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US Investigating Potential Covert Russian Plan To Disrupt November Elections (washingtonpost.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Washington Post: U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies are probing what they see as a broad covert Russian operation in the United States to sow public distrust in the upcoming presidential election and in U.S. political institutions, intelligence and congressional officials said. The aim is to understand the scope and intent of the Russian campaign, which incorporates cyber-tools to hack systems used in the political process, enhancing Russia's ability to spread disinformation. The effort to better understand Russia's covert influence operations is being coordinated by James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence. The Kremlin's intent may not be to sway the election in one direction or another, officials said, but to cause chaos and provide propaganda fodder to attack U.S. democracy-building policies around the world, particularly in the countries of the former Soviet Union. U.S. intelligence officials described the covert influence campaign here as "ambitious" and said it is also designed to counter U.S. leadership and influence in international affairs. One congressional official, who has been briefed recently on the matter, said "Russian 'active measures' or covert influence or manipulation efforts, whether it's in Eastern Europe or in the United States" are worrisome. It "seems to be a global campaign," the aide said. As a result, the issue has "moved up as a priority" for the intelligence agencies, which include the FBI and Department of Homeland Security as well as the CIA and the National Security Agency. Their comments came just before President Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin talked privately about cyberspying and other matters on the sidelines of the Group of 20 talks in China.
if Hillary looses, you can be sure the left will point the finger at Russia. Any election the left looses is automatically "Unfair!".
Progressivism: Parasites helping parasites to help themselves - to other people's stuff.
.... so now the same party is looking for an excuse in case their forced candidate loses the election.
And no ... the allegation of electoral fraud is not just an allegation. The fraud was confirm and well documented, but the DNC refuses to even address it.
They are just doing what Trump asked them to.
“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing."
Just because you are paranoid does not mean that no-one is out to get you.
One congressional official, who has been briefed recently on the matter, said
I first read this as "bribed". Not sure if that says more about me or my perception of members of the U.S. Congress.
Unless somehow Russia manipulated who the final candidates wound up being "sowing public distrust in the upcoming election" is like bringing sand to the beach.
It is about pushing for central control of the election system. They need an made up excuse to push for it and Russia is an easy target who won't fight back in this case or would be able prove one way or another its involvement.
If Russia is with Trump, then electing Trump will mean we will not go to war with Russia, and we almost certainly will if we elect Hillary (which she is already inclined to anyway because of the DNC and email leaks).
The media try to paint Trump as some kind of warmonger, but he's not even sure about backing all NATO countries! Meanwhile Hillary is no stranger to war, having started the war in Libya from scratch for no good reason, and with even flimsier pretext than Iraq... Libya was slowly opening to the west under Gaddafi, there was no need to take him out and now that country is utterly screwed.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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The current 2 party duopoly is a corrupt manipulative mess as the US presidential candidate choices.
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Both Hillary and Trump are AWFUL candidates. So a huge number of voters are stuck voting against who they think is worse. There is NO positive choice.
Facebook is billions of individual "Skinner Boxes." And if you use it you are the pigeon!
Yeah, it's the Russians, not the post Iraq war and post financial crisis revelations that have sown mistrust in institutions.
Uh huh.
Paper ballots
Problem solved
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Public Service Announcement from the Obama Adminstration:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
both parties run bitches of big corporations, which money trail do we follow?
It doesn't seem to me that America needs any help in the electoral distrust arena.
As a result, the issue has "moved up as a priority" for the intelligence agencies, which include the FBI and Department of Homeland Security as well as the CIA and the National Security Agency.
Good, this sort of thing is supposed to be their job. Given that they've been so focused on domestic surveillance since 9-11-01, let's see how well they do at it.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
The fraud was related to evading campaign finance laws, not Bernie: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/07/dnc-leak-clinton-team-deflected-state-cash-concerns-226191
What they did to Bernie wasn't fraud, at least not in the legal sense, just a slap in the face to those in the dem voter base who thought their party's candidate would be determined by a fair and democratic process. Of course the DNC, as a private entity, is free to hand-pick their candidate and skip the entire primary process - as they used to long ago - but decades of at least the illusion of democracy has led people to expect something vastly different.
...a briefing is taking place. The director of the CIA is there, as is the head of the NSA, the National Security Counselor, and the Federal Elections Commission. The briefing, being given by an anonymous deputy
D: "Ladies and Gentleman, we have a problem. Vladimir Putin has developed a new weapon which he plans deploy to disrupt our electoral process."
NSA (interrupting): "He's resurrected the Tsar Bomba and he's going to set it off on election day, isn't he?
CIA: "No, no, no, nukes are too crude even for Putin. Clearly he has a new weapon to cut off all electrical power on election day."
NSC: "Come now, this is foolish. Certainly he has come up with a virus to cause all our voting machines to record all votes for Putin himself, as a thumb in our eye."
D: "No, it's not any of that"
NSA (interrupting again): "It's not that thing where he takes his shirt off again, is it?"
D: "No, it's more horrible than that. Putin intends to tell the American public... the TRUTH"
demand an manual court of each vote and if you have the choice DO NOT USE THE TOUCH SCREEN TO VOTE use paper
...they want their foreign policy back.
Smells like complete bullshit. don't get me wrong I would not put this past Russia (or the US) to engage in such practises but the US election is a world wide laughing stock at this point, If Russia had been manipulating it all along they could not have created a better 2 candidates themselves. I think more likely they are sitting back having a good old chuckle knowing that no matter who wins this election the US loses.
Anyone with half a brain knows HRC is corrupt as fuck, and Trump is 100% unsuited for the office. FFS, the mainstream media has done a fine job of showing 2/3 of the electorate is aware of this is a fact, they're voting against someone instead of for someone.. Most of us don't think either one should be top dawg.
Mainstream media needs to start focusing on the alternatives, like Johnston and Stein, and quit telling us we're stuck with the two fuckwits we see on 99% of the news coverage.
One would assume that people at that level can cheat better. Voters should be offended not by he fraud but by their incompetence and shameless lies.
lucm, indeed.
There was some famous person from the US that was making fun of Canada for having a law against people residing in another country trying to influence Canadian elections by telling people who live in Canada how they should vote, or not vote..
Now suddenly that it's happening to the USA as their election draws near, why the change of heart?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
You mean the stuff going to the Clinton foundation?
Why bother investigating? The overt stuff is bad enough.
It's as if Trump is ticking every box to do whatever he had ever accused someone else of doing.
The "truther" thing of 2011 was to imply that Obama was a "Manchurian Candidate" (watch the movie of that name if you haven't - good even if the science is wildly wrong) under the control of another power. So what does Trump do in 2016 - puts himself deep in debt with Russian banks tied very closely to Putin to theoretically put himself under the control of another power.
Trump is probably going to default on those loans and tell the Russians to piss off just like the US banks he's done the same to, but in some ways that's even worse.
Also Trump himself is already going on about how the election will be rigged - he's deliberately sowing distrust in the election.
That's a good thing. As the President of the United States, Mr. Obama is supposed to be mocked. He is supposed to be the butt of jokes, and everything he does is supposed to be criticized just like anyone else would be. Per the First Amendment, every American citizen's right to mock the President (and everyone else, for that matter) is protected to within reasonable limits. That's why he's still just Mister Obama, and not the Almighty Honorable Supreme Commander President Barack Hussein Obama.
We have elected him to lead the people, but he is still one of the people, and his basic legal protection is the same as the rest of the people.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
So, just to be clear, what Trump meant was her emails that Russia probably already have in their possession because Hillary Clinton doesn't know how to secure stuff. And apparently Colin Powell was a bad actor too. A bad actor being a person acting in bad faith while possibly managing to stay within the letter of the law.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Actually the world political system is a little more complicated than that. Russia is not automatically the most strengthened the more the US is weakened. Multinational conglomerates are also more important now than during the Soviet era. Putin has his friends he wants to enrich. You've got the fact that we are living with a de facto world government.The world government is generally operating under the assumption that keeping the world under Thomas Hobbes' Soveraigne's thumb is the way to go.
Its relationship with Europe certainly is.
But Putin spent enough time in the KGB to still have strong feelings about bringing down the West. I mean, we're talking about a guy who imprisons three girls in a punk rock band. I'm sure he'd like to piss on America's grave while Donald Trump holds his dick.
You are welcome on my lawn.
If you actually care there's only one correct answer: *all of it*.
That's all well and good, but what about the local working girls? Can prostitutes go on strike? I can see it now, the signs reading "They took our johns" and "Foreign Whores Go Home". Nasty business.
The people tearing into electronic voting are going after the wrong target.
In a state where there is only one news agency (the government one), it's possible to steal an election by ballot stuffing, fake votes, etc. In a state where there are a fairly large number of independent and semi-independent news agencies, it's pretty much impossible. If all the pre-election polling and exit polling indicates candidate A is winning by 7%, and candidate B suddenly comes out with a 5% lead despite that, everyone starts taking a *really* close look at the election mechanisms, because statistically you just don't see that kind of inaccuracy across the board.
To steal an election in America, you have basically three options:
1. Have a deniable asset do an unanswerable last-minute negative campaign. Think "election day mailer claiming candidate B has ties to organized crime." It doesn't need to be true, it just needs to skew the "undecided" voter long enough to go to the polls, because we don't invalidate election results after that kind of event here.
2. Gerrymander the districts so your party has an overwhelming advantage. This is very well-described elsewhere, so I'm not going to go into the mechanics behind it, but needless to say it works and it's legal in a lot of the country.
3. Make it harder for members of the other party to vote. Want to make it harder for the elderly to vote? Put restrictions on voting by mail, because many of them have mobility issues. Want to make it harder for the poor and working class to vote? Put specific ID requirements (driver's license is a common one since there's not a whole lot of reason to have a driver's license if you have no car) in place, or restrict polling place hours so that they won't be able to vote during work. There's also the popular "play games with the voter rolls" stunt, but we're starting to wise up to that one, so it's getting less effective.
So there you go. Want to steal an election? Manipulate who is allowed to vote and how their vote is apportioned, not how their vote is cast.
Never underestimate the stupidity inherent in all human beings.
Please try to be less stupid.
I think you may have hit on a brilliant point worthy of further development.
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No because powel had written permission to use the commercial server. After him rules were changed.
Hilliary did not follow the rules that applied to her because she was too stupid and incompetent to understand them.
Even Reagan was openly mocked in his last few months, but that was by people in the USA and is usual for outgoing Presidents.
In the Philippines it is the USA that is seen as so weak due to the massive decline since 2000 or so and it's the USA that is being mocked.
Its going to be one of the threads of my ongoing analysis of how the State and Hobbes-Hamiltonian government in particular are bad for America and the world and it would be best if we got to thinking about the human race as one big family and we need to think of individuals that just happen to be bad actors and not humanity as a whole composed of bad people.
Can we now have a discussion about alternatives to "first past the post" voting? How about proportional representation, where the number of seats is directly proportional to the number (percent) of votes you get?
I would think there's more of a likelihood of a domestic entity engaging in electoral fraud. More motive and more evidence.
When the king heard the words of the Book of the Law he tore his robes.2Kings22:11
Good one.
You are welcome on my lawn.
That will please Monica.
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I'm not going to debate most of your opinions, but...
The info source does not matter.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
The source absolutely matters, especially considering the recent fad of leaking classified documents under the guise of "whistleblowing". Due to the classified nature of the information, there usually can be no official explanation beyond what is leaked. This means that the leaker has absolute editorial control over what can be discussed, and by exercising that control can manupilate public perception. Since nobody else can offer a rebuttal, the deception can last for decades.
Consider the well-known ethics thought experiment of a runaway railroad trolley heading towards five people tied to the track. You stand at a switch with the ability to divert the trolley to a different track, but there is one person standing on that path.
Depending on the circumstances involved, a wide variety of ethical outcomes may be selected. Sometimes it's considered more ethical to do nothing, and remain innocent. Sometimes it's considered more ethical to kill one person rather than five, and save a net of four lives. Sometimes less-conventional solutions are proposed, like sacrificing yourself to try to stop the trolley.
The perception of ethics also changes when more circumstances are known. If the one person on the other track is the villain who tied up the other five, he is almost universally chosen to die instead. If he's an innocent child, he's usually chosen to live in preference to five elderly people.
The circumstances matter, and selecting which circumstances the audience does or does not know means the ethical perception of the issue can also be selected. This was seen directly in the "Collateral Murder" video, where WikiLeaks made extensive use of editing to minimize the evidence that the targets were hostile, and emphasizing the evidence that they were innocent. They also edited around the protocols used to confirm a target, and intentionally made no acknowledgement of the fog of war, letting the viewers know from the beginning that the victims were innocent.
Even if the original footage were unclassified ("honestly and transparently", as you put it), a full understanding of events requires an expert's knowledge. As we've seen from other cases where official full reports were released, they're usually ignored because they don't agree with the earlier biased reports released to the public.
Always consider the source for all information, and consider any bias they may have. The more outrageous the scandal, the more incentive there is to editorialize it, or even to outright fabricate the information. Even if the US government were fully transparent, it would always be possible to claim that there is some secret agency (or department, or program, or person) that isn't transparent, and exists to do all of the distasteful things the rest of the government can't do.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
I'm sure he'd like to piss on America's grave while Donald Trump holds his dick.
He'd probably prefer for Hillary to hold his dick. She would have to put down the reset button to free up her hands, of course.
Like...are we to believe the NSA is concerned about Democracy ... or only the appearance of Democracy?
The criminals running the show are starting to confuse the confusion. Sort of how they privatized the privacy.
If true (whic it is not), it's only fair. The US interferes with everyone else's elections (including Russian) all the time. Sometimes through CIA, sometimes by financing NGOs which serve its needs. This doesn't work in Russia, of course, because Putin is famous for his 146% voter turnout, but they still try.
Doh.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
What relationship with Europe? I think you are confusing the Ukraine's oscillation between Europe and Russia with the interrelationships between government factions of Europe, the US, Russia, and China.
Trump's wishy washy support of NATO is far more likely result in war in Europe than strong support for NATO would.
That is inevitable at this point anyway because Russia has not been countered for eight years. They will take back what they have lost.
But regardless it wouldn't be AMERICA starting the war, as it would be under Hillary.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
As if "we the people" need any more help not trusting our government.
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
Read the Constitution. The President is supposed to be an administrator, not a leader (except in time of war, when he's Commander in Chief.) The concept of "leader" in government is disjoint from the United States. FREE PEOPLE ARE NOT LED.
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... would be, uh, pretty difficult to hack into. A lot more difficult than some crappy Diebold voting machine running some Windows variant.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
I've never lived in a state where it was not possible to write in my preference.
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No that's just what the de facto world government wants people to believe to better hide their moves that keep people under their Thomas Hobbes' State loving thumbs.
Snowden's revelations of how our government betrayed us, combined with the farcical attempt at representing the public that the current crop of candidates makes, is more than enough to ruin the world's faith in America's "democratic" process.
Any American that has been paying attention has known for years that our government is corrupt to its core.
We deserve to be doubted. Right now, "trustworthy" does not apply to anything any politician says or does.
The current 2 party duopoly is a corrupt manipulative mess [...].
The parliamentary system sounds much fairer, but is more subject to letting radicals get total control of a country.
Both Hillary and Trump are AWFUL candidates.
Hillary is only AWFUL if you believe all the right-wing smears. I've actually come to think more highly of her after following all the bogus scandal stories we're being fed.
People on the left generally wish she was more liberal. Bernie's views matched mine better than hers do, but there's about a negative chance that he would get a congress that would let him pursue his agenda. (Even centrist Hillary probably won't.) Also, Bernie showed several times that he's too hot-headed for the job.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Do you believe this crap, Dascombe?
DASCOMBE: It's not our job to believe it, Lewis. Our job is to tell the people --
Russia would love the natural gas concession to Western Europe. It's one of the few things left they have to export besides hacking and suppression of political dissent.
http://time.com/4205782/pussy-...
[Note: they were arrested again after this]
You are welcome on my lawn.
The Washington Post has a bit of bias in this, so take it with a grain of salt. When will the Washington Post start investigating themselves for holding illicit fundraisers with the DNC? Or is it Russia's fault they did this? Those damned Russians, how dare they expose our corruption!
Source: https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/emailid/2699
Bzzt - fail.
Get a grownup to tell you about the bombing raid on Libya after the terrorist attack on a Pan-Am flight.
Well, I'm not about people getting what they deserve. I'm about teaching people to become people who ask for and deserve better.
What makes you think they don't already know?
I love how people hide stuff like this at -1 because they don't want to hear it...
Both, ideally. And don't vote for either of them...
Even though this election may be self-inflicted, Putin can take credit regardless, and use that to threaten other nations.
"If you don't do things our way, you'll end up with bozos in your election also."
That may be a more effective threat than nukes.
Table-ized A.I.
As a shill you are going to dislike this one, but fair is fair.
Clinton hasn't said if she loses the system must be rigged. That's Trump. Hillary has however been caught repeatedly lying to the public, Law enforcement, Congress, Senators, and has done so for decades.
Clinton hasn't benefited from Russian hackers. Hillary and the DNC did however blame the Russians and attempted to pin motive (unsuccessfully) on Trump.
Clinton isn't particularly approved by people like Putin and David Duke. That's Trump. Trump disavowed Duke long before the media made their claim, so it's a try hard line of shit. Hillary has demonstrated that she cares nothing for the US and it's allies, only her own. Being disliked and untrustworthy may be a good set of traits for politicians to you, but not to others. More failed propaganda brought about by media.
Clinton didn't win the lie of the year last year from politifact. That's Trump. In fact if you add up each of their true, mostly true and half of their half true statements, Clinton is at 61% compared to Trump's 22.5%, so Trump tells the truth about a third as often as Clinton does. Hahaha, too fucking funny. The corrupt media has repeatedly given Clinton max ratings for her lies and THEY GET PAID TO PANDER FOR HER!
Clinton didn't basically ask for foreign espionage to be done on Hillary Clinton to help his campaign. The DNC has however attempted to claim that a plain statement regarding Hillary's "lost" emails is the same thing as requesting the US be hacked. Yet another failed effort at propaganda.
Clinton didn't call most Mexicans rapists and criminals. People who can't read persist in believing a propaganda message making the claim that Trump did, but most people can read. More failed propaganda.
Clinton didn't make up medical problems about her opponent. That's Trump. This is different from Hillary and the Democratic party talking about McCain how exactly? Oh, it's the same thing but against your candidate so it's bad.
Clinton didn't change the core of her key policy proposals so many times that not even her surrogates can keep up. That is such a bold faced lie I don't know where to start. How about abortion, LGBT rights, the war on Drugs, and rape victims to start. You get the idea I'm sure.
Clinton didn't do his best to get the Central Park 5 killed, completely bypassing due process. That's Trump. (The turned out to be innocent.) Another WTF? Are you doing a poor job of attempting to divert people from investigating the Clinton's Body Count? Like the DNC staffer who was murdered right around the time of the DNC leaks, which was blamed on "robbery" within a day yet nothing was missing on him?
Clinton isn't the one that paid bribes That's Trump in Florida and texas. I'm sure you have criminal conviction to reference right? Oh no, you don't. Another propaganda claim.
Clinton isn't the one funnelling what money she can back into herself. Except for the currently being investigated Clinton Foundation right? Oh shit, another one you lie openly about.
Trump hasn't spent her whole life as a public servant, with a long record to show for it. That's Hillary. Trump just has multiple bankruptcies, failed businesses and ruined lives. Career politicians have done such a great job with our country over the last two hundred years they have proven that business people interested in preserving liberty can't do the job right? Except for the founding fathers, and Lincoln, and countless other people who were not career politicians but working people who took office trying to make the country better. That is probably your most useless piece of propaganda because Trump gains support because he is not a career politician. People are well beyond seeing through the guise.
Trump isn't the one with a charity that has saved million
You seriously need to study magic. You are woefully naive about the fine art of vote-rigging. I suggest watching Penn and Teller's Fool Me and Googling the hints they drop after each magician's performance. On top of that, they have the ability to mess with things when all of the tallies are brought together and any number of places between where the votes are cast and the announcement of the final results.
The elections in all nations are a laughingstock.
Everyone who has the slightest idea about how electronic voting works is against it. And for good reason, as electronic voting is against many basic principles of a democratic voting process.
It is completely pointless to cry "Russia wants to manipulate the vote!", because a lot of interested parties want to do this, and pointing at Russia (or China, or the aliens) is just about distracting attention from the problem that electronic ballots make an election easy to manipulate. And it is not that US politics would need an outside force to manipulate votes, after all, Gerrymandering is an American invention.
Basically, both sides are upping the ante in case they lose, so the loser can say "Everybody knows that Russia (or whoever) wanted to manipulate the ballots to make the other side win", and start a court battle of recounts and repeat elections which would make the "battle" between Bush and Al Gore look like a friendly exchange of pats on the back.
The only way out of this shit is basically to stop any electronic voting, and return to the good old ballot papers. They are damn hard to manipulate, and easy to control for anybody. The initial results might not be there in time for the evening news, and some recounts might draw the time frame to get final results even further, but at least there won't be court battles and forensic analysis of thousands of voting machines to prove in endless court battles that this or that party tried to manipulate the votes.
He doesn't really care about America's grave. To him America is just a distant whining voice and occasional mosquito bite. If someday the US congress can have some sort of agreement about Syria or Ukraine he may pay more attention, but I can't see either of those things happening any day soon.
What do you mean? Russia just about held the EU to ransom with gas a while back - they HAVE that natural gas concession to Western Europe.
What's actually going on is that someone is trying to create as much fear, uncertainty and doubt as possible over the election. This could be one or both parties, expecting a defeat and preparing for some kind of gambit where they can challenge the result, or it could be a third party with some conspiracy-theory-level agenda. I'm not a big fan of conspiracy theories, but given what has been disclosed about US operations around the world, not much is too outlandish to be probable.
But it's very clear that the media is simply spreading FUD in advance of the election.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
The parliamentary system sounds much fairer, but is more subject to letting radicals get total control of a country.
After Reagan, Bush and the current top candidates, you can say that with a straight face?
Hillary is only AWFUL if you believe all the right-wing smears. I've actually come to think more highly of her after following all the bogus scandal stories we're being fed.
If even half of the e-mail scandal is true, she belongs locked up, and not in the White House. She is the classic example of ruling class members believing they are above the law.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
While we find Russia was extremely careless with their handling of information, we find that there was no ill-intent so we won't be taking any action against them.
Never thought of it like that before. Thanks for the post.
-- The Genesis project? What's that?
Paper ballots are COUNTED ELECTRONICALLY.
No one trust human beings to count hundreds of millions of individual pieces of paper, tally up dozens of markings, and come to anything like the same number even two times in a row. We invented machines to REMOVE humans from the equation.
The benefit of a paper ballot is that it is a second, parallel data protocol, and thus can serve as a true audit.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
sow public distrust in the upcoming presidential election and in U.S. political institutions, intelligence and congressional officials said
The U.S. government is already doing a bang-up job of that themselves.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
The circumstances matter, and selecting which circumstances the audience does or does not know means the ethical perception of the issue can also be selected. This was seen directly in the "Collateral Murder" video, where WikiLeaks made extensive use of editing to minimize the evidence that the targets were hostile, and emphasizing the evidence that they were innocent. They also edited around the protocols used to confirm a target, and intentionally made no acknowledgement of the fog of war, letting the viewers know from the beginning that the victims were innocent.
Isn't "Collateral Murder" by definition referring to the victims who were not the targets, hence "collateral"? Accordingly, isn't it irrelevant that the initial intended targets were hostile, if a whole bunch of innocent people got killed afterwards?
Serious statement as a lot of people believe that you can write in whoever you want and it will be counted. This may not be the case as in Minnesota you have to register with the Secretary of State's office to have your write-in votes counted for a number of elected positions. It wouldn't surprise me if there were similar laws in other states as well.
Time to offend someone
A Russian disinformation campaign has already been in full swing in Germany for over a year.
Funny. I live in Germany. Show me this information war, because I don't see any sign of it.
OK. Look here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/29/world/europe/russia-sweden-disinformation.htm
A Russian disinformation campaign has already been in full swing in Germany for over a year. Russia has identified Germany as the key player in European politics and foreign policy and Russian internet trolls are flooding the comment sections of German news sites with pro-Russian propaganda while trying to sow distrust in German institutions, the government and mainstream German media.
That's well documented.
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/08/the-kremlins-troll-army/375932/
or here http://euromaidanpress.com/201...
or here http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05...
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
What a waste of Russian money. Smart Americans already don't trust these corporate-controlled electronic voting machines and the corporate-controlled politicians running for office....
Frankly, whilst it's easy to dismiss based on an already high distrust in the US for the establishment I don't think this can rationally be dismissed out of hand as mere deflection. It's in the US national spirit to distrust authority, it was the basis of creation of your country and it's enshrined somewhat in your constitution - I get it, but what you can't do is let that national distrust of your own authority blind you to the threats caused by authorities from elsewhere.
Distrust of the establishment is both America's strength and also our weakness. The Russians are trying to use it against us to sow discord and divisiveness. Of course they are.
What we most urgently need to do is to strengthen the integrity of the voting process, find and fix the flaws and backdoors in machines, trash the un-secureable machines, establish better watchdog protocols, and most of all, make sure that all votes have a verifiable paper trail.
We should do this anyway.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Fucking shit, the US government is completely crackpot paranoid.
To quote an old saying, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean you don't have enemies.
Sure the Russians are trying to bollux up the system and create discord in America. That's always been their operating plan. It costs almost nothing, disrupts what they see as their historical enemy, and as a result increases their influence in Europe.
For them, it's a win-win strategy. Even if it's explicitly pointed out, half the people in the US won't even believe it because they hate the government so much to start with.
Or should we call it "The vast Russian conspiracy"?
What they did to Bernie wasn't fraud, at least not in the legal sense, just a slap in the face to those in the dem voter base who thought their party's candidate would be determined by a fair and democratic process.
It was. Everyone had a vote. Heck, they even let a lot of people who weren't Democrats vote too. More people voted for Clinton. Period.
And cry all you want about "the base", but if it weren't for all of those non-Democrats voting (by definition, not the base), Sanders wouldn't have even been in the running. "The base" of the Democratic party is people of color, and they voted overwhelmingly for Clinton.
Sanders lost because he couldn't win the base of the Democratic party. He barely even tried to. Blaming it DNC officials nobody cares about or listens to isn't helping anything.
Nobody actually believes your hyperbole. It only paints you as truly ignorant and not having read his actual platform and tax rates.
At some point a foreign power stirring up unrest (in diplomatic parlance "destabilizing") your country becomes an Act of War.
Prior to WWII Germany took over two countries this way (Austria and Czechoslovakia). Godwin or no, its pretty clear Putin has been using the same playbook for quite a while in places like Ukraine/Crimea and Georgia/South Ossetia. He's starting to do similar things to our NATO allies, and now the USA itself.
He's not going to stop doing this until someone makes him. So who's going to do that, and what is it going to take to get them to act?
I'm not interested with fads. If informing people of the truth is lame, then so be it.I'm not talking about mere trends, except one that has been going around 240 years. Thomas Hobbes said that individuals are little monsters that need a complete authority big monster in a State to keep everyone all in line. University professors teach that Hobbes is a great guy and to go by what he says. The politicians take the lesson to heart that it it expected that people are monsters and not only endeavor to make the big monster in the state, but be little monsters themselves. This means that they cannot allow anything be left in any condition to be used by someone that has a differing opinion on Hobbes' philosophy. This means that in their eyes, there is an obligation to rig the vote.
The horse is not dead until people's hearts have been won over.
The big hoopla in this incident was a journalist walking with them. That was the "innocent" one.
No matter they were targeting a guy with a machine gun and another with a rocket launcher in the same tight group of people.
Sucks to be that guy, but you take a risk walking with the devil.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Since any *reasonable* person recognizes that Hilary should win by a landslide, we need to lay the groundwork so that if Trump DOES win, we can call Russian Shenanigans and suspend the vote (you know, that "key to our democracy") in order to 'sort it out properly'.
Is that pretty much it?
-Styopa
Raise your hand if you think it's reasonably likely (it's ok to not be sure what'll happen, just take a realistic gamble) that you're going to approve of the next president.
I don't see many hands. The election is still months away, and everyone is acting like America already lost. So let's stop worrying about some future hypothetical case where we lose confidence in how we choose leaders, and admit it already happened.
Our problem is that we still act like we trust the system. As far as I can tell, the worst-case scenario is that there aren't any more scandals and disaster stories, because that means America will lose the 2018 and 2020 elections too.
Chaos is good for America. Russia might not have our interests at heart, but any successes on their part can only help America anyway, simply by virtue of it finally being enough to get us off our asses. It's not like they're going to get us worse R and D candidates, are they?
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
Colin's attributed remarks are Irrelevant, as Hillary had already set up her server. Convenient, expedient politically, and whitewash for the ignorant self-misinformed cheerleaders. The rest of us know the reason for the server to exist, and it wasn't because Colin told her to do it. When data was destroyed without any arms length oversight and the one who destroyed the data claims that attorney client privilege covers the criteria for the destroyed data, you can rest assured the original intent for setting up the server was accomplished.
Any other conclusion defies logic, reason, facts, reality, Occam, and actions.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
There is NOTHING that the Russians can do that can even come close to sewing 1% of the distrust that Hillary Clinton generated.
If this were propaganda, designed to lessen the impact of future leaks by suggesting the Russians may alter or fabricate documents, would we be able to tell?
The US does not provide leadership to the world, it provides bullying and aggression that make the world less safe.
Leadership should be about inspiration and bringing people together mutually, this is not the middle ages we are supposed to be enlightened by now.
Also disinformation is not the right term either given that mostly what happens is that people find out stuff that powerful people want to hide and that actually provides valuable perspective on how broken US politics is.
[site]
Gov. Gary Johnson!
The only candidate on the ballot that isn't a corrupt jerk bent on fucking up pretty much everything.
Why do you think everybody is building natural gas liquefaction plants?
Russia's cash cow has an expiration date. They better have their pipelines to China built out soon.
The Germans in particular are building out solar and wind in large part because they don't trust or like the Ruskies. Sure it's expensive, but it's cheaper in the long run than being dependant on Putin.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
The November elections have already been disrupted ... months ago ... by the candidates themselves.
Independent and partisan election observers at all polls, paper ballots, clear ballot boxes, voter ID, finger marking ink and public vote counting.
Otherwise it's just continuing the sham.
Also charges brought against the ineligible voters who are caught.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Powell's remarks may be irrelevant to the Hillary Clinton incident, but it isn't irrelevant to getting a picture of how corrupt the politicians really are and the nature of the corruption. The idea is that he was probably enriching himself while skirting the records law and you can expect anyone else no matter what the party coming up to do so to.
The US Government does enough all by itself for people to not trust the process or the candidates. I don't think the Russians actually need to do anything.
Examine even your most deeply held beliefs. Nobody is always right.
It was announced that DHS can take control of an election if there is fear of external manipulation.
We know that clapper and comey only lie, and that they both stated past events may have been Russia or China.
So it seems obvious that the u.s. government wants to fabricate some manipulation of the votes to justify turning the election over to DHS who will do something even more corrupt and illegal than all the past crap they have done.
May be a way to keep obama in the chair.
They can cheat better, but when officials can do it with impunity, there's no longer any incentive to bother hiding it.
Sanders lost because he couldn't win the base of the Democratic party. He barely even tried to.
Piss off. Sanders has been fighting for "people of color" as you put it for his entire career. Don't act like he wasn't trying, he was screwed from the start. In 2008 the DNC organized 26 debates for their candidates. They learned their lesson though, because as the debates went on and on people liked Clinton less and less, and Obama beat her. They weren't going to make the same mistake again, they were going to get their anointed candidate through this time. So they scheduled 6 debates, and ended up doing 9 after Sanders kept pushing for more and more. They knew that the more people heard from Hillary, the less they would like her, and they didn't want to expose her to another defeat. They adopted almost all of Bernie's platform (how's that for your base?) but apparently the candidate himself wasn't good enough, right?
Don't try to force the dialog into suggesting that Bernie didn't try. The DNC was lined up behind Clinton since before the campaigning even started, and they rammed her through the entire process. Now they want to bitch and whine about how they need everyone's help to defeat the single most disliked candidate in the history of presidential polling, it's pathetic. Only Clinton could possibly lose to the single most disliked candidate, because she's in second place right behind him. The Republicans give the Democrats an election that they can't possibly lose and the Democrats respond by nominating the only person who can possibly lose, just because "it's her time". The Democrats wholeheartedly deserve to lose this election, Clinton absolutely deserves to be defeated by Trump. The best thing she can possibly do is shut up and let Trump defeat himself, and that's exactly what she's doing because no one wants to hear her shit. The debates are going to be an absolute shit show this time around when she has to actually try to defend herself and convince anyone paying attention that she's honest and trustworthy. She's neither, she's corrupt, and she deserves to get hammered by Trump.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
This comment is ridiculous. Fear of Trump (itself understandable) is turning Hillary supporters into establishment dupes with absolutely no sense of proportion or critical thinking.
The "poor little girls in a rock band" broke into a church and desecrated the altar. For that they served less than 2 years. I'm not sure any such "poor little" anythings in the US would get off so lightly, given the zeal for punishment here. Tim DeChristopher was sent to prison for disrupting an illegal Bush-era giveaway of public lands and no one in Hillary Clinton's camp batted an eyelash. They were too busy defending police-killers in democratic foreign countries that don't line up with Wall St and NATO, or promoting the militarization of Central American regimes with death squads that like to murder environmental activists.
Hillary is blowing her chances by making her campaign all about Trump and "OMG! THOSE RUSSIANS!!!" -- so she is no better than the corp. media that try to keep Trump the focus of attention. She knows her negatives tend to get higher as people become familiar with her, so her answer is to be much more negative about Trump instead of talking about solutions. Come November, people may simply vote for who seems the most familiar. Think about it, einstein...
"...a guy who imprisons three girls in a punk rock band"
You mean like Obama "imprisoned" so many US citizens under "mandatory" sentencing laws ?
Like mothers of five given 20 years for a joint ?
If the 3 Russian punk rockers had desecrated a church in the US, they would probably STILL be in jail.
Gotta love kneejerk mods who end up trying to protect the US police state...
Piss off. Sanders has been fighting for "people of color" as you put it for his entire career.
...this is actually a pretty good representation of the response one can expect any time this issue (all-important for winning a Democratic primary, mind you) is brought up. All the Black people I follow on twitter had timelines full of sentiments like this. Usually even less nice though, and almost always from eggs or people with white AVI's. I'll tell you what I tell Trump followers asserting similar things: Asserting something doesn't make it true, even if you do it angrily. (Out of curiosity, does it even stack up to the experience of his actual constituents? nope.).
Don't act like he wasn't trying
I don't have to act. We had his whole campaign to watch. It was pretty obvious. And now that its over, the stories from the inside are coming out. Not shocking given how black voters were treated by his campaign, but there are all kinds of tales of supporters of color being ignored, his own press secretary (a black woman hired probably in part to contradict the rumors) being assaulted and turned away at meetings, and just generally treated like they didn't belong. Like the campaign didn't care about them, and didn't want their support. Well, guess what? You don't want it, you didn't get it. #EarnThisDamnVoteOrLose.
My personal favorite came from TWiB (a black-run podcast, that was also acting as the media org behind Netroots Nation). They landed an interview with Sanders during NN16. Nothing weird about that, since he was there, and they were the media org running NN16. They showed up to the interview, and no Sanders. Thought he stood them up. Now that the campaign is over, they were talking with some ex-staffers that were there, and it turned out it wasn't that Sanders stood them up. His own staffers wouldn't let him go. They knew what Bernie was going to say, and knew it would not be taken well at all by TWiB or its audience.
This is precisely what a losing campaign for the Democratic nomination looks like. If you lose POC by double digits, you lose. Take a kewpie doll, and better luck next time.
So what does his own high-level former staff (who know the campaign better than you or I) say happened?
But let me be clear - NO ONE STOLE THIS ELECTION! Team Sanders we did AMAZING WORK. But we lost. It's a hard reality for some
It was a hard reality for me. Because I fought hard. Now, we won some great battles, but the reality is the system didn't cheat us.
Now the contents of the leaked emails show individuals were definitely biased, but 7 folks on an email didn't "steal" the election.
There are other qualms. Other valid arguments, but a stolen election is not one. I worked there. No one stole the election from us
And it had nothing to do with their message?
How much time did Russia give the guy who murdered Alexander Litvinenko? What's that? He got a medal? But three girls who mess up an altar go straight to the joint. You want to go tit for tat on who's worse, Russia or the US? Fine. But please don't pretend that Russia hacking into voter registration systems in several states is a good thing for the US.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Hilliary did not follow the rules that applied to her because she was too stupid and incompetent to understand them.
Oh I have a hard time with that, she may have been too fixated on avoiding FOIA laws to have properly considered all of the implications of using a private server, she may have been too arrogant and narcissistic to realize she would evetually get caught and the rules apply even to a Clinton, but she was never stupid or incompetent; at least not pre-concussion Hillary.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
I have to add - if you see Putin as a communist you've either got a really fucked up world view or think that "communist" only means "bad" and that any bad state of affairs equals communism. Putin is a fucking gangster and would be right at home in 1930s New York, he's no more communist than Trump is.
And what about Tim DeChristopher's message about protecting the environment? Oh, the court explicitly banned any mention or consideration of his message or even motives. The system can declare open season on activists whenever it wants.
BTW, a party that will commit fraud in order to hoard money away from state/local campaigns into the hands of the already wealthy Clinton is no doubt interested in creating as much hysteria as possible to deflect attention.
Hacking voter registration systems is a serious issue for sure. For one thing, those systems should not be online. Another thing is that the Snowden leaks show the US routinely breaks into foreign municipal and university systems to steal their data. They even leak data for political impact. But no corp. infotainment brand in the US is going to make an issue out of it. Which is odd, because supposedly Americans would be the first people you would expect to be capable of stopping our government from doing this.
And lets not forget infotainment's penchant for labeling any activity by Russian or Chinese individuals as a government conspiracy against the West. They segue from intentionally vague language intended to erase any distinction, to more serious language calling for bombing campaigns. A similar tactic was used in the coverage over Iran's "nuclear program", an erasure of the nuclear power / nuclear weapons dichotomy they do not commit when discussing US programs.
As for Russian government involvement in the two voter db hacks: Contrasted with the DNC hack, it looks rather iffy. Did N. Korea's government commit the Sony hacks? Probably not, but interestingly enough we expect our government to keep blaming them anyway.
EVEN our NATO allies are not trusted... they are spied upon in minute detail. So the good will that had grown for a time between nations has been pissed away because of this paternalistic, power-mad attitude emanating from the US establishment (and assorted hangers-on in the other four of the Five Eyes). And please don't pretend that we didn't set the bar...or that it's not an important issue.
You act like this is some shocking discovery.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/...
http://www.newsweek.com/2014/0...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://www.theguardian.com/wo...
The bar was set before the United States was even a country. Only the techniques have changed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
You are welcome on my lawn.
almost always from eggs or people with white AVI's
I have no idea what that means.
Asserting something doesn't make it true, even if you do it angrily.
Your response to that assertion is to simply claim it isn't true? How about this picture and the story behind it?
I don't want to have an argument where I try to find examples of things Bernie has done his "entire career" and have to try and back up the specific words I wrote until you're satisfied. Instead, I'll just say that Bernie's policies are unaffected by the color of the people that he represents, whereas Clinton is on record calling young black men super-predators and touting her husband's crime bill that saw so many of them locked up. To imagine that Hillary has done, or even more to the point, will do in the future, more for the benefit of black people (and indeed all people) than Sanders is, I believe, incredibly naive. If you look at Clinton's behavior and track record and conclude anything other than that she is in the pocket of Wall Street and other special interests, and is in this election to serve her own interests, then you have well and truly bought into her stock and we both know I'm not going to convince you otherwise. A show of hands, how many people think that Clinton will refuse to sign the TPP? I know, someone ask Terry McAuliffe what he thinks. He knows the game that she's playing.
I admit that I have no idea where Clinton's wide support from black people comes from, and maybe that's the piece of the picture that I'm missing. I honestly don't know what they see in her that is so appealing. I don't understand the logic. I'm willing to admit that.
We had his whole campaign to watch. It was pretty obvious.
The enormous crowds and unprecedented funding effort illustrates to you that he wasn't trying? What else do you think he should have done? Should he have pushed for more debates with Clinton? Because he did that. I'm not sure where you think the effort was lacking. The message that he was promoting had nothing to do with race, why does he need to treat black people with the special gloves if his entire platform is based on more equal treatment of everyone who is currently getting screwed by the system regardless of the color of their skin?
They knew what Bernie was going to say, and knew it would not be taken well at all by TWiB or its audience.
Well don't leave me in suspense, what exactly was he going to say that was so offensive? Hopefully that isn't all just hearsay.
So what does his own high-level former staff (who know the campaign better than you or I) say happened [motherjones.com]?
I don't believe that any election in any state was rigged. That's not what I think happened. I think that the DNC tilted the playing field so that Clinton would cruise to a relatively easy victory. That explains the shift from 26 debates to 6. I don't think the election was stolen or rigged, I think that the DNC simply pushed the narrative from the start (with the help of the media, you can see the close relationship in the emails) that Clinton was going to be the nominee, as if it was a foregone conclusion, it was already decided, Sanders was just some fringe kook to be ignored and ridiculed, and I think the rules that they set up were created with that in mind. If they had a more transparent and unbiased system with 20 or more debates I think that we would be having a different discussion right now. I'd like to see some exit poll numbers concerning people who voted for Clinton who knew next to nothing about Sanders, but we aren't going to see those numbers (not because of some conspiracy, but we're just not). I think Clinton got rammed down people's throats and the Democrat
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Those aren't examples of 'cyberwar' tactics that the US invented.
And besides, I doubt very much the British ever bugged the President's phones and rooms, even under the most dire circumstances of a hot war on their own soil; Spying on US dissidents is a far cry from that grasped straw you threw in my direction.
The US still operates under the concept of "Full Spectrum Dominance" and if you look up that policy you'll see that it involves not only spying on every last private detail from all data sources, but also the goal of driving popular opinion anywhere in the world. No wonder the NSA, FBI, DEA are choking on their excess.
When you talk about politicians as if they were all the same, you're reducing them to a function; you're removing the human factor from the equation. Usually that's a sign of a flawed perception and lack of empathy (like when feminazis say that all men are rapists) and can lead to radical positions.
There are politicians that will gladly rig the vote not because they think they need to impose their will on the little monsters but simply because they want power for the sake of power. You can usually spot them because they surf on vague agendas and ideas, and once they do get elected they have no idea what to do. For example, look at how Obama used to get elected (before he became president); instead of campaigning and promoting his ideas, he systematically got strong opponents kicked from the ballot on technicalities or other similar strategies. And look at his voting record in office (again before he became president); he essentially abstained or voted with the majority, like someone who walks between the raindrops. Was it all a master plan to get to the higher office to implement his lifetime priority (although he never talked about healhcare before the race) or was it just opportunism?
Now compare this with another Democrat President: LBJ. Not only did LBJ took decisive action after decisive action in terms of social progress, he also supported social programs created by Republicans, like Medicare (which was a pet project of Eisenhower), and initiated covert war in Southeast Asia (aka the Vietnam war). One may of may not agree with his decisions, but unless one subscribes to the theory that he was behind the assassination of JFK this isn't a politician that rigged the vote or walked between raindrops.
Recent history is full of examples of complex politicians. Like Sarkozy who tried to take down the fat cats of the French public administration (he even asked the lady who was running a "cost cutting" department to cut her own expenses) but who got caught in an electoral and financial corruption scandal. Or Calderone who was elected the same way Bush was (by a court decision) and tried to end the Mexican Drug War by sending the army, only to make it a hundred times worse.
From Reagan (last US president who wrote his own speeches) to Berlusconi, who despite countless accusations of fraud, corruption, sexual misconduct and other scandals managed to be the longest serving prime minister of Italy in the last 50 years, there's a wide variety of politicians with or without political agendas, with or without personal agendas.
You can't put all those people in the same bucket.
lucm, indeed.
Correct; you could google it yourself, instead of asking me to.
And I would find one misleading news story. How is that evidence of a large-scale, government-controlled desinformation campaign?.
About 258,000 results (0.49 seconds), according to Google over here. Doesn't Google work over there?
Here's the first page, with sources ranging from The New York Times to The Guardian to Der Spiegel::
http://www.atlanticcouncil.org...
https://www.theguardian.com/wo...
http://khpg.org/en/index.php?i...
http://www.dw.com/en/german-me...
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
http://www.spiegel.de/internat...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08...
http://uaposition.com/kharkiv-...
You made a claim, you have flimsy evidence to back it up.
Since you're unwilling to look at any of the 258,000 results, I doubt that anything I can post is likely to affect your position.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Your response to that assertion is to simply claim it isn't true?
Didn't say that. My only point here is that Bernie didn't win the votes of people of color because they voted against him. That's a fact. End of story. Whatever he did or said obviously either wasn't enough in their minds, or wasn't the right things at the right time. He needed to get them to vote for him, and he didn't. Fact.
I admit that I have no idea where Clinton's wide support from black people comes from, and maybe that's the piece of the picture that I'm missing.
It isn't just a piece of the picture, its the entire picture. They are more than a quarter of the Democratic primary electorate. If you aren't competitive with them, you lose. And they voted against her in 2008, so they were there to grab for the right candidate. So if you have some great argument where its obvious that black voters should prefer someone they didn't, then the Scientific Method tells us that clearly your argument has flaws. That's just a fact. A scientific mind would go looking for them (and not start with a cop-out like, "they are all stupid and/or voted against their own interests").
if the DNC basically did nothing wrong like you seem to sort of kind of be implying
Nope, never said that. Just said they didn't steal the election. Which is exactly what Sander's own people are saying too. Because they didn't.
The reason this whole argument really annoys me is that the Dem party establishment was way more in the tank for Hilary in 2008 than they were this time.
There was actually pressure in 2008 trying to get Obama to drop out *while he was winning*. He still won. Why? Because he was a better candidate. More democrats voted for him. Why couldn't Bernie have done that? And where was all this talk of "corruption" back in 2008?
Here's another little history lesson. Black people could actually vote in the South for a short while after the war. They elected black people to Congress and the Senate and everything. What was the response from the losing whites then? Corruption! Mind you this was the South in the late 1800's. It was probably not physically possible to be more corrupt than their politics already were. But suddenly corruption was huge problem when it wasn't just white guys benefiting from it. This what led to Jim Crow. There was even a whole branch of American history that developed to justify this. Hopefully they don't teach it anymore, but it was what I was taught. Perhaps today white people don't bother to learn that bit of history, but black folks haven't forgotten it.
So when "Corruption!" is suddenly only a problem when the mediocre White Guy wins, even though it was worse before, what do you think is really going on here? More to the point, what do you think all those black voters hear you saying, considering they voted overwhelmingly for the candidate you are now insisting is corrupt, largely just because they all voted for her?
The source of the information is Hillary's campaign and the DNC. The deliverer or messenger *might* be Russia. And that makes a great narrative, but that really does not matter and is an attempt by Hillary and the DNC to discredit content that they already acknowledge as accurate.
Facebook is billions of individual "Skinner Boxes." And if you use it you are the pigeon!
I've called people out on that myself, but when it comes to the belief that the government should oppress the people, the organization doesn't let people advance that don't toe the line. Hobbes felt that the organization was vastly superior to the individual.
The power to rig the vote has largely been removed from the individual, being subsumed into the organization proper.
When it comes to politics the functions are distributed across people. In the writings of the Hamiltonians (I'm looking at Federalist Paper 10, at the moment), they practically out-and-out say they wish we were like the Borg or the Cybermen, except of course those characters didn't exist back then.
If I'm the one who is the idiot, then how come that's the best you can do?
I am not sure if Powell was enriching himself or not. What the tone from both Hillary and Colin seems to indicate is the people in the state department, and specifically in the position of secretary of state, are quite concerned with keeping records and details of what they are actually doing while "serving" in office a secret from the American people.
There are innumerable lessons we can learn from our government's handling of what goes on behind closed doors. From the Pentagon Papers/Viet Nam and our government conspiring to start a war, to Snowden/warrant-less mass surveillance that contravened both Congress and the Constitution, and a thousand other things in between, the track record for secret actions by our government is abysmal. Transparency seems to be the only way to ensure that the people who are entrusted with a responsibility to uphold the law aren't blatantly breaking it in service of power grabs that undermine the very fabric of what America is and stands for.
And, as with any abuse of power, it will continue until we, the People, decide it needs to stop.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
Didn't say that. My only point here is that Bernie didn't win the votes of people of color because they voted against him. That's a fact.
I would put it another way. I doubt very much that the vast majority voted against him, I don't think that they knew about him enough to vote against him. They voted for Clinton, not against Sanders. We can contrast that with the general election, where a majority of people who are planning to vote for either Clinton or Trump cited as their reason that they want the other person to lose more than their candidate to win. I don't think that's the case with Sanders vs Clinton. I think Clinton got a lot of votes from people who didn't know the first thing about Sanders. As to why that is, that goes back to the cozy relationship with the DNC and media, the lack of coverage that Sanders got, and the lack of debates and poor timing of the ones that were shown.
Nope, never said that. Just said they didn't steal the election. Which is exactly what Sander's own people are saying too. Because they didn't.
That's good. I'm also not saying that. Should we list other things that neither of us are saying?
The reason this whole argument really annoys me is that the Dem party establishment was way more in the tank for Hilary in 2008 than they were this time.
The major difference is that they learned their lesson, and figured out why she lost so that it wouldn't happen again. They succeeded in not exposing her too much to voters during the primaries, but the general election is another story. She actually had to talk to the press on her plane, that sounded like a fun, super-casual, and totally not awkward exchange. It's been, what, over 270 days since she had a press conference? Yeah, the DNC learned their lesson in 2008 all right. This time around it's so far only been Debbie who had to take one for the team, but it's not over yet.
More democrats voted for him. Why couldn't Bernie have done that?
Round and round we go. I hope that's not a serious question.
And where was all this talk of "corruption" back in 2008?
Is that what the history books say now? No one way back in 2008 was concerned with political corruption? OK, buddy. Yeah, this is definitely a 1-time, election year issue.
Here's another little history lesson.
Is it from the same book that says no one in 2008 was concerned with political corruption? Because it sounds like that book has a bunch of bullshit in it. Yeah, coming off the Cheney-Halliburton presidency, everyone in America thought that political corruption was a non-issue.
They elected black people to Congress and the Senate and everything. What was the response from the losing whites then? Corruption!
You need to explain exactly what your point is, because it sounds like you're saying that because black people voted in the late 1800s and white people responded with claims of corruption, that therefore corruption in the Democrat party does not exist in 2016. Which would be a pretty stupid non-sequitor argument, so I'm sure that's not the one you're trying to make. You better spell it out.
So when "Corruption!" is suddenly only a problem when the mediocre White Guy wins
Oh, I see. You're assuming that the only reason people are complaining about corruption is because of Bernie Sanders. You probably think that Bernie is the only reason I'm concerned with corruption. I could point you to the essays I wrote around the election in 2012 when I refused to vote again for Obama (hey, guess what the reason was), or I could point to any list of people charting out a history of modern political corruption, but if you're already assuming that the root cause for these complaints is Bernie Fucking Sanders, then it doesn't really matter what I say, does it?
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
And Vince Foster died in Bill's bedroom while Hillary coordinated a coverup
Serious insanity in the Trumpist worldview.
The "source" is whoever passed the information on to someone else. With respect to the editorial power they hold, anyone along the way may choose to manipulate their targets.
Let's suppose for sake of discussion that Russia hired a third-party hacker to get the DNC emails. In that case, the hacker has an incentive and opportunity to select the most damaging emails to provide to his client, under the reasonable assumption that providing juicy gossip would be considered a good job, and likely to lead to more jobs in the future. The emails wouldn't need to be fabricated, but may be carefully selected to avoid internal rebuttals, for example.
Once Russia has the emails, they again have an editorial opportunity. They are the sole means by which those emails will reach the rest of the world, and they can also pick and choose which parts get released. Since Trump has promised to be a much more Russia-friendly candidate, there is again a motive to select the most damaging emails for release.
Finally the emails reach WikiLeaks, where Assange has apparently publicly stated he will try to attack Clinton's campaign. Again, being the first route for the emails to reach the masses, they hold power over the narrative. If the emails' previous custodians already used their power to manipulate the emails, there are already fewer directions the discussion can take, but they could still be reduced further.
If you want to not be manipulated, you have to consider everyone who has the opportunity to manipulate what you see, and consider their motivations. They are your sources.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Your worldview is seriously compromising your ability to think properly. I am not a Trump supporter. Between you and I, the only person exercising vivid fantasies about the situation is you.
In fact, I am on your side, though you don't know it and probably couldn't disengage yourself from the political paradigm you are addicted to long enough to make a rational decision one way or another. From your post you obviously see the political spectrum in the indoctrinated form of a two party system. You will defend your chosen party, even sacrificing reason, logic, and your own integrity to do so. You see the threat of "the other party" as so immense that you will do anything, and even worse feel justified in doing anything, to make sure they don't get power. You will also shamelessly proselytize and engage in apologetic arguments for your chosen brand of politics. Loyalty to the party is your currency, with which you buy self worth. You wager your precious time and exchange authentic self expression for politically constructed self expression. You become a programmed robot for a group of people who use you like a tool and care nothing for your existence, much less your support as long as there are enough useful idiots to vote for them when the time comes.
I challenge you to make a small tweak to your observation of American politics that will ultimately free you from giving your support to a structure that is not concerned with your best interests and not worthy of your unconditional support. You can even keep your two party paradigm. Just realize that there are two parties in the US, namely the elected, and the electorate. I dare you to reclaim your self determination. Quit being a fool for a power system that is designed to put you at the throats of your fellow American brothers and sisters. Look what it has gained us, the American people, just in this election. We have the two most polarizing and flawed candidates ever presented to the electorate. Don't blame the opposition. Blame yourself for participating in the system in such a way that you will accept a candidate like Hillary, overlook all of her flaws, keep your mouth shut, and even defend her against all comers with mudslinging attacks against imaginary opponents. Even if her campaign is paying you handsomely to troll and AstroTurf on her behalf, you deserve better than that. The same goes for Trump supporters. Trump's only advantage is that he hasn't had as much time "in the system" to rack up a litany of questionable acts, though he is catching up quickly with his propensity to piss people off when he opens his mouth.
Partisan politics make this country almost unlivable. There are innumerable party cheerleaders falling for carefully crafted wedge issues hook, line, and sinker. They buy into the party mindset and in doing so learn to hate Americans at the direction of their party leaders. Can't you see that the Machiavellian machinations of our political parties are focus-group-honed to appeal to your baser instincts? They exploit class, race, what they call wealth, sexuality, and thought to divide, and ultimately to conquer the electorate? Isn't it obvious by now that blind, devoted partisanship results in the elected dictating to their supporters in the electorate which Americans need to be watched closely, distrusted, and thwarted? The system is set up to find and exploit people who can't or won't cop to being used, who instead double down and tunnel farther into the party conditioning when challenged. Yes, that's what I said. You are being used to exploit yourself and the rest of America by a very small sect of people who do not have your or America's best interests at heart. And you love it. And it is what is killing America.
Drop the pom-poms, bro. It's obvious you can't see past them.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
Well, nice, long well stated polemic without a shred of fact but, hey, points for typing
Fact: One of two candidates will be the next President as of Jan. 5, 2017
Neither of them polls less than 15% or ever will
So, either admit that voting third party makes Trump the winner or...well, just continue your delusion that you will make reality change
You miss the point. Supporting one of candidate/party so much that you aren't willing to even discuss the the moles on the face of your favored candidate is a problem. Instead you throw mud and false accusations in response to serious discussion of the problems your candidate created. That is indicative of voluntary myopia, a chosen disassociation and disorientation to reality. Don't feel singled out. This type of thought is epidemic.
For instance: I never mentioned third party voting. You didn't even read what I said, or you can't comprehend it from behind your bunkers of self reinforcing, tail chasing, rah-rah bullshit.
What I am more concerned about than the person who is elected? If your candidate won, would you hold them accountable for their actions during their tenure, or continue to blindly support them regardless of their actions, just because they are your chosen party candidate? Based on how little of that is going around before the election and during the last presidency...well lets just say that I have serious doubts that you would.
So, the reality is that one of these fucking jokers will get elected, and the people that support them will not take them to task and hold them accountable when they do incredibly destructive things to our nation. That is a problem. Keep pointing fingers all you want. Until you learn to point them at the people who run your own party things will continue to deteriorate.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
Like I said, points for typing.,
reality is that one or the other are our only choices
Resign yourself to reality
Comey said the reason they did not prosecute her was because her action were just incompetent.
Hillary said she did not could not remember or understand the briefings she had and could not understand that the markings like (S), (C) in front of paragraphs meant the classification level and thought they were to number them. If that is not "lacking intelligence or common sense" I don't have a better example.
First of all stupidity is not a defense in a negligence offense, She signed an agreement to protect classified information in her possession from unauthorized dissemination and she failed. She was required to attend annual briefings on how to protect classified information that taught her what the (t), (s) and (c) meant so neither "I hit my head and don't remember" or "I'm stupid" or "I don't recall" doesn't apply. Comey being too corrupt or derelict or incompetent to properly and evenly enforce the law is a separate issue.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds