Arrayed against the policy of the elected government of Poland (which ran for election twice on this policy) is: the EU Commission (not elected), the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights (not elected), the Council of Europe / Venice Commission (not elected), and any number of Polish judges — all appointed by a process wholly insulated from democratic control. But I repeat myself.
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I cannot prove this, but I expect if during our domestic squabbles involving the elected arms of the government manipulating the federal courts (circa 1802, and again circa 1863, or even today in relation to court packing) a bunch of international organisations told us what to do, such interventions would not have been (and will not be in the future) very welcomed, and might very well have made (and will make in the future) normal political compromise less likely.
“Purge”. If you want more Trump … but I repeat myself.
Elections
The Truth is Starting to Seep Out about the Spy in the Trump Campaign
Way back during the transition from the Obama Administration, the evidence of illegal surveillance of the Trump Campaign began to appear. First, Admiral Mike Rogers warned Donald Trump, the president-elect, that he was under surveillance by the Obama Administration.
June 2016: FISA request. The Obama administration files a request with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) to monitor communications involving Donald Trump and several advisers. The request, uncharacteristically, is denied.
October 2016: FISA request. The Obama administration submits a new, narrow request to the FISA court, now focused on a computer server in Trump Tower suspected of links to Russian banks. No evidence is found — but the wiretaps continue, ostensibly for national security reasons, Andrew McCarthy at National Review later notes. The Obama administration is now monitoring an opposing presidential campaign using the high-tech surveillance powers of the federal intelligence services.
On Tuesday November 8th, 2016 the election was held. Results announced Wednesday November 9th, 2016.
On Thursday November 17th, 2016, NSA Director Mike Rogers traveled to New York and met with President-Elect Donald Trump.
Trump moved his transition team to his private golf course immediately.
The other Mike Rogers, a Republican who was deeply compromised by the Benghazi matter, was quickly dropped from the Trump transition team.
This worried the DNC mouthpiece WaPoo. Admiral Rogers probably also warned Trump about the former Intel Committee Chair.
The FBI surveillance and CIA complicity has continued with the appointment of insider Mueller.
Then they took down Mike Flynn who had once written a letter supporting the complaint of a woman named Robyn Gritz, an FBI agent who had worked with McCabe’s team, and accused him of sexual harassment.
In 2013, she filed an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) complaint against her FBI supervisors alleging sexual discrimination and hostile work environment. In 2014, she amended her complaint by averring that she suffered “a hostile [work] environment, defamation of character through continued targeting by Andrew McCabe.”
The FBI’s response claimed that she had become “underperforming, tardy to work, insubordinate, possibly mentally ill…”
She was forced out.
In May 2014, Flynn provided a letter on Pentagon stationery which stated that Gritz “was well-known, liked and respected in the military counter-terrorism community for her energy, commitment and professional capacity, and over the years worked in several interagency groups on counter-terrorism targeting initiatives.” He added, “Her work consistently produced outstanding results in the most challenging environments.”
That is the back story of why the FBI went after General Flynn. Plus, of course, he had resisted Obama’s out reach to Muslims.
Despite his underlings’ concerns, McCabe’s plan of retaliation against Flynn proceeded apace. According to Joseph diGenova, the newest member of President Trump’s legal team, McCabe set up Flynn for the interview that led to the general’s indictment for lying to the FBI. One of the agents who was tasked with this maneuver sought private legal advice.
Now, the New York Times, at last, admits the presence of a spy in the Trump campaign. Of course, the Times’ version is the FBI/CIA version with enough spin to make the left feel justified.
Strange Comparison, Dangerous Conclusion
About a week ago, the WSJ ran an article titled Mark Zuckerberg is No James Madison. The article argues that a constitution is similar to a block of computer code—a valid point, although I would argue it is also true of legislation and contracts in general…both the code, and the constitution/law/contract must be sufficiently clear and unambiguous to be executable without reference to their originators.
Then the article goes on to say that ‘the Constitution understands human nature. Facebook, dangerously at times does not. In designing the Constitution, Madison managed to appeal to people’s better angels while at the same time calculating man’s capacity to harm and behave badly. Facebook’s designers, on the other hand, appear to have assumed the best about people. They apparently expected users to connect with friends only in benign ways. While the site features plenty of baby and puppy photos, it has also become a place where ISIS brags about beheadings and Russians peddling misinformation seek to undermine the institutions of a free society.’
The attempt to create a parallel between Zuckerberg and Madison is a strange one, IMO, given the completely different nature of the work the two men were doing. Madison was attempting to create a new model for a self-governing country, Zuckerberg was attempting to make money for himself and his investors, and maybe to provide a little fun and value for his users along the way.
What I find especially problematic is the ‘therefore’ that the author draws:
Facebook insists it is not a media company. Maybe so. But unless it takes on the responsibilities of an editor and publisher by verifying the identities of users, filtering content that runs on its platform, and addressing the incentives to post specious or inflammatory “facts,” Facebook should expect to be policed externally.
But is Facebook really a publisher, or it is it more of a printer? If someone..Ben Franklin in the mid-1700s or some corporation today…is running a printing shop, running printing jobs for all who will pay, should he or it be held accountable for validating the truth of the material printed and verifying the identities of the customers?
Catalist, “The 480,” and The Real 480
(In the light of the Cambridge Analytica revelations and controversy. I thought this 2014 post might be due for a rerun)
There has been much discussion recently of Catalist, a database system being used by the Democratic Party to optimally target their electioneering efforts…see Jonathan’s post here. I’m reminded of Eugene Burdick’s 1964 novel, The 480
Simulmatics was a real company. It was founded by MIT professor Ithiel de Sola Pool, a pioneer in the application of computer technology to social science research. Data from 130,000 interviews was categorized into 480 demographic groups, and an IBM 704 computer was used to process this data and predict the likely effects of various alternative political tactics. One question the company was asked to address by the 1960 Democratic campaign, in the person of Robert F Kennedy, was: How best to deal with religion? There was considerable concern among some parts of the electorate about the prospect of choosing a Catholic as President. Would the JFK campaign do better by minimizing attention to this issue, or would they do better by addressing it directly and condemning as bigots those who would let Kennedy’s faith affect their vote?
Simulmatics concluded that “Kennedy today has lost the bulk of the votes he would lose if the election campaign were to be embittered by the issue of anti-Catholicism. The simulation shows that there has already been a serious defection from Kennedy by Protestant voters. Under these circumstances, it makes no sense to brush the religious issue under the rug. Kennedy has already suffered the disadvantages of the issue even though it is not embittered nowand without receiving compensating advantages inherent in it.” Quantitatively, the study predicted that Kennedy’s direct addressing of the religion issue would move eleven states, totaling 122 electoral votes, away from the Kennedy campbut would pull six states, worth 132 electoral votes, into the Democratic column.
It is not clear how much this study influenced actual campaign decision-making…but less than three weeks after RFK received the Simulmatics report, JFK talked about faith before a gathering of ministers in Houston. “I believe in an America where religious intolerance will someday end,” Kennedy said, “where there is no Catholic vote, no anti-Catholic vote, no bloc voting of any kind.” (Burdick’s novel also suggests that the Kennedy campaign used Simulmatics to assess the effects of a more-forthright posture on civil rights by the campaign, and furthermore to analyze Kennedy’s optimal personality projection during the debatesI don’t know if these assertions are historically correct, but the religion analysis clearly was indeed performed.)
Considerable excitement was generated when, after the election, the Simulmatics project became publicly known. A Harper’s Magazine article referred to to the Simulmatics computer as “the people machine,” and quoted Dr Harold Lasswell of Yale as saying, “This is the A-bomb of the social sciences. The breakthrough here is comparable to what happened at Stagg Field.” But Pierre Salinger, speaking for the Kennedy campaign, asserted that “We did not use the machine.” (Salinger’s statement is called out as a lie in the recent book, The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns
In Burdick’s novel, the prospective Republican candidate is John Thatch, head of an international engineering and construction company. Thatch has achieved popular renown after courageously defusing a confrontation between Indians and Pakistanis over a bridge his company was building, thereby averting a probable war. Something about Thatch’s personality has struck the public imagination, anddespite his lack of political experiencehe looks to be an attractive candidate. But initially, the Republicans see little hope of defeating the incumbent Kennedy“the incumbent is surrounded by over four years of honorific words and rituals,” a psychologist explains. “He seems as though he ought to be President. He assumes the mantle.” This outlook is deeply disturbing to a Republican senior statesman named Bookbinder, who strongly believes that defacto 8-year terms are bad for the country…but if it is true that Kennedy is unbeatable, then the best the Republicans can hope to do is lose as well as possible. Things change when Kennedy is assassinated and the election becomes a real contest.
Bookbinder and Levi, another Republican senior statesman, are introduced to Simulation Enterprises by a young lawyer named Madison (Mad) Curver and his psychologist associate (quoted above), a woman named Dr Devlin. Mad and Dr Devlin explain that what Sim Enterprises does is different from the work done by garden-variety pollsters like the one they have just met, Dr Cotter:
“The pollster taps only a small fragment of the subject’s mind, attention, background, family influence, and habits. The Simulations thing, just because it can consider thousands of elements influencing the subject, even things he may not know himself, gets much better results.”
“And one further thing, Book,” Mad said. “Simulations Enterprises can predict what people will do in a situation which they have never heard of before. That was the whole point of the UN in the Midwest example. No one has gone out there and asked them to vote on whether we should get out of the UN, but Dev outlined a procedure by which you can predict how they will react…if they ever do have to vote on it.
Again Bookbinder had the sharp sense of unreality. Unreal people were being asked invented questions and a result came out on green, white-lined paper…and when you got around to the real people six months later with the real question they would act the way the computer had said they would.
The Russia Collusion story is becoming more clear.
I was a little late coming to the Trump supporters, but it was interesting almost back to the beginning.
Then it began to form a preference cascade.
Can the GOP really be so out of touch with the legions of out-of-work Americans — many of whom don’t show up in the “official” unemployment rate because they’ve given up looking for work in the Obama economy? With the returning military vets frustrated with lawyer-driven, politically correct rules of engagement that have tied their hands in a fight against a mortal enemy? With those who, in the wake of the Paris and San Bernardino massacres by Muslims, reasonably fear an influx of culturally alien “refugees” and “migrants” from the Middle East?
April 2016:
Trump is a coward, four time bankrupt loser, con artist, bully, 12 time business failure, WWE character, hypocrite, liar, dullard, loose cannon and has very poor character. He will lose in November and people need to wake up to that fact. Otherwise, hello President Hillary.
A year later, that commenter is a supporter.
Trump was in touch with them.
The result was “Deep Confusion.”
I left Queens for Brooklyn to meet Dany L. Esquilin, a Republican I met in the first week of this assignment, aboard a train to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland.
Mr. Esquilin was not a stereotypical Trump supporter. His parents were born in Puerto Rico, he is black and he had once been a Democrat. (Then again, so had Mr. Trump.) A retired private investigator, Mr. Esquilin worked to marshal Republican votes from Jews, Russians and Chinese-Americans.
Oh Oh.