The Many Faces of US Politics...

[whitey]

Believe what you want

Mueller found nothing of any substance

The dossier was a complete fabrication

Trumps was illegally surveilled by rogue FBI operatives who fraudulently obtained FISA warrants

[J70]

Believe what you want

Mueller found nothing of any substance

The dossier was a complete fabrication

Trumps was illegally surveilled by rogue FBI operatives who fraudulently obtained FISA warrants

And you believe what YOU want.

I will say its hard to find anything of substance when the full power of the presidency and the ruling party is standing in your way, obstructing at every step, and the man himself wasn't even allowed to testify by his handlers because they knew he'd lie his arse off every two minutes and get done for perjury (I'll bet Bill Clinton was looking on, whistfully thinking, if only I could have gone down that road!).

Regardless of that, even if things had progressed as they should have and Trump was completely cleared (he wasn't), that does NOT mean that an investigation wasn't warranted.

[whitey]

J70

The whole lot of them are fvckin pathetic.....at this point I really don't care who gets elected (and I actually do like Uncle Joe)

How you guys can sit by and say nothing about Schiff and the stunts he has pulled is very disappointing

[dec]

The Trump campaign has upped the ante in the war against facts with "TRUTH OVER FACTS"

https://www.thetruthoverfacts.com/

[sid waddell]

WTF are you on about?

Trump's playmate girlfriend lawyer (the same girlfriend Trump's erstwhile trusted fixer, Cohen, went to prison for for campaign finance violations for buying her silence in the run-up to the election)  came out with an additional allegation on top of the credible one already in the public sphere about Kavanaugh. Of course it was news. How wouldn't it be?

As for the "Russian Collusion Delusion", I repeat:

1. the Russians WERE doing everything they could to help Trump; 2. he bent over backwards, including at the expense of his own government agencies, to side with Putin at every opportunity; 3. his campaign met with Russian representatives hoping to get dirt, while he called publicly for the Russians to release the Clinton emails; 4. they did everything they could to derail and obstruct the investigation once it got going.

And let's not forget that Trump's own justice dept hired Mueller, a man with a GOP background and solid standing across parties until he started asking awkward questions.

Barr was brought in to cut the Mueller investigation short and did so, like the dutiful corrupt fixer he is. Mueller's performance during it was f**king terrible though, the inquiry was clearly never meant to go anywhere. Even at that, what was revealed in it was a straight up resigning matter for Trump, among a long, long list of them.

Fascists like Trump deliberately engage in things that would be 100% resigning matters for anybody else - matters that would have anybody in prison - it's a demonstration of total shamelessness and a shameless grab for absolute power - to project invincibility and to make opposition give up hope of removing him.

The evidence of Trump being a Russian asset is not so much smoke as a raging fire like the one on 9/11. Believe what's in front of your eyes.

[whitey]

Why do you think Samantha Powers lied about unmasking Flynn when asked before Congress?

If her memory is that fvckin bad, she must have Alzheimer's and should be committed to a
Long term care facility

[sid waddell]

Trump says he's been taking hydroxychloroquine for a week and a half now.

I somehow doubt he has.

The point of this is to distract from crime with ludicrous spectacle, to create an alternative reality world where public debate and the chance for public debate is distorted and destroyed. This has been his daily strategy all along - a whole silo of dead cats, thrown daily.

Trump is not mentally ill. It's a very clever strategy. It's the classic tactic of a dictator, or in Trump's case a wannabe dictator - and that's exactly what he wants to be, because, like Putin, having total power is the only way he can ensure he stays out of prison.

[sid waddell]

HBO's "Kill Chain" is a very good documentary - anybody who thinks the Republicans don't have a plan to rig the election with the help of their Russian friends is deluding themselves. The machines used in US voting are hackable from outside and the Republicans have refused point blank to enact any election security measures. I think there's very reasonable grounds too to suspect the 2016 election results may have been falsified in Trump's favour.

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2020/mar/26/kill-chain-hbo-election-hacking-documentary

In the documentary Kill Chain, the weaknesses of America's basic election infrastructure are laid bare

Adrian Horton

Even as much of America grinds to a halt, coronavirus has yet to derail the date of the 2020 election. Which introduces a perhaps underestimated terror, as explained in one of the more deceptively scary documentaries to drop in recent weeks: the vulnerable voting machine. That seemingly benign piece of equipment – the hardware of American democracy – is, as several experts explain in HBO's Kill Chain: The Cyber War on America's Elections, nothing more than an obsolete computer. And these machines' vulnerabilities to hacking are "terrifying", Sarah Teale, co-director along with Simon Ardizzone and Russell Michaels, told the Guardian. America's current election infrastructure is, as Kill Chain explains, a prescription for disaster – an outdated, willfully naive system no more prepared for attack than four years ago.

Like After Truth: Disinformation and the Cost of Fake News, another HBO documentary which premiered last week and focused on the threat of disinformation on American democracy, Kill Chain re-examines foreign interference in the 2016 election with critical and scientific distance. The film follows the liabilities of the American democratic system even further than fake news, to its basic infrastructure: the machines in poll booths across the country, the very method through which votes are tallied, the databases in which voter data – name, address, eligibility – are stored.

The process of voting in the United States is idiosyncratic and often chaotic, but no matter how each polling station is managed, the vast majority rely on electronic machines produced by three companies with removable hardware such as USB flash drives or memory cards. Individual incidences of alleged voting malpractice – for example, the purge of 340,000 voters, mostly people of color, from the Georgia rolls in 2018 – are thus part of a pattern of election vulnerabilities across the country known in cyberwarfare as a kill chain, as the voting security expert and veteran hacker Harri Hursti explains in the film. Most Americans vaguely know of Russian interference in 2016, but Kill Chain offers forensics on specific events in this pattern: the scanning and examining of state election registration databases; the hacking of the Election Assistance Commission, in which an unknown Russian actor accessed and sold information from a federal database on election technology throughout the country. Teale interviews a young man in India known online as "Cyberzeist", who hacked into an Alaskan vote counting computer in 2016 and claimed to be able to alter votes and voter data.

Hursti, who is originally from Finland, has been studying weaknesses in the American election system for more than 15 years. He first appeared on HBO in 2006, in Teale's documentary Hacking Democracy; in a clip replayed in Kill Chain, a young and somewhat smug Hursti shocks the supervisor of elections in Leon county, Florida, when he easily hacks the county's Diebold voting machine with just a tampered memory card. Hursti realized then that "this is way worse than I would've ever believed", he told the Guardian. But 15 years later, little has changed; the Diebold machines are still in use in 20 states. "If somebody would try to explain to me everything I have seen and experienced and learned myself, I wouldn't believe it," Hursti said, characterizing America's election infrastructure as "ridiculously broken".

"We started pitching this film [in 2016] because nothing has really changed since 2005," Teale said. Back then, the machines' producers brushed off criticism as slander. But in 2017, Hursti could purchase an AccuVote TSx, one of the most common machines in the country, from an Ohio warehouse for $75 to test its hackability. The machine became part of the Voting Village, an initiative Hursti co-leads at the hacker conference DefCon, in which participants can attempt to hack various models of voting machines in use in the United States. In 2019's conference, all were found to be easily hackable.

"Adversaries are fast to adapt," said Hursti, who laid out the underlying issue as one of pace: "If you take the most magnificent hack you can imagine today – six months down the road, it is just a good hack. And two years later, it's just average." Voting machines, meanwhile, are kept in service for decades; a new "secure" batch purchased for $107m by the state of Georgia came installed with dead-on-arrival Windows 7, said Hursti, "so you see how hopelessly this conversation is outdated". And until recently, there were no cybersecurity experts on staff at the machines' manufacturers, an oversight Teale called "mind-blowing".

"I hope ordinary Americans will come to the understanding that if any part of the election was connected to the internet it is vulnerable, and that these machines are vulnerable to hacking," said Teale. Both Teale and Hursti are concerned with recent confidence in new measures such as ballot-marking machines or individual bar codes – both of which put yet another computer, and thus another hacking vulnerability, between the voter and the vote. "If they cannot see how they voted, if there isn't a piece of paper with that clearly on it, it can be changed," said Teale.

But Kill Chain also offers some areas of promise, especially in the form of paper ballots, which present a clear trail of evidence, and mandatory risk-limiting audits in which a random, small yet statistically significant sample of the votes are hand-counted to ensure an uncompromised process. And the film includes interviews with three senators – Democrats Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Mark Warner Virginia and Republican James Lankford of Oklahoma – who are awake to the vulnerabilities of America's elections and the risk of another attack in 2020. Klobuchar and Lankford co-sponsored the Secure Elections Act, a bipartisan bill which would require states to keep back-up paper ballots and conduct the risk-limit audit. The measure has not passed Congress; the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, a Republican from Kentucky, has refused to bring it to the floor, citing lack of need.

Both Teale and Hursti maintain that it's not all reason to despair. Teale encourages insisting on paper voting at individual polling stations and advocating for mail-in ballots. And above all, said Hursti, vote. "Voting apathy is as bad a problem – nothing in this should be discouraging you to vote." And vote all the way down the ballot, which usually gets less attention and votes and is thus easier to rig – "that's where the money and motivation for local adversaries are," said Hursti. And if you really care, get involved as a poll worker. "Right now, the population of poll workers is very old and they're not technologically savvy," he said. "They need help."

Even in the context of a pandemic, Teale said, Americans should wonder how we're going to pick who will lead the country in the next crisis. "How are we going to vote in the primaries, and how are we going to vote in November?" she said. "I think we should all be pushing on our election officials to be thinking ahead."

Kill Chain: The Cyber War on America's elections will premiere on HBO on 26 March and in the UK at a later date

[J70]

J70

The whole lot of them are fvckin pathetic.....at this point I really don't care who gets elected (and I actually do like Uncle Joe)

How you guys can sit by and say nothing about Schiff and the stunts he has pulled is very disappointing

What did Schiff supposedly do?

(honest question - I'm not really watching news these days beyond reading the latest COVID updates and reading this place now and then. Too busy with work, homeschooling and childcare. I have seen an occasional "shifty Schiff" headline, but I don't generally click on loaded bait like that)

[whitey]

J70

The whole lot of them are fvckin pathetic.....at this point I really don't care who gets elected (and I actually do like Uncle Joe)

How you guys can sit by and say nothing about Schiff and the stunts he has pulled is very disappointing

What did Schiff supposedly do?

(honest question - I'm not really watching news these days beyond reading the latest COVID updates and reading this place now and then. Too busy with work, homeschooling and childcare. I have seen an occasional "shifty Schiff" headline, but I don't generally click on loaded bait like that)

All the Adam Schiff Transcripts
Newly released documents show he knew all along that there was no proof of Russia-Trump collusion.

By The Editorial Board
May 12, 2020 7:29 pm ET
Rep. Adam Schiff on Jan. 28.
Rep. Adam Schiff on Jan. 28.
PHOTO: JACQUELYN MARTIN/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Americans expect that politicians will lie, but sometimes the examples are so brazen that they deserve special notice. Newly released Congressional testimony shows that Adam Schiff spread falsehoods shamelessly about Russia and Donald Trump for three years even as his own committee gathered contrary evidence.

The House Intelligence Committee last week released 57 transcripts of interviews it conducted in its investigation into Russia's meddling in the 2016 election. The committee probe started in January 2017 under then-Chair Devin Nunes and concluded in March 2018 with a report finding no evidence that the Trump campaign conspired with the Kremlin. Most of the transcripts were ready for release long ago, but Mr. Schiff oddly refused to release them after he became chairman in 2019. He only released them last week when the White House threatened to do it first.

Now we know why. From the earliest days of the collusion narrative, Mr. Schiff insisted that he had evidence proving the plot. In March 2017 on MSNBC, Mr. Schiff teased that he couldn't "go into particulars, but there is more than circumstantial evidence now."

In December 2017 he told CNN that collusion was a fact: "The Russians offered help, the campaign accepted help. The Russians gave help and the President made full use of that help." In April 2018, Mr. Schiff released his response to Mr. Nunes's report, stating that its finding of no collusion "was unsupported by the facts and the investigative record."

None of this was true, and Mr. Schiff knew it. In July 2017, here's what former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told Mr. Schiff and his colleagues: "I never saw any direct empirical evidence that the Trump campaign or someone in it was plotting/conspiring with the Russians to meddle with the election." Three months later, former Obama Attorney General Loretta Lynch agreed that while she'd seen "concerning" information, "I don't recall anything being briefed up to me." Former Deputy AG Sally Yates concurred several weeks later: "We were at the fact-gathering stage here, not the conclusion stage."

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The same goes for the FBI agents who started the collusion probe in 2016. Most remarkable, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe admitted the bureau's reason for opening the case was nonsense. Asked in December 2017 why the FBI obtained a secret surveillance warrant on former Trump aide Carter Page, rather than on George Papadopoulos (whose casual conversation with a foreign diplomat was the catalyst for the probe), Mr. McCabe responded: "Papadopoulos' comment didn't particularly indicate that he was the person that had had—that was interacting with the Russians." No one else was either.

On it went, a parade of former Obama officials who declared under oath they'd seen no evidence of collusion or conspiracy—Susan Rice, Ben Rhodes, Samantha Power. Interviews with Trump campaign or Administration officials also yielded no collusion evidence. Mr. Schiff had access to these transcripts even as he claimed he had "ample" proof of collusion and wrote his false report.

He's still making it up. Last week he said the transcripts contain "evidence of the Trump campaign's efforts to invite, make use of, and cover up Russia's help in the 2016 presidential election."

The question we'd ask our friends in the media is when are they going to stop playing the fool by putting him on the air? Mr. Schiff is a powerful figure with access to secrets that the rest of us don't have and can't check. He misled the country repeatedly on an issue that consumed American politics.

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President Trump often spreads falsehoods and invents facts, but at least he's paid a price for it in media criticism and public mistrust. An industry of media fact checkers is dedicated to parsing his every word. As for Mr. Schiff, no one should ever believe another word he says.

[sid waddell]

That's intriguing. I wonder what the advertisements were?

I suppose they're different for each person based on the sort of pages the person has been clicking into. So in the eejit above's case they were likely ads for Alex Jones's health supplements which cure COVID 19, containing Jones's sooper dooper patented nanosilver™.

[whitey]

J70-whether you agree or disagree with the WJ editorial board, the question is, why didn't he release them and only did so when the White House threatened to do so?

[sid waddell]

What did Schiff supposedly do?

Schiffgate.

[Eamonnca1]

Ketchup is one of the few useful things that America has given the world.

Au contraire:

In the 17th century, the Chinese mixed pickled fish and spices and called it (in the Amoy dialect) kôe-chiap or kê-chiap (鮭汁, Mandarin Chinese guī zhī, Cantonese gwai1 zap1) meaning the brine of pickled fish (鮭, salmon; 汁, juice) or shellfish.[7][8] By the early 18th century, the table sauce had arrived in the Malay states (present day Malaysia and Singapore), where English colonists first tasted it. The Malaysian-Malay word for the sauce was kicap or kecap (pronounced [kɛt͡ʃap]). That word evolved into the English word "ketchup".[9] English settlers took ketchup with them to the American colonies.

[J70]

J70-whether you agree or disagree with the WJ editorial board, the question is, why didn't he release them and only did so when the White House threatened to do so?

No idea, but he should obviously answer and if the evidence he claims exists does exist, then he should release it through or to the appropriate channels.