Last Call For 2016 All Over Again

With several Democratic Party candidates entering the race in the last month, the Russian social media disinformation machine is starting up once again to demoralize black and Latino voters and help Comrade Donald win reelection.

A wide-ranging disinformation campaign aimed at Democratic 2020 candidates is already under way on social media, with signs that foreign state actors are driving at least some of the activity.
The main targets appear to be Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), former Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-Texas) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), four of the most prominent announced or prospective candidates for president.

A POLITICO review of recent data extracted from Twitter and from other platforms, as well as interviews with data scientists and digital campaign strategists, suggests that the goal of the coordinated barrage appears to be undermining the nascent candidacies through the dissemination of memes, hashtags, misinformation, and distortions of their positions. But the divisive nature of many of the posts also hint at a broader effort to sow discord and chaos within the Democratic presidential primary.

The cyber propaganda — which frequently picks at the rawest, most sensitive issues in public discourse — is being pushed across a variety of platforms and with a more insidious approach than in the 2016 presidential election, when online attacks designed to polarize and mislead voters first surfaced on a massive scale.

Recent posts that have received widespread dissemination include racially inflammatory memes and messaging involving Harris, O’Rourke and Warren. In Warren’s case, a false narrative surfaced alleging that a blackface doll appeared on a kitchen cabinet in the background of the senator’s New Year’s Eve Instagram livestream.

Not all of the activity is organized. Much of it appears to be organic, a reflection of the politically polarizing nature of some of the candidates. But there are clear signs of a coordinated effort of undetermined size that shares similar characteristics with the computational propaganda attacks launched by online trolls at Russia’s Internet Research Agency in the 2016 presidential election, which special counsel Robert Mueller accused of aiming to undermine the political process and elevate Donald Trump.

“It looks like the 2020 presidential primary is going to be the next battleground to divide and confuse Americans,” said Brett Horvath, one of the founders of Guardians.ai, a tech company that works with a consortium of data scientists, academics and technologists to disrupt cyberattacks and protect pro-democracy groups from information warfare. “As it relates to information warfare in the 2020 cycle, we’re not on the verge of it — we’re already in the third inning.”

An analysis conducted for POLITICO by Guardians.ai found evidence that a relatively small cluster of accounts — and a broader group of accounts that amplify them — drove a disproportionate amount of the Twitter conversation about the four candidates over a recent 30-day period.

Using proprietary tools that measured the discussion surrounding the candidates in the Democratic field, Guardians.ai identified a cohort of roughly 200 accounts — which includes both unwitting real accounts and other ‘suspicious’ and automated accounts that coordinate to spread their messages — pumped out negative or extreme themes designed to damage the candidates.

This is the same core group of accounts the company first identified last year in a study as anchoring a wide scale influence campaign in the 2018 elections.

Since the turn of the year, those accounts began specifically directing their output at Harris, O’Rourke, Sanders and Warren, and were amplified by an even wider grouping of accounts. Over a recent 30-day period, between 2 and 15 percent of all Twitter mentions of the four candidates emanated in some way from within that cluster of accounts, according to the Guardians.ai findings. In that timeframe, all four candidates collectively had 6.8 million mentions on Twitter.

“We can conclusively state that a large group of suspicious accounts that were active in one of the largest influence operations of the 2018 cycle is now engaged in sustained and ongoing activity for the 2020 cycle,” Horvath said.

Twitter and Facebook have done precisely zero.  Trump has done precisely zero.  Once again Americans are being flooded with disinformation that only helps Donald Trump.  Another 21 months of this is guaranteed, and the goal is clear: a second term for Russia's favorite puppet.

We saw this before.  It's happening again now in real time.

All In All It's Just Another Trick With The Wall

Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent argues that Trump's national emergency scam plays great with his racist white evangelical base, but not so much with everyone else.

The new NPR poll finds that Americans disapprove of the national emergency declaration by 61 percent to 36 percent; that Americans do not think there is a national emergency at the border by 58 to 39; that Americans say he’s misusing his presidential powers by 57 to 39; and that 54 percent say this makes them less likely to vote for him in 2020.

But his voters support him on this, so who cares, you’ll respond. Well, here’s where the poll gets particularly interesting. It’s true that the poll finds that Trump supporters and Republicans overwhelmingly side with him on these questions.

But those people aren’t enough to win reelection for Trump. The question is whether he can duplicate his 2016 electoral college hat trick by dramatically energizing noncollege whites again, and by winning independents and others who decide they don’t like either candidate (as Trump did in 2016).

And among those groups, the poll finds surprising levels of opposition. Large majorities of independents tilt against Trump on these questions. And non-college-educated whites disapprove of the national emergency declaration by 53 to 43; they lean slightly against the idea that there’s even any emergency (49-47); and even marginally say that it makes them less likely to vote for Trump (46-41).

But guess which group is overwhelmingly behind Trump on all of this? White evangelical Christians. They approve of the declaration by 67 to 26; think there is a national emergency on the border by 70 to 22; say he’s properly using his powers by 69-23; and say this makes them more likely to vote for him by 60 to 22.

All of this suggests that Trump’s national emergency mainly appeals to the hardest of hardcore Trump supporters.

That of course is the point: get the base behind his white nationalism and the rest of the party will follow.  It's been working for years now.  Yes, there are plenty of Trump 2016 voters who think this national emergency on the wall is so much bull.

But they'll vote for him anyway.

Unlike Democratic voters, Republicans understand that a vote against Trump benefits the Democrats, regardless of the reason why, whereas Democratic voters who didn't like Clinton because they wanted Bernie still keep blathering on about their personal morals while Donald Trump burns the planet down.

Here's the killer though.

When it was all said and done, many Bernie Sanders supporters voted for Hillary.

But, nearly 12% of Bernie sanders supporters voted for Donald Trump. A great deal of them were actually in swing states that could have potentially cost Trump the election. pic.twitter.com/C3IdzoL6ir

— Frederick Joseph (@FredTJoseph) February 19, 2019

And for that, I will never forgive.

Justice Finally Served

It took 11 years, but a federal judge has finally nailed Trump Labor Secretary Alex Acosta for his role in crafting an illegal plea deal as a US attorney more than a decade ago for Miami hedge fund tycoon Jeffrey Epstein.

A judge ruled Thursday that federal prosecutors — among them, U.S. Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta — broke federal law when they signed a plea agreement with a wealthy, politically connected sex trafficker and concealed it from more than 30 of his underage victims.

U.S. District Judge Kenneth A. Marra, in a 33-page opinion, said that the evidence he reviewed showed that Jeffrey Epstein had been operating an international sex operation in which he and others recruited underage girls — not only in Florida — but from overseas, in violation of federal law.

“Epstein used paid employees to find and bring minor girls to him.,’’ wrote Marra, who is based in Palm Beach County. “Epstein worked in concert with others to obtain minors not only for his own sexual gratification, but also for the sexual gratification of others.’’

Instead of prosecuting Epstein under federal sex trafficking laws, Acosta, then the U.S. attorney in Miami, helped negotiate a non-prosecution agreement that gave Epstein and his co-conspirators immunity from federal prosecution. Epstein, who lived in a Palm Beach mansion, was allowed to quietly plead guilty in state court to two prostitution charges and served just 13 months in the county jail. His accomplices, some of whom have never been identified, were never charged.

Acosta agreed to seal the deal, which meant that none of Epstein’s victims, who were mostly 13 to 16 years old at the time of the abuse, were told about it until it was too late for them to appear at his sentencing and possibly reject the deal. Upon learning that Epstein had pleaded guilty without their knowledge, two of his victims filed a lawsuit in the Southern District of Florida in 2008, claiming that prosecutors violated the Crime Victims’ Rights Act, which grants victims of federal crimes a series of rights, including the ability to confer with prosecutors about a possible plea deal.

Marra agreed, saying that while prosecutors had the right to resolve the case in any way they saw fit, they violated the law by hiding the agreement from Epstein’s victims. Marra’s decision capped 11 years of litigation — which included the release of a trove of emails showing how Acosta and other prosecutors worked with Epstein’s high profile lawyers to conceal the deal — and the scope of Epstein’s crimes — from both his victims and the public.

“Particularly problematic was the Government’s decision to conceal the existence of the [agreement] and mislead the victims to believe that federal prosecution was still a possibility,’’ Marra wrote. “When the Government gives information to victims, it cannot be misleading. While the Government spent untold hours negotiating the terms and implications of the [agreement] with Epstein’s attorneys, scant information was shared with victims.’’

The U.S. attorney’s office in Miami declined to comment.

Acosta's goose should be cooked, but you never know with the Trump regime.

We'll see how things are going to go here, but at the very least Epstein should be spending the rest of his natural life in jail for starters.  As for the rest of his legal team, Acosta and Alan Dershowitz, I would be very nervous right now if I were them.

Again, the real issue here is that the Epstein plea deal was legal, Acosta deliberately hiding it from his victims was not.  The judge ruled that it was a clear violation of the Crime Victims Rights Act, a 2004 law that spells out the rights victims have in federal cases like this.

Considering Acosta oversees both child labor laws and human trafficking laws as Labor Secretary, his forced resignation should have come months ago when the Miami Herald made this slimy deal public.

But that's the brutally corrupt Trump regime for you.

StupidiNews!

• Japan's Hayabusa 2 space probe has fired a projectile into an asteroid dubbed Ryugu in order to dig out core materials to bring back to study.
• The Trump regime says it will leave 200 US peacekeeper troops in Syria after finishing the military pullout from the war-torn country.
• Israel has launched their first ever lunar lander aboard a US SpaceX Falcon rocket, the unmanned lander is expected to touch down on the lunar surface in about two months.
• Consumer food giant Kraft Heinz has written off a $15 billion charge as the company faces stiff competition from Mondelez, Amazon, and America's healthier eating habits.
• Advertisers like Disney and Fortnite creator Epic Games are pulling all ads from YouTube after the ads popped up on videos popular with pedophiles.