The Russian information attack on the election did not stop with the hacking and leaking of Democratic emails or the fire hose of stories, true, false and in between, that battered Mrs. Clinton on Russian outlets like RT and Sputnik. Far less splashy, and far more difficult to trace, was Russia’s experimentation on Facebook and Twitter
.. On Wednesday, Facebook officials disclosed that they had shut down several hundred accounts that they believe were created by a Russian company linked to the Kremlin and used to buy $100,000 in ads pushing divisive issues during and after the American election campaign.
.. On Twitter, as on Facebook, Russian fingerprints are on hundreds or thousands of fake accounts that regularly posted anti-Clinton messages. Many were automated Twitter accounts, called bots, that sometimes fired off identical messages seconds apart — and in the exact alphabetical order of their made-up names, according to the FireEye researchers. On Election Day, for instance, they found that one group of Twitter bots sent out the hashtag #WarAgainstDemocrats more than 1,700 times.
.. understanding the Russian efforts will be crucial in preventing or blunting similar, or more sophisticated, attacks in the 2018 congressional races and the 2020 presidential election.
Kim Jong-un and the Art of Tyranny
You do not subjugate a people by taking everything from them. You subjugate them by giving them something they know you can take away. Desperate people aren’t always obedient. Dependent people usually are.
.. You need a 50-year solution to your strategic dilemmas, not just another set of piecemeal concessions from Seoul or Washington. That requires changing the game in East Asia by nudging America out. Whoever is helping you make such astonishing progress in your missile and nuclear programs clearly wants to use you to change the game, too.
.. Drive every wedge you can between Washington and Seoul. Some you get for free: Who else but Donald Trump would think to start a trade war with Seoul in the midst of a nuclear crisis with Pyongyang?
.. Or what if somebody found a Stuxnet-type solution to cripple your only operational refinery or blow up the pipeline through which you import crude from China?
.. Your retaliatory options are few. You can’t simply level Seoul with artillery: that would mean full-scale war and your prompt destruction. When you get down to it, you’re making up in gumption what you lack in nearly every other resource.
Trump Stuns GOP by Dealing With Democrats on Debt, Harvey Aid
However, Mr. Trump’s decision to align with Democrats over the objections of GOP leaders and a member of his cabinet is likely to inflame tensions between the president and his fellow Republicans. Just hours earlier, House Speaker Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) had called Democrats’ proposal to combine Harvey aid and a three-month debt limit increase “ridiculous” and “unworkable.”
Former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott said it was “terrible” for Mr. Trump to undercut his fellow Republicans, particularly when their partisan adversaries were witnesses to it. “The president should not do that,” Mr. Lott, a Republican, said. “It is embarrassing to Republican leadership and it shows a split.”
.. During the Oval Office meeting,
- Mr. Ryan,
- Senate Majority Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.),
- House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.) and
- Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin
all pushed for a longer suspension of the debt limit increase, according to people briefed on the meeting, with Mr. Trump cutting off Mr. Mnuchin at one point.
.. Republicans initially advocated for an 18-month extension, pushing the next vote on the debt limit until after next year’s midterm elections. When Democratic leaders, Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York and Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California, rejected that, the GOP leaders suggested a six-month extension.With congressional leaders at a standstill, they planned to agree to disagree, according to a person briefed on the meeting. Instead, the president accepted the deal from Democrats and later singled out only those two leaders in announcing the deal. “We had a very good meeting with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer,” he said.
.. But privately, Senate Republican aides said the deal registered as a rebuke, following a stormy summer
.. Mr. Trump picked a sensitive subject on which to take his stand Wednesday. Republicans have made addressing debt and deficits a cornerstone of their governing philosophy.
Former House Speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio) was vilified by conservatives for his budget and debt limit deals with President Barack Obama, a Democrat, which helped build pressure leading to Mr. Boehner’s resignation in September 2015.
The prospect of having to vote again in three months to raise the borrowing limit—and to do so less than a year before the 2018 elections, and at a time when Democrats will seek to extract concessions on must-pass items like a new spending bill—represented a major concession, some GOP lawmakers said. “The Pelosi-Schumer-Trump deal is bad,” Sen. Ben Sasse (R., Neb.) said in a statement.
.. “We very, very poorly deal with our finances and we’re heading ourselves into a fiscal crisis,” Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker (R., Tenn.) told reporters Wednesday.
.. Mr. Sessions said he strongly preferred a longer time line for the debt limit and said the next vote in December would be harder. “He is new to the negotiation,” Mr. Sessions said of the president. “Experience teaches you that it’s not this vote that’s the hardest. The next one is.”
.. Democrats had said Wednesday that their offer was designed in part to maintain their leverage in other negotiations over issues including health care and Mr. Trump’s decision Tuesday to end after six months an Obama-era program that shields undocumented immigrants who entered the U.S. as children.
How Hurricane Harvey Will Ripple Through the U.S. Economy
Economists in The Wall Street Journal’s monthly survey see hit to GDP and jobs in third quarter, followed by slow rebuild
Hurricane Harvey will distort measures of the U.S. economy in weeks and months ahead. Everything from jobless claims, which already surged in a report on Thursday, to gross domestic product and inflation, will be knocked off course by the storm.
The storm will make it difficult for economists to gauge the trajectory of the economy, with brief spikes across a wide range of reports. It will be hard to discern whether bad reports result from storm damage and then whether good reports owe to the effects of rebuilding. It could be well into 2018 before the storm’s effects have fully washed out of the economic data.
.. They expect the storm to reduce the pace of job gains by about 27,000 jobs a month in the third quarter on average, followed by little change in the fourth quarter and then a boost of 13,000 in the first quarter 2018, as many people find work in the rebuilding process.
..The growth rate of gross domestic product will fall by about 0.3 percentage points in the third quarter, they expect, followed by no effect on the fourth quarter, and an 0.2 percentage point boost in the first quarter of 2018.
..In the longer run, the storm is expected to have no lasting impact, with forecasts for gross domestic product, unemployment, inflation and other major economic indicators unchanged for 2018 overall,