Everyone knows by now that Senator Mitch McConnell invoked a rarely used Rule 19 to silence Senator Elizabeth Warren as she was reading a letter that Coretta Scott King wrote years ago against Jeff Sessions. Warren was an immediate media sensation to the Democratic base. Women identified with her as she was told to shut up and sit down for being a naughty girl. Civil rights groups were outraged that the reading of a letter by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was cause for punishment.

But Salon points out that McConnell was throwing red meat to his base by telling an uppity left wing woman to shut up.

The Trumpistas hate Warren. They would like to punch her in the mouth. She is far and away the most outspoken, smartest, toughest woman in politics at the national level. She is articulate and fearless. She must be silenced, and McConnell won one for his base.

All of this reflects George Lakoff’s analysis of right-left thinking. The left is compassionate, empathetic, rational, and thinks that facts will win elections.

The right, says Lakoff, sees the world as a morality play, in which strict fathers make the rules and enforce them. Girls should not be outspoken. They should be polite and deferential. The strict father gives a warning. If the naughty girl persists in speaking up, she must be told to sit down and not allowed to speak again. Or leave the room.

Who won?

Of course, you can extend this line of thought to the field of education, which has a predominantly female work force. The legislate are mostly male. They make the rules. They believe they know what schools should do and how they should run, because they went to school. They think of the profession as a bunch of women who should stick to their classrooms and stay out of the serious business of decision making about policy. That’s for the men.

Some politically savvy folks in Pennsylvania started a GoFundMe campaign to buy Senator Pat Toomey’s vote. Toomey took $55,800 from Betsy DeVos, and of course he will Vote to confirm even though she is unfit, uninformed, and unqualified.

The GoFundMe campaign is trying to top DeVos’ contribution. In one day, it has raised more than $25,000 from 1,557 people. The goal is $55,800.

I contributed. Let’s all work together to buy Senator Toomey’s vote. It is not too late.

If the campaign raises $55,900 we beat DeVos.

British intelligence agencies warned US intelligence agencies about Russian hacking in 2015.

The New York Times notes that the US intelligence agencies were aware of the hacking but were slow to respond.

The report, compiled by the F.B.I., the C.I.A. and the National Security Agency, makes no judgments about the decisions that the agencies or the White House made as evidence of Russian activity mounted. But to anyone who reads between the lines and knows a bit of the back story not included in the report, the long lag times between detection and reaction are stunning.

The delays reveal fundamental problems with American cyberdefenses and deterrence that President-elect Donald J. Trump will begin to confront in two weeks, regardless of whether he continues to resist the report’s findings about Russia’s motives.

The intrusion hardly had the consequences of Pearl Harbor some 75 years ago, when the incoming force was seen on radar and dismissed. But it had similar characteristics. Then, as now, a failure of imagination about the motives and plans of a longtime adversary meant that government officials were not fully alert to the possibility that Mr. Putin might try tactics here that have worked so well for him in Ukraine, the Baltics and other parts of Europe.
And while American intelligence officials — who were focused primarily on the Islamic State and other urgent threats like China’s action in the South China Sea and North Korea’s nuclear and missile threat — saw what was happening, they came late to its broader implications.

It was telling that within an hour of the release of the report on Friday, the secretary of homeland security, Jeh Johnson, declared for the first time that America’s election system — the underpinning of its democracy — would be added to the list of “critical infrastructure.” This after years of cyberattacks on campaigns and government agencies.

In the intelligence report’s most glaring example of the government’s lagging response, it says that “in July 2015, Russian intelligence gained access to Democratic National Committee networks” and stayed there for 11 months, roaming freely and copying the contents of emails that it ultimately released in the midst of the election. Classified briefings circulating in Washington indicate that British intelligence had alerted the United States to the intrusion by fall 2015.

Almost immediately, a low-level special agent with the F.B.I. alerted the Democratic National Committee’s information technology contractor, which doubted the call and did nothing for months. The F.B.I. failed to escalate the issue, even though it was clear from the start that the attackers were almost certainly the same Russians who had mounted similar campaigns against the State Department, the White House and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

At a news conference in December, President Obama made it clear that he was not aware of any of this until mid-2016, nearly a year after the hacking began and the British had sent up a flare.

A team of investigative reporters at the New York Times unearthed the details of how Russian government agents hacked into the Democratic National Committee computer system, were detected by the FBI, whose warnings were ignored by the guys who answered the phone at the DNC.

It begins:

WASHINGTON — When Special Agent Adrian Hawkins of the Federal Bureau of Investigation called the Democratic National Committee in September 2015 to pass along some troubling news about its computer network, he was transferred, naturally, to the help desk.

His message was brief, if alarming. At least one computer system belonging to the D.N.C. had been compromised by hackers federal investigators had named “the Dukes,” a cyberespionage team linked to the Russian government.

The F.B.I. knew it well: The bureau had spent the last few years trying to kick the Dukes out of the unclassified email systems of the White House, the State Department and even the Joint Chiefs of Staff, one of the government’s best-protected networks.

Yared Tamene, the tech-support contractor at the D.N.C. who fielded the call, was no expert in cyberattacks. His first moves were to check Google for “the Dukes” and conduct a cursory search of the D.N.C. computer system logs to look for hints of such a cyberintrusion. By his own account, he did not look too hard even after Special Agent Hawkins called back repeatedly over the next several weeks — in part because he wasn’t certain the caller was a real F.B.I. agent and not an impostor.

“I had no way of differentiating the call I just received from a prank call,” Mr. Tamene wrote in an internal memo, obtained by The New York Times, that detailed his contact with the F.B.I.

It was the cryptic first sign of a cyberespionage and information-warfare campaign devised to disrupt the 2016 presidential election, the first such attempt by a foreign power in American history. What started as an information-gathering operation, intelligence officials believe, ultimately morphed into an effort to harm one candidate, Hillary Clinton, and tip the election to her opponent, Donald J. Trump.

Like another famous American election scandal, it started with a break-in at the D.N.C. The first time, 44 years ago at the committee’s old offices in the Watergate complex, the burglars planted listening devices and jimmied a filing cabinet. This time, the burglary was conducted from afar, directed by the Kremlin, with spear-phishing emails and zeros and ones.

When you look over the win-loss column between the two major parties, what is striking is how little changed as a result of the 2016 election. The Democrats picked up 6 seats in the House and gained 2 seats in the Senate. They are still a minority in both chambers, but if a three dissident Republicans turn against Trump, he won’t get everything he wants.

The Louisiana Senate contest was not held on election day. The Republican is leading. The election will be held on December 10.

Mike Klonsky notes that a voter recount will not be able to measure the effect of voter suppression.

In response to recounts underway in Wisconsin and North Carolina, Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law President and Executive Director Kristen Clarke issued the following statement:

 
“Current recount efforts do not address the discriminatory impact of voter suppression laws during the 2016 election cycle. Wisconsin and North Carolina are states that were part of a coordinated campaign to make voting more difficult, particularly for African American and other minority voters. Wisconsin’s restrictive photo id law and North Carolina’s sweeping voter suppression law were among the most discriminatory efforts instituted prior to the November 2016 election. The laws in both states were the subject of protracted litigation because of their impact on African American and other minority voters. It is no surprise that these states are places where some now feel a grave injustice has occurred. Yet, none of the recount efforts underway focus on the impact of voter suppression efforts or attempt to account for those who were blocked or deterred from voting as a result of voter suppression laws in those states.

 
Throughout this election cycle, we received complaints from voters in Wisconsin about the state’s strict photo ID requirement which a federal court found would impair the rights of 300,000 registered voters. It is no surprise that Milwaukee County, Wisconsin shows that 51,554 fewer voters were able to participate in 2016, compared to 2012. In North Carolina, a 4th Circuit found that the state’s voter suppression law was discriminatory in purpose and effect. Yet, after the ruling on the state’s law, party official Dallas Woodhouse issued a directive encouraging local election officials to undermine the 4th Circuit’s ruling by using their discretion to cut early voting locations and hours down to a bare minimum. Officials across North Carolina heeded the call, resulting in long lines in many counties during the early voting period.

 
The recount efforts underway do not address pervasive discrimination that threatens American democracy. The way to strengthen public confidence in our elections and to promote transparency is to lift barriers that lock out eligible Americans from the process. This requires litigation and advocacy efforts that will uproot ongoing voting discrimination and voter suppression in our country. Among the most pressing needs is work to eliminate strict voter ID requirements, felon disenfranchisement laws that harken back to the Jim Crow era, and intimidation and harassment at the polls. This is also a time to closely analyze the Electoral College, an institution with roots that lie in debates surrounding slavery in our county.The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law remains committed to leading this important work to strengthen our democracy.”