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by Grizzly » Thu Apr 11, 2019 1:33 am
Michael Tracey thanking #Russiagate skeptics on a recent episode of Jimmy Dore
by alloneword » Thu Apr 11, 2019 3:48 am
Grizzly » Thu Apr 11, 2019 5:33 am wrote:Michael Tracey thanking #Russiagate skeptics on a recent episode of Jimmy Dore
Can someone post a link to this please? I can't find it on his youtubes... I’m trying to catch up, ...
by JackRiddler » Thu Apr 11, 2019 5:54 am
Wombaticus Rex » Thu Apr 11, 2019 12:00 am wrote:I do hope someone leaks the unredacted report soon. The results would likely be a bipartisan bloodbath.
DC corruption is systemic and decades-old -- trying to frame Trump as a unique case, and breaking the law to do it, was pure hubris.
Then again, that's the Obama Administration in a nutshell: pure hubris.
by Wombaticus Rex » Thu Apr 11, 2019 11:24 am
by Grizzly » Thu Apr 11, 2019 11:58 am
by Elvis » Thu Apr 11, 2019 3:52 pm
by stickdog99 » Fri Apr 12, 2019 10:32 pm
liminalOyster » 11 Apr 2019 05:01 wrote:Russian trolls are weaponizing social media to spread misinformation in the US about vaccines
by liminalOyster » Fri Apr 12, 2019 11:01 pm
New data suggests Russians targeted Bernie Sanders voters to help elect Trump
Clemson researchers find thousands of Russian tweets urging Sanders supporters not to vote for Hillary Clinton
IGOR DERYSH
APRIL 12, 2019 8:00PM (UTC)
Russia’s effort to target Bernie Sanders supporters after the 2016 primaries in a bid to help swing the election to Donald Trump was more “central” to their strategy than previously known, according to an analysis by researchers at Clemson University.
The researchers analyzed English-language tweets originating from Russia, many as part of the country’s effort to influence the 2016 election, and found that the targeting of Sanders supporters was “central” to their strategy, the Washington Post reports.
It’s impossible to say how many tweets targeted Sanders supporters without mentioning his name, but researchers found that around 9,000 Russian-sourced tweets used the word “Bernie.” The tweets were “liked” 59,281 times and retweeted 61,804 times. Thousands of other tweets were also targeted at Sanders supporters in an attempt to dissuade them from backing Hillary Clinton but did not mention Sanders by name.
“I think there is no question that Sanders was central to their strategy. He was clearly used as a mechanism to decrease voter turnout for Hillary Clinton,” Clemson communications professor Darren Linvill told the Post, adding that the analysis shows the targeted tweets came at a “ higher volume than people thought.”
Many of the tweets were aimed at disillusioned Sanders supporters who believed he was treated unfairly by the Democratic Party. Other tweets simply disparaged Clinton.
“Conscious Bernie Sanders supporters already moving towards the best candidate Trump! #Feel the Bern #Vote Trump 2016,” said a tweet by an account with the name “Red Louisiana News,” that was actually operated from Russia.
“#BlackMenForBernie Leader Switches to Trump! I will Never Vote for Hillary, Welcome aboard the Trump Train,” said a tweet by a purported "Southern, Conservative Pro God, Anti Racism" Twitter user from Texas with 72,121 followers that was actually operated from Russia.
Special counsel Robert Mueller’s team said in an indictment last year that workers at a Russian organization called the Internet Research Agency were instructed to “use any opportunity to criticize Hillary and the rest (except Sanders and Trump — we support them).”
The effort to target Sanders supporters significantly increased after WikiLeaks released emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee, some of which appeared to suggest the primary process was tilted toward Clinton.
Linvill said that Russia viewed Sanders as “just a tool,” like Green Party candidate Jill Stein.
“He is a wedge to drive into the Democratic Party,” Livill told the Post.
Though it’s impossible to know what impact the strategy had on the 2016 general election, if any, an Ohio University survey seeking to learn how fake news affected the 2016 race found that the strategy may have hurt Clinton’s turnout, according to the Post. The analysis found that a surprising number of people said they believed demonstrably false news stories. Researchers determined that “belief in these fake news stories is very strongly linked to defection from the Democratic ticket by 2012 Obama voters.”
A YouGov poll found that just 77 percent of voters who backed President Obama in 2012 voted for Clinton in 2016. Ten percent of the Obama voters surveyed backed Trump, 4 percent voted for third-party candidates, and 8 percent did not vote.
Sanders disavowed Russia’s efforts in 2016 and actively campaigned for Clinton. But a former senior Clinton campaign official told the Post Friday that there is still bitterness toward Sanders in the party because some believe he “could have done more” to lower tensions between his supporters and Clinton’s base.
Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill told the Post that it was imperative in 2020 for “everyone else, especially Democratic candidates, to work together and support each other to defend against these threats.”
IGOR DERYSH
Igor Derysh is a New York-based political writer whose work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Boston Herald and Baltimore Sun.
https://www.salon.com/2019/04/12/new-da ... ect-trump/
by JackRiddler » Sat Apr 13, 2019 2:40 am
by Belligerent Savant » Sat Apr 13, 2019 12:01 pm
Here are the three lines of excuse and denial currently being fired off by diehard Russiagaters in their fighting retreat, and my responses to them.
1. The Mueller Report is irrelevant, anyhow. ‘Cause either A) Per Congressional blowhard Adam Schiff: There already “is direct evidence” proving Trump-Russia collusion, dating from before the Mueller Investigation, so who cares what that doesn’t find; or B) (My personal favorite) Per former prosecutor and CNN legal expert Renato Mariotti: Of course there is no evidence of Trump-Russia collusion, and it’s “your fault” for letting Trump fool you into thinking Mueller’s job was to find it. (The Mueller “collusion” investigation was a red herring orchestrated/promoted by Trump! I cannot make this up.)
This is, of course, the weakest volley. It’s absurd, patent bad faith, for Russiagaters to pretend that they knew, thought, or suggested the Mueller investigation was irrelevant. It is they who have been insisting that the integrity and super-sleuthiness of the “revered” Robert Mueller himself was the thing that would nail Donald Trump for Russian collusion. To now deny that any of that was important only acknowledges how thoroughly they have been fooling the American people and/or themselves for two years. Either Adam Schiff had the goods on Trump’s traitorous Russian collusion two years ago, in which case he’s got a lot of explaining to do about why he’s been stringing us along with Mueller, or Schiff is just bluffing. Place your bets.
2. The Mueller Report didn’t exonerate Trump entirely. It was agnostic about whether Trump was guilty of “obstruction of justice,” and there are probably many nasty things in the report that may not be provably criminal, but nonetheless demonstrate what a slimeball Trump is.
No, Russiagaters will not get away with denying that the core purpose of the Mueller investigation was to prove Trump’s traitorous relation to Vladimir Putin and the Russian government, which helped him win the 2016 election. They will not get away with denying that, if the Mueller investigation failed to prove that, it failed in its main purpose, as they constantly defined and reinforced it, with table-pounding, hyperventilating, and—a few days ago!—disco-dancing to “the hymnal.”
They will not get away with trying to appropriate, as if it were their point all along, what the left critics of Russiagate have been saying for two+ years—that Donald Trump is a slimeball grifter whose culpability for politically substantive and probably legally actionable crimes and misdemeanors should not be hard to establish, without reverting to the absurd accusation that he’s a Russian agent.
These are the left critics of Russiagate and Trump, whom Russiagaters deliberately excluded from all their media platforms, in order to make it seem that only right-wing Trump supporters could be skeptical of Russiagate—the left critics Russiagaters then excoriated as ”Trump enablers” and “Putin apologists” for speaking on the only media platforms that would host them. Among them, Glenn Greenwald and Aaron Maté (who just deservedly won the I.F. Stone prize for his Russiagate coverage) were the most prominent, but many others, including me, made this point week after week (Brian Becker, Dave Lindorff, Dan Kovalik, Daniel Lazare, Ted Rall, to name a few). As I put it in an essay last year: “There are a thousand reasons to criticize Donald Trump…That Donald Trump is a Russian agent is not one of them. There are a number of very good justifications for seeking his impeachment…That he is a Kremlin agent is not one of them.”
So, it’s particularly slimy for Russiagaters to slip into the position that we Russiagate skeptics have been enunciating, and they have been excluding, for two years, without acknowledging that we were right and they were wrong and accounting for their effort to edit us out.
3. But we haven’t seen the whole Mueller Report! Barr may be fooling us! Mueller’s own team says so! You are now doing what you accused us of doing for two years—abandoning proper skepticism about Republicans like Barr and even Mueller (Yup. He’s a suspicious Republican now!), and assuming a final result we have not yet seen.
This is the one the Russiagaters like the most. Gotcha with your own logic!
Well, let’s first of all thank those who are saying this for, again, recognizing that we Russiagate critics had the right attitude toward such an investigation: cautious skepticism as opposed to false certainty. And let’s linger for a moment or more on how belated that recognition is and what its delay cost.
But let’s also recognize that what’s being expressed here is the last-minute hope on the part of the Russiagaters that the Mueller report actually does contain dispositive evidence of Trump’s treasonous Russian collusion. Because, again, that is the core accusation that hopeful Russiagaters are still singing about, and nobody ever argued that evidence of other hijinks was unlikely.
Well, that hope can only be realized if one or both of the following are true: 1) Barr’s quotes from the report exonerating Trump of collusion are complete fabrications, or 2) Mueller both wrote those words even though they contradict the substance of his own report and declined to indict a single U.S. person for such “collusion” even though he could have.
...
There will be endless leaks, and interpretations of leaks, and arguments about the interpretations of leaks based on speculation about what’s still hidden. The Mueller Investigation has morphed into the Mueller Report, a hermeneutical exercise that will go on forever.
The Mueller Investigation never happened and will never end.
It wasn’t an investigation. It was/is an act of political theater, staged in an ongoing dramatic festival where, increasingly, litigation substitutes for politics. Neither party has anything of real, lasting, positive political substance to offer, and each finds itself in power only because it conned the electorate into thinking it offered something new. That results in every politician being vulnerable, but to a politically vacuous opposition that can only mount its attacks on largely politically irrelevant, often impossible to adjudicate, legalistic or moralistic grounds. Prosecutorial inquiry becomes a substitute for substantive political challenge.
It’s the template that was established by the Republicans against Bill Clinton, has been adapted by the Democrats for Trump and Russiagate, and will be ceaselessly repeated.
...
Neither party really wants, or knows how, to engage in a sustained, principled debate on substantive political issues—things like universal-coverage, single-payer health insurance, a job guarantee, a radical reduction of the military budget, an end to imperialist intervention, increasing taxes on the wealthy and lowering them for working people, a break from the “overwhelming” and destructive influence of Zionism, to name a few of the policies the Democratic congressional leadership could have insisted on “investigating” over the last two years..
Instead, both parties’ political campaigns rely on otherizing appeals based on superficial identity politics (white-affirmative on the one hand, POC-affirmative on the other) and, mainly, on bashing the other party for all the problems it ignored or exacerbated, and all the terrible policies it enacted, when it was in power—and for the version of superficial, otherizing identity politics it supposedly based those policies on (the real determinants of class power remaining invisible). What both parties know how and will continue to do is mount hypocritical legalistic and moralistic “investigations” of illegal campaign contributions, support from foreign governments, teenage make-out sessions, personal-space violations, et. al., that they are just “shocked, shocked” about.
It’s Investigation Nation. Fake politics in the simulacrum of a democratic polity. Indeed, someone, of some political perspicuity, might just notice, if only for a flash, that the people who do pretty well politically are often the ones who frankly don’t give a crap about all that. Maybe because they’re talking to people who don’t give a crap about all that. But we wouldn’t want to confuse ourselves thinking on that for too long.
...
the Democratic establishment’s’ main goal throughout this was not to “get” Trump, but to channel its own voters’ disgust with him into support for some halcyon, liberal, status quo ante-Trump, and away from left demands for a radical change to the social, economic, and political conditions that produced him and his clueless establishment opponent in 2016. The Democrats’ goal was, and is, not to defeat Trump, but to stave off the left.
What they are doing with the Mueller Investigation/Russiagate is what they did in the primaries in 2016: Then, they deliberately promoted Trump as an opponent, while working assiduously to cheat their own leftist candidate; now, they gin up a fictional spy story whose inevitable collapse helps Trump, but on which they will double down, in order to continue branding “divisive” leftists who challenge any return to their version of status-quo normalcy as the Kremlin’s “useful idiots.”
The Democrats’ main goal in all this is not to impeach, or stop the re-election of, Donald Trump; it’s to prevent the nomination and election of Bernie Sanders, or anyone like him.
by liminalOyster » Sat Apr 13, 2019 12:22 pm
JackRiddler » Sat Apr 13, 2019 2:40 am wrote:.
liminal, why are you carpet bombing us with such discouraging examples of man's inhumanity to elementary reason?
.
by JackRiddler » Sat Apr 13, 2019 1:37 pm
liminalOyster » Sat Apr 13, 2019 11:22 am wrote:JackRiddler » Sat Apr 13, 2019 2:40 am wrote:.
liminal, why are you carpet bombing us with such discouraging examples of man's inhumanity to elementary reason?
.
Sorry Jack. I feel like we're in the fruition stage of the experiment where all the desired associations are now being tested for viability. Sort of like the reliable cheese-reward has been removed and now we get to see if the mouse still navigates the maze. Looking good,
Well, some of these are relatively unimportant, and therefore annoying to see, since they are no less disgusting for it. But the last one especially was relevant. by liminalOyster » Sat Apr 13, 2019 1:49 pm
by JackRiddler » Sat Apr 13, 2019 2:40 pm
These are the left critics of Russiagate and Trump, whom Russiagaters deliberately excluded from all their media platforms, in order to make it seem that only right-wing Trump supporters could be skeptical of Russiagate—the left critics Russiagaters then excoriated as ”Trump enablers” and “Putin apologists” for speaking on the only media platforms that would host them... As I put it in an essay last year: “There are a thousand reasons to criticize Donald Trump… That Donald Trump is a Russian agent is not one of them. There are a number of very good justifications for seeking his impeachment… That he is a Kremlin agent is not one of them.”
So, it’s particularly slimy for Russiagaters to slip into the position that we Russiagate skeptics have been enunciating, and they have been excluding, for two years, without acknowledging that we were right and they were wrong and accounting for their effort to edit us out.
by JackRiddler » Sat Apr 13, 2019 3:34 pm
www.craigmurray.org.uk
Muellergate and the Discreet Lies of the Bourgeoisie - Craig Murray
This cartoon seems to me very apposite. The capacity of the mainstream media repeatedly to promote the myth that Russia caused Clinton’s defeat, while never mentioning what the information was that had been so damaging to Hillary, should be alarming to anybody under the illusion that we have a working “free media”. There are literally hundreds of thousands of mainstream media articles and broadcasts, from every single one of the very biggest names in the Western media, which were predicated on the complete nonsense that Russia had conspired to install Donald Trump as President of the United States.
I genuinely have never quite understood whether the journalists who wrote this guff believed it, whether they were cynically pumping out propaganda and taking their pay cheque, or whether they just did their “job” and chose to avoid asking themselves whether they were producing truth or lies.
I suspect the answer varies from journalist to journalist. At the Guardian, for example, I get the impression that Carole Cadwalladr is sufficiently divorced from reality to believe all that she writes. Having done a very good job in investigating the nasty right wing British Establishment tool that was Cambridge Analytica, Cadwalladr became deluded by her own fame and self-importance and decided that her discovery was the key to understanding all of world politics. In her head it explained all the disappointments of Clintonites and Blairites everywhere. She is not so high-minded however as to have refused the blandishments of the Integrity Initiative.
Luke Harding is in a different category. Harding has become so malleable a tool of the security services it is impossible to believe he is not willingly being used. It would be embarrassing to have written a bestseller called “Collusion”, the entire premiss for which has now been disproven, had Harding not made so much money out of it.
Harding’s interview with Aaron Mate of The Real News was a truly enlightening moment. The august elite of the mainstream media virtually never meet anybody who subjects their narrative to critical intellectual scrutiny. Harding’s utter inability to deal with unanticipated scepticism descends from hilarious to toe-curlingly embarrassing.
In general, since the Mueller report confirmed that $50 million worth of investigation had been unable to uncover any evidence of Russiagate collusion, the media has been astonishingly unrepentant about the absolute rubbish they have been churning out for years.
Harding and the Guardian’s story about Manafort repeatedly calling on Assange in the Ecuador Embassy is one of the most blatant and malicious fabrications in modern media history. It has been widely ridiculed, no evidence of any kind has ever been produced to substantiate it, and the story has been repeatedly edited on the Guardian website to introduce further qualifications and acknowledgements of dubious attribution, not present as originally published. But still neither Editor Katherine Viner nor author Luke Harding has either retracted or apologised, something which calls the fundamental honesty of both into question.
Manafort is now in prison, because as with many others interviewed, the Mueller investigation found he had been involved in several incidences of wrongdoing. Right up until Mueller finalised his report, media articles and broadcasts repeatedly, again and again and again every single day, presented these convictions as proving that there had been collusion with Russia. The media very seldom pointed out that none of the convictions related to collusion. In fact for the most part they related to totally extraneous events, like unrelated tax frauds or Trump’s hush-money to (very All-American) prostitutes. The “Russians” that Manafort was convicted of lobbying for without declaration, were Ukrainian and the offences occurred ten years ago and had no connection to Trump of any kind. Rather similarly the lies of which Roger Stone stands accused relate to his invention, for personal gain, of a non-existent relationship with Wikileaks.
The truth is that, if proper and detailed investigation were done into any group of wealthy politicos in Washington, numerous crimes would be uncovered, especially in the fields of tax and lobbying. Rich political operatives are very sleazy. This is hardly news, and if those around Clinton had been investigated there would be just as many convictions and of similar kinds. it is a pity there is not more of this type of work, all the time. But the Russophobic motive behind the Mueller Inquiry was not forwarded by any of the evidence obtained.
My analysis of the Steele dossier, written before I was aware that Sergei Skripal probably had a hand in it, has stood the test of time very well. It is a confection of fantasy concocted for money by a charlatan.
We should not forget at this stage to mention the unfortunate political prisoner Maria Butina, whose offence is to be Russian and very marginally involved in American politics at the moment when there was a massive witchhunt for Russian spies in progress, that makes The Crucible look like a study in calm rationality. Ms Butina was attempting to make her way in the US political world, no doubt, and she had at least one patron in Moscow who was assisting her with a view to increasing their own political influence. But nothing Butina did was covert or sinister. Her efforts to win favour within the NRA were notable chiefly because of the irony that the NRA has been historically responsible for many more American deaths than Russia.
Any narrative of which the Establishment does not approve is decried as conspiracy theory. Yet the “Russiagate” conspiracy theory – which truly is Fake News – has been promoted massively by the entire weight of western corporate and state media. “Russiagate”, a breathtaking plot in which Russia and a high profile US TV personality collude together to take control of the most militarily powerful country in the world, knocks “The Manchurian Candidate” into a cocked hat. A Google “news search” restricts results to mainstream media outlets. Such a search for the term “Russiagate” brings 230,000 results. That is almost a quarter of a million incidents of the mainstream media not only reporting the fake “Russiagate” story, but specifically using that term to describe it.
Compare that with a story which is not an outlandish fake conspiracy theory, but a very real conspiracy.
If, by contrast, you do a Google “news search” for the term “Integrity Initiative”, the UK government’s covert multi million pound programme to pay senior mainstream media journalists to pump out anti-Russian propaganda worldwide, you only get one eighth of the results you get for “Russiagate”. Because the mainstream media have been enthusiastically promoting the fake conspiracy story, and deliberately suppressing the very real conspiracy in which many of their own luminaries are personally implicated.
Furthermore – and this is a truly tremendous irony, which relates back to the cartoon at the start – only two of the top ten news results for “Integrity Initiative” come from the Western corporate media.
And this next fact comes nearly into the “too good to be true” category for my argument. Those two MSM mentions, from Sky News and the Guardian, do not complain of the covert anti-Russian propaganda campaign that is the Integrity Initiative. They rather complain that it was an alleged “Russian hack” that made the wrongdoing public!! You could not make it up, you really could not.
According to the mainstream media, it is not Hillary Clinton’s fault for conspiring with the DNC to cheat Bernie out of the nomination, it is Russia’s fault for allegedly helping to reveal it. It is not the British government’s, or their media collaborators’, fault for running a covert propaganda scheme to dupe the public of the UK and many other countries, it is the Russians’ fault for allegedly helping to reveal it!
Which brings us full circle to the DNC leak that sparked Muellergate and the claims that it was the Russians who lost Hillary the election. Robert Mueller repeats the assertion from the US security services that it was Russian hackers who obtained the DNC emails and passed them on to Wikileaks. I am telling you from my personal knowledge that this is not true.
Neither Mueller’s team, not the FBI, nor the NSA, nor any US Intelligence agency, has ever carried out any forensic analysis on the DNC’s servers. The DNC consistently refused to make them available. The allegation against Russia is based purely on information from the DNC’s own consultants, Crowdstrike.
William Binney, former Technical Director of the NSA (America’s US$40 billion a year communications intercept organisation), has proven beyond argument that it is a technical impossibility for the DNC emails to have been transmitted by an external hack – they were rather downloaded locally, probably on to a memory stick. Binney’s analysis is fully endorsed by former NSA systems expert Ed Loomis. There simply are no two people on the planet more technically qualified to make this judgement. Yet, astonishingly, Mueller refused to call Binney or Loomis (or me) to testify. Compare this, for example, with his calling to testify my friend Randy Credico, who had no involvement whatsoever in the matter, but Mueller’s team hoped to finger as a Trump/Assange link.
Randy Emerges From His Evidence Session Displaying A Great Taste in Reading Material [BOOK IS MURRAY'S]
The DNC servers have never been examined by intelligence agencies, law enforcement or by Mueller’s team. Binney and Loomis have written that it is impossible this was an external hack. Wikileaks have consistently stressed no state actor was involved. No evidence whatsoever has been produced of the transfer of the material from the “Russians” to Wikileaks. Wikileaks Vault 7 release of CIA documents shows that the planting of false Russian hacking “fingerprints” is an established CIA practice. Yet none of this is reflected at all by Mueller nor by the mainstream media.
“Collusion” may be dead, but the “Russiagate” false narrative limps on.
I should add it seems to me very probable Russia did make some efforts to influence the US election. I worked a a British diplomat for 20 years and spent a lot of time trying to influence political outcomes in the country in which I was posted, in Eastern Europe and in Africa. It is part of the geopolitical game. The United States is of course the world leader by a long way in attempting to influence elections abroad, spending hundreds of millions of dollars to that effect in countries including Ukraine, Georgia, Ecuador and Venezuela recently, and pretty well everywhere in Africa. It is a part of normal diplomatic life.
Mueller uncovered some high level influence-broking meetings. This is what states do. He uncovered some sleazy deals. This is what rich people do. He uncovered some US $110,000 of Facebook ad spending from Russia targeted on the USA, some of which promoted sex toys, some of which was post-election, but some of which was apparently trying to assist Trump against Clinton. Compared to the amount the USA pumps into similar arms length assistance to Putin opponents in Russia alone, it was negligible. That this tiny bit of Facebook advertising crucially impacted the US $13,000,000,000 PR campaigns of the candidates is a ludicrous proposition.
That every country stay out of every other country’s politics is arguably desirable. It is not however the status quo, and the United States is in the worst position of all to complain.
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