David Von Drehle is a regular opinion writer for the Washington Post. In this column, he describes the lack of ideas in the Republican Party. Their only goal is power. They didn’t even bother to write a party platform. Whatever Trump wants, that’s what they want. No discussion, no debate, no dissent. Their goals in capturing six seats on the Supreme Court are negative: to roll back abortion. To roll back Obamacare. To roll back any gains for civil rights. To roll back the New Deal.
“The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run,” declared the self-destructive Captain Ahab, concerning his pursuit of Moby Dick. The elusive white whale of Republican politics is abortion rights. For nearly 50 years, over oceans of campaign speeches and seas of television ads, GOP candidates have promised to fill the Supreme Court with enough harpooners to slay the beast.
With the chance to replace the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a pioneer of women’s rights, mere weeks before a presidential election, the Republican Ahabs are lowering boats and putting their backs into one more try. Four years ago, they used their Senate majority to preserve a 5-to-4 conservative advantage on the court by blocking President Barack Obama’s pick in the final year of his second term. Now they spy the chance to grab a 6-to-3 margin.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) might want to flip ahead to the final chapters to see how this story ends. Or I could just tell him: Ahab is last seen being dragged by the whale into the fatal briny.
One of three things could come of this. Cooler heads might prevail — but what’s the chance of that these days? The other two alternatives both bristle with disaster for the GOP.
The GOP might actually spear its whale, by creating a majority of justices willing to undo the reproductive autonomy that has been affirmed and reaffirmed in earlier court opinions. The number of new supporters this would win for the Republican Party is approximately zero. They already have, as their rock-solid base, all the voters who genuinely believe that human life begins at conception — not as a scientific proposition (obviously true), but as a moral law. That the single zygote cell formed when a microscopic sperm cell fertilizes an ovum is as much a person as you and me.
As a former zygote myself, I understand the principle. I also understand that an entity composed of many trillions of cells is relevant to these matters. “Overturning Roe v. Wade,” as the campaign shorthand goes, would compromise the rights of every woman with a zygote in her body. By the same life-at-conception logic, a number of contraceptive methods could potentially be banned, including IUDs and the so-called morning-after pill. Never in U.S. history has there been a comparable rollback of officially recognized rights.
While gaining zero voters, the GOP stands to lose millions of them. Generations of women — and the men who love them — have factored reproductive freedoms into their world views. A qualified right to abortion is recognized even in Italy, home to the antiabortion Roman Catholic church. Among those who would lose autonomy are many women, and their men, who have loyally voted Republican year after year while quietly depending on these rights. Democrats aren’t the only ones who experience unwanted pregnancies.
The third alternative fits the cynical spirit of McConnell’s power play. Elected Republicans could grab the seat to the delight of their antiabortion base, while quietly counting on the justices not to do anything radically unpopular. A fact you won’t find in Republican campaign ads is that all federal protections of abortion rights are the products of Republican-dominated courts. The last time the Supreme Court had a majority appointed by Democratic presidents was 1969.
When Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973, six of the court’s nine justices were appointed by Republican presidents. Five of the six were in favor. In 1992, the court explicitly reconsidered whether a qualified right to abortion exists. By then, eight of the nine justices were Republican appointees.
How did the GOP keep its grip on the abortion issue despite this history? By denouncing those justices as the wrong kind of Republicans and pledging to find more reliable ones. Over time, the party has replaced the supposedly squishy justices with rock-ribbed conservatives approved by Federalist Society gatekeepers. If six such stalwarts should fail to deliver the long-promised repeal, it will be obvious that abortion rights are here to stay and Republican rhetoric to the contrary is baloney.
The GOP cupboard would then be entirely bare. The party of fiscal discipline has become the party of trillion-dollar deficits. The party of free trade has become the party of Trump tariffs. The party of limited government has become the party of executive orders. The party of Reagan has become the party of resentment. When the hollowness of its antiabortion rhetoric is confirmed, the Republican Party will stand for nothing, on a platform they don’t even bother to write.
There’s an old saying: When you stand for nothing, you’ll fall for anything. A suitable epitaph for the party of McConnell in the age of Trump.
“Ahab is last seen being dragged by the whale into the fatal briny.”
The GOP cupboard is bare. Now THERE’s a fact-based expose’ if I ever saw one. Love it.
FYI: Here’s another opinion piece from David Brooks on the relationship between one’s religious foundations and their political ideas: CBK
OOOPS . . . I linked the wrong David Brooks column . . . here is the correct one: CBK
Not True, Not True —
AFAB (Anything For A Buck) is a name that’s true …
The Republican party today has been taken over by right wing extremists and religious zealots. Trump is the perfect figure head of this group of vandals. He mostly represents his own greedy self interests. The party of Lincoln is now the party of avarice, dangerous conspiracy theorists, racists, and corporations that mock the uninformed as they ride on their coattails on their way usurp more power.
Love the allusion to Moby Dick, my candidate for co-winner of the title greatest American novel, alongside The Grapes of Wrath.
Here, my favorite line from the book, a profound observation that perfectly captures my approach to this business of living:
“But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe myself in eternal mildness of joy.”
I recognize that this is not the face that I present to the world. And that it’s challenging to maintain this in the age of Trump and McConnell.
I will quibble about one notion in this otherwise wonderful essay: Many Republican leaders haven’t given a whit about abortion except to the extent that the issue helps them at the polls. Trump, of course, could care less. All that matters to Trump is getting reelected so that he doesn’t have to face the literally hundreds of criminal indictments and civil suits that he faces when he leaves office and is no longer protected by the supposed immunity to prosecution that the Department for the Defense of Donald Trump, formerly the Department of Justice, has reaffirmed that he has.
Anti-abortion justice? Check. Shore up the slipping evangelical vote.
For the same cynical reasons, Trump the stereotypical extreme racist has suddenly discovered black people. While continuing to work against their interests at every turn, he made a big deal a day or two ago about announcing new opportunity loans targeted to black small businesses. If there were a snake vote, Trump would be announcing that in a second term, he would ensure dead rats everywhere.
The GOP has morphed into a vicious nasty cult that is adamantly opposed to anything that would benefit the 99% because (according to them) that would be socialism, communism, Marxism, Stalinism, Maoism, etc, ad nauseam. Their only guiding principle is greed and whatever benefits the top 1%. Science, logic and sanity be damned. Now the GOP is the Trump party which supports and abets an anti-democratic Putin wannabe.
Isn’t nothing something?
Republicans stand For Nothing
Nothing is something
So if they do stand
For nothing, that’s one thing
That they can demand
The Republican Party exists in name only. The RINO’s have become slaves to Trump’s pronouncements, are threatened by his Tweets, and think it is ok for Attorney General Bill Barr to serve as Trump’s personal lawyer, not guardian of the Constitution and rule of law.
Barrett is a perfect choice to forward the rights of zygotes, big business, wealthy people, and criminals who want to have guns. She has supported the mandatory arbitration clauses in contracts for gig workers, a tactic used to deny workers overtime pay and the right to seek other remedies from employers such as class action lawsuits.
See more about some of her other rulings here https://www.afj.org/nominee/amy-coney-barrett/ and here https://www.dailyposter.com/p/barrett-crushed-gig-workers-weeks
Barrett will be a deep dive into the dark ages, especially for women, quite a contrast to the socially progressive Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The Supreme Court will be out of step with what the majority of people want.
This was a good rant from Elie Mystal today:
“The problem is not that Amy Coney Barrett is particularly Catholic. The problem is that she’s a HYPOCRITE. I would — I’m Catholic. I could live with the Catholic judge. I could live with a judge who devoutly applied their faith to issues of the law. But it is not Catholic, it is not devout to turn away thy neighbor who is need of assistance as Amy Coney Barrett did in 2020 when she was the lone judge to uphold Donald Trump’s public charge rule which denied green cards to people who might need public assistance. It is not devoutly Christian or Catholic to praise the deliberate indifference of human life, which Amy Coney Barrett did in 2018 when she was the lone judge to tell a group of prisoners they had no 8th Amendment protections, when prison guards shot loaded guns into a crowded cafeteria. It is not devoutly Catholic to take away people’s health care, as Amy Coney Barrett has repeatedly said she will. It is not devoutly Catholic to apply the death penalty, which Amy Coney Barrett has written that a good Catholic judge should recuse themselves from situations implying the death penalty, but she has not written and here’s the elephant in the room, she has not written that a good Catholic judge should recuse themselves on issues involving abortion or a women’s right to choose. So what we’re left with is a hypocrite who will insert her judicial opinion between a woman and a woman’s doctor, but will not insert her moral opinion between the executioner and the prisoner on the chopping block. Now, that kind of hypocrisy is something I can’t deal with.”
Quo Vadis is on TCM today. Peter Ustinov’s portrayal of Nero is a good facsimile of todays GOP.
This was sent out today by PatriotPulse…the true voice of the American Right
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One state just guaranteed that there will be fraud in the November election
The November election is shaping up to be a mess.
With Democrats demanding wide-spread vote-by-mail measures, major delays and errors are expected.
And one state just guaranteed that there will be fraud in the election.
The reason Democrats are pushing so hard for vote-by-mail is simple.
It opens up for massive cases of voter fraud through ballot harvesting.
Very few states are equipped to handle such massive amounts of mail-in ballots.
And with the use of ballot drop of stations, the chance of forged ballots being delivered is a virtual certainty.
All somebody needs to do to deliver forged ballots is to collect large numbers of mail-in ballots, which is not difficult in highly populated urban areas, which generally favor Democrats.
Then they just need to fill out the ballots and deliver them to a ballot drop off station.
If the state doesn’t have the means to accurately compare signatures on the ballots to the signature in voter files, there is little chance those ballots will be challenged.
And there is no ID requirement to deliver those ballots.
Simply dropping them in the slot is all that is necessary.
To make matters worse, Democrats are now pushing to delay the election by extending the time-frame those ballots can be accepted.
And Democrats just succeeded in pushing that date to be over a week in three battleground states.
The latest state to have this implemented is North Carolina, which will accept late ballots up to November 12th, which is nine days after the election!
Michigan and Pennsylvania are trying to go even further, accepting late ballots for up to 14 days after the election.
This is creating a guarantee that the election results will not come the night of the election.
Or the next day.
But rather, many days, and even weeks after polls close.
With tensions already as high as they are across the nation, and the radical Left making riots a regular occurrence, this could become a very dangerous time.
Big tech companies are already preparing for the chaos, with tech giant Facebook making it against the rules to declare victory in an election until they agree with you.
Some are even speculating that Democrats want the election to be so chaotic that nobody will be decided in time, which some believe would put Nancy Pelosi in the White House because of the line of succession.
NBC recently reported about a survey that found 39% of Catholics and evangelicals believe Trump is more virtuous than Biden.
With weather and medical diagnoses, predicted results based on percentages allow for greater accuracy. The same process should be used to understand a religious segment.
And, we can come closer to understanding an individual’s views if we know percentages about a subgroup they selected to belong to, like Opus Dei or People of Praise (reportedly Amy Barrett’s subgroup).
There’s peril for a progressive and diverse nation when it ignores the dominance of any demographic segment within the power structure but, especially those segments that have a history of supporting colonialism, that have a religious vernacular they use to
exclude others e.g., “the one and only true church”, whose leaders express beliefs that are dangerous to society, like end of times, opposition to women’s rights, and anti-science, which includes opposition to effective pharmaceutical birth control, promoting the highly ineffective rhythm method instead.
On the continuum of modern humane nations vs. countries with a substantial and growing population in poverty, is there ever an occasion when there is an inverse relationship between colonialism and an increase in the conservative religious in power?
“NBC Survey Offers Insight on Social Issues Facing Catholic Church/By Jodie Fleischer, Rick Yarborough and Steve Jones • Published November 26, 2019 • Updated on November 26, 2019 at 8:03 pm”
“A vast survey of Catholic Church employees across America shows the people who know the church best — the priests, nuns and other religious employees — are deeply split on key issues facing parishes across nation. . . . ” CBK
All: See how Linda misstates, omits, and twists the statistics:
“Doug Pagitt Election 2020: Trump’s support from Catholics and evangelicals is dropping. They fault his unkindness. Many religious voters have woken up to the fact that Trump simply lacks basic Christian kindness, and they are looking for an off-ramp. . . . ”
“What Trump may not fully realize is that his general tendency to be unkind may have already cost him the election. In 2016, many evangelical and Catholic voters seemed willing to look past his bombast and crudeness on the campaign trail to give him a chance, choosing him over his Democratic competitor, Hillary Clinton, by 65 percentage points and 7 percentage points, respectively. Since then, however, they have witnessed four years of unrelenting cruelty. And some now seem to feel that enough is enough.
“My organization has found in an extensive survey of religious voters in five swing states that Trump’s unkindness is correlated with significant defections from the president. And the pattern is strong enough that it could well mean the difference in these states’ going red or blue.”
“Related/OPINION/Racism among white Christians is higher than among the nonreligious. Here’s why.
Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have seen an 11 percentage point aggregated shift in support among evangelical and Catholic voters toward Joe Biden and away from Trump compared to 2016, according to our online poll. The results echo trends in the Public Religion Research Institute’s July poll, which showed a 7-point drop in white Christian support for the president, and an August Fox News poll that showed Biden at 28 percent support among white evangelicals — 12 points more than Clinton received in 2016.
“believe our poll to be the largest carried out among religious voters in swing states in the 2020 cycle. The poll surveyed a representative sample of evangelicals and Catholics across gender, race and age within each state. It was conducted by an independent research firm from Aug. 11 to Aug. 26 in conjunction with leading behavioral scientists at Duke University, the University of Southern California and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on behalf of Vote Common Good, a faith group focused on mobilizing evangelicals and Catholic voters to make the common good their primary voting criterion to stop Trump’s re-election.
“June: How will evangelicals feel about Trump after Supreme Court rulings?/JUNE 19, 202007:31
“The Vote Common Good survey gives important insight into what factors beneath the daily chatter of politics are likely to be driving some religious voters away from the president. The survey looked at how evangelical and Catholic voters evaluate Trump and Biden on core values, specifically seven virtues and seven sins. Each survey question was accompanied by Bible passages highlighting the religious definition of the relevant sin or virtue.
“Across all the virtues measured — kindness, generosity, humility, chastity, modesty, diligence and patience — on average, 50 percent of respondents rated Biden as more virtuous than Trump, and 39 percent rated Trump as more virtuous than Biden, with the largest gaps emerging around the virtues of humility and modesty (28 points and 22 points in Biden’s favor, respectively). Across the seven sins — lust, sloth, greed, wrath, gluttony, envy and pride — on average, 51 percent of respondents rated Trump as more sinful than Biden, and 37 percent rated Biden as more sinful than Trump, with the largest gaps emerging around the sins of pride and anger (29 points and 26 points in Biden’s favor, respectively).
RELATED:
“. . . Indeed, 44 percent of all respondents said Biden is kinder than Trump, while 30 percent said Trump is kinder. Among 2016 Trump voters, perceiving Trump as unkind was the single strongest predictor of swinging away from him, with 2016 Trump voters who viewed the president as ‘not at all’ kind having about an 80 percent chance of saying they didn’t intend to vote for him again in 2020.”
https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/election-2020-trump-s-support-catholics-evangelicals-dropping-they-fault-ncna1240750
Diane In view of the above obvious “cropping” of the statistics about polls and Catholic and evangelical Trump/Biden support from the polling, would you please ask Linda to give verifiable references/links to her posts that include statistics and quotes? Thank you for all you do. CBK
Some new polls from Politico:
HAPPY SUNDAY. A HANDFUL OF NEW BIG POLLS this morning, 37 DAYS out from Election Day:
— WAPO/ABC: JOE BIDEN is leading DONALD TRUMP 53-43 among registered voters, and 54-44 among likely voters. WaPo’s Dan Balz and Emily Guskin with more
ABC’S @rickklein: “Clinton won political moderates by 12 points. Biden leads among them by 47 … Clinton won independent women by four points. Biden leads among them by 57 points.”
— NYT/SIENA: BIDEN leads TRUMP 49-41. NYT’s Jonathan Martin and Alex Burns with more
— NBC NEWS/MARIST: MICHIGAN: BIDEN 52, TRUMP 44 … WISCONSIN: BIDEN 54, TRUMP 44.
BIDEN, as you see above, is above 50 in both states.
Diane . . . comforting, yes . . . however, in today’s environment. . . . And then there are the debates . . . .Am I the only one who still worries? CBK
Fingers crossed that Biden is well prepared for an onslaught of attacks on his integrity and on his family.
Diane “Finger crossing.” I hadn’t thought of that. (Just kidding.) But with Trump’s history and personality, who knows. CBK
Donnie had no respect for his ailing father. He wants to date his daughter. He has NO morals and he is our president who might get re-elected. His influence on the media is responsible for all the lies that continue to cover up his lack of decency. As one Trump supporter told me, “I do not read anything from the Washington Post.”
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Donald Trump was facing financial disaster in 1990 when he came up with an audacious plan to exert control of his father’s estate.
His creditors threatened to force him into personal bankruptcy, and his first wife, Ivana, wanted “a billion dollars” in a divorce settlement, Donald Trump said in a deposition. So he sent an accountant and a lawyer to see his father, Fred Trump Sr., who was told he needed to immediately sign a document changing the will according to his son’s wishes, according to depositions from family members.
It was a fragile moment for the senior Trump, who was 85 years old and had built a real estate empire worth hundreds of millions of dollars. He would soon be diagnosed with cognitive problems, such as being unable to recall things he was told 30 minutes earlier or remember his birth date, according to his medical records, which were included in a related court case.
Now, those records and other sources of information about the episode obtained by The Washington Post reveal the extent of Fred Trump Sr.’s cognitive impairment and how Donald’s effort to change his father’s will tore apart the Trump family, which continues to reverberate today.
The recent release of a tell-all book by the president’s niece Mary L. Trump and the disclosure of secret recordings of her conversations with her aunt reflect the ongoing resentment of some family members toward Donald Trump’s attempt to change his father’s will…
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/politics/donald-trump-father-will/
With no intent to rain on the parade of good poll news for Biden (and, the world), 6 out of 9 conservative SCOTUS judges is bleak but, not nearly as bleak as 4 more years of Trump.
Clarence Thomas on religion-
The Constitution doesn’t ban states from establishing their own religions…several early American states, Georgia and Maryland allowed taxation to support Christian churches.
Sanford Levinson, a Constitutional scholar said the Thomas opinion is bizarre.
If those who want STATE-supported religion knew the full implications of that support, even on their own religion, they wouldn’t want it either. It would be a set-up for a re-institution of the basis for religious wars. I think the Constitution “trumps” states on this anyway. CBK
Linda, that is a wacky opinion. The states might support all religions (a bad idea), but there is no way that in 2020 or thereafter, any state would have an established religion.
Pastor Charles Foster Johnson of Pastors for Texas Children has said many times that the best protection for religious liberty is to keep the church and state separate.
If that happened, then Sharia Law could enter the state. Several European countries allow Sharia Law. ☹️
Polls don’t meant diddly if voters are prevented from getting to them.
To Avoid The Abyss
We have come to the edge of a moral abyss.
The abyss is telling us — “Stop. Do not go this way. Turn and go another way.”
A simple message. Easy to obey. But there may be other forces in play.
Is there too much whirring in our ears and heads to hear what the abyss is saying? Are we going too fast, have too much momentum in a single direction to stop in time? Are there people pushing us toward the abyss? — they call themselves leaders, but they walk behind. Are there people pulling us toward the abyss? — they call themselves leaders, the already lost.
It will take each individual stopping and asking, “Who are the real enemies of freedom? Who are the real enemies of truth?” It will take each individual stopping and saying, “No, I will not go this way. I will not teach the lie anymore.”
That is what it will take …
Trump paid $750 in taxes for two years and then nothing for the previous 15 years.
Dang, I’m a retired elementary music teacher. Wish my taxes had been that low. I’m honest and therein lies the HUGE difference.
PS. This is a LONG article.
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Trump’s Taxes Show Chronic Losses and Years of Income Tax Avoidance
The Times obtained Donald Trump’s tax information extending over more than two decades, revealing struggling properties, vast write-offs, an audit battle and hundreds of millions in debt coming due.
Donald J. Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes the year he won the presidency. In his first year in the White House, he paid another $750.
He had paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years — largely because he reported losing much more money than he made.
As the president wages a re-election campaign that polls say he is in danger of losing, his finances are under stress, beset by losses and hundreds of millions of dollars in debt coming due that he has personally guaranteed. Also hanging over him is a decade-long audit battle with the Internal Revenue Service over the legitimacy of a $72.9 million tax refund that he claimed, and received, after declaring huge losses. An adverse ruling could cost him more than $100 million.
The tax returns that Mr. Trump has long fought to keep private tell a story fundamentally different from the one he has sold to the American public. His reports to the I.R.S. portray a businessman who takes in hundreds of millions of dollars a year yet racks up chronic losses that he aggressively employs to avoid paying taxes. Now, with his financial challenges mounting, the records show that he depends more and more on making money from businesses that put him in potential and often direct conflict of interest with his job as president.
The New York Times has obtained tax-return data extending over more than two decades for Mr. Trump and the hundreds of companies that make up his business organization, including detailed information from his first two years in office. It does not include his personal returns for 2018 or 2019. This article offers an overview of The Times’s findings; additional articles will be published in the coming weeks.
The returns are some of the most sought-after, and speculated-about, records in recent memory. In Mr. Trump’s nearly four years in office — and across his endlessly hyped decades in the public eye — journalists, prosecutors, opposition politicians and conspiracists have, with limited success, sought to excavate the enigmas of his finances. By their very nature, the filings will leave many questions unanswered, many questioners unfulfilled. They comprise information that Mr. Trump has disclosed to the I.R.S., not the findings of an independent financial examination. They report that Mr. Trump owns hundreds of millions of dollars in valuable assets, but they do not reveal his true wealth. Nor do they reveal any previously unreported connections to Russia…
**NO!!!* gop stands for groveling old penumbras (if you don’t know what that means, I used it on an earlier post or–(a novel idea!)–use Roget’s or a dictionary. The perfect word!
Or–to celebrate the New Year 5781–I feel justified in using the word putzes.
gop not in capitals because NOT deserving of them. Just as I hate it when the word “Honorable” is (mis)used before the names of (s)elected (s because NOT always “elected”) legislators or some crooked judges, et.al.
Cyber attacks will help Trump claim fraud if he loses the election. He thrives on chaos.
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Ransomware Attacks Take On New Urgency Ahead of Vote
Sept. 27, 2020
Attacks against small towns, big cities and the contractors who run their voting systems have federal officials fearing that hackers will try to sow chaos around the election.
A Texas company that sells software that cities and states use to display results on election night was hit by ransomware last week, the latest of nearly a thousand such attacks over the past year against small towns, big cities and the contractors who run their voting systems.
Many of the attacks are conducted by Russian criminal groups, some with shady ties to President Vladimir V. Putin’s intelligence services. But the attack on Tyler Technologies, which continued on Friday night with efforts by outsiders to log into its clients’ systems around the country, was particularly rattling less than 40 days before the election.
While Tyler does not actually tally votes, it is used by election officials to aggregate and report them in at least 20 places around the country — making it exactly the kind of soft target that the Department of Homeland Security, the F.B.I. and United States Cyber Command worry could be struck by anyone trying to sow chaos and uncertainty on election night.
Tyler would not describe the attack in detail. It initially appeared to be an ordinary ransomware attack, in which data is made inaccessible unless the victim pays the ransom, usually in harder-to-trace cryptocurrencies. But then some of Tyler’s clients — the company would not say which ones — saw outsiders trying to gain access to their systems on Friday night, raising fears that the attackers might be out for something more than just a quick profit.
That has been the fear haunting federal officials for a year now: that in the days leading up to the election, or in its aftermath, ransomware groups will try to freeze voter registration data, election poll books or the computer systems of the secretaries of the state who certify election results.
With only 37 days before the election, federal investigators still do not have a clear picture of whether the ransomware attacks clobbering American networks are purely criminal acts, seeking a quick payday, or Trojan horses for more nefarious Russian interference. But they have not had much success in stopping them. In just the first two weeks of September, another seven American government entities have been hit with ransomware and their data stolen….