Saturday, June 24, 2017

An #Outsider Newsflash (Special W-End Edition): On Tech-Support Scams Courtesy of @US-CERT)

Please be advised as our team has also seen this periodically--Be Forewarned--it is a scam!!

Onward to the New Week with all its' possibilities!!



U.S. Department of Homeland Security US-CERT
National Cyber Awareness System:

06/23/2017 04:09 PM EDT

Original release date: June 23, 2017The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has released an alert on technical-support scams. In these schemes, deceptive tech-support operations offer to fix problems that don't exist, placing calls or sending pop-ups to make people think their computers are infected with viruses. Users should not give control of their computers to any stranger offering to fix problems.
US-CERT encourages users and administrators to refer to the FTC Alert and the US-CERT Tip on Avoiding Social Engineering and Phishing Attacks for more information.https://www.us-cert.gov/ncas/current-activity/2017/06/23/FTC-Releases-Alert-Tech-Support-Scams

Notations From The Grid (W-End Special Edition): ON @POTUS Watch

File photo: President Donald Trump speaks at a rally in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, June 21, 2017.
President Donald Trump speaks at a rally in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, June 21, 2017. SCOTT OLSON/AFP


For this edition of "World", our team chose a recent column by the Harretz' Chemi Shalev to Feature in its' entirety--he lays out a challenging set of circumstances

Many Armenians regard Deir el-Zour in northeast Syria as their Auschwitz. Ottoman authorities set up concentration camps near Deir el-Zour during the First World War for the hundreds of thousands who survived death marches from Turkey, until they too were murdered or died of hunger in the harsh Syrian Desert. Syria allowed the Armenians to build a memorial at the site of the camps, but ISIS destroyed it when they conquered the region in 2014.

Deir el-Zour subsequently played a role in other important junctures in modern history. The British Army won a decisive victory in the region over Vichy forces during World War II. The nuclear reactor that Israel destroyed in 2007, according to foreign sources, was located in the Deir el-Zour area. The Iranian missile attack this week, which created more noise than damage, was aimed at ISIS bases in Deir el-Zour. But, in addition to signaling both to Israel and Saudi Arabia about its ballistic missile capabilities, as commentators noted, Tehran was also telling Washington that it would fight to take control of the Deir el-Zour province.

In fact, Deir el-Zour is a leading contender to serve as the flash point for a potential U.S. military confrontation with Syria, Iran or even Russia. The battle, in fact, might already be underway. In recent weeks, U.S. forces shot down two Iranian drones and bombed several pro-Iranian militias that approached Tanf, southeast of Deir el-Zour, where pro-U.S. rebels are preparing for an expected campaign to break the ISIS siege of the city of Deir el-Zour, currently held by pro-Assad militias. The Syrian Sukhoi-22 that was shot down by an American F-18 this month and inflamed tensions with Moscow was intercepted because it tried to bomb similar Western-trained rebels who are preparing to take part in the final battle for the ISIS stronghold in Raqqa. Security analysts believe that after Raqqa falls, the Deir el-Zour province could serve as the final graveyard for ISIS and its dream of setting up an Islamic Caliphate, a demise that grew closer after Moscow’s assertion on Thursday that ISIS leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi had been killed in a Russian bombing raid.

But the significance of the expected battle for Deir el-Zour extends beyond the final recapture of territory held by ISIS or the power struggles in a post-ISIS Syria. If the province falls into the hands of Iranian and pro-Assad forces on the Syrian side, and pro-Iranian militias on the Iraqi side of the Euphrates River, the groundwork will be laid for the fulfillment of the Iranian fantasy of creating a crescent of influence that would run from Tehran to Damascus and Beirut. Fear of such a strategic Iranian victory is driving the White House to press the Pentagon to begin staving it off even before the war on ISIS is over. This anti-Iranian approach, shared by Defense Secretary General James Mattis and National Security Adviser Herbert McMaster, could lead to open hostilities that might start with Syrian planes and Iranian drones but quickly deteriorate to regional if not global conflict.

America’s willingness to challenge Tehran militarily is appreciated by many Israelis, who view it as a welcome change from what they viewed as Barack Obama’s overcautious approach that some even saw as pro-Iranian. Saudi Arabia, which anointed Muhammad Bin Salman as its new Crown Prince this week, also welcomes the new American aggressiveness. The rest of humanity, however, wonders whether Trump realizes that he’s playing with fire or that imprudent moves could explode in his face. The evidence, so far, is not encouraging.

Whether he realized it or not, Trump was the godfather of the clash between Saudi Arabia and its Sunni allies with the unruly princedom of Qatar. In the first few days after the Sunni boycott was imposed, many Israelis were quick to welcome the anti-Qatar campaign, as Trump egged the Saudis on and lambasted Qatar. The President, however, apparently forgot that the U.S. maintains an air base in Qatar that is vital for its operations in Syria. He also didn’t take into account Newton’s Third Law by which for every action there is a reaction. Faced with a Sunni coalition against Qatar, Iran and Turkey rallied to its side. The anti-Iranian coalition that Trump was seeking to set up in his colorful visit to Riyadh earlier this month disintegrated, and the ad-hoc anti-ISIS coalition in Syria was weakened. Turkey, for its part, is also seething over Trump’s approval for direct American arming of the Kurdish Defense Units in Syria, in advance of a final push on Raqqa.

U.S. efforts to navigate the standoff in the Gulf also exposed the extent of the disarray in its foreign policy. At the same time as Trump was tweeting about Qatar being a strong backer of terror, a State Department spokeswoman was chiding Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates for having failed to bring the conflict to a close. Saying Washington was “mystified” by their behavior, Spokeswoman Heather Nauert asked whether the Saudi-led coalition’s actions against Qatar “were really about their concerns regarding Qatar's alleged support for terrorism or were they about the long-simmering grievances between and among the Gulf Cooperation Council countries.” Listening to the statement, one might have been led to believe that Trump was merely a pawn in a regional Saudi scheme.

But the biggest and most dangerous challenge facing the U.S. is still North Korea, and Trump also cast doubt this week about his ability to handle that crisis as well. Against the backdrop of American rage at the death of Otto Warmbier, who sustained brain damage at the hands of his North Korean interrogators, Trump tweeted a particularly juvenile message that said “While I greatly appreciate the efforts of President Xi & China to help with North Korea, it has not worked out. At least I know China tried!” Not only did Trump insult the Chinese President, who he had been cultivating, but he also raised concern in world capitals that he might soon launch a preemptive military strike on Pyongyang.

Some Trump insiders tried to portray Trump’s bizarre tweet as an effort to apply pressure in advance of administration talks held in Washington this week with senior Chinese officials, but they couldn’t convince even themselves. They had no idea what Trump meant, so they had a hard time calming concerned allies, especially as Mattis and Secretary of State Tillerson insisted that China still had a vital role to play. According to reports in the U.S. media, Mattis and Tillerson, along with McMaster and Vice President Pence have been quietly urging allies to ignore Trump’s tweets and to relate to actual administration policy instead. Though they are mostly hawkish, they cast themselves as the voice of moderation and reason compared to Trump’s impetuous outbursts. Needless to say, these assurances often achieve the opposite effect, presenting the U.S. as a country led by a clueless President presiding over an administration in chaos.

Israel is one of the few places on earth that has exempted itself from this anxiety. Over here, Trump is still flavor of the month. “He’s an extraordinary man who thinks outside the box,” Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked said admiringly this week, earning herself social media comebacks such as “he never thinks anywhere” and “he doesn’t even know there is a box in the first place.” But the disdain for Obama and his policies run so deep in Israel, that Trump, while flawed, is still the messiah; and the Israeli dogma that use of force trumps diplomacy under any and all circumstances is so strong, that American’s precarious escalations are praised; and the identification with Trump’s callous values is so rooted among Israel’s right-wing rulers that even his peace emissaries, which included son in law Jared Kushner for the first time this week, were warmly welcomed, probably on the safe assumption that their efforts won’t amount to much anyway.

The rest of the world is warily watching the tensions with Moscow, which could deteriorate despite, or even because of, the Kremlin’s help in getting Trump elected; the time running out in the nuclear confrontation with North Korea, which might push Trump to take the kind of rash action that his predecessors averted; the growing friction with Iran and the increasing number of flash points that could set off open conflict; Trump’s embrace for the new Saudi Crown Prince, admired by some as a courageous reformer but feared by others as a dangerous adventurer; and the unbelievably complex situation on the ground in Syria, which even diplomatic geniuses on the order of Kissinger and Metternich would find hard to unravel. Despite his bluster, it must be said, Trump hasn’t shown himself to be gung-ho, but without the help of hallucinatory mushrooms, it’s hard to see how he navigates America’s way safely through such dangerous waters while he tries to fend off serious and numerous legal challenges at the same time.

Never mind that after the two GOP successes in the special congressional elections this week, which were portrayed as referendums on Trump, there is a clear danger that Trump will only grow bolder, more satisfied with himself and less inclined to heed the counsel of more cautious advisers.  With so many potential pitfalls and conflagrations, miscalculation and ensuing flare-ups seem almost inevitable. The U.S. might find itself embroiled in a new military campaign, perhaps even more than one, led by a president whose judgment or word isn’t trusted by most of the world. The Trumpocalypse may not be now, but it’s getting hard to miss its looming shadow. 

Update: As we went to press, the US Senate GOP Healthcare Bill was introduced.   We are pleased to present the Vox.Com analysis on it as the Country awaits the CBO Score.  We also picked this up while "on the Grid" on the effect on one member of the Ordinary Faces that is heart breaking:





Friday, June 23, 2017

View of the Week (Friday Edition): On Trump vs. Reagan





As the Senate Healthcare Bill was rolled out and the on-going battles ensue in Washington (including cutbacks at EPA, Interior Department and other Federal agencies), we chose this from Larry Sabato's Crystal Ball on an interesting analysis of Trump vs. Reagan that is quite a read:




http://www.centerforpolitics.org/crystalball
WORKING-CLASS REPUBLICANISM
A new book reassesses Reagan
& prompts Trump comparisons
By Kyle Kondik
Managing Editor, Sabato's Crystal Ball

Editor’s Note: The Crystal Ball is taking a break for the July 4 holiday next week. So we will not publish on Thursday, June 29. We’ll be back on Thursday, July 6. Have a safe and pleasant holiday. -- The Editors
A new book tells the story of a president who made his name as an entertainer and a Democrat before moving to the Republican Party and then launching a bid for the presidency. This candidate won his party’s presidential nomination despite objections from some party stalwarts that he was unelectable in the fall. He then captured the presidency in part because he was able to perform better than Republicans typically do in some traditionally white, working-class areas in key states.
This description applies to the current president, Donald Trump, but the book itself is actually about Ronald Reagan. The Working Class Republicanan intriguing new book by Henry Olsen, argues that Reagan was less conservative than is commonly acknowledged, and a close examination of his campaign message and time in office provides a model for Republicans going forward. In fact, Olsen argues, Trump mimicked Reagan in some ways. But now Trump is in danger of squandering his Reaganesque coalition, Olsen says, because unlike Reagan, Trump may be governing too far to the right.

Olsen, a senior fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, argues that even as Reagan moved from left to right throughout his time in public life, he did not deviate all that much from his ideology as a young New Dealer in the 1930s and 1940s, when he vigorously supported Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a man Reagan idolized his whole life. Reagan’s criticisms of government had more to do with opposing what he saw as the leftward drift of Democrats on both opposition to communism and support for bigger government, as exemplified by Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Despite making one of his most famous political speeches on the eve of the 1964 election backing Barry Goldwater, Reagan did not go as far as Goldwater in his own ideology. Instead, Reagan accepted the New Deal and allowed a role for government programs such as Social Security and, eventually, Medicare (part of Johnson’s Great Society, which Reagan rebuked) even while criticizing a government that he saw as too big and too unresponsive to the people. In Olsen’s telling, Reagan occupied a position on the center-right, with contemporaries such as Goldwater and supply-side economy acolytes like David Stockman (Reagan’s one-time budget director) to his right and the Democratic Party to his left. “In short, Reagan was against returning to the America before the New Deal. He was for interpreting Roosevelt’s legacy in a way that maximized freedom and minimized bureaucratic control and the direction of Americans’ lives,” Olsen writes.
Olsen applies to American politics what he calls the “truckers and cashiers” test. Truck driving is the biggest employer of white, working-class men, and being a cashier or waitress is the most common blue-collar job for white, working-class women. For Reagan, “virtually every speech had this person in mind, and virtually every speech had something that person could uniquely relate to.”
Reagan, a man whose public warmth shrouded a lifelong inability (or uninterest) in developing deep relationships with others -- save perhaps his wife, Nancy -- remains a difficult person for historians to fully nail down, and others have come to different conclusions about him. For instance, Slate Group editor-in-chief Jacob Weisberg concludes in his recent book on Reagan as part of the American Presidents series that “Reagan had two enormous and related blind spots. One was about the possibility of government serving as a positive force in people’s lives. The other was about private enterprise serving as a negative one.”
But our point here is not to litigate Reagan’s legacy; rather, it’s about how both Reagan and Trump peeled away some traditionally Democratic voters in winning victory.
To understand that, it’s important to drill down on an important swing group in American politics -- a group that Reagan, and then Trump, cultivated.
A common and defensible way to measure political ideology is to think of it as a single scale on a straight line, with “liberal” on the left and “conservative” on the right. But reality is a little more complicated than this. Even though the two parties are increasingly ideologically cohesive, with Democrats generally representing the liberal, left-wing position on most issues and Republicans generally holding conservative, right-wing positions, that does not necessarily mean that voters themselves always fall neatly into these consistent ideological boxes.
Perhaps a more complete way to measure the actual ideology of voters, to the extent that voters do hold ideologies as opposed to just taking on the identity/beliefs of their preferred party, is to try to place them within a more complex but still easy-to-understand framework. This is what Lee Drutman does in a recent report for the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group (Olsen is also involved in this project). Drutman, a senior fellow at New America, uses data from the Views of the Electorate Research (VOTER) Survey to plot its respondents based on their responses to questions measuring their economic and social attitudes. Drutman sums up these dimensions by noting that the poll is basically measuring respondents’ answers to two overarching questions: “how much should government redistribute wealth, and what does it mean to be an American?”
The results appear in Figure 1, which is reprinted from Drutman’s recent piece:

Figure 1: The 2016 electorate’s views on economic and social/identity issues

SourceDemocracy Fund Voter Study Group
The lower left corner represents liberals -- people who are left of center on both economic and social issues -- while the upper right corner represents conservatives -- people who are right of center on both economic and social issues. But then there are two other groups. The sparsely-populated lower right-hand corner is for libertarians, who are economically conservative, socially liberal. Notice how few dots land in that quadrant, which puts a cap on the Libertarian Party’s potential base of support. The much more densely-packed upper left corner is for voters who are economically liberal and socially conservative.
These “populist” voters, Drutman finds, were already likelier to be Republicans than Democrats: Mitt Romney won these voters in 2012. But they shifted even further toward Republicans in 2016, backing Trump over Hillary Clinton by a three-to-one margin. Clinton only held onto six of 10 populists who voted for Barack Obama in 2012.
In a different era, these kinds of voters were known by the term “Reagan Democrats.” Reagan’s victories in 1980 were fueled by victories in white, working-class areas like Macomb County, Michigan, the place Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg associated with the Reagan Democrats in the 1980s. Trump did well in many white, working-class areas across the Midwest, allowing him to narrowly carry a few key states that hadn’t gone Republican since they supported Reagan’s heir, George H.W. Bush, in 1988 or, in the case of Wisconsin, hadn’t voted Republican since Reagan’s 1984 reelection.
Note that while there’s a similar distribution of voters both above and below the horizontal line representing views on social/identity issues, the center of gravity on the economic questions is to the left. This is yet another confirmation of an oft-made observation about the American electorate: While voters are “symbolically conservative” (and thus there are more self-identified conservatives in the electorate than self-identified liberals) they are “operationally liberal,” meaning that the public’s actual positions on individual issues, particularly as they pertain to the size of government and government intervention in the economy, tend to skew to the left.
The ideological challenge for both parties, then, is for a culturally liberal Democratic Party to secure enough of these voters to win nationally by appealing to their economic sentiments, while the economically conservative Republican Party needs to sway them by appealing to their cultural conservatism. It can be easier to do this with a GOP candidate who is perceived as being not as far to the right on preserving popular government services. Reagan sloughed off so many attacks on him by Democrats that he was a heartless government cutter that some nicknamed him “the Teflon president.” Trump had a little Teflon on him, too, given his ability to win the presidency despite monumental personal baggage, but he also did himself a favor, in Olsen’s reckoning, by defending Social Security and Medicare on the campaign trail and campaigning on an anti-trade message that in some ways made him sound like a Democrat. Not being maximally conservative on economic issues gave both Reagan and Trump the opening to make their pitch to voters, and both emphasized a nationalistic cultural conservatism that played to populist voters. Reagan expressed this through a dual opposition to the post-FDR Democratic Party and the communist Soviet Union, Trump through attacks on elites and immigrants.
Once in office, Reagan’s domestic-issue record was ideologically mixed. He presided over big reductions in the top tax bracket, but also signed several tax increases and expanded the Earned Income Tax Credit, which helps lower-income voters. He did not conduct a full-on assault on social safety net programs. Today, Reagan is remembered as one of the great presidents of the last century: A recent University of Virginia Center for Politics poll conducted by Reuters/Ipsos found that respondents generally rated Reagan (and John F. Kennedy) as the top presidents of the post-World War II era.
Trump, too, is facing cross-pressure from his specific voter base, which is reliant on economically liberal, socially conservative “populists,” and Republican Party stalwarts, who are more uniformly economically conservative (in fact, it seems clear that the GOP is more ideologically to the right now than it was during the Reagan years -- for more on that, see the book Asymmetric Politics by Matt Grossmann and David Hopkins). While Trump can get by on being more conservative than his campaign persona on many issues, health care looms large as a key issue for him and Republicans in general. The American Health Care Act, the bill passed by the House that is now being considered by the Senate, is very unpopular: Its popularity is likely underwater in every state, and deeply so in most, according to a New York Times Upshot analysis.
Writing in American Greatnessa new journal that defends Trumpish conservatism, Olsen argues that the GOP is falling into an old, familiar trap in how it is approaching health care, echoing sentiments he expressed in The Working Class Republican. Olsen notes how more Americans have identified as Democrats than Republicans ever since the New Deal. “It’s not hard to figure out why Democrats have out-polled Republicans for that length of time,” Olsen wrote. “For years the polls have also shown that the GOP is viewed as the ‘party of the rich’ and the Democrats as the party that will give the working person a hand up.” He adds: “Democrats often like to charge that Republicans cut programs that benefit the average person to finance tax cuts for the rich: the AHCA lets them do that with impunity.” The bill, in other words, fails Olsen’s “truckers and cashiers” test.
Olsen ended with a plea to Trump: “make sure that the Obamacare replacement bill that finally passes values a person’s life more than it values a billionaire’s dollar.”
Trump has largely outsourced the creation of the AHCA to the House and Senate, leaving House Speaker Paul Ryan (R, WI-1) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) to craft the bill. Say what you will about the House and Senate leaders, but they are more ideologically conservative on economic matters than candidate Trump was -- and probably Reagan, too.
In his conclusion to the book, Olsen speculates about how Reagan might have dealt with the Affordable Care Act. He argues that Reagan would have wanted to repeal it because of its rules and regulations, but he also would have wanted to preserve the ACA’s expansion of health insurance coverage. “I can’t imagine Reagan would be more concerned about money than about life,” Olsen writes.
Trump seemed to be channeling Olsen’s Reagan last week when he reportedly told Senate Republicans that the House version of the AHCA was “mean,” even though Trump publicly celebrated when the bill passed the House. Trump said he wants the bill to be “generous, kind (and) with heart.” Whether the bill that eventually emerges and/or passes is that, or whether Republicans can persuade the public that it is, remains to be seen. If Trump and the GOP cannot, though, they may find that Reagan’s “Teflon” does not cover them.