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‘TOTAL BULLSHIT’: Trump Goes Off on Mueller Report, People Who ‘Take So-Called Notes’

After a 22-month investigation — with 2,800 subpoenas, 500 witnesses and 500 search warrants, which generated thousands of pages of information, all costing upwards of $30 million — the media boiled it all down to two words: “I’m fucked.”

The media, toeing the line for Hillary Clinton — who, after her shocking and humiliating loss decided that she needed someone or something to blame and pointed a crooked finger at Russia — decided that President Trump all but admitted his alleged crimes with those two words.

In his report revealed on Thursday, Robert Mueller described a scene in the Oval Office that allegedly took place right after he was appointed special counsel and charged with investigating allegations that Trump or his campaign minions colluded with Russia to alter the outcome of the 2020 election.

“Oh my God,” the president told then Attorney General Jeff Sessions, according to the report. “This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I’m fucked.” The interaction was recorded in notes taken by Session’s chief of staff, Jody Hunt.

Many media outlets did not include the context, which was plainly spoken by Trump at the same time. “Everyone tells me if you get one of these independent counsels it ruins your presidency,” Trump said. “It takes years and years and I won’t be able to do anything. This is the worst thing that ever happened to me.”

Luckily for America, he has been able to work through it all, returning the economy to its past glory, achieving record lows in unemployment, and much more.

Now, Trump is taking aim at “people that take so-called ‘notes.’ “

“Statements are made about me by certain people in the Crazy Mueller Report, in itself written by 18 Angry Democrat Trump Haters, which are fabricated & totally untrue. Watch out for people that take so-called ‘notes, when the notes never existed until needed. Because I never….” Trump wrote Friday morning on Twitter.

Trump got worked up after that, calling some tales told in the report “total bullshit.”

“[I]t was not necessary for me to respond to statements made in the ‘Report’ about me, some of which are total bullshit & only given to make the other person look good (or me to look bad). This was an Illegally Started Hoax that never should have happened,” he wrote.

Late Thursday night, Trump also praised Wall Street Journal opinion writer Kimberley Strassel, saying she “should get the Pulitzer. She is a treasure (and I don’t know her) who correctly called the Russia Hoax right from the start! Others who were soooo wrong will get the Prize. Fake News!”

In a tweet on Thursday, Strassel perfectly summed up the contents of the Mueller report.

“1) What is in the Mueller report: –endless, unrevealing details of inconsequential interaction between trump folks and Russians. –remarkable details about the many and varied statutes the SC [special counsel] nonetheless debated using to tie someone up for something on the Russia front,” she wrote.

 

 

 

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WaPo worries: Is the success of Notre Dame fundraising “white privilege”? Update: Art pieces all survived

For most everyone else, the massive fundraising response to the fire at Notre Dame was a stirring, patriotic, and charitable reaction to a cultural tragedy. For some, however, it’s an example of everything wrong — ranging from class warfare to ethnic identity and all points in between. The Washington Post mulls over whether French billionaires coming to the rescue of a French national wonder doesn’t amount to “white privilege” and upper-crust snootery:

“Of course, I find it nice, this solidarity,” said Ingrid Levavasseur, a leader of the yellow vest movement that has protested inequality in a series of often violent Saturday demonstrations since mid-November. The stream of donations essentially confirmed the movement’s broader social critique, Levavasseur said.

“If they can give tens of millions to rebuild Notre Dame, then they should stop telling us there is no money to help with the social emergency,” Philippe Martinez, head of the CGT trade union, said on Wednesday.

The cash flow has also furrowed brows abroad, with critics emphasizing that destroyed landmarks in non-Western locales — like the ancient sites destroyed by the Islamic State in Syria — have hardly inspired such a global groundswell.

“In just a few hours today, 650 million euros was donated to rebuild Notre Dame,” South Africa-based journalist Simon Allison tweeted. “In six months, just 15 million euros has been pledged to restore Brazil’s National Museum. I think this is what they call white privilege.”

I think this is what’s called fringe thinking everywhere except in the rarified editorial circles of Western media. Let’s take the latter example first. Brazil’s National Museum was built in 1808 and burned down last year, which is of course a tragic loss for Brazil. Did their National Museum have anywhere near the same cultural and religious impact on the world as Notre Dame? Of course not. Perhaps one can chalk that up to Eurocentrism, but since most of the money that poured in after the Notre Dame fire came from French billionaires, the money was pretty “Eurocentric” too.

Shouldn’t the question about fundraising for Brazil’s National Museum be directed at Brazilians anyway? It’s not as if they don’t have a few multi-billionaires lounging around, too. Two years ago, Forbes listed ten Brazilians worth more than Donald Trump, including Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin ($8 billion) and three Anheuser-Busch/InBev magnates worth over $55 billion combined. In between, Joseph Safra has a net worth over $20 billion. If all that Brazil could manage to raise to restore their National Museum was a little €15 million, that’s not the fault of French billionaires.

Also, the reason that no one’s donating to salvage the Syrian sites is because the nation’s still dealing with a civil war and a brutal dictatorship. Not only is a restoration investment premature, it’s still unsafe. When Syria transitions to a stable liberal democracy, perhaps a comparison could then be made.

As to the class-warfare/envy argument, that’s more of an internal taxation-spending issue. It’s worth noting, at least regarding taxation, that the donations made by French billionaires likely came from their wealth rather than their income. That may not matter to French populists looking to defenestrate private wealth for the general public good, of course, but on that point Notre Dame is instructive. The French state owns Notre Dame, and one reason why the fire was as destructive as it was is because of neglect of the asset by the state (which was a contributing factor in the Brazil National Museum fire too). The Washington Post goes into that at length today, too:

But as crews continue to assess damage, some noted that Notre Dame could have used a major restoration years ago and wondered whether the fire would have been as bad had the edifice been looked at earlier. Others, meanwhile, wondered whether France’s secularism had gotten in the way of the funding necessary for such a restoration effort. …

“The 1905 law does not prevent state authorities or public authorities from maintaining — it’s actually quite the opposite,” Lopinot said. “The 1905 law preserves the principle that those buildings are not private buildings but that they are state-owned buildings. That comes directly from the revolution.”

Or, as Gérard Araud, France’s ambassador the United States, tweeted in response to the notion that the separation of church and state had prevented the latter from funding Notre Dame’s restoration, “The cathedral belongs to the state which is responsible of its maintenance.”

That gets farmed out to cultural associations, but only for short-term maintenance, not the larger-scale, continuing maintenance that 800-year-old churches require. Thanks to the “Laïcité” law and the welfare demands such as those made above, the state hasn’t spent that kind of money or resources on Notre Dame or other cultural assets in a long, long time:

“We know that, the public finance situation being quite challenging, there are a few historical buildings, monuments that probably have not been maintained as they used to be maintained when our public finance was better,” Lopinot said. According to a Ministry of Culture survey from the 1980s, there are about 32,000 churches, 6,000 chapels and 87 cathedrals in France. All those built before 1905 are publicly owned.

“Apart from that, it’s a huge building that requires incredible expertise to maintain because it is so old [and] because the competencies you would need for a person to work on these kinds of buildings are very rare,” Lopinot said.

They’re rare because the state hasn’t created a market for them by investing in their upkeep. They’ll keep being rare unless France’s billionaires continue bailing them out. Perhaps instead of responding in envy, the “yellow vests” and other populists should be grateful to the wealthy in their country for investing in public infrastructure where the state itself has refused to do so.

Notre Dame is worth saving, and that has nothing to do with privilege, white or any flavor. The pushback from the progressives on the very idea has a lot to say about their nihilism, though.

Update: This is certainly good news, regardless of where your privilege lies:

Top French art conservation officials say the works inside Notre Dame suffered no major damage in the fire that devastated the cathedral, and the pieces have been removed from the building for their protection.

Isabelle Palot-Frossat of the center for research at the French Museums said neither fire, nor soot, nor water reached inside the cathedral’s walls. The fierce fire Monday evening was concentrated on the cathedral’s roof and destroyed its famous spire.

Judith Kagan of the French Culture Ministry said that many of the artworks span several meters (yards) across and were being transported to a secure location.

Frank Riester, France’s culture minister, said the cathedral’s vaulted ceiling is still “in an emergency situation.” Officials will have to carefully remove the debris that is weighing it down, cover the ceiling against the elements and dismantle the scaffolding that had topped the cathedral when it caught fire.

Even the beehives survived, the AP reports.

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Fox Denied Access From Ocasio-Cortez Town Hall Speech On Veteran’s Care, Excuse For Denial Was Lie

And what was worse? She argued against choice for veterans, even saying that we should have “VA care for all.” Via The Nation: She said that should Medicare for All be passed, the VA would most likely remain unchanged. While many champions of universal health-care coverage are fighting to essentially abolish private health insurance while […]

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Snopes Actually Fact-Checks Whether AOC Bid ‘Free’ For Every Item As Contestant On ‘The Price Is Right’

The report was right there, in black and white: “Ocasio-Cortez Appears On ‘The Price Is Right,’ Guesses Everything Is Free.”

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was pumped to attend a taping of The Price Is Right in Hollywood this week. The special guest introduced herself as a U.S. representative and rising star of the Democratic Party. Things got interesting when the game began and every time it was her turn to estimate the price of an item her answer was “free.”

Items included a set of Italian leather handbags, an all expenses paid trip to the Bahamas, and a brand new 2019 BMW 330i, at all of which Ocasio-Cortez shouted, “FREE!”

When host Drew Carey asked if Ocasio-Cortez understood the game’s rules, she told Carey not to cat-call her and then responded, “Don’t hate me cause you ain’t me.”

Pretty funny. And the Democratic socialist from New York might well do that if she ever appears on the show (she does, after all, call for free health care, free college tuition, and free cash for everyone, along with pushing an climate change program estimated to cost $93 trillion over 10 years).

But the story was just a joke, posted by the satirical website Babylon Bee.

For some reason, Snopes — which calls itself the “definitive fact-checking resource” and was once employed by Facebook to rule on what is true and what is not — decided to “fact check” the fake article.

“FALSE,” said the website.

“In mid-April 2019, an image supposedly showing U.S. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez guessing that the cost of an item was ‘free’ during an appearance on the daytime television game show ‘The Price is Right’ started circulating on social media,” Snopes wrote, posting the above picture. “This is not a genuine photograph of Ocasio-Cortez on the show. This image was created for a satirical article that was originally published by The Babylon Bee.”

“This viral image combined a photograph of the congresswoman during her appearance on ‘The Late Show with Stephen Colbert’ in June 2018 with a still from an October episode of ‘The Price is Right.’ “

After much mocking of Snopes, the “fact” checker posted an explanation.

“What started as a story about @AOC on a satirical website also spread on social media as a standalone altered image. Without context, it is inevitable in today’s misinformation age that some people will see, believe, and keep scrolling,” Snopes wrote on Twitter.

It’s not the first time Snopes fact-checked a Bee piece. In February, Snopes ruled as “FALSE” a Bee story headlined, “Jussie Smollett Offered Job At CNN After Fabricating News Story Out Of Thin Air.”

And these people are the ones checking the veracity of news?

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You Zucked Up!: Regulators Debate Holding Facebook Boss Accountable for Scandals

Social media companies are going to have to come up with a solution for privacy scandals. Otherwise, the government will do it for them and their bosses won’t like it. On Thursday, two sources told NBC News that regulators are debating if and how they will hold Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg responsible for Facebook’s private information leaks. Facebook’s latest privacy scandal was that it "unintentionally uploaded" the email contact lists of approximately 1.5 million users. 540 million users’ data was found uploaded to Amazon Cloud for the public to…

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Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, YouTube Working on ‘Global Censorship Database’

Social media platforms and Big Tech companies have been slowly working to censor content on their platforms more efficiently. Emma Llanso, Director of Free Expression at the Center for Democracy and Technology, wrote in an op-ed for Wired that the response to the New Zealand mass shooting in March brought the internet to a terrifying reality.

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Kate Smith’s ‘God Bless America’ Out At Yankee Stadium Over Racist Song

The song was for a Broadway show mocking racism. That’s why Robeson also sang it. Via Fox News: The New York Yankees have decided to no longer run Kate Smith’s version of “God Bless America” during their seventh-inning stretch because of Smith’s affiliation with songs that carried racist lyrics. Most famously, Smith sang a 1931 […]

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Levin: ‘It’s a Crap Report;’ Claims of ‘Real Evidence’ Against Trump ‘All B.S., From Top to Bottom’

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The reason there are almost no redactions in Volume Two of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Trump-Russian report is that “It’s all crap,” conservative pundit Mark Levin declared on his nationally-syndicated radio program Thursday.

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Facebook Admits To Uploading Contacts of 1.5 Million Users Without Permission

You know which company could weather a good privacy controversy right now? Facebook.

After all, making Cambridge Analytica a household name didn’t really sour anyone on the social media giant. Releasing the phone numbers of two-factor authentication users to companies for advertisements they couldn’t opt out of? A minor blip. That time when they accidentally reset 14 million users’ default settings so that they would post publicly instead of privately? Whoops.

So, imagine my relief when I found out it was Facebook, as opposed to one of those social media companies with shakier reputations that might not be able to cope with another scandal, that uploaded the email contacts of more than a million users to their servers without the permission of said users.

“Since May 2016, the social-networking company has collected the contact lists of 1.5 million users new to the social network,” Business Insider reported on Thursday.

“The Silicon Valley company said the contact data was ‘unintentionally uploaded to Facebook,’ and it is now deleting them.

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“The revelation comes after pseudononymous security researcher e-sushi noticed that Facebook was asking some users to enter their email passwords when they signed up for new accounts to verify their identities, a move widely condemned by security experts. Business Insider then discovered that if you entered your email password, a message popped up saying it was ‘importing’ your contacts without asking for permission first.”

Users weren’t given any chance “to opt out, cancel the process, or interrupt it midway through” once it began harvesting the email contacts.

While the security breach didn’t give Facebook the content of the user’s emails, it did tell them who the user was emailing with. According to Business Insider, this information was used “to improve Facebook’s ad targeting, build Facebook’s web of social connections, and recommend friends to add.” Of course it was.

The company says it will notify all of the users whose email data was uploaded without their permission. Thursday was indeed a red-letter day for Facebook, as it was also revealed that another major PR face-plant involving password storage was much more widespread than initially revealed.

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“Facebook says it stored millions of Instagram users’ passwords in plain text, leaving them exposed to people with access to certain internal systems,” The Verge reported. “The security lapse was first reported last month, but at the time, Facebook said it only happened to ‘tens of thousands of Instagram users,’ whereas the number is now being revised up to ‘millions.’ The issue also affected ‘hundreds of millions of Facebook Lite users’ and ‘tens of millions of other Facebook users.’

“Passwords are supposed to be stored in an encrypted format that allows websites to confirm what you’re entering without directly reading it. But as Krebs on Security first reported, various errors seem to have caused Facebook’s systems to log some passwords in plain text since as early as 2012. Facebook noticed the problem in January and said in March that the issue had been resolved.”

Again: Whoops!

I don’t just mention this to pile on a platform that rightly deserves opprobrium for a freight train of privacy scandals over the past few years, though that’s certainly a) deserved and b) fun. I’d instead like to point you to the fact that this all comes as Mark Zuckerberg is literally begging Congress to regulate his industry.

In a Washington Post Op-Ed on March 30, the Facebook CEO said that he believed “we need a more active role for governments and regulators. By updating the rules for the Internet, we can preserve what’s best about it — the freedom for people to express themselves and for entrepreneurs to build new things — while also protecting society from broader harms.”

RELATED: NYT Shows Zuckerberg What Privacy Invasion Feels Like with Report on What’s in His Trash

Or, as a Reason headline put those calls for government intervention more succinctly: “Zuckerberg’s Plea: Regulate Me Before I Violate People’s Privacy Again!”

“While Congress has been holding hearings, poking tech execs, and dancing the legislative Fandango, the marketplace has imposed actual sanctions” on Facebook, Thomas Hazlett wrote in a piece published Wednesday.

“Between the time Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal was revealed, March of last year, and March of this year, shareholders lost more than $61.6 billion adjusted for overall market (NASDAQ) fluctuations.”

A proposed fine of up to 4 percent on annual revenue for violations of the law in legislation written by Democrat Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, meanwhile, would have only cost Facebook a mere $2.2 billion.

And make no mistake, this kind of regulation would be good for Facebook and its shareholders while being bad for the free market. What Facebook aims at doing is ossifying the current social media landscape so that the current leaders — most notably Facebook and Twitter — won’t face new competition. It would take a lot to challenge those platforms now, but imagine the kind of resources it would require if new entrants to the marketplace didn’t just have to make a better product and market it more effectively but also had to comply with a slew of government regulations purportedly designed to protect your privacy.

Hazlett and I would part ways on whether regulation is required when dealing with Facebook, but it oughtn’t be on the company’s terms. Protecting Facebook and protecting your data are two different things. What the company wants is the former disguised as the latter. That ought to be a non-starter, for reasons that were all too evident Thursday.

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