama administrations rejected multiple Russian proposals for an international cyber code of conduct."

The conclusion I draw from Russiagate is that it is a U.S. Government effort to stifle dissent among its domestic population. U.S. internet censorship has accelerated since 2016 behind the screen of Russiagate. Google and Facebook are cracking down on "inauthentic" voices. Take the example of anti-war presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard. She's suing Google for pulling her ads out of the blue just at the time she was peaking right after the first Democratic presidential debate. According to The New York Times in "Tulsi Gabbard, Democratic Presidential Candidate, Sues Google for $50 Million":

Tulsi Now Inc., the campaign committee for Ms. Gabbard, said Google suspended the campaign’s advertising account for six hours on June 27 and June 28, obstructing its ability to raise money and spread her message to potential voters.

After the first Democratic debate, Ms. Gabbard was briefly the most searched-for candidate on Google. Her campaign wanted to capitalize on the attention she was receiving by buying ads that would have placed its website at the top of search results for her name.

The lawsuit also said the Gabbard campaign believed its emails were being placed in spam folders on Gmail at “a disproportionately high rate” when compared with emails from other Democratic candidates.

Google can't explain why Gabbard's account was suspended:

Gabbard campaign workers sent an email to a Google representative on June 27 at 9:30 p.m. once they realized the account had been suspended. In emails reviewed by The New York Times, the campaign sent Google a screenshot of a notice of suspension for “problems with billing information or violations of our advertising policies.”

The account was reactivated at 3:30 a.m. on June 28. In the email announcing that it had reinstated the account, Google wrote that the company temporarily suspended the campaign’s account to verify billing information and policy compliance, but offered no other explanation for what had happened.

The campaign said it had opened the Google advertising account in February and had bought ads on Google search before the suspension. It said there was no problem with its billing information and that it had not violated Google’s terms of service.

“To this day, Google has not provided a straight answer — let alone a credible one — as to why Tulsi’s political speech was silenced when millions of people wanted to hear from her,” the lawsuit said.

The most likely reason, one that Google will never publicly acknowledge, is that Gabbard's account was suspended because she's been tarred by U.S. intelligence agencies as a Russian agent.

Russiagate is an excuse for the U.S. Government to brazenly interfere in elections both at home and abroad in order to manufacture electoral consent for the broadly unpopular neoliberal-perpetual-warfare Washington Consensus.

Deep State Desperation

There is a good synopsis in this morning's Foreign Policy Situation Report of the latest Deep State effort to disqualify Trump before his inauguration next Friday:

Well, that was something. Welcome to the New Normal, where the head of the Senate Armed Services Committee personally delivers memos to the FBI director, alleging the President-elect’s team has been in contact with Russian intelligence, which has compromising personal and financial material. That was the bombshell dropped Tuesday by Buzzfeed, which published the documents, calling them “unverified, and potentially unverifiable.”

Quickly. The memos, first disclosed by CNN, were written by a former high-ranking British intelligence official hired by Republicans last year to collect information on Trump, were delivered by Sen. John McCain to FBI chief James Comey in December. While the FBI has not verified the accuracy of any of the claims, “U.S. officials had evaluated the sources relied upon by the private firm, considered them credible, and determined that it was plausible that they would have firsthand knowledge of Russia’s alleged dossier on Trump,” the Washington Post reports.

Briefing book. The information was included in the classified report the U.S. intel officials briefed to President Obama and Trump last week.

The first elements of the story were published in October by Mother Jones’ David Corn, but as The Guardian’s Julian Borger points out, Trump’s staffers have been an object of interest for the U.S. intel agencies for months. “The FBI applied for a warrant from the foreign intelligence surveillance (Fisa) court over the summer in order to monitor four members of the Trump team suspected of irregular contacts with Russian officials. The Fisa court turned down the application asking FBI counter-intelligence investigators to narrow its focus. According to one report, the FBI was finally granted a warrant in October, but that has not been confirmed, and it is not clear whether any warrant led to a full investigation.” On Wednesday, Moscow denied having any compromising information on Trump.

Then for the Gray Lady Jonathan Weisman regurgitates Trump's tweeted rejoinder, "Trump on Compromising Dossier Leak: ‘Are We Living in Nazi Germany?’"

What Buzzfeed did was to reanimate opposition research (crafted by a former British intelligence official) that had been floating around in the press prior to the November election. Buzzfeed was able to call this news because of Deep State consul McCain's hand-off of the old opposition research to FBI's Comey. Pretty pathetic and desperate. It's reminiscent of the "Dodgy Dossier."

Blaming Russia Fails to Persuade the Masses

Here is a gem from Lambert Strether's Water Cooler:

“Just one-third of Americans say they believe Russia influenced the 2016 presidential election, according to a new POLITICO/Morning Consult poll” [Politico].. Good proxy for the size of Clinton’s base. Not enough.

After a solid week, possibly more, of incessant haranguing about the evil genius of Putin-directed Russian hackers stealing the presidential election from poor victim Hillary, the mainstream media has largely gone silent on the topic. (The big story now is whether Congress will create a special select committee to investigate the hack or whether existing committees will handle the chore.)

By now New York Times editors, let alone Deep State power brokers, should be able to connect the dots and realize that the "Russians ate poor, poor Hillary's lunch" is a colossal dud. This isn't 1950. Joseph Stalin is long dead. The Democratic Party fosters a tiny fraction of the allegiance it did in the Truman era. Instead Dem stalwarts should get to work on the 2018 midterms -- which as Nate Silver argues in "Democrats Need To Win Elections, Not Flip Electors" could see a change in control of the House -- rather than moaning about Russian bogeymen.

But as I have opined before, blaming the Russians keeps the Bernistas at bay and forestalls any reckoning for the money bags who run the show; it also splits Trump from his own party, as John McCain's almost daily Strangelovian pronouncements make clear. So even if the "Russians did it" is a dud, it is a song that will likely be in steady rotation, both for the internal political ambiance it creates as well as its dulcet neocon tone for U.S. clients among the Gulf emirates.

There is some self-congratulation from the Gray Lady today. "How We Identified the D.N.C. Hack’s ‘Patient Zero’ , " according to a blurb, "[D]etails how [Eric Lipton] and his Times colleagues David E. Sanger and Scott Shane constructed a chronological narrative of one of the most famous hacks in history."

Marcy Wheeler pokes holes in this timeline in "THE DNC’S EVOLVING STORY ABOUT WHEN THEY KNEW THEY WERE TARGETED BY RUSSIA."

Maybe the sudden disappearance of the Russian hack story from the front page is due to a preponderance of evidence pointing to a leak, whether from someone within the Clinton/Democrat organization or the NSA, rather than a hack.

No "December Surprise"

Today is the day a "December Surprise" is supposed to happen. As Harvey Wasserman explains,

. . . Donald Trump lost the popular vote by nearly three million votes but is apparently leading in the Electoral College with official victories in five states (Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Florida) where he lost in the exit polls.  Those vote counts were not contested by Hillary Clinton, and green recount attempts in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania were stymied.

Those wanting someone other than Donald Trump to become president must now persuade some 37 electors from states officially won by Trump to not vote for him.  They must either switch those votes to Hillary Clinton or produce at least one electoral vote for a third candidate who would then be selected in the House of Representatives by a majority of the state delegations.

Such a “December Surprise” has never happened in US history.  It would appear to be a Constitutional possibility.  But the only certainty at this point seems to be that the clock is ticking. 

Stay tuned.

There is a December 19 movement which is mobilizing people to come to state capitols "to call on the Electors of the Electoral College to listen to the voice of the people and refuse to cast their ballots for Donald Trump."

Howard Dean's Democracy for America appears to be one of the main groups behind the effort. Turnout very likely will be robust, particularly if unions like SEIU participate.

According to the Wall Street Journal, there is no evidence of a revolt:

But Republicans have said they may lose just one pledged elector, giving Trump more than enough votes to secure the presidency. AP reported Thursday that, based on interviews with more than 330 electors of both parties, there was little evidence of a revolt. Reince Priebus, Trump’s incoming chief of staff, said Sunday on Fox News: "We expect everything to fall in line. Everything is going to be very smooth."

December 19 will come and go with Trump officially triumphant. The real chance to take Trump down was lost when the Stein failed recount. Greg Palast argues convincingly, "The Republican Sabotage of the Vote Recounts in Michigan and Wisconsin," that by blocking hand recounts in Milwaukee, Detroit and Flint state GOP officials prevented thousands of votes from being counted and likely saved both states for Trump. Philadelphia also declined to conduct a hand recount. Ballots were just fed back through the optical scan machines a second time. So anyone who marked an 'X' across the bubble on his/her ballot likely went uncounted again.

Trump won Wisconsin by 22,000 votes; Michigan, 10,000; Pennsylvania, 34,000. Jill Stein claimed victory because she was able to show the flaws in the way we vote. But this was just spin. Stein's effort was blocked at every step by Republican elected officials and the courts. In this turbulent news environment when everyone is being inundated with Russian hackers and dead babies in Aleppo, few paid attention to the recount.

Whose Fake News?

Based on Jennifer Steinhauer's "Senate and House Leaders Call for Inquiry of Russian Hacking in Election" it looks like there will be three separate congressional investigations on purported Russian cyber-meddling in the U.S. presidential election:

[A] continuing investigation by Representative Devin Nunes of California, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.

[T]he Senate investigation would be led by Senator Richard M. Burr, Republican of North Carolina, the chairman of the Intelligence Committee. Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, will add a subcommittee to look into cyberattacks, led by Mr. Graham.

“The first thing we want to establish is, ‘Did the Russians hack into our political system?’” Mr. Graham said in an interview on Monday. “Then you work outward from there. I have a high degree of confidence Russia did this.”

Graham is a preeminent neocon. So the findings of his subcommittee, as his quote makes clear, are preordained.

At the same time, the Senate has passed a "ministry of truth" bill designed to counter the fictional tsunami of Fake News conjured by Poseidon Putin.

Simultaneously, the U.S. and its clients in the Gulf monarchies are about to lose their Stalingrad in Aleppo.

Fake News is what the organs of the mainstream press produce. Read Anne Barnard's latest, "Aleppo Close to Falling Under Complete Control of Syrian Government." Barnard reports from Beirut. A couple of years back she used to write somewhat critical pieces about the Syrian National Coalition and the Free Syrian Army.

The myth of a secular, democratic opposition has almost entirely been scrapped. Now the "moderate opposition" label is applied with a wink and nod to mean "our jihadis."

This is on display in Barnard's work of the last several months. She is in communication with the "opposition" still holed up in the eastern part of Aleppo. She emails, she texts, she calls from her bureau in Beirut. She can't travel to any of these areas controlled by the "opposition" because she would be kidnapped and held for ransom, or worse. The only time Barnard has traveled to Syria recently has been at the invitation of the government. She met with Assad.

In any event, almost all of Barnard stories in the last month or two follow a pattern. She talks to someone in Aleppo -- 95 percent of the time it is someone in eastern half of the divided city, not the government controlled western part -- and that someone says something to the effect, "I am dying. The government is killing me. Bodies are everywhere. Babies are dead all around."

Mostly she doesn't explicitly identify who she is speaking with because who she is speaking with are jihadis. Here is a sample which ends today's article:

Malek, an activist who asked to be identified only by his first name for fear that he would soon find himself in government territory, said he had moved on Monday to a safer place for the 10th time since the offensive began, along with his cats, Rocky and Loz, the Arabic word for almond.

“Why should I lie? I’m not well,” he said in a series of voice messages. “We are people, are being deleted from the human map. We have two neighborhoods and one street, and the regime will keep bombing this small area.”

Bodies were stuck under the rubble, Malek said, and even members of the White Helmets civil defense group could not rescue anyone, because the group’s equipment had been destroyed and their members scattered by the shelling.

Still attempting to find humor, he said that his cat Rocky had lost “his fiancée” along the way. “Now he’s lonely,” Malek said.

Dr. Salem, a dentist who had kept his clinic open until last week, finally moved to one of the last rebel neighborhoods as his own was taken by government forces. He said he walked through streets shrouded in smoke, and littered with the dead and wounded, to a small area where thousands were crowded in a shrinking space. “There will be a massacre if one rocket falls here,” said Dr. Salem, using only his first name.

The only way that dentist could operate was if he had the support of the jihadis who control the territory. If he were a secular, "moderate" democrat he would have been purged.

What Barnard produces is propaganda. Plain and simple. Fake News. What the Fake News crisis is all about is that the mainstream media has lost control of the narrative. What we are witnessing is a futile attempt to re-legitimize the mainstream, a mainstream, founded on war and ever-increasing inequality, that has lost all credibility.

New McCarthyite Congressional Investigations Coming Our Way

If you read this morning's frontpager by Mark Mazzetti and Eric Lichtblau, "C.I.A. Judgment on Russia Built on Swell of Evidence," you will find that the story does not merit the headline. The story repeats the same old stuff -- the DNC hack, the Podesta emails, the RNC hack -- and then says that CIA analysts have shifted their opinion from believing that Russia sought to sow chaos to Russia intended to elect Donald Trump. That conjecture is all there is.

Mazzetti and Lichtblau then, helpfully, mention that the FBI, the agency which is actually in charge of investigating the hacks and bringing charges against any guilty party, is unconvinced that Russia tried to steal the presidency on behalf of Trump:

And yet, there is skepticism within the American government, particularly at the F.B.I., that this evidence adds up to proof that the Russians had the specific objective of getting Mr. Trump elected.

A senior American law enforcement official said the F.B.I. believed that the Russians probably had a combination of goals, including damaging Mrs. Clinton and undermining American democratic institutions. Whether one of those goals was to install Mr. Trump remains unclear to the F.B.I., he said.

The official played down any disagreement between the F.B.I. and the C.I.A., and suggested that the C.I.A.’s conclusions were probably more nuanced than they were being framed in the news media.

The agencies’ differences in judgment may also reflect different methods of investigating the Russian interference. The F.B.I., which has both a law enforcement and an intelligence role, is held to higher standards of proof in examining people involved in the hacking because it has an eye toward eventual criminal prosecutions. The C.I.A. has a broader mandate to develop intelligence assessments.

Law enforcement officials said that if F.B.I. agents had the evidence to charge Russians with specific crimes, they would do so. The F.B.I. and federal prosecutors have already gone aggressively after Russian hackers, including two men detained in Thailand and the Czech Republic whom the United States is trying to extradite.

Russia has tried to block those efforts and has accused the United States of harassing its citizens.

The F.B.I. began investigating Russia’s apparent attempts to meddle in the election over the summer. Agents examined numerous possible connections between Russians and members of Mr. Trump’s inner circle, including former Trump aides like Paul Manafort and Carter Page, as well as a mysterious and unexplained trail of computer activity between the Trump Organization and an email account at a large Russian bank, Alfa Bank [which turned out to be nothing].

At the height of its investigation before the election, the F.B.I. saw some indications that the Russians might be explicitly seeking to get Mr. Trump elected, officials said, and investigators collected online evidence and conducted interviews overseas and inside the United States to test that theory.

The F.B.I. was concerned enough about Russia’s influence and possible connections to the Trump campaign that it briefed congressional leaders — including Senator Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat and Senate minority leader — on some of the evidence this summer and fall. Mr. Reid, in particular, pressed for the F.B.I. to find out more and charged that the agency was sitting on important information that could implicate Russia.

But the agency’s suspicions about a direct effort by Russia to help Mr. Trump, or about possible connections between the two camps, appear to have waned as the investigation continued into September and October. The reasons are not entirely clear, and F.B.I. officials declined to comment.

Now that a partisan squall has erupted over exactly what role Russia played in influencing the election, there is growing momentum among both Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill to have a congressional investigation.

“I’m not trying to relitigate the election,” said Senator Angus King, independent of Maine, who is one of the lawmakers calling for such an investigation. “I’m just trying to prevent this from happening again.”

Is this an attempted coup? I don't think so. I think it is business as usual. The Democratic Party is in serious trouble. The party leaders do not want to relinquish power to the Bernistas and they don't want the Republicans to coalesce behind Trump and pass a bunch of legislation. How can they achieve what they want in their present diminished state? Reboot the Cold War and McCarthyism. Conduct a big congressional investigation that will keep Democrats from straying from the reservation and isolate Trump from his party.

It is a desperate play, but it is the hand that Democratic leadership is playing. Read Krugman, "The Tainted Election," and the lede unsigned editorial this morning, "Russia’s Hand in America’s Election." It is not going to work, particularly when the activist base of the Democrats are getting their information from outlets that have been smeared as Kremlin dupes.

Laying the First Bricks of the Western Great Firewall

Western neoliberal orthodoxy, though discredited, its high priests headed off to retirement or the unemployment line, appears to be in need of a quick and dirty technological patch.

As soon as Trump won the U.S. presidential election, stories started appearing in the mainstream media about the role Fake News played in securing his victory.

Fake News has a neo-McCarthyite overlay in that all this false information that is purportedly pulsating through the internet is of a Kremlin origin.

So the empire strikes back. You could see this coming in stories from Europe published in the last couple of weeks. Fake News was being mentioned in the same sentence as hate speech. Clearly the plan is to conflate the two, and have the giant tech companies -- Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter -- design a filter, a censorship program, to remove offensive content. In other words, a corporate Western version of the Chinese Great Firewall. Europe will test the beta version, and then the U.S. will follow.

The tech giants actually kicked things off on Monday when they announced an effort to censor terrorist content on the internet. Then yesterday the European Commission published its "Code of Conduct on countering illegal hate speech online." All that needs to be done is to categorize Fake News as a variant of hate speech. And lo and behold! We have ourselves a Western Great Firewall.

Yves Smith weighs in this morning with "Witch Hunt: “Fake News” Software Touted by CBS Smears Naked Capitalism, ShadowProof, TruthDig, Others; Creator Admits He Made Up Who Went on Hit Li[s]t":

The faith in coders coming up with a magic bullet for information validation is similarly questionable. The concern about “fake news” on the Internet is almost comical given that more citizens encounter “fake news” via seeing National Enquirer and National Examiner covers in grocery stores than via websites. It is not hard to imagine that much of the tender concern expressed by the mainstream media is commercial: independent news and analysis sites threaten their legitimacy by exposing how dependent they are on stories planted by government or business source that these press outlets often fail to vet adequately.

Hallelujah! The irony of this post-election Fake News crisis is that if there is any substance to the issue it is due to the ad-driven revenue model of the tech giants. Fake Newsies aren't agents of the Kremlin but people of modest means hustling to concoct click bait to generate income from ad placement (see "Inside a Fake News Sausage Factory: ‘This Is All About Income’."

Let me quote Mark Scott's "Europe Presses American Tech Companies to Tackle Hate Speech" in full. The first bricks of the Western Great Firewall are being laid.

European officials pushed on Tuesday for American technology giants to do more to tackle online hate speech across the region, adding to the chorus of policy makers worldwide demanding greater action from the likes of Facebook, Google and Twitter.

The rebuke came a day after many of those companies announced that they were joining forces to fight the spread of terrorist content on the internet, agreeing to share technology and information to prevent propaganda and other dangerous materials from being disseminated on their services.

Amid growing security tensions in much of the Western world, governments, intelligence agencies and advocacy groups want Google, Microsoft and other technology companies to take further steps to curb hate speech on digital platforms, as well as to clamp down on how terrorists circulate information online.

But freedom of expression campaigners have warned that such demands may limit people’s ability to communicate across the internet, and they have cautioned that the line between hate speech and legitimate political discussion can be blurry.

In a report published on Tuesday, however, the European authorities signaled that only 40 percent of material flagged as possible hate speech online (albeit in a relatively small sample of 600 posts, videos and other online material) had been reviewed by the Silicon Valley companies within 24 hours. Of those 600 postings, just over a quarter was eventually taken down, the report said.

“While I.T. companies are moving in the right direction, the first results show that the I.T. companies will need to do more to make it a success,” Vera Jourova, the European commissioner for justice, consumers and gender equality, said in a statement. “It is our duty to protect people in Europe from incitement to hatred and violence online.”

Press officers for Google and Microsoft declined to comment. Representatives for Facebook and Twitter were not immediately available to comment.

In a recent interview, Richard Allen, Facebook’s head of public policy in Europe, said that the social network was committed to tackling hate speech online, but that there was a fine line between what was legitimate under freedom of speech laws and what was required to protect people online.

“Our policies provide protection from hate speech,” Mr. Allen said last month. “We shouldn’t apply media regulation to the speech of ordinary citizens.”

The report on Tuesday is part of European efforts to coax American technology companies to take more responsibility for what is published through their services. In May, companies including Google, Facebook and Twitter signed a voluntary code of conduct, agreeing to do more to tackle the rise of online hate speech across the 28-member European Union.

Some lawmakers, though, are not satisfied.

In Germany, where Facebook, in particular, has come under scrutiny, a government-backed task force is to report early next year on whether the social network, among other companies, has met national targets for responding to — and potentially eliminating — hate speech. Officials want companies to remove at least 70 percent of online hate speech within 24 hours of it being reported.

Heiko Maas, the German justice minister, has said that Facebook could even be held criminally liable for illegal hate speech posts, and he has called for legislation if the company does not meet its legal commitments.

“Facebook has a certain responsibility to uphold the laws,” Mr. Maas said.

The social network denies any wrongdoing.

Chalk One Up for the Green Party: Stein and Cobb Box the Democratic Illuminati while Rolling in the Dough

A golden truth of politics is that if you can split your opponent's base you will usually win.

It didn't work for Hillary, whose campaign was pegged -- maybe not for public consumption, since Robby Mook insisted in the final days leading up to November 8 that surging Latino support would offset any drop off in African Americans -- on an enormous but fictitious gender gap (I bought it) that predicted droves of Republican-leaning suburban soccer-&-megachurch moms, offended by Trump's misogyny, casting a Democratic ballot.

But mediocre Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein seems to have found the sweet spot and is cleaving the Democratic Party in twain with her drive for a recount in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania based on the possibility of a computer hack in these three swing states. Yesterday the Clinton campaign reluctantly agreed to join Stein in her recount quest, as David Sanger reports in "Hillary Clinton’s Team to Join Wisconsin Recount Pushed by Jill Stein":

WASHINGTON — Nearly three weeks after Election Day, Hillary Clinton’s campaign said on Saturday that it would participate in a recount process in Wisconsin incited by a third-party candidate and would join any potential recounts in two other closely contested states, Pennsylvania and Michigan.

The Clinton campaign held out little hope of success in any of the three states, and said it had seen no “actionable evidence” of vote hacking that might taint the results or otherwise provide new grounds for challenging Donald J. Trump’s victory. But it suggested it was going along with the recount effort to assure supporters that it was doing everything possible to verify that hacking by Russia or other irregularities had not affected the results.

In a post on Medium, Marc Elias, the Clinton team’s general counsel, said the campaign would take part in the Wisconsin recount being set off by Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, and would also participate if Ms. Stein made good on her plans to seek recounts in Michigan and Pennsylvania. Mrs. Clinton lost those three states by a total of little more than 100,000 votes, sealing her Electoral College defeat by Mr. Trump.

The Clinton campaign had assailed Mr. Trump during the election for refusing to say he would abide by the results if he lost. On Saturday, Mr. Trump responded to the campaign’s decision to join the recount with a statement calling the effort “ridiculous” and “a scam by the Green Party.”

He suggested that most of the money raised would not be spent on the recount. “The results of this election should be respected instead of being challenged and abused, which is exactly what Jill Stein is doing,” Mr. Trump said.

In Wisconsin, Mr. Trump leads by 22,177 votes. In Michigan, he has a lead of 10,704 votes, and in Pennsylvania, his advantage is 70,638 votes.

Mr. Elias suggested in his essay that the Clinton campaign was joining the recount effort with little expectation that it would change the result. But many of the campaign’s supporters, picking up on its frequent complaints of Russian interference in the election, have enthusiastically backed Ms. Stein’s efforts, putting pressure on the Clinton team to show that it is exploring all options.

What we have here is the Democrats reaping what they have sowed. For months they hid behind allegations of Russian hacking masterminded by the evil Putin to explain away the proof of corrupt behavior by DNC officials and Clinton campaign honchos contained in the WikiLeaks revelations. So when a New York Magazine article published last week reported that a group of experts had approached the Clinton campaign "with persuasive evidence that results in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania may have been manipulated or hacked," and it was the Green Party not the Democrats who sprang into action, well, how does that play to the base?

Memories are still present (probably due to a widespread familiarity with Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 911) of Gore's passivity in the face of the Supreme Court intervention to end the recount in Florida; that, combined with the Oz-like baleful Russian bogeyman hacker that Democratic leaders and Obama administration officials have conjured up in the present day to obscure the party's venality and intellectual bankruptcy, effectively put Hillary in a box. Thanks to Stein and her campaign manager, the former Green Party presidential candidate, David Cobb, Hillary had to join the recount.

Sanger continues:

The Clinton campaign will not contribute financially to the effort, which has been funded by small contributions. But it will pay to have its own lawyers present at the recount, campaign officials said.

The Obama administration issued a statement to The New York Times on Friday in response to questions about intelligence findings related to Russian interference in the election. In the statement, it said it had concluded that the election was free of interference.

The administration issued a second statement on Saturday saying that “the federal government did not observe any increased level of malicious cyberactivity aimed at disrupting our electoral process on Election Day.”

Mrs. Clinton conceded the race to Mr. Trump early on Nov. 9, when it became clear that he would have a large margin of victory in the Electoral College. But as her lead in the popular vote has grown — it now exceeds two million votes — her base has increasingly pressured her to challenge the results.

That has been fueled in part by how aggressively the Clinton campaign spread the word of Russian involvement in the theft of emails from the Democratic National Committee and from the personal account of John D. Podesta, the campaign’s chairman. The campaign also charged that the Russians were behind fake news about Mrs. Clinton’s health, among other stories — a claim supported to some extent by recent studies.

Some critics saw those accusations as an effort to shift the discussion from mistakes the Clinton campaign had made in taking on Mr. Trump.

Mr. Elias’s post offered a revealing look at how much time and energy the campaign had spent in the past two weeks looking for evidence of Russian hacking or other irregularities, and how it had tried to keep those efforts secret.

“Since the day after the election, we have had lawyers and data scientists and analysts combing over the results to spot anomalies that would suggest a hacked result,” Mr. Elias wrote.

“Most of those discussions have remained private, while at least one has unfortunately been the subject of leaks,” he wrote, a reference to conversations between Mr. Podesta and a group of experts that included J. Alex Halderman, a computer scientist with deep experience in the vulnerabilities of voting systems.

Mr. Halderman recently put his own post on Medium, describing his suspicions and the case for recounts. But even he doubted that the election result would change.

But what of the Greens? Is Trump correct? Is this a money-making scam? Yes, I think it is. David Cobb has done this before -- in 2004, along with the Libertarian presidential candidate, with a recount in Ohio. I have met David Cobb. He is shitbird, a peddler of snake oil. But that didn't prevent me from voting for Stein this go-round, nor did it stop me from contributing $50 to the recount effort. Why is it permissible for only the major parties, the two branches of the duopoly, to fleece the public and lard their pantries? Why can't the minor parties join the barbecue now and then? And it appears that the recount fund drive has been wildly successful. Stein has already raised over $6 million, well on the way to achieving her goal of $7 million, which would double the amount she raised during the campaign.

Jeffrey St. Clair inveighs against Stein in his weekly must-read "Roaming Charges" column:

What in the world is Jill Stein up to? She is trying to raise more $2 million for recounts in WI, Michigan & Penn, recounts that presumably aren’t about getting a bigger vote total for the Green Party, but trying to find “lost” votes for HRC. If HRC isn’t willing to stand up for her own voters (assuming there are lost votes) why the hell should the Greens? What’s the goal? To be able to say: “I didn’t cost Hillary the election, I tried to win it for her?”

This smells of Stein’s campaign manager David Cobb to me, who in 2004 really wanted the Greens to run a stealth campaign so as not to be tarnished by reelection of Bush. (Indeed, the Wisconsin recount has nothing to do with the Green Party itself. The executive committee voted 5-3 to reject Stein and Cobb’s request that they sponsor the recounts.) Shortly after the 2004, elections Cobb spear-headed an audit of the returns from Ohio, the state that sank John Kerry. Many of the Greens are simply disaffect liberals, who really want to be teleported back to the Democratic Party of the 70s and 80s.

Nearly 100 million eligible voters didn’t vote. Stein would be better served spending some of the $2 million turning them Green, organizing their own party, providing legal support for Standing Rock protesters, investing it in the Powerball lottery or almost anything other than auditing the vote for Hillary. But if, as with Sanders, Stein uses that $2 million (or even $200,000 or $20,000 or $2000 or $200) to help the candidate she rightly assailed as a threat to peace, the environment and working people during the campaign, then Stein will have defrauded the very people who supported her.

The end result, even if successful in revealing some hijinks in the voting machines, as in Ohio 2004, will be to make more “legitimate” the very electoral process that kept the Green Party off the ballot in many states and locked it out of the debates. I don’t see that as any kind of win for independent parties. It will only serve to improve and restore confidence in the two-party system that crushes every aspiration of the Green Party’s own members.

If Stein/Cobb recount initiative is really about preserving integrity of the democratic process, why only investigate states HRC narrowly lost and not the ones–NH, MN–she narrowly won?

But St. Clair, usually so perceptive, misses how much the Dems loathe this recount effort. The recount forces Dems to actively collaborate in the kind of conspiracy-theory thinking that they found so disreputable in Trump. Also, party leaders despise it when their base bolts off the reservation. And this is certainly a case of that.

St. Clair bemoans any renewed legitimacy the duopoly might enjoy thanks to the recount, but he misses the damage to an already discredited Democratic Party if the recount reveals zero evidence of a hack (something which FiveThirtyEight sees as a foregone conclusion). Then all the hyperventilating about a hostile power hijacking U.S. democracy will be exposed for what it is -- a flimsy cover story meant to protect out-of-touch elites from the voters.

I have to say that the Washington Post's David Weigel, "Why are people giving Jill Stein millions of dollars for an election recount?" is closer to the mark when he laments that,

For Democrats, Stein's role in the campaign resurrects some of the worst aspects of the campaign. It directs liberal anger toward a hopeless goal. It feeds into a Russian story line promoted on RT — that American democracy is awfully flimsy, considering that the country claims to lead the world. And it helps a third party that can split Democratic votes.

Trump is in a Box

Digesting more election postmortems over the weekend, it is apparent that Trump won in the Rust Belt thanks to Democratic voters who felt both betrayed by Obama's weakness and disgusted by Hillary's mendacity. Democratic elite who suddenly find themselves in free fall are promoting the narrative that it was racist, sexist neo-fascism that led to Trump's triumph, not regular rank'n'file union members who had once voted for Obama. They are doing this to avoid any accountability to the working class, hoping to live again to fight another day by keeping us penned in on the identity-politics-Wall-Street reservation.

Trump owes his razor-thin victory to Reagan Democrats. Now he has to find a way to get some bounty delivered to them by means of a hostile Republican congress. No easy feat. Something has to give.

Editorials over the weekend were rife with hosannas to free trade and perpetual war (in the form of Russophobia, Assadophobia and NATO maintenance), as if the occupants of the deep state seriously entertain the possibility of a Trump about-face once he enters the White House.

I suppose it's possible. But I doubt Trump wants to be a one-term wonder like Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush. So he will work on passing some sort of public works infrastructure plan (for the Reagan Dems) and a tax cut (for Wall Street). That's the easy part. The hard part for Trump is going to be battling the deep state on perpetual war and globalized free trade.

The Big Question About Trump

To what extent is Trump willing to joust with the national security apparatus of the permanent U.S. warfare state? This I think is the big question about a Trump presidency. Those on the Left and the Alt Right who imagine a real reboot to be forthcoming are being naive. All one had to do is listen to the "USA! USA!" chants emanating from the election night Trump campaign party to know that what we are dealing with here is more like an unbridled Reaganesque militarism than a wily realpolitik embrace of the Russian Federation.

James Luchte in "Trump vs. the National Security Establishment: Will There be a Revolution in US Foreign Policy?" frames the question well:

On the one hand, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Israel seek regime change in Syria in order to build a gas pipelines to Europe.  On the other hand, the US disrupts Russian supply chains – via the Ukrainian crisis and the European sanctions regime – to destabilize Russia and Russian-European relations.  Crimea is significant, in this light, as it is a primary distribution hub for Europe, a status threatened by the coup d’etat.  The reunification of Crimea with Russia took place directly against the background of the Syrian conflict as a response to the overall US strategies of containment and market displacement.  Further pressure has been placed on Russia through oil price deflation from shale gas and oil smuggling by ISIS.

US strategy in Syria has tragically metastasized into a policy of “nation destroying”, of proxy, mercenary warfare, destabilization, partition and ethnic cleansing (the “refugee crisis”).  Syria has made a horrific sacrifice for the US national security obsession with Russia.

For Trump to ask, “What do we care?” clearly exposes why the national security establishment has condemned his candidacy in such vitriolic terms.  In its view, to allow Putin to win in Syria would be not only to accept Assad, but also to give Russia a permanent presence in the region. To exclude and push Russia back has always been the US objective and Trump’s Russophilia is a direct challenge to the National Security establishment and its plan to throw Putin out of Europe.

Trump has however won the election and he is on a direct collision course with the National Security establishment.  Of course, Trump is an unlikely revolutionary.  He has never said he would defy the National Security Act of 1947 (no president has), which means that he will accept its shadowy apparatus and its bureaucratic methodologies. Indeed, he supports increased NSA surveillance, expanded military spending, CIA activism, FBI phone hacking, etcetera. He is simply suggesting a different target for business-as-usual, by reminding us of our last propaganda cycle, the “War on Terror”.

Yet, Trump has thus far failed to articulate the “big picture” of a Russian rapprochement in the context of the necessity of a US glasnost – of a deconstruction of the National Security state.  During a campaign characterised by serial violations of longstanding taboos (Sanders’ opposition to the CIA, his support of the Sandinistas and Cuba) and Wikileaks’ disclosure of sensitive and damaging government and campaign documents, Trump squandered his opportunity to lay out a credible vision for either radical reform or revolution.  Indeed, he has been happy to simultaneously endorse the NSA surveillance state and Wikileaks – and without irony.

Trump’s has thus far failed to articulate a coherent vision of a cooperative, multi-polar world – in other words, to invite ordinary citizens to demand a radical change in the concept of national security and of the place of the US in the world.  If he does not challenge the NSC, Trump’s insurgency will expose itself as a distraction to the urgent task of finding a pathway out of the labyrinth of empire.  In its naivety, Trump’s “revolution” would then serve to further merely consolidate the unquestioned impunity of the National Security state.

If Trump is serious, he will set forth a coherent critique of US national security and the constitutional disaster that is the National Security Act.  If Trump is serious, he will defy the National Security Act.

I think we'll find out early on in the first 100 days of Trump how sincere he is in regards to Syria. Cooperation with Russia on Raqqa will tell us what we need to know.

One Silver Lining to Trump Victory: TPP Now Truly DOA in Lame Duck

According to the Kiwi National Business Review, "There is 'very close to zero' chance that President Obama will get the TPP ratified before he leaves office, Prime Minister John Key admitted today."

It makes sense. Unles you're one of the Republicans who lost his seat or is retiring, you're not going to throw down against the incoming messiah whose coattails saved the Senate. And if you're a Democrat, you're not going to publicly embrace policies that cost you Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Ohio.

No, the Trans-Pacific Partnership is done. Hallelujah. Copyright NBR. Cannot be reproduced without permission.
Read more: https://www.nbr.co.nz/article/key-admits-tpp-odds-now-very-close-zero-ck-196483
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Trump Grabbed White Women

The Clinton campaign in the end pinned its hope for a win on a gender gap. Hillary sculpted her ads around Trump's vulgarity and predatory sexual appetites. The gap appeared real enough. I embraced it and thought it would be enough to see the Clintons back into the White House. Early exit polls even backed it up.

But as Jeffrey St. Clair points out in his excellent "The Cataclysm: Notes on Election Day and the Politics of Hubris":

Hillary, who based much of her campaign strategy on decisively winning the women’s vote, lost among white women by a 10-point margin: 53-43. Think, for a moment, about that 53 percent number for Trump. It’s safe to say that Hillary ran the worst campaign since Al Gore. In fact, it was worse than Gore’s in almost every respect.

In a way, Hillary's strategy of winning Republican-leaning women was the only path available to her after the primary. She couldn't really don the mantle of Bernie, even though she tried it on now and then, because no one would believe her. She had to try to grab the soccer moms/megachurch moms by the pussy. It didn't work.

It's Not All Hillary's Fault

UPDATE: Good presidential election postmortem from Jacobin:

This election, in the words of New York Times analyst Nate Cohn, was decided by people who voted for Barack Obama in 2012. Not all of them can be bigots.

Clinton won only 65 percent of Latino voters, compared to Obama’s 71 percent four years ago. She performed this poorly against a candidate who ran on a program of building a wall along America’s southern border, a candidate who kicked off his campaign by calling Mexicans rapists.

Clinton won 34 percent of white women without college degrees. And she won just 54 percent of women overall, compared to Obama’s 55 percent in 2012. Clinton, of course, was running against a candidate who has gloated on film about grabbing women “by the pussy.”

This was Clinton’s election to lose. And she lost. A lot of the blame will fall on Clinton the candidate, but she only embodied the consensus of this generation of Democratic Party leaders. Under President Obama, Democrats have lost almost a thousand state-legislature seats, a dozen gubernatorial races, sixty-nine House seats and thirteen in the Senate. Last night didn’t come out of nowhere.

The problem with Clinton wasn’t her peculiarity but her typicality. It was characteristic of this Democratic Party that the power players in Washington decided on the nominee — with overwhelming endorsements — many months before a single ballot was cast.

True, Hillary is uniquely horrible, a bloated, moldering neoliberal/neoconservative corpse that should have been cremated long ago. But what about Barry?

I speak here of Barack Obama, the first black president, the hope and change peace candidate of 2008. Isn't he to blame as well?

The only direct evidence I experienced that there was a presidential campaign came in the form of television commercials and robodials left on my answering machine.

I thought the commercials for both campaigns were pretty good.

The robodials were plentiful and featured both Barack and Michelle. They were meaningless to me. No different from getting a recorded message from Robert Redford or Gloria Steinem.

Obama was dispatched to North Carolina and Michigan to make sure his coalition members voted. He failed.

Obama failed because his presidency has largely been a failure. He ran as a peace candidate, and he maintained the perpetual U.S. warfare state. Economic growth remained neoliberal and unequal in its distribution. His signature achievement is the Affordable Care Act, and it doesn't look like it is going to survive.

Catatonic Depression in Liberalland

The hush of shock has descended on my liberal neighborhood. The funereal quiet is equivalent to when the Seahawks lost the Super Bowl in the final seconds to the despised machine-like New England Patriots. On the streets that night after the game you could hear a pin drop. It was the same last night.

The Democrats have some soul-searching to do, but how can they do it? They tomahawked Bernie Sanders who likely would have won in the Rust Belt that was Clinton's undoing. In a different age there would be a pogrom at the Democratic National Committee. But we know from experience that, zombie-like, present leadership will stumble on (and that includes Richard Trumka at the American Federation of Labor).

The postmortem by Naked Capitalism's Yves Smith is terrific:

The election outcome was based not just on Clinton being a terrible candidate on the merits, but on the abjectly poor conduct of the Clinton campaign.

Let us not forget that Clinton had every advantage: Presidential campaign experience, the full backing of her party, a much bigger ground apparatus, oddles of experts and surrogates, the Mighty Wurlitzer of the media behind her, an opponent widely deemed to be world-class terrible – utterly unqualified, undisciplined, offensive, with a mother lode of scandals – and what historically was deemed the most important asset of all, a large lead in fundraising.

Yet Clinton was a lousy campaigner and strategist. By all accounts, she was a micromanager who regularly overrode her staff’s advice. All the big-ticket Madison Avenue spin-meistering could not get the dogs to eat enough dog food. 

You don’t win voters by telling them they are stupid and beneath contempt. That is tantamount to saying you have no intention of representing them. 

You don’t win voters by failing to offer a positive vision and selling only fear. 

You don’t win voters by trying to get them to believe you’ll suddenly behave differently and take positions contrary to the ones you’ve held for decades to extract cash from the the richest and most powerful. 

You don’t win voters with a record of failing upward. 

You don’t win voters by saying your opponent is a sleaze, even when undeniably true, when you are at least as sleazy yourself.

And readers in Lambert’s live blog last night read Clinton’s defeat the same way:

John:The Red Wave is rolling across this country because
the Democrats wont listen to their base. 

Waldenpond:Trump’s election is completely due to the incompetence and arrogance of the D elite. 

Scott: It’s really amazing to see how little of the blame is going to Clinton herself. It was her decision to set-up a private email server. It was her decision to serve as Secretary of State while accepting millions from foreign governments. It was her decision to get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars while unofficially running for President. It was her decision to call millions of Americans deplorable. 

Uahsenaa: The liberal histrionics and gnashing of teeth (especially on twitter) are actually just making me mad now. So, you sat out the fight from 2008 to the present and suddenly NOW the world is coming to an end. Where were you when Occupy was scuttled by your precious Democratic administration? Where were you when Secretary Clinton was negotiating away the last vestiges of labor rights in this country? Where have you been while state after state has passed right to work laws? Where were you when the current administration ramped up deportations? Where were you when the DoJ pumped weapons into Mexico just to see what would happen? Where were you when a sixteen year old American kid was blown to pink mist in Yemen? And the list goes on… 

I should make this into a card that I hand to every single person tomorrow who blubbers about the coming apocalypse. The world was already on fire. Now the veil has been lifted. I’d hope to see these fresh discontents on the picket lines, but something tells me that’s unlikely.

Smith thinks Trump is headed for the kind of one-term calamity Jimmy Carter experienced in the White House. She thinks the GOP will only be willing to work with Trump on the massive tax cuts he proposed. Smith is waiting to see if Trump will really go after Clinton; in particular, the Clinton Foundation:

There is one more Trump campaign promise that will serve as an important early test of his seriousness as well as his survival skills: investigating Clinton. Even if Obama pardons her, as our Jerri-Lynn Scofield has predicted, it will be critical for Trump to carry out a probe of the Clinton Foundation’s business while Clinton was Secretary of State. 

If Trump is to cut the cancer of the neocons out of the policy establishment, he has to have them on the run. It is a reasonable surmise that Clinton’s enthusiasm for war was due at least in part to heavy Saudi support of the Foundation. Showing that American’s escalation in the Middle East, which Obama tried with mixed success to temper, was due in part, and perhaps almost entirely, to the personal corruption of the Secretary of State, would keep the hawks at bay, particularly if other prominent insiders and pundits were implicated in Clinton Foundation influence-peddaling. 

It will be hard for Trump to do much to alter the course of the military-surveilance complex unless he can hamstring the warmongers. Just as Warren has argued relative to bank regulations, “personnel is policy.” If Trump is a fast learner, he’ll see that that is just as true on the foreign policy front.

This assumes that Trump aspires to be a transformational leader, which I don't think is or ever was his intention. He is a pitchman who wanted the White House, and, because the duopoly is crumbling, he won it. He's smart enough to keep people distracted. The question is for how long.

Old, Cracker America Renascent

Ohio has just been called for Trump. Florida and North Carolina look to be headed Trump's way, Hillary's only hope appears to be holding onto Michigan.

So much for my prediction of a Clinton romp. Trump's boast of another Brexit appears to be coming to pass.

What an enormous plate of crow for Democrats. What will they do? Curl into a fetal position and curse Putin?

The big takeaway of the evening is the turnout in lily-white rural America for Trump. White non-college crackers are going for Trump big time. Add Hillary's underperformance with college-educated whites -- her gender-gap advantage must have been oversold -- to softer turnout among Blacks, and you have Trump's trifecta.

Colorado was just called for Hillary. She has to win Nevada and Michigan.

Bad News for Clinton Early

Reports of low African-American turnout in Ohio's Cuyahoga County. Robust turnout in Virginia's rural counties. Michigan improbably in play. New Hampshire a toss up. North Carolina undecided. "Real jitters setting in at Clinton's headquarters."

Of course things could break in the next 90 minutes decisively for Hillary, and it could be over. On the other hand, the black swan could be spreading his wings. Trump triumphant. How does that sound?

If Clinton loses Virginia and Michigan, I think Trump wins.

Hillary on Her Way to a Big 300+ Electoral Vote Win

There is a fluid that we all share. We live in it together all at once. It is time. That's our placenta. The key is to recognize this with whatever umbilical cord -- newspapers, comic books, film, music, baseball, television -- you have.  I have discerned a big break for Hillary from Sunday on, following the FBI announcement that nothing actionable was discovered in the Weiner/Abedin email hoard.

Nate Silver's latest post, "Election Update: Clinton Gains, And The Polls Magically Converge," backs this up: "As a lot of you noticed, Nevada, North Carolina and Florida flipped from red to blue over the course of Monday."

Silver discounts this as non-significant, one-day movement in the polls. But my sense is that it is real. I think Hillary will clear 300 electoral votes, as FiveThirtyEight's latest map shows. So 2016 is going to end up being more like Obama-Romney 2012 than a Bush v. Gore constitutional crisis.

Which as an election-day reality is all for the best. A Trump shellacking at the polls will prove that white male supremacy as an electoral divide-and-conquer strategy is done.

The systemic problems don't disappear tomorrow though. We're still headed for some sort of collapse or seismic slip. The Western theater will just pack up and move east across the Atlantic.

Hamburger Hippies

When I plod along Sunday afternoons lying on my back on the mattress on the floor watching the National Football League I have noticed the new Chili's commercials (though I didn't see any yesterday).

The ad campaign is called "The Hamburger Hippies." It celebrates the founding of the restaurant chain by bohemians from the Age of Aquarius. The counterculture is invoked with classic rock'n'roll songs -- Foghat's "Slow Ride" (1975), Faces' "Ooh La La" (1973) and ZZ Top's "Tush" (1975). I thought I heard Free's "All Right Now" (1970) too, but I can't verify that.

The ad campaign is effective because it reminds the viewer of a time when our culture seemed roomy and affordable enough that we could drink, get stoned and laid; then wake up the next day, yawn, and not feel paranoid about the rent going up or being late for work or feeling the need to check email or Facebook. In other words, society provided enough time and space -- freedom! -- for the working class to do what it likes, which is fornicate and alter the everyday mundane pensiveness of sober-minded consciousness.

We know though from the irregular -- the last one was in July -- "Hippies vs. Punks" posts that 1975 is in fact the end of the line for the Hippies. In 1976 there is an efflorescence of California lite rock with Hippie hues -- Fleetwood Mac, Steve Miller Band, Eagles, Peter Frampton -- that signals an accommodation with the workaday world. No longer are the Hippies rocking out with cries of "Kick Out the Jams, Motherfucker!" Rather, it is a shift on the assembly line before stopping off for a meal at a Hippie-run eatery (probably what Chili's was at its founding; what Geppetto's was in my hometown) before returning home to smoke a joint and watch Baretta on ABC.

The Hippies made the transition back to The Man, exchanging their aspirations for another world, whether psychedelic or political, for a steady job, cheap rent, and free time filled with recreational drugs and looser sexual mores.

Sounds pretty good, but something mostly alien in our present digital age. We still long for such a society though. When Foghat's "Slow Ride" or Free's "All Right Now" fill the air we remember what it was like.

The GOP came to power in the late 1960s thanks to two Californians, Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon. They perfected the politics of white working-class resentment. The scapegoats were Blacks and Hippies, the Watts Rebellion in Los Angeles and the Freedom of Speech Movement at U.C. Berkeley.

Now with marijuana set for a legalization breakthrough and Black Lives Matter here to stay as a cultural force, the foundation of reactionary politics is cracked. Hippies and Blacks are saintly once again. Trump is the last gasp of White Flight, like the Iraqi Baath Party hiding out in Nineveh bankrolled by Saudi royals waiting to pop up reborn as the Islamic State.

Hillary will win, but the war will rage on.