4203

It really seems like there is a campaign revving up to fire Mueller right now.

I don’t know what to do if that happens and the GOP does nothing. The rule of law will be dead in America. The great democratic experiment would be over.

4204

4205

Yeah, I think he’s absolutely going to fire Mueller, or at least try to. Meanwhile, Congress warns him not to do so and threatens him with a tweet-storm.

“That’s not our lane. It’s an independent counsel. So he should be independent. And we should do our job and the two things should not be connected,” Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) told The Daily Beast. Heinrich sits on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which is also investigating Russian meddling and potential collusion between Trump associates and Russian operatives.

Sen. Tom Carper (D-DE) also acknowledged that Congress could not prevent the president from dispensing of Mueller. In a reflection of the powerlessness of the legislative branch in such a scenario, he humorously suggested that a robust social-media campaign might do the trick.

“I think that maybe we could have a tweet-storm—a tweet-storm directed at the president that all of us, Democrats and Republicans, would tweet the same message to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. and say: Mr. President, don’t you dare,” Carper said with a laugh

4206

It’s mind boggling, really. Instead of addressing the issue at hand, the President is in effect saying, “Yeah, so what? I’m going to screw the people trying to hold me to task for this.” It’s blatant, it’s criminal, and it’s disgusting, but still, talk about “sheeple;” the Trumpistas are the most brain-washed groupd of political felators that you can ever think of.

4207

So if he fires Mueller, the question for all us lowly citizens is…

4208

All these Twitter personalities saying I predicted constitutional crises x months ago. Like only Nostradamus or Hrose could’ve seen this coming.

4209

Democrats regain control of the House, and shit gets really real in a hurry.

And what looked like a chance to gain seats in the Senate would ned up being “I hope we can hold this thing” for Republicans.

4210

I would have felt better about that article if all the congressmen they had quoted hadn’t been Democrats.

4211

Yup. Don’t mean shit without some R’s on board.

4212

2018 is an eternity away and it’s hard for me to stay optimistic that we will still have those elections. We’re at the mercy of Republicans at this point

4213

I am boldly confident there will be elections in 2018.

I am reasonably confident that the Democrats have at least a puncher’s chance of gaining control of the House.

One very smart point made by FiveThirtyEight earlier this week: Trump is holding at strong approval among Republicans…but the number of people in polls identifying as Republicans is shrinking, which implies a condition by which people who have fallen out with Trump are no longer self-identifying as Republicans with pollsters and thus not considered within that demographic.

4214

The fact that you even have to state it is still more worrying to me than anything I can remember in our politics.

4215

My tongue was firmly in cheek.

4216

They’re shedding body parts right now.

4217

Republicans have given every indication over the course of the past several months that no malfeasance, no matter how naked and severe, will impel them to rein in Trump or impeach him. Outside of Congress, the hope would be that firing Mueller—let alone pardoning the targets of his investigation—would essentially cost Trump control of the Justice Department.
[…]
If this crisis unfolds as depicted here, the country’s final hope for avoiding a terminal slide into authoritarianism would be the midterm election, contesting control of a historically gerrymandered House of Representatives. That election is 16 months away. Between now and then, Trump’s DOJ and his sham election-integrity commission will seek to disenfranchise as many Democratic voters as possible, while the president himself beseeches further foreign interference aimed at Democratic candidates. Absent the necessary sweep, everything Trump will have done to degrade our system for his own enrichment and protection will have been ratified, and a point of no return will have been crossed.

4219

Corallo’s resignation – he’s the PR guy who was spokesperson for the Trump legal team and handling their messaging – has been noticed in GOP quarters. Longtime Republican stalwart washing his hands of Trump and walking away.

4220

Well he already lost close to the entire Republican Foreign Policy establishment even before the election (see for example this). Sadly from what we saw in the election and in Trump’s current Republican Party ratings, Republicans who actually gave a damn about foreign policy was a much smaller and less influential group than I had thought.

4221

Y’know what though? If Trump tried to suspend elections Tucker Carlson would fucking find a reason to support it.

It’s late, I should sleep.

4222

Here is the full text of that letter. I have saved the link to quote it loudly on the 1yr anniversary August 8.

4223

So Microsoft has apparently been kicking Russian hacker ass.

Last year attorneys for the software maker quietly sued the hacker group known as Fancy Bear in a federal court outside Washington DC, accusing it of computer intrusion, cybersquatting, and infringing on Microsoft’s trademarks. The action, though, is not about dragging the hackers into court. The lawsuit is a tool for Microsoft to target what it calls “the most vulnerable point” in Fancy Bear’s espionage operations: the command-and-control servers the hackers use to covertly direct malware on victim computers. These servers can be thought of as the spymasters in Russia’s cyber espionage, waiting patiently for contact from their malware agents in the field, then issuing encrypted instructions and accepting stolen documents.

Since August, Microsoft has used the lawsuit to wrest control of 70 different command-and-control points from Fancy Bear. The company’s approach is indirect, but effective. Rather than getting physical custody of the servers, which Fancy Bear rents from data centers around the world, Microsoft has been taking over the Internet domain names that route to them. These are addresses like “livemicrosoft[.]net” or “rsshotmail[.]com” that Fancy Bear registers under aliases for about $10 each. Once under Microsoft’s control, the domains get redirected from Russia’s servers to the company’s, cutting off the hackers from their victims, and giving Microsoft a omniscient view of that servers’ network of automated spies.

“In other words,” Microsoft outside counsel Sten Jenson explained in a court filing last year, “any time an infected computer attempts to contact a command-and-control server through one of the domains, it will instead be connected to a Microsoft-controlled, secure server.”