It's Election Eve. NO BEDWETTING, PLEASE!
This ain't 2016.
We hate to interrupt your panic attack, but Your Wonkette would like to remind you that the Trump campaign would have its hands full arranging a three-car funeral, much less a nationwide campaign to ratfuck this election.
Okay, that's a lie. We very much hope to interrupt your panic attack, because that shit is entirely unproductive. The part about them being a pack of losers who couldn't find their collective junk with two hands and a map is completely true, though. All this posturing about the unstoppable Death Star juggernaut Trump campaign was bullshit from the jump, so don't get yourself worked up about some kind of eleven-dimensional chess. They're still the same old chucklefucks who needed Vladimir Putin's help to get elected in 2016, only now the country hates them even more.
Check out Old Three Shirts saying that they're going to "get into the counting rooms" and deny Joe Biden a victory that way.
Here's the transcript courtesy of Media Matters:
STEVE BANNON: The one thing we've taken off the table I'm pretty sure is the knockout blow of a Biden win on Tuesday night — not going to happen. [If you say so, Steve. -- Ed.] So, you take that off the table then you're in uncharted territories.
President Trump is going to declare victory on Tuesday night. I'm glad the mainstream media is finally catching up with that. You know why? Because he's going to be in the lead and then we're going to get into the counting rooms, right, we're going to get in the counting rooms.
People are now starting to ascertain we have a strategic advantage not just in the counting rooms, we have a strategic advantage in the state legislatures and we have a strategic advantage in the House of Representatives.
Ah, yes, the House of Representatives, which is controlled by noted Trump superfan Nancy Pelosi. And it's a good thing Trump and his minions blanketed the media with B-roll of them shouting WE INTEND TO STOP THE COUNT AND THROW OUT ALL THE MAIL-IN BALLOTS. Uncharted territories, indeed!
Here on Planet Earth, that's just noise, totally unconnected from reality. Remember a little over a month ago when Li'l Meat Sweats promised an "Army for Trump" to stop Democrats from stealing the election with fraudulent votes?
Well, ProPublica's Jessica Huseman went looking for the promised fighting force, and SURPRISE, it's just as weak and flaccid as the rest of Trump's output.
Although there's no official data, election officials across the country say that they have seen relatively few Republican poll watchers during early voting, and that at times Democratic poll watchers have outnumbered the GOP's. In Colorado and Nevada, where the Trump campaign was particularly active in recruiting poll watchers, its efforts largely petered out.
Ah, well. When they're not skiing down a mountain of white powder, they probably realize Colorado and Nevada are not happening. How about in Georgia?
"I am receiving reports of a few thousand poll watchers from a variety of left-leaning groups. There are very few poll watchers from right-leaning groups," [deputy secretary of state Jordan Fuchs] said. "The Trump campaign is simply calling for additional poll watchers because they know there is a dearth of right-leaning poll watchers."
Kentucky?
In Fayette County, home of Lexington, Republicans have submitted only seven names of challengers while Democrats have submitted 117. Don Blevins Jr., the clerk in the county, says he doesn't know how many will actually show up on Tuesday.
"Only in recent years have campaigns thought about doing this, and then rarely followed through," he said.
Texas?
In Williamson County, Texas, a swing county just north of Austin, election administrator Christopher Davis said that the few poll watchers there were mostly sent by a local conservative activist who promotes unfounded claims of voter fraud. When the county opened up its central count office this past weekend to process mailed ballots, only one poll watcher showed. The watcher, Davis said, was from the Trump campaign and behaved according to the rules.
"Maybe we're just lucky in WilCo," Davis said.
Or ... maybe not.
Several Trump supporters in Arizona said they volunteered to be poll watchers, but there was no follow-up. "I actually signed up twice because I never heard from them. I never was contacted, and I signed up almost two months ago," said Lynne Berreman, who lives in Phoenix. "Hopefully it's because they already have enough people."
Hopefully! Keep your fingers crossed, Mrs. B.
The point is, let's not go psyching ourselves out that these guys have some kind of amazing plan ready to jujitsu this election. Because they don't. There is no Great and Terrible Oz. Pay attention to the little man behind the curtain!
Anything could happen, of course. But this isn't 2016, and Biden is in a much better position than Hillary Clinton was four years ago.
There's a mountain of data at FiveThirtyEight to back up the site's 90 percent odds of a Biden win. And if poring over the polls makes you feel better, here have at it.
COLORADO Biden 54% (+13) Trump 41% WISCONSIN Biden 54% (+13) Trump 41% PENNSYLVANIA Biden 52% (+9) Trump 43% MIN… https://t.co/2cMktzksTf— Political Polls (@Political Polls)1604326286.0
But we don't recommend it. Take a walk, have a drink, call someone you haven't spoken to in a while to catch up. And we'll see you on the other side.
OPEN THREAD.
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GOP's BUT HIS EMAILS Bombshell Fails To Detonate
Not with a bang, but with a whimper.
This is a story about Rudy Giuliani busting in like the Kool-Aid Man and blowing up Donald Trump's last, best chance to ratfuck this election with Hunter Biden's buttery, buttery emails. But at least he kept his chram in his pants this time.
New York Times media columnist Ben Smith reports that Rudy Giuliani wasn't the first one who tried to get a Rupert Murdoch publication to run with Hunter Biden's emails. In early October, MAGA troll Arthur Schwartz invited White House lawyer Eric Hirschman and former deputy White House counsel Stefan Passantino to his McLean, Virginia, home to pitch the Wall Street Journal on a story. The team had "a cache of emails detailing Hunter Biden's business activities" and Tony Bobulinski on speakerphone swearing Joe Biden was a silent partner in all his son's business deals.
Note that these emails were not attached to any laptop "abandoned" at a random Delaware computer repair shop. Note also that the younger Biden's emails and photos had been circulating in Ukraine in the fall of 2019, with a price tag of $5 million, according to Time. Giuliani himself passed up on the same stuff in May, deeming it too sketchy, according to Salon. (And when something is too sketchy for Rudy Giuliani ...)
Nonetheless, the GOP brain trust congratulated itself on its foolproof plan to steal another election with an apparently hacked set of emails. Hooray!
Or, perhaps not.
Because while Trump was hyping an "important piece" from the Journal on his opponent's supposed business conflicts, the IRL reporters were actually trying to verify the claims. And they didn't appreciate "Trump's insinuation that we were being teed up to do this hit job," as a source told Ben Smith.
On the eve of the October 22 debate, with no legit media outlet willing to publish their claims, Giuliani and Bobulinski panicked and ran back into the arms of the New York Post and Breitbart. Bobulinski's unverified statement ran in both outlets — hardly an incentive for the Journal to rush to press with what was no longer an exclusive.
"He got spooked about whether they were going to do it or not," Steve Bannon said of Bobulinski. How this desperate move to get his allegations out there before the debate aligns with Bobulinski's insistence that he's "not a political person" is ... unclear.
Bannon, who is evil but not a fool, understood exactly what they'd just pissed away by giving the story to an outlet that had already been throttled for publishing an unverified hitpiece. As Smith points out, back in 2015, Bannon had carefully ensured that the bullshit claims in Peter Schweizer's Clinton Ca$h book would get covered, by slipping early copies to the New York Times and the Washington Post. So he knew what they'd given up by forfeiting the imprimatur of legitimacy conferred by getting their story into a major media outlet.
In Smith's interpretation, the gatekeepers of legacy media are reasserting themselves, no longer allowing the rightwing echo chamber to set the agenda. Which ... okay, he's the media columnist, that's his job. But he excoriates social media platforms for throttling the New York Post story — which, for the record, contained Hunter Biden's phone number, home address, and unpixelated images of his minor children — while failing to acknowledge the very real possibility that America's intelligence agencies told them the story was Russian interference operation. Not for nothing, but Rudy was picked up trying to get his hands on those emails last year in Ukraine, our intel agencies have been working hand-in-glove with social media platforms this cycle, the FBI has had a copy of "Hunter Biden's" hard drive for eleven months now, and shit ton of retired spies say it has all the hallmarks of a Russian interference op.
But if refusing to print uncorroborated allegations based on unverified emails sourced by notorious dirty tricks political operatives whose stated aim is to throw an election is "gate keeping," then FFS, KEEP THE GATES.
In the event, the Journal's opinion page was willing to run with Bobulinski's allegations, but the news side was not.
"Corporate records reviewed by the Wall Street Journal show no role for Joe Biden," journalists Andrew Duehren and James T. Areddy wrote, contradicting their editorial colleague Kimberly Strassel's nutterings. "Text messages and emails related to the venture that were provided to the Journal by Mr. Bobulinski, mainly from the spring and summer of 2017, don't show either Hunter Biden or James Biden discussing a role for Joe Biden in the venture."
Womp womp. So much for the GOP's big hack and dump scoop.
EIGHT MORE DAYS.
[NYT]
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Deep State Hard At Work Protecting Free And Fair Elections. No, We Mean It!
Be cool, guys.
Can it be ... Nice Times?
IT CAN!
The Washington Post has a new story on all the ways our government is actually doing the work to stop electoral interference. And they're doing it in coordination with social media platforms and local governments. Deep State FTW!
For months American military cyber-operators, aided by intelligence from the National Security Agency (NSA), have been targeting Russian spies to disrupt their plans by repeatedly knocking them off the Internet, confusing their planners and depriving them of their hacking tools. The goal is to prevent them from attacking U.S. voting systems, according to security officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the matter's sensitivity.
The effort spans multiple agencies in the executive branch. Most visibly, the State Department revoked visas for Rudy Giuliani's Ukrainian disinformation sources, Andrii Telizhenko and Andrii Derkach, while the Treasury Department put Derkach on the sanctions list, after which Google disabled 14 of his accounts and deleted his YouTube channel.
President Obama, hallowed be his name, failed to take the threat of electoral interference seriously enough four years ago, allowing Russian propaganda to spread unchecked on social media. He also blinked when Mitch McConnell threatened to turn it into a partisan issue if the administration publicly announced that the Russians were working to get Trump elected. Additionally, Republican states were loath to coordinate their election security apparatus with someone they'd demonized for eight straight years. The result was ... this waking nightmare.
Behind the scenes, the NSA, FBI, and Department of Homeland Security are now taking a more proactive role. DHS's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has installed malware trackers on every state election network, placing them in each county in some large states like Florida, where some systems were breached in 2016. The agency's Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center was in place to monitor both the overall threat to election security and jurisdiction-level vulnerabilities during the midterms. (Side note: Do you know how hard it is for us to say something nice about that babysnatching POS Chad Wolf?)
Meanwhile, US Cyber Command has massively upped its game to counter the GRU.
"Our goal is to make it as difficult as possible for an adversary to execute an operation that may interfere with some type of U.S. election system or may influence a U.S. citizen or entity," Brig. Gen. Joe Hartman, Cyber Command election security lead, said in an interview, without discussing operations. Hackers need malware, network access and servers, he said. "The ability to take those things away from an adversary prevents them from achieving their tactical or strategic objective."
Cybercom is also helping foreign allies find malware used by Russian and Chinese hackers, then disclosing it. In August, the NSA and the FBI revealed Russian malware used by the GRU. The same month, the State Department's Global Engagement Center issued a report exposing websites and organizations as Russian sites spreading disinformation.
Working with the spooks at NSA, last month Facebook and Twitter took down a Russian influence operation known as Peace Data that recruited western journalists to write articles critical of Joe Biden. (Oh, hey, wasn't that one of the FARA violations they didn't prosecute Mike Flynn for? And wasn't Paul Manafort running a scam just like that?) A similar campaign targeting conservatives was disabled last year before it could catch on. So the GOP may be running around screaming bloody murder about censorship, but the country's intelligence agencies are quietly cooperating with tech companies to throttle the disinformation campaigns before they get off the ground.
Which brings us to the New York Post story about Hunter Biden, which landed like a lead balloon this week. The original hitpiece was immediately throttled by Twitter and Facebook, provoking howls from the usual suspects who went to Harvard Law School and pretend not to understand the First Amendment. Blahblah whatever.
The Washington Post reports that intelligence agencies intercepted Giuliani's communications with Ukrainian/Russian spies last year. Time says that someone was trying to sell the same images and emails on "Hunter Biden's" laptop in Ukraine last year. And a story peddled by Giuliani and Steve Bannon — who was just indicted and spends quite a lot of time chatting up shady foreign nationals who might find themselves on the wrong end of a FISA warrant — immediately tripped the breaker and caused the major social media sites to bring down the banhammer.
And maybe all those things are a coincidence. Or maybe they're not.
Which is a long way of saying, let's all take deep breaths and remind ourselves that this is not 2016. Donald Trump may be out there barfing out nonsense about NO RUSSIA! but at least behind the scenes, our election security apparatus appears to have made enormous strides in the past four years.
Twelve more days. We can make it.
[WaPo]
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We're Beginning To See Why Brad Parscale Might Be Going Li'l Bit Bugf*ck
Did Ol' Neckbeard lie to Congress? And is he under investigation for stealing from the Trump campaign?
SAD NEWS, everyone. The Trump campaign has been systematically deleting Brad Parscale's nasty gross neckbeard from its website, as if it was never there! The good news is that you are a lot less likely to get a hairball if you go to the Trump website now.
Meanwhile, Parscale has officially "resigned" from the Trump campaign, which is funny because from what we've heard, Parscale wasn't doing a whole lot of "work" for the campaign in the first place, even before they quit-fired him and gave his "campaign manager" position to some other idiot named Bill Stepien. Parscale seemed to be mostly hanging out in Florida and spending the Trump campaign's money on Ferraris and other baubles for himself. ALLEGEDLY.
You'll remember that this week started five years ago with an incident at Mr. Parscale's home, where the cops had to come out and respond to what was either somebody waving a gun threatening to kill himself, or possibly he was threatening to kill his wife, or maybe both. His wife, Candice Parscale, has now recanted what she told the cops about him abusing and threatening her. "He hits me," she told the cops on scene when asked about her bruises, but it is now "unclear." We hope she can safely get out and away from him.
Regardless, we all saw the video of a shirtless Parscale being manhandled to the ground by Florida cops, and noted how much worse that might have gone had Parscale been Black.
But there are some updates on what is really going on with Brad Parscale, why he might be going literally bugfuck right at this minute. And those updates are related to how the Trump campaign is also reportedly going literally bugfuck, because they're scared Old Dirty Neckbeard is going to cooperate with the authorities and spill Trump campaign secrets and crimes, ALLEGEDLY.
We'll start there, with Gabe Sherman in Vanity Fair, on the Trump freakout that is this week. Not only did the New York Times start spilling Trump's tax secrets, but there's also this:
Parscale's public meltdown happened while he is reportedly under investigation for stealing from the Trump campaign and the RNC. According to [a] source close to the campaign, the Trump family is worried that Parscale could turn on them and cooperate with law enforcement about possible campaign finance violations. "The family is worried Brad will start talking," the source said.
Oh no! Does Brad Parscale KNOW THINGS? It would be terrible if Brad Parscale KNOWS THINGS.
What might he know? Oh, just perhaps that he might have lied to Congress about the Trump campaign's voter suppression efforts in 2016, for one.
The other day, Channel 4, from the isles of Britain, reported on an enormous data leak from the Trump campaign, about how in 2016, using data firm Cambridge Analytica, they specifically targeted Black voters for "deterrence," i.e. targeted 3.5 million specific Black voters with social media messages to try to keep them from going out to vote for Hillary Clinton. Indeed, back in 2016, the Trump campaign bragged it was running "three major voter suppression operations," one of which was targeted at Black voters. Brad Parscale was the campaign's data guru in 2016, and his neckbearded "brilliance" was a big part of the reason Trump stupidly hired him to be his 2020 campaign manager, before that all went wrong.
Professor David Carroll, an expert on all things "data" who has been on this Cambridge Analytica story from the beginning — he was in Netflix's The Great Hack, about the data firm — tweeted the transcript earlier this week of Democratic Rep. Jackie Speier asking Parscale directly if the campaign targeted voters by race, and he said, under oath, that NO HE NEVER:
@RepSpeier asked the question. Parscale responded with a false statement that tonight’s @Channel4News exposé will c… https://t.co/afjbGIHsBM— David Carroll 🦅 (@David Carroll 🦅)1601309766.0
"I did not target by race specifically in GOTV and/or persuasion efforts," said Parscale, who went on to clarify that he definitely didn't target Black voters, and he doesn't even know if you can do such a thing!
As for Parscale being under investigation, the Daily Mail reported this week, so GRAIN OF SALT BECAUSE "DAILY MAIL," that Parscale is under investigation for maybe stealing a WEE few tens of millions of dollars from the Trump campaign, and maaaaaybe another ten mil from the RNC. No big.
Under investigation by whom? It's not very clear.
The Trump campaign and the RNC deny there are investigations or audits, but they lie every time they breathe, so who knows. But if Gabe Sherman, a real reporter, is correct that the campaign is worried Neckbeard Brad might cooperate with law enforcement on all this, then we understand how they might have reason to worry.
So yeah, sounds like Brad Parscale might have a reason to be li'l bit bugfuck right now. And also the Trump campaign.
Couldn't be happening to more terrible people, bless their hearts.
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