Month: September 2017

Authored by Wendy McElroy via The Future of Freedom Foundation,

The Roman Empire never doubted that it was the defender of civilization. Its good intentions were peace, law and order. The Spanish Empire added salvation. The British Empire added the noble myth of the white man’s burden. We have added freedom and democracy.

 

– Garet Garrett, Rise of Empire

The first step in creating Empire is to morally justify the invasion and occupation of another nation even if it poses no credible or substantial threat. But if that’s the entering strategy, what is the exit one?

One approach to answering is to explore how Empire has arisen through history and whether the process can be reversed. Another is to conclude that no exit is possible; an Empire inevitably self-destructs under the increasing weight of what it is — a nation exercising ultimate authority over an array of satellite states. Empires are vulnerable to overreach, rebellion, war, domestic turmoil, financial exhaustion, and competition for dominance.

In his monograph Rise of Empire, the libertarian journalist Garet Garrett (1878–1954), lays out a blueprint for how Empire could possibly be reversed as well as the reason he believes reversal would not occur.  Garrett was in a unique position to comment insightfully on the American empire because he’d had a front-row seat to events that cemented its status: World War II and the Cold War. World War II America already had a history of conquest and occupation, of course, but, during the mid to late 20th century, the nation became a self-consciously and unapologetic empire with a self-granted mandate to spread its ideology around the world.

A path to reversing Empire

Garrett identifies the first five components of Empire:

• the dominance of executive power: the White House reigns over Congress and the judiciary.
• the subordination of domestic concerns to foreign policy: civil and economic liberties give way to military needs.
• the rise of a military mentality: aggressive patriotism and obedience are exalted.
• a system of satellite nations in the name of collective security;
• and a zeitgeist of both zealous patriotism and fear: bellicosity is mixed with and sustained by panic.

These are not sequential stages of Empire but occur in conjunction with one another and reinforce each other. That means that an attempt to reverse Empire in the direction of a Republic can begin with weakening any of the five characteristics in any order.

Garrett did not directly address the strategy of undoing Empire but his description of its creation can be used to good advantage. The first step is to break down each component of Empire into more manageable chunks. For example, the executive branch accumulates power in various ways. They include:

• By delegation — Congress transfers its constitutional powers to the president.
• By reinterpretation of the Constitution by a sympathetic Supreme Court.
• Through innovation by which the president assumes powers that are not constitutionally forbidden because the Framers never considered them.
• By administrative agencies that issue regulations with the force of law.
• Through usurpation — the president confronts Congress with a fait accompli that cannot easily be repudiated.
• Entanglement in foreign affairs makes presidential power swell because, both by tradition and the Constitution, foreign affairs are his authority.

Deconstructing these executive props, one by one, weakens the Empire. When all five components are deconstructing, the process presents a possible path to dissolving Empire itself.

A sixth component of Empire

But in Rise of Empire, Garet Garrett offers a chilling assessment based on his sixth component of Empire. There is no path out. A judgment that renders prevention all the more essential.

That was why Garrett does not deal with how to reverse the process of Empire. Once an empire is established, he argues, it becomes a “prisoner of history” in a trap of its own making. He writes, “A Republic may change its course, or reverse it, and that will be its own business. But the history of Empire is a world history and belongs to many people. A Republic is not obliged to act upon the world, either to change it or instruct it. Empire, on the other hand, must put forth its power.”

In his book For A New Liberty, Murray Rothbard expands on Garrett’s point: “[The] United States, like previous empires, feel[s] itself to be ‘a prisoner of history.’ For beyond fear lies ‘collective security,’ and the playing of the supposedly destined American role upon the world stage.”

Collective security and fear are intimately connected concepts. It is no coincidence that the sixth component of Empire — imprisonment — comes directly after the two components of “a system of satellite nations” and, “a complex of vaunting and fear.”

Satellite nations

“We speak of our own satellites as allies and friends or as freedom loving nations,” Garrett wrote.

 

“Nevertheless, satellite is the right word. The meaning of it is the hired guard.” Why hired? Although men of Empire speak of losing China [or] Europe … [how] could we lose China or Europe, since they never belonged to us? What they mean is that we … may lose a following of dependent people who act as an outer guard.”

An empire thinks that satellites are necessary for its collective security. Satellites think the empire is necessary for territorial and economic survival; but they are willing to defect if an empire with a better deal beckons. America knows this and scrambles to satisfy satellites that could become fickle. Garrett quotes Harry Truman, who created America’s modern system of satellites. “We must make sure that our friends and allies overseas continue to get the help they need to make their full contribution to security and progress for the whole free world. This means not only military aid — though that is vital — it also means real programs of economic and technical assistance.“

In contrast to a Republic, Empire is both a master and a servant because foreign pressure cements it into the military and economic support of satellite nations around the globe, all of which have their own agendas.

Garrett also emphasizes how domestic pressure imprisons Empire. One of the most powerful domestic pressures is fear. An atmosphere of fear  — real or created — drives public support of foreign policy and makes it more difficult for Empire to retreat from those policies. In his introduction to Garrett’s book Ex America, Bruce Ramsey addresses Garrett’s point. Ramsey writes, Empire has “‘less control over its own fate than a republic,’ he [Garrett] commented because it was a ‘prisoner of history’, ruled by fear. Fear of what? ‘Fear of the barbarian.’”

It does not matter whether the enemy is actually a barbarian. What matters is that citizens of Empire believe in the enemy’s savagery and support a military posture toward him. Domestic fear drives the constant politics of satellite nations, protective treaties, police actions, and war. Foreign entanglements lead to increased global involvement and deeper commitments. The two reinforce each other.

The fifth characteristic of Empire is not merely fear but also “vaunting.” Vaunting means boasting about or praising something excessively — for example, to laud and exaggerate America’s role in the world. Fear provides the emotional impetus for conquest; vaunting provides the moral justification for acting upon the fear. The moral duty is variously phrased: leadership, a balance of power, peace, democracy, the preservation of civilization, humanitarianism. From this point, it is a small leap to conclude that the ends sanctify the means. Garrett observes that “there is soon a point from which there is no turning back….The argument for going on is well known. As Woodrow Wilson once asked, ‘Shall we break the heart of the world?’ So now many are saying, ‘We cannot let the free world down’. Moral leadership of the world is not a role you step into and out of as you like.”

Conclusion

In this manner, Garrett believed, Empire imprisons itself in the trap of a perpetual war for peace and stability, which are always stated goals. Yet, as Garrett concluded, the reality is war and instability.

It is not clear whether he was correct that Empire could not be reversed. Whether or not he was, it is at its creation that Empire is best opposed.

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In the latest sign that the market for initial coin offerings has probably peaked, Bloomberg is reporting that a company is planning to launch an ICO with the explicit goal of raising enough money to purchase the only extant copy of “Once Upon A Time In Shaolin”, the rare Wu Tang Clan record and current record holder for most expensive single album ever sold. Martin Shkreli once paid $2 million for the record.

Behold Wu-Tang Coin, the digital token at the heart of a purported ICO whose sole purpose is to raise money to buy and publicly release the Wu-Tang Clan album that convicted fraudster Martin Shkreli once spent $2 million on.

The coin launched Monday, according to its Twitter account, which has a whopping 13 followers. Rare Music Ltd., the company behind the efforts, is seeking to raise $3 million to $4 million, according to a white paper listed on the internet. Because of its decentralized nature, the creators of Wu Tang Coin claimed in a White Paper that an ICO would be able to circumvent legal restrictions barring the owner from publicly releasing the album for commercial purposes until the year 2,103.

The goal of the project is to release the album for free on the internet. The company says coin holders will be compensated with "gifts" to incentize participation.

A straightforward purchase of the album by a music company would be pointless because the album cannot be “commercially exploited” in a reasonable amount of time. Therefore,
we propose to:

1. Raise funds via an ICO and attempt to negotiate a purchase with the album’s current owner.

2. Give Wu-Tang Coin donors to the ICO (i.e. owners of Wu-Tang Coin) gifts to incentivize participation.

3. Release the album on all free and paid streaming music sites after a short amnesty period (six months) designed to give owners of Wu-Tang Coin time to enjoy the album exclusively, before everyone else.

As we reported earlier this month, the ownership of the Wu Tang album is in doubt after Shkreli sold the album on eBay for just over $1 million – about half what he paid for it in late 2015, shortly before being labeled “the most hated man in America” after his former company, Turing Pharmaceuticals, raised the price of Toxoplasmosis drug Daraprim by 5,000%.

After being convicted on three counts of securities and wire fraud after the conclusion of a month-long trial in Brooklyn Federal Court, Shkreli's bail was revoked shortly before the auction ended and he was sent to a notorious federal jail in Brooklyn to await his sentencing in January. Prosecutors asked that his bail be revoked after a published what he described as a satirical post saying he would pay a $5,000 bounty for a strand of Hillary Clinton's hair. It's unclear what will happen with the Wu Tang album.

Read the White Paper in full below:

Wu-Tang+Coin+whitepaper+v1.0.0 by zerohedge on Scribd

 

 

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Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,

Fears of an imminent eruption on the Indonesian tourist island of Bali have led to the evacuation of an estimated 50,000 people.  

The Mount Agung volcano is going to erupt, scientists say.

Waskita Sutadewa, the spokesman for the disaster mitigation agency in Bali, said people have scattered to all corners of the island and some have crossed to the neighboring island of Lombok.

Indonesian authorities raised the volcano’s alert status to the highest level on Friday following a dramatic increase in seismic activity. It last erupted in 1963, killing about 1,100 people.

Evacuation post #SiagaGunungAgung is in 9 distric; Karangasem, Buleleng, Klungkung, Bangli, Tabanan, Denpasar, Gianyar, Badung &Jembrana http://pic.twitter.com/Z49iOG0UCj

— Indonesian Red Cross (@palangmerah) September 25, 2017

Villagers are staying in temporary camps, sports centers, village halls, or with friends and relatives. Some do return to the exclusion zone during the day to tend to their livestock or shift the animals to areas further from the volcano for their safety. Others say they are selling their cows because they don’t know when they’ll be able to return.

“It’s obviously an awful thing. We want to be out of here just to be safe,” said an Australian woman at Bali’s airport who identified herself as Miriam. National Disaster Mitigation Agency spokesman Sutopo Purwo Nugroho said hundreds of thousands of face masks will be distributed in Bali as part of government humanitarian assistance that includes thousands of mattresses and blankets. Indonesia is prone to seismic upheaval due to its location on the Pacific “Ring of Fire,” an arc of volcanoes and fault lines encircling the Pacific Basin.

Government volcanologist Surono, who uses one name, said the feared eruption could be huge and potentially also close airports in East Java and Lombok, according to local media reports. Agung is in the north of the island about 43 miles from the tourist hotspot of Kuta. People have been told to stay at least 6 miles from the crater, but to stay 7.5 miles away when to the north, northeast, southeast, and south-southwest.

Over the past 5,000 years, Agung has erupted once a century on average and about a quarter of its eruptions have been a similar or stronger strength than 1963. Macquarie University volcanologist Heather Handley said the eruptions in 1843 and 1963 had a Volcanic Explosivity Index of about 5 on a scale where 8 would be the strength of an ancient supervolcano eruption such as Yellowstone in the U.S. or Toba in Indonesia.

Although officials have said there is no immediate threat to tourists, a significant eruption would force the closure of Bali’s international airport, stranding thousands. The island is famous for its surfing, beaches and its elegant Hindu culture is still safe to visit. Bali’s Ngurah rai International Airport has been operating normally since the alert status for Mount Agung was raised to the highest level on Friday.

Nearly 5 million tourists visited Bali last year.

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The Germans are the people least worried about fake content on the internet.

According to a survey by the BBC, only 14 percent are very perturbed by content possibly being fake. Another 33 percent are somewhat worried. So, while 47 percent overall are worried to some degree, this is a low figure compared to how worried people in other countries are.

However, as Statista’s Dyfed Loesche notes, in Brazil, most people are concerned: 92 percent are worried about what’s real and what’s fake.

Perhaps most notably however, while American politicians (on the left) continue to push the narrative of ‘fake’ content, fewer Americans “worry about what is real and fake in the web” than in Russia, China, Spain, France, or Greece (though notably the percentage who ‘strongly agree’ is dramatically high relative to other nations).

You will find more statistics at Statista

The study also finds that more people in 2017 than in 2010 say that the internet should never be regulated by government (58 percent in 2017 to 51 percent in 2010).

But slightly less people than in 2010 think the internet is a safe place to express their opinions (46 to 48 percent).

16,542 adults in 18 countries took part in the survey, of which 11.799 used the internet, conducted by GlobeScan.

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Ever since election day Hillary and her former minions have attempted to reinforce a narrative that some combination of Russian hackers, James Comey and angry, sexist, xenophobic, white men were the cause of here staggering defeat in November 2016.  That said, a new study highlighted by the Washington Post (of all places) today, confirms that it very well could have been black voters that ultimately crushed Hillary’s chances at the White House and not so much a sudden onset of racism.

Per the first chart below, precinct-level data gathered by Decision Desk HQ reveals that while Hillary lost ground with white voters compared to Obama’s performance in 2012, she also lost significant ground with black and hispanic voters as well. 

But there’s another factor that bears mentioning. One of the reasons that Trump is president and Clinton isn’t is because of how black Americans voted relative to 2012.

 

After the 2016 election, Ryne Rohla gathered precinct-level vote tallies from nearly every neighborhood in the United States for Decision Desk HQ. This data, which he also collected for the 2012 race, offers a uniquely specific overview of how Americans voted that we’ve used to analyze where Americans were most likely to live in bubbles of shared political thought and how the candidates fared in the places where they raised the most money.

But, where Hillary lost minority votes is perhaps even more important than how many votes she lost.  After analyzing precinct-level data for “majority-black” precincts across the country, Defense Desk HQ created the following maps showing areas where Clinton gained ground with black voters versus 2012 (blue circles) compared to where she lost ground (red circles).  Anyone notice a theme?

Meanwhile, and perhaps most importantly, Hillary lost ground with minority voters in almost every “majority-black” precinct in the four states that ultimately ended up determining the outcome of the election: Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

And, just to put some numbers behind maps, roughly 130 million people voted in the 2016 presidential election.  Of that, Wapo says that roughly 12%, or 15.6mm, of the people who cast their ballot were black.  Finally, Hillary’s loss of 7 points with black voters versus Obama’s results in 2012 equates to a total of about 1.1 million votes lost…which, needless to say, was more than enough to swing an election that was determined by a few thousand votes in a couple of key states.

But a small uptick in support for Trump vs. Romney combined with less support for Clinton means that Obama’s 87-point margin became an 80-point margin for Clinton. That mattered.

 

Notice, too, that exit polling suggests a decrease in how much of the electorate was black in 2016. The Census Bureau collects data on that, too, which the University of Florida’s Michael McDonald used to estimate turnout percentages and composition of the electorate for the past 30 years.

 

In 2016, the turnout rate for black Americans dropped about 8 points, McDonald estimates — meaning that 8 percent fewer black Americans who were registered to vote came out to cast a ballot. That’s a lower rate than in 2004. The percentage of white voters turning out increased slightly.

While we haven’t had a chance to read it yet, we’re gonna go out on a limb and bet that none of this actual data from Wapo made it into Hillary’s latest book.

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Authored by Louis Cammarosano via Smaulgld.com,

• China’s crackdown on crypto exchanges highlights the issue with centralized crypto exchanges.
• Decentralized crypto exchanges, like local bitcoins gain favor after China’s crackdown.
• Atomic Swaps bypass exchanges altogether.

Centralized vs Decentralized Exchanges

Cryptocurrencies are decentralized products traded largely on centralized exchanges. Cryptocurrency proponents note that an advantage of cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and litecoin is that reliance on or trust in a third party is not required to transact. Centralized exchanges, however, themselves may make it hard to open an account or may place restrictions or ban the withdrawing of funds or cryptos. Centralized exchanges can also be be hacked or closed by governments. Thus, centralized exchanges may run counter to one of the advantages of transacting in cryptocurrencies.

Centralized exchanges provide places for price discovery to take place. On a centralized exchange the operator of the exchange buys and sells crypto inventory on behalf of its users. The potential for abuse exists, especially absent regulation. A centralized crypto exchange can operate a fractional reserve system of trading and credit user accounts with crypto currencies that may or may not exist at the exchange. The exchange may rely on the knowledge that many account holders may not withdraw their crypto currencies. The possibility of this type of practice most likely was one of the reasons for China’s decision to close crypto exchanges.

Regulated centralized exchanges, however, hold promise as a way of integrating the entire crypto currency space with the existing financial system. In “Crypto Currencies Fiat Strengtheners or Killers?” we noted that solutions like TenX and others that allow for a variety of crypto currencies to be loaded onto Visa cards so that they may be spent worldwide.

Fidelity Investments recently provided its nearly 70 million customers with an integration option whereby they could access their Coinbase accounts on their Fidelity dashboards. The number of Coinbase accounts as of this writing was 10.5 million. If crypto currencies are to become fiat strengtheners, heavily regulated exchanges are necessary to track transactions and collect taxes.

Enter Decentralized Exchanges:

Decentralized exchanges don’t require users to provide identifying information and their servers reside in different locations. A decentralized exchange holds no assets or customer funds and therefore there is nothing to seize and no central location to shut down. Using a decentralized exchange, users can buy and sell crypto currencies with other users on the platform or off platform in person. Decentralized exchanges make it extremely difficult to track transactions and collect taxes.

Currently, the volume of crypto currency trading on centralized exchanges is vastly greater than volumes trading on decentralized exchanges. With the closing of the Chinese cryptocurrency exchanges, however, decentralized exchanges have seen an increase in trading volumes.

The number of decentralized exchanges are proliferating. Here are just a few of them:

• Local bitcoins
• Shapeshift’s Prism
• Bitshares
• Open Ledger
• Ether Delta
• Coinfeeine

Crypto detractors say that Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies derive their value from the ability to convert into fiat currency to purchase goods and services. Some go as far as to say that this makes cryptos itself an extension of debt-based fiat currencies. If cryptos inevitably become fiat strengtheners with full integration into the banking system, that point of view has validity.

If, however, governments crack down on crypto currencies and don’t embrace centralized crypto currency trading, increased trading may occur on decentralized exchanges and the crypto ecosystem may instead of pricing cryptocurrencies and tokens in fiat pairs, price them only in Bitcoin or Ether.

Atomic Swaps:

Atomic swaps allow users to by-pass even decentralized exchanges and transact with each other, even if the transaction involves different cryptocurrencies. Atomic cross-chain trading allows users to trade cryptocurrencies on different blockchains. For example atomic swappers holding alt coins like Litecoin can trade with holders of Bitcoin (or vice versa) at an agreed ratio (currently about 75-1; just like the gold silver ratio). Atomic swaps can occur using digital signatures that act as a functioning escrow that prevent one party from sending coins to another party and not receiving the bargained for swapped coins in return.

Developers are currently testing atomic swaps. Charlie Lee, creator of Litecoin, recently tweeted his success in an atomic swap involving Bitcoin and Litecoin.

 

Did a cross-chain atomic swap with LTC/BTC! ????
10 LTC for 0.1137 BTC with @JStefanop1. ????????https://t.co/vXwTNirk0Jhttps://t.co/3NTplBOoW9 http://pic.twitter.com/DRKaHg4Wc7

— Charlie Lee (@SatoshiLite) September 22, 2017

 

Questions:

• Will governments embrace and encourage crypto development and regulated centralized crypto exchanges?
• Will governments attempt to ban cryptocurrencies?
• If so will that halt the use of cryptocurrencies whereby only crimminals use them?
• Will both centralized and decentralized exchanges co-exist?
   

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On Saturday, when a defiant Iran allegedly confirmed the existence a brand new ballistic missile it has unveiled just hours earlier at a military parade in Tehran, we reported that Iranian state television released video footage Friday claiming to show the launch of a new type of medium-range ballistic missile.

But it turns out this was “fake news”, or rather “fake nukes“, as Iran never actually fired a ballistic missile, according to Fox News government sources, and instead the video released by the Iranians was more than seven months old – dating back to a failed launch in late January, which resulted in the missile exploding shortly after liftoff, according to two U.S. officials.

After the footage was aired, Iranian media claiming a successful test launch – though it apparently showed the failed January launch. At the time, Iran was attempting to launch its new Khorramshahr medium-range ballistic missile for the first time. It flew 600 miles before exploding, in a failed test of a reentry vehicle, officials said at the time. The failed late January launch was first reported by Fox News and prompted the White House to put Iran “on notice” days later.

However, apparently news of the fake launch was not filtered by the US “intelligence” apparatus before it reached Trump who responded to the reported launch in a late-Saturday tweet, saying, “Iran just test-fired a Ballistic Missile capable of reaching Israel. They are also working with North Korea. Not much of an agreement we have!” Last week, speaking before world leaders at the United Nations, Trump slammed the Iranian regime and called the Iran nuclear deal an “embarrassment” to the United States. 

“We cannot let a murderous regime continue these destabilizing activities while building dangerous missiles, and we cannot abide by an agreement if it provides cover for the eventual construction of a nuclear program,” he said. As reported previously, Trump later told reporters he had made up his mind about the deal, but he has yet to explain if that means the United States will be pulled out of the nuclear accord.

Meanwhile, Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani, speaking at the U.N. one day after Trump, claimed his country’s missile program was “solely defensive” in nature.  “We never threaten anyone, but we do not tolerate threats from anyone,” he said. Rohani returned to Tehran two days later to preside over the missile parade featuring the new medium-range design and said his country would build as many missiles as necessary to defend itself. 

Ironically, Iran’s new medium-range missile is based on a North Korean design—Pyongyang’s BM-25 Musudan ballistic missile, which has a maximum range of nearly 2,500 miles, putting U.S. forces in the Middle East and Israel within reach… assuming its problems have been fixed of course.

“The very first missiles we saw in Iran were simply copies of North Korean missiles,” missile proliferation expert at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies Jeffrey Lewis, told Fos News. “Over the years, we’ve seen photographs of North Korean and Iranian officials in each other’s countries, and we’ve seen all kinds of common hardware.” 

A senior Iranian general said last weekend that the missile had a range of less than 2,000 miles. “The Khoramshahr missile has a range of 2,000 kilometers [1,250 miles] and can carry multiple warheads,” Iran’s official IRNA news agency quoted Revolutionary Guards aerospace chief General Amir Ali Hajizadeh as saying.

 

The missile “is capable of carrying multiple warheads,” Hajizadeh added.

 

“I am not sure why the Iranians are lying about the range,” one U.S. official said. “I think they don’t want to piss the Europeans off.”

While U.N. resolution 2231, put in place days after the Iran nuclear deal was signed, calls on the Islamic Republic not to conduct ballistic missile tests, but does not forbid them from doing so, after Russia and China insisted on the watered-down language in order to pass the resolution. Iran is “called upon not to undertake any activity related to ballistic missiles designed to be capable of delivering nuclear weapons, including launches using such ballistic missile technology,” according to the text of the resolution.

Iran possesses the largest arsenal of ballistic missiles in the Middle East, with more than 1,000 short- and medium-range ballistic missiles. Tehran has conducted over 20 missile tests since 2015. Tehran claims the tests are legitimate because they are defensive in nature. 

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Not only was the Republicans’ third attempt to repeal Obamacare not lucky, but as of moments ago, said attempt has died a total of three times, the first when John McCain said he would vote no last Friday, then yesterday when Ted Cruz also said he would not support the Graham-Cassidy Obamacare repeal bill, and then the third and final time came late on Monday when Maine Senator Susan Collins confirmed she would oppose the latest GOP effort to repeal and replace ObamaCare, dooming the measure.

“Health care is a deeply personal, complex issue that affects every single one of us and one-sixth of the American economy. Sweeping reforms to our health care system and to Medicaid can’t be done well in a compressed time frame, especially when the actual bill is a moving target,” she said in a statement.

Senator Collins opposes Graham-Cassidy health care bills https://t.co/nW6MFUvYVg http://pic.twitter.com/0DSxDJNMPp

— Sen. Susan Collins (@SenatorCollins) September 25, 2017

Her announcement is hardly a surprise: as we said last week, Collins was widely viewed as a “no” vote but talked with Pence over the weekend and said Sunday she wanted to see the preliminary analysis from the Congressional Budget Office. “It’s very difficult for me to envision a scenario where I would end up voting for this bill,” she told CNN’s “State of the Union.” Well, just prior to Collins’ statement, the CBO projected that the last-ditch GOP ObamaCare repeal bill would result in “millions” of people losing coverage. The agency did not give a specific number given a lack of time to do the analysis before a vote, but said the “direction of the effect is clear.” That was enough to seal Collins’ “no” answer.

According to Bloomberg, Collins joins Republican Sens. Rand Paul and John McCain, who have already come out against bill, although technically on Sunday Ted Cruz said that “Right now, they don’t have my vote and I don’t think they have Mike Lee’s vote either,” which means that the third and final attempt to repeal Obamacare was not even down to the wire.

Collins’s announcement came as Graham, Cassidy and the White House engaged in a dash of last minute negotiations to try to keep their ObamaCare repeal push alive and win over holdouts, including Collins. “If there’s a billion more going to Maine … that’s a heck of a lot,” Cassidy told The Washington Post. “It’s not for Susan, it’s for the Mainers. But she cares so passionately about those Mainers, I’m hoping those extra dollars going to her state … would make a difference to her.”

According to The Hill, it isn’t immediately clear whether leadership will force a vote even though they are short of necessary support to pass a bill. “I’m in a fact-gathering mode,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), the No. 2 Senate Republican, told reporters earlier Monday.

A spokesman for Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said last week that it was his “intention” to bring up Graham-Cassidy but he didn’t mention a potential vote in his opening remarks on Monday. Rank-and-file members have also expressed skepticism that they would ultimately have a vote.

And now onto Trump’s tax reform, which despite Wall Street’s recent spike in enthusiasm will likely suffer the same fate as Obamacare repeal.

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That was quick.

Less than a week after Facebook agreed to turn over to Congressional investigators copies of the 3,000-odd political advertisements that the company said it had inadvertently sold to a Russia-linked group intent on meddling in the 2016 presidential election, the contents of the ads have – unsurprisingly – leaked, just as we had expected them to.

Congressional investigators shared the information with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team, which has repeatedly allowed information about its investigation into whether members of the Trump campaign actively colluded with Russian operatives to leak to the press. Once this happened, we knew it was only a matter of time before the ads became part of the public record.  

And, shockingly, descriptions of the ads provided to the Washington Post hardly fit the narrative that Democratic lawmakers have spun in recent weeks, claiming the ads – which didn’t advocate on behalf of a specific candidate, but rather hewed to political issues like abortion rights – were instrumental in securing Trump’s victory.

After initially denying the story this spring, Facebook came clean earlier this month, saying its investigators had discovered that the company sold at least $100,000 worth of ads – and possibly as much as $150,000 – to Russia-linked group that bought the ads through 470 phony Facebook pages and accounts.

WaPo reports that the ads represented issues on both sides of the ideological spectrum, which would suggest that the buyers didn’t intend to support a specific candidate, but rather their own unique agenda.

The batch of more than 3,000 Russian-bought ads that Facebook is preparing to turn over to Congress shows a deep understanding of social divides in American society, with some ads promoting African-American rights groups including Black Lives Matter and others suggesting that these same groups pose a rising political threat, say people familiar with the covert influence campaign.

 

The Russian campaign — taking advantage of Facebook’s ability to simultaneously send contrary messages to different groups of users based on their political and demographic characteristics – also sought to sow discord among religious groups. Other ads highlighted support for Democrat Hillary Clinton among Muslim women.

Of course, support for Hillary Clinton among minority groups was less enthusiastic than it was for Barack Obama, suggesting that the ads perhaps weren’t as effective as some Democratic lawmakers would have voters believe. Despite the innocuous description, WaPo insisted on reporting that the ads were meant to “sow dischord” among different voting blocs that supported Clinton. The paper of record also reported that the targeted messages “highlight the sophistication of an influence campaign slickly crafted to mimic and infiltrate US political discourse”…again without explaining exactly how they accomplished this.

These targeted messages, along with others that have surfaced in recent days, highlight the sophistication of an influence campaign slickly crafted to mimic and infiltrate U.S. political discourse while also seeking to heighten tensions between groups already wary of one another.

Yet, WaPo reports that the “nature and detail” of the ads has bothered investigators at Facebook and the Justice Department, as well as those working on behalf of the Congressional committees that are conducting independent investigations. The House and Senate Intelligence committees plan to begin reviewing the Facebook ads in the coming weeks.

Furthermore, the paper ran quotes from Sen. Mark Warner and Rep. Adam Schiff, two of the most vocal proponents of the Russia election-hacking conspiracy theory (it is only a theory, after all), describing the ads as part of a sinister effort to undermine the democratic process.

“Their aim was to sow chaos,” said Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.), vice-chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. “In many cases, it was more about voter suppression rather than increasing turnout.”

 

The top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Adam Schiff of California, said he hoped the public would be able to review the ad campaign.

 

“I think the American people should see a representative sample of these ads to see how cynical the Russian were using these ads to sow division within our society,” he said, noting that he had not yet seen the ads but had been briefed on them, including the ones mentioning “things like Black Lives Matter.”

For a story that’s supposed to be about the content of political advertisements that are now at the center of a widely followed investigation (much like Don Jr.’s meeting with a Russian lawyer and her entourage in Trump Tower was just a month ago), the WaPo story includes scant details about their contents. For whatever reason, the paper neglected to publish photos of the ads.

We imagine that whoever leaked the story probably figured that once readers see the ads and realize they’re indistinguishable from the rest of the political ad copy running on Facebook, voters will quickly lose interest.

However, that didn’t stop one expert from offering some helpful “context” meant to feed the hysteria without saying anything conclusive. As the paper notes, the expert quoted hasn’t even seen the ads.

While Facebook has downplayed the impact of the Russian ads on the election, Dennis Yu, chief technology officer for BlitzMetrics, a digital marketing company that focuses on Facebook ads, said that $100,000 worth of Facebook ads could have been viewed hundreds of millions of times.

 

“$100,000 worth of very concentrated posts is very, very powerful,” he said. “When you have a really hot post, you often get this viral multiplier. So when you buy this one ad impression, you can get an extra 20- to 40-times multiplier because those people comment and share it.”

 

Watts, the Foreign Policy Research Institute fellow, has not seen the Facebook ads promised to Congress, but he and his team saw similar tactics playing out on Twitter and other platforms during the campaign.

With little else to cling to, it appears that investigators – not to mention Trump’s critics – have invested so much in the Facebook interference narrative (not to mention Paul Manafort’s dealings with pro-Russian oligarchs), that admitting they were wrong would just be too damaging.

via http://ift.tt/2hw9HVF Tyler Durden