Cambridge Analytica, who stands accused of stealing data from over 50 million Facebook users, is working overtime to stop media outlets from issuing reports revealing their tactics.

Courtesy of The Hill: 

Cambridge Analytica is trying to prevent an undercover report by London’s Channel 4 News that shows the firm’s CEO Alexander Nix speaking candidly about the firm’s practices from airing, according to the Financial Times. 

Reporters for Channel 4 posed as prospective clients and secretly filmed a number of meetings with the firm. 

The Financial Times's report did not make clear how the data firm was working to stop the report from airing. 

Cambridge Analytica also threatened to sue the Guardian to stop this story about the guy who blew the whistle on their Facebook data theft from being published: 

The Observer also received the first of three letters from Cambridge Analytica threatening to sue Guardian News and Media for defamation. We are still only just starting to understand the maelstrom of forces that came together to create the conditions for what Mueller confirmed last month was “information warfare”. But Wylie offers a unique, worm’s-eye view of the events of 2016. Of how Facebook was hijacked, repurposed to become a theatre of war: how it became a launchpad for what seems to be an extraordinary attack on the US’s democratic process. 

Wylie oversaw what may have been the first critical breach. Aged 24, while studying for a PhD in fashion trend forecasting, he came up with a plan to harvest the Facebook profiles of millions of people in the US, and to use their private and personal information to create sophisticated psychological and political profiles. And then target them with political ads designed to work on their particular psychological makeup. 

“We ‘broke’ Facebook,” he says. 

And he did it on behalf of his new boss, Steve Bannon.

Clearly that didn't work.

In another piece by the Guardian that I am sure Cambridge Analytica would like to make go away, we learn that the guy who orchestrated the data mining on Facebook has ties to Russia: 

Aleksandr Kogan, the Cambridge University academic who orchestrated the harvesting of Facebook data, had previously unreported ties to a Russian university, including a teaching position and grants for research into the social media network, the Observer has discovered. Cambridge Analytica, the data firm he worked with – which funded the project to turn tens of millions of Facebook profiles into a unique political weapon – also attracted interest from a key Russian firm with links to the Kremlin. 

Energy firm Lukoil, which is now on the US sanctions list and has been used as a vehicle of government influence, saw a presentation on the firm’s work in 2014. It began with a focus on voter suppression in Nigeria, and Cambridge Analytica also discussed “micro-targeting” individuals on social media during elections. 

The revelations come at a time of intense US scrutiny of Russian meddling in the 2016 US presidential election, with 13 Russians criminally charged last month with interfering to help Donald Trump.

Man no matter what the story, it always links back to Russia in some way or another. 

By the way Robert Mueller has requested all emails between the Trump campaign and Cambridge Analytica, so this party is far from over.

Interesting that not only is the Trump White House all super double secret about what they are up to, but so is just about everybody who helped them to get there in the first place.

Bill Moyers has updated his Russia/Trump timeline. You might want to take a look at it.

Courtesy of Bill Moyers.com:

When it comes to Donald Trump, his campaign and their dealings with Russia past and present, sometimes it’s hard to keep track of all the players without a scorecard. We have one of sorts — a deeply comprehensive timeline detailing what actually happened and what’s still happening in the ever-changing story of the president, his inner circle and a web of Russian oligarchs, hackers and government officials. 

Since first launched in February 2017, the Trump-Russia Timeline has grown to more than 600 entries — and we will continue to add updates regularly. What have reporters and investigators already uncovered and made public? 

What are the connections and patterns? Review the timeline to see.

The new information about George Papadopoulos is now included, as well as the revelations from Carter Page which came out during his testimony and his many bizarre cable news appearances.

Simply put once you scroll through it there is no longer any way to doubt that there was absolutely collusion between the Trump campaign and Kremlin operatives. 

On that note Seth Abramson is also convinced that recent information provided by Papadopoulos proves collusion as well:

You will likely have to actually visit the site if you want to read that on your phone or I-Pad.

So have we proven collusion yet?

Yeah, I think we have. 

Alcoholism is now so out of control in Alaska that some stores are forced to keep everyday products containing alcohol behind lock and key.

Common household products alcohol addicts are abusing... can you guess what they are? We'll tell you at 6 @ktva pic.twitter.com/tj2oQUQFT2

— Daniella Rivera (@RiveraDanie) September 14, 2017

The answer, by the way, is vanilla extract, hand sanitizer, mouthwash, and brake fluid. All containing enough alcohol to make them irresistible to addicts.

Courtesy of KTVA: 

While alcohol abuse in Alaska is nothing new, desperation among addicts is becoming more visible inside Anchorage grocery stores. When users can no longer legally buy liquor, they turn to common household products, forcing many businesses to move them behind the counter, in some cases storing them under lock and key.

Last month, while filming an unrelated story, a KTVA news crew watched a man near Bean’s Café down two small bottles of liquid, throw them on the ground, and ride away on a bike while the camera was rolling. The bottles on the ground, now empty, once held vanilla extract. 

Krystal Taddicken, who lives at the Brother Francis Shelter, told KTVA a the time, vanilla extract is an easy way for an addict to get drunk if they can’t buy alcohol. 

“It shows that it’s 35 percent minimum of alcohol, it’s one of the highest alcohol there is,” she told KTVA, picking the bottle up off the ground and pointing to the ingredients listed on the back. 

It’s not just vanilla extract, addicts are using anything that contains alcohol to get drunk, including mouth wash, hand sanitizer and according to the Anchorage Fire Department, brake fluid.

Alcoholism has been a problem in this state, I believe even before we became a state.

My family is essentially wall to wall alcoholics, with only a few nonconformists like my daughter and I standing out from the herd.

And it is much worse among the homeless community.

All of my life I have seen drunks passed out in the woods and along bike paths laying next to bottles of everything from store bought booze to cleaning products that they have huffed or ingested.

I once saw a homeless guy spraying what looked like a disinfectant of some kind into a clear bag and then drinking the contents.

It is hard to imagine how that could get any worse.

But if it has that is very troubling indeed.

And finally leave it to an Australian journalist to perfectly sum up Trump's trip to the G20 Summit. Update!

What did we learn about @realDonaldTrump at this #G20? @CUhlmann explains. #Insiders pic.twitter.com/TGOXdiFWhB

— Insiders ABC (@InsidersABC) July 8, 2017

I wish that OUR journalists would be as frank when discussing Donald Trump's bullshit.

Update: Here is the transcript.

What we already knew is that the President of the United States has a particular skill set, that he's identified an illness in Western democracies, but he has no cure for it and seems intent on exploiting it – and we've also learned that he has no desire and no capacity to lead the world. 

The G20 became the G19 as it ended. On the Paris climate accords, the US was left isolated and friendless. But given that was always going to happen, a deft president would have found an issue which he could rally most of the leaders. And he had the perfect one – North Korea's missile tests. So where was the G20 statement condemning North Korea which would have put pressure on China and Russia? Other leaders expected it. They were prepared to back it, but it never came. 

There's a tendency among some hopeful souls to confuse the speeches written for Trump with the thoughts of the man himself – he did make some interesting, scripted observations in Poland about defending the values of the West. And he's in a unique position. He's the one man who has something to do something about it. But it's the unscripted Trump that's real: a man who barks out vile in a 140 characters, who wastes his precious days as president at war with the West institutions like the judiciary, independent agencies and the free press. He was an uneasy, lonely, awkward figure at this gathering and you got the strong sense some of the leaders are trying to find the best way to work around him. 

Donald Trump's a man that craves power because it burnishes his celebrity. To be constantly talking and talked about is all that really matters and there is no value placed on the meaning of words, so what's said one day can be discarded the next. 

So what did we learn? We learn that Donald Trump has pressed fast forward on the decline of the United States as a global leader. He managed to isolate his nation, to confuse and alienate his allies and to diminish America – he will cede that power to China and Russia. Two authoritarian states that will forge a very different set of rules for the 21st century. Some will cheer the decline of America. But I think we'll miss it when it's gone. And that's the biggest threat to the values of the West which he claims to hold so dear.

As they say in Australia, good on ya Mate. 

Dan Rather takes his fellow reporters to the wood shed.

Courtesy of Rather's Facebook page:  

Donald Trump’s disdain, mockery, and antagonism of the press, whose freedoms are enshrined in the Bill of Rights and whose presence has provided ballast to our democracy since its inception, raises very serious questions about his fitness for the presidency of the United States. 

For a long while, these thoughts have been coursing through my veins with concern and disbelief, and yet my abiding loyalty to the notion of fair, accurate and unbiased journalism held me in check from saying it out loud – much as I suspect it has muzzled the true feelings of many of my colleagues. But we must remember that Donald Trump knows this and cynically plays the press corps’ deep desire for fairness to his undeserved benefit. The latest, barring the traveling press from covering an event and using them as ridicule in a speech, are but the most recent chapters in a novel full of outrageous acts. And this sentiment apparently extends to members of his own family as witnessed by his daughter Ivanka’s actions in an interview with Cosmo. 

I am well aware that I will be met with bile and venom for saying this, called a communist, a liberal in bed with Hillary Clinton, a washed-up joke. To quote Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind, “frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” Let others attack my motives. My conscience is clean. This is not about partisan politics, about who is right on immigration or gun control. This is about the very machinery that has allowed our American experiment to persist and thrive, a machinery which is far more fragile than we would like to believe. 

Trump’s relationship with the press is at the heart of so much that is troubling about his candidacy - the secrecy, the lack of transparency on something as normal as tax returns, the flaunting of the very rules by which we elect our leaders, the appeasement of hate groups. And his embrace of Roger Ailes and Breitbart, institutions who have polluted press freedoms, is a further dangerous sign of decay. And yet when presented with this challenge, too much of the press has been cowed into inaction. This is a man who can be fact-checked into obscurity by any second grader with an Internet connection. 

And yet when he issues a mealy-mouth non-apology about President Obama’s obvious pedigree as an American, here we are with too many in the press not acknowledging his years of lies (check your Twitter feeds about how the New York Times initially covered this event). All of this of course sets the stage for Trump to lie again about somehow birtherism being Clinton’s fault. 

I fear that this mindset will infect the debates. Trump is already setting the stage for that. If you are moderating and are not going to fact check him, you might as well just roll campaign speeches live - far too many of which have been shown on television without being subjected to journalistic context. If these debates will be debates in name only, another opportunity for Trump to flout fairness by spewing his venom and bullshine, I say cancel them. 

Enough is enough. It is a reality that every reporter must come to grips with. Trump is not a normal candidate. This is not a normal election. He will set a precedent that other demagogues will study and follow. Fear, combined with the lure of ratings, views, clicks and profits, have hypnotized too much of the press into inaction and false equivalency for far too long. I am optimistic the trance is being broken. Fear not the Internet trolls. Fear instead the judgement of history.

Very, very well put.

By the way if you are one of those who wants to dismiss Rather as a former journalist with a damaged reputation, you should take the time to watch the movie "Truth" and learn a little about the terrible injustice done to this man.

He is in fact a brave man and a national treasure and he should be treated as such.

Bristol Palin's exotic model friend wishes the press would spend more time reporting about drugs in schools and our "screwed government" rather than focus on her. I bet.

Courtesy of the Marina Lupas Facebook page.

Here is what she wrote back when somebody asked why the Anchorage Press was "hating" on her:


Marina Lupas I don't mind what so ever ... Lol extremely funny to me 

Marina Lupas And to answer your question because apparently there is nothing more interesting to write about 

Marina Lupas I have said earlier ... I wish who ever wrote this took the time to address more important issues such is drugs in schools ...education our screwed government ect. Things that actually matter

Actually the most recent edition of the Anchorage Press has several rather diverse articles.

As it turns out you CAN report on a variety of topics and still find time to cover the fact that the abstinence mascot daughter of the one time governor is knocked up out of wedlock again and hanging out with a self identified "exotic" Russian model.

Go figure.

Speaking of the abstinence mascot here is a picture of her, Piper, and her new paternity currently unresolved daughter leaving a restaurant courtesy of the Daily Mail.

Andrew Sullivan comes to the defense of a Mozilla CEO who resigned after his negative views on gay marriage came to light, and is applauded for his reasonableness. Well Greta Van Susteren and Sarah Palin cannot allow that to stand.

So some of you may have read how how the CEO of the internet browser Mozzila stepped down from his job after it came to light that he had given a $1,000 contribution on support of the 2008 gay marriage ban in California.

In response Andrew Sullivan wrote a rather thoughtful piece on what he saw as the equivalence of pro-gay lynch mob: 

He did not understand that in order to be a CEO of a company, you have to renounce your heresy! There is only one permissible opinion at Mozilla, and all dissidents must be purged! Yep, that’s left-liberal tolerance in a nut-shell. No, he wasn’t a victim of government censorship or intimidation. He was a victim of the free market in which people can choose to express their opinions by boycotts, free speech and the like. He still has his full First Amendment rights. But what we’re talking about is the obvious and ugly intolerance of parts of the gay movement, who have reacted to years of being subjected to social obloquy by returning the favor. 

This is a repugnantly illiberal sentiment. It is also unbelievably stupid for the gay rights movement. You want to squander the real gains we have made by argument and engagement by becoming just as intolerant of others’ views as the Christianists? You’ve just found a great way to do this. It’s a bad, self-inflicted blow. And all of us will come to regret it.

I have to admit that though I frequently use the Mozilla browser, Firefox, I did not feel compelled to weigh in on this debate one way or the other.

However Greta Van Susteren felt the need to provide her two cents, not so much about what happened to Mozilla CEO and co-founder Brendan Eich, but rather how irritating it was the Sullivan was now being celebrated for his defense of free speech.

Here is her headline:

Andrew Sullivan, is now the Free Speech guy? Free speech should include at least an effort at NO SLANDER yet he felt it was ok, when it advanced his career, to slander a mother by saying obsessively that she should PROVE she is the mother of her special needs child! Yes, a bully! What a world we live in, huh?

Oh yeah, she went there.

And because she went there could the Wasilla Wendigo be far behind?

Aww poor Sarah, bullied by the big bad openly gay blogger, who is now receiving accolades for defending those he feels are being denied their right to free speech.

Oh the humanity.

But exactly what about Sullivan's questioning of the circumstances of Trig's birth would be considered bullying? Here is what he said on June 13, 2011:

It seems to me we have two options. It’s possible that Palin simply made up her drama of labor, or exaggerated it for effect, when in fact it was a routine, if rare, pregnancy, and she had mild warnings that the birth may be premature, and she gussied that up into a tall tale of her pioneer spirit, guided by her doctor, who refused to take the NYT’s calls as soon as Palin hit the big time. I think that’s the likeliest explanation, given the sheer world-historical weirdness of the alternative. 

But it’s also possible that she never had that baby at all. I mean, if you read the emails and independent reports above and were asked if this woman were in labor with a special needs child, and that her water had already broken, would you believe it? Just put all the facts in front of you and ask yourself that question. 

So she is either a self-serving drama queen who didn’t realize her story would imply she put her child – and many others on the planes – at great risk and then winged it to make her story more plausible; or she is a fantastic hoaxer and liar at a world class meshugana level that, at some point, will make Weinergate look like a damp squib. 

To my mind, either option makes her unfit for high office, which is all you need to know really. And the fact that she has never been asked about this by any MSM journalist tells you so so much about what motivates the DC press corps. It’s certainly not curiosity.

That is not bullying, that is simply good reporting.  Something that his fellow journalists completely failed to do.

And, as we all know, he was not at all wrong to pursue this story.

Because only one month later we provided the smoking gun that would demonstrate that Sarah Palin lied about her pregnancy in any court in the land.

So yes, Andrew Sullivan is a defender of free speech. And no, he is NOT a bully.

But I know somebody who is.

It is day two and all of the Republican warnings about Obamacare are coming true. No, NOT the ones they told us, the ones they whispered secretly to each other. "It's going to work!"

"Goddammit I knew it would go this way!"

So here we are on day two and the conservatives are trying like crazy to get everybody in the country to focus on computer glitches, long wait times on the telephone, and every little bump or hiccup they can possibly identify.

Sadly for them, much of the rest of the country is ignoring them.

Just take a look at these headlines:

CONNECTICUT: Health Care Plans Begin: 28,000-Plus Go Online To State Marketplace 
GEORGIA: Enrollment Sites Are Swamped On First Day 
IDAHO: Idaho Health Exchange Launches With Few Hiccups 
KENTUCKY: Kynect Opens To High Demand 
MAINE: Insurance Marketplace Opens To Flood Of Interest 
MICHIGAN: Insurance Exchange Debut Draws Millions 
CALIFORNIA: Millions Try To Enroll 
PENNSYLVANIA: A First-Day Rush On Health Care 

"Wait, they like it?"

You get the idea. 

Were there glitches during attempts to sign up or learn more? You betcha!

Were these indications of a long term problem with the program? What are you, an idiot?

Here is how the Washington Post summed it up: 

The top story all day was that Republicans had shut down the federal government because President Obama wouldn't defund or delay the Affordable Care Act. The other major story was that the government's servers were crashing because so many people were trying to see if they could get insurance through Obamacare. 

So on the one hand, Washington was shut down because Republicans don't want Obamacare. On the other hand, Obamacare was nearly shut down because so many Americans wanted Obamacare.

Pretty much says it all, wouldn't you agree?

 So successful was the program that one of Fox News's very own broke ranks: 

Personally, as someone who pays through the nose for individual insurance in New York State — a state where, historically, few individual insurance options have even been available — I can’t wait to enroll in ObamaCare and see my premiums plummet, as they are expected to by at least 50%. 

Again, all this is why Republicans are in such a desperate rush to try and defund ObamaCare before October 1 — even if it means holding our economy hostage and even if most voters, including Republicans, oppose the repeated and wasteful defunding attempts. 

After all, the law is already popular when it’s not fully in effect and most people haven’t felt its benefits. We all know what will happen when ObamaCare takes effect — and works! 

So we are coming to the end of the second day of the Obamacare roll out, and the second day of the the Republican's attempt to hold the government hostage in the hopes of stopping it.

One of these things is a colossal train wreck, and will cost the country millions unnecessarily. And it is NOT the one the Republicans want you to think it is.