[Hm, what’s missing from the reporting on this story?]
The Justice Department on Wednesday charged two Russian media executives in an alleged scheme that authorities say illegally funneled millions of dollars to a Tennessee-based company to create and publish propaganda videos that racked up millions of views on U.S. social media.
The 32-page federal indictment accuses Kostiantyn Kalashnikov and Elena Afanasyeva, employees of RT, a Russian-state news site formerly known as Russia Today, of conducting a money-laundering operation that spent nearly $10 million on efforts to covertly influence public opinion and sow social divisions, including placing blame on Ukraine regarding the war with Russia.
Authorities said the U.S. company, which was not identified by name in the indictment, allegedly created and posted hundreds of English-language videos on social media sites, including TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and X, that echoed Russian state propaganda and garnered 16 million views on YouTube alone.
[Finally, in paragraph 7, we get what they were spewing propaganda FOR — it was all about election interference]
...“We’re seeing more and more. It’s coming faster and faster … and therefore it’s a bigger threat than it ever was before,” Attorney General Merrick Garland told reporters at the Justice Department’s headquarters in Washington, where he was joined by FBI Director Christopher A. Wray and other members of the agency’s Election Threats Task Force. “We will be relentlessly aggressive in countering attempts to interfere in our elections and undermine our democracy.”
RT reacted to the U.S. government actions with an email that mocked the indictment and included, “Hahahaha!”
Disinformation experts said the U.S. government was seeking, ahead of the Nov. 5 presidential election between Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, and former president Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, to crack down on Kremlin efforts to interfere before it could have the deep impact that Russian operatives did in 2016.
This is an open thread where everyone is welcome, especially night owls and early birds, to share and discuss the happenings of the day. Please feel free to share your articles and stories in the comments
As always, Marcy Wheeler has the deep dive on this one:
...There’s some real clown show stuff in this. But it didn’t matter for Pool and whichever one is Commentator-1, because they signed contracts worth almost $5 million a year or $100,000 per non-exclusive video.
The money laundering part of the indictment describes that RT has laundered $10 million to pay for Tenet’s work.
...Anyway, read the whole thing: It’s a tale of right wing grift, sloppy operational security that was nonetheless adequate to satisfy far right grifters, and a far bigger spend on the part of Russia to play in this year’s election.
And read it, too, for how even the producers who worked for Tenet, who also appear to have known the gig, thought that Tucker Carlson’s video, pretending to be wowed by a Russian supermarket was too much. “It just feels like overt shilling.”
Nevertheless they shilled away.
Also:
Kamala Harris is succeeding in accomplishing something none of Donald Trump’s adversaries have since 2016: Turning off his political oxygen supply by refusing to engage with his manufactured spectacles of insults and taunts, or with the often wholly substance-free issues that preoccupy the press.
As last Thursday’s CNN interview of Harris and her running mate Tim Walz made clear, she’s resolutely unwilling to let the press — or Trump himself — set the agenda for her presidential campaign. In the process, she’s managed to blunt the tools Trump has repeatedly used to undermine his opponents: drawing them into responding to his schoolyard slights, and turning the media’s pursuit of purportedly “legitimate” questions about his opponents — many of them formulated by GOP partisans — into political weapons.
Harris’s refusal to engage with Trump on his terms represents a break from how Democrats traditionally have dealt with him. In related news, her favorables continue to rise while an obviously flustered Trump flails at ghosts and searches in vain for a smear campaign that will allow him to regain the initiative.
...Trump has long relied on tempting his adversaries to respond to his insults and bigoted taunts. That is how he has, for years, maintained control of the news cycle and made himself the perpetual center of attention. Harris’s curt dismissal of Trump’s most recent round of racism as a tired replay of a stale show marginalized him more effectively than most any of his adversaries, Republican or Democratic, have ever accomplished.
When a showman like Trump is no longer the center of attention, he turns into that most pathetic of Hollywood creatures: a has-been. With her “that’s it” declaration, Harris left Trump standing alone in the pit, covered in mud, with nobody to wrestle.
Republicans are racing to plug a massive money hole — before it’s too late.
The leader of House Republicans’ biggest super PAC told donors last month he needed $35 million more to compete with Democrats in the fall. Senate GOP campaign chair Steve Daines used his primetime speaking slot at the Republican convention to lament that massive spending from Democrats was keeping him awake at night. And his House GOP counterpart warned that their party’s challengers trailed Democratic incumbents by a collective $37 million at the end of June.
...Panic is starting to set in.
“The only thing preventing us from having a great night in November is the massive financial disparity our party currently faces,” said Jason Thielman, the executive director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “We are on a trajectory to win the majority, but unless something changes drastically in the next six weeks, we will lose winnable seats.”
Leaking clandestine plans to add hardscape amenities to Florida state parks cost James Gaddis his $49,000-a-year job at the Florida Department of Environmental Protection.
He knew the risk, but didn't foresee the windfall of gratitude that includes more than $180,000 in donations.
...Gaddis had worked at the Florida Department of Environmental Protection for more than two years when he was asked in late July to begin mapping out golf courses, hotels and pickleball courts at nine state parks from Miami-Dade’s Oleta River to Grayton Beach in the Panhandle’s Walton County.
...Gaddis called the project secretive and atrocious. He said it was unethical as there was little to no involvement from the public leading up to hour-long meetings scheduled to be held simultaneously throughout the state on each proposal.
After he made the documents public, the opposition was so deafening that Gov. Ron DeSantis pulled the plug on all of the plans. Groups pushing the golf courses at Jonathan Dickinson — Tuskegee Dunes Foundation and Folds of Honor — also withdrew their proposal.
A conversation with Nathaniel Stinnett of the Environmental Voter Project.
There are lots of green nonprofits out there trying to make voters care more about climate change, through education and persuasion. As any of them will tell you, it’s incredibly difficult work. People are quite resistant to changing their minds!
The Environmental Voter Project takes a different approach. Rather than trying to talk anyone into caring about climate, it tries to identify people who already care about climate, but who don’t consistently vote, and get them to the polls. In other words, it tries to change behavior rather than minds, which is much easier.
... young voters' and Independents' growing concerns about the environment have disproportionately benefited the Democratic Party and may have even cost Republicans the 2020 presidential election, according to one study.
"If Republicans don't talk about this in a way that does not make them look crazy to the average young person or the average Independent, they're going to lose a voting bloc that they possibly will never recover," said Chris Barnard, president of the American Conservation Coalition, a conservative environmental nonprofit, to Fox News Digital.
Strong feelings about the environment were one of the biggest predictors of voting behavior in 2020, a University of Colorado study found.
Nearly three quarters of Independents who considered climate change "very important" voted for Joe Biden over Donald Trump, according to the report. So did more than a quarter of Republicans who felt the same way about the environment.
"Climate change opinion represents an electoral advantage for the Democrats," researchers wrote. "We estimate that this advantage was probably large enough in 2020 to change the outcome of the presidential election in the Democrats' favor."
...Although the media routinely dismisses all COVID infections as an inconsequential nuisance, that’s not what the science says. The virus remains deadlier than the flu and repeated infections can radically change your health.
An important new Nature study, for example, has now proven that the spike protein of the virus can bind with a blood protein, fibrin, setting off a chain of blood clots resulting in chronic inflammation and brain damage. Fibrin can actually form a mesh impeding blood flow in arteries to multiple organs in the body.
Repeated studies show in the bluntest terms that the initial acute infection is only the tip of the iceberg. Even a mild bout of COVID can leave a legacy of blood clots, heart failure, diabetes, decreased brain function (see sidebar), long COVID (now affecting 400 million people worldwide) and immune damage that increasingly makes people more vulnerable to a plethora of infectious diseases and possibly cancers.
These problems can erupt three years after an infection and are especially prevalent in patients who’ve been hospitalized by COVID.
Which is why physical therapist and COVID specialist Dr. David Putrino emphasizes, “There is no such thing as a SARS-CoV-2 infection that does NOT have prolonged consequences.”
...The subject of how to respond to a slow burn pandemic remains taboo because most public health officials have already declared the emergency over. They’ve also stopped collecting critical data… As a consequence, authorities can’t now turn around and admit to the breadth of their mistake, let alone acknowledge the growing disorder in public health. Nor do they dare collect critical data documenting the scale of their errors including the relentless march of long COVID.
The commander of a Navy destroyer that’s helping protect the San Diego-based aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt in the Middle East has been relieved of duty about four months after he was seen in a photo firing a rifle with a scope mounted backward.
The image brought the Navy considerable ridicule on social media. The San Diego Union-Tribune reported that Cameron Yaste, commanding officer of the destroyer USS John McCain, was removed on Friday.
The Navy said Yaste was relieved of duty “due to a loss of confidence in his ability to command the guided-missile destroyer” that's currently deployed in the Gulf of Oman. The statement didn't elaborate about why Yaste was replaced.
...Quartz itself is also quite odd. It’s a simple mineral, made with just silicon and oxygen. But it’s also the only common mineral whose crystals lack a center of symmetry, meaning it’s structurally wonky. That means, under certain conditions, quartz’s internal electrical configuration is also imbalanced, which allows it to do something weird: create electricity.
Quartz doesn’t spark up by itself. But if you apply a force to a quartz crystal—stamp on it, say—then it generates an electric field. This phenomenon is known as piezoelectricity (which derives from piezo, the Greek word for “push”).
...To find out if earthquakes were the mysterious force at play, Voisey and his team placed slabs of pure natural quartz in sealed chambers containing gold-bearing liquid solutions. Some slabs were jostled about by a machine that replicated seismic waves from an earthquake. Others were left unshaken as control experiments. The hope was that gold would start appearing in a solid form atop the quivering slabs.
After the fake quakes subsided, Voisey took the quartz and looked at it under a powerful microscope. There they were: myriad gold particles, glittering across the surface.
Looking for something to do to help? We had an interview with Nathaniel Stinnett of the The Environmental Voter Project up above… they’ve got folks JUST LIKE YOU busy RIGHT NOW contacting low-propensity environmental voters to make sure they get out and vote for Harris/Walz!
Here’s a link to a list of actions you can take from anywhere
And they’re having a fundraiser tomorrow night, September 5!
The BLUE WAVE IS COMING!
Here’s waving at YOU, kids! What are you working on this week? (I have to get up at 6:30 to get my kid ready for his first day of first grade, so I may not respond tonight… but do let us know in the comments!)
The crew of the Overnight News Digest consists of founder Magnifico, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, Chitown Kev, jeremybloom, Magnifico, annetteboardman, Rise above the swamp, Besame and jck. Alumni editors include (but not limited to) eeff, Interceptor 7, Man Oh Man, wader, Neon Vincent, palantir, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse (RIP), ek hornbeck (RIP), rfall, ScottyUrb, Doctor RJ, BentLiberal, Oke (RIP) and jlms qkw
