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Facebook Will Share Copies of Political Ads Purchased by Russian Sources With the US Congress (recode.net)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Facebook will turn over copies of political ads purchased by Russian sources to congressional lawmakers, who are investigating the country's potential interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Initially, Facebook had only released those ads -- 3,000 of them, valued at about $100,000 -- to Robert Mueller, the former FBI director who is spearheading the government's probe into Russia's actions. Facebook had withheld those details from House and Senate leaders, citing privacy concerns. But the move drew sharp rebukes from the likes of Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, who has charged in recent days that Facebook may not have done enough to scan its systems for potential Russian influence and to ensure that such foreign purchases -- otherwise illegal under U.S. law -- don't happen again. "After an extensive legal and policy review, today we are announcing that we will also share these ads with congressional investigators," wrote Colin Stretch, the company's general counsel. "We believe it is vitally important that government authorities have the information they need to deliver to the public a full assessment of what happened in the 2016 election."
Mostly because the accusations against Hillary turned out to be bullshit as the investigation showed.
Which ones? The ones where the FBI plainly spelled out the illegal things she did and directly told you that anyone else would have faced legal jeopardy for the same acts? The ones where all of her staff had to be offered immunity deals before they would even talk about it? The ones where the simply broke federal law at numerous levels and looked you in the eye and lied about (and still does to this day), but assures us that her husband's private meeting with the chief law enforcement officer who would be tasked with indicting her, and who then had to recuse herself, didn't have any impact at all? Gotcha.
You're confusing "got away with it" with "didn't do it."
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Hillary and her supporters spent an estimated $1.2 Billion, roughly twice what Trump spent. And she lost. And she blames the Ruskies for her loss. Seriously?
The FBI said, "We don't think we can prosecute her because we don't think we can show that she broke the law as the law is written."
What Comey actually said:
"Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case."
That's something VERY different.
Death pangs of an elite? Are you seriously saying that Trump is not himself part of that very elite himself?
This idea that a millionaire who appointed numerous wall street people to his cabinet, and is doing his best to help the rich get tax cuts and further the benefit of large corporations is baffling to me. And before you start bashing me as a Hillary supporter, I'm not even American, and I think Hillary was an awful candidates that the democrats should have never ran. But honestly, the fact that this idea that Trump is somehow separate from, or against 'the elites' is without any basis in reality. He's a different breed of elite than Washington has typically seen in power, but he is still most certainly a member of the elite himself.
Look at how oligarchies are born. It doesn't matter if they're right-wing oligarchies like in Russia, or left-wing oligarchies like in Venezuela, the basic formula is always pretty much the same: a political movement is born, lead by a strongman who most often is a part of the wealthy elite himself. This man then declares to everyone that corruption and greed have ruined everything and that he and only he can save the people from these corrupt elites. This is then used as a reason to purge the major institutions of ideological opponents who're then replaced with a more loyal group of people, often from the close circle of the man himself. This is usually followed by the stripping of the parliament of any de-facto power, and the manning of all relevant courts with judges loyal to the party.
The end result of such movements is pretty much always worse off for the people because of course they never wanted to get rid of the elites, or the corruption, they just wanted to overthrow the elites and take their place. Venezuela has more oil than saudi-arabia but its economy is now below Zimbabwe because what Chavez created and what Maduro has continued is a system so thoroughly corrupt that billions and billions have been shoveled into the back pockets of the elites while the people are now starving. Yet they still claim that they're 'continuing the revolution for the Venezuelan people', and who do they blame on this issue that's entirely of their own creation? 'The elites' of the US and EU, without whom, according to Maduro Venezuela would be prosperous.
As I said this is not a left-right -thing. This is a liberal vs. authoritarian thing. Russia has exactly the same deal going on, where Putin has consolidated all the power to himself and his close group of allies and divided the massive fortunes of his country's raw materials to the select few and shut down any and all opposition by painting it as just malicious 'western propaganda' that seeks to destroy Russia.
What's scary to me is that traditionally Americans have been good at spotting this development when it happens in other countries, even at times supporting it covertly or openly when the new oligarchy is more pro-US than the old. But now that it looks like the exact same deal is staring in your own country, out in broad daylight, somehow myopia sets in and people fall right for it just because they dislike the status quo so much. Traditionally the thing that has kept the US resilient against such movements is the strength of American institutions and the separation of powers that has been able to keep the president in check but Trump is already hard at work at discrediting and attacking all of those institutions: the courts, the media, the FBI and so on. I still personally want to believe that the institutions will withstand these blows and america will not turn the way of Russia or Turkey because I believe there's a large enough segment of intelligent Americans who will
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead