Cambridge Analytica, who stands accused of stealing data from over 50 million Facebook users, is working overtime to stop media outlets from issuing reports revealing their tactics.

Courtesy of The Hill: 

Cambridge Analytica is trying to prevent an undercover report by London’s Channel 4 News that shows the firm’s CEO Alexander Nix speaking candidly about the firm’s practices from airing, according to the Financial Times. 

Reporters for Channel 4 posed as prospective clients and secretly filmed a number of meetings with the firm. 

The Financial Times's report did not make clear how the data firm was working to stop the report from airing. 

Cambridge Analytica also threatened to sue the Guardian to stop this story about the guy who blew the whistle on their Facebook data theft from being published: 

The Observer also received the first of three letters from Cambridge Analytica threatening to sue Guardian News and Media for defamation. We are still only just starting to understand the maelstrom of forces that came together to create the conditions for what Mueller confirmed last month was “information warfare”. But Wylie offers a unique, worm’s-eye view of the events of 2016. Of how Facebook was hijacked, repurposed to become a theatre of war: how it became a launchpad for what seems to be an extraordinary attack on the US’s democratic process. 

Wylie oversaw what may have been the first critical breach. Aged 24, while studying for a PhD in fashion trend forecasting, he came up with a plan to harvest the Facebook profiles of millions of people in the US, and to use their private and personal information to create sophisticated psychological and political profiles. And then target them with political ads designed to work on their particular psychological makeup. 

“We ‘broke’ Facebook,” he says. 

And he did it on behalf of his new boss, Steve Bannon.

Clearly that didn't work.

In another piece by the Guardian that I am sure Cambridge Analytica would like to make go away, we learn that the guy who orchestrated the data mining on Facebook has ties to Russia: 

Aleksandr Kogan, the Cambridge University academic who orchestrated the harvesting of Facebook data, had previously unreported ties to a Russian university, including a teaching position and grants for research into the social media network, the Observer has discovered. Cambridge Analytica, the data firm he worked with – which funded the project to turn tens of millions of Facebook profiles into a unique political weapon – also attracted interest from a key Russian firm with links to the Kremlin. 

Energy firm Lukoil, which is now on the US sanctions list and has been used as a vehicle of government influence, saw a presentation on the firm’s work in 2014. It began with a focus on voter suppression in Nigeria, and Cambridge Analytica also discussed “micro-targeting” individuals on social media during elections. 

The revelations come at a time of intense US scrutiny of Russian meddling in the 2016 US presidential election, with 13 Russians criminally charged last month with interfering to help Donald Trump.

Man no matter what the story, it always links back to Russia in some way or another. 

By the way Robert Mueller has requested all emails between the Trump campaign and Cambridge Analytica, so this party is far from over.

Interesting that not only is the Trump White House all super double secret about what they are up to, but so is just about everybody who helped them to get there in the first place.

The Jehovah Witnesses would rather pay a fine of $4,000 a day rather than turn over documents about sexual abuse within the church.

Courtesy of The Week:

The Jehovah's Witnesses have refused to turn over secret documents regarding alleged child sex abuse. And it's getting very, very costly. 

A new report from Reveal details how the religion has been mandated to pay $4,000 for every day it doesn't release the documents. So far, the tab has reached $2 million. 

It all stems from a court case in which a former Jehovah's Witness and sexual abuse victim sued the religion for not warning congregants they were practicing alongside a confessed child sexual abuser. The accused, Gonzalo Campos, has admitted to abusing children. But the religion's headquarters knew of his conviction and didn't tell the congregation, court documents show. 

Reveal has obtained internal Jehovah's Witness documents that suggest this case is part of a much larger cover-up. One of the documents, for example, claims religious elders have been told to keep child abuse allegations a secret since at least 1989.

Okay if you are willing to pay over 2 million dollars in fines rather than reveal documents about sexual abuse that clearly means that there is rampant sexual abuse in this church. 

I have long heard that there is an epidemic of sexual abuse within the Jehovah's Witnesses and this certainly lends credibility to those claims.

The night that Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee disappeared he later turned up on White House property for a clandestine rendezvous. Update!

Remember when we reported that the night before Devin Nunes ran to the White House to spill his guts he had received a phone call and suddenly disappeared into the night?

Well as it turns out we now know where he went.

Courtesy of the New York Times:

Representative Devin Nunes of California, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, met on the White House grounds with a source who showed him secret American intelligence reports a day before he revealed that President Trump or his closest associates may have been “incidentally” swept up in foreign surveillance by American spy agencies.

Wait. So the night before he ran to the White House to tell Donald Trump this disturbing news, he first went to the White House to learn it himself?

Uh...WTF?

Well here was Nunes' supposed explanation courtesy of CNN: 

The California Republican confirmed to CNN in a phone interview Monday he was on the White House grounds that day -- but he said he was not in the White House itself. (Other buildings, including the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, are on the same grounds.)

Nunes went to the building because he needed a secure area to view the information, he told CNN. He said he didn't believe the President nor any of his West Wing team were aware he was there, and the White House said Monday it learned of Nunes' visit through media reports and directed any questions to the congressman.

Uh...okay.

So Nunes HAD to visit the White House grounds in order to view the confidential information in a "secure room." However as many pundits have pointed out there are secure rooms all over Washington including in the Capitol building where Nunes works.

CNN also reports that a government official said Nunes was seen Tuesday night at the National Security Council offices of the Eisenhower building, which has a secure room, and that he arrived and left alone.

So doesn't that mean that whoever gave him this "information" was already IN the Eisenhower building? And did no one see that person arrive or leave? (Update: I just saw Nunes on CNN again and he is now claiming that he had this information for quite awhile, and did not just receive it the night in question. A statement that literally just makes all of this even more confusing.)

CNN further reports that members of Congress, like the general public, must be cleared and escorted into facilities on White House grounds.

Which of course immediately brings up the question, "Who the fuck let Nunes onto the White House grounds? And how could Trump or any of his staff NOT know he was there?"

What does that Cheshire cat always say? "Curiouser and curiouser?"

By the way with these new revelations House Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is demanding that Nunes be removed from this investigation.

And Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, is saying the same.

Actually I think that at this point this is not enough and that the FBI should subpoena his ass and get to the bottom of all of this cloak and dagger bullshit. Something is WAY off about all of this.

Update: I think we all saw this coming.

BREAKING: @DevinNunes tells reporters he will not step down after @RepAdamSchiff calls for his recusal, says "everything is politics here"

— Katherine Gypson (@kgyp) March 27, 2017

Upgrades by the State Department as to what is "confidential" or "secret" find that former Secretaries of State Condollezza Rice and Colin Powell may now be in violation of the guidelines as well. Oops.

Courtesy of CNN: 

Colin Powell and top staffers for Condoleezza Rice received classified information through personal email accounts, according to a new report from State Department investigators. 

Hillary Clinton has received severe criticism -- particularly from Republicans and computer security experts -- for using her personal email account while serving as the nation's top diplomat under President Barack Obama. 

Thursday's revelation about the two secretaries of state under former President George W. Bush gave her supporters an opportunity to claim the Democratic presidential candidate was being singled out over the practice. 

The emails were discovered during a State Department review of the email practices of the past five secretaries of state. It found that Powell received two emails that were classified and that the "immediate staff" working for Rice received 10 emails that were classified. 

The information was deemed either "secret" or "confidential," according to the report.

So I assume that we can now look forward to Condi and Colin having to sit before some Congressional investigative committee as well now, right?

Oh no I'm sorry that only happens if your name is Clinton.

Colin Powell is not exactly happy that he has been dragged into this BS either:

"The State Department cannot now say they were classified then because they weren't," Powell said. "If the Department wishes to say a dozen years later they should have been classified that is an opinion of the Department that I do not share." 

"I have reviewed the messages and I do not see what makes them classified," Powell said.

Okay we need to move onto a new scandal, this one is boring.

I think the new shiny object is that Hillary is supposedly the mascot of Wall Street.

Well at least it's relatively new.

Is Hillary Clinton a closet Fundamentalist?

So yesterday one of you intrepid people sent me a 2007 Mother Jones story that I had never seen before. 

It ties Clinton to a secretive religious organization that has strong connections with, and influence over, numerous political leaders.

This from the Mother Jones article:

In fact, Clinton's God talk is more complicated—and more deeply rooted—than either fans or foes would have it, a revelation not just of her determination to out-Jesus the GOP, but of the powerful religious strand in her own politics. Over the past year, we've interviewed dozens of Clinton's friends, mentors, and pastors about her faith, her politics, and how each shapes the other. And while media reports tend to characterize Clinton's subtle recalibration of tone and style as part of the Democrats' broader move to recapture the terrain of "moral values," those who know her say there's far more to it than that. 

Through all of her years in Washington, Clinton has been an active participant in conservative Bible study and prayer circles that are part of a secretive Capitol Hill group known as the Fellowship. Her collaborations with right-wingers such as Senator Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) and former Senator Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) grow in part from that connection. "A lot of evangelicals would see that as just cynical exploitation," says the Reverend Rob Schenck, a former leader of the militant anti-abortion group Operation Rescue who now ministers to decision makers in Washington. "I don't....there is a real good that is infected in people when they are around Jesus talk, and open Bibles, and prayer."

The article goes into incredible detail concerning the organization, much of which sounds like a description of a slightly watered down version of Jerry Falwell's ministry,  and Hillary's involvement. 

It ends with this sobering assessment:

Then, as now, Clinton confounded secularists who recognize public faith only when it comes wrapped in a cornpone accent. Clinton speaks instead the language of nondenominationalism—a sober, eloquent appreciation of "values," the importance of prayer, and "heart" convictions—which liberals, unfamiliar with the history of evangelical coalition building, mistake for a tidy, apolitical accommodation, a personal separation of church and state. Nor do skeptical voters looking for political opportunism recognize that, when Clinton seeks guidance among prayer partners such as Coe and Brownback, she is not so much triangulating—much as that may have become second nature—as honoring her convictions. In her own way, she is a true believer.

For an Atheist who is desperate to get religion out of politics this makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand straight up.

It should also be noted that among those who have been confirmed as belonging to the Fellowship are Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, Sen Ken Salazar, Rep. Jeff Session, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick, Rep. Louie Gohmert, and several Watergate conspirators.

They are also, it appears, behind the infamous National Prayer Breakfast, which every President seems honor bound to attend.

Author Jeff Sharlet wrote a very revealing book about this group in 2008. 

This is from an Alternet article about that book: 

The roster of current and former Family members includes senators, congressmen, Fortune 500 CEOs, generals and at least one Supreme Court justice. The Family does not publish membership lists, and its members are sworn to secrecy, so a full accounting is impossible. 

Sen. Hillary Clinton has been involved with the Family since 1993 when, as first lady, she joined a White House prayer circle for political wives. Clinton has also sought spiritual counseling from the current head of the Family, Doug Coe. Sharlet argues that Clinton's longtime association with the Family has helped her forge working relationships with powerful religious conservatives such as Family member and anti-abortion crusader Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas. 

The Family nurtures the next generation of prayer warriors in suburban dormitories. Sharlet spent nearly a month living at Ivanwald, a dormitory in Virginia where sons of the Family are sent to immerse themselves in Jesus and clean the toilets of congressmen and senators. 

The Family also runs a house on C Street in Washington, D.C. The C Street Center has housed a number of federal legislators, including Sen. John Ensign of Nevada. Residents allege that the center is just a cheap place to live, but as an Ivanwald brother, Sharlet saw firsthand that the center is a religious community. As far as the IRS is concerned, the C Street Center is a church. 

Members will tell you that the Family is just a group of friends. As Sharlet discovered, 600 boxes of documents at the Billy Graham Center Archives tell a different story.

There is quite a bit more in the article that will bring you pause, such as the fact that several members have demonstrated admiration of Adolph Hitler.

I have to be honest and tell you that I find this incredibly disturbing, and just the idea of Hillary Clinton and "prayer warriors" being mentioned in the same article makes me nauseous.

Believe me I want to support Hillary in 2016, and indeed I doubt seriously that we have anybody that could challenge her for the nomination.

But I may have to sit down and take stock of my reasons for supporting her, and do a little soul searching.

Fuck! Why isn't this ever easy?

Secret Service agent assigned to President Obama leaked information to Romney campaign.

Courtesy of Inside Sources:  

As scandal continues to envelop the Secret Service, InsideSources has learned of a security failure leading up to the 2012 election. Multiple sources inside the Romney presidential campaign confirm that a Secret Service agent provided details of President Obama’s schedule several days prior to the President’s campaign stops becoming public. 

While sources involved in other presidential campaigns tell InsideSources that Secret Service detail assigned to each campaign will sometimes disclose private and personal information about those they are assigned to protect to opposing campaign staff, this instance in particular is very revealing of failures inside the Secret Service. 

In the closing weeks of the 2012 campaign, a Secret Service agent was on the ground in a key swing state to coordinate security ahead of several campaign stops by the President. The agent, who was married, made advances towards a Romney campaign staff member. 

InsideSources spoke with two staffers who witnessed the events in question. Each spoke on condition of anonymity and independently confirmed the details.

You know I used to have a great deal of respect for the men and women who stand between the President of the United States and those who mean him harm, but now I almost feel the whole agency should be disbanded and a new one started from scratch.

I think this guy said it best: 

When asked about the recent spate of security issues surrounding the Secret Service, a former member of the Presidential advance team under President Bush said, “Seeing firsthand the considerable threat the President is under and how seriously so many of these agents take their duty, it’s very concerning that there are some who would put the lives of the President and their Secret Service colleagues in peril. The President isn’t just a person; he’s an institution, a third of our functioning government, and a primary target for any country or group who would seek to do our country harm.”

Damn straight!

National Enquirer blind item may not be so "blind" afterall.

All day long I have been receiving this National Enquirer blind item post courtesy of Crazy Days and Nights:  

THIS prominent lady politico is frantic to keep news of her recent tummy tuck and liposuction procedures out of the media. The conservative mom wants her fans to believe she’s all natural and stays trim by exercising daily! Can you name her?

First let me say that I don't have any definitive proof that this is Palin, but I have been chronicling her plastic surgery for years, and even received information from a witness to one of the surgeries, so there is really no longer any doubt that she goes under the knife fairly regularly. (As does Bristol obviously.)

Remember the lump?

As for whether she had a tummy tuck, I guess I would have to ask why a woman who looked like THIS when she was seven months pregnant would even NEED one of those?

Sarah Palin in Juneau 3-26-2008

I mean whatever happened to those famous "tight abs?"

Unless, perhaps THAT'S the reason for all of the secrecy from this person identified in the above NE blind item. After all if you are famous for having the tightest abs in politics, so tight that people could not "discern the stage of your pregnancy," it certainly would not look good to let the world know that you required a little surgical nip and tuck in order to continue with that facade now would it?

Though to be honest, this would not be the FIRST time that Palin's little tight tummy deception has been exposed.

P.S. If you visit the link to Crazy Days and Nights up above, and read the comments, you will see that virtually EVERYBODY just automatically assumed the item is about Palin. So we are certainly not alone in our suspicions.

Newsweek interviews Todd Palin's father. Yeah I don't know why either.

It sounds to me as if this reporter hoped that Todd's dad, Jim Palin, could get him an interview with the always paranoid Sarah, or at the very least Todd.  Hah, what a moron!

However this article was not a complete loss and actually contained a few interesting nuggets:

What Jim doesn’t much want to discuss is Sarah’s political career. He says that he will, of course, support Sarah if she runs. But I got the distinct impression he believes she won’t. Todd’s close friends are hoping, for his sake, that she doesn’t.

Todd's own father does not think Palin will run?  Well isn't THAT interesting?

As we were walking out of Evangelo’s, Jim Palin suddenly said, “How would you like to see Todd and Sarah’s place?

He is taking a reporter to the Palin Compound?  No way this guy gets out alive if the Palins are home, they HATE reporters!

We turned off the main highway onto a dirt road and came to an electric gate and an unoccupied sentry box. Jim walked around the gate onto the property, which is unfenced. “All this is to keep folks from driving up to the front door,” he explained.

Yeah I have also wondered about that.  Why even have a gate, if it is not connected to a fence?

(I have kind of a funny story about that gate.  The first time I went out to visit Joe McGinniss, I missed a turn and ended up driving through the open gate onto Palin's property.  The big iron gate was new back then and at first I was not sure the driveway belonged to them.  But when I figured it out I carefully backed out, hoping they would not see me, because NO WAY would they have believed I was not trespassing on purpose. But honestly, it was a total accident.)

The Palins’ yard is strewn with five snowmobiles, half a dozen dusty trucks, several small aluminum boats, a couple of airplane floats, a trampoline, and a little plastic basketball hoop. (Which just goes to show you can throw buckets of money at white trash all day long, but all that means is they will have more expensive crap strewn around their yard than their neighbors can afford to have strewn around theirs.) For 18 years, Todd Palin worked as a “wrench” on two-week shifts for BP on the North Slope. He spent six weeks every summer pulling salmon out of nets in Dillingham. That, along with his racing purses and endorsements, and Sarah’s salary as mayor and then governor, made the Palins relatively prosperous. But since 2008, they have become plain rich from Sarah’s books, lectures, TV series, and Fox News contract. (They forgot to mention taking in political donations without really intending to run for office, pimping out their daughter on Dancing with the Stars, and selling stories trashing Levi to the tabloids for some extra spending money.)

Jim called out, but there was no one home. (Both Todd and Sarah had made it clear they didn’t want to talk to me.) The simple five-bedroom house Todd built is a now a two-building compound—one for him, one for her, reflecting their differing tastes and ambitions. We opened the door to Todd’s annex, revealing a hangar as big as a professional basketball court. “Todd’s plane isn’t here,” Jim said. “He must be out flying it somewhere.” We walked upstairs to Sarah’s domain, a luxe office/studio with a podium framed by a view of Lake Lucille and a professional television camera aimed in its direction. “Sarah makes her broadcasts from here,” Jim said. “That big satellite dish you saw in the yard was installed by Fox News.”

Let me get this straight. You can just walk around the gate like it is not even there, find an unlocked door into the main house, and simply enter the Palin Compound without anybody noticing or stopping you?  Well so much for all of that talk about receiving dozens of death threats and feeling terrified of stalkers!

By the way I especially love this part, "The simple five-bedroom house Todd built is a now a two-building compound—one for him, one for her, reflecting their differing tastes and ambitions."

Oh yeah, THAT is a loving couple!  Go ahead Palin-bots, tell me again how my Splitsville post back in August of 2009, was "all made up!"  And by the way, it is no surprise that Jim Palin and this reporter did not find anybody home, since I have been told that Sarah is spending as little time in Alaska as possible these days. (Which by the way, is ALSO something I predicted in that post back in 2009.)

The article almost makes it sound as if the compound is abandoned. I wonder how much time any of the family actually spend there these days?

We know Bristol is rarely in Wasilla since she bought that place in Arizona, and Sarah has been doing her Fox reports from around Bristol's place in Maricopa recently as well.

Nobody has seen Willow, Piper, or Trig in months so they could be anywhere. (Though we know Willow was in Alaska on May, 12 when she received a ticket for driving 10 to 19 miles over the speed limit.)  And Todd only seems to show up for photo-ops once in awhile to help provide the facade of the happy political couple.

Just another addition of "Things that make you go, Hmmm."

California State University documents pertaining to Sarah Palin's upcoming speech found shredded! Update!

From the San Francisco Chronicle:

Students at Cal State Stanislaus have discovered evidence that documents related to an upcoming speaking engagement by Sarah Palin were shredded and dumped after the university claimed that no public documents existed, a state senator said on Tuesday.

The students appeared at a Sacramento news conference with State Sen. Leland Yee, D-San Francisco this morning and said they found the documents on Friday in a dumpster outside the school's administration building in Turlock. They include four pages of a contract for a "speaker" who will be traveling from Anchorage, though they do not identify the speaker by name.

The senator in March questioned how much the university is paying the former Alaska governor and vice presidential candidate for her speaking engagement on June 25. The university said a private university foundation contracted Palin for the $500-a-plate event and the contract included a privacy clause preventing officials from disclosing the speaker's fee.