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Michael Cohen Says He Tried To Rig Online Polls 'at the Direction' of Donald Trump (cnbc.com)
Dan Mangan, writing for CNBC: President Donald Trump's former personal lawyer and longtime fixer Michael Cohen on Thursday said he tried to rig online polls -- including one conducted by CNBC -- "at the direction and for the sole benefit of" Trump when he was thinking about making a run for the White House. "I truly regret my blind loyalty to a man who doesn't deserve it," Cohen said in a tweet copping to the electronic chicanery to have Trump's name rank higher in online polls than it otherwise would have.
Cohen's admission came shortly after The Wall Street Journal published a story detailing how he retained an information technology company to manipulate a 2014 CNBC online poll identifying the nation's top 100 business leaders to bolster Trump's chances of making that list. That effort failed. And Trump himself fumed in 2014 on Twitter about his absence from CNBC's poll results.
Cohen's admission came shortly after The Wall Street Journal published a story detailing how he retained an information technology company to manipulate a 2014 CNBC online poll identifying the nation's top 100 business leaders to bolster Trump's chances of making that list. That effort failed. And Trump himself fumed in 2014 on Twitter about his absence from CNBC's poll results.
Online polls (and related things like reviews/Yelp ratings etc) have been rigged so often and so easily since the dawn of the internet, the only surprising news here is that Cohen/Trump actually FAILED AT IT.
My favorite part of this story is that Cohen paid a guy who was recommended to him by Jerry Falwell Jr, to create a social media campaign called, "Women for Cohen", that promoted how sexy he was, like sexier than "Andy Garcia in The Godfather". It contained photos of Trump and Cohen together with the caption, "Two Handsome Men" and a photo of Cohen with Diamond & Silk (who are a pro-Trump minstrel show) captioned, "Look at that stud!"
https://www.usatoday.com/story...
You gotta admit, Trump only surrounds himself with the best people.
Oh, and since Jerry Falwell Jr's name is in this story, it's worth mentioning that Jerry Falwell Jr and his wife met an attractive pool boy while on vacation in Miami and ended up giving him $1.8 million for...something.
https://www.miaminewtimes.com/...
Part of me is really gonna miss Trump when he's gone. You gotta admit, he's done the "circuses" part of "bread and circuses" better than any president since WWII. You got your porn stars, you got your Putin, you got your Rudy Giuliani (who fucked his cousin), you got your evangelical leaders w/ pool boys, you got your Women for Cohen. Haberders. I don't know how I'm gonna be entertained when Trump is gone.
You are welcome on my lawn.
You are an idiot if you think on-line polls are accurate. Most on-line polls simply record the actions of spam bots.
I'm struggling to find the technical aspect of this. Because the polls he was trying to rig are online? Or is this nothing more than orange-tinged clickbait?
The technical aspects of this are basically what you think. Asking for some IT guy to create a way to click though online polls to skew them in the way that you want.
What escapes me is the importance of this revelation. Online polls are about as unscientific and irrelevant as you can get in the polling world. They basically are like the junk science of perpetual motion or energy from nothing of the polling world. Nobody but political punditry pay attention to their results and then only when they support their political ideas, otherwise nobody looks at the results or takes them seriously.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Paying for it with campaign donations is what constitutes the felony.
What escapes me is the importance of this revelation.
Really the humor of it. We've got someone with very high name recognition, who tries to create an image as a savvy businessman, literally hiring a company for a sole purpose of getting him a place on the top 100 business leaders, and he failed. That's pretty funny.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Cohen's lied before and you think NOW he's telling the gospel truth?
Well, he does have a motive to say whatever he thinks will keep himself out of prison. But he is a lawyer, and they have mandatory classes on ethics, so I think we can trust him.
1) Understand what polling is and how it works before saying "polls mean nothing". The actual election itself was a poll. The main difference between the election and the pre-election polls was that the election included the entire sample set of people whose votes were actually counted, whereas a pre-election poll, by necessity, cannot know whether any given voter will actually show up on election day, and even if they could predict that perfectly, they have a margin of error regarding whether or not their MUCH smaller sample size is adequately representative of the population of voters on election day.
2) In 2016, the election hinged on a few states where Trump won by very small margins. Margins much smaller than the margin of error in pre-election polls.
3) It is possible that a) late-breaking events or b) the polls themselves altered the behavior of voters when it came time to vote on election day. People can change their minds about who they will vote for or their likelihood of voting. Events that happen after a pre-election poll cannot be retroactively fitted into existing poll results. People deciding that the election is a foregone conclusion and staying home is also difficult to incorporate. People deciding that they simply cannot stand the projected result is the other side of that coin. Constant exposure to polling information is demotivating to the projected winner's supporters and motivating to the supporters of opponents.
4) If the election for president was strictly popular vote, Hillary would have won easily and the polls would have been correct. Instead, polling for who is going to win the office of president is complicated by the fact that you really need to model 50 individual elections and then combine the results. See #2.
5) For the efficacy of polls, you cannot cherry-pick your sample like that and say the 2016 prediction was wrong, therefore polls mean nothing. That is no more insightful than saying that the 2012 predictions were all accurate therefore polls never lie.
6) Different polls have different reliability levels. Online polls of the sort that the President apparently sought to cheat on have some of the worst reliability levels you can get. Online polls have the abysmal selection bias, among other problems. And since his target audience is filled with people who discount science when it comes to things like evolution and climate change, whose education in mathematics, social science, and statistics is almost certainly lacking... it might be useful for him to have polls he cheated on to point to as a counter-point to those produced by the "fake news" folks. Then the narrative becomes "fake news trying to prevent Trump win with fake polls, don't let that happen! The real polls show Trump can win!" Competing polls results can heighten the effects mentioned in #3, to emphasize an "us vs. them" narrative.
I do not have a signature
No, there just aren't enough idiots in US to elect Trump, so significant number of non-idiots voted for him. You need to understand why non-idiots voted for him instead of just calling them idiots or this will happen again.
Voting for someone is a value judgment. It is very likely that most Trump voters could see all the things you listed yet chose to vote for him despite that. This means some other value was a higher priority. If you can understand what that other value is, you can understand why Trump was elected. Outright dismissing that there could be such value would just lead to a second term.
but it gives an echo chamber something to report on. This is how the sausage is made:
1. Commission an online poll.
2. Game said poll.
3. Have sites you own pick up the story of you "winning" the poll.
4. Sites you don't own but who are sympathetic with your cause pick up the news stories you wrote based on those faked polls.
5. Eventually if you get enough faked polls and matching stories mass media (Fox, CNN,etc) pick up on them and report them with an itty bitty * to say these numbers aren't scientific.
This works because Americans don't value news and so they don't pay much for it, so there's heavy pressure to keep costs down and overworked journalists and editors will run anything that gets eyeballs. If we paid more for news and had more journalists as a result they'd fact check and find the base polls were bullshit. But a deadline's a deadline and a story's a story as long as it gets those eyeballs on it.
This is how you manipulate the institution of media to do bad things.
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>The FBI wanted to correct what they felt was a mistake by the American people, and began to work on a soft coupe
That's not a take, that's Trumpist propaganda. That's the kind of thing that liars like Hannity feed to the rubes. It may even be projection about a coup enabled by foreign actors, installing a failed businessman as President.
Cohen's lied before and you think NOW he's telling the gospel truth?
I agree, we shouldn't just trust Michael Cohen at his word. We should look at the evidence and base it on that. The evidence says he hired the firm he is claiming he hired. In fact the firm is saying he didn't pay them the full amount, which means they admit they did the work as well. Of course to know that you would have to go beyond the headline and care enough to reads the story.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
What I find both astonishing and scary is all the GOPers chirping "So, what LAWS were broken?".... Really, your bar for the leader of the "civilized" world is that low? Don't we deserve better?
That's the first time I've heard anyone make the accusation that state borders are gerrymandered. And I rather doubt that was actually your intent.
Quick civics lesson: Virtually all electors cast their vote based on who won the popular vote in their state. Any gerrymandering (redrawing of voting boundaries) would require redrawing interstate borders - which I don't believe has ever happened to a state after it has joined the union.
Now, the electoral college *is* set up so that each state gets as many electoral votes as it has congressional representatives, which does mean that some citizen's vote counts for more than others, the same way some citizens get more congressional representation, since states get two senators each, regardless of population. And it was set up that way for a reason - so that the small, densely-populated states couldn't just ignore the large rural ones. Without that, the large rural states would have had little incentive to join the nation in the first place. Who would want to be the farming-bitch for the cities, with little political power?
We could change the laws for how states get federal representation - but to do so we'd need a constitutional amendment to be ratified by all those states that would be delegated to political bitch status - and they'd have to be stupid to support that.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
The problem is, he hasn't weakened the country.
Except by alienating our allies, randomly engaging in mindless economic and military stratagem, and destroying a lot of moral credibility.
We have a stronger economy, we are checking NoKo, China, and Iran.
Except for the need to bailout agriculture, fake numbers and how neither North Korea or Iran were actual threats and how China is blowing us off.
Oh, and illegals, he is struggling to fend them off, but no one disagrees that they drain our entitlement coffers. Every administration since Reagan has said so.
Actually for the Social Security coffers, they have contributed a surplus and the most expensive drain is on wasteful bailouts for corporations.
They'll make up anything to do that.
Well then it's a good thing we follow the rule of law and have things like trials. But, go on, tell me again how the entire FBI functions as a single entity with one hive-mind.
get the Russians to leak it to the press.
Why would the Russians want to damage their guy? Do you understand how little the Russians like the Clintons? You understand that they were actively working against Hillary, right? But, they're going to do something to damage Trump? And you believe that? Is that the current state of cognitive dissonance in the Trump camp regarding the investigations? Is the current line that Russia was now working AGAINST Trump instead of for him? Do you guys do any actual training for those kinds of mental gymnastics or do you just kind of wing it?
They took down Nixon, and apparently think they can get rid of any democratically elected president they don't like.
Holy shit, I think this is the first time I've seen the "Nixon was innocent" argument. If nothing else, you guys are at least amusing.
I've heard of revisionist history, but holy fuck. Russia was working against Trump? Nixon was innocent? Look at how far you have to go to get to a place where all of these pieces of evidence that you don't like start to line up with your chosen narrative. This is absurd. You're jumping through more hoops than Giuliani trying to explain the campaign's involvement with Russia.
There was NO CONTACT!
OK, there was contact, but it wasn't planned!
OK, it was planned, but not about the campaign!
OK, it was about the campaign, but it wasn't meaningful! And there was another meeting.
Collusion isn't even a crime!
You can't collude with someone you don't personally know!
OK, maybe SOMEONE colluded, but it wasn't Trump!
Oh, but yeah, sure, the ENTIRE FBI is corrupt. OK, yeah, sure buddy. It's not your guy who is an amazingly incompetent dickhead, no it's the entire federal law enforcement agency which is breaking the law and being unconstitutional. You know, literally the two things that they're there to specifically not do.
Time to defund the FBI and bar all members from any future government job.
With all due respect, it's time for you to stop talking like you've got the pulse of "real Americans." The FBI does a fine job. The FBI is staffed with many, many people who love and care about the country and have made it their life's work to help the country. I believe that anyone who goes out of their way to make it seem like the majority of government workers have some hidden, secret agenda is probably full to the tipping point with bullshit. Sorry pal, that argument doesn't pass the smell test. You may believe the turds that fall out of the president's mouth, but let me assure you that you are in a very small majority with regard to that. The majority of the country still believes that the people working in the government - REGARDLESS OF THEIR POLITICAL BELIEFS - are there because they love the country and want to help it, not damage it. Trying to act like the literal federal law enforcement agency would go against the Constitution and break the law is laughably absurd, and it says very bad things about your though process and where you get your information from.
You know what? Don't take my word for it. How strong are your convictions? Are you just a big talker or do you back it up? Because I would encourage you, whole-heartedly, to find the bars around your local FBI office and go in and start telling everyone how all FBI agents are corrupt and hate the country. Go ahead, let me know how that works out for you.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
That's easy: Tribalism. I remember someone saying that the extraordinary thing about the election was that the result was so ordinary. People voted along party lines like they always had.
When a belief becomes a part of your identity, facts no longer matter. Information does change your factual beliefs but not your attitude/position in general. The brain also does motivated reasoning and will find counterarguments for any inconvenient facts. If Trump is caught lying he's not an immoral liar, he's a strategic smart guy playing the opposition etc.
It is important to note this is a universal feature of all humans. We all do top down motivated reasoning. Republicans are not idiots, they just happened to be republicans when an idiot was elected president. It can, and does happen to all of us.
This program explains some of the psychology behind it:
https://youarenotsosmart.com/2...
Not even slightly true. The gap between CNN and Fox polling is really very narrow. That's because they're both making a good-faith effort to be at least slightly scientific.
For instance, on December 9-11, Fox polled Trump's approval ratings at 46%. That same week, NBC/WSJ polled it at 43%. The next poll with CNN's name on it was Jan 10-11 - 3 weeks into the shutdown - when CNN put it at 37%. Allowing for margins of error and base drift (which has gone against Trump during the shutdown), those are pretty damn' close.
See here for a comprehensive list.
Let me see if I've got this straight. Being a retard, it sometimes takes me a little longer than most of my peers to achieve a working understanding of such matters. You voted to elect the Joker to the office of President of the United States, but I'm the "retard."
Is that basically the size of it?
Aaaand that's why he's so seriously considered invading Iran, North Korea, and fucking Venezuela that he's had the military put together plans for him?
I've said it before and I'll say it again, Trump would stumble into more wars than Hillary would enter on purpose, and I think it's been only luck and less-hot heads surrounding him that have prevented it. Now the less-hot heads are gone, and who knows when the luck will run out...
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Ah, the old "He's not a moron, he's just doing a really good job of pretending to be one for strategic reasons" argument. Well if he's pretending, he's really doing an amazing job:
https://www.apnews.com/a3309c4...
Although I don't see any positive results from doing so. He may have come close to bringing NK to the table but instead he snatched defeat from the jaws of victory:
https://nationalpost.com/opini...
If you think that North Korea has changed course at all since Trump took power, then they've pulled the wool over your eyes just like Trump's:
https://www.theatlantic.com/in...
Also while pulling out of Syria was not a bad idea, the way he chose to announce it, as a surprise to everyone except himself, was idiotic:
https://www.theguardian.com/us...
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel