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bountyofbeads · 4 years

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(Bill Barr) He is an ideologue who, like many of his Republican predecessors, believes that Republican presidents can do whatever they want, regardless of what Congress, the law, or the Constitution says. And that makes him far more dangerous.

BILL BARR MUST RESIGN

The attorney general is working to destroy the integrity and independence of the Justice Department, in order to make Donald Trump a president who can operate above the law.

By Donald Ayer, Former U.S. Deputy Attorney General under George H. W. Bush | Published February 17, 2020 6:00 AM ET | The Atlantic Magazine | Posted February 17, 2020 |

When donald trump chose Bill Barr to serve as attorney general in December 2018, even some moderates and liberals greeted the choice with optimism. One exuberant Democrat described him as “an excellent choice,” who could be counted on to “stand up for the department’s institutional prerogatives and … push back on any improper attempt to inject politics into its work.”

At the end of his first year of service, Barr’s conduct has shown that such expectations were misplaced. Beginning in March with his public whitewashing of Robert Mueller’s report, which included powerful evidence of repeated obstruction of justice by the president, Barr has appeared to function much more as the president’s personal advocate than as an attorney general serving the people and government of the United States. Among the most widely reported and disturbing events have been Barr’s statements that a judicially authorized FBI investigation amounted to “spying” on the Trump campaign, and his public rejection in December of the inspector general’s considered conclusion that the Russia probe was properly initiated and overseen in an unbiased manner. Also quite unsettling was Trump’s explicit mention of Barr and Rudy Giuliani in the same breath in his July 25 phone call with Volodymyr Zelensky, as individuals the Ukrainian president should speak with regarding the phony investigation that Ukraine was expected to publicly announce.

Still more troubling has been Barr’s intrusion, apparently for political reasons, into the area of Justice Department action that most demands scrupulous integrity and strict separation from politics and other bias—invocation of the criminal sanction. When Barr initiated a second, largely redundant investigation of the FBI Russia probe in May, denominated it criminal, and made clear that he is personally involved in carrying it out, many eyebrows were raised.

But worst of all have been the events of the past week. The evenhanded conduct of the prosecutions of Roger Stone and Michael Flynn by experienced Department of Justice attorneys have been disrupted at the 11th hour by the attorney general’s efforts to soften the consequences for the president’s associates. More generally, it appears that Barr has recently identified a group of lawyers whom he trusts and put them in place to oversee and second-guess the work of the department’s career attorneys on a broader range of cases. And there is no comfort from any of this in Barr’s recent protests about the president’s tweeting. He in no way suggested he was changing course, only that it is hard to appear independent when the president is publicly calling for him to follow the path he is on.

Bad as they are, these examples are more symptoms than causes of Barr’s unfitness for office. The fundamental problem is that he does not believe in the central tenet of our system of government—that no person is above the law. In chilling terms, Barr’s own words make clear his long-held belief in the need for a virtually autocratic executive who is not constrained by countervailing powers within our government under the constitutional system of checks and balances.

Indeed, given our national faith and trust in a rule of law no one can subvert, it is not too strong to say that Bill Barr is un-American. And now, from his perch as attorney general, he is in the midst of a root-and-branch attack on the core principles that have guided our justice system, and especially our Department of Justice, since the 1970s.

The system that Barr is working to tear down was built up in the aftermath of the Watergate scandals, during which the Justice Department’s leadership was compromised by its support of a president who sought to use the machinery of government to advance his personal interests and prospects for reelection. As Richard Nixon later told David Frost, he believed that “when the President does it, that means it is not illegal.” But the system held, and after two attorneys general and numerous other government officials were convicted for their conduct in these scandals, the Ford administration turned to the task of restoring public trust in government.

President Gerald Ford chose as his attorney general Edward Levi, a distinguished legal scholar and professor who was then president of the University of Chicago. “Levi took restoring faith in the legitimacy of government and adherence to the rule of law as his very highest priority,” his special assistant at the time, Jack Fuller, later recalled. Levi said at his swearing-in that the central goal of the Justice Department must be to sustain “a government of laws and not men,” which he knew would take “dedicated men and women to accomplish this through their zeal and determination, and also their concern for fairness and impartiality.”

Given the Department of Justice’s extraordinary powers to affect lives, and often to do so long before any case goes to court, Levi characterized its proper actions as having a “judicial nature” that demanded, in many instances, a substantial insulation from political influence. And he saw the pursuit of fair, accurate, and equal justice as a shared endeavor, with decisions best made through a sort of “government by discussion,” so that the soundness and integrity of any actions could be tested by the review and consideration of others.

In two short years, Levi enshrined these ideas at the Department of Justice, turning them into articles of faith for its employees. He created new mechanisms of accountability to ensure their endurance, such as the Office of Professional Responsibility, an ethics watchdog for the department. His reforms substantially restored public trust in our justice system. For the past 45 years, the vision he articulated has also inspired thousands of Justice Department lawyers. This was the department that I served, as an assistant U.S. attorney, United States attorney, principal deputy solicitor general, and deputy attorney general in the Carter, Reagan, and first Bush administrations.

Barr’s frontal attack on this system begins with an assault on Levi’s central premise, that ours must be a “government of laws and not men,” in which no person is above the law. Far from emphasizing thorough, transparent, and evenhanded processes—like the investigations presided over by former Special Counsel Mueller and Inspector General of the Department of Justice Michael Horowitz—Barr has done whatever he can to suppress findings adverse to the president, and to endorse conclusions more favorable to Donald Trump.

Even more emphatically, though, Barr has brought with him to the department an extraordinary belief in the need for an all-powerful president that is flatly irreconcilable with Levi’s vision, which restored the Department of Justice to honor and integrity in the mid-’70s. Perhaps most disturbingly, Barr contends that it is virtually impossible for a corrupt president to be held to account by the Department of Justice, or by any independent counsel that it or Congress might appoint.

His views on that point were set forth with breathtaking clarity in June 2018, in an unsolicited 19-page memorandum that Barr sent to then–Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, arguing that Mueller’s investigation of the president for obstruction of justice was fundamentally misconceived. The president “alone is the Executive Branch,” he wrote, and “the Constitution vests [in him personally] all Federal law enforcement power, and hence prosecutorial discretion.” (The emphasis is his.) Thus, as a matter of constitutional law, Barr concluded that Congress is without any power to bar the president from “[exercising] supervisory authority over cases in which his own conduct might be at issue.” It followed, according to Barr, that the whole idea of a prosecutor within the executive branch operating beyond the president’s direct oversight—even a special counsel like Mueller—was a constitutional nonstarter. So the president’s recent statement that he has a “legal right” to interfere in criminal investigations just repeats what Bill Barr has told him.

Barr would make real Nixon’s vision that if the president does it, it may not be challenged by the Department of Justice, or from any other agency of the executive branch. But Barr’s efforts to place the president above the law go far beyond foreclosing interference through checks that might arise within his own branch. His department has been very active, and he has personally been quite vocal, in working to cripple the traditional checks and balances on presidential prerogatives that arise from the distinct, co-equal roles of Congress and the courts.

Take, for example, Trump’s categorical stonewalling of Congress’s power to exercise its traditional oversight role by subpoenaing documents and calling witnesses from the executive branch. During his prior term of government service, in the 1980s and ’90s, Barr opposed what he regarded as congressional interference with executive prerogatives. He wrote several opinions on the subject when he served as head of the Office of Legal Counsel. So it should come as no surprise that, as attorney general, he has returned to this familiar theme.

Last May, Barr’s Office of Legal Counsel issued an opinion advising that former White House Counsel Don McGahn was not subject to Congress’s subpoena power, asserting that senior officials have “absolute immunity from congressional compulsion to testify about matters that occur during the course of discharging official duties.” Trump’s government has held to that position, which has provided the analytical core for the sweeping assertion of a right to not even appear at the House’s impeachment hearings, thus exceeding the long-recognized right to raise executive privilege or other specific objections to particular questions when grounds for doing so arguably exist.

In June, OLC issued another opinion, this one advising that the Treasury Department should not provide the House Ways and Means Committee with Trump’s tax returns, despite a statute that requires Treasury to do so. For the critical reasoning, it quoted from one of Barr’s own OLC opinions, which said that Congress must articulate why it needs the particular materials before the executive branch will even consider what, if any, information it will provide.

And in September, OLC said that the whistle-blower report—the one that first brought to light the Ukraine telephone call that became the basis for an article of impeachment—was not a matter of “urgent concern” and thus need not, under the relevant statute, be transmitted to congressional intelligence committees. That opinion provoked a letter from 68 inspectors general throughout the federal government, protesting that such a conclusion was indefensible and would grossly undermine the effectiveness of whistle-blower protections as a check on executive power.

The Justice Department has also been at the forefront of the president’s defiance of Congress’s traditional power of the purse as a check on executive-branch adventurism. On February 15, 2019, the day after Barr was confirmed, the president issued an emergency declaration to divert funds from other appropriations for use in building a border wall. Congress had several times considered and refused to appropriate the requested funds for this purpose, and the president had himself conceded that there was no actual emergency. But Barr’s DOJ has vigorously litigated the cases challenging this action, and thus has worked to undermine Congress’s express constitutional power to control the appropriation of funds.

All of this conduct—including Barr’s personal interventions to influence or negate independent investigations or the pursuit of criminal cases, and his use of the department’s resources to frustrate the checks and balances provided by other branches—is incompatible with the rule of law as we know it, and especially as it has functioned since Levi’s Watergate reforms. Far from recognizing the sensitive “judicial nature” of the department’s work and the need to avoid even the appearance of improper influence and to show that no person is above the law, under Barr, the Department of Justice is actively engaged on many fronts in helping realize Trump’s stated goal of being able to do whatever he wants, free from interference from any branch of government.

Barr’s agenda was confirmed by his November speech to the Federalist Society on“the Constitution’s approach to executive power.” He argues that “over the past several decades, we have seen a steady encroachment on presidential authority by other branches of government,” and that those “encroachments” must end. He purports to justify his position by offering a selective version of American history, discussing the Founders’ intentions with regard to presidential power, characterizing the role the presidency has supposedly played over time, and arguing that, in recent decades, the Founders’ vision has been undermined by actions of Congress and the courts.

Perhaps even more disturbing than Barr’s manifesto for radical change—for the creation of a president with nearly autocratic powers—is the revisionist account of American history on which it is based, and his dogmatic insistence on it in the face of ample evidence to the contrary. Whereas Levi recognized a commitment to intellectual integrity and accountability as the keys to building public trust and defending the rule of law, Barr simply presents as gospel a conveniently distorted vision of the past.

At the beginning of his speech, Barr derides “the grammar-school civics-class version” of our history—the one that generations of students have internalized. It is that the Founders, sensitive from experience to the danger that one part of government might develop tyrannical powers, adopted a complex structure of checks and balances. In that government, power was shared among the three branches through sometimes-countervailing delegations of authority, which made each branch dependent on the others. The numerous checks that the Constitution created to limit the president’s authority—the impeachment power, the House appropriation power, Congress’s power to override vetoes, the need for a congressional declaration of war, and the Senate power to advise and consent, for example—show that presidential tyranny was prominent among their concerns.

According to Barr, the Founders actually were not much concerned about an out-of-control president, as this “civics-class version” suggests. He reasons that history shows a rise in the relative power of Parliament against the King during the mid-18th century, and that by the time of our own Revolution, the evil perceived by the patriots was more “an overweening Parliament” than “monarchical tyranny.” Further, chaotic governance during the Revolution and under the Articles of Confederation pointed out the need for a single executive officer, and after some debate, such a president was included in the Constitution. Of course, none of this negates the specific provisions that the Founders adopted to curb presidential overreach, or suggests that it was not a matter of great concern. Nor does it remotely suggest that the later development of institutions such as judicial review and congressional oversight was out of step with what the Founders had in mind.

Barr’s next piece of history—his account of how things have allegedly proceeded during the intervening 230 years—is the real stunner. He would have us believe that this vision of an all-powerful president that he wants to restore has in fact been a reality for most of our history. Indeed, he says, “more than any other branch, the [American presidency] has fulfilled the expectations of the Framers.” At least, that is, until recently.

But what about the widespread consensus of historians that, throughout the 1800s and until the 1930s, Congress was the dominant branch of government, and that over the course of the 20th century, the balance of power shifted dramatically toward the president? With the exception of the founding generation and a few others, including Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson, most of our presidents prior to Franklin D. Roosevelt were extremely weak. And without doubt, the greatest expansion of executive power came not early in our history, but during the 20th- and 21st-century era of the imperial president.

According to Barr, all of this is mistaken. Strong and omnicompetent presidents have led our government from the beginning, “protecting the liberties of the American people.” Lately, though:

the deck has become stacked against the executive. Since the mid-’60s, there has been a steady grinding down of the executive branch’s authority, that accelerated after Watergate. More and more, the president’s ability to act in areas in which he has discretion has become smothered by the encroachments of the other branches.

What does he say happened, and what is the nature of these encroachments? He first targets “two aspects of contemporary thought that tend to operate to disadvantage the executive.” The first is the idea that “the greatest danger of government becoming oppressive arises from the prospect of executive excess.” No doubt Levi’s Watergate reforms had something to do with this, and Barr seems quite unhappy with them and their consequences.

The second is the “notion that the Constitution does not sharply allocate powers among the three branches, but rather the branches, especially the political branches, ‘share’ powers.” Barr seems to be obsessed with the notion of shared powers, and is quite keen on eradicating the whole idea: “Whenever I see a court opinion that uses the word share, I want to run in the other direction.”

The last half of Barr’s speech purports to address the ways that, “in recent years, both the legislative and judicial branches have been responsible for encroaching on the presidency’s constitutional authority.”

First, he says, Trump’s congressional opponents inaugurated “the resistance” and used “every tool and maneuver available to sabotage the functioning of his administration.” Then he alleges that the Senate has engaged in “unprecedented abuse of the advise-and-consent process to draw out the approval process for nominees.” Never mind that Republicans were at all times in the majority and have had unprecedented success in confirming their judicial nominees.

Finally, he claims that Congress has engaged in “constant harassment” by trying to “drown the executive branch with ‘oversight demands’ for testimony and documents.” He does not mention the administration’s repeated assertion of a categorical, prophylactic executive privilege against even having to appear, respond, or assert any specific privilege based on the facts. Nor does he note that this outrageous denial of Congress’s established power has been largely successful, or that it has even been raised in the impeachment context, where Congress’s constitutional power to inquire is at its apex.

But perhaps the most outrageous and alarming ideas that Barr advances come in his attacks on the judiciary, which occupy fully a third of his speech. In his mind, it seems, the courts are the principal culprit in constraining the extraordinarily broad powers that the president is constitutionally entitled to exercise. His discussion ignores a pillar of our legal system since almost the very beginning—Chief Justice John Marshall’s magisterial pronouncement in the early days of our republic that “it is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.”

Barr complains that the judiciary “has appointed itself the ultimate arbiter of separation-of-powers disputes between Congress and the executive,” saying that the Framers did not envision that it would play such a role. Barr yearns for a day when the president can bully everyone else in government, and leave them no ability to seek relief in court.

Barr complains specifically that the role of courts to determine the law has only recently invaded areas of decision making that the Founders intended to leave to the president, and has thus impeded the president’s exercise of discretion in ways that he says would never have happened a few decades ago. President Harry Truman, who 70 years ago was barred by the Supreme Court from seizing steel plants by executive order in the name of national defense, might be surprised to hear that.

And Barr is quite clear about what he wants the courts to keep their noses out of. They have no proper role in “constitutional disputes between the other two branches,” because “the political branches can work out their constitutional differences without resort[ing] to the courts.” More generally, he claims that courts have no business second-guessing decisions of the executive in areas that “cannot be reduced to tidy evidentiary standards and specific quantums of proof,” or that involve an exercise of “prudential judgment.” Nor should they be permitted to inquire into the “motivation behind government action.” Three cheers for a toothless rule of law that lets the president do anything he desires for any reason.

After citing several specific instances in which judicial scrutiny of Trump’s actions allegedly went off the rails, Barr closes with a lengthy discussion of what he apparently views as the worst such usurpation to date—the Supreme Court’s 2008 Boumediene decision. In that case, a majority that included three Republican appointees ruled that the traditional and well-recognized habeas corpus jurisdiction of the federal courts applied not only on American soil, but also in the anomalous precincts of the Guantánamo Bay enclave, where the United States exercises de facto sovereignty. For that reason, the Court said, the political branches could not categorically suspend the constitutional writ of habeas corpus there. But for Barr, “the idea that the judiciary acts as a neutral check on the political branches to protect foreign enemies from our government is insane.”

Barr’s Federalist Society speech suggests that he is ready to say nearly anything in pursuit of his lifelong goal of a presidency with unchecked powers. As Napoleon is reputed to have said, the man who will say anything will do anything. That Barr has also repeatedly used his authority as attorney general to tailor the position of the United States, in court and in legal opinions, to empower such an unworthy incumbent as Donald Trump to do whatever he wants suggests that this is correct.

The benefit of the doubt that many were ready to extend to Barr a year ago—as among the best of a bad lot of nominees who had previously served in high office without disgrace—has now run out. He has told us in great detail who he is, what he believes, and where he would like to take us. For whatever twisted reasons, he believes that the president should be above the law, and he has as his foil in pursuit of that goal a president who, uniquely in our history, actually aspires to that status. And Barr has acted repeatedly on those beliefs in ways that are more damaging at every turn. Presently he is moving forward with active misuse of the criminal sanction, as one more tool of the president’s personal interests.

Bill Barr’s America is not a place that anyone, including Trump voters, should want to go. It is a banana republic where all are subject to the whims of a dictatorial president and his henchmen. To prevent that, we need a public uprising demanding that Bill Barr resign immediately, or failing that, be impeached.

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DONALD AYER served as United States Attorney and Principal Deputy Solicitor General in the Reagan administration and as Deputy Attorney General under George H.W. Bush.

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BACKGROUND INFORMATION:

Why Bill Barr Is So Dangerous

He is using the office he holds to advance his extraordinary lifetime project of assigning unchecked power to the president.

By Donald Ayer, Former U.S. Deputy Attorney General under George H. W. Bush | Published June 30, 2019 |The Atlantic Magazine | Posted February 17, 2020 |

Buried behind our president’s endless stream of lies and malicious self-serving remarks are actions that far transcend any reasonable understanding of his legal authority. Donald Trump disdains, more than anything else, the limitations of checks and balances on his power. Witness his assertion of a right to flout all congressional subpoenas; his continuing refusal to disclose his tax returns, notwithstanding Congress’s statutory right to secure them; his specific actions to bar congressional testimony by government officials; and his personal attacks on judges who dare to subject the acts of his administration to judicial review. More blatant yet are his recent assertion of a right to accept dirt on political opponents from foreign governments, and his declaration of a national emergency, when he himself said he “did not need to do this,” he just preferred to “do it much faster.”

Attorney General William Barr has not had the lead public role in advancing the president’s claims to these unprecedented powers, which have come to us, like most everything about this president, as spontaneous assertions of Trump’s own will. To the contrary, in securing his confirmation as attorney general, Barr successfully used his prior service as attorney general in the by-the-book, norm-following administration of George H. W. Bush to present himself as a mature adult dedicated to the rule of law who could be expected to hold the Trump administration to established legal rules. Having known Barr for four decades, including preceding him as deputy attorney general in the Bush administration, I knew him to be a fierce advocate of unchecked presidential power, so my own hopes were outweighed by skepticism that this would come true. But the first few months of his current tenure, and in particular his handling of the Mueller report, suggest something very different—that he is using the office he holds to advance his extraordinary lifetime project of assigning unchecked power to the president.

On March 24, just two days after he received the Mueller report, Barr issued a terse four-page letter purporting to summarize the report’s major conclusions—and drawing one more that was critical—while offering virtually no facts. It was not until 25 days later, on April 18, that the redacted report itself appeared, after a stage-setting press conference by Barr the same morning. Its 448 pages raised severe doubts about the accuracy of some of Barr’s characterizations, and his ensuing testimony on Capitol Hill was an exercise in curmudgeonly obfuscation, as he held his ground while explaining almost nothing.

Barr’s March 24 letter stated accurately that “the Special Counsel did not find that the Trump campaign, or anyone associated with it, conspired or coordinated with the Russian government” with regard to proven Russian efforts to hack computers and influence the election. He has since repeatedly misstated this conclusion as a finding of “no collusion,” which it is not. Mueller documented plenty of collusion between Russians and Trump’s agents, even as he failed to find evidence beyond a reasonable doubt of a conspiracy (meaning agreement) to disrupt the election.

As to the investigation of possible obstruction of justice, while noting the report’s explicit statement that it could not “exonerate” the president, Barr’s letter said that Mueller’s approach was just to “describe the facts of his obstruction investigation without reaching any legal conclusions and leave it to the Attorney General to determine whether the conduct described … constitutes a crime.” In fulfillment of this self-assigned duty, the letter reports that “Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and I have concluded that the evidence developed … is not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense.”

The attorney general’s release of a redacted copy of the Mueller report on April 18, including the extensive facts recited in Volume II on the topic of obstruction of justice, produced great consternation. Many people who had supported Barr’s nomination because they thought he could be counted on to play straight were perplexed. He was sharply criticized for misleading the public about the findings of the investigation, which plainly chronicled numerous acts aimed at impairing the investigation.

Mueller himself had noted in a letter to the attorney general on March 27 (but not released until much later) that the March 24 letter “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this Office’s work and conclusions.” Following the release of the report, more than a thousand former prosecutors (including me) signed a letter stating that under conventional understandings of what constitutes obstruction, the report made a very strong case. It would have been an easy call to indict Trump, were it not for the categorical Office of Legal Counsel opinion foreclosing federal criminal charges against any sitting president.

Ken White: Barr’s startling and unseemly haste

Many people also scratched their heads in wonder that Rod Rosenstein—the dogged deputy attorney general who had appointed Mueller in the first place, then oversaw his investigation for two years while Sessions was recused, and tolerated all manner of personal public abuse from the president—could have agreed to a finding of legally insufficient evidence when the report itself said that it could not exonerate the president.

When asked to respond to allegations that he was “protecting or enabling the president,” Barr’s grumbled response was characteristically uninformative, noting that he was acting on “the law, the facts, and the substance,” and that the criticism just “goes with the territory of being the attorney general in a hyper-partisan time.” So what are we to make of Barr’s conclusion that the overwhelming evidence of presidential interference uncovered by the Mueller investigation would not support an obstruction charge, even if OLC had not said that a sitting president can never be charged?

One possible answer is that Barr’s goal has simply been to mislead the public about the facts at issue, and thus back up the president’s claim that he did not willfully interfere with the investigation. That would make Barr part of a very large group of people who, for reasons known only to themselves, have seen fit to support Trump in his lies and abuses. Their reward, in most cases, has been to be mercilessly trashed by their master and dismissed for being weak or stupid.

Those who were most hopeful that Barr would restore some regularity to our government are among those most puzzled by recent events, since there is no imaginable reason for Barr to seek such a disreputable role for himself. At his stage of life, after a successful legal career and distinguished government service, why would he accept the job of lying to defend the president? And, especially, why would he go to such extraordinary and unconventional lengths to pursue the position by submitting, on June 8, 2018, a lengthy and apparently unsolicited memorandum attacking the Mueller investigation?

There can be no doubt that the primary effect of Barr’s conduct to date has indeed been to befuddle and mislead, and create a public misimpression, for those who have not read Mueller’s report, that the president may not have interfered with the investigation. But Barr never said that the president did not in fact interfere, only that there is no basis in fact and law to support a finding of criminal obstruction. Indeed, a careful review of Barr’s conduct suggests that his mission is far more grandiose that just misleading people about the facts.

April Doss: Bill Barr’s dangerous claims

For many decades, Barr has had a vision of the president as possessing nearly unchecked powers. That vision is reflected in many OLC opinions, and in arguments advanced and positions taken since the 1970s. But the most compelling source for present purposes is Barr’s memorandum submitted just a year ago. Notable near its beginning is his statement that he was “in the dark about many facts,” followed immediately and repeatedly by vehement assertions that “Mueller’s obstruction theory is fatally misconceived,” and if accepted “would have grave consequences far beyond the immediate confines of this case and … do lasting damage to the Presidency.”

As this introduction suggested, Barr’s memo rested not on facts, but on a much more sweeping claim that as a matter of law, the obstruction-of-justice statute, 18 U.S.C. Section 1512, cannot possibly apply to any conduct by the president that is arguably at issue. In a five-page section, Barr’s memo advanced arguments based on interpreting the words of the statute. Then in a much longer second section, he got to the meat of the matter. He claimed that, regardless of whether the statute is correctly understood to have been intended to apply to actions by the president to interfere with an investigation of himself—as the Mueller report concluded it was—it would be an unconstitutional infringement on the president’s Article II powers to apply that law to the president.

The vehemence of Barr’s memo is breathtaking and the italics are all his: “Constitutionally, it is wrong to conceive of the President as simply the highest officer within the Executive branch hierarchy. He alone is the Executive branch. As such he is the sole repository of all Executive powers conferred by the Constitution.”

Thus, “the Constitution vests all Federal law enforcement power, and hence prosecutorial discretion, in the President.” That authority is “necessarily all-encompassing,” and there can be “no limit on the President’s authority to act [even] on matters which concern him or his own conduct.” Because it would infringe upon the total and utterly unchecked discretion that Barr believes Article II confers on the president, “Congress could not make it a crime for the President to exercise supervisory authority over cases in which his own conduct might be at issue.” Indeed, according to Barr, “because the President alone constitutes the Executive branch, the President cannot ‘recuse’ himself.” Thus, in Barr’s view, the only check on gross misconduct by the president is impeachment, and the very idea of an independent or special counsel investigating the president is a constitutional anathema.

It is not at all surprising that Bill Barr, with this vision of the law in mind, could reach his ultimate conclusion on obstruction in just a few days, or that in subsequent public appearances he has never offered to explain his conclusions by referencing what Trump actually did. The facts simply don’t matter under Barr’s understanding of the Constitution, in which “the President alone is the Executive branch … the sole repository of all Executive powers conferred by the Constitution,” and Congress may not restrict his exercise of discretion in using those powers. Why worry about facts if, as Trump has claimed repeatedly, the president has unlimited power to direct or terminate any investigation, including of himself?

This understanding of recent events also may explain how Rosenstein could sign on to a conclusion that the president had not provably committed obstruction of justice, despite the interference in the investigation that Mueller documented, and despite slaving in the vineyards of Justice for two years to preserve the integrity of Mueller’s fact-finding process. The answer may be that facts are facts, and not to be messed with—but that law, especially constitutional law, is often subject to interpretation. And if Rosenstein believed that Barr’s extreme view of the president’s constitutional powers passed the red-face test, he could have rationalized that he had a legal duty to defer to his superior. Rosenstein’s struggle to maintain the factual integrity of the Mueller investigation could thus be brought to a close by his own deference to a legal judgment that an obstruction case against the president is legally impossible, regardless of the facts.

Finally, this view of Barr’s conduct sheds a new light on why he not only accepted but sought out—indeed, may have craved—the opportunity to serve as attorney general under Donald Trump. Eighteen months serving under the sedate George H. W. Bush afforded him little opportunity to seriously contend that the president is the executive branch, or otherwise argue for almost unlimited presidential powers.

Trump and his endless assertions of power offer countless opportunities to pick and choose those executive-power claims with the best chance to succeed in court. Thus, in the Trump administration, Barr may have found the ideal setting in which to pursue his life’s work of creating an all-powerful president and frustrating the Founders’ vision of a government of checks and balances. His strange pursuit of an investigation of the investigators—on the supposition that the FBI may have been improperly “spying” on the Trump campaign when they investigated Trump associates who were found to have met with various Russians—may be the opening public chapter in that endeavor.

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The Dangerous Ideas of Bill Barr

The attorney general’s theory of executive power places presidents above the law.

By Adam Serwer | Published May 2, 2019 | The Atlantic Magazine | Posted February 17, 2020 |

One of the stranger aspects of the Donald Trump era is the open competition for the president’s affection. From Fox Business’s Lou Dobbs saying that Trump’s presidency is “the most accomplished … in modern history” to the president forcing his Cabinet secretaries to praise him on camera to his former fixer Michael Cohen once declaring that he would “take a bullet” for his former employer, it seems like each of the president’s myrmidons is daily attempting to outdo the others in employing Soviet-style hyperbole in praise of the president.

If there’s a comfort in this spectacle, it’s in the recognition that this is performance, that it’s a schtick, and that its ubiquity is a marker of the president’s deep insecurity. It is not a projection of strength, but one of weakness. The performativity of the spectacle suggests that at least some of these people recognize they are doing a bit. Others seem to have been corrupted by their proximity to Trump. Career civil servants such as Rod Rosenstein, who swore oaths to uphold the Constitution, have somehow been reduced to shuddering with fear at the thought of being fired in a tweet, begging the president for the opportunity to ensure that the law bends to his will.

It should be clear from Wednesday’s hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee that William Barr, the attorney general of the United States, is something else entirely. Barr is no flunky. He is a hardened ideologue who believes that the president he serves is largely above the law. Barr seems genuinely committed to defending the imperial prerogatives of the office against shortsighted liberals who would weaken the presidency in a delusional quest to remove a Republican from office. As he put it in his 2017 memo attacking the special counsel’s investigation, “crediting” the belief that the president could have committed obstruction by his official acts “would have grave consequences far beyond the immediate confines of this case and would do lasting damage to the Presidency and to the administration of law within the Executive branch.”

Barr is not protecting Trump because he thinks Trump is the most accomplished president in modern history, because he fears Trump, because the real-estate mogul has some psychological hold on him, or because he has been corrupted. Barr is defending Trump because Barr is a zealot.

In March, Barr released a letter summarizing the long-awaited conclusions of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s inquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 election. That letter mischaracterized Mueller’s conclusion that the Trump campaign took advantage of, and benefited from, Russian interference, only quoting the part of Mueller’s report that found that Trump-campaign officials’ conduct did not amount to a prosecutable crime.

Barr also misleadingly framed Mueller’s discussion of obstruction of justice in order to reach a conclusion that Trump did not obstruct—even though Mueller all but suggested that Trump would have been indicted if the Department of Justice did not have a policy against prosecuting a sitting president. Tuesday evening, the news broke that Mueller had written a letter expressing frustration with Barr’s effort to mislead the public about the conclusions of his investigation, after watching days of credulous press coverage suggesting that the president had been exonerated.

On Wednesday, before the Senate, Barr elaborated on his decision making. Barr not only defended his decision to clear the president of obstruction despite the fact that the public watched the president fire the FBI director over the Russia investigation, dangle pardons before suspects, and intimidate witnesses, but insisted that the president could not have obstructed justice simply by shutting down the investigation, because “the president does not have to sit there constitutionally and allow it to run its course. The president could terminate the proceeding and it would not be a corrupt intent because he was being falsely accused.”

The logic here is breathtaking: The president can end an investigation on the basis that he is “falsely accused.” The entire point of an investigation is to determine culpability; if the president can end an investigation into himself or any of his allies simply by asserting his own innocence, then he is effectively above the law. Under this standard, President Richard Nixon was perfectly within his rights when he attempted to end the investigation into the break-in of Democratic headquarters at the Watergate, which implicated several of his campaign operatives and ultimately led to his resignation.

Barr has previously suggested investigating the officials involved in the Trump inquiry for wrongdoing; on Wednesday, he was evasive when Senator Kamala Harris asked whether the White House had ever asked him to prosecute anyone. Should Trump demand that his attorney general prosecute the next Democratic nominee for president, there’s little evidence that Barr would be any kind of obstacle. The attorney general is sworn to uphold the Constitution, not to act like a mob enforcer against the president’s political enemies.

Nixon famously declared in 1977, in an interview with the reporter David Frost, that “when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” That was not mere sophistry, but ideology, and it is an ideological strain that has run through nearly every Republican administration since Nixon.

Barr’s involvement in the Iran-Contra scandal helps illuminate his conduct today. The administration of President Ronald Reagan defied federal law by selling arms to Iran in order to fund right-wing guerrillas in Central America, a scandal that led to the appointment of an independent counsel and the convictions of several high-ranking administration officials. When George H. W. Bush took office, he pardoned six officials implicated by the investigation at Barr’s urging.

The Iran-Contra scandal itself speaks to the conception of executive power to which Barr subscribes: that a president can do whatever he wants, even if Congress bars him from doing so, particularly if he is acting in what he believes to be the interests of the country—Trump is famously incapable of distinguishing between national interests and personal ones, between loyalty to him and loyalty to the nation. As Reagan’s former national security adviser Robert McFarlane put it, Reagan “just didn’t believe that it was a legitimate authority of the Congress to say that—that he, rather than the Congress, determined how he would conduct, in this case, the support of the freedom fighters.”

This has been particularly true of the expansive conservative conception of the president’s constitutional war-making powers. If Reagan openly defied Congress and the law, the first President Bush ratified his actions by pardoning those involved in the scheme. The next Republican president, George W. Bush, covertly defied the law by building a network of secret prisons across the globe, indefinitely imprisoning those suspected of terrorism, and sanctioning warrantless surveillance of American citizens, all based on dubious legal theories that amounted to little more than Nixon’s insistence that the president is above the law. Less articulate was the former George W. Bush Justice Department official John Yoo’s response to being asked whether the president could order a child’s testicles crushed: “I think it depends on why the president thinks he needs to do that.”

This theory of executive power does not apply to Democratic presidents, who become tyrannical figures the moment they take office. But that’s for the best—even if the skepticism is partisan in origin, preventing the powers of the president from growing too vast to meaningfully constrain is in the public interest. But what is at work with Barr is something more perilous than the sort of bizarre partisan overstatement that characterizes much of the Trump-era conservative discourse.

The thing about the Trump sycophants is that, at a certain point, the praise becomes so effusive that it feels, if not quite insincere, aware of its own absurdity. If someone as committed to the president as Cohen once was can flip and tell Republicans in Congress, “I’m responsible for your silliness because I did the same thing that you’re doing now for 10 years,” it suggests that when the time comes, the pageantry can be discarded, that the grift can be abandoned once it is no longer profitable.

Barr is not Cohen. He is not doing a bit. He is not grifting. He is not performing. He is not a suck-up, or an opportunist, or a lackey. He has not been compromised or corrupted. He is an ideologue who, like many of his Republican predecessors, believes that Republican presidents can do whatever they want, regardless of what Congress, the law, or the Constitution says. And that makes him far more dangerous.

*********

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wendyimmiller · 5 years

Text

Garden regionally. Get inspired globally.

Guest Rant by Marianne Willburn

Somewhere near the bottom of every writer’s artistic license, a clever wordsmith will find the following recommendation:

Monty Don

“Comically exaggerating the position of one’s opponent is encouraged in the defense of one’s argument.”[i]

Thus, after verbally sparring with Scott Beuerlein over the curiously inflammatory subject of whether to openly read British garden writers, or to do so under the covers by flashlight – all the while pledging fidelity to the American values of Weed & Feed; a tortured Scott is wrestling with the inadequacies of a Midwestern accent late into a Cincinnati evening, and I am apparently one step away from a sexting relationship with Monty Don.

Yet, beyond the slings and the arrows and the thoroughly base attempt to play cards as sneaky as cancer and a dead, beloved dog (I see you one dog and raise you a dad, Scott), the rebuttal beautifully illustrates the constant niggling suspicion American gardeners have that the British are looking down their noses at us, feeding us advice to help us fail, sniggering with intent, and securing all the fat Timber contracts in order to render our garden gurus speechless upon their own soil.[ii]

Rubbish.

Or if you prefer, horseshit.

And when social media gets involved, the comments reveal our innate prejudices and (I believe) underlying insecurities as Americans.

For the record:

I am not a self-righteous Brit who ignores and disparages American garden writers because I am so enchanted with the idea of tea at four and ha-has across the south lawn that I can’t remember my USDA zone. I AM an American garden writer with dual citizenship who has lived most of her life in America, reads authors on both sides of the Atlantic and writes for American publications on American soil. I married a Marine. And not as a war bride.

And neither is Scott a Trumpian angry ethnocentrist (as one commenter lamented) because he has a beef with the relevance of British garden writing to American gardeners. He was clearly just having a bad day.

Perhaps it was a work-related trauma. Spring is a cold and busy season at the Cincinnati Zoo. The last thing the Manager of Botanical Garden Outreach needs to have shoved down his throat is a picture of Fergus Garrett standing under a fruiting Musa basjoo.

Perhaps someone left a copy of George Plumptre’s The English Country House Garden in the men’s toilets. We can only speculate.

Nevertheless, something primal snapped in the man. I get it. But to throw out the cherubic baby with the bath water? That’s when I objected.

It’s just so damned predictable.

Though a strong stance, Scott took a safe one. An American audience is not going to object to giving the Brits a tongue-lashing for what we immediately assume to be their propensity towards snobbery, condescension and arrogance. And, any written defense of such a reprehensible population will be met with equal certainty that the author [obviously bewitched] eats her eggs soft-boiled.

An autumn tapestry at the newly opened Delaware Botanic Gardens, designed by Dutch Wave guru Piet Oudouf, and providing 25 acres of forage, habitat and outstanding beauty for wildlife & visitors.

Except.

Americans are not innocent in this game. Far from it. From my American pine cradle, I’ve grown up in both worlds. My mother is a California rancher’s daughter, my father, a public-schooled Brit. After a lifetime of lively conversations around their dining room table with friends from far and wide, I can attest to the fact that the two cultures take great delight in a strong sense of superiority over one other. I’ve seen my share of sparring. Subtle and not so.

All these decades after the American Revolution, there is still the spirit of rebellion in your average American heart and we’re deeply (and rightly) proud of it. We object to being told what to do – whether it’s what to do for a living, what to wear to a funeral, or what to plant in our gardens. We expect the luxury of space, and claim it when we can – from 4200 square foot homes for two people to insisting on a wide berth when standing at an ATM.

We’re pioneers, explorers and dreamers. But we’re also pragmatists. A great many of us feel strongly that we don’t need a two thousand year-old language to refer to a plant our daddies always called Ramps. And if we want to spell it with a capital R, that’s our business. We sure as hell don’t need people with a perfect climate telling us how to grow it.

Even though they probably weren’t.

In their less generous moments, the Brits look upon us as spoilt children who think the world revolves around us. (Scott, your original essay didn’t help with this.) They write for their own as surely as we write for ours; and if it’s American money that’s buying a gardening book, they credit that money with the good sense to recognize that it doesn’t live in Cornwall – and to adapt accordingly.

They’ve got their own issues and insecurities certainly. In a country with an average population density of 720 people per square mile (the USA is 87)[iii], space is a luxury many never dream of attaining, no matter how quickly they get on the property ladder or how upwardly mobile their lifestyle.

This means that they can be a little prickly about American ideas of personal space. But they are an exceptionally self-reliant people – particularly those who live rurally – making do with very little to create lives that most Americans would find inconvenient.

Sparked by the blight that is decimating boxwood, RHS Wisley has created a knot garden composed of alternate shrubs to inspire depressed gardeners. I can’t grow several of these species, but it doesn’t stop me taking what I can from this fantastic, educational display. (Though not perhaps cuttings.)

When it comes to gardening, they know what they’ve got: the Gulf Stream and hundreds of years of exploiting it to create some of the best gardens in the world; and a culture that gardens more than it doesn’t. But they also know what they don’t have. Besides the obvious (colonies in the Americas & room to swing a cat), they don’t have the guarantee of a decent summer every year.

So, here we are. They, envious of our wide open spaces and [mostly] abundant sunshine. Us, fascinated by their walled kitchen gardens and high streets clothed in annuals. We may admit to a little jealousy – joke about it perhaps – right up until the moment we start feeling the slightest bit insecure.

Then, Americans tend to lash out in righteous fury….

“I don’t need to know the [insert expletive] “proper” [voice dripping with sarcasm] name for this [long pause] blue poppy, to grow it!”

…while the Brits rely on cold condescension.

“But you’re not growing it particularly well, are you?”

And the resentments build.

Now, no one with an ounce (or a gram) of sense thinks that we shouldn’t garden regionally in America, or for that matter, anywhere else in this world. That we shouldn’t find garden writers who live where we live and garden where we garden in order to help us to gain knowledge and experience relevant to our climate.

Influences from all over the world come together in the wildly beautiful gravel garden at Chanticleer Garden, PA.

But to dream, and perhaps more importantly, to innovate, we should inspire ourselves globally: Paradise gardens of Andalusia, potagers in Normandy, xeriscapes in San Diego, shambas in East Africa. People working with their specific environments to create life-giving works of art that other gardeners can observe, absorb and adapt to their own climates and their own environments. Thus:

Half of Europe is embracing naturalistic pollinator and wildlife-friendly designs inspired in part by the prairies and open spaces of the Americas, and led by top designers. Hell, even Hyde Park is letting the grass grow. Do they loathe their own traditions?

A nearby grower friend is showcasing & selling Mediterranean look-alike plants (in a cruel and chilly Mid-Atlantic 6b) as Cali-faux-nian. The customers love it. Did she throw out her summer stock of petunias & calibrachoa?

Monty Don is inspiring his slavering audience to create restful Moorish gardens within the limitations of urban garden flats and boring, but respectable suburban neighborhoods. Does he thus despise boring, but respectable suburban neighborhoods? Well, probably, but we can all agree upon that.

Therefore, I plead with gardeners, garden educators, and Scott on a chilly spring day, who wish to make a full retreat into the safe space of regional gardening advice delivered by regional gardening experts:

Garden regionally. Inspire yourself globally.

Cutting ourselves off from other influences is short-sighted, possibly pig-headed, and will not lead to innovative, exciting design movements of the future. And for those now racing to the captcha to virtuously proclaim how few damns they give for “exciting design movements of the future” (I’m talking to you mom): it’s the Dutch Wave/New Perennial Movement you can thank for inspiring a new generation of gardeners – and non-gardeners – to create pollinator-friendly landscapes in an increasingly urbanized world.

Tom Stuart-Smith’s innovative design within the walled garden at Broughton Grange encourages gardeners all over the world to move beyond traditional borders and contrast formal architectural elements on a relaxed, perennial canvas.

This isn’t a zero sum game. The rest of the world does some things better than we do, and vice versa. Know what you know about where you garden, and know it well. Take time to know more. Look for alternative opinions. Read footnotes. Whether British or American, pens deftly wielded as daggers can be a great deal more effective than those used to spoon-feed.

Doing all this doesn’t make you a snob – it makes you smart. And it just might put you at the top of your regional game.

Marianne Willburn is an American garden columnist and author of the book Big Dreams, Small Garden. Read more at www.smalltowngardener.com

Photo credit for Monty Don. All other photos by the author.

[i]Neither the license nor the sentence actually exist, although they should.

[ii] C’mon Timber, seriously. What if Bloomsbury snaps us up?

[iii] Countries By Density Population. (2019-10-01). Retrieved 2019-10-09, from http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/countries-by-density/

Garden regionally. Get inspired globally. originally appeared on GardenRant on October 16, 2019.

from Gardening https://www.gardenrant.com/2019/10/garden-regionally-get-inspired-globally.html via http://www.rssmix.com/

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turfandlawncare · 5 years

Text

Garden regionally. Get inspired globally.

Guest Rant by Marianne Willburn

Somewhere near the bottom of every writer’s artistic license, a clever wordsmith will find the following recommendation:

Monty Don

“Comically exaggerating the position of one’s opponent is encouraged in the defense of one’s argument.”[i]

Rubbish.

Or if you prefer, horseshit.

And when social media gets involved, the comments reveal our innate prejudices and (I believe) underlying insecurities as Americans.

For the record:

Perhaps someone left a copy of George Plumptre’s The English Country House Garden in the men’s toilets. We can only speculate.

Nevertheless, something primal snapped in the man. I get it. But to throw out the cherubic baby with the bath water? That’s when I objected.

It’s just so damned predictable.

An autumn tapestry at the newly opened Delaware Botanic Gardens, designed by Dutch Wave guru Piet Oudouf, and providing 25 acres of forage, habitat and outstanding beauty for wildlife & visitors.

Except.

Even though they probably weren’t.

Then, Americans tend to lash out in righteous fury….

“I don’t need to know the [insert expletive] “proper” [voice dripping with sarcasm] name for this [long pause] blue poppy, to grow it!”

…while the Brits rely on cold condescension.

“But you’re not growing it particularly well, are you?”

And the resentments build.

Influences from all over the world come together in the wildly beautiful gravel garden at Chanticleer Garden, PA.

Garden regionally. Inspire yourself globally.

Doing all this doesn’t make you a snob – it makes you smart. And it just might put you at the top of your regional game.

Marianne Willburn is an American garden columnist and author of the book Big Dreams, Small Garden. Read more at www.smalltowngardener.com

Photo credit for Monty Don. All other photos by the author.

[i]Neither the license nor the sentence actually exist, although they should.

[ii] C’mon Timber, seriously. What if Bloomsbury snaps us up?

[iii] Countries By Density Population. (2019-10-01). Retrieved 2019-10-09, from https://ift.tt/2BoQmQI

Garden regionally. Get inspired globally. originally appeared on GardenRant on October 16, 2019.

from GardenRant https://ift.tt/2VSx4fX

#GardenRant

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thisdaynews · 5 years

Text

The End of the German-American Affair

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/the-end-of-the-german-american-affair/

The End of the German-American Affair

BERLIN — Just off a wide boulevard in a leafy west Berlin suburb, the U.S.-German friendship is alive and well.

Americans play football, sail and dance with their German friends. The decades-old bond between the two countries is on full display.

Story Continued Below

Trouble is, it’sonlya display. Opened in 1998, the Allied Museum, a free exhibition housed in an old U.S. Army theater, offers a window into what once was — and a welcome escape from what is.

Nearly 75 years after the end of World War II, the U.S.-German relationship isn’t just moribund, it’s on life support.

At both the official and unofficial level, the foundation that has supported the transatlantic alliance since the 1950s is crumbling. About 85 percent of Germans consider their country’s relationship with the U.S. to be “bad” or “very bad,” according to a recent study, while a clear majority want Germany to distance itself from the U.S.

Angela Merkel is in the United States this week for the United Nations climate conference but a meeting with the U.S. president, who is also in New York, is not on her agenda. Merkel didn’t see Trump during her last visit to the U.S. in May either.

While Merkel visits the U.N., her heir apparent, Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, is in Washington, where she is expected to face more tough questions at the Pentagon over German defense spending.

The fraying of ties — which began long before Trump came to power but has accelerated since — carries implications that stretch far beyond the two countries’ bilateral relationship. With China seeking to expand its influence in Europe, and Russia eager to exploit the transatlantic rift, the disintegration of German-American unity would have profound implications for the future of NATO and the broader global order.

That might be why both sides are trying to pretend everything is OK.

“I have German in my blood,” Trump, who has treated Germany like a piñata since he took office in 2017, said during a brief encounter with Merkel at the G-7 meeting in France last month. He added he would be “very honored” to visit her in Berlin, while acknowledging he has no firm plans to do so.

Trump’s sudden affinity for the land of his forebears triggered an audible guffaw from Merkel, who did her best during their joint press conference to keep a straight face.

“It’s not a problem for us to address difficult topics with one another,” she insisted.

More worried thanwunderbar

Berlin is so worried about the deterioration in the ties with its biggest trading partner that Germany’s Foreign Office is funding a special initiative dubbed “WunderbarTogether,” a yearlong series of events across the U.S. meant to remind Americans how much the two countries really like one another.

Merkel’s role in America’s culture wars, where — depending on the stage — she plays either the villain who opened the floodgates to uncontrolled Muslim migration, or the saint who rescued people in need, has complicated Germany’s PR effort. That was apparent during the German leader’s May visit, when she was celebrated like a lost savior during her commencement speech to Harvard graduates.

Merkel appeared to revel in the adulation. Whether it helps Germany, which depends on the U.S. both in economic and strategic terms, to have its leader at the center of America’s partisan battlefield is another question.

Germans’ attitude to Trump is much more straightforward: They universally dislike him.

When it comes to relations between nations, most Americans continue to have a positive view of Germany — in contrast to Germans’ opinion of the U.S.

But the “difficult topics” that Merkel referenced dominate the official conversation. Whether the question is Iran, trade, defense spending or climate change, Berlin and Washington are at loggerheads. Even in areas where strategic logic should make them natural allies — such as confronting China’s growing influence — the two have failed to move beyond their differences.

It’s tempting to blame the troubled relations on Trump’s withering attacks on Germany. His riffs on Germany’s tepid defense spending, its chronic trade surpluses and “Ahngula’s” migration policies are among the highlights of his rhetorical repertoire.

“In contrast to every other president before him, Trump has created the impression that partnership amongst equals isn’t desired,” former German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel, who now heads the transatlantic lobbying group Atlantik Brücke, told me recently.

In truth, the U.S.-German alliance has never been a partnership of equals. Tension has been part of the mix throughout the post-war era to varying degrees. If Konrad Adenauer and John F. Kennedy shared a mutual dislike, Helmut Schmidt and Jimmy Carter absolutely despised one another.

From the 1960s until the end of the Cold War, Germans took to the streets in droves to voice their opposition to both the U.S. war in Vietnam and the arms race with the Soviets.

Even so, this time, things really are different. And that’s not just down to Trump.

People power

For decades the German-U.S. relationship was sustained not just by military alliances and business interests, but by personal bonds. Even Germans critical of the U.S. agreed that American engagement was better than the alternative. At times of tension and disagreement, most Germans gave America the benefit of the doubt.

Over the course of the Cold War, millions of American soldiers were stationed in Germany, where many married and had children. Untold thousands of German teenagers went to the U.S. as exchange students and countless more studied at U.S. universities.

With the fall of the Berlin Wall, the number of U.S. military personnel fell dramatically from nearly 250,000 in 1985 to about 35,000 today. Though the U.S. remains a favorite destination for German high schoolers, the number of exchange students heading across the Atlantic has dropped by about 30 percent since 2009 to fewer than 6,000.

As the U.S. troops have gradually withdrawn, the residual gratitude many Germans felt over their presence has also evaporated.

During my first posting in Germany as a correspondent in the mid-1990s, the Germans I met brimmed with enthusiasm for all things American and were full of stories of their adventures there. Even if they took issue with many U.S. policies, there was a reserve of goodwill, a sense that we were all on the same side.

When the subject comes up these days, it’s like walking on eggshells.

“My father was a big fan of the U.S. and its democracy,” a new acquaintance told me recently, making it clear that he didn’t share his father’s perspective.

The German distrust began to take hold in the aftermath of 9/11. Though Germany joined the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan against the Taliban, Berlin refused to participate in the Iraq War, arguing there wasn’t enough evidence to support claims that Saddam Hussein had stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction.

While Germany’s decision under then-Chancellor Gerhard Schröder proved to be prescient, it also left a wound that has never fully healed. In recent years, Germany’s view of the U.S. has been framed by Guantanamo, NSA spying and Trump’s attacks.

Those issues made it easier for Germans to ignore persistent U.S. demands that Berlin reduce its massive export surplus, which most economists agree exacerbate global imbalances, or that it meet the NATO defense spending target. The last two U.S. administrations also pressured Merkel’s government to spend more on security, albeit with little success. Trump, on the other hand, appears to have gotten the Germans’ attention.

But Trump’s relentless pressure campaign has come at a cost at street level.

For almost 60 years, Germans and Americans have celebrated their friendship with an annualVolksfest, an open-air fair with a replica town from the Old West, hotdogs and American music. In July, the fest was canceled for the second time in three years after Berlin Mayor Michael Müller, who heads a leftist coalition, claimed to have failed to find a venue.

Just weeks earlier, Müller’s city government refused to allow 20 “Candy Bombers” — the historic U.S. transport aircraft used during the Berlin Airlift — to land at the city’s Tempelhof airport, citing local laws and safety regulations. Some of the planes had been flown over from the U.S. for the event.

What’s striking about such incidents is that few Germans seem to really care. A couple of newspaper writers expressed outrage over the Candy Bomber snub, but the story was quickly forgotten.

Even though the U.S. remains the guarantor of German security, for many Germans, both in and out of government, America is just another partner, not a true friend. Travel-obsessed Germans still visit the U.S. by the millions on vacation, to enjoy the beaches in Florida or the sights of New York. Just like they go to Turkey, another erstwhile German friend with whom relations have soured.

Recent suggestions by U.S. officials that Washington might transfer its German-based forces to Poland were met with a collective shrug in Berlin. Even though most German officials viewed it as an empty threat, some joked that losing the bases might be worth it if it took Germany out of Trump’s crosshairs.

With official German-U.S. relations at such a low point, it’s been left to a small band of die-hard believers to keep the transatlantic flame burning.

“At the moment, Trump is the dominant factor in the transatlantic relationship,” said Wolfgang Ischinger, the former German ambassador to Washington who now heads the Munich Security Conference, an annual forum that has been a fixture of the transatlantic dialogue for decades.

Ischinger does not believe the the U.S.-German alliance can return to the “status quo ante” after Trump’s presidency, but he said he hasn’t given up hope on a relationship that delivered his country from tyranny and returned it to prosperity.

“George W. Bush wasn’t that popular in Western Europe either,” he told me. “But as soon as Barack Obama emerged as a candidate, 200,000 people ran to Berlin’s Victory Column to listen to him speak and to cheer. Suddenly, America was highly popular again and our entire nation was excited.”

If all else fails, that could be the final exhibit in the Allied Museum.

#Affair #Foreign #German-American #Politics

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courtneytincher · 5 years

Text

F-35s Obsolete? Russia Has Lots of Thoughts on the Future of Aircraft Carriers

Carrier advocates will often make the dubious claim that a couple of missiles or even a torpedo could not actually sink these hulking ships. Perhaps not, but please try to imagine the armada that would have to be assembled to rescue a disabled ship of this stature.The 2019 iteration of the naval exercise Sea Breeze, which brought together nineteen nations (mostly from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization) and thirty-two ships, ended in the Ukrainian port of Odesa on July 12. The exercise was apparently conducted without incident. The Black Sea has indeed become fraught with tension since the November 2018 Kerch Strait skirmish, which witnessed Russia’s violent seizure of three Ukrainian vessels, whose crews remain in Russian captivity.If some nationalists in Kyiv thought that crisis would cause Ukrainians to “rally round the flag” and support Petro Poroshenko’s continuing hard line regarding Russia and the fate of the Donbas, they were utterly mistaken. Now, if Moscow is serious about dealing constructively with the new administration in Kyiv, then Kremlin needs to cut the gamesmanship and release the captive crews and vessels as a gesture of goodwill.Washington has not helped matters by “upping the ante” with Sea Breeze and such demonstrations of force on Russia’s doorstep. In the best case, such measures could be viewed as helping to give Kyiv the confidence to negotiate with Moscow. Yet, the risks of such maneuvers have not been adequately realized in Washington. To take but one example, it is asserted that no less than 18,000 mines left over from WWII still exist in the waters of the Sea of Azov and also along the Black Sea coasts. “They lie somewhere on the bottom and await their moment [Они где-то лежат на дне и ждут своего часа.].” It is actually not hard to imagine a U.S.-Russia war initiated by the accidental sinking of a NATO vessel participating in the Sea Breeze exercise with an unexploded mine in such hazardous waters. Remember the USS Maine?In such a conflict, of course, NATO forces (excluding Turkey) in the Black Sea would constitute a mere “tripwire”—military parlance for a force with some political value at “phase zero,” but with little actual military significance. They would be wiped out in the first few hours of a war. Perhaps, it is fortunate, therefore, that the U.S. is forbidden to bring aircraft carriers through the Turkish Straits by the Montreux Convention. In a hypothetical situation in which they were allowed to transit the Straits, they would likely be rapidly destroyed by a robust combination of diesel submarines, shore-based mobile missile forces, and small but lethal Russian missile boats. All of this, of course, does not even mention land-based aircraft equipped with hypersonic anti-ship missiles, such as the new Kinzhal system.If aircraft carriers have limited utility in a regrettably conceivable war over the future of Ukraine, what are the U.S. Navy’s capital ships actually good for in a conflict against Russia? It is true that many decades ago, America’s flattops faced off against the Soviet Navy in a significant naval stare down in the Eastern Mediterranean. Back in 1973, however, some U.S. Navy officers had serious misgivings about employing U.S. aircraft carriers against the Soviet Union’s so-called “Fifth Eskadra,” which even then was bristling with lethal anti-ship missiles.A mid-July 2019 study in the Russian military newspaper Military Review [Военное Обозрение] takes up the following question in the headline “The future U.S. Navy: nuclear ‘super’ or light aircraft carriers [Будущее ВМС США: атомные ‘суперы’ или лёгкие авианосцы?]?” The piece is historically grounded and the Russian author understands that the value of aircraft carriers has been questioned since the dawn of the Atomic Age. Yet, it is explained that “American admirals categorically disagreed” with that skepticism. In U.S. military doctrine, it is assessed that airpower “always played first violin … and that command of the air has been viewed as an essential precondition for victory in war [всегда играли первую скрипку … господство в воздухе почиталось ими абсолютно необходимой предпосылкой для победы в войне.].”A certain degree of envy is apparent in this analysis. A clear contrast is visible when this Russian analyst talks about the “rich experience” that the U.S. Navy gained in the Pacific War in the employment of aircraft carriers. Thus, even as the size and cost of aircraft carriers have increased precipitously, the Russian author maintains that American strategists “believed it to be criminal to economize on this critical system of naval armament [полагали преступным экономить на ключевой системе морских вооружений].” One can sense more than a little jealousy when the author reminds his readers that, after all, “America is a rich country.”The U.S. Navy’s newest aircraft carrier is briefly assessed. It is noted that the Gerald D. Ford aircraft carrier has electromagnetic catapults, an expanded aircraft capacity, and a smaller crew due to automation. Moreover, the Russian analysis notes both new nuclear reactor technology, as well as enhanced stealth. At the same time, it is realized that the vessel, as a first in its class, may suffer from certain “childhood illnesses [детскими болезнями],” and it remains unclear if these kinks can be resolved or are of a chronic character. What is beyond dispute, the author writes, is that the ship is “expensive. Very expensive.” Coming in at a cool $13 billion without counting the costs of the air wing or the escorts for the behemoth, “it makes sense in these conditions” that some in the U.S. are calling for smaller aircraft carriers that are less costly, according to the Russian analysis. Much of the second half of the Russian article explores a RAND report on “Future Carrier Options.” It is explained that this study evaluated building either 70,000-ton, 40,000-ton, or 20,000-ton alternatives to the 100,000-ton supercarriers. For these smaller and cheaper ships, the Russian analyst notes, of course, that they would have “significantly limited combat potential [боевой потенциал существенно ограничен],” of course. Ultimately, it is concluded that the Americans are unlikely to sacrifice combat power in order to save money due to the admirals’ objections. The Russian analysis ends with a joke, wishing the Americans good luck with developing smaller carriers. It is explained that recent American experience shows that the U.S. Navy is likely “to receive ships 1.5 times smaller, two times less effective and three times more expensive as a result of efforts to make the carrier fleet less expensive.” [что в результате попытки удешевления авианосного флота ВМС США получат корабли в полтора раза меньше, в два раза хуже и втрое дороже существующих].One could even be inclined to agree with the Russian strategist’s wry humor, and perhaps to even sympathize with the predicament of a Russian fleet that has seen some ups and perhaps more than its share of downs in recent decades. No doubt many Russian leaders still dream wistfully about gazing upon a shiny Ford-type supercarrier bearing the Russian naval ensign—the blue-cross flag of St. Andrew. Apparently, the idea is not quite dead, moreover, and may live on within a China-Russia partnership, although that “bilateral option” still seems rather far-fetched.Nevertheless, the envy of other navies does not necessarily make the supercarrier the ideal capital ship for the U.S. Navy going forward. More than a few American naval strategists have pronounced the aircraft carrier to be obsolete for modern naval warfare. While reasonably useful in conflicts from the Korean War to Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, it must be said that these conflicts were notable in that they featured opponents lacking the means to contest the seas. It’s sad to say, but unfortunately even the smaller and more backward militaries of Iran or North Korea could have a chance of putting a flattop down these days. Never mind the determined efforts of both China and Russia, which have both been working energetically to solve this problem for now more than half a century. Carrier advocates will often make the dubious claim that a couple of missiles or even a torpedo could not actually sink these hulking ships. Perhaps not, but please try to imagine the armada that would have to be assembled to rescue a disabled ship of this stature. To continue logically in this nightmare, now imagine the immense and vulnerable target that such a rescue operation would represent for an adversary. Such a scenario could result in the loss of a significant portion of the U.S. Navy. Regrettably, sometimes one must imagine a tragedy in order to prevent it.Indeed, it is well past time to shelve the pervasive big deck culture that has persisted against all evidence and common sense within the U.S. Navy and Congress too. Let us instead act decisively to pursue a more rational naval force structure that strongly emphasizes undersea capabilities, along with unmanned and highly distributed networks of sensors.Lyle J. Goldstein is Research Professor in the China Maritime Studies Institute (CMSI) at the United States Naval War College in Newport, RI. In addition to Chinese, he also speaks Russian and he is also an affiliate of the new Russia Maritime Studies Institute (RMSI) at Naval War College. You can reach him at [email protected]. The opinions in his columns are entirely his own and do not reflect the official assessments of the U.S. Navy or any other agency of the U.S. government.Image: Reuters.(This article was originally published earlier this year and is being republished due to reader interest.)

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tripstations · 5 years

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Review: United 787-10 Polaris Business Class

After flying from Hartford to Dublin on Aer Lingus and then from Porto to Newark on TAP Air Portugal, I spent a night at the Marriott Newark Airport. I’ve reviewed the hotel before, so won’t be doing so again.

The next evening it was off to Brussels on the United 787-10. I’ve reviewed United’s 777-300ER with the new Polaris seats, but was excited to check out the 787-10 for a couple of reasons:

This would be my first time flying a 787-10 on any airline (I had only previously flown the 787-8 and 787-9) This would be my first time flying a United 787 with new Polaris seats, because all of United’s 787-8s and 787-9s have their old business class seats

How I booked United Polaris with miles

United had a lot of award seats (more than nine) from Newark to Brussels for the date I was looking to travel. To see that kind of award availability during peak summer travel season is pretty awesome.

So I could have easily booked with with Air Canada Aeroplan miles, Avianca LifeMiles, or United MileagePlus miles. But I decided to have more fun instead.

Rather than just terminating in Europe, I decided to connect the same day to Bangkok. So for 77,500 Aeroplan miles plus about $150 in taxes and fees I was able to book a ticket from Newark to Bangkok.

I won’t reveal my connecting itinerary just yet, because what would be the fun in that? But you’re welcome to guess in the comments.

I’d say that was a great award redemption. Aeroplan would have charged 55,000 miles for a one-way ticket from the US to Europe, so for just 22,500 more miles I could continue all the way to Asia.

United 787-10 Polaris business class review

I stayed at the Marriott Newark Airport until 4PM, and then headed over to the airport. I reviewed United’s Newark Polaris Lounge last year, so won’t be doing so again this year. It’s an impressive lounge, though it was much busier than the last time I visited.

And it’s not just that it was more crowded, but it was also a very different crowd. Let me just say that I’m shocked that the seats weren’t stained from the degree to which many of the guests were spray tanned. Also, what is it with so many people from New Jersey not understanding the concept of inside voices?

Beyond the lounge, I have to note how good of a job has been done with United’s terminal at Newark. It’s a legitimately nice terminal, and the contrast between that and the other terminals at the airport is night-and-day.

There was lots of great plane spotting at the airport (assuming you’re like me and like seeing the same types of planes over and over), as 787s and 767s were all getting ready for their Atlantic crossings.

United 767 Newark Airport

I was surprised by just how many 787-10s there were, given that this is still a new plane type for them. As it turns out, United already has nine of their 14 787-10s, having taken delivery of their first one in March 2018.

United 787-10 Newark Airport

United 787 Newark Airport

My boarding pass indicated that boarding was supposed to start at 5:40PM, so I headed to the gate at around 5:20PM. At that point the crew was just getting on the plane.

Personally I find United’s boarding process rather confusing, especially given that they have signs for zones one and two, even though most people aren’t in those zones.

Newark Airport departure gate

I was standing near the gate agent, and overheard no fewer than a dozen people come up and ask her where they should stand since they were in other groups.

One other impressive thing about this flight — it wasn’t full in business class, even after all upgrades and even non-revs. The travel benefits offered to airline employees often aren’t quite as glamorous as they seem, though on this flight everyone got business class, and there were still 10 empty seats.

Boarding actually only started at 6:05PM. The gate agents didn’t make any sort of announcement about why there was a delay.

Boarding started with those who need extra time, followed by active duty military, followed by Global Services members, followed by families, followed by 1Ks, followed by Polaris. Yay, it’s fun to be the sixth group invited to board when you’re in the forward-most cabin on a plane.

United Airlines 999 Newark (EWR) – Brussels (BRU) Tuesday, August 6 Depart: 6:30PM Arrive: 7:45AM (+1 day) Duration: 7hr15min Aircraft: Boeing 787-10 Seat: 9L (Polaris Business Class)

I boarded through the second set of doors, and the first thing I noticed was just how massive the space between doors one and two is on the 787-10. The Polaris cabin consisted of 44 seats, all between doors one and two.

United 787-10 Polaris cabin

I’ve gotta give United credit, the 787-10 Polaris cabin is really, really pretty, and even prettier with mood lighting.

United 787-10 Polaris cabin

Polaris seats alternate in each row to maximize space:

In the center section in odd numbered rows there are “honeymoon” seats, where you’re seated very close to your seatmate, and far from the aisle In the center section in even numbered rows the two center seats are further apart from one another and closer to the aisle

United 787-10 Polaris business class center seats

The same concept is true in the window seats. In even numbered rows, seats are closer to the aisle, meaning that your seat is more exposed and the console is closer to the window.

United 787-10 Polaris business class seats

These would be my less-preferred seats, given that you’re much closer to the aisle, and it’s more difficult to look outside.

United 787-10 Polaris business class seats

The seats you want here are the “true” window seats, which are in odd numbered rows. These seats have better views out the windows and a lot more privacy. My seat, 9L, was one of those seats closer to the windows.

United Polaris business class seats 787-10

United 787-10 Polaris business class seats

United Polaris business class seats 787-10

These “true” window seats have a small walkway connecting the aisle to the seat.

United Polaris seat access 787-10

To the left of my seat was the console. United did a great job with the faux-marble they use, because it actually looks pretty nice in my opinion (for the avoidance of doubt, I’m not being sarcastic, as it’s rare I’d complement faux-marble and call it “classy”)

United Polaris seat counter & storage

Immediately above the counter were the entertainment controls, headphone jacks, and power outlets. Then above that was an enclosed storage compartment and reading light.

United Polaris seat storage

To the left of the seat below the counter was an armrest as well as a literature pocket.

United Polaris seat literature pocket

The seat controls were along the window-side of the seat, and were easy to use. I especially love the wheel you can turn to adjust the position of your seat.

United Polaris seat controls 787-10

The tray table folded out from underneath the personal television in front, and could be folded over in half. It was sturdy and easy to move around.

United Polaris seat tray table 787-10

Generally with staggered seats the biggest issue is that the footwells tend to be small, which can be uncomfortable when sleeping. The good news is that this footwell didn’t feel small at all.

United Polaris seat footwell 787-10

I was expecting the seat might feel a bit more compact than on the 777-300ER, given that the cabin isn’t quite as wide. However, I didn’t find that to be the case.

Each seat also had an individual air nozzle, which is much appreciated.

Already waiting at my seat upon boarding were a pair of headphones. While not Bose or Bang & Olufsen quality, they were pretty good.

United Polaris headphones

Also already waiting at my seat was United’s spectacular bedding. This is where Polaris really shines, as I think they have the best business class bedding in the world. This included a duvet, a light blanket, a regular pillow, and a cooling gel pillow. Not even pictured is the mattress pad, available on demand.

United Polaris bedding

Spoiler alert: I fear at this point the bedding is literally the only aspect of the Polaris soft product that still impresses.

Also at my seat was a Spider-Man amenity kit.

United Polaris amenity kit

The kit was well stocked, and I couldn’t help but laugh out loud when I walked to the bathroom mid-flight and saw someone with the Spider-Man eye shades on.

United Polaris amenity kit contents

United used to offer chocolates and pre-departure drinks of choice. This time I just had a flight attendant hold out a tray and say “water… orange juice… champagne.” That’s quite a generous pour! Apparently you can still request other pre-departure drinks, though champagne worked for me.

United Polaris pre-departure champagne

Also waiting at my seat was the menu.

United Polaris menu

At 6:35PM the main cabin door was closed, and at 6:45PM meal orders were taken. To my surprise I wasn’t even asked for a second choice.

Around the same time the captain made his welcome aboard announcement, informing us of our flight time of 6h33min. At that point the Spider-Man safety video was screened.

youtube

We pushed back at 6:50PM — a bit behind schedule — and started our taxi at 7PM. There were several United heavies at remote stands as we taxied to the runway.

United 787-10 Newark Airport

United 767-400 Newark Airport

We had a quick taxi to runway 22R, and surprisingly there wasn’t much of a queue. There was a La Compagnie A321neo taking off right ahead of us, which is another product on my review list.

La Compagnie A321 Newark Airport

Taxiing Newark Airport

Taking off from Newark

Our takeoff roll was pretty quick, and we had a smooth climb out.

View after takeoff from Newark

As we climbed out I played around with the entertainment system, starting with looking at the moving map.

United entertainment selection

Moving map enroute to Brussels

The entertainment selection was excellent, with a seemingly never-ending choice of TV shows and movies.

United entertainment selection

I also connected to the wifi.

United wifi 787-10

United had three pricing options for wifi:

One hour for $8.99 Two hours for $12.99 Full flight for $22.99

United wifi pricing

The internet speeds were good, and I didn’t notice any coverage gaps.

The crew was quick to start the service after takeoff. The menu read as follows (annoyingly they don’t publish a drink list):

Service began with warm towels being distributed, followed by tablecloths.

United Polaris warm towel

35 minutes after takeoff a flight attendant reached my seat with a cart to offer me a drink. I ordered some champagne and sparkling water, along with United’s signature warm nuts.

United Polaris dinner — warm nuts and drinks

There was a second flight attendant with another cart right behind her, so less than a minute later I was served the appetizer and salad on a tray.

The appetizer consisted of smoked duck, farro salad with dried cranberries, brined carrots, and whole-grain mustard, and just tasted a bit off to me. I also thought the salad of mixed greens, fennel, and bell pepper, was super bland. On the plus side, the pretzel bread was good.

United Polaris dinner — salad and appetizer

55 minutes after takeoff I was served the main course. United has switched from plating dishes onboard to already loading them pre-plated so that the crews just have to put them in the ovens. That most definitely shows when it comes to presentation. Like all changes that are made in the airline industry, United has assured me that this was due to customer feedback.

I ordered the seared lemon grass salmon with coconut red curry sauce, Thai coconut risotto, stir-fried bell pepper, carrot, and onion. The dish was alright.

United Polaris dinner — main course

Lastly the dessert trolly was rolled through the cabin about 75 minutes after takeoff. I asked for ice cream with nuts and strawberries.

United Polaris dinner — dessert

On the plus side, I appreciated that the meal service was done within 90 minutes of takeoff. Unfortunately the speed of the service was the only part of the meal that impressed me.

I’m not sure if this was just a bad flight, but I feel like Polaris has fallen quite a bit when it comes to food quality. They used to be above average for US airline catering, while now I think they’re on par with American (which is not where you want to be).

The flight attendants were fine-ish. Some were friendly-ish. Some were efficient but not friendly. Overall they went through the motions and that’s about it.

After the meal I checked out the lavatory — there were two in front of the cabin and two behind. I’m not sure if the ones behind are shared with premium economy, or what, because the curtains suggested they all belonged to business class (in which case four lavatories for 44 seats is an excellent ratio).

United 787 lavatory

United 787-10 Polaris cabin

I then reclined my seat all the way to get some sleep. After all, I had a long day ahead of me after landing in Brussels.

United Polaris business class bed 787-10

I fell asleep just under five hours from landing in Brussels.

United entertainment system

Progress enroute to Brussels

I got a solid 3.5 hours of sleep, and woke up just under 90 minutes before landing.

Progress enroute to Brussels

The sleep quality was excellent, and between United’s great bedding and having an individual air nozzle, the conditions were perfect.

The cabin lights were turned on a few minutes after I woke up, at which point breakfast service started.

A flight attendant walked by my seat and said “you’re not joining us for breakfast?”

This is ultimately minor, but I find this stuff happens on United more than any other airline. Like, I had indicated to the flight attendant when she took the meal order that I wanted to be woken for breakfast, and I was awake before they started serving anyone breakfast.

So was the flight attendant trying to discourage me from having breakfast, or wouldn’t the correct question be “would you care to join us for breakfast?”

Etihad has a partnership with Savoy for training their onboard butlers. Maybe United should have a partnership with McDonalds? In some cases it would represent an improvement in standards…

Anyway, the breakfast was quite large when you consider that this is a short transatlantic flight (many airlines just offer a continental breakfast).

For breakfast there was the choice between a fruit salad and a cream omelet. The omelet came with chicken sausage and potatoes. It also came with a side of fruit and a croissant.

United Polaris breakfast

it was a beautiful morning as we approached Brussels. At 7AM the first officer announced we were just starting our descent and would be landing in 30 minutes.

View enroute to Brussels

View approaching Brussels

Sure enough, we touched down at exactly 7:30AM, and from there had a 10 minute taxi to our arrival gate. I had a great view of the 787-10 upon deplaning.

United 787-10 in Brussels

United 787-10 Polaris bottom line

On the plus side, the 787-10 is a gorgeous plane, and in particular United’s Polaris cabins are very nice. While Polaris seats aren’t my absolute favorite business class seats out there, they’re near the top, and I’d say they’re on par with reverse herringbone seats.

United’s entertainment, wifi, and bedding are all very good. Furthermore, the pace of service was good, given the short overnight flight.

Everything else left a bit to be desired, though, from the food quality to the service.

Still, on balance I’d say this is a solid transatlantic product.

If you’ve flown United’s new Polaris, what was your experience like?

The post Review: United 787-10 Polaris Business Class appeared first on Tripstations.

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josephborrello · 5 years

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Magnitude and Direction, Issue #34 | 31 May 2019

Hardware, Prototyping, and Fabrication

Via Low-Tech Magazine (via The Prepared): A comprehensive guide on how to build a low-tech, self-hosted, and solar-powered website. I didn't even know Low-Tech Magazine was a thing until now and it looks like a wonderful repository of future hardware shares for M&D. Zipper Rescue's "Zipper Wizard" is a must-have for your pre-travel checklist when, inevitably, your suitcase zipper will get stuck, or broken, or worse. at some point. (Also, I'm sad there's no zipper emoji - the Unicode Consortium needs to get on this.) A few weeks ago, in the 2019 edition of Yale's DISTILLED magazine, I wrote an article about 3D printing guns and said, among other things, that we're not going to be able to use DMCA-style rules and safeguards to halt their proliferation. As this Wired article details, it looks like I was right about that, which makes my DISTILLED argument - that we should be focusing on the development of new digital manufacturing forensics - all the more important. The digitized articles aren't up on DISTILLED's website yet, but in the meantime, if you want to read my original article, check out my crosspost on Medium. You might want to avoid using the models of Master locks featured in this video; they all have some pretty gaping security issues that allows them to be improperly opened even faster than they're opened with their keys or combinations.

Software and Programming

🏻‍ Contrary to the Hollywood portrayals, computer hacking exploits human shortcoming more often than it does computer shortcoming (ref. the below comic). Turns out the same logic applies to the companies that help you get out of ransomware attacks (like 2017's WannaCry). How do they do it? Just pay the hackers - no technical wizardry here. This simple solution can have some pretty unsavory consequences, though. Aaaand, we're back with another deepfake. This time it's an eerily realistic imitation of podcaster (and former Fear Factor host) Joe Rogan. ✂ If you enjoy making stamps out of your face in Instagram or Snapchat, but have been looking for something... more, then check out Weird Cuts, which is pretty much the same thing, but in 3D augmented reality. 🏽‍♀️🏾‍♀️🏿🏻 S.H.E. (the Search Human Equalizer) is a browser extension dedicated to helping un-bias search results away from their current male-leaning outcomes. I can't speak to what Google search results look like for my female colleagues, but boy oh boy the differences for me were pretty striking, and improved for the better with this extension.

Science, Engineering, and Biomedicine

⚠ Animal warning calls is something I'd wager we're all familiar with, but I never even thought to consider that some animals might give different kinds of warning calls based on the approaching thread. A recent study of Titi monkeys shows just that: by combining different calls in different patterns, the monkeys produce a probabilistic message regarding the danger. 🏽 The nose on Japan's new experimental bullet train might look comical, but it's there to reduce the serious aerodynamic issues that can arise when your train is going 1/3 the speed of sound (wouldn't that be a nice problem to have, America?). It looks like being a "dog person" isn't just a trait we acquire over time - in part, at least, it runs in our genes. 🤧 If you've ever felt like waking up sick felt different than getting hit with the same symptoms in the evening, you're not alone. Our immune systems are linked to our bodies' circadian rhythms and the implications for diseases can be pretty significant.

Mapping, History, and Data Science

From M&D reader Jeremy, Fulton History is a repository of digitized newspapers from the US and Canada, dating back to the 1800s and comprising over 45 MILLION pages. I definitely wouldn't have had the patience to do that, but Tom Tryniski did. 🏽‍♀️ Apparently, the margin notes of an archibishop's register from the 14th century tell the tale of a nun who faked her own death and left a life-like dummy in her wake in order to get out of the convent she lived and worked in. And you though you hated your job. ⛰ Game of Thrones may be over, but people still have plenty to say about it. Among the critical analyses and season 8 re-write petitions, though, is this (in my opinion) much more interesting work by a pair of geologists from Austrailia who build a tetonic plate model of the World of Ice and Fire spanning 600 million years of continental drift. Suffice it to say, I love this. 🏽‍♀️ By and large, crime in cities around the world is on the decline. But if you use "police scanner" apps like Citizen or Nextdoor you're likely getting a very different, largely incorrect picture. It's one of the many unforeseen consequences of having unfathomable amounts of information delivered to us constantly, and it's the topic of tomorrow's Moment of Inertia.

Events and Opportunities

Summer is unofficially here, but that doesn't mean anyone is slowing down.

Tuesday, 6/4 Prototyping firm Fictiv has released their 2019 State of Hardware report (which I contributed to!) and now they're doing a road show bringing together local hardware communities and talking about the results. This coming Tuesday, they'll be at Kickstarter HQ for a meetup and discussion.

Wednesday, 6/5 The Life Sciences NYC meetup group hosts Dr. Carlos Cordon-Cardo, Chair of the Mount Sinai Health System Department of Pathology, for a discussion on the emerging field of digital pathology.

Thursday, 6/6 Join the Nanotech NYC meetup at their new monthly Nanonite Social! Whether you are a student, scientist, engineer or just curious about what nanotechnology is and how it's used, you're more than welcome to join the group. Heck, even if you aren’t a nanotech enthusiast and want to just get to know new people, come on by, it's a friendly group!

Saturday, 6/8 The next Music Community Lab hackathon explores the relationships between movement and music. The hackathon is on 6/8, but be sure to apply by 5/22 - space is limited!

Monday, 6/10 Join the NYU Rudin Center for Transportation Policy & Management for a discussion on the future of micromobility (think bike- and scooter-sharing services) in New York City.

Tuesday, 6/11 The Mid Atlantic Bio Angels have their next 1st Pitch competition. Always a great opportunity to connect with local up-and-coming biotech startups as well as the wider life science community in NYC.

Wednesday, 6/12 The NYC life science community will gather at the Alexandria Center for the Life Science Innovation Showcase, featuring 25 of the city's most promising up-and-coming biotech entrepreneurs.

Thursday, 6/13 Join JLABS and Ethicon for a discussion about the challenges, pathways, and pitfalls around bringing a medical device to market.

Friday, 6/14 NYDesigns is launching a new hardware startup accelerator program (which may be a first for the NYC area??) for fall 2019. Learn more about how to apply and what benefits there are at a lunchtime info session at NYDesigns.

Some other upcoming events to keep on your radar...

Monday, 6/17 Join The City College of New York Master’s in Translational Medicine, in partnership with the AAAS-Lemelson Invention Ambassadors for a discussion around the way academic institutions can promote opportunities for students and faculty to invent and develop entrepreneurial endeavors as well as the ways invention itself can open doors for more people to become inventors.

Wednesday, 6/19 Astronomy on Tap's next event waxes historical with musings on the impact of science on events around the world andacross time.

Thursday, 6/20 JLABS celebrates 1 year in New York with a pitch competition some of the area's most promising local talent.

Thursday & Friday, 6/20-21 The Biodesign Challenge Summit 2019 on June 20th and 21st at Parsons School of Design and the Museum of Modern Art brings together 36 teams from 9 countries to present their visions for the future of biotechnology. Use code SUMMITVIP115 for a free pass.

Wednesday, 7/17 The Society for the Advancement of Social Studies has returned after a long hiatus (they were still involved in the Art History Happy Hours at the Brooklyn Museum, to be fair) and is back in a new home and with three great talks about Manhattan-themed history.

Map of the Month

It only has the years 2011 to 2013, but this map of all the filming locations in NYC is pretty fun to explore. On my block during that period, one movie was filmed: New Year's Eve staring well..., a bunch of people.

Odds & Ends

If you're a reader who frequently makes it to the end of M&D, then maybe you're also the kind of reader who would be interested in this digitized collection of the tape cassettes that were played in (all?) KMarts for background music between 1989 and 1992.

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ionecoffman · 5 years

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How To Sell a $50 Water Bottle

The potential judgement of students can lead a teacher to do strange things. For Monique Mongeon, an arts educator in Toronto, her first job teaching adults sparked a small crisis of confidence. “I was in my mid-20s, and I was looking at things I could do to make myself feel like a person who had authority to stand in front of a bunch of other 20-somethings,” she says. After ruling out fancy bags and shoes for being too extravagant, Mongeon settled on a sleek, $45 water bottle. “I was scrolling through websites thinking, which of these S’well bottles looks like the kind of person I want to be?”

Nine years ago, there was only one S’well, and it was blue. Now you can get the curvy, steel-capped bottles in more than 200 different size and color combinations, including some that look like marble or teakwood. Many are customizable with your initials. The big ones will hold an entire bottle of wine, and smaller versions are made for cocktails or coffee. Teens offer S’well bottles to propose to prospective prom dates. They’re a common sight in Instagram photos of artfully stuffed vacation carry-ons and aesthetically pleasing desk tableaus.

S’well’s success is impressive, but the brand has a host of competitors nipping at its heels in what has become an enormous market for high-end, reusable beverage containers. If nothing in S’well’s inventory calls out to you, maybe you’ll like a Yeti, Sigg, Hydro Flask, Contigo, or bkr. A limited-edition Soma bottle, created in collaboration with the Louis Vuitton designer Virgil Abloh and Evian (itself a legend of designer water), was recently feted at New York Fashion Week. VitaJuwel bottles, which can cost more than $100, promise to “restructure” your tap water using the power of interchangeable crystal pods.

On the surface, water bottles as totems of consumer aspiration sound absurd: If you have access to water, you can drink it out of so many things that already exist in your home. But if you dig a little deeper, you find that these bottles sit at a crossroads of cultural and economic forces that shape Americans’ lives far beyond beverage choices. If you can understand why so many people would spend 50 bucks on a water bottle, then you can understand a lot about America in 2019.

The first time I coveted a water bottle was in 2004. When I arrived as a freshman at the University of Georgia, I found that I was somehow the last person alive who didn’t own a Nalgene. The brand’s distinctive, lightweight plastic bottles had long been a cult-favorite camping accessory, but in the mid-2000s, they exploded in popularity beyond just outdoorsmen. A version with the school’s logo on it cost $16 in the bookstore, which was a little steep for me, an unemployed 18-year-old, but I bought one anyway. I wanted to be the kind of person all my new peers apparently were. Plus, it’s hot in Georgia. A nice water bottle seemed like a justifiable extravagance.

Around the same time, I remember noticing the first flares of another trend intimately related to the marketability of water bottles: athleisure. All around me, stylish young women wore colorful Nike running shorts and carried bright plastic Nalgenes to class. “With millennials, fitness and health are themselves signals,” says Tülin Erdem, a marketing professor at New York University. “They drink more water and carry it with them, so it’s an item that becomes part of them and their self-expression.”

Now, across Instagram, you can find high-end water bottles lurking around the edges of stylized gym photos posted by exercisers and fitness instructors. Usually, these people aren’t being rewarded for the placement by anything but likes. Sarah Kauss, S’well’s founder and CEO, says people have been photographing her water bottles since the company began in 2010. “I’d receive hundreds of pictures a week from customers,” she says. “I wasn’t giving them anything for it. There wasn’t a free bottle or a coupon code or anything other than customers just wanting to show their own experience.”

Kauss says she always knew the bottle’s appearance would be important, even though positioning something as simple as a water bottle as a luxury product was a bit of a gamble. “As I moved up in my career, I was upgrading my wardrobe, and the bottle that looked like a camping accessory really didn’t serve my purpose anymore,” she says. When she noticed fashionable New Yorkers were carrying upscale disposable plastic bottles from brands like Evian and Fiji, she realized reusable bottles could use a makeover, too

Kauss and her contemporaries struck at the right time. The importance of fitness and wellness were starting to gain a foothold in fashionable crowds, and concerns over consumer waste and plastic’s potential to leach chemicals into food and water were gaining wider attention. People wanted cute workout gear, and they wanted to drink water out of materials other than plastic. Researchers have found that the chance to be conspicuously sustainability-conscious motivates consumers, especially when the product being purchased costs more than its less-green counterparts.

Nearly a decade on, the water-bottle trend shows no signs of slowing, and people just seem to like their fancy bottles a lot. The insulated metal variety, which is the most popular, does a far better job than plastic at keeping beverages at ideal temperatures. They’re durable and useful. When I put out a call for opinions on Twitter, I heard from hundreds of people about how much they loved theirs. Rebecca Thomas, a 28-year-old in Atlanta who owns three S’wells, says she once paid a ransom to an Uber driver after she left one behind in the car. (“That’s when I decided I’d never put wine in one again,” she says.) Others were similarly dedicated. “I will be buried with all of my different sizes of Hydro Flask,” says Emily Sile, a travel editor in New York City. “Maybe by then Hydro Flask will come out with a coffin, so I can be buried in that, too.”

The trend’s Instagram visibility might make it seem like high-end water bottles are the sole province of women. Indeed, brands like bkr, whose bottles are pastel glass and can come with a special top meant to hold lip gloss, are explicitly marketed as products of feminine beauty. (Drinking water, after all, is often lauded as the ultimate skincare product.) But the category’s origins in camping gear mean that it started out with a strong foothold among male millennials as well, and brands like Yeti and Hydro Flask have continued to court a more masculine audience. Mike Ferguson, a 37-year-old in Los Angeles, has four Yetis of various sizes that he usually uses for iced coffee and water. “I have very few vices, but this is one,” he says. “Am I a brand loyalist? I don’t think so, but the evidence suggests otherwise.”

Ferguson, like many people I spoke with, got his first Yeti as a gift. Kauss says that’s a popular trend she sees with S’well’s customers, too: People will buy one or two, presumably for themselves, and then come back to the website around the holidays and buy six. Most brands also customize orders for large corporate clients, meaning your employer might hand you a logo bottle at the end of the year. Even if spending 40 or 50 bucks on a water bottle sounds bad, getting one for free can turn reluctant consumers into evangelists.

When those factors are taken together, it’s hard to be surprised that so many $50 water bottles exist, or that people have snapped them up in droves. On a certain level, a nice water bottle fulfils its promise in the way few things do. They hold water. They stay cold. They look nice on your desk. They don’t leave an unsightly sweat ring on your nightstand. For people like Mongeon, the art teacher, they look like things that are owned by people who know what they’re doing. For a lot of people, they spark a little bit of joy in the otherwise mundane routine of work, exercise, and personal hygiene. For a generation with less expendable income than its parents’, a nice bottle pays for itself with a month of consistent use and lets you feel like you’re being proactive about your health and the environment.

A container of any kind, whether it’s a rented storage unit or a decorative basket, promises order and control. Marie Kondo’s Netflix show about organizing American homes in disarray was a hit for a reason: There’s a small amount serenity in finding the right vessel and filling it with the right thing. Consumer choices might not be an effective solution to structural problems like pollution, but it’s nice to feel like you’re making ethical choices. If nothing else, millennials can buy the best water bottle they can afford and try their best to stay hydrated.

Article source here:The Atlantic

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vincentbuckles · 5 years

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Weekend reading: Can we take back control from Brexit?

[A quick update on Brexit thoughts for those who want to reasonably discuss it. For those who don’t, please feel free to skip to the links.]

Imagine having anticipated something for 30 years, finally getting the freedom to do it, and then making a car crash out of it.

But enough about my life as a mid-life singleton. I’m thinking here of the Eurosceptic wing of the Conservative party.

You know – those 40-odd guys who can’t muster up enough votes to unseat the UK’s most ineffectual leader since Hugh Laurie’s Prince Regent in Blackadder the Third, and yet who’ve somehow managed to send 63 million of us towards an apparently imminent impoverished future.

You might think the World Class farce we’ve endured over the past 30 months would see me smiling.

After all a second referendum is looking ever more likely, if still not odds-on.

But unfortunately, I continue to read and hear abundant evidence that most of the Leave voting contingent still doesn’t get it.

And that means despite the demographic challenges of that faction (i.e. its original margin of victory is literally dying) it’s quite possible Leave could win again.

Especially if the Remain side sticks to the previous policy of dull facts over bus-splattering bullshit fabrications.

No wonder Leave voters seem almost as angry as Remainers:

I’ve seen a parade of #Brexit leaders on news programmes today. Their position boils down to this: We are absolutely sure voters knew exactly what they voted for and, as soon as we manage to agree among ourselves what that was, we will inform voters what it was they voted for.

— Alex Andreou (@sturdyAlex) December 6, 2018

A second referendum is a horrible solution to a stupid problem, with plenty of downsides.

However from my perspective it has the minor virtue of being less terrible than all the other alternatives.

Whose Brexit is it, anyway

Can we not stop this death march? Absolutely no one seems happy with the direction of travel.

Not even the Leave voters, that’s the most galling – if unsurprising – thing.

Blogger Ermine came close to capturing this contradiction at the heart of the Leave vote with a graphic this week. Leavers are represented here by the two Mickey Mouse ears on top of the smug metropolitan elite mug:

What @ermine’s Venn diagram is missing though is the set of people who voted either Leave or Remain to make us poorer.

Perhaps that’s because it doesn’t exist – despite even the Government admitting that’s what we face.

True, a tiny set of Brexiteers have belatedly conceded that a No Deal Brexit will hit us in the national nads.

That, they now say, is a price worth paying for sovereignty / blue passports / the right to negotiate trade deals with Madagascar and Kazakhstan.

But all the leading Leave-supporting players continue to lie to the electorate.

Theresa May herself rounded off her Deal Debate Dodge by harking back to the supposed ability of Brexit to reduce the inequalities and insecurities she spoke of in the aftermath of the vote – despite almost every single analysis of Brexit showing a net negative impact, economically-speaking.1

If you want sovereignty or fewer immigrants from Brexit, fair enough. Own that. Don’t claim the tooth fairy too.

But sadly, the very few Leavers I come across in real-life are still saying things like “The EU needs us more than we need them.”

The same EU that has run rings around us in negotiations.

The EU that has stuck firmly together, despite all forecasts to the contrary, and strangely believes more in its vision of togetherness than in the fantasies of Brexiteers.

The EU that takes 44% of our exports, while we take 8%2 of theirs.

The roughly 450 million of them versus the 63 million of us.

The UK vs the EU is a negotiating position that only looks attractive to Tories of a certain class raised to see greatness in the self-destruction of The Charge Of The Light Brigade.

“C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre; c’est de la folie”.3

Barry Barricades

What I missed when I created Barry Blimp – the archetypal Home Counties Leave voter of not inconsiderable means and more than a few years – was his zealotry.

Because I now see a big chunk of the Leave cohort want Brexit no matter what.

In fact I rather think some would enjoy it if we had ferries piled up outside Dover and food rationing at Tesco.

Obviously I feel vindicated when I think back to the insults hurled at me when I ventured my opinion on my own blog that many Leave voters didn’t know what they’d started, or that this would drag on for years.

But that’s about as satisfying as telling the person in the seat next to you that yes, you were right that the 747’s engine sounded a bit funny as the Captain shouts “Brace, brace!” over the tannoy.

There seems no good solution to this mess now. Revolutions have started over less.

(That may sound melodramatic if you don’t know your history. I suggest you Google the origins of the French Revolution, the English Civil War, or the American War of Independence before you jab your finger in my chest.)

To be clear I’m not predicting revolution – let alone hoping for it, from any perspective – but there’s got to be a non-zero chance.

Currently we are just living through a nationalist coup, and that’s bad enough.

The irony is for many on the right, Jeremy Corbyn is a revolutionary Marxist.

Politics has abandoned the center ground. As a result, lots of people are going to be very unhappy, however this turns out.

Our politicians need to get a grip, fast.

From Monevator

Money is power – Monevator

From the archive-ator: The characteristics of an entrepreneur – Monevator

News

Note: Some links are Google search results – in PC/desktop view you can click to read the piece without being a paid subscriber. Try privacy/incognito mode to avoid cookies. Consider subscribing if you read them a lot!4

UK economy slows as car sales fall – BBC

Property market at weakest since 2012 as Brexit takes toll, says RICS – Guardian

ECB ends €2.5tn eurozone QE stimulus programme – BBC

Luxury goods inflation running at nearly 6%, says Coutts – Guardian

Richest parts of London generate 30x cash of poorest parts of UK – ThisIsMoney

Scotland freezes threshold for higher-rate income tax – Guardian

Crowdcube investors threaten legal action after Emoov goes bust – ThisIsMoney

Check out the collapse in the price of solar powered energy – Vox

Products and services

Are real or fake Christmas trees better for the planet? – Guardian

Small energy providers keep going bust. Is switching too risky? – ThisIsMoney

Investors flock to venture capital funds [Search result] – FT

Britain to force broadband providers to tell customers their best deals – Reuters

Ratesetter will pay you £100 [and me a cash bonus] if you invest £1,000 for a year – Ratesetter

Examining the risks and rewards of securities lending for funds – Morningstar

Investec’s new notice savings account allows 20% withdrawals – ThisIsMoney

Questioning the $1million retirement maths special

$1 million isn’t enough – Fat Tailed and Happy

The hardest problem in finance – The Irrelevant Investor

$1 million? Meh. [US but relevant] – The Belle Curve

Comment and opinion

Stellar take on the savings-versus-investment-returns debate – Get Rich Slowly

Situational spending – Seth Godin

Index-investing critic takes aim, fires, misses – Bloomberg

Rational versus reasonable – Morgan Housel

Financial planning – Indeedably

Three investing maths mistakes to drive you nuts – The IT Investor

The current danger for stocks: Fear itself – Morningstar

Why you need a money mentor – The Cut

The reason many billionaires aren’t satisfied with their wealth – The Atlantic

The wonderful Portfolio Charts has had a makeover – Portfolio Charts

How to measure a company’s growth rate – UK Value Investor

The best investing white papers of 2018 [For nerds/pros] – Savvy Investor

Crypto corner (December 2017 nostalgic edition)

Four days trapped at sea with crypto’s nouveau riche – Breaker Mag

Yes Bitcoin was a bubble. And it popped… – Bloomberg

…but is it time for believers to buy back into Ethereum? – AVC

Prices are down more than the ‘fundamentals’ [My quotes] – Chris Burniske

Brexit

The EU rebuffs Theresa May on Brexit — six takeaways [Search result] – FT

Lord Heseltine nails it on Brexit [Video] – via Facebook

“This was the second failed attempt to unseat May in three weeks, for a bunch of guys who’d be picked last for paintball and are led by rejected Paddington villain Jacob Rees-Mogg.” – Guardian

EU leaders scrap plans to help Theresa May pass deal after disastrous meeting in Brussels – Independent

Sir Ivan Rogers on Brexit [Full speech] – University of Liverpool

How Ireland outwitted Britain on Brexit – Bloomberg

Don’t know why people see a nasty, racist fringe to the Leave vote… – via Twitter

Kindle book bargains

The Barcelona Way: How to Create a High-performance Culture by Damian Hughes – £1.09 on Kindle

The 100-Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of Longevity by Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott – £2.99 on Kindle

James Acaster’s Classic Scrapes by James Acaster – £0.99 on Kindle

Off our beat

Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement – Farnham Street

Population mountains [Striking 3D maps of global populations] – The Pudding

KFC debuts fried chicken-scented fire logs ahead of Christmas – Fox News

We need academic conferences about robots, love, and sex – Slate

And finally…

“For half a century the competition to produce the fastest stock price-printing machine was almost as frantic as the pursuit of the stocks and the shares. Indeed for many, the two were inseparable.” – Selwyn Parker, The Great Crash: How the Stock Market Crash of 1929 Plunged the World into Depression

Like these links? Subscribe to get them every Friday!

Yes, a couple of things might be made better for a tiny subset of the population. But as we’ve discussed before, almost every serious economist believes those benefits would be grossly outweighed by the economic negatives. They’d be far better addressed directly via redistribution or government investment.

Or 18%, in a certain light.

“It’s magnificent, but it’s not war; it’s madness” – General Pierre Bosquet.

Note some articles can only be accessed through the search results if you’re using PC/desktop view (from mobile/tablet view they bring up the firewall/subscription page). To circumvent, switch your mobile browser to use the desktop view. On Chrome for Android: press the menu button followed by “Request Desktop Site”.

Weekend reading: Can we take back control from Brexit? published first on https://justinbetreviews.weebly.com/

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digitalmark18-blog · 6 years

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Russian meddling in 2018 vote not certain but of concern

New Post has been published on https://britishdigitalmarketingnews.com/russian-meddling-in-2018-vote-not-certain-but-of-concern/

Russian meddling in 2018 vote not certain but of concern

WASHINGTON (AP) — Nearly a year after Russian government hackers meddled in the 2016 U.S. election, researchers at cybersecurity firm Trend Micro zeroed in on a new sign of trouble: a group of suspect websites.

The sites mimicked a portal used by U.S. senators and their staffs, with easy-to-miss discrepancies. Emails to Senate users urged them to reset their passwords — an apparent attempt to steal them.

Once again, hackers on the outside of the American political system were probing for a way in.

“Their attack methods continue to take advantage of human nature and when you get into an election cycle the targets are very public ,” said Mark Nunnikhoven, vice president of cloud research at Trend Micro.

Now the U.S. has entered a new election cycle. And the attempt to infiltrate the Senate network, linked to hackers aligned with Russia and brought to public attention in July, is a reminder of the risks, and the difficulty of assessing them.

Newly reported attempts at infiltration and social media manipulation — which Moscow officially denies — point to Russia’s continued interest in meddling in U.S. politics. There is no clear evidence, experts said, of efforts by the Kremlin specifically designed to disrupt elections in November. But it wouldn’t take much to cause turmoil.

“It’s not a question of whether somebody is going to try to breach the system, to manipulate the system, to influence the system,” said Robby Mook, who managed Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and co-directs a Harvard University project to protect democracy from cyberattacks, in an interview earlier this year. “The question is: Are we prepared for it?”

Online targeting of the U.S. political system has come on three fronts — efforts to get inside political campaigns and institutions and expose damaging information; probes of electoral systems, potentially to alter voter data and results; and fake ads and accounts on social media used to spread disinformation and fan divisions among Americans.

In recent weeks, Microsoft reported that it had disabled six Russian-launched websites masquerading as U.S. think tanks and Senate sites. Facebook and the security firm FireEye revealed influence campaigns , originating in Iran and Russia, that led the social network to remove 652 impostor accounts, some targeted at Americans. The office of Republican Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania said hackers tied to a “nation-state” had sent phishing emails to old campaign email accounts.

U.S. officials said they have not detected any attempts to corrupt election systems or leak information rivaling Kremlin hacking before President Donald Trump’s surprise 2016 victory.

Still, “we fully realize that we are just one click away of the keyboard from a similar situation repeating itself,” Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence, said in July.

Michael McFaul, the architect of the Obama administration’s Russia policy, has said he believes Russian President Vladimir Putin perceives little benefit in a major disruption effort this year, preferring to keep his powder dry for the 2020 presidential contest.

But even if the upcoming elections escape disruption, that hardly means the U.S. is in the clear .

Trump’s decision in May to eliminate the post of White House cybersecurity coordinator confirmed his lack of interest in countering Russian meddling, critics say. Congress has not delivered any legislation to combat election interference or disinformation. Last week, a review of the bipartisan “Secure Elections Act” was canceled after Republican leaders registered objections, congressional staffers said.

The risks extend beyond the midterms.

“The biggest question is going to be how are you going to make sure that people actually trust the results, because democracy relies on credibility,” said Ben Nimmo, a researcher at the Atlantic Council. “It’s not over after November.”

Experts said it is too late to safeguard U.S. voting systems and campaigns this election cycle. But with two months to go, there is time enough to take stock of the Russian-sponsored interference that has come to light so far — and to assess the risks of what we don’t know.

____

In mid-2016, hackers found a way into the voter registration database at the Illinois State Board of Elections and spent three weeks poking around. After the breach was discovered, officials said the infiltrators had downloaded the records of up to 90,000 voters.

It’s not clear that anything nefarious was done with those records. But when special counsel Robert Mueller charged a dozen Russian intelligence agents with hacking this July, the indictment clarified the potential for damage. The hackers had, in fact, stolen information on 500,000 voters, including dates of birth and partial Social Security numbers.

“The internet allows foreign adversaries to attack Americans in new and unexpected ways,” Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said, in announcing the indictments.

The Illinois hack is the most notable case of foreign tampering with U.S. election systems to come to light. There has been no evidence of efforts to change voter information or tamper with voting machines, though experts caution hackers might have planted unseen malware in far-flung election systems that could be triggered later.

Potential problems are not limited to Illinois.

A week before the 2016 general election, Russian intelligence agents sent spear-phishing emails to 122 local elections officials who were customers of VR Systems, a Tallahassee, Florida-based election software vendor.

In addition to Illinois, at least 20 other state systems were probed by the same Russian military unit that targeted VR’s customers, federal officials said.

“My unofficial opinion is that we’re kind of fooling ourselves if we don’t think that they tried to at least make a pass at all 50 states,” said Christopher Krebs, the undersecretary for critical infrastructure at DHS.

In June 2017, the federal Election Assistance Commission informed dozens of local voting officials that hackers had attempted to penetrate the systems of a voting system manufacturer, presumed by many to be VR.

“Attempts have been made to obtain voting equipment, security information and in general to probe for vulnerabilities,” the EAC wrote officials. Despite those concerns, federal officials have moved slowly to share intelligence with officials who supervise elections. As of mid-August, 92 state officials had been given clearances.

Much of the machinery used to collect and tabulate votes is antiquated, built by a handful of unregulated and secretive vendors, with outdated software that makes them highly vulnerable to attacks, researchers said.

“If someone was able to compromise even a handful of voting machines I think that would be sufficient to cause people to not trust the system,” said Sherri Ramsay, a former National Security Agency senior executive.

This spring, a website used by Knox County, Tennessee, officials to display election-night results was knocked offline by an unidentified perpetrator. While the attack was little noticed, it would not be hard to replicate, experts said. Combined with a social media campaign alleging vote tampering, such mischief could cast a shadow over an election, they said.

Election officials have been sandboxing such scenarios for weeks as they prepare for November’s balloting.

There’s already a Russian playbook for thwarting an election: In Ukraine in 2014, the presidential contest was disrupted by a virus that scrambled election-management software, followed by a media disinformation campaign claiming a pro-Moscow candidate had won.

___

Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri is plenty busy this fall as she seeks re-election in a state that voted overwhelmingly for Trump. So when an attempt by Russian hackers to infiltrate her campaign came to light in July, she acknowledged it only briefly.

“While this attack was not successful, it is outrageous that they think they can get away with this,” McCaskill said. “I will not be intimidated. I’ve said it before and I will say it again, Putin is a thug and a bully.”

The failed hack, which included an attempt to steal the password of at least one McCaskill staffer through a fake Senate login website identified by Microsoft, is the most notable instance of attempted campaign meddling by Russia made public this year.

Microsoft executives said recently that the company had detected attempts by Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency to hack two senators. One was presumably McCaskill, but the others have not been identified.

The group behind that attempt, Fancy Bear, is the same one indicted July 13 and identified by Microsoft as the creator of fake websites targeting the Hudson Institute and the International Republican Institute, frequent critics of the Kremlin. Since the summer of 2017, Fancy Bear has aggressively targeted political groups, universities, law enforcement agencies and anti-corruption nonprofits in the U.S. and elsewhere, according to TrendMicro.

“Russian hackers appear to be broadening their target set, but I think tying it to the midterm elections is pure speculation at this point,” said Michael Connell , an analyst at the federally funded Center for Naval Analyses in Arlington, Virginia.

There have been other recent reports of U.S. congressional campaign websites targeted by hackers, but that doesn’t mean Russian agents are to blame. Experts said most are likely run-of-the-mill criminal cyberattacks seeking financial gain rather than political change.

But Eric Rosenbach, who served as assistant secretary of defense for global security during President Barack Obama’s administration and is now at Harvard, said the limited examples of Russian intrusion that have come to light may be only a tip to more significant, still hidden schemes.

“There probably have already been compromises of important campaigns in places where it could sway the outcome or undermine trust in the election,” Rosenbach said. “We might not see that until the very last moment.”

The risk is magnified by poor efforts to protect many campaign sites, said Josh Franklin, until last month the lead National Institutes of Standards and Technology researcher on voting systems security.

Nearly a third of the 527 House of Representatives campaigns examined by Franklin and fellow researchers had such poor cybersecurity they were graded worse than failing.

“We couldn’t go any further with our scan,” he said. “We were told that we would be in danger of being sued by the candidate campaigns.”

___

By the time a group called “ReSisters” began organizing a rally against white nationalism for Aug. 10, it had spent more than a year sharing left-wing posts about feminism, immigration and other hot-button topics.

“Confront + Resist Fascism,” the group urged on a Facebook event page for its “No Unite the Right 2″ protest in Washington, D.C. Like-minded Facebook users posted information about transportation, materials and location so those interested could attend.

In late July, Facebook short-circuited the effort, shutting down the pages and accounts of ReSisters and 31 others. Despite appearing to speak for Americans, the company said, the accounts were planted by unidentified outsiders to fuel divisions among U.S. voters. Researchers at the Atlantic Council who examined the accounts said they acted in ways echoing Russian troll operations before the 2016 election, pointing to English on the pages speckled with grammatical mistakes typical of native Russian speakers.

“We face determined, well-funded adversaries who will never give up and are constantly changing tactics,” Facebook said. The outing of the sites is a reminder as November approaches that Russians and other foreign actors continue to use social media to try to influence U.S. politics.

Since the 2016 election, officials and researchers have learned much more about such infiltration. The May release by House Democrats of more than 3,500 ads placed on Facebook by Russian agents from 2015 to 2017 revealed a deliberate campaign to inflame racial divisions in the U.S. Facebook and other tech companies say they are working hard to combat such behavior. But it is not nearly enough, experts said.

The companies must be forced to act faster against Russian and other disinformation campaigns and be made more accountable , said Dipayan Ghosh, a fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government who has worked at both the White House and Facebook on tech policy including social media manipulation.

Ghosh said quantifying Russian disinformation on social media is difficult because they “are operating behind a commercial veil” of for-profit networks that are not subject to public scrutiny.

“The industry is currently accountable to nobody,” Ghosh said.

After Facebook was criticized for allowing a data-mining firm to collect information about millions of its users, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he was open to regulation. But the “Honest Ads Act,” which would require online political ads to be identified as they are in traditional media, has stalled in Congress.

The bill’s sponsors include the late John McCain and Sen. Mark Warner, the Virginia Democrat who has pressed Facebook for change since the 2016 elections. Executives from Facebook, Twitter and Google are expected to testify before Warner and other members of the Senate Intelligence Committee this week.

Experts said they are uncertain of the effectiveness of Russian disinformation, complicating assessment of the threat it might now pose.

In 2016, Russian actors likely did the greatest damage by hacking and leaking emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign and Democrats’ national organization, which were widely reported by the news media. But comparatively few American voters saw individual pieces of misinformation on social media, making it unlikely that it swayed votes , said Brendan Nyhan, a University of Michigan political scientist who has analyzed the scope and impact of the Russian operations.

“There’s still too much simplistic thinking about all-powerful propaganda that doesn’t correspond to what we know from social science about how hard it is to change people’s minds. I’m more concerned about the threat of intensifying polarization and calling the legitimacy of elections into question than I am about massive swings in vote choice,” he said.

Still, it is clear that Russian intelligence views its efforts as successful and their example has already stirred others, like Iran, to try similar strategies. Such efforts are bent on coloring U.S. politics even if they are not tied to a specific election, said Lee Foster, FireEye’s manager of information operations analysis.

“Where do you draw the line between efforts to influence the election or an election or efforts to influence U.S. domestic politics in general?” Foster said. “We can’t just think in the context of the next election. It’s not like this goes away after the midterms.”

Source: http://www.13abc.com/content/news/Russian-meddling-in-2018-vote–492258971.html

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