Democratic primary watch

[Nodack]

An oldie but a goodie.

[Nodack]

Biden, Gates, Musk: Bitcoin scam breaches some of world's most prominent Twitter accounts
Suspected bitcoin scammers grabbed control of accounts belonging to the rich and famous, as well as lower-profile accounts, for more than two hours.
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/s ... n-n1233948

The Twitter accounts of Barack Obama, Jeff Bezos, Joe Biden, Elon Musk and many other high-profile people and companies became pawns Wednesday in one of the most visible cyberscams in the internet's history.



A tweet typical of the attack sent from the account of Bill Gates, the software mogul who is the world's second-wealthiest person, promised to double all payments sent to his Bitcoin address for the next 30 minutes.

"Everyone is asking me to give back, and now is the time," the tweet said. "You send $1,000, I send you back $2,000."

[Mori Chu]

I watched the attack unfold yesterday on my Twitter. Pretty amazing. It sounds like they had access to internal Twitter tools that they used to change the email addresses of many prominent accounts, then they reset the accounts' passwords and took control. The attackers claimed to have bribed a Twitter employee to get access to the tools. Wow.

It doesn't sound like they made off with too much money, but I worry about how easy it is to disrupt such an important service as Twitter. Will more devious attackers compromise the service just before our November election?

[Indy]

I watched the attack unfold yesterday on my Twitter. Pretty amazing. It sounds like they had access to internal Twitter tools that they used to change the email addresses of many prominent accounts, then they reset the accounts' passwords and took control. The attackers claimed to have bribed a Twitter employee to get access to the tools. Wow.

It doesn't sound like they made off with too much money, but I worry about how easy it is to disrupt such an important service as Twitter. Will more devious attackers compromise the service just before our November election?

I saw a 'report' that estimated hundreds of thousands, and potentially into 7 figures.

[Nodack]

I worry about how easy it is to disrupt such an important service as Twitter.

I don’t consider Twitter an important service. Don’t even have an account or have any interest in one. I even closed my Facebook account after some guy from Taiwan claimed to have my passwords and threatened to do bad things if I didn’t send him 1000 bit coins. I ignored him and closed it. I only received a few more emails before he gave up.

[Indy]

I worry about how easy it is to disrupt such an important service as Twitter.

I don’t consider Twitter an important service. Don’t even have an account or have any interest in one. I even closed my Facebook account after some guy from Taiwan claimed to have my passwords and threatened to do bad things if I didn’t send him 1000 bit coins. I ignored him and closed it. I only received a few more emails before he gave up.

I applaud that, but also you have to admit you are in the vast minority of adults in the US. Isn't twitter in the top 3 information/news sources in the US? TV/Cable, FB, Twitter........... news papers.

[Nodack]

I have no doubt of their popularity. I just don’t have any interest

[Indy]

I have no doubt of their popularity. I just don’t have any interest

I get it, I was just debating the "importance" aspect.

[3rdside]

Article from Bloomberg - normally I can't see them / don't know why I could this one.

One of the points is China wanting Trump to win - any US adversary would for obvious reasons - and there's no way, imo, he can now win without cheating .. but he's got pretty much got all the dictators on his side no doubt prepared to help him do that.

Stopping the cheating I guess is not going to be easy - said with no evidence - and I forgot he has the owner of the post office in his back pocket, which hardly gives me a good feeling ..

Spoiler: show/hide

The World Has Changed Too Much for Biden to Erase the Trump Effect. It isn’t just America that’s moved on.

At last year’s Munich Security Conference, an annual gathering of military chiefs and political leaders, former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden made a promise to America’s allies: “This too shall pass,” he assured them, “we will be back.”

There was little doubt as to what “this” referred to — Donald Trump’s America — or who would be coming back. Biden, now running for president and ahead in opinion polls for November’s vote, might just have the opportunity to make good his pledge.

Yet returning the U.S. and its alliances to a time before Trump is probably unachievable, and only in part because he has changed the U.S. since his January 2017 inauguration in ways that may be irreversible. Just as important, the rest of the world changed too.

Joe Biden HP Social GETTY sub
Joe Biden campaigns in Dunmore, Pennsylvania on July 9.Photographer: Spencer Platt/Getty Images
More U.S. allies have their own versions of Trump in office, from Poland to the Philippines, while others have absorbed at least elements of his nationalist agenda. Even close partners have learned to be wary of a less predictable U.S. partner.

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Above all, China has shed its former reticence to confront Washington — including through a recently reported deal to bankroll and arm Iran — creating a radically altered geopolitical landscape for any White House occupant.

“Even under Biden, as old-school Atlanticist as you can get, it will be a long road back for the United States, and some things have changed forever,” says Adam Thomson, a former U.K. ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization who now heads the European Leadership Network, a think tank that draws on former defense officials from across the continent.

“Europeans will never be quite so sure of the U.S. security guarantee; Iranians and many others will never completely trust a U.S. signature on a treaty; and everyone will want to be less dependent — if they can — on U.S. trade and the U.S. dollar,” Thomson says.

For sure, a Biden victory would be celebrated in many capitals, even if initially only because it would mean an end to dealing with the current administration. It’s an open secret in Berlin that Chancellor Angela Merkel has given up on trying to work with Trump. Plus, Biden has said he would seek to repair damage. His campaign pledges to recommit the U.S. to the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change, from which Trump withdrew U.S. support, and convene a global Summit of Democracies aimed at renewing a sense of common purpose.

President Trump Hosts Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel At The White House
Angela Merkel speaks as Donald Trump listens during a news conference at the White House in Washington, D.C. in 2018.Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg
In the Middle East, the former Vice President says he would oppose the Israeli government’s drive to annex about 30% of the West Bank and “reverse Donald Trump’s undercutting of peace” there. He also says he’d take a more skeptical approach to Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, and recommit to the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, which Trump left in 2018, so long as the Islamic Republic returns to compliance.

While such action would ease some significant areas of discord, it’s unlikely to be enough.

The Democratic candidate recognizes there would be a deep hole for him to dig out of, from economic recession deepened by mishandling of the pandemic to abandoned arms control treaties with Russia, weakened alliances and lost time on climate change, according to campaign adviser Jeff Prescott.

Merkel, for one, is well aware that relations with the U.S. can’t go back to the old normal, according to a high-ranking German official who asked not to be named discussing bilateral relations. Too many things have happened and the world has moved on, the official said.

Take the tussle over Nord Stream 2, a 1,200 km (745 mile) marine pipeline that would allow Russia to send more natural gas direct to Germany, robbing Ukraine and other eastern European countries of transit fees and undermining the ability of U.S. liquid natural gas to compete. Opposition to the project in Washington goes well beyond Trump. A group of Democratic and Republican Senators proposed in June to expand sanctions aimed at preventing the pipeline’s completion. Germany considered asking the European Union to retaliate, should that become U.S. law.

Nord Stream 2 is just one of several areas that have caused Europeans to wonder how much of the changing U.S. treatment of allies in recent years was just about Trump and how much is permanent, according to Jonathan Hackenbroich of the European Council on Foreign Relations.

“It’s a completely new thing that the U.S. would go as far as sanctioning German officials because of ultimately economic transactions,” said Hackenbroich, who heads the ECFR’s Task Force for Protecting Europe from Economic Coercion.

The result is a long term push to reduce the dollar dependency that makes even close allies vulnerable to economic pressure from the U.S. Treasury. The European Commission has begun to design dollar avoidance vehicles with the aim of curbing the power of the greenback.

The most important change since Biden left office lies in China. President Xi Jinping has been tightening control at home and asserting power abroad in ways that would make the more cooperative, Obama-era U.S.-China relationship difficult to reproduce.

“When it comes to trade, either we’re going to write the rules of the road for the world or China is,” Biden wrote last year, attacking Trump for his decision to pull out of the budding Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade deal for Pacific Rim nations aimed at balancing Beijing’s economic influence.

Trump Xi GETTY Sub
Trump and Xi in Beijing in 2017.Photographer: Nicolas Asfouri/AFP/Getty Images
Current and former officials in Beijing say the Communist Party leadership would prefer to see Trump win in November, fearing that Biden would be better able to unify Eastern allies to resist China’s influence. And according to Biden’s campaign team, they’re right.

“He’s been very clear we have to rally our allies to take on China’s behavior,” said Prescott, Biden’s adviser. “We can’t insult our friends to do that.”

Core U.S. allies aren’t quite what they were, either. French President Emmanuel Macron last year called the U.S.-dominated NATO alliance “brain dead” and echoed Trump in casting doubt on the collective security guarantee at its heart. Macron’s been pushing for EU member states to integrate their defense and foreign policy resources so they’re less reliant on U.S. security guarantees.

The U.K., caught between the economic dislocation threatened by Brexit and a coronavirus-induced recession, is likely to lack the means to continue as America’s go-to military partner for far flung operations.

Certainly the prospect of strategic U.S. re-engagement under Biden would be widely welcomed in Africa, which Trump dismissed in 2018 as home to “shithole countries,” said Andrea Zanon, a former head of Middle East Risk Management at the World Bank. “The U.S. is well placed to offer an alternative to China by bringing development, technology and capitalism together,” he said. “Biden will have to be bold.”

Yet how bold Biden could afford to be at a time of twin health and economic crises at home is open to question. “If Biden were to be inaugurated in the third week of January at the age of 78, he would be facing interlinked challenges that are an order of magnitude greater than a young and energetic Obama had to face in 2009,” said Constanze Stelzenmueller, senior fellow at the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

Indeed, according to Biden’s campaign his top priority, and his top tool for addressing foreign policy challenges, would be investing at home.

The next president will “have to address the world as it is in January 2021,” Biden wrote in a Foreign Affairs article earlier this year. “Picking up the pieces will be an enormous task.”

— With assistance by Tyler Pager

[3rdside]

What I would absolutely bet money on is Trump having an operation going to work out exactly how cheating the election might work. It's his only chance and he now knows it.

[3rdside]

And I just can't get over this photo of Trump at the top of the page - he's a fucking looney tune and doesn't the photo show it:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... s-pandemic

[Superbone]

He's a freak show inside and out.

[ShelC]

Get ready...

https://www.yahoo.com/gma/13-shot-illin ... ories.html

President Donald Trump is refusing to publicly commit to accepting the results of the upcoming White House election, recalling a similar threat he made weeks before the 2016 vote, as he scoffs at polls showing him lagging behind Democrat Joe Biden. Trump says it's too early to make such an ironclad guarantee.

“I have to see. Look ... I have to see,” Trump told moderator Chris Wallace during a wide-ranging interview on ”Fox News Sunday." “No, I’m not going to just say yes. I’m not going to say no, and I didn’t last time either.

“First of all, I’m not losing, because those are fake polls,” Trump said in the taped interview, which aired Sunday. “They were fake in 2016 and now they’re even more fake. The polls were much worse in 2016.”

[Nodack]

Trump skirting Congress to install loyalists in the Pentagon
Experts and Democratic lawmakers alike decried the campaign to root out those seen as disloyal and replace them with Trump acolytes.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/07/1 ... gon-366922

[ShelC]

So do we really think if he loses in November that he and Barr, McConnell and Miller are just going to let Biden and the Dems wipe out all of these hirings/positions that serve Trump and GOP interests? They're not making these moves just to last a few months.

[3rdside]

Yeah, and the courts stacking as well. If Trump is a criminal - and I think he is, with Obstruction of Justice, Emoluments Clause, Ukraine, and his tax returns promising to show up show some ugly things - and assuming he loses, then I'd expect all his appointments could and should be reviewed.

This election is going to be ugly as hell.

[Mori Chu]

This article talks about options for what might happen if Trump refuses to accept the election results on Election Night, and/or tries to block mail-in votes from being counted.

https://thebulwark.com/get-ready-for-th ... n-recount/

[ShelC]

See what's happening in Portland? Expect that in every major city.

[Cap]

This article talks about options for what might happen if Trump refuses to accept the election results on Election Night, and/or tries to block mail-in votes from being counted.

https://thebulwark.com/get-ready-for-th ... n-recount/

“If”?

[Mori Chu]

See what's happening in Portland? Expect that in every major city.

I think so. I think Trump and Barr will send men to stand guard around polling places, wearing prominent "ICE" logos, to scare off Democratic voters of Mexican ethnicity. And I think he'll use force to try to stop ballot counting in places where he has a lead if the mail-in ballots have not been counted yet.