258 Comments

And still, Trump stays silent. He's allowed disease to run rampant, opened the door wide to Putin, made money off the presidency... And all the while Republicans in congress allow him to carry on, unchecked. I question the patriotism of anyone supporting Donald Trump at this stage of the game. Clearly, the don't understand the meaning of the word.

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Yes. The members of Congress who have been silently allowing this only seem to care about preserving their own asses, not what is in the best interests of the nation.

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I remember when he gutted CISA and what a scary big red flag that was. And here we are.

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Just like he disbanded the pandemic response team in 2018. And here we are.

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Incredible traitor. Dislike djt intensely. Can’t wait for January and Biden’s swearing in.

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Ethics acceptable in the business world do not transfer well to government. Donald Trump and most of today's Republican Party are proof of that.

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Stiffing all your contractors, employees, and investors is not acceptable in the business world. That's how Tя☭mp got involved with the Russians in the first place. No bank in NY would do business with him. Deutsche Bank backstopped by the Russian state bank loaned him money.

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Agree ... but check out the claims business makes in ads with loads of small print ... and the way it treats employees, who are "human resources" rather than persons.

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I'm not defending business in general, just saying that Tя☭mp's behavior is below existing business standards. Plenty of those standards are miserably low.

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Remember when we applied for positions through "Personnel" departments? When "human resources" became the accepted term, I was puzzled by the term. I certainly get it now!

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Yup, it's easier to get rid of a 'resource' than it is to get rid of a person. When you convert from coal to natural gas, you really don't care about the coal any longer. Kinda of like before the Civil War when Southerners referred to enslaved humans as 'property' rather than as people. You can call this 'dehumanization.'

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What a great three point summary: unmanaged pandemic (with great human sacrifice), front door wide open to Putin, making money off the presidency (while in office). I have questioned the so called patriotism of his supporters/base/deplorables/call them whatever . . .for too long. Guns, God, and Country seem to be the likely themes of patriotism. Protect those three at any cost. My thoughts are not coherent enough to write what I truly want to say. I don’t believe the dumpster fire’s base TRULY understands (or cares to explore or think broadly) about the security risk of this cyber Pearl Harbor event (I’m calling it what others have suggested.) I can imagine the response, screw the Russians let’s just bomb them. It is binary - you hurt us we hurt you. Without thinking about the entirety of the breach and our vulnerability. It would be hard to “just bomb them”when our defense system (electronic and mechanical but certainly TECHNOLOGY based) is compromised or offline. It’s like a scene from a movie. The entire town is without power or computers and the hero gets in the plane and nothing works because there is no power or computers. Only our hero can’t get out of the plane to magically start the plane and there is no brilliant woman at her laptop helping to reboot the entire United States. We need a project. WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE PATRIOTIC? Give participants <900 words to answer the question.

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re: Guns, God and Country...

Author Anne Lamott attributes this quote to a priest friend in her book "Bird by Bird, “You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”

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I think you made yourself understood! And I love the idea of a 900 word essay on what it means to be patriotic.

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I'd be more interested in having them do a <900 word essay on what America means. Patriotism is a term I have a lot of issue with. Its connotations of nationalism and patriarchy (at least in my own interior thesaurus) are not what I would use to describe what this country (or at least what I hope the majority in this country aspire it to be) means to me.

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Clearly they are complicit.

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Yet, they (at least his stereotypical un- or under- educated ‘base’) truly believe they *are* the only patriots. They believed the lies, and drank the cool-aid.

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I don't know if that's what they believe or the story they tell US. Perhaps they believe their own lies.

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The kool-aid is literally death. Hopefully these rats die before they kill the rest of us.

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Certainly the name Benedict Arnold comes to mind...

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On his watch...

And more deafening, thunderous silence from Congressional Republicans.

Had half, or even a tenth, of these serial scandals occurred under a Hillary Clinton administration, there would multiple, on-going committee investigations, special prosecutors, and impeachment votes.

Russian cyber tentacles at this point are likely so deeply imbedded into the software of US government agencies and business enterprises it will take years to find and remove them. Quite a legacy.

It is apparent to many of us that Trump's intransigence vis-a-vis the election outcome is a result of his expectation that Russian hacking would hand him the election.

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I hoped someone would come to the same conclusion as I did - this explains why Tя☭mp expected to win the election - it was the mail in votes that turned the tide since the malware wasn't able to change those votes!

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Paula: I thought from about the middle of last summer that Trump's INSISTENCE on pushing us to the polling machines was just weird. Pretty sure I even wrote about it.

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It would explain how McConnell won again.

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I don’t put much stock in Alternet articles. I think KYers lied about voting out Mitch because they were scared of all Socialism disinformation.

Most in Red States vote Republican because it is so ingrained, even if it’s smothering the majority of them economically. They might have voted out Trump, but they were not going to allow Biden to make any changes.

They just want to live in a White 1950’s America bubble and don’t really care what it costs non-Whites.

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Lisa, I do agree with you about the lying, and the wanting to live in the White bubble at all costs. But I'm curious, too -- what makes you discount articles from Alternet? They do lean left, yes, although in the last couple of years they've upped their game considerably when it comes to sourcing the articles they produce. I am seeking out reliable news sources all the time, and generally the things I put forward have been pretty well vetted. I would like to know why I should discount Alternet articles, too.

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I thought the same.

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I don’t think that was an accident. I still think that Vladimir Putin has some thing on Trump, and I think that he’s giving them a hard pass to do whatever they want

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Yes, I believe you did write about it!

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I think you may be right in your conclusion. That’s why he went against the tradition and advice of Republican leaders and denounced mail in voting. OMG. In its horribly ironic way, the unexpected pandemic stopped Trump and Putin. I feel so naive. All those dead Americans were our casualties in this war. ❤️🤍💙

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And yet, HCR's column from the previous day indicates that Trump's administration planned to not only depend upon herd immunity against the virus, but work to spread it more intensely to get there faster. Maybe back in February, delusional Trump hoped that could happen as early as November 3 and the pandemic would be over and mail in voting a moot point.

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It was a plan to commit genocide because the presumption--given the stats about mortality and extreme morbidity--was that the Great Dying would be in Black and Brown communities. This was not a plan to create "herd" immunity. There are so many treasonable acts committed by this "administration" it is hard to single out one or two for particular attention.

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And Democratic cities, leaving the “base” unscathed.

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Yes he wanted several million people to die so he didn’t have to move any faster on doing testing and all that and that’s why he dragged his feet.

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Some people call me a skeptic or cynical, I like to refer to myself as a realist.

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"Critical thinker" also comes to mind.

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I thought Christopher Krebs was credible when he said the election was secure. Could he be unaware that malware changed votes? Or was he talking about a different type of voter fraud? If it is as you say, that the mail-in votes turned the tide on a Russian-hacked election, then that is something I want to think more about.

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I suspect Krebs and his team did a good job and prevented the machines from being compromised...but I suspect Russia was trying to find a way in by parsing all the information they were gathering. One part of the puzzle is how they chose the Solarwinds product as the trojan horse...they must have had knowledge of the install base first, and that was probably a precursor hack that went undetected. The timing of this whole effort does suggest it was designed to manipulate the election. It will also be telling to see which of of the 18,000 Solarwinds clients were ignored...that will tell us what they were after. In the end if tRump knew about this , it should be grounds for treason/sedition charges or both. Hopefully someone is working on a counterhack to find out what they have, and what they were doing...

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Perhaps Krebs foiled the Russian attempts, so tRump was ordered to fire him.

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I think that is a very plausible statement.

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And let's hope someone in Georgia is looking into their voting software! Hopefully, enough people have requested absentee ballots to make any hacking moot.

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The voting machines used in Austin, Texas (don’t know about elsewhere) took paper ballots (as backups) and were not connected to the internet. I would like to learn more about this — did other places use machines that weren’t connected to the internet?

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So hard to know, Becky, but since Krebs won wide praise for his efforts it seems he didn't get the "memo" to not make our election secure. I don't know how big a supporter of 45 he was before the "fallout."

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Actually, do you remember they were talking about impeaching her even before the election? At this point I think the Republicans simply refuse to recognize any Democratic victor as legitimate. And I wondered repeatedly back in the summer why he was so hell-bent on forcing us to polling places when all the statistics prove that mail-in voting does not normally benefit one party or the other....

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I wouldn’t put it past him to have allowed it. I still think the Russians have something on him

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I think it’s more like Trump has a fixation on Putin and needs his approval at any cost.

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They’re going to have to scrap their entire system.

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The incompetence of 45 and his administration will, no doubt, go down in history as the US' most detrimental on multiple levels: from our integrity to our safety to our individual and collective well-being (both mental and physical). This one, highly inept, amateurish man playing the role our leader has pulled us down into the throes of instability, near anarchy, and death -- and all the while, the GOP leadership has allowed him to continue.

Very few of us are surprised, despite the extent to which we have been compromised. We have known in our guts that 45 was selling us down the river. Where are the cries of outrage from all Republicans for this breech of security, for the lies, for the incompetence, for the rising numbers of Covid cases and deaths? A solo voice does not outrage make!

The enormity of 45's treacherous ineptitudes, inefficiencies, misconducts, indignities, and blanket inhumanity leave me numb, yet fearful of the next 30 days -- hardened, yet in pain for all the innocents who continue to suffer because of a single, solitary narcissist who has played Russian roulette with our freedoms, our rights, and our lives.

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I don’t think it was incompetence: it was outright destructive maliciousness

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There is an extremely fine line between incompetence and maliciousness. For example, a person who displays such malice, is totally inept at displaying compassion and humanity, and entirely incapable of moral and ethical decision-making. In order to make those connections, I purposefully noted: "The enormity of 45's treacherous ineptitudes, inefficiencies, misconducts, indignities, and blanket inhumanity leave me numb ..."

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I agree with you that massive incompetence and manifest maliciousness have been jumbled together throughout this administration--not just Trump's malignant narcissism, but across the branches of government. I am not a lawyer (if readers are, please correct as necessary), but I found myself thinking of the legal concept of depraved indifference. Here is one definition from the NY legal code in reference to murder [fn's removed]:

DEPRAVED INDIFFERENCE TO HUMAN LIFE refers to a person’s state of mind in recklessly engaging in conduct which creates a grave risk of death. A person has a depraved indifference to human life when that person has an utter disregard for the value of human life – a willingness to act, not because he or she means to cause grievous harm [to the person who is killed], but because he or she simply does not care whether or not grievous harm will result. In other words, a person who is depravedly indifferent is not just willing to take a grossly unreasonable risk to human life - - that person does not care how the risk turns out. Depraved indifference to human life reflects a wicked, evil or inhuman state of mind, as manifested by brutal, heinous and despicable acts. It is evinced by conduct that is wanton, deficient in a moral sense of concern, devoid of regard for the life or lives of others, and so blameworthy as to justify the same criminal liability that the law imposes on a person who intentionally kills.

https://www.nycourts.gov/judges/cji/2-PenalLaw/125/125-25%282%29.pdf

There same definition, minus only the concluding phrase, is also used in addressing First Degree Assault--i.e., where death did not result.

I realize that any attempt to actually charge administration figures is unsustainable, but "depraved indifference" seems to me to be a useful concept to keep in public discussions.

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Thank you for the citation. We have some mighty good laws on the books, and we need to throw the books at the outgoing administration until they are buried in a pile of them.

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Next to last sentence should read "the same definition," not "there same..."

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And don't forget that McConnell is right in there with him...affecting the lives of children who are going hungry and are now without water or electricity because of shut-offs for non-payment, or who have been evicted from their homes, because of shut-downs and no additional help from the government...and why? Because McConnell has blocked the bills from being heard in the Senate. And the Senate, in its Republican majority, is just as culpable. They all knew this was occurring, and did nothing to stop it. My anger at this grows every day...and obviously calling the Senate hasn't done any good.

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McConnell is Evil. It rhymes. It’s true. He should be considered an Enemy of the State. Like Putin. GA, please. Mail ins are high in number. Hope? ❤️🤍💙

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It will be a squeaker.

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You have said quite eloquently what many of us think and fear. Thank you.

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Well expressed. And thousands of Americans will die today. Horrible. ❤️🤍💙

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Interesting play on words 😉

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Russian Roulette indeed!

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I would really love to see this so called president (lower case on purpose) held accountable. He has been having secret talks with Putin since he took office.

It would be incredibly sad to see a President brought up on charges of treason.....aiding and abetting the enemy. But, I am thinking that is exactly what needs to happen.

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I will not be sad to see him charged with treason or dereliction of duty as the "turning the other cheek" has been going on since at least Nixon and the Ford pardon and that has given rise to the attitude we see in the WH now.

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Don't forget to include sedition along with that treasonous aiding and abetting a hostile foreign entity...

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Thank you for suggesting charging him with treason. I was afraid i was the only one

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Oh, I think you havew lots of company.

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I believe he committed treason the first day that he broke his oath of office.

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Bas-turd probably broke his oath of office within hours.

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And his children and Kushner,they have to be in on it was well.

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I would not be sad to see him charged with treason. He needs to be held accountable.

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Yes, please. This cannot go without consequences.

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Agree. ❤️🤍💙

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Sedition as treason only applies during declared wars.

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So much for all the IT "jeany-is-es." The hackers were able to penetrate Solar Winds using the password "solarwinds123." Jesus. H. Christ!!! These people are a *security* company????

Romney was right when he said this is like having Russian bombers flying overhead 50 years ago.

And here we sit with Putin's Bitch at the head of the government.

(bangs head against wall for 10,000th time in the past 48 months - ah, the pain feels so good now)

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Russian spy planes, never mind bombers, have been "lawfully" overflying the US by treaty for a very long time.....and vice-versa. Remember Gary Powers? Trump just pulled out of the treatry allowing this "mutual confidence builder" and is trying to sell or destroy the planes before Biden puts them back in action.

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and is destroying the planes on our side that could put us back in the treaty

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What is your source of information on that?

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And selling our best military planes to Saudia Arabia, who are close with Russia.

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Wow. Is that true??

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OMG you hit the head on the nail.

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Isn't Marco Rubio the Chairman of the Senate Intelligence committee? Given the gravity and scope of this cyberattack on our government and corporate entities, on what is he focusing his tweets? An interview in Glamour magazine where a female Biden staffer dropped an "F" bomb, that's what. This feigned indignation speaks to the overt hypocrisy that exists in Trump's party, and how curious it is that Marco Rubio is into Glamour magazine.

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Rubio is worthless. He, unfortunately, is my senator (gag!). When volume 5 of the senate intelligence report came out I sent him a letter excoriating his complicity. All I got back was a form letter acknowledging my correspondence.

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I too live in Florida, but do not consider either him or Rick Scott as "my" senator. They've done nothing for our state. Every letter I've received from his office oozes with sanctimonious patronizations. He is a fraud, just like Scott, just like De Santis, and just like their Beloved Leader, whose boots they lick and asses they kiss.

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DeathSantis. I live in Florida too and it’s criminal, literally, what goes on here.

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He’s mine, too, so sadly. Good for you for writing him. You did your part. I will be calling him today.

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And remember all of the senators who referred to Drumpf's racism, sexism, misogynism etc as just "locker room talk"

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I have spoken to a number of men who find "locker room talk" to be pretty untenable an excuse, as they do not themselves engage in it. The assumption that all men objectify women in this way is simply not true.

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I agree - just using their language for excusing Drumpf's "grab em by the P**y"

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Mitt: "to not have the White House aggressively speaking out and protesting and taking punitive action is really, really quite extraordinary."

Yeah, one could even say, "treasonous".

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"quite extraordinary" is the politically correct way to say "treasonous."

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Too many people don't speak political correctness, in fact, they claim only liberals employ it and only to shame Republicans. But then, too many Americans no longer do nuance or subtlety at all. That would require engaging a number of brain cells they lack, apparently.

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They lack them, they have them surgically removed, or they have them hidden in the deepest recesses of their truly frightening minds. Although I often wonder what it would be like to be inside the mind of an other, there are some minds I would be terrified to enter!

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As someone who, over the past four years, has continually felt that the worst thing Trump has done was still yet to be revealed ... we may be getting close to the end game.

Here's a true doomsday take ... Heather lays out the circumstantial case that this president has committed, or facilitated or allowed, the most destructive act of security espionage in the history of the world.

She has populated the game board with factual dots and sufficiently connected a great many of them that start to reveal an image. I'd like to add another dot and suggest it may expand the image that Heather has sketched.

Also in March, the apparent month the hack occurred, the U.S. stock market suffered historic drops in the major stock indexes. From 20 Feb to 20 Mar -- one month -- the DJIA, S&P500, and NASDAQ indexes dropped 35, 32, and 29%. Since 20 Mar through today, those indexes have risen 57%, 60%, and 86%.

This historic bull market was fueled by the U.S. Federal Reserve essentially printing money for banks.

How vulnerable might we be to bad actors with the ultimate insider trading information?

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Steve: I think you're onto something.

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Wow, Heather, substack didn't kick you off your own blog.

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I've been playing with it and I think the problem is when I post questions. I hung out here a lot the other night and never got kicked off. Here's hoping!

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That's odd. Why would they object to questions? Perhaps you can frame questions without a question mark. Example, "How are you—question mark."

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Good point. Always follow the money. Yet, my first thought when reading your post was that I almost wonder if those gains are even real? If they have hacked as extensively as reported surely they are in financial markets, too. Will they, now that they have been discovered, suddenly reverse any false gains and crash the markets? How better to wreak havoc than complete financial collapse while also having a pandemic and a treasonous occupier of the White House? I shudder to think of the implications.

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I've been concerned since early 2017 that it was apparent that Trump's words could move the markets, especially his back-and-forths with China. If ... big IF ... there were millions of dollars of Russian oligarchs getting an early sign that Trump was about to make a newsworthy announcement, they could leverage even moderate market moves into big gains, especially by shorting. This hack brings up the possibility of a much larger nefarious scheme if they had inside first-hand info about the Federal Reserve's intentions. Why would Trump willingly force markets to dive? Because up to now he knew he could make them go back up because the oligarchs have enough bucks or Euros or yen to move markets quickly, knowing what the Fed Reserve and Treasury are going to do. It's all conjecture on my part, but the factual dots are out there and they *can* be connected in a number of ways, which could be random. But if they're not random ... it is scary.

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"Connecting dots" and "following the money" are all too often basically the same thing.

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Thank you for the ‘likes’, Heather. I am honored.

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The only thing the stock market has shown me is that the marketplace has shrunk so much and consolidated money into those who most influence the market that they cannot fail. There isn’t a scenario where they lose income. Hand out stimulus checks - pay the landlord. Afraid of leaving the house - use any number of silicone valley’s apps to fill the gap. And Americans feel that having their retirement tied to the market is their investment into their wealth. This is actually a sign of a bad economy, and with or without stimulus dollars, at some point, there won’t be any more money left to travel upwards.

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You may appreciate the Noam Chomsky film "Requiem for the American Dream." He presents such a lucid view of what is happening to us economically. It's very well done.

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Russia, if you’re listening, we’d still like to see his tax returns.

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Here in the UK this morning, the Guardian reports: "Two senators on Thursday requested a briefing with the Internal Revenue Service on whether personal taxpayer information has been stolen in the breach." [Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Ron Wyden of Oregon.]

Heather quotes a U.S. official as saying: “This is looking like it’s the worst hacking case in the history of America. They got into everything.” Isn't it interesting that Senators, in this era of principled, disinterested state-craft, seem most concerned about the risk of revelations about tax returns.

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To Susan Lorraine Knox's comment:

I am afraid that 50% of the Senators mentioned are Democrats - this is not just a "cold blooded Reptiliacan" response. To an outsider, it seems to me that a huge proportion of politicians in the US, from both parties, are driven by money, and might be apprehensive of a revelation from IRS files. It seem that a vanishingly small proportion are motivated by principles of good representative Government. Will we ever see another John Lewis? How many AOC's are there?

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AOC is uniquely gifted, but she is not alone. Thank goodness. We need to recognize their voices in the DC wilderness. And work to elect more progressives to national office. GA! Everyone. ❤️🤍💙

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It is more about the plutocrats then it is about a party. We are subject to the duplicity of the wealthy "masters." As Dr. Richardson has pointed out, our "democracy" was originally meant to protect only the propertied. It still is used for that purpose.

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The worms can still turn.

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Not enough.

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They are worried about social security numbers. Which have already been hacked multiple times over but the fiction that they are secure persists. It's not so much about their personal taxes as about the wholesale identity theft of Americans who have SS numbers.

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Any anyone’s tax info specifically? Perhaps the owner of those returns turned a blind eye? The handing over of America to the Russians is nearly complete. Traitor.

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As to Senator Wyden being concerned regarding the attack on the I.R.S.....he is the ranking member for the finance committee...that is his expertise. I would expect ranking members of each of the other committees to look into the attacks on their respective agencies.

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I hoped someone would come to the same conclusion as I did - this explains why Tя☭mp expected to win the election and it was the legitimate mail in votes that turned cost him the win since the malware wasn't able to change those votes! Lock him up!

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Maybe Trump eased cyber security BECAUSE Putin told him he could fix the election in Trump’s favor. But instead, Putin invaded America’s cyber infrastructure.

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Now that makes perfect (cynical) sense.

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As hard as it is, we have to be patient right now. We are uncertain that we have even stopped the bleeding, and are at an even earlier stage in our understanding of exactly what happened, who was involved, how it was done, and what the effects and ramifications are. Many cyber security professionals have long argued security needs would be underfunded and minimized until Cyber Pearl Harbor happened. Could this be that event? Yes, but even that isn’t sure at this point. We have integrated IT into our lives to the point it is impossible to distinguish where IT ends and business begins. That makes cyber a vector that is especially suited to assymetrical attack. The administration’s incredibly naive view of the world — whether of the Russians or other state actors capable of an attack of this nature — may very well have helped land us in this place. However tempting it is, though, we cannot rush to judgment about virtually anything at this point. It is far too important that we get it right. Unfortunately that takes time at a point where the human mind wants the security of answers it can grasp. The one thing we can be certain of at this point is that most if not all of those answers are not yet known. It is vital that our response hit the right targets and that we remediate all of the damage that can be identified. Unfortunately that will take lots of time and treasure.

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