NBC News has the report U.S. intel: Russia compromised seven states prior to 2016 election.

All state and federal officials who spoke to NBC News agree that no votes were changed and no voters were taken off the rolls.

<sarcasm>Oh, horrors. We must stage a nuclear retaliation for an attack that had no consequences</sarcasm>.

If this were just a practice run for future attacks, then the Russians have certainly given up the element of surprise, and they have revealed their methods of attack.

At least our intelligence agencies are finally responding to to the 15 years of warning about electronic voting system vulnerabilities that our domestic experts have been warniog about

Bev Harris has even written about her work in the 2004 book Black Box Voting: Ballot Tampering in the 21st Century.

When I heard this NBC report, there seemed to be a lot of discussion about how the need to keep intelligence secrets was getting in the way of protecting our next election.

Top election officials from all 50 states met in Washington this month for a National Association of Secretaries of State conference and received temporary security clearances for a classified threat briefing from intelligence officials.

I cannot fathom how telling states what they must do to harden their computers would compromise our intelligence sources or methods. Certainly our security experts could tell states what they must guard against, and perhaps even tell them how to do it. They don’t have to tell the states how they discovered the attacks, nor give away any information about who told them.

If it is a danger that the Russians find out how we are guarding our computers, then the methods are not very robust. If these methods need to be kept that secret, then it is unlikely that we will be able to keep them that secret.

You might be interested in the VOX article Report: Russia probed at least 7 states’ voter systems before the 2016 election that discusses the NBC report among others.

The dreaded New York Times has the article Fed Chair Powell Indicates He’ll Keep Bolstering Growth in Public Debut. Below is an excerpt with emphasis added by me.

Randal K. Quarles, the Fed’s vice chairman for supervision, said Monday that the tax cuts could increase the country’s economic capacity, allowing faster growth without faster inflation.

This is complete economic nonsense. Tax cuts do not of themselves increase economic capacity. They increase buying power. If some of that buying power goes into industrial investment to increase economic capacity to produce consumer goods, then our capacity to satisfy consumer demand increases. If the tax cuts are used primarily to increase attempts at extra consumption, they could very well let loose the forces of inflation. If the increase in consumption occurs too fast for increased capacity to keep up with consumption, then that is the definition of inflationary pressure.

If the tax cuts are “invested” in extra military capacity, then the wages paid to military/industrial complex workers will increase consumer demand, without any concomitant increase in capacity to satisfy that consumer demand. So how our government decides to spend its budget and how our private investors decide to spend the tax cuts will have a huge impact on whether or not we get inflation.

People who have so little grasp of economics ought not be in charge at the Federal Reserve. The people in the rest of the executive branch who are spending and in Congress who are deciding what to spend it on, need to have a deep understanding of the economics because they have so much concentrated spending power to impact the economy.