Whistleblower States that Cambridge Analytica, Subsidiary of British Defense Contractor to the Ministry of Defense and US DOD, Was a Bridging Node to the Russians

by 10:58 pm. It has 5 Comments.

This was a joint appearance event, including Q&A, held today in London. A lot of important news was made:

Chris Wylie’s answer here, if it is borne out, clearly places Cambridge Analytica, a subsidiary of the defense and intelligence contractor SCL, doing work for Russian interests. This is noteworthy for two different, but equally important reasons. The first is that it provides some of the first direct evidence, by direct statement of one of the principles and founders of Cambridge Analytica as a subsidiary of SCL, that Cambridge Analytica had concrete, for profit ties to Russia. Making it a bridging node in the network of groups, people, and organizations involved in the US 2014 and 2016 elections and the Russians. The second is that a subsidiary of SCL, which is essentially a private, for contract intelligence company, was doing work for Russian interests at the same time that the parent company was doing work for the British Ministry of Defense and the US DOD.

I’ve been a defense contractor off and on for over a decade. This included doing what is essentially a niche form of  intelligence work for the US Army. I have also served on two different term appointments as a senior civil servant under the Intergovernmental Personnel Act. One of my biggest concerns as a national security professional has always been about the privatization of intelligence work. I’ve had the pleasure of working for an excellent, small defense contractor (who I’m currently still with) that appreciates professional ethics, providing quality work for the governmental client, and has my back. This was also the case for the not for profit sponsoring agent for my Intergovernmental Personnel Appointment. Unfortunately, I’ve also worked for a terrible business development unit (BDU) of a very large multinational defense and intelligence contractor that, through hard experience, I trust to do what is best for their bottom line to the exclusion of all else – including the right thing. So I can say I’ve experienced the best and worst of the contractor world. Having a subsidiary of a defense and intelligence contractor that is doing political intelligence work for Russian interests at the same time that the parent company is doing intelligence and/or intelligence related work for the MOD, the DOD, and NATO should be raising red flags in DC, London, and Brussels. Given what we know of how Nix and his partners conduct business, national security and counterintelligence professionals in the US, the UK, and at NATO HQ should be very, very, very concerned that whatever they were paying SCL to do has managed to make its way to Cambridge Analytica’s Russian clients.

Other important news was also made at this event about Steve Bannon, Robert Mercer, and their interest in the UK Independence Party (UKIP) and Brexit:

You’ll notice that Andrew Breitbart’s “politics is downstream of culture” concept was in play here.

Finally, some absolutely revolting news was also broken at this event pertaining to Shahmir Sanni. If there is any justice left in Her Majesty’s kingdom, it will be the end of Theresa May’s political career, as well as the two lowlifes on her staff responsible for outing Sanni and placing his family in Pakistan in jeopardy:

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Deplorables on Parade Open Thread: Steve ‘Pig Muck’ King Lunges for A New Low

by 9:44 pm. It has 99 Comments.

Speaking of HERITAGE NOT HATE…


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Iowa-based, or knowledgeable, commentors: Which of these three have the best shot at unseating Rep. Pig Muck?


Linda Brown, Pioneer of School Desegregation

by 7:43 pm. It has 46 Comments.

Linda Brown, at the center of the Brown v. Board of Education case that began the long end of school desegregation, died on Sunday in Topeka, Kansas, at the age of 76.

It is Ms. Brown’s father, Oliver, whose name is attached to the famous case, although the suit that ended up in the United States Supreme Court actually represented a number of families in several states. In 1954, in a unanimous decision, the court ruled that segregated schools were inherently unequal. The decision upended decades’ worth of educational practice, in the South and elsewhere, and its ramifications are still being felt.

“I feel that after 30 years, looking back on Brown v. the Board of Education, it has made an impact in all facets of life for minorities throughout the land,” Ms. Brown said in a 1985 interview for “Eyes on the Prize,” a PBS documentary series on the civil rights movement. “I really think of it in terms of what it has done for our young people, in taking away that feeling of second-class citizenship. I think it has made the dreams, hopes and aspirations of our young people greater, today.”

The ruling overturned Plessy v. Ferguson, which established the separate but equal doctrine that formed the legal basis for Jim Crow laws. The court directed schools to desegregate “with all deliberate speed,” but it failed to establish a firm timetable for doing so. The Supreme Court would outline the process of school desegregation in Brown II in 1955, but it would take years for schools across the nation to fully comply.

Oddly, both the New York Times and the Washington Post (first two quotes) say that a more complete obituary will run later. Usually they have obituaries pre-written for notable people.


Russigate Open Thread: Today’s Cambridge Analytica / Facebook Thumbnails

by 6:19 pm. It has 200 Comments.

All this… seems significant. You more technologically adept people want to explain why it is or isn’t?


Annals of Post-Racial America

by 4:14 pm. It has 137 Comments.

ETA: As someone in the borked comments pointed out and I hadn’t caught — this story is a couple of years old. Well, that’s a long time to sit in my open tabs, ain’t it?

I stand by everything said below, and note that this bolsters my view that Trump is a symptom, not a cause, of the deep pathology in which our nation finds itself. That he’s making it worse is true, but he’s only there in the first place because one of our political parties thought that power was worth race baiting for decades before he ever emerged from his first bankruptcy.

I’m still drowning in grading and book revisions, so I’m blogging even less than usual. But we need more thread, and I’ve some hate-opened browser tabs to clear, so I thought a dyspeptic proof-of-life post might be the thing.

Today’s 2016’s offering comes from the great state of Minnesota, where a restaurant operator had an interesting concept of an appetite-whetting joke:

According to the Minneapolis NAACP, Tyrone Williams and Chauntyll Allen were preparing to dine at Joe’s Crab Shack in Roseville on Wednesday night when they noticed a photo embedded inside the table.

It appeared to show a large group of white people watching a public execution of at least one black person. On the bottom of the picture, it reads: “Hanging at Groesbeck, Texas, on April 12th, 1895.” At the top, the caption reads, “All I said was that I didn’t like the gumbo.”

For some reason — who can imagine why? — when Williams and Allen registered what they were actually seeing, they were…how to put this?…unamused:

“Although the manager was apologetic about the lynching depiction, that does not change the fact that this sickening image of black men being lynched was intentionally embedded inside of a table,” Williams said. “This type of blatant racism should not be tolerated in this country, or in our local and national eating establishments. I have felt sick tomy stomach and stressed out since seeing that image on the table where I was planning to eat my food.”

Allen said she could not believe the image was used so casually.

“Seeing a picture of two black men being lynched was the last thing that I expected to see at what was supposed to be a family-friendly restaurant,” Allen said.

One would expect better — but despite Chief Justice Roberts’ certainty that the United States have gotten past racism, that was never true, and is even less so with the Racist in Chief infesting the Oval Office.

The photo was removed from the Roseville franchise — no word on whether it can be found elsewhere — and the COO of the chain’s parent company apologized, sort of:

We sincerely apologize to our guests who were disturbed by the image and we look forward to continuing to serve the Roseville community,” Catalano said in a statement.

Perhaps I’m too much of a stickler, but I think that telling a joke about a murder of two black men for the crime of being black is a universal problem, and not merely one in the context of those who were angered by the image.  I’m more worried about those who weren’t, who accepted the normalizing of race violence and an ill remembered and hence still present past.  That’s what’s wrong here: that this seemed funny to anyone, to the point that someone made the choice to put this on public display.

Feh.  The GOP has pursued a race-baiting strategy with success since Nixon. Trump’s the most egregious symptom of that tendency, but he’s hardly the driver of such hatefulness.  The ubiquity of casual racism and the constant threat of violence is the product of fifty years of a cynical, evil political choice to play on race to win power. It is certainly true that the Democratic Party is far from perfect on all of this, but this is not a both-sides situation. It isn’t going to get better until the GOP is a smoking crater on the political landscape.

And with that….talk among yourselves.

Image: Edward Hopper, Nighthawks, 1942.


Monday Afternoon Open Thread

by 2:09 pm. It has 188 Comments.

Ugh, I’m having a day. I spelled the first word of the heading “MOnay” on a prior attempt. Better stop now. Open thread!


Monday Morning Open Thread: Laugh or Cringe

by 10:27 am. It has 188 Comments.

I will admit, David Axelrod made my morning, so I had to share before I dashed off to begin my week.

If you need some good twitter thoughts today, I suggest you follow the amazing young activists from Parkland. They continue to inspire.  @davidhogg111, @Emma4Change, @JaclynCorin to name just a few. 

What’s everyone up to on the first day of the work week?

Open thread





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US, Europe Expel Russian “Diplomats”

by 9:33 am. It has 84 Comments.

In a coordinated action, the United States and several countries of Europe have expelled Russians identified as spies in solidarity with the UK over the poison attack in Salisbury. The US is also closing down the Seattle Russian consulate.

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Say my name, say my name

by 9:29 am. It has 10 Comments.

Almost a quarter of the population is covered by Medicaid.  But not everyone who is on Medicaid knows it.  Ashley Tallevi examines the implications of privatization features that leads to the misidentification of Medicaid as private insurance in the Journal of  Health Politics, Policy and Law**:

When I measured privatization simply using managed care enrollment, which is the most widely used measure of Medicaid privatization in studies of Medicaid underreporting, I found no relationship between privatization and Medicaid self-reporting. However, when I specified administrative features of Medicaid managed care organizations (MCOs) that obscure government’s role, I found that these administrative features are related to the underreporting of Medicaid enrollment. Medicaid recipients become less likely to report their enrollment when MCOs mix Medicaid recipients and commercial enrollees in the same plan and when Medicaid MCOs include the private company’s name in the MCO plan name. I also found that, when this misreporting occurs, Medicaid enrollees are frequently reporting enrollment in private insurance plans.

Charles Gaba was curious about this question in 2015 and his data is stunning:

it’s jaw-dropping to discover that not only does Medicaid itself operate under more than 100 different names (some states have several separate or overlapping Medicaid programs), but that when you include CHIP and “other” state-funded healthcare programs the total number swells to over 200.

Going back to my main point: Of the 106 different Medicaid programs, only 15 of them (from just 12 states) have the word “Medicaid” in their actual publicly-branded name. For instance, in Connecticut, “Medicaid for Low-Income Adults” is referred to as “HUSKY Part D”. In Wisconsin, their main Medicaid program is called “BadgerCare”, but they do have another variant called “Wisconsin Medicaid Purchase Plan” or MAPP for short.

My last position at UPMC Health Plan was on the Medicaid team where I optimized risk adjustment revenue strategies for UPMC for You, the Medicaid managed care component of the company. This rings true to me. Every piece of advertising, branding and communication that I can remember focused on UPMC for You. Medicaid or Medical Assistance was seldom mentioned anywhere other than the Monday morning data geek team meeting.

One of the things that happily surprised me last year was the power of the Medicaid push back on the Republican health cut bills.  Not everyone on Medicaid knew that they were on Medicaid although I would imagine that the parents of medically fragile children and the beneficiaries with significant, persistent high cost needs were very well aware of how Medicaid allows them to structure their life even if they were on Badger Care or Apple Care or UPMC for You or whatever else.

Medicaid is a critical resource for lots of families, but the naming conventions hides the value of that resource to some beneficiaries and the broader public.

** Ashley Tallevi; Out of Sight, Out of Mind? Measuring the Relationship between Privatization and Medicaid Self-Reporting. J Health Polit Policy Law 1 April 2018; 43 (2): 137–183. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/03616878-4303489





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Ah, The Woes Of RSS

by 8:27 am. It has 33 Comments.

For those folks still facing RSS issues, I’ve escalated this to our wonderful web hosts, Hosting Matters. They’re very responsive, very skilled, and are now helping solve this issue.

I’ve received a number of reports over the past week, but I didn’t respond to many of them. Just making sure that you issue-submitters know were heard, even if I didn’t respond directly. Normally I respond to all issue emails from the contact form, but in this case I had little to offer as I was gathering more information.

Since this issue affects more than one RSS service, I’m pretty sure that the issue isn’t something on our pages that sometimes causes their RSS parsing engine to puke. We’re now looking at HM’s security setup blocking automated requests and so mucking things up. Hopefully that’s it, and this issue will ease away over the next day or so.

Open thread!


On the Road and In Your Backyard

by 5:00 am. It has 36 Comments.

Good Morning All,

This weekday feature is for Juicers who are are on the road, traveling, or just want to share a little bit of their world via stories and pictures. So many of us rise each morning, eager for something beautiful, inspiring, amazing, subtle, of note, and our community delivers – a view into their world, whether they’re far away or close to home – pictures with a story, with context, with meaning, sometimes just beauty. By concentrating travel updates and tips here, it’s easier for all of us to keep up or find them later.

So please, speak up and share some of your adventures and travel news here, and submit your pictures using our speedy, secure form. You can submit up to 7 pictures at a time, with an overall description and one for each picture.

You can, of course, send an email with pictures if the form gives you trouble, or if you are trying to submit something special, like a zipped archive or a movie. If your pictures are already hosted online, then please email the links with your descriptions.

For each picture, it’s best to provide your commenter screenname, description, where it was taken, and date. It’s tough to keep everyone’s email address and screenname straight, so don’t assume that I remember it “from last time”. More and more, the first photo before the fold will be from a commenter, so making it easy to locate the screenname when I’ve found a compelling photo is crucial.

Have a wonderful day folks, enjoy the pictures!

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Monday Morning Open Thread: Waiting on the Twitter-Tantrum

by 4:55 am. It has 148 Comments.


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And speaking of squealing snowflakes…


Russiagate Open Thread: Forget the Sex Worker — Who Was Selling Trump’s “Access”?

by 11:08 pm. It has 99 Comments.

Cash Rules EveryONE Around Him… dolla-dolla, y’all, get th’ money:

For Elliott Broidy, Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign represented an unparalleled political and business opportunity.

An investor and defense contractor, Mr. Broidy became a top fund-raiser for Mr. Trump’s campaign when most elite Republican donors were keeping their distance, and Mr. Trump in turn overlooked the lingering whiff of scandal from Mr. Broidy’s 2009 guilty plea in a pension fund bribery case.

After Mr. Trump’s election, Mr. Broidy quickly capitalized, marketing his Trump connections to politicians and governments around the world, including some with unsavory records, according to interviews and documents obtained by The New York Times. Mr. Broidy suggested to clients and prospective customers of his Virginia-based defense contracting company, Circinus, that he could broker meetings with Mr. Trump, his administration and congressional allies.

Mr. Broidy’s ability to leverage his political connections to boost his business illuminates how Mr. Trump’s unorthodox approach to governing has spawned a new breed of access peddling in the swamp he vowed to drain.

Mr. Broidy offered tickets to V.I.P. inauguration events, including a candlelight dinner attended by Mr. Trump, to a Congolese strongman accused of funding a lavish lifestyle with public resources. He helped arrange a meeting with Republican senators and offered a trip to Mar-a-Lago, the president’s private Florida resort, for an Angolan politician. And he arranged an invitation to a party at Mr. Trump’s Washington hotel for a Romanian parliamentarian facing corruption charges, who posted a photograph with the president on Facebook…

As with so many other political conventions, Mr. Trump has upended the traditional system of access to the president, among the most prized chits in Washington. That is partly because of lax vetting that has allowed largely unfettered access to Mr. Trump and his White House by loyalists, friends and hangers-on with their own policy agendas or business interests.

But it is also because few of Washington’s established lobbyists have close connections to the president. In their place, a new class of insider has emerged, able to lobby the president directly on behalf of clients or business partners, an uncommon opportunity in prior administrations, when lobbyists focused on winning support from lawmakers or regulators…

So, expect a lot of words to be spewed tomorrow about how “our” poor, naive businessman-president allowed himself to be taken advantage of by sweet-talking Beltway lobbyists. Because this will presumably sell better to Trump’s in-every-sense-Base than the alternate understanding that Donny Dollhands has never not been for sale to the highest bidder, no minimum reserve.


“60 Minutes” Open Thread

by 7:39 pm. It has 268 Comments.

We don’t have to talk about this:

Anyone watching? What else is happening this fine Sunday evening?





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Sunday Evening Self-Indulgence Open Thread: Left Behind / Unraptured

by 5:05 pm. It has 223 Comments.

Merriam-Webster on the derivation of the word fiefdom:

A fief (/fi?f/; Latin: feudum) was the central element of feudalism and consisted of heritable property or rights granted by an overlord to a vassal who held it in fealty (or “in fee”) in return for a form of feudal allegiance and service, usually given by the personal ceremonies of homage and fealty.

There’s a PhD treatise waiting to be written on the modern American gated community as the latest form of fiefdom, where the vassals hold their perceived “rights” — to not be ruffled by the appearance or actions of anyone who isn’t exactly like them, mostly — in return for their fealty in faithfully voting for the local Republican overlords, however incompetent or venal. God bless the Squire and his relations, and keep us all in our proper stations!

Vox interviews the author of yet another study on the Forgotten American Heartlanders and their sturdy “moral values”. This guy, at least, seems to have some idea of just how shoddy and meretricious those “values” really are…

Robert Wuthnow, a sociologist at Princeton University, spent eight years interviewing Americans in small towns across the country. He had one goal: to understand why rural America is so angry with Washington.

Wuthnow’s work resulted in a new book, The Left Behind: Decline and Rage in Rural America. He argues that rural Americans are less concerned about economic issues and more concerned about Washington threatening the social fabric of small towns and causing a “moral decline” in the country as a whole. The problem, though, is that it’s never quite clear what that means or how Washington is responsible for it…

Sean Illing: In the book, you argue that the anger we’re seeing in rural America is less about economic concerns and more about the perception that Washington is threatening the way of life in small towns. How, specifically, is Washington doing this?

Robert Wuthnow: I’m not sure that Washington is doing anything to harm these communities. To be honest, a lot of it is just scapegoating. And that’s why you see more xenophobia and racism in these communities. There’s a sense that things are going badly, and the impulse is to blame “others.”

They believe that Washington really does have power over their lives. They recognize that the federal government controls vast resources, and they feel threatened if they perceive Washington’s interest being directed more toward urban areas than rural areas, or toward immigrants more than non-immigrants, or toward minority populations instead of the traditional white Anglo population.

But that’s just racism and cultural resentment, and calling it a manifestation of some deeper anxiety doesn’t alter that fact.

I don’t disagree with that. I’m just explaining what I heard from people on the ground in these communities. This is what they believe, what they say, not what I believe.

Fair enough. The title of your book, The Left Behind, rubbed me the wrong way. It seems to me that many of these people haven’t been left behind; they’ve chosen not to keep up. But the sense of victimization appears to overwhelm everything else.

I make it very clear in the book that this is largely a choice. It’s not as though these people are desperate to leave but can’t. They value their local community. They understand its problems, but they like knowing their neighbors and they like the slow pace of life and they like living in a community that feels small and closed. Maybe they’re making the best of a bad situation, but they choose to stay.
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