Edwin Starr sang it loud in 1970.

War, huh (good God y’all)
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing
Say it, say it, say it
War (uh-huh), huh (yeah, huh)
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing, listen to me

You can see the full lyrics here. Starr was lucky to live in the USA where War not only got widespread airplay, but spent three weeks at number 1 on the Billboard charts. Starr’s intense anti-Vietnam War anthem hit a cord.

Imagine such a thing happening in Russia today, where any public criticism of the Kremlin line in its bloodthirsty and unprovoked war in Ukraine guarantees its citizens up to 15 years of jail time, no redress admitted. In Russia, the Russian invasion of Ukraine is fake news.

Edwin Starr’s War is just one in a long line of anti-war, protest and solidarity songs that are enshrined in our collective conscience. Joan Baez did her part with We Shall Overcome. Marvin Gaye gave us all a wake-up call with What’s Going On. John Lennon pushed us to Imagine. Dolores O’Riordan summed up the Northern Ireland conflict with Zombie. Jimi Hendrix sang there are many here among us who think that life is just a joke when he electrified Bob Dylan’s All Along The Watchtower. Putin foretold.

Putin miscalculated on many fronts, military, intellectual, strategic and cultural. His generals and foot soldiers are dying in unprecedented numbers on his self-determined battlefield. His true support comes only from those Russians and Belarussians brainwashed or ignorant of the facts, a situation that Putin facilitated by shutting down any and all media outlets that might have found him accountable. In terms of Russia’s importance in the world, Putin has sent his country back to the Soviet dark ages. And he completely underestimated the connectivity that defines the world outside of Russia in 2022.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is being photographed, televised, YouTube’d and tweeted in real time. Russia has no escape from the atrocities in which it is now complicit. Putin has no escape here. He is forever going to be damned for leading his country to disaster and for lending his reputation, or what is left of it, to a Russia diminished.

Putin was once an able chameleon, biding his time in a background role on the world stage. But now, thanks to his recklessness and inflated ego, he finds himself an emperor without clothes in a real world that has coalesced, and how, against him. It turns out that Putin is just the latest version of the Russian tyrant, dictator, despot and oppressor that we once knew as Stalin. Stalin died by natural causes. Putin can only wish for the same.

How do you protest such evil in song?

At a moment when so many people are dying daily in Ukraine, it may seem inconsequential, but it’s not.

Pink Floyd put out their first new song in 28 years to protest Putin’s self-delusional brain fart in attempting to redefine a Russia-centric world. Floyd’s song was called Hey Hey Rise Up, and featured Andriy Khlyvnyuk of Boombox singing in Ukrainian. And even though it spent a short time atop the Apple US Chart, the song didn’t resonate.

But then came Florence + the Machine. By some mechanism of chance, Florence Welch went to Kyiv in late 2021 to film the video for her latest release. This was months before the onslaught of Russia’s atrocities in Ukraine. By coincidence, or not, Florence’s song is called Free. Hers is not a protest song at all on the surface. Her song is an upbeat pop/rock dance track. Florence did the video with the actor Bill Nighy as her side portraying her anxiety. The lyrics don’t obsess over political freedom even though the video ends with Florence and her anxiety overlooking a graveyard in Ukraine. But Florence does sign off on the video with a dedication to the spirit, creativity and perseverance of our brave Ukrainian friends, and notes that the video was filmed with Ukrainian filmmakers and artists, whose radiant freedom can never be extinguished. The song may not be protest per se, but the video keeps Kyiv and Ukraine front and center on YouTube. It’s already been seen more than 2,144,546 times.

Keep in mind that not all solidarity songs need to be anti-war. Does anybody remember the Andrews Sisters? They had a huge hit during World War 2 with Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy. The Andrews Sisters great contribution to ending the Second World War was in making our soldiers feel valued, loved, important and appreciated in song. The lyrics were secondary. The Andrews Sisters made everyone feel that a future with good times was still possible.

Just a week ago, Ed Sheeran premiered a new song 2step with a video also filmed in Kyiv before the Russian attack began. Sheeren is donating the royalties of his song to Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) Ukraine Humanitarian Appeal. The DEC website reminds us that 18 million people are projected to be affected by Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine, and that 12 million Ukrainians, more than a quarter of the population, have so far had to flee their homes. Ed Sheeren and Florence Welch show us just how badly Putin miscalculated. Ukraine was already firmly integrated, accepted and understood as European long before Putin’s botched attempt to claim it for himself and Russia.

Unfortunately, nobody in Putin’s coterie of yes-men gave him the message.

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Barack Obama was clearly one of the most cerebral and well-spoken presidents that the United States has ever had. But as odd as it may seem, two slips of his tongue may have led to the rise of the two worst dictators so far in the 21^st Century.

In 2011, Obama spoke at the White House Correspondents Dinner. One of the guests was Donald Trump. Obama showed little mercy when while looking at Trump, he said, “No one is happier, no one is prouder to put this birth certificate matter to rest than the Donald. And that’s because he can finally get back to focusing on the issues that matter, like: Did we fake the moon landing? What really happened in Roswell? And where are Biggie and Tupac?” Obama also included a fake video of his birth and an artist’s rendition of what the White House would look like if Trump was president, further embarrassing Trump.

You can see the five-minute video here:

As you might expect, Trump was not pleased by being the butt of the jokes. Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie said Trump was “pissed off like I’d never seen him before.”

Trump had played around with the idea of running fore president before the 2011 Correspondents Dinner. But the events that evening truly crystallized his hate towards Obama as well as any Democrat who held him in low regard. In June of 2015, Trump announced that he was running for president in 2016. He decimated the rest of the Republican field of candidates and then lost to Hillary Clinton by nearly three million popular votes, but won the outdated and undemocratic Electoral College.

The second faux pas by Obama came in 2014. In March of that year, shortly after Vladimir Putin and Russia had invaded Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine, Obama called Russia a “regional power.” Specifically, he said, “Russia is a regional power that is threatening some of its immediate neighbors, not out of strength but out of weakness.” Obama describes in in more detail in the following 50-second video:

Knowing what we know now about Putin, it is no surprise that he would be humiliated and outraged at the thought of Russia being called a regional power. After all, his dream as president of Russia was to re-establish the old Soviet Union, with all seventeen republics. He felt that Russia and the Soviet Union had a long and proud history of being a global power and he want to reassert what had been lost at the end of the twentieth century when Mikhail Gorbachev orchestrated to collapse of the Soviet Union in order to give more autonomy to each of the republics.

We cannot say that Obama’s demeaning remarks about Russia caused Putin to bully and ultimately further invade Ukraine in 2022, but it certainly did not help. Putin was also irritated by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who repeatedly criticized Putin and Russia for the lack of fair and democratic elections.

Generally, Barack Obama measures his words as well as anyone. You can see it, particularly in his press conferences, when he often pauses between phrases to make sure that the next thing that he says is precisely what he is thinking and not something that he will later regret.

Life is full of ironies, and the fact that Barack Obama may well have significantly contributed to the rise of dictators Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin can be considered unexpected and certainly unfortunate. It is further evidence that we all make mistakes, even when we try our best to avoid them.

The post How Loose Lips from Obama Hurt America and the World appeared first on Occasional Planet.

In 1959, Chuck Berry had a hit with a song called Back in the USA, a rock ‘n roll propelled love anthem to America. The lyrics went:

Oh well, oh well, I feel so good today
We touched ground on an international runway

… New York, Los Angeles, oh, how I yearned for you
Detroit, Chicago, Chattanooga, Baton Rouge
Let alone just to be at my home back in ol’ St. Lou

.… Well, I’m so glad I’m livin’ in the U.S.A.
Yes, I’m so glad I’m livin’ in the U.S.A.
Anything you want, we got right here in the U.S.A.

Just about a decade later, in November 1968, the Beatles led off their White Album with a tongue-in-cheek riff on the East-West divide going on at the time, a track called Back in the USSR, a shout-out to Chuck Berry.

The Beatles lyrics went:

… back in the USSR
You don’t know how lucky you are, boy

Back in the US
Back in the US
Back in the USSR

Then the Beatles segued into a spoof of the Beach Boys – California Girls:

… Well the Ukraine girls really knock me out
They leave the west behind
And Moscow girls make me sing and shout

And then back to:

… I’m back in the USSR
You don’t know how lucky you are, boys
Back in the USSR

The Beatles brought many new Russian fans on board with Back in the USSR, among them a certain Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, the very same thug now directing genocide against the people of Ukraine. But the Beatles were just messing around. Back in the USSR was not a love anthem to the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union had just invaded Czechoslovakia in August of that same year, 1968, and the Beatles were well aware of that. The song had its base in irony.

In a changed world, Paul McCartney later sang the song at a concert in Moscow’s Red Square in 2003, and Putin was in attendance. At that Red Square concert, everywhere you looked Moscovites were rockin’ and rollin,’ happy as hell that they were being acknowledged by McCartney. Putin was deadpan, perhaps already fixated on how he might recreate the empire that the Beatles had satirized and that McCartney was now flaunting right in front of him in Moscow. Putin was not amused by the irony.

All water under the bridge now that Comrade Vlad has directed his military might to invade and attempt to choke off life in Ukraine.

Despite the passage of time, inter-connected world economies, the acceptance of Russia as a partner, glasnost, the internet, Facebook, TikTok, Telegram and Twitter, here we are looking at an East-West divide, the likes of which we never imagined possible at the beginning of the third decade of the 21st century.

And what the fu .. why (expletive removed)?

Well, just maybe because Putin, going about his daily life as a dictator par excellence in Russia in 2022, has an ego even greater than Trump’s. Putin is mega-egotistical, eager for a mention in history equal to that of his heroine Catherine the Great, paranoiac in the extreme and, unfortunately for the rest of us, someone with a uniquely manhood-threatened view of civilization. He has his finger on a nuclear trigger, something that Stalin and Hitler never had. His mention in history, if the there ever is a history after this, is sure to be in the column of the latter.

Once, we might have imagined, in our innocence, that Paul McCartney knew what he was doing, penning a guitar-driven rock song that the world – Russia included – could twist-and-shout to.

Oh, how silly we were.

All the while, our real future was being decided in Comrade Putin’s mind.

Here in the USA, we were dutifully electing a new President every four years. Back in the USSR of his dreams, the de facto ruler of Russia since December 1999, according to Wikipedia, Putin was upending the last 22 years of history, consolidating power, readying his new Russia for the moment when he might recreate some semblance of his lost Soviet empire.

Soviet, you might just reasonably ask, What is that exactly?

Basically, Soviet is a synonym for Communist, an elected community council that makes decisions for a society, a country, no dissension allowed.

It’s a world vision that went out of favor in 1991 when the Soviet Union was dissolved, an empire that consisted of none other than Russia, but also Ukraine, Georgia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.

In the world at large, we may have thought Soviet was forever gone from our reality, a thing of the past.

In 1991, the Soviet Union was replaced by something called the Commonwealth of Independent States. The Bush Administration at the time quickly recognized the independence of Ukraine and other former Soviet republics. And some of those newly independent states immediately understood their opportunity. Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, fast aligned themselves with Europe and the West, and over a relatively short period of time became NATO members.

And so Soviet was gone from the world stage, or so we wished ourselves into thinking.

Except, Soviet was not gone. Soviet had one major shareholder remaining.

That major USSR shareholder was not at all discouraged, put off or disheartened by past Soviet setbacks or failures, but in a cockeyed view of world politics, found himself not only the President of Russia, but capable of invading a previous ally to inflict unprecedented death, pain and destruction on Ukraine.

That shareholder’s name is Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.

His goal?

To drag us all back to a pre-McCartney, pre-Beatles era, to a psuedo-utopia, a ghost empire that he has convinced himself he can regroup called the USSR?

What a blockhead, what a fu..-up (expletive again removed.)

Pardon my French.

The post Back in the USSR appeared first on Occasional Planet.

History is something that binds us all together, and that includes an unlikely pairing of Russian President Vladimir Putin and the affirmative action movement in the United States. To understand the motives of why Putin feels so possessively towards Ukraine and why affirmative action is central to the advancement of minorities, we must draw upon the history of both.

To comprehend why Putin is so interested in protecting his interests in Ukraine, it’s necessary to consider how since the time of Napoleon, more than two hundred years ago, Russia has repeatedly been attacked from its west. There have been three major incursions into Russia from other European countries. First was Napoleon from France in 1812. Second was Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm in 1914 and third was Germany again, this time under Adolf Hitler in 1941.

When the Soviet Union was formed in 1922, there was Russia and sixteen other states nearby republics. One of those sixteen was Ukraine, which was one of the founding republics in the U.S.S.R. Other republics that came to form a barrier of protection around Russia were Armenia, Azerbaijan, Byelorussia, Estonia, Georgia, Kirghizstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldavia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan (there were four others that came later).

What early leaders of the Soviet Union, including Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin, did was to form a protective shell around Russia. In some ways, it is similar to the United States asserting that it has control of the Americas (North, Central and South) through the Monroe Doctrine of 1823. The U.S. has engaged European countries twice to “protect the independence of Cuba.” First was in 1898 with the Spanish-American War and then in 1962 in staring down Russia in the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The key point is that both Russia and the United States have acted in ways to protect themselves from invasion. Each has formed geographic barriers around its borders. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, it left Russia in many ways unprotected.

For many years post-1989, the Ukraine had a government friendly to Russia. However, in recent years, Ukraine has become more independent and interested in developing closer relations with western Europe. Economic trade between western Europe and Ukraine has increased and Ukraine has also asked to become part of the western defense alliance, NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization).

For Vladimir Putin and many others in Russia, this is scary. This is also not the way it should be according to the Russian playbook. Russia’s field of reference is the Soviet Union of old, in which Ukraine and other republics on its western flank protected it from western incursion, or western even influence.

In this light, it makes sense that Putin would want to take control of the Ukrainian government. In his mind, doing so would include the possibility of using military force to do so.

I am not asserting that NATO countries, including the United States, should just stand by and let Russia invade Ukraine without consequences. But it is important to understand that Russia has valid reasons to want to control Ukraine. That is something that is very different from when they placed offensive missiles in Cuba in 1962, a country thousands of miles outside of their “sphere of interest.”

So, drawing upon history, it is important to understand from where Russia comes and why it is important for NATO countries to negotiate with Putin. One component of an agreement might be to include a declaration agreeing not to include Ukraine in NATO now, but to have a sunset provision whereby the issue could be reconsidered in twenty years.

In many ways, looking at Russia’s current desires is not that different from the ways in which many white people in the United States look at minorities. In 2019, the New York Times Magazine devoted an entire issue to the history of African-Americans, beginning with the estimated first day that slaves from Africa arrived on the American shore of the colony of Virginia.

Lead author of the 1619 Project, Nicole Hannah-Jones, does a remarkable job of connecting the elements of slavery to current problems that African-Americans face. She is joined by a number of other outstanding writers who provide more detail on subjects such as how urban interstate highways have been intentionally designed to divide black neighborhoods, how the work of slaves on southern plantations provided need for investment and eventually the establishment of the New York Stock Exchange. The work of the Times is greatly supplemented by lessons from the Pulitzer Center.

Many white people are now getting upset about Critical Race Theory, which is simply a recognition of how contemporary conditions (good and bad) for African-Americans is a result of the history of blacks in America.

It is because of the discrimination that black people have endured in America, now for more than 400 years, that programs such as Affirmative Action have been needed, and still are. Affirmative Action is a policy or a program that seeks to redress past discrimination through active measures to ensure equal opportunity, as in education and employment.

Affirmative Action is not something that is limited to race. It is used for those who are economically disadvantaged, or for people with disabilities, or for women. It is necessary to balance the playing field.

White people need to understand the history of minorities, just as NATO countries need to understand the history of Russia. To be fair, the reverse is true in each case. On a global level, if we are going to live peacefully and with justice, it is important to understand one another’s history.

The post What Putin and Affirmative Action have in common appeared first on Occasional Planet.

It’s not a hoax. The recently released (July 25, 2019) Senate Intelligence Committee report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election makes that very clear. All you have to do is read it. It’s only 67 pages, and about a third of it is blocked out. But, of course, Donald Trump didn’t do that, nor did he listen to briefings that would have left no doubt that Russians not only tried, but succeeded in breaking into election databases in all 50 states—that they continued their efforts during the 2018 mid-terms, and that they’re on track to do it again in 2020, perhaps on a much larger and more damaging scale.

He doesn’t want to know. But I do, and I imagine so do many others. So, I read the report and copy/pasted some highlights, so you don’t have to. Here they are. Sub-headings in bold are my interpretations, not from the report. The excerpts are in the order in which they appear in the report.

Why they did it: Just to let us know that they can?

“While the Committee does not know with confidence what Moscow’s intentions were, Russia may have  been probing vulnerabilities in voting systems to exploit later. Alternatively, Moscow may have sought to undermine confidence in the 2016 U.S. elections simply through the discovery of their activity.”

Should we have heard more about it? Maybe not.

“In 2016, officials at all levels of government debated whether publicly acknowledging this foreign activity was the right course. Some were deeply concerned that public warnings might promote the very impression they were trying to dispel—that the voting systems were insecure.”

What were they doing, exactly? Checking to see if we’re home. Maybe they’ll come back later.

“One security expert characterized the activity as simple scanning for vulnerabilities, analogous  to somebody walking down the street and looking to  see if you are home. A small number of systems were unsuccessfully exploited, as though somebody had rattled the doorknob but was unable to get in…[however]a small number of the networks were successfully exploited. They made it through the door.”

“What  it mostly looked like to us was reconnaissance…I would have characterized it at the time as sort of conducting the reconnaissance to do the network mapping, to do the topology mapping so that you  could actually understand  the  network, establish a presence so you could  come back  later and actually execute an operation.

How widespread were the attacks? Very.

“By late August 2016…the Russians had attempted to intrude in all 50 states, based on the extent of the activity and the apparent randomness of the attempts. “My professional judgment was we have to work under the assumption that they’ve tried to go everywhere, because they’re thorough, they’re competent, they’re good.”

“Several weeks prior to the 2018 mid-term election, DHS assessed that “numerous actors are regularly targeting election infrastructure, likely for different purposes, including to cause disruptive effects, steal sensitive data, and undermine confidence in the election.”

Did they change any votes? Probably not.

“Russian intelligence obtained and maintained access to elements of multiple U.S. state or local electoral boards.  DHS assesses that the types of systems Russian actors targeted or compromised were not involved in vote tallying.”

Illinois was hit first. The attack reached deep into voter information files. Be afraid.

“In June 2016, Illinois experienced the first known breach by Russian actors of state election infrastructure during the 2016 election. As of the end of 2018, the Russian cyber actors had successfully penetrated Illinois’s voter registration database, viewed multiple database tables, and accessed up to 200,000 voter registration records. The compromise resulted in the exfiltration of an unknown quantity of voter registration data. Russian cyber actors were in a position to delete or change voter data, but the Committee is not aware of any evidence that they did so.”

“The compromised voter registration database held records relating to 14 million registered voters. Records exfiltrated included information on each voter’s name, address, partial social security number, date of birth, and either a driver’s license number or state identification number.”

“Russia would have had the ability to potentially manipulate some of that data, but we didn’t see that.” …The level of access that they gained, they almost certainly could have done more. Why they didn’t…is sort of an open-ended question. I think it fits under the larger umbrella of undermining confidence in the election by tipping their hand that they had this level of access or showing that they were capable of getting it.”

They were ballsy.

“The Russian Embassy placed a formal request to observe the elections with the Department of State, but also reached outside diplomatic channels in an attempt to secure permission directly from state and local election officials. For example, in September2016, the Secretary of State denied a request by the Russian Consul General to allow a Russian government official inside a polling station on Election Day to study US. election procedures.”

They had a Twitter campaign ready, to question the results, if Hillary Clinton had won.

“Russian diplomats were prepared to publicly call into question the validity of the results…and that pro-Kremlin bloggers had prepared a Twitter  campaign on election night in anticipation of Secretary Clinton’s victory.”

They got access via a phishing scam.

“After a county employee opened an infected email attachment, the cyber actor stole credentials, which were later posted online. Those stolen credentials were used in June 2016 to penetrate State4’s voter registration database. The actor used the credentials to access the database and was in a position to modify county, but not statewide, data.”

They were playing a long con, and still are.

“Russian intentions regarding U.S. election infrastructure remain unclear. Russia might have intended to exploit vulnerabilities in election infrastructure during the 2016 elections and, for unknown reasons, decided not to execute those options.”

“Alternatively, Russia might have sought to gather information in the conduct of traditional espionage activities.”

“Lastly, Russia might have used its activity in 2016 to catalog options or clandestine actions, holding them for use at a later date…Russia’s activities against U.S. election infrastructure likely sought to further their overarching goal; undermining the integrity of US elections.”

“It is classic Russian espionage….They will scrape up all the information and the experience they possibly can, and “they might  not be effective the first time or the fifth time, but they are going to keep at it until they can come back and do it in an effective way.”  -Andrew McCabe, former FBI Director.

Tampering with voting machine is hard. Causing election day chaos is a more achievable goal.

“While any one voting machine is fairly vulnerable, as has been demonstrated over and over again publicly, the ability to actually do an operation to change the outcome of an election on the scale you would need to, and do it surreptitiously, is incredibly difficult.”

“A much more achievable goal would be to undermine confidence in the results of the electoral process, and that could be done much more effectively and easily….A logical  thing would be, if your goal is to undermine confidence in  the U.S. electoral system— which the Russians have a long goal  of wanting to put themselves on the  same moral plane as the United States… one way would be to cause chaos on election day.”

“How could you start to do that? Mess with the voter registration databases.”

Here’s how voter-registration tampering would play out on election day:

“So if you’re a state and local entity and your voter registration database is housed in the secretary  of  state’s office  and it is not encrypted  and it’s not backed up, and it says Lisa Monaco lives at Smith Street and I show up at my [polling place] and they say ‘Well we don’t have Ms. Monaco at Smith Street, we have her at Green Street,’ now there’s difficulty in my voting. And if that were to happen on a large scale, I was worried about confusion at polling places, lack of confidence in the voting system, anger at  a large scale in some areas, confusion, distrust.”  -Lisa Monaco, US Homeland Security Advisor to President Barack Obama.

Changing elections on a large scale would be difficult, but there are ways to make a significance difference.

“The level of effort and scale required to change the outcome of a national election would make it nearly impossible to avoid detection.”

“Nationwide elections are often won or lost in a small number of precincts. A sophisticated actor could target efforts at districts where margins are already small, and disenfranchising only a small percentage of voters could have a disproportionate impact on an election’s outcome.”

Some people don’t want to talk about Russian interference at all and want the press to shut up.

“Many state election officials emphasized their concern that press coverage of, and increased attention to, election security could create the very impression the Russians were seeking to foster, namely undermining voters’ confidence in election integrity. Several insisted that when ever any official speaks publicly on this issue, they should state clearly the difference between a “scan” and a “hack,” and a few even went as far as to suggest that U.S. officials stop talking about it at all.

To talk about it or not: a dilemma for the intelligence community.

“We know that the Russians had already touched some of the electoral systems, and we know that they have capable cyber capabilities. So there was a real dilemma, even a conundrum,  in terms  of what do you do that’s going to try to stave off worse action on the part of the Russians, and what do you do that is going to…[give]the Russians what they were seeking, which was to really raise the specter that the election was not going to be  fair and unaffected.” –John Brennan, former director of the CIA

Potential problem: Only a few companies make voting machines.

“The number of vendors selling voting machines is shrinking, raising concerns about a vulnerable supply chain. A hostile actor could compromise one or two manufacturers of components and have an outsized effect on the security of the overall system.”

Some states don’t want help: They fear “a federal takeover of elections.”

In an August15, 2016, conference call with state election officials, then-Secretary Johnson told states, “we’re  in a sort of a heightened state of alertness; it behooves everyone to  do everything you can for your own cyber security leading up to the election.”

“But states pushed back. A number of state officials reacted negatively to the call.  Secretary Johnson said he was surprised/disappointed that there was a certain level of push back from at least those who spoke up…The push-back was: This is our responsibility and there should not be a  federal takeover of the election system.”

Elections are critical infrastructure.

“We should think of the electoral infrastructure as critical infrastructure…it’s just as critical for democracy as communications, electricity, water. If that doesn’t function, then your democracy doesn’t function. That is the definition of critical.”

The post I read the Russia election-tampering report. Here are some highlights. appeared first on Occasional Planet.