Trumpublicons: Foreign Influence/Grifting in '16 US Election

[Rory]

Unsubstantiated, evidence free allegations. Kind of like the whole anti Russia, pro war propaganda being spread across the board

[Luther Blissett]

Watch: Lawmakers appear shaken after Comey briefing on Russia
By Leah McElrath |
MARCH 15, 2017
Following a "highly classified" briefing by the FBI Director to select members of the Senate and House, lawmakers emerged appearing worried.

Tommy Christopher | Shareblue
FBI Director James Comey met separately with members of the Senate and House for highly classified briefings. Members went into the briefings looking for a firm answer from the FBI to the question of whether or not their was an ongoing investigation into possible ties between Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and Russia but emerged silent on that question and appearing visibly disturbed.
On the Senate side, Comey met with the Chair, Senator Chuck Grassley, and Ranking Member, Senator Dianne Feinstein, of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
After the meeting, Feinstein spoke very briefly with reporters who had been waiting for the pair to emerge from the briefing:

Long-time observers of events on the Hill noted the unusually somber appearances of the Senators:

Phil Elliott ✔@Philip_Elliott
I've seen Feinstein have the worried look on her face. This is more than that. She just met with FBI chief Comey.
3:56 PM - 15 Mar 2017
1,523 1,523 Retweets 2,587 2,587 likes

Fay Murphy @murfdawgie
@Philip_Elliott @kurteichenwald She had a similar look when she announced Moscone & Milk had been shot by Dan White.
4:52 PM - 15 Mar 2017

Karoli @Karoli
Grassley looked grim too. Grimmer than usual.
4:43 PM - 15 Mar 2017

Also notable is the fact the meeting with Comey took place not just behind closed doors, but within a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF):

As we previously reported, the Chair, GOP Representative Devin Nunes, and the Ranking Member, Democratic Representative Adam Schiff, met with Comey on the House side. Nunes came out of that briefing appearing likewise and saying it was “very possible” information involving Trump himself had been collected as part of the incidental intelligence gathered when the U.S. intelligence community was monitoring Russian officials. Nunes and Schiff likewise appeared tight-lipped and visibly discomfited:

Additionally, Schiff took the unusual step of openly disagreeing with Nunes to assert it was not possible to say there were no contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia:
Video Player

00:0001:46
Reporter: “Do you have any evidence that there were contacts between the Trump campaign and Russians?”
Nunes: “I don’t have any evidence of that, and we’re not going to get into, I mean, this gets to the whole issue of incidental collection, you know, who else was talking to the Russian Ambassador. This is a slippery slope. I think you just need to let the appropriate agencies get us the information in a timely manner, which I agree with the Ranking Member on, the more that they stall, the more they make it more complicated for us, the slower the investigation goes and the more complicated it makes it for us to answer your questions.”
Schiff: “I do want to say on that question because, Director Clapper [sic] was asked a similar question, I cannot answer that question the same way. Not certainly with the same categorical nature of the response. So, I don’t share that summary conclusion, and that’s about all I can say on that subject.“
Judging from the unusual reactions to the information the members received from the FBI Director, the story about the extent and nature of communications between Donald Trump and his campaign associates and the Russian government is far from over. However it ends, the American people deserve to know whether Trump and his aides were complicit in Russia’s activities to subvert the will of our electorate.
http://linkis.com/shareblue.com/jYd0G

Very interesting.

[JackRiddler]

So now it's the reporters' impression of facial expressions.

Maybe they'd look somber also if Comey told them they've been full of bullshit?

Interesting how it's in Comey's hands. He made the possibly decisive intervention against Clinton in the election with the (not out of sight) Weiner find. Now his bureau decides how much Trump's Russian shit stinks. What was it that Hoover supposedly used to call his office? SOG? Seat of Government. "Deep State" is an inadequate description if it is understood merely as hidden, let alone an informal conspiracy. Here we see agencies that are not hidden (though they act in secret) but embedded, a permanent bureucracy that resists mere admin changes.

[Rory]

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/cli ... on-n734176

Didn't see if this made it's way here, or maybe it doesn't fit into the "narrative".

Former Acting CIA Director Michael Morell, who endorsed Hillary Clinton and called Donald Trump a dupe of Russia, cast doubt Wednesday night on allegations that members of the Trump campaign colluded with Russia.

Morell, who was in line to become CIA director if Clinton won, said he had seen no evidence that Trump associates cooperated with Russians. He also raised questions about the dossier written by a former British intelligence officer, which alleged a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia.

His comments were in sharp contrast to those of many Clinton partisans — such as former communications director Jennifer Palmieri — who have stated publicly they believe the Trump campaign cooperated with Russia's efforts to interfere in the election against Clinton.

"On the question of the Trump campaign conspiring with the Russians here, there is smoke, but there is no fire, at all," Morell said at an event sponsored by the Cipher Brief, an intelligence web site.

"There's no little campfire, there's no little candle, there's no spark. And there's a lot of people looking for it."

Morell pointed out that former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said on Meet the Press on March 5 that he had seen no evidence of a conspiracy when he left office January 20.

"That's a pretty strong statement by General Clapper," Morell said.

About the dossier, Morell said, "Unless you know the sources, and unless you know how a particular source acquired a particular piece of information, you can't judge the information — you just can't."

The dossier "doesn't take you anywhere, I don't think," he said.

He continued: "I had two questions when I first read it. One was, How did Chris talk to these sources? I have subsequently learned that he used intermediaries.

"And then I asked myself, why did these guys provide this information, what was their motivation? And I subsequently learned that he paid them. That the intermediaries paid the sources and the intermediaries got the money from Chris. And that kind of worries me a little bit because if you're paying somebody, particularly former FSB officers, they are going to tell you truth and innuendo and rumor, and they're going to call you up and say, 'hey, let's have another meeting, I have more information for you,' because they want to get paid some more.

"I think you've got to take all that into consideration when you consider the dossier."

[seemslikeadream]

Cost of security for Trump Tower: $183 million/year
Budget for National Endowment Arts/Humanities: $148 million/year

Let them eat diamonds.





and the HATE at RI has risen by the power of Rory by 100%

Hate Crimes in U.S. Rose More Than 20 Percent During 2016 Presidential Campaign
Another new study also shows that terror attacks by a Muslim perpetrator got about four times more media coverage.
By Sophia Tesfaye / Salon March 15, 2017

Researchers have determined that the rampant xenophobic and anti-immigrant rhetoric that dominated much of the media’s attention during the 2016 presidential election led to a “very significant” increase in the number of reported hate-based acts of violence or intimidation across the U.S.

In 2016 there were 1,037 hate-related incidents in nine U.S. metropolitan areas, up from 841 in 2015, according to the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino. The FBI defines a hate crime as a “criminal offense against a person or property motivated in whole or in part by an offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender or gender identity.”

In recent months, incidents of hate directed against transgender women, African-Americans, Hispanics, Muslims, Hindu Americans, Sikh Americans and others have gained national media attention. The recent wave of bomb threats against Jewish community centers and schools has even gained international attention, as President Donald Trump was criticized for his reluctance to denounce the attacks. But researchers say that such acts of violence and intimidation have been on the rise for much of 2016, as Trump’s campaign helped focus presidential politics on issues like illegal immigration and terrorism.

Cities including New York City, Chicago and Columbus, Ohio, registered double-digit increases last year. Cincinnati, a considerable part of Trump country, saw a 38.5 percent increase in hate crimes year-over-year.

But perhaps surprisingly, 2016 saw rates of hate-related incidents rise most sharply in the nation’s most liberal cities. Washington, D.C. saw such incidents increase 62 percent from 2015, while the number of anti-LGBT hate crimes in the District increased by 59 percent. Hate crimes related to ethnicity or national origin quadrupled in that nation’s capital last year, those related to religion tripled, those related to gender identity or expression nearly doubled, and those related to sexual orientation increased by about 50 percent.

New York City had 380 reported hate-related incidents last year, a 24 percent increase from 2015 and the highest number in over a decade.

“Based on the timing and the extraordinary increase we’ve been seeing, not only in New York but around the nation, you have to conclude that the presidential campaign was the major factor,” Stephen Davis, the NYPD’s deputy commissioner for public information, told Bloomberg News last month.

“We’re getting enough data that appears to indicate a broad national increase,” said Brian Levin, the director of the nonpartisan Center for the Study of Hate Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino. Hate crime data is notoriously difficult to track; Levin explained that his previously unreleased report is preliminary data, based on information provided by state and local law enforcement and government agencies.

The seven cities “do have a decent population and a statistically relevant number of cases where we can at least draw some preliminary conclusions about an overall trend,” Levin said. “I don’t think we can just explain away the increase with increased reporting”.

Furthermore, perpetrators appear to have been emboldened by Trump’s win. For example, 43 percent of 2016 hate crimes in Philadelphia happened post-election in November and December.

“We definitely saw an election-time bump,” Levin said.

In Chicago, the police department has received 13 reports of hate-related incidents during the first five weeks of 2017 — more than triple the number recorded in the first five weeks of 2016.

This most recent study is in line with a Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) report released in Feburary that found 1,372 reported incidents of hate, harassment or intimidation during the three months following the November election. Researchers at SPLC directly attributed the dramatic spike to Trump’s campaign, saying his success “energized the radical right.

“2016 was an unprecedented year for hate,” SPLC’s Mark Potok said in a statement. “The country saw a resurgence of white nationalism that imperils the racial progress we’ve made, along with the rise of a president whose policies reflect the values of white nationalists. In Steve Bannon, these extremists think they finally have an ally who has the president’s ear.”

The FBI’s most recent hate crime report, issued last November, showed incidents targeting Muslim-Americans jumped 67 percent in 2015. Trump announced his presidential run in June of that year and proposed his infamous Muslim ban in December.

“Trump’s run for office electrified the radical right, which saw in him a champion of the idea that America is fundamentally a white man’s country,” said Potok.

The number of hate groups in the United States rose to 917 in 2016 from 892 in 2015, the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism reported, and the most dramatic increase was in the number of anti-Muslim hate groups, which jumped to 101 in 2016 from 34 in 2015.

Another recently released study suggests that the media’s coverage of Muslims in America and throughout the world may be just as culpable in the rise of such incidents as the president of the United States. Researchers from Georgia State University found that although Muslims commit far fewer acts of terrorism than non-Muslims in the U.S., attacks by Muslims are written about 4.5 times more than other attacks.

“Whether intentional or not, US media outlets disproportionately emphasize the smaller number of terrorist attacks by Muslims, leading Americans to have an exaggerated sense of that threat,” the researchers wrote in the Washington Post.

The researchers examined all 89 terrorist attacks carried out in the U.S. between 2011 and 2015, as listed by the Global Terrorism Database, and found that Muslims perpetrated only 12.4 percent of those attacks but received 44 percent of the total news coverage in print media.
http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/h ... 6-campaign

[Rory]

Cost of security for Trump Tower: $183 million/year
Budget for National Endowment Arts/Humanities: $148 million/year

Let them eat diamonds.

Off topic. Is this a general antitrump thread, or a russia hack thread? You called out liminaloyster for it last night. so..

[seemslikeadream]

and the HATE at RI has risen by the power of Rory by 100%

Hate Crimes in U.S. Rose More Than 20 Percent During 2016 Presidential Campaign
Another new study also shows that terror attacks by a Muslim perpetrator got about four times more media coverage.
By Sophia Tesfaye / Salon March 15, 2017

Researchers have determined that the rampant xenophobic and anti-immigrant rhetoric that dominated much of the media’s attention during the 2016 presidential election led to a “very significant” increase in the number of reported hate-based acts of violence or intimidation across the U.S.

In 2016 there were 1,037 hate-related incidents in nine U.S. metropolitan areas, up from 841 in 2015, according to the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino. The FBI defines a hate crime as a “criminal offense against a person or property motivated in whole or in part by an offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender or gender identity.”

In recent months, incidents of hate directed against transgender women, African-Americans, Hispanics, Muslims, Hindu Americans, Sikh Americans and others have gained national media attention. The recent wave of bomb threats against Jewish community centers and schools has even gained international attention, as President Donald Trump was criticized for his reluctance to denounce the attacks. But researchers say that such acts of violence and intimidation have been on the rise for much of 2016, as Trump’s campaign helped focus presidential politics on issues like illegal immigration and terrorism.

Cities including New York City, Chicago and Columbus, Ohio, registered double-digit increases last year. Cincinnati, a considerable part of Trump country, saw a 38.5 percent increase in hate crimes year-over-year.

But perhaps surprisingly, 2016 saw rates of hate-related incidents rise most sharply in the nation’s most liberal cities. Washington, D.C. saw such incidents increase 62 percent from 2015, while the number of anti-LGBT hate crimes in the District increased by 59 percent. Hate crimes related to ethnicity or national origin quadrupled in that nation’s capital last year, those related to religion tripled, those related to gender identity or expression nearly doubled, and those related to sexual orientation increased by about 50 percent.

New York City had 380 reported hate-related incidents last year, a 24 percent increase from 2015 and the highest number in over a decade.

“Based on the timing and the extraordinary increase we’ve been seeing, not only in New York but around the nation, you have to conclude that the presidential campaign was the major factor,” Stephen Davis, the NYPD’s deputy commissioner for public information, told Bloomberg News last month.

“We’re getting enough data that appears to indicate a broad national increase,” said Brian Levin, the director of the nonpartisan Center for the Study of Hate Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino. Hate crime data is notoriously difficult to track; Levin explained that his previously unreleased report is preliminary data, based on information provided by state and local law enforcement and government agencies.

The seven cities “do have a decent population and a statistically relevant number of cases where we can at least draw some preliminary conclusions about an overall trend,” Levin said. “I don’t think we can just explain away the increase with increased reporting”.

Furthermore, perpetrators appear to have been emboldened by Trump’s win. For example, 43 percent of 2016 hate crimes in Philadelphia happened post-election in November and December.

“We definitely saw an election-time bump,” Levin said.

In Chicago, the police department has received 13 reports of hate-related incidents during the first five weeks of 2017 — more than triple the number recorded in the first five weeks of 2016.

This most recent study is in line with a Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) report released in Feburary that found 1,372 reported incidents of hate, harassment or intimidation during the three months following the November election. Researchers at SPLC directly attributed the dramatic spike to Trump’s campaign, saying his success “energized the radical right.

“2016 was an unprecedented year for hate,” SPLC’s Mark Potok said in a statement. “The country saw a resurgence of white nationalism that imperils the racial progress we’ve made, along with the rise of a president whose policies reflect the values of white nationalists. In Steve Bannon, these extremists think they finally have an ally who has the president’s ear.”

The FBI’s most recent hate crime report, issued last November, showed incidents targeting Muslim-Americans jumped 67 percent in 2015. Trump announced his presidential run in June of that year and proposed his infamous Muslim ban in December.

“Trump’s run for office electrified the radical right, which saw in him a champion of the idea that America is fundamentally a white man’s country,” said Potok.

The number of hate groups in the United States rose to 917 in 2016 from 892 in 2015, the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism reported, and the most dramatic increase was in the number of anti-Muslim hate groups, which jumped to 101 in 2016 from 34 in 2015.

Another recently released study suggests that the media’s coverage of Muslims in America and throughout the world may be just as culpable in the rise of such incidents as the president of the United States. Researchers from Georgia State University found that although Muslims commit far fewer acts of terrorism than non-Muslims in the U.S., attacks by Muslims are written about 4.5 times more than other attacks.

“Whether intentional or not, US media outlets disproportionately emphasize the smaller number of terrorist attacks by Muslims, leading Americans to have an exaggerated sense of that threat,” the researchers wrote in the Washington Post.

The researchers examined all 89 terrorist attacks carried out in the U.S. between 2011 and 2015, as listed by the Global Terrorism Database, and found that Muslims perpetrated only 12.4 percent of those attacks but received 44 percent of the total news coverage in print media.
http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/h ... 6-campaign

[seemslikeadream]

Is Rory intentionally sowing chaos at RI?

Is Donald Trump Intentionally Sowing Health Care Chaos?
With the GOP's health care bill on the critical list, Trump's cynical fallback plan looks like his only option.
By Heather Digby Parton / Salon March 15, 2017

Predictably, the promised Obamacare “repeal and replace” legislation has thrown all of Washington into a tizzy. The reason it was predictable is that if the Republicans had been able to put together a serious alternative to Obamacare’s market-friendly, hybrid health care program, they would have done it long ago and run on it. The fact that they didn’t should have been a hint that whatever they did was going to be politically unpopular. Instead, they demagogued the program for years, turning it into an easy symbol of Obama hatred to motivate their base. Now they are like dogs who finally caught the car they’ve been chasing and have no idea what to do with it.

Since Paul Ryan and company dropped their plan and the House speaker took to the airwaves with his sleeves rolled up to give the country a riveting PowerPoint presentation, it’s been obvious that their plan is in big trouble. When the Congressional Budget Office released its analysis on Monday showing that 24 million people stood to lose their insurance and costs would rise insanely high for older people, all to give the wealthy yet another tax cut, the bottom fell out. Headlines like this one, from the Augusta Chronicle in Georgia, were seen all over the country on Tuesday morning:



That certainly didn’t make Ryan’s job any easier but he carried on gamely, appearing on Fox News to say that he was “encouraged” by the news, prompting Bret Baier to ask him, “If you’re encouraged by this CBO report, what’s a CBO report you’re discouraged by?”

The Republicans are all over the place with this at the moment. Nobody knows if there’s a strategy or if they’re just running around in circles trying to figure find a way out and bumping into each other in the process. At this point, the Tea Partyers of the House Freedom Caucus are upset that the plan isn’t harsh enough and are demanding that all the cutbacks happen immediately. The rest of the caucus is either backing Ryan or trying desperately to come up with a good reason not to.

They’re all getting an earful from their districts and are feeling unsure why they should walk the plank on an unpopular bill when it’s pretty clear the Senate is having none of it. There, the revolt is mainly among a handful of moderates who see the Ryan bill as going way too far rather than not far enough. At least that was the state of play until Tuesday, when Ted Cruz stepped forward to criticize the plan for the projected premium increases.

Even Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, whom nobody would call a moderate, came out swinging, saying the House should tear up the Ryan bill and start over. The governor of Arkansas, Asa Hutchinson, is also rebelling as are a number of other Republican governors who will have to deal directly with the havoc this plan will wreak.

Every faction of the Republican party is at odds with at least one other faction of the party, sometimes with all of them. When that happens, one would expect that a president of the same party would be the mediator. In this case, expectations are exceptionally high since the president has sold himself as the greatest negotiator in the world, a man who will single-handedly bring peace to the Middle East and personally renegotiate all global trade agreements over lunch at Mar-a-Lago.

Publicly, the White House is backing Ryan’s plan. Press secretary Sean Spicer said on Tuesday that the administration rejects the CBO projections because they don’t account for the “three-pronged” strategy, which he was unable to coherently explain. But Trump had said something different to conservative activists who call Ryan’s plan “Obamacare-lite,” promising to endorse their demands and punish those who disagreed.

Meanwhile, Breitbart has suddenly become an important player in the debate. The site has returned to bashing Ryan on a level that hasn’t been seen since late 2015, when Trump adviser Steve Bannon was the editor and wrote in an email to the site’s Washington editor that his “long game” was for Ryan to be “gone by spring.” This has people wondering if Bannon is trying to send a message to Trump through the media, since that’s rumored to be one of the tactics by which the courtiers seek to influence the king. But that’s assuming that Bannon needs to do that and that he still has great influence at Breitbart. (He went out of his way to distance himself from Breitbart over a different matter recently, but nobody knows whether that was a feint or not.) Bannon or not, Breitbart is pro-Trump, and whatever the site’s editors are doing, they believe they’re doing it on his behalf.

So what does Trump want? He’s been all over the map, promising the moon and having no idea how to deliver it, repeatedly assuring everyone that health care reform would be “easy” and “fast,” until he was informed that it was very complicated. Since then it’s been obvious what his preference really is and he’s been open about it. As I mentioned in this piece from earlier in the week, he wants the bill to fail, at which point he will sabotage the existing program and then blame it on the Democrats.

When Trump met with that group of conservative activists and promised to support their even harsher version of the bill, he described this as his fallback position. But he has signaled this numerous times since the election. In his press conference on Jan. 11, he tipped his hand:

We don’t wanna own it, we don’t wanna own it politically. They own it right now. So the easiest thing would be to let it implode in ’17 and believe me, we’d get pretty much whatever we wanted, but it would take a long time.

Trump considers “blame” an important aspect of politics and thinks it would be useful for him to have Obamacare to kick around for a while. But Republicans have been promising to repeal Obamacare for years. They know that if they don’t get it done when they control all three branches of government, their voters will logically blame them for whatever happens to their health care, not the Democrats.

Trump probably understands that and just doesn’t care. His motto when it comes to politics is “ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for me.” It’s all about him. The Republicans are on their own.http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politi ... care-chaos

[Rory]

Off topic copy pasta.

[seemslikeadream]

Is that you Donald? You are always off topic

[seemslikeadream]

Chuck Grassley and Dianne Feinstein both look like they just saw a Trump-Russia ghost
By Bill Palmer | March 16, 2017 | 0

Nothing about it made sense. Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein and Republican Senator Chuck Grassley had finally gotten the Trump-Russia briefing from FBI Director James Comey that they’d been demanding. Grassley had even threatened the DOJ just to get the briefing. And yet here they were before the cameras after their meeting, both looking like they’d just seen a ghost. We’ve only ever seen this once before.

Try walking through the possible scenarios for how their meeting went. If Comey’s briefing had been insufficient, Grassley and Feinstein would both have looked angry and defiant, and they’d have said so. If Comey had given them some evidence that Donald Trump was innocent on Russia, then Grassley would have looked relieved. But the news they received in that meeting was visibly devastating to them both. So much so that the usually talkative Grassley couldn’t muster a word. Feinstein was even making a point of protecting Grassley from having to speak at all, as if she knew that he was in an even worse headspace than she was.

There’s only one scenario that could have produced that result: James Comey briefed them on evidence so grave and so damning about Donald Trump and Russia that they both just realized the fate of nation now hinges on their ability to come together and handle it correctly. Chuck Grassley and Dianne Feinstein have been in the Senate for decades. They’ve seen it all. And yet they both had that look that we last saw on the faces of members of Congress back on 9/11.

If I’m right, then this is even more tenuous than 9/11 was, because this time around the Bin Laden figure holds the office of President of the United States – and he’ll have to be legally extricated from within. Some of the longest tenured members of our government, from both parties, seemed to just telegraph that we’re all in for the fight of our lives. They’re certainly on the same side of the fight now. And I can’t stop thinking about the looks on their faces.
http://www.palmerreport.com/opinion/chu ... ssia/1942/

[barracuda]

Screen Shot 2017-03-16 at 7.30.07 AM.png

[Rory]

The desperation is palpable.

both looking like they’d just seen a ghost

I mean, the standard of reporting here is risible.

There’s only one scenario that could have produced that result: James Comey briefed them on evidence so grave and so damning about Donald Trump and Russia that they both just realized the fate of nation now hinges on their ability to come together and handle it correctly. Chuck Grassley and Dianne Feinstein have been in the Senate for decades. They’ve seen it all. And yet they both had that look that we last saw on the faces of members of Congress back on 9/11. ermagerds

Meanwhile the MSM and serious political commentators are backtracking away from this frenzied mass hysteria. Doesn't stop moron partisan bloggers like Palmer from going wild with his McCarthyite wet dreams though

[seemslikeadream]

I know you didn't watch the video donald Rory so how would you know anything about it?
Is it the donald posting or Rory...can't tell the difference



Is that you Donald? You are always off topic

Is that you Donald? You are always off topic





Kaspersky Labs paid Flynn for his Moscow jaunt? Oh myyyyyyyy

[Rory]

lmao. normal service is resumed