A superthread of all my thoughts on ballot removal in the past couple of months. Starting with this take, that I _think_ was overly optimistic. But I DO still think it's possible.

And I think the reasons WHY they SHOULD do this still hold.

https://twitter.com/thomasafine/status/1744846211301974424

I ended up (and am still at) a more pessimistic view, but apparently not as pessimistic as most people. I _still_ don't think it'll be 9-0 to overturn ballot removal.

https://twitter.com/thomasafine/status/1755924094896202192

By 2013, Maria Butina had already wormed her way into NRA culture. By 2014 she was in Indianopolis (and South Dakota?) for an NRA conference where she'd met with several NRA leaders, as well as members of Congress. In 2015 she was asked Trump a question at a press conference. In 2018 she was (officially) identified as a Russian agent. By which time she'd "interfaced" with numerous members of Congress. We knew FOR SURE at that time that Russia was targeting members of Congress. Republican members of Congress.

Let's do a brief timeline on the Biden/Shokin allegations.

Keep in mind Shokin was removed in February 2016.

The earliest whiff I've found even vaguely related is in Peter Schweizer's Secret Empires book, published in March of 2018. Schweizer in a broad hand-wavey way says that the Burisma investigation coming to an end seems weird. He never mentions Shokin, or a bribe, and focuses on 2017.

Who released the photo — instead of the full video — to the press? Assuming Bowman is being truthful, I suspect the video will back his story.

The body language of figuring out a confusing sign on an unfamiliar door is very different than maliciously pulling an alarm. But there's something funny going on about the signage, and I'm honestly not sure who is faking us out here.

https://twitter.com/MattBruenig/status/1708305191575900440

I have never seen the right-wing and/or Russian propaganda networks go as hard in on rewriting history as I am seeing this past week with Shokin.

Jon Solomon and the Murdoch rags are leading the charge, providing every possible out-of-context fact that they can spin their way. One angle is covered in this this thread, which exposes that what @nypost claimed was praise for Shokin was really praise for NABU, and anti-corrupt group that Shokin tried to block, which only existed because of corruption from people like Shokin.

https://twitter.com/thomasafine/status/1702031861864874065

My God Grassley is embracing the Science Fiction Double Feature Bribery Scheme. Why do I call it a Science Fiction Double Feature Bribery Scheme?

Because to make it work, Biden would have to have BOTH a time machine AND a mind control ray.

And even with both of these in hand, you can't construct a sensible plot that would fit into only a single movie.

Fucking Republicans.

Let me remind you that Trump was impeached for:
1. Attempting to extort a foreign leader into interfering in a U.S. election (which by the way would have give Putin leverage over Zelensky in Ukraine).
2. Orchestrating a coup to overturn an election. Republicans don't even have a clue exactly what they're going to impeach Biden for, but they'll move forward anyway.

Seriously.

Not. A. Fucking. Clue.

To fully appreciate the latest embarrassing debacle at Spoutible, you have to give the context of going all the way back to January, which is when, according to Bouzy, they began using @detectify to scan their website. You have to go back that far, because in February, when Spoutible was released to the public, it was revealed that the software was based on some shady 89 dollar Russian software thing.

AND the software was exposing users' personal data to the public.

What the fuck?

https://twitter.com/MeidasTouch/status/1669393498389512192

I found a "news report" that claims that Mykola Lisin's wife just died. It seems like it is entirely based on (their interpretation) of his newsmax statement. They don't even have her name. "Mykola Lisin wife".

The report is at snbc13 dot com but I'm not linking to shit.

It's a massive failure of U.S. media that we are even talking about this.

The core premise (that Shokin removal was a corrupt Biden move) is provably false and always has been.

https://twitter.com/NoLieWithBTC/status/1669336202959257603

By the time Biden asked Ukraine to remove him, so had over a hundred members of Ukraine's parliament, 25,000 citizens (in a petition), (at least) two US ambassadors, and the EU ambassador. Before Biden threatened to withhold aid, EU had threatened to withhold $1.2B.

Thunder. I'm surrounded.

Understanding the literal meaning of the Second Amendment, as the framers intended it: This diagram is based on not only research on how these terms were used in that day, but also in the debates of that era about the issues where these terms came up.

So why does "justthenews" update an old bullshit Durham story from last April (btw website ONLY shows updated dates on stories)? And why does Solomon tweet about it? And the quote tweets here are the tip of the iceberg. Claims that Nashville shooting was done by Dems is all over the craziest parts of right-wing twitter right now.

What was missing? They desperately needed something that Dems would want to distract FROM.

Releasing internal corporate docs is not a middle-management decision. Especially if they contain private user information, where the handling of that information is covered by a consent decree from the Federal Trade Commission.

Security through obscurity works great, and people should stop saying it doesn't. And if they do actually understand what the expression is supposed to mean, then they should say what it is supposed to mean, instead of repeating this popular but dumb expression. People think it means that hiding your security methods is not helpful, because security methods can be discovered.

This understanding is wrong and dumb. There's a grain of truth there, but people massively overuse this expression.

I've been wanting to upgrade my home wifi to mesh for awhile and am not realizing how much this space has been taken over by Amazon and Google, and WOW THAT IS SO CREEPY. They're coming in and selling these at aggressive loss-leader prices that are likely to put traditional home network vendors out of the market. They're bundling extra features to make it more attractive.

Very strongly feeling the urge to do this right now.

https://twitter.com/thomasafine/status/1572802837176025089

So the Federalist found and published a whitepaper last week from the Durham case. A paper about rare Russian cell phones in various Trump-connected locations.

And they're saying a lot of nonsense about it, because that's what they do.

I still have many questions about the validity of the calendar pdf file Kavanaugh submitted as evidence to defend against a rape charge and to become a Justice. As evidence, it's a disaster. It's heavily post-processed to the point where it should be considered totally worthless, even IF this post-processing was all innocent.

Etienne Trouvelot was a both a fantastic draftsman for science, and a fantastic artist. People often assume his works like this one are scientific, but this is a purely artistic, intentionally abstract portrayal.

https://twitter.com/georgelazenby/status/1571701720350072837

Part of the point is, give him credit as an artist. And part of the point is, red spot not to scale.

Ironically (relative to this discussion), there is significant evidence that the red spot disappeared from view, entirely or almost entirely, in the mid-1880s.

My latest attempt at graphically representing the complexity of Trump's coup. There were many plans, with many overlapping elements. This Venn diagram tries to answer how the various plan elements overlapped and related to each other. Arguably, somewhere near the center of this would be "SCOTUS For the Win", which would overlap with nearly everything (though it didn't work out that way).

Has anybody done a good job of tracing how the coup plans evolved over time? I haven't found any yet. The earliest talk of electors seems to center on variations of the independent state legislature theory — a whacko idea that state legislatures are free to do whatever the eff they want in selecting electors, including ignoring their own state laws.