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Photos by: joanneleon. September, 2013.
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Creep by The Pretenders
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Tor Terrorist (from your friendly neighborhood intelligence agency's EGOTISTICALGIRAFFE presentation). I bet you think I'm making this shit up. More about this and the latest revelations from the Snowden files down below. I've seen the #geekwars hashtag floating around on Twitter about that, by the way.
Wall Street Journal got a statement from a senior administration official, off the record, which is their default policy with the media.
White House's Hard Line on Shutdown, Debt Ceiling Has Risks Attached
Said a senior administration official: "We are winning...It doesn't really matter to us" how long the shutdown lasts "because what matters is the end result."
Jay Carney jumped on that quickly, but note that he doesn't deny that a senior administration official said it.
The president doesn't deny that a senior administration official said it either. Maybe now, between this and the fact that both parties are going way over the top in the kabuki game, more people will realize they're being set up and this is all a scripted, manufactured crisis, manufactured shutdown, manufactured chaos to justify a grand bargain of some kind. This might take awhile, and the first step might be setting up the conferees for a deal in November, but what's going on is clear already and we're not even close to the end of this thing. Wall Street has hardly even begun flexing their muscles, though the conversation has almost entirely pivoted from Obamacare to the debt ceiling/default.
‘We’re winning’: A ‘game’-changer?
President Obama was asked whether he was “winning” earlier Friday and responded, “there’s no winning” and “no one is winning.”
I tend to think the White House might want to speed things up for a few reasons, some of them tragic. Well the whole thing is tragic for the American people, whose government is going to extraordinary lengths to screw them over, but the two horrific incidents in DC over the past two days may very well have been related to the sensational manufactured crises designed and implemented by both parties. Miriam Carey, if the stories are to be believed, had ideas about her town being shut down and about surveillance. Now, I don't have a lot of faith in what is being said about her right now (constantly 24/7) by CNN but those two reasons seem to have come from someone close to her. And then yesterday, a man set himself on fire on the Mall. Nobody has offered a reason yet and there has been no statement from his family or friends but the cable news channels are inferring that it was related to the chaotic crises going on in Washington. It's hard not to recall
Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisan fruit vendor who self emolated in protest and who was the catalyst for the Arab Spring. Because of that, it would not surprise me if the media keeps that story as low key as possible.
The other reason why I think that the White Hous and the party leaders might want to speed things up is that after more than a week of solid 24/7 obsession about this, both in the media and on the press conference stages and on the floors of the House and Senate, the poll numbers are a bit squishy and not all that definitive.
GOP finds its shutdown message
Two polls out late in the week found the public is blaming Republicans for the shutdown. A Fox News poll found 42 percent of voters blaming the GOP, with 32 blaming Democrats, while a CBS poll found the split at 44 percent to 35 percent.
CAF Damon Silvers starting to prep the base for the Grand Bargain, claiming it's the extremist Republicans and Wall Street forcing him to do it.
Return of the Grand Bargain, and Other Tales From the Kidnap House
But here’s the real punch line—the whole thing, the hostage taking and the Grand Bargain scam, depends on Wall Street believing that in the end President Obama will cave. Both the House Republican extremists and the Wall Street scam artists believe that they can run this dangerous, destructive game with no risk because the president will in the end give the House Republicans some version of what both the House Republicans and the Wall Street crowd want because he is afraid of the possibility of a default on the nation’s debts.
But if the president stands firm, and makes clear he works for the American people and has sworn an oath to defend the Constitution, he will quickly separate the House hostage-takers from the Wall Street con men. And then this whole unnecessary, profoundly destructive cycle of events that was set in motion in 2011 will come to an end.
And that’s why people need to tell the president, “stand tall, we are with you. No negotiating with hostage-takers. Not about the Affordable Care Act, not about the Grand Bargain and certainly not about cuts to Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid, or more giveaways for big corporations that outsource jobs. You won the election. You must defend democracy and you must stand up for the 99 percent, and that means no more rewarding hostage-takers.” And if the Wall Street geniuses come back to the White House in a panic, the president should send them down the street to the House Republicans. The bankers know the way there.
Just a little reminder. There are a number of them that I really should collect and put into a diary. The Gene Sperling sequester memo is another one, and various Obama statements going all the way back to 2009. And of course the Durbin breakfast meeting sponsored by the Wall Street Journal last spring. The Catfood Committee and the Super Congress. Joe Lieberman letting the cat out of the bag on the Senate floor. The Baucus top secret tax loopholes, sealed for 50 years. Anyway, here's a backstage chat between Bill Clinton and Paul Ryan, a glimpse of the two wings of the Corporate 1% Party in action.
May 2011: Rep. Paul Ryan Talks With Bill Clinton on Entitlement Reform
Digby finds an announcement of a Politico event on Monday with Gene Sperling.
The Village
THIS MONDAY: POLITICO PLAYBOOK BREAKFAST WITH JASON FURMAN & GENE SPERLING
Presented by Bank of America
Joe Firestone over at Naked Capitalism. It's a long article where he lays out his guesses, etc.
Joe Firestone: Stop “the Great Betrayal” – Kabuki Update
It now looks like the big media and leaders in both parties are no longer focusing on the Government Shutdown crisis, but are now moving on to the notion that the shutdown is melding with the upcoming probable breaching of the debt limit to create a combined mother of all fiscal crises. Along with this, the media and many politicians, encouraged by the President’s standing “strong, strong, strong,” are now directing attention away from whether ObamaCare will be delayed or compromised, to other types of ransom the Administration might pay in return for both re-opening the Government and also providing an increase of an undetermined amount in the debt limit. Meanwhile there are reports that under increasing Wall Street pressure John Boehner is preparing to negotiate with House Democrats and allow a vote to pass a CR and a clean debt limit increase bill, in return for concessions he can take back to his caucus.
TINA does not apply in this case, and the President’s choices are not limited to just refusing to negotiate or giving in to ransom demands whether focused on Obamacare, the Keystone Pipeline, entitlement cuts,“tax reform frameworks” or any other measures that give “tea party” Republicans “the respect” they think is due them. By continuing to frame things in this way, the media and politicians in both parties are echoing the Administration’s framing of the situation and absolving the President of his share of the blame for the debt limit crisis. They are also preparing the way for a compromise, that will, almost certainly, result in hurtful cuts to Government spending including renewed consideration of “the Great Betrayal,” also known as the Grand Bargain, and probably passage of the chained CPI cuts to Social Security over the objections of a large majority of the American people.
Bill Black
Government Close Down - Another Grand Betrayal in the Works?
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Guardian, from the Snowden files. You've got to see this. I'm just laying out the latest articles from the Snowden files now and will have more to say later.
'Tor Stinks' presentation – read the full document
Top-secret presentation says 'We will never be able to de-anonymize all Tor users all the time' but 'with manual analysis we can de-anonymize a very small fraction of Tor users
NSA and GCHQ target Tor network that protects anonymity of web users
Top-secret documents detail repeated efforts to crack Tor
• US-funded tool relied upon by dissidents and activists
• Core security of network remains intact but NSA has some success attacking users' computers
• Bruce Schneier: the NSA's attacks must be made public
• Attacking Tor: the technical details
• 'Peeling back the layers with Egotistical Giraffe' – document
• 'Tor Stinks' presentation – full document
• Tor: 'The king of high-secure, low-latency anonymity'
Attacking Tor: how the NSA targets users' online anonymity
Secret servers and a privileged position on the internet's backbone used to identify users and attack target computers
The online anonymity network Tor is a high-priority target for the National Security Agency. The work of attacking Tor is done by the NSA's application vulnerabilities branch, which is part of the systems intelligence directorate, or SID. The majority of NSA employees work in SID, which is tasked with collecting data from communications systems around the world.
According to a top-secret NSA presentation provided by the whistleblower Edward Snowden, one successful technique the NSA has developed involves exploiting the Tor browser bundle, a collection of programs designed to make it easy for people to install and use the software. The trick identified Tor users on the internet and then executes an attack against their Firefox web browser.
Obama Told Israel Attack on Syria Was Imminent on August 31
Said War Would Begin That Weekend
Underscoring President Obama’s dramatic overestimation of his administration’s ability to sell a war against Syria to the American public, Israeli officials have revealed that they were contacted by the US on August 31 and told an attack was imminent, and would begin in the next “24-48 hours.”
The retired intelligence professionals, VIPS, are still vigilant on the Syrian chemical weapons situation.
Time for Proof on Syrian CW Attack
Memorandum to: Secretary of State John Kerry and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov
From: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
We applaud your moves toward a peaceful resolution of the Syria crisis that will lead to the destruction of all chemical stockpiles possessed by the Syrian Government.
At the same time, we strongly believe the world has the right to know the truth about the chemical attack near Damascus. We note that both sides continue to claim possession of compelling evidence regarding the true perpetrators of this crime.
We therefore call upon Russia and the United States to release all the intelligence and corroborative information related to the 21 August chemical attack so that the international community can make a judgment regarding what is actually known and not known.
Wicked smaaart. Maybe even scary smaaart. You can always tell a brilliant idea by it's simplicity and elegance.
Surprisingly simple scheme for self-assembling robots
Small cubes with no exterior moving parts can propel themselves forward, jump on top of each other, and snap together to form arbitrary shapes.
In 2011, when an MIT senior named John Romanishin proposed a new design for modular robots to his robotics professor, Daniela Rus, she said, “That can’t be done.”
Two years later, Rus showed her colleague Hod Lipson, a robotics researcher at Cornell University, a video of prototype robots, based on Romanishin’s design, in action. “That can’t be done,” Lipson said.
In November, Romanishin — now a research scientist in MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) — Rus, and postdoc Kyle Gilpin will establish once and for all that it can be done, when they present a paper describing their new robots at the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.
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Stop Watching Us.
The revelations about the National Security Agency's surveillance apparatus, if true, represent a stunning abuse of our basic rights. We demand the U.S. Congress reveal the full extent of the NSA's spying programs.
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Blog Posts and Tweets of Interest
The Evening Blues
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The Pretenders - I'll Stand By You