The last three years may eventually come to be seen as the final death rattle of the global warming scare.

A New York Times report on Monday alluding to “overwhelming circumstantial evidence” leading the CIA to believe that Russian President Vladimir Putin “deployed computer hackers with the goal of tipping the election to Donald J. Trump” is, sadly, evidence-free. This is no surprise, because harder evidence of a technical nature points to an inside leak, not hacking – by Russians or anyone else.

Guccifer 2.0

The question isn’t whether Russia spied on the U.S. presidential election, it’s whether it released the election emails.

there is little doubt about Russian cyber fingerprints in various U.S. campaign activities.

A week later, Vice President Joe Biden said on NBC’s Meet the Press that "we're sending a message" to Putin and "it will be at the time of our choosing, and under the circumstances that will have the greatest impact." When asked if the American public would know a message was sent, Biden replied, "Hope not." 

AutoLISP was derived from an early version of XLISP, which was created by David Betz

SENIOR EDITOR David Betz

As far as I know, the only reliable way to contact David Betz is on Bix, the BYTE Information eXchange. He hosts his own XLISP conference there, with a separate XScheme topic in it.

At this point, there's no way to rule out that the documents are fakes. There's also no way to rule out that they're authentic files that were leaked by either by a DNC insider or by one of the hacking groups named by CrowdStrike in an attempt to sow doubt or confusion after their cover was blown

Murray said he retrieved the package from a source during a clandestine meeting in a wooded area near American University, in northwest D.C

Exhibit A in the case is this document created and later edited in the ubiquitous Microsoft Word format. Metadata left inside the file shows it was last edited by someone using the computer name "Феликс Эдмундович." That means the computer was configured to use the Russian language and that it was connected to a Russian-language keyboard.

Mike Caulfield, a social media adviser to faculty at Washington State University, has started a project, The Digital Polarization Initiative, with the American Association of State Colleges and Universities to help college students identify fake news and understand how their Facebook news is skewing their view.

“I know who leaked them,” Murray said. “I’ve met the person who leaked them, and they are certainly not Russian and it’s an insider

“I know who leaked them,” Murray told The Guardian. “I’ve met the person who leaked them, and they are certainly not Russian and it’s an insider.

Julian Assange, who has claimed since the beginning that they are leaks, not hacks

Since cyberwar can lead to conventional

a whistleblower tradition

disgruntled insider

as I research, I am constantly highlighting evidence for and against the claim in articles I find and tagging it

Binney said Julian Assange has already said publicly it was not the Russians, but “a leaker inside.”

“[The CIA] haven’t come out with the evidence to show the tracing of the data from the DNC server to, for example the Russians, or anybody else, or going from them to WikiLeaks, which is a high priority target for NSA, in terms of network monitoring,”

He’s one of the group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity who signed a letter arguing that if the data was a hack, the NSA would have a trace of the hack.

overwhel

Several security firms who have analyzed the software used in the DNC hack say it bears the hallmark of two competing groups within the Russian government. Guccifer 2.0 made his first public appearance to refute that claim and to say that he's a Romanian who carried out the attack on his own. While analysis of documents revealed in that initial dump showed they had Russian fingerprints on them, they were never tied to any Russian government group. An attempt to falsely implicate Russia by a non-Russian hacker can't be ruled out, either.

One Excel spreadsheet contains a dizzying amount of work and cell phone numbers, home addresses, official and personal e-mail addresses, names of staffers, and other personal information for the entire roster of Democratic representatives. Several other documents contain passwords for various DCCC accounts. Other documents purport to be memos detailing fund raisers and campaign overviews.

I’m saying people have gotten things wrong throughout the 5,500-year history of our planet.

Donald Trump’s tweet cost Lockheed Martin more than $28 million a character

In the 1998 reissuance, EPA Region 6 authorized new discharges of seawater and freshwater to which treatment chemicals, such as biocides and corrosion inhibitors, have been added. The maximum discharge rate limit for produced water was removed and the critical dilutions required to be met for the produced water toxicity limit were updated based on the new discharge rates and more current models. To account for advances in drilling fluid technology, the permit was modified on December 18, 2001 (66 FR 65209), to authorize discharges associated with the use of synthetic based drilling fluids.

Section 301(a) of the Clean Water Act (CWA or the Act), 33 USC 1311(a), renders it unlawful to discharge pollutants to waters of the United States in the absence of authorizing permits.

the group estimates companies in 2014 were allowed to release more than 76 billion gallons of waste fluid into the ocean based on an analysis of federal wastewater discharge permits.

Oil companies were also allowed to dump about 76 billion gallons of waste fluid into Gulf waters in 2014.

“The Obama administration is essentially letting oil companies frack at will in Gulf ecosystems and dump billions of gallons of oil waste into coastal waters,” said Kristen Monsell, a Center attorney. “Every offshore frack increases the risk to wildlife and coastal communities, yet federal officials have been just rubber-stamping this toxic practice in the Gulf of Mexico for years.”

Application for Permit to Modify (APM)

Defendant has failed to meet continuing nondiscretionary duties under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) to review and revise regulations and guidelines to keep up with this growing source of wastes and the threats these wastes pose to human health and the environment

 "The Obama administration is essentially letting oil companies frack at will in Gulf ecosystems and dump billions of gallons of oil waste into coastal waters," said Kristen Monsell, an attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity, in an online statement.

Federal regulators quietly gave the green light to more than 1,200 oil company fracking operations s in the Gulf of Mexico between 2010 and 2014, according to documents environmentalists obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

In February 2014 we petitioned the Environmental Protection Agency to ban the discharge of fracking fluids into the ocean and to strengthen ocean discharge criteria — at a time when oil companies were allowed to dump up to 9 billion gallons of wastewater, including fracking chemicals, into the ocean off California every year. In 2015, the Center sued the Obama administration for failing to disclose the extent of offshore fracking in the Gulf of Mexico.   In January 2016 the Center settled a lawsuit with the Obama administration requiring a halt to offshore fracking in federal waters off California pending the Department of the Interior’s completion of a final environmental review. Unfortunately just three weeks after our settlement, Interior released a draft review that fails to adequately analyze offshore fracking’s impacts on water and air pollution, as well as on the risk of earthquakes, accidents and toxic spills. In fact, the document proposes to let oil companies resume fracking off California’s coast — and even to go back to dumping fracking chemicals, mixed with wastewater, into the ocean.

 The Environmental Protection Agency recently announced a new permit condition that requires oil companies to maintain an inventory of the chemicals used in offshore fracking activities and in doing so has placed new, higher limits on the amount of offshore fracking wastewater that can be dumped under the Clean Water Act, the Center for Biological Diversity warned in a Sept. 17 letter.

Lee Fuller, executive vice president of the Independent Petroleum Association of America, said liquids such as fracking fluid shouldn’t even be part of this discussion. He said that’s regulated by the Safe Drinking Water Act.

The lawsuit – filed Wednesday in federal court in Washington, D.C.

The report, titled "Dirty Water," also alleges that discharge and drilling permits were being rubber stamped in California's Santa Barbara Channel using generic, outdated environmental reviews and without stringent enough testing of overboard water.

The Environmental Impact Statement for offshore drilling in the central Gulf of Mexico calls fracking "small scale by comparison" with the onshore version.

Under the EPA's current and draft permits

Regulators and the fossil fuel industry say offshore fracking operations have a good safety record

In a letter sent to EPA officials last week, attorneys for the Center for Biological Diversity warned

"The EPA is endangering an entire ecosystem by allowing the oil industry to dump unlimited amounts of fracking chemicals and drilling waste fluid into the Gulf of Mexico," said Center attorney Kristen Monsell.

Some scientists, including Dr Gavin Schmidt, head of Nasa’s climate division, have claimed that the recent highs were mainly the result of long-term global warming.Others have argued that the records were caused by El Nino, a complex natural phenomenon that takes place every few years, and has nothing to do with greenhouse gas emissions by humans.The new fall in temperatures suggests they were right.

The GSA and the Trump Organization in 2013 agreed to a $180 million lease over 60 years. As president, Trump would oversee the GSA and appoint its administrator ― a conflict of interest with his business.

The contract language is clear: “No ... elected official of the Government of the United States ... shall be admitted to any share or part of this Lease, or to any benefit that may arise therefrom...”   

In almost all federal government contracts, the government reserves the right to terminate the contract “for the convenience of the government” (with appropriate compensation due to the contractor), whenever “it is in the Government’s interest.” Unfortunately, the Trump hotel lease explicitly prohibits GSA from exercising that longstanding, well-established, Congressionally-mandated right.

"The contract between GSA and the Trump Organization specifically says that no elected official of the United States government shall be party to, share in, or benefit from the contract," he says, citing clause 37.19 of the contract.

Drabkin, the former senior procurement officer at the GSA, thinks for this reason alone, the president-elect should give up the hotel.But as far as the tool to force him to do that, Drabkin doesn't think clause 37.19 is it.

David Drabkin, once the GSA's senior procurement officer, said he thinks the clause doesn't apply to Trump because it only prohibits adding elected officials to the lease after it was signed, not banning original parties to it who subsequently get elected to office. He adds, though, that a president leasing the building is "absolutely untenable" because of other conflicts of interest issues.

African American Early Voting is down 8.5% from this time in 2012. 

As a share of Early Voters, African Americans are down 6.0%, (2012: 28.9%, 2016: 22.9%) and Caucasians are up 4.2%, (2012: 65.8%, 2016: 70.0%).

By2009, “the racial gap in voter registration and turnout[was] lower in the States originally covered by §5 than it [was] nationwide.”

(b) The provisions of subsection (a) shall apply in any State or in any political subdivision of a state which (1) the Attorney General determines maintained on November 1, 1964, any test or device, and with respect to which (2) the Director of the Census determines that less than 50 percentum of the persons of voting age residing therein were registered on November 1, 1964, or that less than 50 percentum of such persons voted in the presidential election of November 1964.

Does the renewal of Section 5 of the Voter Rights Act under the constraints of Section 4(b) exceed Congress' authority under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, and therefore violate the Tenth Amendment and Article Four of the Constitution?

Section 5 prohibits eligible districts from enacting changes to their election laws and procedures without gaining official authorization. Section 4(b) defines the eligible districts as ones that had a voting test in place as of November 1, 1964 and less than 50% turnout for the 1964 presidential election.

Gov. Pat McCrory (R) filed an emergency petition to restore the law, but a deadlocked Supreme Court on Wednesday refused his stay request, meaning the law will not be in effect for the Nov. 8 election. Because the lower court did not offer specific guidelines for reinstating early voting, however, local election boards run by Republicans are still trying to curb access to the polls.

Within months of McCrory's victory, emails show, the state election board began receiving requests for demographic data from a group of GOP lawmakers, including Lewis, a top aide to Tillis named Ray Starling, and state Reps. Tim Moore and Harry Warren.They asked for statistics on voter behavior broken down by race: Who voted early, and who voted on Election Day? Who voted out of precinct?They asked about what kinds of people were registered to vote but did not have a driver's license. They asked about student ID cards - which some states allow as a form of voter ID - and how many African-Americans had them.

The new bill shortened early voting by half, cutting one of the Sundays when black churches held their "Souls to Polls" drives. It eliminated same-day registration and out-of-precinct voting.It also proposed changes that, to Stein and other opponents, made no sense unless you were purposely trying to discourage voting. For example, it canceled an existing rule that let 16- and 17-year-old high schoolers to pre-register to vote in civics classes or when they got driver's licenses. And it took away counties' ability to extend poll hours on Election Day during extraordinary circumstances such as long lines.

On July 25, 2013, the bill passed the House, 73 to 41. Everyone who voted for the law was a white Republican, and every black member of the legislature voted against it. As the final vote was cast, Democratic representatives all stood up, held hands and bowed their heads in prayer.

started out in early 2013 as a simple voter ID bill, but then grew quickly later that summer into a 50-page comprehensive package of provisions scaling back previous measures designed to expand voting opportunities.

The lawsuits

on Oct. 8, sending North Carolina voters to the polls in November 2014 with fewer early voting days, without the benefit of same-day registration and unable to cast a ballot if they showed up at the wrong precinct.

many additional provisions, including the following that are being challenged in this litigation: (1) the reduction of the period for so-called “early voting”9from 17to ten days; (2) the elimination of same-day registration (“SDR”), which permitted voters to register and then vote at the same time during the early-voting period; (3) the prohibition on the counting of provisional ballots cast outside of a voter’s correct voting precinct on Election Day (“out-of-precinct” ballots); (4) the expansion of allowable poll observers and voter challenges; (5) the elimination of the discretion of county boards of election (“CBOEs”) to keep the polls open an additional hour on Election Day in “extraordinary circumstances”; and (6) the elimination of “pre-registration” of 16-and 17-year-olds who will not be 18by the next general election.1

preclearance

NAACP allegations that at least three counties purged voter rolls through a process disproportionately targeting blacks.

The explanation seems blindingly obvious. In 2008 and 2012, black voters were electing (and reelecting) the first black president

I provided early user feedback

var href = location.href.replace(/\?.+$/,'');