As the outrage among Democrats grows about alleged Russian involvement in US elections, Lyle Jeremy Rubin feels that it is time to get a little perspective on the issue.

I was trained at NSA headquarters as a signals intelligence officer in the Marines. This was about a decade ago, and I was by no means an area specialist. That said, I was privy to relevant briefs. At the time I learned that U.S. cyber operations in Russia, across Russia’s periphery, and around the world already dwarfed Russian operations in size, capability, and frequency. It wasn’t even close, and the expectation was that the gap was about to grow a whole lot wider.

This should hardly come as a surprise. Just compare the defense budgets of the United States and Russia. The president recently signed a gargantuan $700 billion gift to the Pentagon, with marginal dissent from either party or their affiliated media outlets. The budget increase alone ($61 billion) exceeds Russia’s entire annual expenditure ($46). The U.S. military budget now equals more than the combined budgets of China, Russia, Britain, Japan, Saudi Arabia, India, and France. As Vice concluded, “it’s 14 times larger than the Kremlin’s budget.”
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Yesterday I posted a clip from Sacha Baron Cohen’s new show that showed Jason Spencer, a Republican Georgia state legislator, speaking and behaving vilely and ridiculously in a manner that has to be seen to be believed. He now faces calls to resign from his own party members in the legislature.
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The effort posed by progressives to get the Democratic party to adopt more progressive polices has clearly alarmed the so-called moderates within the party who are now trying to launch a counter-offensive to retain control. They have organized a ‘summit’ to discuss how best to do so, and in the process they are revealing why they should be rejected.
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I wrote earlier about the efforts to try and wrest congressional seats away from Republicans by advancing progressive politics in what is considered deep-red Kansas. Briahna Gray provides an update on the rallies and other efforts by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in support of two progressive candidates James Thompson and Brent Welder in two congressional districts in Kansas where primary elections will be held on August 7. Gray says that the message that the two gave were clearly aimed at a larger audience than just those two constituencies.
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When people look for a state that supposedly represents dyed-in-the-wool red state conservatives in the Midwest, Kansas is the top choice. When people push for more progressive policies for the Democratic party, the frequent response from the leadership is to grudgingly conceded that it might have some appeal in the urban coastal areas but will not play at all in the Midwest, the supposed heartland. This is false historically but that has not stopped the argument from being advanced.
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