Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 157

America’s voting machinery is hackable, falling apart and privatized — and the GOP doesn’t care

(Credit: Getty/Michael Reaves)

Democrats in Congress have issued what may be their most alarming report ever about the vulnerability of America’s voting machinery to sophisticated adversaries and the limited abilities of government at every level to stop Election Day chaos.

The “Congressional Task Force on Election Security Report,” from the party’s foremost experts on cyber threats in the House, gives new details on Russian hacking of the 2016 election and how the response across many layers of government was often poorly coordinated and marginally ineffective.

For example, as the 2016 presidential election came to a close, the Department of Homeland Security wanted to help states and counties by probing their computer systems to identify hacking vulnerabilities. But it noted that states and localities that sought help had to wait for weeks in October — a timeline out of sync with early November’s Election Day. (The report said DHS is now trying to do better.)

The report also restated how and why the nation’s electronic voting infrastructure is aging, cannot universally be trusted to accurately count votes, is not accompanied by thorough post-election audits to verify vote counts, and is made and maintained by a monopoly of private firms and contractors with little regulation or marketplace pressure to do better.

Its authors are sponsoring legislation to spend hundreds of millions to patch a national system beset by hacking pathways and other vulnerabilities. Not a single Republican in Congress took part in the hearings that produced the report. Nor have Republicans shown interest in acknowledging the cyber threats to voting or the millions needed to fortify the machinery for more trustable elections.

“The president and House Republicans have done nothing,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said at a press conference releasing the report and the legislation, where she recounted how every top intelligence official appointed by President Trump has recently said that Russia is already meddling in the upcoming 2018 election. “They have refused to take inventory of what our resources are and what they need to be. They have refused to assess what the danger is to our electoral system, while the intelligence community, clearly by consensus, has told them.”

Layers of Vulnerability

The report covers a lot of ground, starting with what Russia did in 2016 that was different from its past efforts to seed and spread political propaganda in the U.S.

It began by citing the outlines of what most people already know; that Russian agents posted “more than 1,000 YouTube videos, 130,000 tweets, and 80,000 Facebook posts. The latter were viewed by approximately 126 million people on Facebook platforms alone.” But the report quickly narrowed its focus to cyber probing of voting systems, starting with state voter registration databases.

“The 2016 election has shown us that these systems are vulnerable to attack,” the report said. “The Department of Homeland Security found that Russian hackers targeted these [registration] systems in 21 states. In Illinois, Russian hackers successfully breached the databases and attempted, but failed, to alter and delete voting records. In Arizona, hackers were able to successfully install malware on a county election official’s computer. That gave the hackers access to the official’s credentials which could have then been used to get into the county’s voter registration database. In addition, hackers targeted at least one election vendor with the hope of ultimately obtaining access into voter registration databases.”

The report described the kind of havoc that could have ensued had the Russians — or anyone else — scrambled voter data in those systems.

“The most significant threat posed by vulnerable voter registration databases is that an attacker could alter, delete, or add voter registration records which would then cause profound chaos on Election Day and potentially change the results of the election,” it said. “There is no federal law that governs what steps election vendors must take to safeguard their systems from attack. Instead, any obligations that vendors are subject to stem from the terms of their contracts with states and localities.”

The report also noted successful hacks by North Korea, China and Iran of U.S. companies, including defense contractors, banks and major media. However, it noted that none of those foreign governments were known to have meddled in U.S. elections. In comments at the press conference, report co-author Rep. Val Demings, D-FL, emphasized that America’s system of privatized contractors programming voting machines must be pushed to follow higher security standards.

“The [proposed] Election Security Act proactively strengthens our elections system by requiring election technology vendors to adopt specific cyber security standards that share threats with elections and security officials, intelligence officials, as well as running pre-election threat assessments to uncover vulnerabilities, with enough time to solve them,” Demings said. “Nowhere is that more evident than in my home state of Florida, where a voter registration vendor [VR Systems] for 57 of 58 counties was targeted in August of 2016. By October, at least 12 county elections officials had received information about it, but it was not until November first that all counties were notified of the attempted hack. To my knowledge there were no successful breaches, but Russia and others will be back with a vengeance. We must be ready.”

DHS and Critical Infrastructure

Demings alluded to some of the report’s most eyebrow-raising content, which discussed, in great detail, how difficult it was for DHS to work with state and county officials to try to detect and prevent attacks on the different computer systems overseeing voting. (Voter registration databases are one system; another system tabulates the votes.) That cooperation was also hampered by Republicans in Congress and states that didn’t trust the Obama administration — even though DHS is not a regulatory agency.

“DHS was slow to gain the trust and buy-in of its state partners,” the report said. “On September 28, 2016, with the election nearing and fewer than half the states requesting assistance from DHS, bipartisan congressional leadership wrote to state election officials to urge them to take advantage of resources to secure their network infrastructure, including those offered by DHS. At the same time Congressional leadership promised to ‘oppose any effort by the federal government to exercise any degree of control over the states’ administration of elections by designating these systems as critical infrastructure.’”

The report notes that DHS was unable to expeditiously help states as 2016’s election came to a close, even where its assistance — such as running tests to see if voting networks could be hacked — was wanted.

“On October 10, DHS once again warned election officials that: ‘[T]ime is a factor… There are only 29 days until Election Day,’” the report said. “Although cyber hygiene scans can be performed quickly and remotely, ‘it can take up to two weeks…to run the scans and identify vulnerabilities. It can then take at least an additional week for state and local election officials to mitigate any vulnerabilities on systems that we may find.’”

The report’s authors have drafted legislation in which DHS can play a significant role. As a result, the report alternates between critical passages like the above paragraph, and supportive passages about what DHS achieved, such as: “With consistent prodding, DHS provided cyber hygiene scans to election officials in 33 states and 36 local jurisdictions and shared over 800 cyber threat indicators officials could use to identify attempted intrusions, as well as other tactics, techniques and best practices, with officials in thousands of jurisdictions across the country.”

But the problems of DHS coordinating with states that want its help has persisted since the 2016 election, the report noted. In one example, states had to wait nine months to have the federal agency assess their cyber vulnerabilities. That track record, apart from promises of help by top DHS officials, was troubling, election officials told the report’s authors.

“Election officials also had difficulty squaring DHS’ offer of ‘priority access’ to services with the nine month waiting list for certain services like Risk and Vulnerability Assessments,” the report said. “These delays render the benefit useless in light of the compressed time frame of an election cycle.”

While these revelations don’t mean DHS officials aren’t trying to help states, they underscore how difficult it is to make systemic changes that are needed to safeguard elections. Another example given was that DHS kept telling governor’s offices what was needed, but the messages were never given to senior state election officials — because election offices use different computer systems for their data and communications.

“Although DHS officials testified in June 2017 that Russia targeted voting systems in 21 states, for example, it did not notify state election officials whether their election systems were targeted until late September, almost a year after the election,” the report said. “In part, DHS attributed these information sharing challenges to the nature of its existing information sharing channels and reporting structures within each state. As a general rule, DHS shares threat information at the state level through state Homeland Security Advisors, Fusion Centers, CIOs and other agents of the state governor. Each state government is organized differently, but for the most part, Secretaries of State and other chief election officials are independently elected officials who do not report to the governor and exist outside the executive branch chain-of-command. As a result, information shared by DHS did not automatically flow to them under existing information-sharing relationships.”

Little Political Will to Fix Voting Systems

These kinds of delays and communication snafus show a system that operates at a snail’s pace relative to the speed of cyber probes and attacks. To make matters worse, in many states — and in Congress, as seen in the just-passed federal budget — there’s no willingness to spend the funds needed to modernize voting in the United States.

“State and local election officials are acutely aware of the threats they are facing, but they lack the necessary funds to safeguard their voting infrastructure,” the report said. “In most states, legislatures are not increasing their election security budgets. In some cases, Governors [Florida, Ohio, Wisconsin] are actively undermining election security efforts. Moreover, state and local officials have expressed a desire for Congress to step in.”

The report recites the known vulnerabilities of electronic voting systems — problems that so-called election integrity activists have repeatedly raised for more than a dozen years. They note paperless systems, which are still used in 13 states for about one-fifth of the country’s voters, can mistakenly record votes and cannot be audited. The report recommends replacing all of the remaining paperless systems with paper ballot-based machines. It said ink-marked paper ballots are the best way to have a verifiable vote, one that could be audited for accuracy even if those ballots were electronically scanned. It cited one academic estimate that it would cost between $130 million to $400 million to make that transition in all remaining states with paperless systems, and noted that “over $300 million” remains in federal funds from a past law to buy voting machines.

It also said states should institute much more rigorous post-election audits to see if their machinery is properly counting votes. And Congress should empower and fully fund a little-known federal agency, the Election Assistance Commission, to help with developing and implementing the technical standards needed to meet cyber threats.

But mostly, the report said states have to spend more money “to replace outdated technology and hire IT support. It is important to note that cyber threats evolve at a rapid pace, and a one-time lump sum investment is not enough. States also need resources for maintenance and periodic upgrades, and cybersecurity training for poll workers and other election officials.”

Looking at 2018 and 2020

The report by House Democrats may be one of the most detailed and honest assessments of the vulnerabilities of America’s voting systems to be issued by a congressional panel in years. Its findings are truly frightening, from the cyber threats and the best responses, to the lack of political will to spend money to address the problems, and the sorry state of the privatized voting machinery industry.

The report gives no indication that elected officials with the power of the purse — mainly Republicans these days — have much inclination to make voting and elections more trustworthy. Perhaps because they are in power, they feel no need to patch the vulnerabilities in the system that helped elect them. But the political tides shift, and Americans across the political spectrum deserve to know that their voters are accurately cast and counted.

Sadly, the report notes that the tech sector has shown no inclination to step in. Consider these passages in the report describing the current monopoly held by voting machinery manufactures and contractors maintaining them:

“According to a recent study put out by the Penn Wharton Public Policy Initiative, the election technology industry is dominated by three firms whose products cover approximately 92% of the total eligible voter population. These firms are neither publicly nor independently held which limits the amount of publicly available information available about their operations. Smaller companies routinely get bought out and merged with one of the three larger companies, and biggest tech companies, including Apple, Dell, IBM, HP, and Microsoft have chosen to stay out of the election technology business. This may in part be because the sector generates approximately $300 million in annual revenue, a relatively modest amount when compared to the revenue of the largest technology companies. For example, Apple generates about $300 million in revenue every 12 hours.

“Currently, election technology vendors present serious security risks. The consolidation in the election technology industry means that ‘there is no meaningful competitive pressure from the suppliers to the vendors.’ In other words, there is no incentive for election technology vendors to prioritize security. This problem is compounded by the lack of regulation in this area. These vendors are not required to make financial disclosures to the Securities and Exchange Commission. The executives are not required to disclose political contributions to the Federal Elections Commission. State and local contracts do not necessarily require vendors to notify election officials in the event of a cyberattack. Under current law, there is no way to ensure that vendors are doing everything possible to keep their systems secure.”

This is the sorry state of voting infrastructure in America. The report by House Democrats is filled with best-practices that could be implemented, and even some lines of defense that might seem a bit far-fetched, such as training poll workers to look for cyber-security threats. But taken as a whole, it reveals that the voting system that will record and count the ballots in upcoming elections is marked with a range of vulnerabilities. And sadly, there’s little political will in America’s current ruling party, the Republicans, to improve things.

Melania Trump’s parents likely to become U.S. citizens via chain migration: report

(Credit: Getty/Molly Riley)

When it comes to so-called chain migration — a demography term recently turned into a right-wing slur to insinuate that immigrants to the United States cunningly exploit their immigration status to allow relatives to piggyback on their migration — President Donald Trump has taken an oppositional stance, calling many times in person and on Twitter for America to “end chain migration.”

CHAIN MIGRATION must end now! Some people come in, and they bring their whole family with them, who can be truly evil. NOT ACCEPTABLE! pic.twitter.com/PQGeTTdRtX

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 1, 2017

Yet a new report speculates that it is likely that Trump’s in-laws may gain citizenship due to the rules regarding chain migration that Trump himself has often attacked. First Lady Melania Trump is herself an immigrant, having migrated to the United States in the mid-1990s; her family is from Slovenia.

As the Washington Post reports:

Matthew Kolken, a partner at a New York immigration law firm, said there are only two substantive ways Trump’s in-laws could gain green cards: by their daughter sponsoring them or by an employer sponsoring them. The latter is unlikely, as it would require a showing that there were no Americans who could do the job for which they were sought.

Both the Knavses are reportedly retired. In Slovenia, Viktor Knavs, now 73, worked as a chauffeur and car salesman. Amalija Knavs, now 71, was a pattern maker at a textile factory.

The Knavses’ immigration status has become a source of public scrutiny since Trump began to rail against chain migration, which the White House describes as the process that occurs when “newcomers are admitted to the United States based on family ties and distant relations, as opposed to a merit-based system that selects newcomers based on economic and national security criteria.”

Trump has said that this policy harms America’s “national security.”

“We need a 21st Century MERIT-BASED immigration system,” Trump tweeted on Feb. 6. “Chain migration and the visa lottery are outdated programs that hurt our economic and national security.”

We need a 21st century MERIT-BASED immigration system. Chain migration and the visa lottery are outdated programs that hurt our economic and national security. https://t.co/rP9Gtr2E5N

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 6, 2018

Trump decried the current immigration system as “broken.”

“Under the current broken system, a single immigrant can bring in virtually unlimited numbers of distant relatives,” Trump said during his 2018 State of the Union address. “Under our plan, we focus on the immediate family by limiting sponsorships to spouses and minor children. This vital reform is necessary, not just for our economy, but for our security, and our future.”

Melania Trump’s parents, Viktor and Amalija Knavs, are currently living in the U.S. on green cards. Michael Wildes, an immigration attorney who represents Melania and her family, confirmed that to the Washington Post.

“I can confirm that Mrs. Trump’s parents are both lawfully admitted to the United States as permanent residents,” he said. “The family, as they are not part of the administration, has asked that their privacy be respected so I will not comment further on this matter.”

According to a separate unidentified source who has “knowledge of the parents’ immigration filings,” Melania Trump’s parents are waiting for their swearing-in ceremony.

Add this episode to the ever-increasing list of Trump’s ideological hypocrisies, which rarely seem to make a dent in his supporters’ perception of him.

It’s time to stop calling it Russian meddling

Robert Mueller; Donald Trump (Credit: Getty/Alex Wong/AP/Evan Vucci/Salon)

The indictment filed last week by Special Counsel Robert Mueller against 13 Russians makes the case that the interference in our national election in 2016 was a Russian intelligence operation run out of Moscow begun in 2013 and funded to the tune of as much as $1.2 million per month.

This nails shut the coffin on Trump saying that there was no “Russian meddling” in the election. There was more than meddling. Thirteen Russians are charged with a conspiracy to steal the election for Donald Trump. I’ve been wondering since Mueller was appointed what crimes he would find. He found some good ones. The indictment states that the United States has an essential governmental interest in running an honest and fair election for the presidency, and these 13 individuals, “knowingly and intentionally conspired to defraud the United States by impairing, obstructing, and defeating the lawful functions of the Federal Election Commission, the U.S. Department of Justice, and the U.S. Department of State in administering federal requirements for disclosure of foreign involvement in certain domestic activities.”

And that’s only Count One.

Count Two is “Conspiracy to commit wire fraud and bank fraud.”

Counts Three through Eight are “Aggravated Identity Theft.”

The indictment was announced at the Department of Justice by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and is signed “Robert S. Mueller III, Special Counsel, Justice Department.”

Mueller’s name wasn’t on any of the previous four indictments his office has brought in the Russia investigation. Rosenstein did not personally announce those indictments.

But this time Rosenstein and Mueller waved a red flag in Trump’s face. The indictment shows that Trump has been lying to the American people that there wasn’t any Russian interference in the election. By signing the indictment and announcing it at the Department of Justice, Mueller and Rosenstein threw down a legal gauntlet and said, let’s see you fire us now.

They spelled out in the indictment the ways that the Russians conspired to interfere in the election of 2016 and help elect Trump and defeat Hillary Clinton. They did it with breathtaking bluntness and power:

“Defendant ORGANIZATION had a strategic goal to sow discord in the U.S. political

system, including the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Defendants posted derogatory information

about a number of candidates, and by early to mid-2016, Defendants’ operations included

supporting the presidential campaign of then-candidate Donald J. Trump (“Trump Campaign”) and disparaging Hillary Clinton.”

Trump can keep lying that there was no Russian “meddling,” but his lies won’t work anymore. Thirteen Russians are charged with doing exactly what he has insisted over and over wasn’t done. The indictment puts forth a copious amount of evidence that this conspiracy existed, and that specific attempts were made to carry it out. That’s what happens when the criminal justice system gets involved. It doesn’t accept lies. It charges people who lie with perjury. If Trump doesn’t believe this, he should ask his former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, and his former campaign adviser George Papadopoulos.

The way Trump has tried to spin the bad news that was carried into the Oval Office on Friday by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein has been pathetic. He spent the long holiday weekend trying to say that the fact the Russians began their interference campaign in 2013 exonerates him because he wasn’t running for president back then. “No collusion” Trump tweeted, as if trying to wish it away.

Bullshit. 2013 was the year Carter Page got involved with three Russian spies in New York City. The three Russian nationals were later indicted for espionage. Two worked in the Russian mission to the U.N. and had diplomatic cover and were expelled from the country. One spy worked in the New York office of Vnesheconombank (VEB Bank), the bank owned by the Russian government and controlled by Putin. He was convicted of espionage and jailed for a year before being expelled from the country. Carter Page was referred to in the charges against the spies as “individual A,” a person who met with the Russian spies and passed them information. Page has since admitted “individual A” was him.

VEB Bank was sanctioned by the Obama Administration in 2014 after the Russian incursion into the Ukraine and seizure of Crimea, and banned from doing business in the United States. This sanction was among those Trump’s National Security Adviser, Michael Flynn, promised to lift in his infamous phone conversation with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in December of 2016. It was this conversation Flynn lied about to the FBI, causing him to be indicted for perjury and begin his cooperation with Mueller’s investigation. So Russia’s interest in electing Trump goes straight back to 2013, with the arrest of its spies and discovery that the VEB Bank was being used for espionage, and 2014, with the sanctioning of VEB Bank, which Putin and his oligarch buddies were using to launder ill-gotten monies and move them out of Russia.

2013 was also the year Trump took the Miss Universe Pageant to Moscow. It is widely suspected that he made up his mind to run for president after Obama eviscerated him at the 2011 White House Correspondents dinner. I’ll bet he told his Russian oligarch buddies in Moscow in 2013 that he was planning to run for president. I’ll bet his oligarch buddies told Putin. That’s when Putin made his decision to back Trump when he began his run for the presidency. The man he picked to run his secret operation to influence the presidential election was one of the oligarchs closest to him, Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, who was named in Mueller’s indictment as running the troll factory in St. Petersburg the Russians called the Internet Research Agency which generated and paid for all of the bots and posts and lies floated by the Russians to help elect Trump.

Fox News and various pundits and politicians friendly to Trump have tried to pooh-pooh the Mueller indictment as much ado about practically nothing, comparing 13 Russians and the expenditure of a few million dollars to the presidential campaigns of Clinton and Trump, which employed thousands of campaign workers and spent hundreds of millions of dollars during the electoral season.

But it’s what’s left out of the indictment that is potentially as important as what’s in it. It is known, for example, that the St. Petersburg troll factory employed as many as 90 people who worked in 12 hour shifts to generate all the content that went into the Russian influence campaign. Yet only 13 Russians were indicted. The indictment names the 13 Russians and gives their specific jobs and titles within the Internet Research Agency. This means the Mueller team had access to incredible quantities of intelligence from the CIA and NSA on the Russian operation, and doubtlessly has seen all of the communication between the 13 named Russians and anyone they were in contact with in the United States.

The other key point is what the Russian were not indicted for. It’s illegal for foreign nationals to spend money in American elections, and yet they were not charged with breaking any campaign finance laws. Instead, they were indicted for conspiracy to “defraud the United States” by taking actions to interfere with the “lawful functions of the Federal Election Commission, the U.S. Department of Justice, and the U.S. Department of State.” The “lawful functions” of these agencies would include enforcing the federal election laws and laws against stealing identities and using banks and other financial institutions to pay for illegal activities. By indicting the Russians for conspiracy to break American laws, the Mueller investigation and prosecution leaves open the question of who else conspired to break these laws. Any Americans with whom the Russians made contact can be charged with conspiracy to break these laws simply because they made contact with the Russians named in the indictment or had knowledge of the conspiracy.

That is what is meant by “collusion,” and the indictments mean it’s illegal.

The other thing missing were indictments of the Russians who hacked into and stole the emails from the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. If Mueller’s past performance is a guide, these will be forthcoming soon.

Now Mueller has charged a lawyer by the name of Alex van der Zwaan with lying to the FBI about his contacts with Paul Manafort and Rick Gates. The lawyer, who worked for the white-shoe law firm Skadden Arps Slate Meagher & Flom LLP, has pled guilty and is cooperating with Mueller’s investigation. He worked with Gates and Manafort in the Ukraine during the time they were in the employ of Viktor Yanukovych, the former president of Ukraine who fled to protection in Moscow by his pal Putin after he was defeated. But van der Zwaan isn’t just any lawyer. He is also the son-in-law of German Kahn, a Russian oligarch and friend of Putin who owns Alfa Bank, the outfit that during the 2016 campaign continually contacted a server located in Trump Tower one floor below the Trump campaign headquarters. What this server was doing “talking” to a Russian bank connected to Putin has never been established, but you can bet that Mueller has his sights set on figuring that out.

Five days have passed since Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein walked into the Oval Office and informed President Trump of this Russian conspiracy to influence the presidential election of 2016. More than two years have passed since the conspiracy was actually hatched. The FBI, the Department of Justice, the CIA, the National Security Agency, and the Defense Intelligence Agency have known since the summer of 2016 that the Russians engaged in a conspiracy to influence the presidential election and defraud the United States. Trump has denied that such a conspiracy existed for more than a year and has yet to convene a single cabinet meeting or meeting of his National Security Council to address the crime that has already been committed and the threat Russia represents to the elections this year and in 2020. Nor has he directly accused Putin of interfering with our election, or taken a single action to stop him from doing it again in the future.

Gee, I wonder why, don’t you?

The assault rifle and me: On guns and the illusion of power

(Credit: Getty/arinahabich)

The past few days, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the first time I held an assault rifle. It was 2011, and I was in New Orleans. Obviously, I was at party.

I’d been invited to the well-appointed home of a successful local entrepreneur, where catered wine flowed and musician guests jammed in his instrument-lined music room. Yet as the evening progressed, it became apparent that the fact that there was a northerner in the midst was a topic of even greater interest than the custom waterfall out back. It was some time after midnight when a male reveler asked the host, “Have you shown the yankee the safe room yet?”

So he showed me to his safe room.

Behind a thick yet otherwise nondescript door, a pantry-sized space held a cache of canned provisions, maps and guidebooks, boxes he said contained several thousand dollars in cash — and a wall full of military grade weapons. “You ever held one before?” he asked me. I shook my head no. A friend had taught me how to hold his revolver once, but that was the extent of my relationship with guns. I’d hated the experience. Even though I knew it was unloaded, my hands shook just touching it.

This time, my host gently took a rifle off the wall and presented it to me as if it were a bouquet of roses. “It’s OK,” he said. The safety switch was on; I remember him showing me. It may have been an AR-15; I only remember how surprisingly light it felt in my hands. The man then stood behind me and guided my arms up toward eye level, as the gun met my shoulder. A small group of male guests gathered around to view the spectacle, politely amused, like they were watching a dog trying to walk on its hind legs.

I turned my head back and said, “I have to ask. I live in New York. Can you explain this to me? Can you tell me why?” He met my gaze and answered without hesitation. “Because when the police aren’t coming, and the military isn’t coming, you protect your own.” This was six years after Katrina. And for the first time, I understood. Because I’ve got mine too. “Feels good, doesn’t it?” he asked. “Yeah,” I answered, truthfully. “It does.”

When I held that rifle in my hand, I’d thought I’d once again feel revulsion and fear. Instead, I felt power. An intoxicating surge of Clint Eastwood meets Liam Neeson “What did you just say to me?” power. For a moment I imagined myself invincible, and that I could handle anything that might come for mine. That night, in my hands, I briefly understood why people can fall in love with these things. But when I handed the gun back, the magic dissolved instantly. I remembered that power was an illusion. A dangerous one. Then I thanked my host and went back to a group of people singing old blues songs.

On April 20, 1999, I was one week away from learning that I was carrying my first child. On that day, I knew immediately that Columbine was a tragedy. But I was still naive enough to believe it was an anomaly. I’m not naive any more.

Now it’s nearly 19 years later. Virginia Tech later. Sandy Hook later. Isla Vista later. Parkland later. Las Vegas and Orlando and Fort Hood and Sutherland Springs later. Every day, I kiss my kids goodbye and sent them off to school and out into the world. Every day, my heart drops a little bit when they walk out the door, when I pray that they come home. And I feel so, so powerless.

Why Oprah offends Trump to his very (dark) soul

Oprah Winfrey (Credit: AP/Jordan Strauss)

In case you haven’t noticed, Donald Trump is threatened by Oprah Winfrey. Like, in a tiny quivering hands kind of way.

“Just watched a very insecure Oprah Winfrey, who at one point I knew very well, interview a panel of people on 60 Minutes,” Trump tweeted just before midnight on Sunday, apparently after having viewed Oprah’s “60 Minutes” roundtable segment featuring her return to speak with voters in Grand Rapids, Michigan. “The questions were biased and slanted, the facts incorrect. Hope Oprah runs so she can be exposed and defeated just like all of the others!”

Like most of what Trump says or tweets, the substance of this toilet-top missive is utter hooey and misrepresents what the segment actually was about.

But, even more importantly, he doesn’t want her to run so she can be “exposed.”

Trump wants Oprah to run in order to pit his brand against hers, in a heee-yooge “lay ‘em on the table and haul out the meter sticks” contest. This is why such a race will never happen.

It’s not that Oprah fears such a thing. Rather, as someone whose net worth exceeds that of several countries, Oprah does not need the enhancement of the presidency. Her brand is bigger, stronger, and has way more staying power.

Every day is a freestyle taco fiesta for Oprah. Each Sunday that she doesn’t spend as a “60 Minutes” correspondent is a Super Soul Sunday. This is an arena in which Trump cannot compete, the secret ingredient perpetuating Oprah’s global reach: her packaging of spiritual growth and healing.

“Now it’s time for America to bind its wounds of division,” Trump said in his election night victory speech, pledging to be a president for all Americans. But he’s kind of whiffed that part of the deal, and bigly.

Contrast this with the soul touch of Oprah gets people to do and say impossible things, such as believing in the power of empty jars or the merits of $35 English muffins, or believing in doctors Oz and Phil, or reading books. So many books!

Can you imagine Oprah doing a listening tour during primary season? You don’t have to — she’s already done it. It was called “Oprah’s Lifeclass.” Oprah can share life lessons about trusting your gut via videos starring lambs; Trump would look at that video and mention that his line of steaks is way better than lamb, so much better, the best, also baby lambs are dumb.

Thus, Oprah may be the only quasi-journalist (or as she dubs herself, conversationalist) who can do what Trump never could, and gather a group of 14 political opposites around a table and not only get them to speak to each other but, in a very Oprah-esque twist, inspire them to continue their dialogue long after the cameras stopped rolling.

Sunday’s “60 Minutes”’ showed Oprah’s return to Michigan as a follow-up an interview she conducted in September, featuring a group divided between seven people who voted for Trump and seven who did not. To mark the occasion of Trump’s year anniversary in office, she regathered them to see whether their views had changed.

(Coincidentally, this second interview took place shortly after her memorable Golden Globes speech in which she unabashedly supported #TimesUp. Asked by an interviewer in a supplementary “60 Minutes Overtime” video if her speech was a temperature test for a political run, she replies, “I was just trying to give a good speech. I was looking for a way to express what was going on in this moment in terms of gender, and class, and race.”)

A sampling of her allegedly slanted questions includes the following: “When we first met, there were some of you who had said, you know, you’d never been in conversations, certainly engagement, with members of the opposite side, political side. So has that changed for you now?”

And, “How many people here voted for him . . . And how many of you would vote for him again?” “How do you feel safer? Tell me how you feel safer?”

What may have ticked off Trump is, “There have been some members of Congress, including Republicans, questioning his stability and fitness for office. What do you think of that, and do you believe he has the temperament to be president?” Or perhaps it was, “Who here believes that he made the comment about, quote, “shithole countries? . . . You think all presidents have used the term shithole?”

To nobody’s surprise, the Trump voters had no regrets. In fact, one man professed that he still loved the President more and more every day.

But for whatever reason, the men and women stayed in touch, communicating regularly in a closed Facebook chat group titled “America’s Hope.” Some forged friendships and went on outings together. This is why Oprah returned with conservative pollster Frank Luntz in tow. “This never, ever happens,” Luntz said.

And this is something Trump can never accomplish and, moreover, has no desire to.

Trump likely feels he can safely go after Oprah because it continues his trend of going after powerful black women on social media; he attacked Florida congresswoman Federica Wilson for confirming his callous comments to a black Gold Star widow, and targeted ESPN’s Jemele Hill for her comments supporting NFL players’ protests. Any high profile black woman whose name isn’t Omarosa is fair game (but give him time on that one — remember, he once adored Oprah and fantasized about her being his running mate). Why not take aim at the world’s first black female billionaire, especially given the chorus of calls for her to run for the top office?

Oprah also is an especially safe target because she will never descend from the rare ether of the moral high ground to answer his challenges. On Twitter.

Oprah tweets, mind you. Just not about the president. Here’s one that went viral on Tuesday while coverage of Trump’s swipe at her was peaking.

George and Amal, I couldn’t agree with you more. I am joining forces with you and will match your $500,000 donation to ‘March For Our Lives.’ These inspiring young people remind me of the Freedom Riders of the 60s who also said we’ve had ENOUGH and our voices will be heard.

— Oprah Winfrey (@Oprah) February 20, 2018

She’s not completely above trolling Trump, though; she just does it surreptitiously. People visiting Oprah.com on Tuesday were greeted with an excerpt of Oprah’s conversation with Marla Maples on a 1992 episode of “The Oprah Winfrey Show.” For whatever reason, that ancient video was being surfaced on a main page. Who knows why?

Anyway, in the segment Oprah flashes back to an even more classic clip of Trump’s 1988 visit to the show with his first wife Ivana.

When the host asks about that relationship,” Trump replies, “We get along very well, and there’s not a lot of disagreement, because, ultimately Ivana does exactly as I tell her to do.”

Ivana then throws back her head and laughs. “Male chauvinist!” she chortles elegantly.

Back in 1992, Oprah asks Maples if Trump is controlling? “He’s a very strong person,” she replies, going on to call him a loving man “who tries his best to do the right thing and just make it in this life.” We know what happened after that. Tiffany happened after that. Then, Melania. And Stormy Daniels and heaven knows who else.

Oprah has said time and again that she does not plan to run for President. She said it again on the supplementary video series “60 Minutes Overtime.” Even so, you just know Trump wants this match-up because of the ratings potential. Just picture it.

But this lady is playing the long game. The entirety of the Oprah brand exists to troll Trump, albeit inadvertently, via endless clips and articles about toxic relationships  and people, the danger of hidden narcissists and, oh yeah, that recent poll that indicates that in a potential presidential race, she’d win. In an era of mass decline in our sense of well-being, she markets meditation and awareness and hope. Why, if you were to visit her website’s page on “Super Soul Sessions” right now, you can find her talking to “spiritual pioneer” Gary Zukav about living in a world of fear-based leadership which, she observes, “is only going to lead to more fear, and create more fear, unless we the people can authentically align with ourselves.”

In this moment a woman in the audience calls out, “Oprah for president!” and the place erupts.

Eyes downcast, she smiles gently and lets the roar of applause die back. “No thank you,” she says, because regardless of what happens between now and 2020, she’s already winning.

The ACLU just proved that our courts are being manipulated by private debt collectors

(Credit: Getty/larryfinnphotography)

A new report by the ACLU reveals how the private debt collection industry has been able to manipulate America’s court system to target the financially disadvantaged.

Even though Congress abolished debtors’ prison in 1833, private debt collectors have still managed to manipulate the court system to have debtors thrown in jail for the inability to pay up, according to the ACLU. They do so by filing lawsuits which, more than 95 percent of the time, will be decided in favor of the collector. After that, private debt collectors will ask the court to compel a debtor to appear for “judgment debtor examinations.” If the debtor does not show up, the private debt collectors will often ask the judge to issue a civil warrant so that the debtor can be arrested.

“Our investigation found that many people missed their court dates because of work, childcare responsibilities, lack of transportation, physical disability, illness, or because they didn’t receive notification of the court date,” Jennifer Turner, Human Rights Researcher for the ACLU’s Human Rights Program, wrote. “We found two cases in which elderly women missed hearings because they were terminally ill. They died shortly after warrants were issued for their arrest. The threat of arrest is an incredibly powerful tactic for collectors.”

In a separate piece for the ACLU, Turner wrote that the courts have become “mills for these companies, approving without evaluating scores of arrest warrants, wage garnishments, property seizures, default judgments, and other legal actions against consumers accused by debt collectors of owing money.”

The ACLU included a number of harrowing stories of people whose lives were ruined by the new partnership between private debt collectors and the court system.

A mother of three in Indiana was jailed for missing hearings over medical bills for her cancer treatment. She was physically unable to climb the stairs to the women’s section of the jail, so she was held in a men’s mental health unit.

A Georgia woman was arrested while caring for her terminally ill mother. A debt collection company had bought a 6-year-old rental debt her landlord claimed she owed after evicting her from her trailer home. She was jailed overnight. Her mother died two days later.

In Missouri, a single mother of a toddler took out a high-interest payday loan of $425. She wasn’t able to pay it back, and the creditor sued. She didn’t go to court and was arrested and jailed for three days.

A Utah man committed suicide while jailed for failing to appear in court over an unpaid ambulance bill. He killed himself shortly after he was asked whether he had the money to post bail.

The ACLU’s report, aptly titled “A Pound of Flesh,” proposed legislation that would bar courts from issuing arrest warrants in debt collection proceedings and protect people from being jailed over debt that they weren’t notified about, can’t afford or aren’t legally obligated to pay.

VA Secretary David Shulkin has green light to purge dissident staffers: report

Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin (Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin)

Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin has reportedly received a stamp of approval from the White House to dismiss employees who may be associated with an “internal rebellion,” Politico reports. The dirty work of firing dissenters — which the agency is calling a “subversion” investigation — will be helmed by Shulkin’s new chief of staff Peter O’Rourke.

Shulkin told Politico that O’Rourke is meeting with staffers “individually and as a group to determine, now that there is a clear direction where we are going, where people are going to stand.”

“Those who crossed the line in the past are going to have to be accountable for those decisions,” Shulkin told Politico.

The Veterans Affairs office named O’Rourke as the new chief of staff on Friday. He replaced Vivieca Wright Simpson, following an Inspector General (IG) report that accused Simpson of altering an email so that Shulkin’s wife, Merle Bari, could legitimately accompany Shulkin on a trip to Europe last summer — and be reimbursed by the government for it. The alleged fabrication happened in an email exchange between a program specialist and Simpson, and was crafted to intimate that Shulkin was going to receive an award in Denmark, which was untrue. Simpson allegedly lied because receiving an award in Denmark would have made Shulkin’s wife eligible to join Shulkin’s trip on the government’s dime.

“The OIG [Office of the Inspector General] found that in order to obtain a favorable decision, Ms. Wright Simpson falsely represented to [Designated Agency Ethics Official Tammy] Kennedy that Secretary Shulkin would receive an award while in Denmark, which Ms. Wright Simpson understood to be the criterion that would justify Dr. Bari’s travel at VA expense,” the Inspector General’s report explains.

The Inspector General report also found that Shulkin improperly accepted Wimbledon tickets in 2017.

Shulkin told Politico that, amid the backlash, the White House has told him to stay “focused on the president’s agenda,” and the day-to-day agency operations.

“The White House has been clear they want me focused on the president’s agenda, and to do that I have to have the authority to be able to run the organization,” Shulkin told Politico. “There’s never been any deviation from that.”

On the chopping block could be Press Secretary Curt Cashour, according to Politico, which claims Cashour has “openly defied” Shulkin’s orders, and has removed statements posted by Shulkin on the VA website.

The Inspector General’s report also incited Shulkin’s conservative critics outside of the VA office to question his position and moral authority — including Colorado Republican Mike Coffman.

“He’s really part of the culture of corruption that too often defines this organization. I just don’t think that he has the moral authority to clean it up,” Coffman said in a statement.

Following the news of Simpson’s departure, Coffman continued to call for Shulkin’s resignation.

While this is a first step in the right direction, Ms. Simpson's "retirement" is not enough. This no way exonerates @SecShulkin for intentionally misleading the @DeptVetAffairs ethics officials. C'mon, our Veterans deserve better! #FireShulkin https://t.co/ThmAznMZbt

— Rep. Mike Coffman (@RepMikeCoffman) February 16, 2018

Shulkin told Politico he didn’t understand the rebellion and framed it as a “classic power struggle.”

There is little insight into the dismissal process at this time, but Shulkin told Politico he anticipated firings. “I don’t think everybody’s going to remain at the VA,” he said.

Disney uses its promised $1,000 employee bonus as leverage over union negotiations

(Credit: AP/Michel Euler)

Remember last month when Walt Disney Co. announced it would give a $1,000 annual bonus to 125,000 of its employees? There’s an important caveat the corporation conveniently left out: the bonus is being used as leverage to settle negotiations with a union that represents low-wage workers.

Unite Here Local 11, which represents 2,700 housekeepers and low-wage employees at Disneyland Resort, filed a National Labor Relations Act complaint on Tuesday, The Orange County Register reported. The union alleged Disney is withholding the bonus as a threat against its unionized workers.

“Disney is holding our bonus hostage,” Ada Briceño, the co-president of Local 11 said. “They just increased their park prices, but the 40-cent raise they are offering to most of our workers is not going to put food on the table or allow our members to live in a dignified way.”

In the complaint, the union alleged that Disney “has violated its duty to bargain in good faith, and has engaged in conduct that is inherently destructive to rights guaranteed employees under the [National Labor Relations] Act.” Simply put, Disney won’t provide the aforementioned bonus to employees unless the union agrees to the last contract the company offered — no exceptions.

Disney stated the employee bonus was the result of President Donald Trump’s recently signed tax plan, which he has touted as a gift to working-class Americans.

“If the company’s comprehensive offer is ratified by March 31, 2018, the bonus will be paid,” a document from Disney reads, according to the Register. “If the company’s offer is not ratified by August 31, 2018, the bonus offer will expire.”

The corporation has defended its tactics and believe it has negotiated fairly. Notably, Disney has a reported $1.6 billion tax relief, and a history of tax battles.

“Because we are in an open contract with Local 11 and wages and bonuses are terms and conditions of employment, the bonus is part of our negotiation process,” Disney spokeswoman Suzi Brown told the Register. “We have a strong offer on the table that includes wage increases averaging 3 percent annually over three years and a $15 hourly rate for certain job classifications, such as housekeeping and specialty culinary.”

The news arrives in tandem with new reports that suggest that the Republican’s much-ballyhooed tax plan is not resonating with most Americans, especially those with lower incomes. Meanwhile, Trump has continued to praise the plan and corporations that have pledged to offer employees $1,000 bonuses — though he’s remained silent as some of those same companies enacted mass layoffs.

 

Judge in Kentucky school shooting case accused of misconduct

Authorities investigate the scene of fatal school shooting at Marshall County High School, Jan 23, 2018, in Benton, Ky. (Credit: AP/Stephen Lance Dennee)

In a new court filing, three Kentucky news organizations are alleging gross misconduct by the judge presiding over the case of the Kentucky high school shooting that left two students killed and more than a dozen others wounded. Fifteen-year-old Gabriel Parker has been charged with murder and first degree assault for the Jan. 23 Marshall County High School shooting, and was arraigned Friday as an adult.

The “petition for writ of mandamus or prohibition” claims Marshall County Circuit Judge James Jameson “engaged in highly unusual and inappropriate series of actions to prematurely intervene in the handling of the criminal matter,” the filing says on behalf of WPSD TV, The Paducah Sun and the County-Tribune Courier. These accusations allege that Jameson is an acquaintance of Parker’s mother, though it is unclear in what nature; that Jameson assigned Parker a public defender just hours after the shooting — well before the case entered his court — and that Jameson demanded the police stop an ongoing interview with Parker.

“The filing also says that Jameson illegally closed Parker’s Circuit Court arraignment last Friday and subsequently illegally sealed records of the proceeding in an apparent effort to avoid scrutiny of his actions,” The Paducah Sun reported.

The filing claims Jameson’s decision is in violation of Kentucky law KRS 635 120, which declares: “Records . . . of juveniles tried as adults in the Circuit Court shall be open to the public after the child has been indicted and arraigned on the offense for trial of the child as an adult.”

Parker was indicted Tuesday, Feb. 13 and before his Friday arraignment, Paxton Media said they learned that Jameson planned to conduct a closed hearing. Counsel to the news organizations sought to inform Jameson of the law barring a closed hearing, to which the petition claims, the judge responded by saying the arraignment was “juvenile proceedings before the Circuit Court.” The Marshall County Circuit Court Clerk’s office then refused Paxton Media’s requests for the court records following the arraignment Friday and then again Monday, according to the petition.

“Plainly, the public has a compelling right — and need — to know what happened in the closed hearing,” the filing says. “Immediate relief is necessary to vindicate the public’s right to know how courts are handling one of the most high-profile murder cases in the state in recent memory.” Paxton Media is petitioning the Kentucky Court of Appeals to override Jameson’s actions and to release the records of court proceedings from Friday, Feb. 16, and asking that all future proceedings be accessible to the public and media.

Publisher Jim Paxton said that he questioned the court action, but was compelled to do so in thinking of the victims of the shooting: “What is the right thing to do here? Because here’s where we are: You know, we got kids who were killed and we’ve got other kids who’ve been disfigured for life. And we got a whole bunch of other kids who the best years of their lives have been taken from them by this. And those people are just morally, and by the Constitution, entitled to a public, a fair, and impartial prosecution of this case.”

“That’s why we filed this action,” Paxton added. “That’s our only motive in filing this action.”

The full court filing can be read here.

Ditch the deodorant, save the planet?

(Credit: Anykeen via iStock)

The study, published Thursday in the journal Science, used computer models to study how a wide range of stuff people use in their homes, from lotion to house paint, contributes to air pollution. Printer ink, glue, and cleaning products contain petroleum-based chemicals. Even your deodorant may release smog-promoting particles into the air (not to mention your armpit).

Researchers showed that these volatile chemical products (VCPs) produce half of the volatile organic compounds found in Los Angeles. That means that household products may contribute as much to air pollution as motor vehicles do. VCPs help create ozone, the compound that provokes asthma, and PM2.5, super-small pollutants that can cause cancer and lung disease.

It’s hard to believe that a dab of lotion could be as harmful as a gallon of gasoline, but gas only produces carbon dioxide (which causes a whole different set of problems). A full 40 percent of the chemicals in lotions and other personal products float into the atmosphere.

So the next time you’re indulging in some well-deserved self-care, maybe go easy on the products.