Author: A.T.

How.  Does.  He.  DO this?  If you have a theory, please let me know.  (Thanks, Mel!)

And now . . .

The reason I got the DNC gig in the first place is that in 1996, a relatively small amount of money found it’s way into DNC coffers that, in a perfect world, the DNC would have detected had originated in China (not with the American donors through which it was funneled) — and rejected.

When this eventually came to light, a new set of DNC officers was installed.

It was not acceptable for even a small amount of foreign money to slip into our system — lest it theoretically help one candidate beat the other (though Clinton beat Dole by 379 to 159 in the Electoral College, and with 8 million more popular votes, so this tainted cash was clearly not decisive) . . . or lest it influence the recipient’s foreign policy (which assumes the candidate would be told of the crime, which I highly doubt; and that, if told, he would sell out America’s interests after winning reelection, out of gratitude, which I totally doubt).

Still, mistakes were made and heads rolled.

Here we are 20 years later, in an election that turned not on 8 million votes but on a hair (Clinton needed 77,744 more votes, on top of her 3 million-vote lead, to win the Electoral College) — that was the first difference.

And — the second — the extent of foreign meddling this time was way to deep for “meddle” even to be the right word.  The right word was attack.

It’s wonderfully disciplined and perhaps gentlemanly of almost all the talking heads to say, “not that Russian meddling affected the outcome of the election.”  But of course it almost surely did.  The Russians had thousands of agents working to tear down public opinion of Hillary Clinton.

Inside Russia’s Social Media War on America

. . . In 2016, Russia had used thousands of covert human agents and robot computer programs to spread disinformation referencing the stolen campaign emails of Hillary Clinton, amplifying their effect. . . .

And before you dismiss this as “re-litigating the election,” if you’re one of the 35% or so still pleased with its outcome, consider reading it anyway.

Most of this story is about potential future attacks:

. . . What chaos could Moscow unleash with thousands of Twitter handles that spoke in real time with the authority of the armed forces of the United States? At any given moment, perhaps during a natural disaster or a terrorist attack, Pentagon Twitter accounts might send out false information. As each tweet corroborated another, and covert Russian agents amplified the messages even further afield, the result could be panic and confusion.

For many Americans, Russian hacking remains a story about the 2016 election. But there is another story taking shape. Marrying a hundred years of expertise in influence operations to the new world of social media, Russia may finally have gained the ability it long sought but never fully achieved in the Cold War: to alter the course of events in the U.S. by manipulating public opinion. The vast openness and anonymity of social media has cleared a dangerous new route for antidemocratic forces. “Using these technologies, it is possible to undermine democratic government, and it’s becoming easier every day,” says Rand Waltzman of the Rand Corp., who ran a major Pentagon research program to understand the propaganda threats posed by social media technology.

Current and former officials at the FBI, at the CIA and in Congress now believe the 2016 Russian operation was just the most visible battle in an ongoing information war against global democracy. . . .

In one case last year, senior intelligence officials tell TIME, a Russian soldier based in Ukraine successfully infiltrated a U.S. social media group by pretending to be a 42-year-old American housewife and weighing in on political debates with specially tailored messages. In another case, officials say, Russia created a fake Facebook account to spread stories on political issues like refugee resettlement to targeted reporters they believed were susceptible to influence. . . .

Read the whole piece.

It’s fascinating and frightening, and anyone who loves America, whether on the left or the right — which is to say pretty much all of us — should be aware that right now, Putin’s winning.  Bigly.

Amazing three-minute video!  But it cuts off before the girl pufferfish arrives?  DOES his work get noticed?  And what about the ocean current destroying his creation?  And what does he EAT to fuel all this activity?  And if she does show up and they mate, what’s THAT like?  And where are his compatriots?  Is he too cool for school?

A few of the answers are here, but only a few.

And then there was Roger Ailes.  I’m not a big fan of speaking ill of the dead; but this guy did so much harm to our social fabric — right up there with Lee Atwater and Rush Limbaugh — that Matt Taibbi’s rant of remembrance may be worth sharing.

Doug:  “Thanks for the piece on Revlon and the update on other stocks. I’m wondering if you also still own AKBA, JNP, MRTX, CVV,SIGA, TTNP, and UTHR. Seems like a great time to sell if not.”

You have been reading this page for a long time!  For better or worse, I do still own AKBA, SIGA, and UTHR.

Donald Trump says Kim Jong-un is a “smart cookie”; James Comey is a “nut job.”

Think about it.

Der Spiegel says “Donald Trump has transformed the United States into a laughing stock and he is a danger to the world. He must be removed from the White House before things get even worse.”

I agree — but how dare a foreign power try to meddle with our presidency?  (Oh.  Wait. )

Can you find 12 minutes for this Closer Look?  Seth Meyers is terrific.  Laughter is the best medicine.

Along with climate change and maybe one or two others, the biggest theme we face, it seems to me, is how to organize ourselves to rejoice in — not implode over — the astonishing wealth and well-being technology is rushing to offer.

If there were a way to supply the nation with a reliable food supply with the toil of under 2% of the population instead of the 60% it once took — that would be good, right?  If there were an eco-friendly way to make beds and wash kitchen floors without human effort — that would be good, right?  (We’ll get to Mars long before we invent the self-making bed, but it’s still something to dream about.)

But as we rush toward a world where fewer and fewer human hours are required to supply the basics of a middle-class existence — where energy from the sun is virtually free, dramatically lowering the cost of everything and computers can do almost anything humans can do, but better and faster, without sleep — what will most people do?  How will they find purpose in life?  How will everyone get to share in the amazing world that the struggling and suffering of ten thousand generations of their ancestors have suddenly made possible, without many being made to feel useless and undeserving, while a few live like masters of the universe — and believe their good-fortune is not just self-made and well-deserved but over-taxed?

It is to ponder such questions that I commend “The Meaning of Life in a World Without Work” from the Guardian.

Have a great weekend.  (Don’t work too hard.)

It seems odd to talk about anything other than how we take the ball back from Vladimir Putin, for whom every day seems to be a new first and ten.

But life will go on, the globe will continue to warm, the seas will continue to rise, so here is the TED Talk I told you about — unlocking the climate puzzle.  It’s a brilliant free-market approach with real voter appeal.  Who doesn’t want to get a $2,000 check every year?

Meanwhile, Revlon was written up in Barron’s this past January as an enticing buy at $32:

. . . One top holder, Chris Mittleman, chief investment officer of Mittleman Brothers, thinks Revlon can command a multiple more in line with its peers’. He thinks the stock is worth $76—an enterprise value of 13.5 times his 2017 Ebitda estimate of $500 million. While the discount may persist as long as Perelman controls the company, Mittleman contends “that doesn’t mean the stock can’t rise dramatically while maintaining the discount.”

In the past six years, Revlon has grown revenue 51% and Ebitda 60%, by making market-share gains and acquisitions. In September, Revlon paid $900 million for cosmetics maker Elizabeth Arden, which has struggled in recent years as its celebrity fragrances have become less popular with consumers. The deal is expected to generate substantial synergies . . .

I didn’t buy, though I did go see War Paint, the Helena Rubinstein / Elizabeth Arden (and slightly Charles Revson) musical on Broadway. I once wrote a book about this world.

Well, here we are five months later and Revlon is around $20, down from $32, so at this price I did buy some.  You never know.  If not $76, it might get back to $32.

I continue to hold, among others, GEC, SPRT, HD, BKUTK, PRMRF, and of course (with money I can truly afford to lose) BOREF.  But for the most part, I wouldn’t think this is a time to rush into the market.

Give it up for Richard Cohen in the Washington Post:

Trump doesn’t embody what’s wrong with Washington. Pence does.

When history holds its trial to account for the Donald Trump presidency, Trump himself will be acquitted on grounds of madness. History will look at his behavior, his erratic and childish lying and his flamboyant ignorance of history itself and pronounce the man, like George III, a cuckoo for whom restraint, but not punishment, was necessary. Such will not be the case for Mike Pence, the toady vice president and the personification of much that has gone wrong in Washington.

On any given day, Pence will do his customary spot-on imitation of a bobblehead. Standing near Trump in the Oval Office, he will nod his head robotically as the president says one asinine thing after another and then, maybe along with others, he will be honored with a lie or a version of the truth so mangled by contradictions and fabrications that a day in the White House is like a week on LSD.

I pick on Pence because he is the most prominent and highest-ranked of President Trump’s lackeys. Like with all of them, Pence’s touching naivete and trust are routinely abused. He vouches for things that are not true — no talk of sanctions between Mike Flynn and the Russians, for instance, or more recently the reason James B. Comey was fired as FBI director. In both instances, the president either lied to him or failed to tell him the truth. The result was the same: The vice president appeared clueless.

I don’t feel an iota of sympathy for Pence. He was among a perfidious group of political opportunists who pushed Trump’s candidacy while having to know that he was intellectually, temperamentally and morally unfit for the presidency. They stuck with him as he mocked the disabled, belittled women, insulted Hispanics, libeled Mexicans and promiscuously promised the impossible and ridiculous — all that “Day One” nonsense like how the wall would be built and Mexico would pay for it.

I also have little sympathy for Sean Spicer, who plays the role of a bullied child. Trump routinely sends him out to lie to the American people, which he has done ever since his insistence that the inaugural crowd was bigger than the photos showed. He persists at his job even though Trump broadly hints that he will soon fire him. When Spicer is gone, he will be easily replaced. Washington is full of people who have no honor and no pride, either. 

I think of Steven Mnuchin, the treasury secretary, and Wilbur Ross, at Commerce. What possessed them to back Trump for the GOP nomination? Didn’t they know the sort of man he is? Did they think a lower tax rate and fewer regulations are worth risking American democracy and our standing in the world? When they watched the bizarre way Trump sacked Comey, were they proud of their candidate?

The swamp that Trump kept mentioning in the campaign is not really one of tangled bureaucratic mangroves, but of moral indifference. Washington always had a touch of that — after all, its business is politics — but Trump and his people have collapsed the space between lies and truth. The president uses one and then the other — whatever works at the time.

The president cannot be trusted. He cannot be believed. He has denigrated the news media, not for its manifest imperfections but for its routine and obligatory search for the truth. He has turned on the judiciary for its fidelity to the law and, once, for the ethnic heritage of a judge. Trump corrupts just about everything he touches. 

From most of the Republican Party comes not a whisper of rebuke. The congressional leadership is inert, cowed, scurrying to the White House for this or that ceremonial picture, like members of the erstwhile Politburo flanking Stalin atop Lenin’s mausoleum. They are appalled, but mute. They want to make the best of a bad situation, I know, and they fear the voters back home, but their complicity ought to be obvious even to them.

America is already worse off for Trump’s presidency. He was elected to make America great again, but his future is more like other nations’ sordid past. His own party has been sullenly complicit, showing how little esteem many politicians place in our most cherished values, not the least of them honesty and dignity. For all of them, an accounting is coming. When they are asked by history what they did during the Trump years, the worst of them will confess that they bobbled their heads like dumb dolls, while the best will merely say they kept their heads down.

Give it up, also, for David Brooks in the New York Times:

When The World Is Led By A Child

. . . There are three tasks that most mature adults have sort of figured out by the time they hit 25. Trump has mastered none of them. . . .

With a lead-in like that, I’m pretty sure I can count on you to read it all.

So how is it that the stock market has been so robust?  A lot of smart people seem to think — and I agree — there is more risk than reward in the market these days . . . and in the bond market and perhaps the real estate market.

I like to think most of the things I’m invested in are worth holding (famous last words), not least because much of what I’m invested in I basically have to hold: tiny stakes in private start-ups we hope will someday get bought by Johnson and Johnson or Google or somebody.  (Hey: Honest Tea got bought out by Coke.  It can happen.)

But if you’ve borrowed on margin to leverage your gains — for heaven’s sake pay off those loans.

And if you might have to sell stocks in the next two or three or five years to pay for necessities of one sort or another, consider selling that much of your portfolio now.  If the market just keeps going up and up, wonderful; the rest of your portfolio will do fine.  But markets generally do not just keep going up and up.

You’re going to hate me for this because — if it grabs you — there goes an hour of your otherwise well-planned day.  (Now who’s gonna take the dog to obedience school?)  But when I was sent this link last week . . .

Bill Clinton Didn’t Want His New York Times Crossword to Be Boring

. . . how could I resist?  (My dog went to collie heaven more than 50 years ago, so I had the morning free.)

When you finish, the screen suddenly changes to “ta-DA!” . . . and you can go back to your triumph and search for the Easter Egg.

When I found it, I almost started to cry.

Oh, to have this brilliant, competent, progressive, globally-respected man back helping humanity confront its urgent challenges.  Or, for that matter, to have his equally amazing wife or vice president in that role.

But — as President Clinton tells the Times — solving crosswords is meant to take your mind off  such cares . . . so forget all that and just get to work.

If you get stuck, scroll down . . .

. . . and further down . . .

. . . because I don’t want to ruin it for you if you don’t need hints . . .

. . . but I’m hoping you’ll find the Easter Egg, and who doesn’t need a hint or two? . . .

. . . okay: here’s one:  the capital of the Philippines is Manila, sure — but half a million Filipinos live in ILOILO CITY.  I hadn’t known that, but sure enough (2 down): it’s true.

. . .  click here if you’re stuck on 38 down.

. . . another clue for 9 across could be “sickle cell ——.”

. . . and (57 down) if you’re a fan of Chinese take-out, you’ve likely eaten his chicken . . .

. . . and if Kim Jong-Un goes nuts, you won’t want to be anywhere near 58 down, a city of more than 10 million souls.

If you’re still annoyed with me and have no further time to waste on this, click here for the Easter Egg (17, 35, and 57 across).

As America gets less great by the minute — if only, literally, by infrastructure decay — what can be done prior to November 6, 2018?

[Part One: how YOU can be most effective]

Tips from a high-level Senate staffer (thanks, Michael and Tee):

You should NOT be bothering with online petitions or emailing. Online contact basically gets immediately ignored, and letters pretty much get thrown in the trash unless you have a particularly strong emotional story – but even then it’s rarely worth the time it took you to craft that letter.

There are two things that all Progressives should be doing all the time right now, and they’re by far the most important things:

1. The best thing you can do to be heard and get your congressperson to pay attention: if they have town halls, go to them. Go to their local offices. If you’re in DC, try to find a way to go to an event of theirs. Go to the “mobile offices” that their staff hold periodically (all these times are located on each congressperson’s website). When you go, ask questions. A lot of them. And push for answers. The louder and more vocal and present you can be at those the better.

2. But, those in-person events don’t happen every day. So, the absolute most important thing that people should be doing every day is calling. You should make 6 calls a day: 2 each (DC office and your local office) to your 2 Senators and your 1 Representative. Calls are what all the Congresspeople pay attention to. Every single day, the Senior Staff and the Senator get a report of the 3 most-called-about topics for that day at each of their offices (in DC and local offices), and exactly how many people said what about each of those topics. They’re also sorted by zip code and area code.

Republican callers generally outnumber Democrat callers 4-1, and when it’s a particular issue that single-issue-voters pay attention to (like gun control, or planned parenthood funding, etc…), it’s often closer to 11-1.

2a. When calling the DC office, ask for the Staff member in charge of whatever you’re calling about (“Hi, I’d like to speak with the staffer in charge of Healthcare, please”). Local offices won’t always have specific ones, but they might. If you get transferred to that person, awesome. If you don’t, that’s ok – ask for their name, and then just keep talking to whoever answered the phone. Don’t leave a message (unless the office doesn’t pick up at all – then you can…but it’s better to talk to the staffer who first answered than leave a message for the specific staffer in charge of your topic).

2b. Give them your zip code. They won’t always ask for it, but make sure you give it to them, so they can mark it down. Extra points if you live in a zip code that traditionally votes for them, since they’ll want to make sure they get/keep your vote.

2c. If you can make it personal, make it personal. “I voted for you in the last election and I’m worried/happy/whatever” or “I’m a teacher, and I am appalled by Betsy DeVos,” or “as a single mother” or “as a white, middle class woman,” or whatever.

2d. Pick 1-2 specific things per day to focus on. Don’t go down a whole list – they’re figuring out what 1-2 topics to mark you down for on their lists, so, focus on 1-2 per day. Ideally something that will be voted on/taken up in the next few days, but it doesn’t really matter…even if there’s not a vote coming up in the next week, call anyway. It’s important that they just keep getting calls.

2e. Be clear on what you want – “I’m disappointed that the Senator…” or “I want to thank the Senator for their vote on…” or “I want the Senator to know that voting in _____ way is the wrong decision for our state because…” Don’t leave any ambiguity.

2f. They may get to know your voice/get sick of you – it doesn’t matter. The people answering the phones generally turn over every 6 weeks anyway, so even if they’re really sick of you, they’ll be gone in 6 weeks. From experience since the election: If you hate being on the phone & feel awkward, don’t worry…there are a bunch of scripts (Indivisible has some). After a few days of calling, it starts to feel a lot more natural. Put the 6 numbers in your phone all under Politician, which makes it really easy to click down the list each day!

Now go get ’em!!  And share this with others!

That’s plenty for today — indeed, for the week, month, and year, if you actually do it! — but for those with an interest in out-of-the-box thinking . . .

[Part Two: an idea to make Congress more productive — even before we fix gerrymandering]

My friend Peter Kinzler recently published this in The Hill: “How Just a Few Members of Congress Could Restore Regular Order.”

. . . The Congress used to work a five-day week. Members and sometimes their families socialized and got to know each other.  These inter-actions helped create the conditions for compromise. . . .

If the Congressional leadership is unwilling to restore the regular order that served it well historically, is there another way to do so?  The Constitution may hold part of the answer.  It states that a quorum for the Senate or the House must be present to do business. Both bodies get around it by assuming a quorum is present. . . .

There are, however, mechanisms to require an actual quorum. Under the Constitution and Senate rules, a single member can force 51 senators to come to the Senate chamber in order to continue business. The House has a higher requirement, but one that a small, determined minority could meet.

If members of Congress had to spend more time with their colleagues, the amount of real engagement might increase – and that could lead to more action on the people’s priorities. . . .

Nor could the Republicans just change the rules, says Peter.  The definition of a quorum resides in the Constitution.  And “were the Republicans to try to require more than one senator to raise the point of order, Democrats could accuse them of unconstitutional behavior, forcing them to explain to their constituents why they changed the rules so they wouldn’t have to do their jobs.”

The idea wouldn’t be to have a quorum sitting in each chamber at all times . . . just to require it when important issues were up for consideration — and frequently enough to get them used to actually working with each other.  Perhaps even getting to know each other.

It’s an interesting notion, anyway.

In the meantime, see Part One, above.

Start with this wonderful clip of the earthrise — as seen by three human beings orbiting the moon.  (Thanks, Glenn!)

And then “This meditative brain candy for the soul.”  (Thanks, Pete!)

Have a cosmic weekend.

Conservative columnist George Will (even before the Comey firing).  From the Washington Post:

Trump Has A Dangerous Disability

It is urgent for Americans to think and speak clearly about President Trump’s inability to do either. This seems to be not a mere disinclination but a disability. It is not merely the result of intellectual sloth but of an untrained mind bereft of information and married to stratospheric self-confidence. . . .

Americans have placed vast military power at the discretion of this mind, a presidential discretion that is largely immune to restraint by the Madisonian system of institutional checks and balances. So, it is up to the public to quarantine this presidency by insistently communicating to its elected representatives a steady, rational fear of this man whose combination of impulsivity and credulity render him uniquely unfit to take the nation into a military conflict.

Read the whole thing?  (“Gusts of factoids that cling like lint to a disordered mind.”)

And speaking of bullies (do you have kids? grandkids?), here are six minutes from California Congressman John Garamendi: “the children are listening” . . . along with the great Peter Yarrow singing the song it inspired (click the arrow just above the speech).

Don’t we ever miss these guys: