Cyber security experts warned the FBI in 2015 that Russians were targeting thousands of powerful leaders, believes they may have been quite successful in compromising many of them.

Courtesy of Politico: 

The active measures are not targeting the military and political system in isolation, but as part of a broader effort to subvert Western institutions including the news media, financial markets and intelligence agencies. Because of its multidimensional nature and use of unconventional tactics the U.S. government has struggled to effectively combat the effort. “This is obviously a really difficult challenge and a lot of people are worried that our response to date hasn’t been effective,” said one expert on active measures who recently testified on the issue before Congress. 

And rather than abating after the presidential election, these campaigns have only continued to get more brazen, according to Strategic Cyber Ventures CEO Tom Kellermann, who has watched them closely. 

In May and June of 2015, Kellermann, who was then the chief cybersecurity officer at Trend Micro, said the firm warned the FBI and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that Kremlin hackers had drawn up a list of 2,300 people comprising the most powerful leaders in Washington and New York along with their spouses and lovers to target with a concerted hacking campaign. Kellerman said he does not know whether the government acted on the tip, which warned that the hackers had the ability to turn on microphones and cameras on the personal devices of their targets to obtain sensitive information about their personal lives. But he believes the campaign has successfully compromised American leaders, emboldening the Kremlin. “When you wonder why certain people act certain ways,” he said, “You have to remember these people have been warned that their dirty laundry could be aired.” (Spokespeople for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the FBI declined to comment.)

Perhaps this explains why certain Republicans and media types are so hesitant to admit publicly that the election was hacked by the Russians, and why they keep coming to Trump's defense in spite of all the damaging information that has come to light recently.

That sentence at the beginning of this post is referring to a strategy directed at military members and their families on social media to feed them disinformation and even compromised pro-military websites and turned them into propaganda outlets for the Kremlin:

Putin has made the creation of a pro-Russian “alternative media ecosystem” to, in his words, smash “the Anglo-Saxon monopoly on the information stream” a top priority of his foreign policy. A significant prong of those operations is aimed at the American military community, and the Russian activity has ramped up in recent years as tensions have increased over sanctions, the annexation of Crimea and the expansion of NATO. 

Veterans Today is a homegrown American site that was founded in 2003 in opposition to the invasion of Iraq and soon began publishing wild conspiracy theories. Before it partnered with Russia’s New Eastern Outlook in 2013, it had forged ties with Iran’s state-backed PressTV and counted among its editorial board of directors a former head of Pakistan’s intelligence services, publishing headlines like, “Israeli death squads involved in Sandy Hook bloodbath” and “Water Terrorism by India to Overawe Pakistan.” 

New Eastern Outlook “chose to work with VT after following us for a while and seeing us for the unique platform that we are,” Veterans Today managing editor Jim Dean explained in an article about the arrangement. He described it as a “marriage made in heaven.”

That "marriage made in heaven" allowed the Russian media to overwhelm the Veteran focused website and essentially turn it into a red, white, and blue version of Pravda.

In October 2013, at the same time that Veterans Today began publishing content from New Eastern Outlook, its sister site Veterans News Now began publishing content from the Strategic Culture Foundation, a Moscow think tank run by Yuri Profokiev, a former head of Moscow’s Communist Party and member of the Soviet Politburo. 

In October 2015, Veterans Today also partnered with a slickly designed, anonymously authored military affairs website called South Front that had been registered in Moscow that April just as Russia was ramping up its influence operations in response to Western sanctions. 

Since then, the site has consistently published articles that push the Kremlin party line, both from its Russian partner and its own contributors.

Also keep in mind that the Russians did not only target the military, conservatives, and powerful Americans, but also targeted those on the Left, especially the so-called Bernie Bros and those on the far left fringe who were already suspicious and critical of Hillary Clinton.

This was a concerted effort that reached deep into America's social media and shaped opinions all over the political spectrum, while also compromising those who may have had the resources to expose them.

To be clear this means that so many of the things that we all saw on our Facebook feed attacking Hillary Clinton, talking about third party candidates, or the failures of Democratic policies to meet the needs of progressives, may very well have come to us directly from Russian disinformation sites determined to undermine our faith in the Democratic candidate and the political system as a whole.

The progressive case for Hillary Clinton.

Courtesy of In These Times:  

When you hear that Hillary Clinton is unlikable, be aware of the study that shows competent women are generally seen as unlikable; when you hear that Hillary Clinton is dishonest, know that this same study shows women in power are generally seen as dishonest. And know that when the same imaginary job candidate is presented to two groups, with the only difference being a male or female name at the top of the résumé, the female candidate is seen as less trustworthy than the man. In each study, these biased reactions were found in both women and men. 

And realize that when women seek power—for example, by running for the nation’s highest office—a Yale study reports that “participants experienced feelings of moral outrage (i.e. contempt, anger, and/or disgust) towards them” and that “women were just as likely as men to have negative reactions.” In the very same Yale study, when “participants saw male politicians as power-seeking, they also saw them as having greater agency (e.g. being more assertive, stronger and tougher) and greater competence.” 

That is not to say that there cannot be specific, convincing arguments against Hillary Clinton, or that there are not arguments against her. It is to say that people who criticize Hillary Clinton, especially from the Left, should be aware of how these stereotypes may distort our perceptions, and how we can frame criticisms without feeding into the very real misogyny that has dogged Clinton throughout her career—an antipathy once expressed in a “Hillary Clinton dismemberment doll,” complete with detachable limbs. 

Once one cuts through that misogyny, one is forced to confront the reason the GOP has fostered hatred against her: For much of the early portions of Clinton’s career, beginning when she arrived on the national stage in 1992, Hillary Clinton was presumed by the Right (and many Democrats) to be too far left to be in politics. She was Bill Clinton’s left-wing liability, a Saul Alinsky-hugging, Children’s-Defense-Fund-working, non-cookie-baking, mouthy feminist, attacked on the stage of the Republican National Convention for supporting “radical feminism” and “homosexual rights.” 

It was in part because of this hatred that Hillary Clinton became the person we know today: a candidate defined by her caution and her frustrating self-contradictions, seemingly torn between challenging the power structure and gaining enough credibility within that power structure to survive. Clinton believes that you need to be in the system in order to change the system, and I think that is true. Clinton’s path has given her tremendous impact, and in many ways, her politics—left sympathies combined with a survivor’s instinct for using the system, and a lawyer’s love of the fine detail—are reminiscent of Obama’s. While leftists have critiques of Obama, too, I think he’s been the best president in my lifetime, which started with Reagan. I also remember that second Bush a little too well to ever believe that the two parties are “basically the same” (though I have been told this many times). 

When I hear claims about Hillary Clinton, the money-grubbing shill for Wall Street who thinks just like a Republican, I don’t recognize the woman who once snapped at her husband for not fighting hard enough for universal healthcare, telling him, “You didn't get elected to do Wall Street economics.” Similarly, I see no shifty dishonesty in the Hillary Clinton who, in 2005, pushed for a 9/11-style commission to investigate the Bush administration’s failure to respond to Hurricane Katrina, and who today is the woman making the administrative negligence in Flint, Mich., central to her campaign. 

Similarly, the Hillary Clinton who traveled to Beijing in 1995 against the wishes of her husband’s administration to declare that “women’s rights are human rights” is entirely recognizable as the Secretary of State who helped to create the Office of Global Women’s Issues and declared that “the United States must be an unequivocal and unwavering voice in support of women’s rights in every country on every continent.” In short, this is the same Hillary Clinton who is today stressing equal pay for women as a racial justice issue, given that the women who are most penalized by the pay gap are black women and Latinas. 

And the Hillary Clinton who is “Republican lite,” “more like Reagan than FDR” and “to the right of Nixon” does not seem remotely the same Clinton whose votes aligned with Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 93 percent of the time during the two years they overlapped in the Senate. They famously parted ways on the 2002 decision to authorize the war in Iraq—a vote that Clinton acknowledges was a mistake. That doesn’t undo the war, or make her right in retrospect, and it doesn’t even defuse the idea that she voted for the war specifically to protect her reputation; many Democratic politicians with presidential aspirations, from John Kerry to Joe Biden, made that same vote. I respect that for a serious and thoughtful person, the Iraq vote might rule Clinton out; it ruled her out for me in 2008. But this is not 2008, and this year, her opponent’s lack of interest or expertise in foreign policy worries me more than her record. We got into Iraq—a quagmire that has lasted, literally, for my entire adult life—not only because of U.S. interventionism, but because the commander in chief didn’t understand the region well enough to know how profoundly we would destabilize it, or how that would trap us in a conflict that would last for generations. I may not always agree with Clinton, but at least I believe she knows her stuff.

I was not aware of this April 6th article until just the other day, and once I read it I realized that it needed to be shared.

There is more at the link and I think it you would be well served to read it all.

The points that Ms. Doyle makes are solid and she has data to back them up. 

Things are only gong to get uglier from here, so it benefits us to have the correct information at our disposal.

New study by nonpartisan group finds that Bernie Sanders' economic plan would double the national debt, increase federal spending by 33 trillion dollars in 10 years.

Courtesy of the AP:

Sen. Bernie Sanders' tax and spending proposals would provide new levels of health and education benefits for American families, but they'd also blow an $18-trillion hole in federal deficits, piling on so much debt they would damage the economy. 

That sobering assessment comes from a joint analysis released Monday by the nonpartisan Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center and the Urban Institute Health Policy Center, well-known Washington think tanks. 

Democratic presidential candidate Sanders would raise taxes by more than $15 trillion over 10 years, with most of that paid by upper-income earners. 

But that wouldn't be enough to cover the cost of his proposed government-run health care system, along with free undergraduate college, enhanced Social Security, family and medical leave, among other new programs. The cost of the health care plan alone is more than $30 trillion, according to the study. 

The bottom line: Sanders would add $18 trillion to federal debt over a decade. That's about double the current total government debt of $19 trillion.

Other news agencies have reported on the study as well.

Courtesy of Politico: 

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has proposed a whopping $33 trillion federal spending increase over 10 years, according to a new report likely to fuel complaints his campaign promises are unrealistic. 

His proposed tax increases would not come anywhere close to covering those costs, the centrist Tax Policy Center said Monday, and his plan would drive federal debt to “unprecedented” levels. 

Courtesy of the Washington Post: 

The studies, published jointly by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center and the Urban Institute in Washington, concludes that Sanders's plans are short a total of more than $18 trillion over a decade. His programs would cost the federal government about $33 trillion over that period, almost all of which would go toward Sanders's proposed system of national health insurance. Yet the Democratic presidential candidate has put forward just $15 trillion in new taxes, the authors concluded. 

In principle, national health insurance could make many families better off overall, without imposing unsustainable burdens on the federal budget. For the system to work in terms of dollars and cents, though, the benefits would have to be less generous than they are in the system Sanders has proposed, or the taxes would have to be more onerous for the middle class, as they are in many European countries.

And the Chicago Tribune simply accuses Sanders of selling a "fantasy agenda."

This is certainly not the first report we have seen that Sanders' plans are simply not workable, but it seems to be the most comprehensive.

Of course ultimately it really doesn't matter what the cost might be because even IF Sanders was to win the nomination, and then the general election, there is absolutely no way any of this would ever make it past Congress.

And in fact it would be this very move towards a more socialist system that would help Republicans hold onto power and most likely increase their hold over the House and the Senate.