Trump is not "Putin's Pet"

 I've got to admit that I'm surprised I would agree with Fiona Hill, but

 Trump wants to be Putin's pet, but he's not.

Revealed: the hacking and disinformation team meddling in elections

OK, maybe you don't give an fcuk about Palestinians, but Israelis live high on the hog with universal health care, nice homes, education, and all sorts of other goodies paid for by the US tax payers.

You don't get the "socialism" and "welfare state", but you pay to support a nation that does not act in the US interest.

Remember the US Liberty.

You know that Russian Interference?

Actually, it's more like they blame Russians for interference even though the 2016 election was thrown by the Electoral College, which comes from the US CONSTITUTION! It's called distraction.

 The Israel lobby actually does what the Russians have been alleged to do. 

And I don't care how pro-Israel you happen to be: that money would be much better spent here.

Why it's Russian Interference instead of Election Reform.

There is a reason people are fixated with having Russian Interference shoved down their throats: Both parties are guilty of "dirty tricks". You point out that the US meddling was much worse than anything the Russians did and people tend to write that off as somehow being OK. In fact all the Russians did was to point out the problems, which means anyone who points out the real issues is somehow a "Russian Bot".

Anyway, the reason that no one is doing anything about the Electoral College is that it is one of the best things for keeping the duopoly going. It's hard for new parties to get into the system. Hint: one of the reasons I voted Green was the hope that the party would somehow get enough of the vote to have ballot access and other perks that being a national party would bring.

Why doesn't US MSM publish things like this.

Al-Jazeera on Trump being Putin's puppet:

Trump does not behave as Putin's puppet. He behaves as a person who sees himself as a great deal-maker, who is able to negotiate with anyone - from Putin to Kim Jong-un - to get a good deal.

The US president is a businessman who started his career in the real estate sector. In this type of business, one does not care who buys the penthouse as long as it is swiftly paid for. A number of apartments in the Trump Tower, for example, were bought by people of questionable or criminal background (including Russian citizens).

In this sense, it is not a surprise that Trump is dealing with anyone and everyone in the pursuit of the most lucrative deal.

Of course, whether this strategy is indeed effective or not can be debated. Many experts think it isn't, but this does not mean that Trump's policies are dictated by Putin; they are dictated by his own views, however wrong they may be.

This is not necessarily good for Putin. Despite all the niceties exchanged and footballs passed at the summit, there is still no development on the major issues of concern for the Kremlin: sanctions and Ukraine. If this is how Trump will do business for the next two years and if reelected, the another four afterwards, the Russian president might start thinking that the hacking of the Democratic National Committee emails might not have been such a good idea after all.

One of the major issues during the campaign was that Trump was a rogue actor. Some people were hoping he would bring down the Republican Party. The Al-Jazeera article makes a really good case that the US MSM spin on Trump and Putin's meeting may not be correct.

Maybe I shouldn't write off Fox News...

I have to agree that I don't think these indictments will go anywhere since there is way too much refutation to this case to provide reasonable doubt. Toss in that there are no specific instances of "Russian meddling" that couldn't be shown to possibly be domestically produced. This segment from Fox news sounds plausible to me as a former lawyer who practised criminal law.And the hack is open to debate.

Not sure where this will go if the Republicans win the "mid-term" elections. Also not sure why the powers that be would have let Trump run, unless it is true about the DNC wanting a pied piper candidate, which is why I think the meddling is domestic and not Russian. And it came from the DNC.

As I said, no one is denying that the leaked e-mails are genuine, which is dangerous since any defence attorney worth their pay has their defence mapped out for them in the e-mails. After all what's the point of having strict rules over elections and referendums if there are no consequences for them being broken? And how is "Russian interference" germane if the DNC can break its own rules and run a rigged primary. As I said before, nothing in the Wikileaks leaked documents came as a revelation to people in the Sanders campaign.

I think this shit is a distraction to keep people from demanding campaign reform.

Internal Misconduct is far more of a concern than "foreign interference".

As I said before, if the goal of  the alleged "Russian interference" in US elections is to destroy confidence in the process, then they don't have too much work to do other than rub the US public's nose in the shit that the electoral process happens to be. Whatever "Russian interference" that may have existed pales in comparison to all the shenanigans that are considered SOP in US elections. The level of damage caused by "Russians" is unquantifiable.

On the other hand, the institutions and institutional practises that led to Clinton "losing" the election tend to be mostly home grown, which is what the "hacked e-mails" demonstrated. Although, it is questionable as to whether the e-mails were really hacked, or leaked by someone disgusted with DNC violations of its own rules. Additionally, Clinton only "lost" in the electoral college, an institution which is intended on thwarting democracy and democratic process. That is the obvious cause for her "defeat" while having one of the largest margins of the popular vote.

In fact, that is the main problem with the "Russian Interference" allegations: Clinton didn't lose by the standards of most democratic systems. Instead, Clinton lost because of an anachronistic, anti-democratic institution created by the US Constitution. It is an institution that most people don't understand.

The letter that former FBI Director James Comey sent to Congress on Oct. 28, 2016, and the subsequent media firestorm over it was an event that could also have contributed to Clinton's "loss". The impact is relatively easy to measure because it was the biggest news event in the final two weeks of the campaign, and we can compare polls conducted just before the Comey letter to the ones conducted just after it.

Is James Comey under indictment?

As I understand it, Russian attempts at influencing the US election consist of the hacking incident, which the Democrats assured us was not an issue: until they lost the election. They also consist of trying to show Clinton as being dishonest and otherwise discredit her. That's another one of those things which is amazingly easy to defend against! Just play one of the many tapes of Clinton contradicting herself.

Anyway, there are a lot of other explanations for why Trump is president which are far more credible and substantial than Russian interference. Any defence attorney worth their pay can blow this one out the stadium with little effort.

You also have to remember that the standard for burden of proof in a criminal conviction is "beyond a reasonable doubt", or "that no other logical explanation can be derived from the facts except that the defendant committed the crime, thereby overcoming the presumption that a person is innocent until proven guilty."

I have yet to see that non-US actions caused Clinton's loss or that any "foreign interference" went beyond that standard.

I think US resources would be far better spent on addressing the internal problems than trying to place fault on things which probably didn't effect the outcome at all.

Wanna see a Liberal's head explode.

I could see this one coming. I mean it had to come didn't it.

Now, watch the pundits try to dodge accusations of anti-semitism if they decide to go down this path.

Russian influence or was Hillary just a bad candidate?

Nate Silver points out that:

How did Trump win? Or more to the point, how did Trump win given that he only had a 38 percent favorability rating among people who voted on Election Day? The answer is partly the Electoral College, of course. But it’s also that Clinton was really, really unpopular herself — almost as unpopular as Trump — with a favorability rating of just 43 percent among Election Day voters. Also, the substantial number of voters who disliked both Clinton and Trump went to Trump by a 17-point margin. Voters really weren’t willing to give Clinton the benefit of the doubt.
That’s largely because Clinton was viewed as dishonest and untrustworthy, exactly the sort of message that the Russian campaign (which used hashtags such as #Hillary4Prison) was trying to cultivate. Trump, of course, was trying to cultivate this message too. Media coverage often struck the same themes. And voters sometimes heard variations on this theme from Sanders and his supporters in the more contentious moments of the Democratic primaries. Was some of this Clinton’s fault? Yep, of course. Would Clinton still have been “Crooked Hillary” even without the Russians? Almost certainly. But the Russians were at least adding fuel to the right fire — the one that wound up consuming Clinton’s campaign.

It's hard to tell what was "Russian influence" or Hillary's own faults the way I read that since a lot of people were talking about "Hillary for Prison" without having the Russians involved. Toss in her reputation for not being trustworthy was due to her own actions and position flipping. There was a 2008 Obama ad that "She'll Say Anything And Change Nothing".

Toss in the bottom line that you were taken by Russian influence if you voted for Trump, Sanders, or Jill Stein. I can honestly say that the DNC is rife with Russian Operatives if that is the basis for saying Russian operatives fixed the election. The DNC's actions pretty much were why I left the Democratic Party.

We can also get into Media complicity in giving Trump free air time which increased his profile.

You also have to remember that the standard for burden of proof in a criminal conviction is "beyond a reasonable doubt", or "that no other logical explanation can be derived from the facts except that the defendant committed the crime, thereby overcoming the presumption that a person is innocent until proven guilty."

Anyway, I am 100% certain any "Russian influence" was insignificant compared to internal US actions. Any investigation worth the money needs to look into the US institutional problems which led to the 2016 election disaster.

The People who persuaded me it would be OK to vote Green.

Hey, Mueller, you gonna indict these people too???

Because they were so sure she was going to win, Hillary Clinton couldn’t have really lost.

All too ironically, they turned for solace to the line Donald Trump was feeding to his followers to embrace in anticipation of defeat ahead of the November election: The election must have been rigged! So on and on the Democratic Party and its supporters in the media have gone about Russian interference in the 2016 election, an interpretation that it now appears will never abate for the fiercest of Democratic partisans (And, suprisingly, even some Republicans).

Admitting the DNC rigged the election against itself by ignoring independent voters and aggressively quelling the nearly successful primary challenge by an independent candidate, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, is out of the question.

Let's toss in that Clinton DID WIN by the standard used by most democracies: the  popular vote. She only "lost" in the electoral college, yet that is another thing which people can't get their heads around because few people understand what the fuck the electoral college actually does.

See also:

• Why Can’t The Media See Independent Voters?
• Check this out for more arrogance that Trump wouldn't win.

You don't need Russians to interfere or meddle or whatever.

The threat is real. There is unanimity of opinion in the intelligence community that hackers working on behalf of the Russian government undertook a coordinated effort to destabilize our election system. As the witnesses from the intelligence and law enforcement community testified, one of their primary objectives was to undermine Americans confidence and trust in their election system. We now live in a world where foreign governments wage war on our country not with guns and bombs, but by attempting to diminish Americans’ faith in our democratic institutions.

Source: The Hill: The truth about Russia, 'hacking' and the 2016 election

As I have been saying any serious investigation requires scrutinising US institutions. You have the Electoral College which is designed to be anti-democratic and the 2016 demonstrated how much it can deviate from the popular vote. But don't think I am being a "snowflake" since FairVote decided to look at the 2008 election for a “worst case scenario” of just how few popular votes Barack Obama really needed to earn a majority of the vote in the Electoral College.  They didn’t change John McCain’s votes, but eliminated all the “unnecessary” votes earned by Obama – meaning all of his votes in states he didn’t’ need to win and any “surplus” votes earned in states he wins (meaning any votes beyond one more than McCain).

 President Obama could have defeated Sen. John McCain in the Electoral College with as few as 24,781,169 popular votes despite McCain earning 59,479,469 votes. In other words, he could have won even while losing the popular vote by 69% to 29% (with 2% for other).

Looking only at states that he actually won, Obama could have carried enough states to earn 270 electoral votes with just 26,721,494 votes – meaning with a popular vote defeat by 68% to 30%.

 Source: http://www.fairvote.org/electoral-college-distortions-winner-could-lose-popular-vote-by-a-landslide

The leaked DNC emails were no real revelation to be quite honest since most people suspected what was in them. They were a confirmation of people's distrust. It was the icing on the DNC's pushing of Hillary Clinton and disdain for people who weren't "true democrats".  As I said, it was shit like that that made me leave the democratic party.

Even more important is the money in US politics. The primary system is long and drawn out to keep people who don't have big bucks backing them. On the other hand, someone like Donald Trump was able to game the system to get anywhere from $2 to $5 Billion in free, "earned" media attention. Which was also given to him by anyone who showed outrage at Trump's antics (figure includes social media). I remember in 1980 when US Stations couldn't show "Bedtime for Bonzo" because it would have given Reagan free coverage.

No Russian help needed to get people disgusted with US politics: the duopoly does a wonderful job on its own.


Ultimately, it is the electoral college, closed primaries, gerrymandering, uncontested elections, big money, and pretty much the whole election circus that causes the results that people want to attribute to the Russians.

So I find that the real culprits are home grown. And that is where all the energy should be directed, not de minimis "foreign meddling".  Simply stated, if the "Russian Objective" is to destroy confidence in "US democratic institutions", then I see any "Russian activities" as being de minimis compared to those of the DNC, Cambridge Analytica/Robert Mercer, and US media, who spent far more money than the Russians are alleged to have spent for destroying confidence in US Democracy.
 

An open letter to Robert Mueller regarding the 2016 Presidential Election Investigation

OK, let's begin this with the stipulation that the DNC e-mails in question are authentic. It was revealed by WikiLeaks emails from the DNC hack that under the guidance of the now scandal-ridden former chairperson of the DNC, Deborah Wasserman Schultz, the party leadership had shown high levels of favourability towards Hillary Clinton and that they quashed the campaign of Bernie Sanders to make sure she won the nomination.

Sometimes a criminal investigation finds more criminal activity than what was originally alleged. In this case, the e-mails show democratic party collusion to promote Hillary Clinton as well as sabotage Bernie Sanders' campaign. There was a class action suit about this which went nowhere, despite all the misconduct of the DNC being a given.

I believe there have been allegations of vote suppression, which I believe is an offence. Some of the e-mails in question show the DNC staff in damage control over allegations from the Sanders campaign, when a report—corroborated by a Politico—revealed the DNC’s joint fundraising committee with the Clinton campaign was laundering money to the Clinton campaign instead of fundraising for down-ticket Democrats. Regardless of the fundraising tactics, because both major campaigns didn’t agree to use the joint fundraising committee super-PAC with the DNC, the DNC should have recused itself from participating with just the Clinton campaign.

The Associated Press called the Democratic primary races in six states for Hillary Clinton on Monday night, based on its survey of superdelegates. CNN confirmed the count a few hours after that, based on the network's criteria, then declared that it had broken the story. This is one of the things that threw the election.

Even more concerning is that an email released by WikiLeaks shows how the Clinton campaign and Democratic Party bear direct responsibility for making Trump the Republican candidate. The email describes using a "pied piper" strategy, the Clinton campaign proposed intentionally cultivating extreme right-wing presidential candidates, hoping to turn them into the new "mainstream of the Republican Party" in order to try to increase Clinton's chances of winning.The Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee called for using far-right candidates "as a cudgel to move the more established candidates further to the right." Clinton's camp insisted that Trump and other extremists should be "elevated" to "leaders of the pack" and media outlets should be told to "take them seriousl

You need to broaden the scope of your investigation to include the DNC misconduct shown in these e-mails if you want to avoid any allegations that your investigation is a political witch hunt. Failure to do so leaves this investigation wide open to those charges.

As someone who voted for Bernie Sanders and then abandoned the Democratic Party to go back to being independent, I can say that the actions of the Democratic Party were far more damaging to it than any purported "Russian Influence".

I know there are a lot of people who buy into the "Russians did it", probably the way they swallowed that the Iraqis had WMD. I didn't . Likewise I do not believe for one second that any Russian activity would rise to the level of misconduct demonstrated by the DNC. And it was the DNC misconduct which cost the election.

And it was Clinton's piss poor campaign and the Electoral College that cost her the election, not the Russians. Address that or your investigation is crap.

See also:

• How the Hillary Clinton campaign deliberately “elevated” Donald Trump with its “pied piper” strategy
• How Much Did Russian Interference Affect The 2016 Election?
• Was the Democratic Primary Just Manipulated, or Was It Stolen?
• The Comey Letter Probably Cost Clinton The Election
• Search the DNC email database
• Five Things That Would Make The CIA/CNN Russia Narrative More Believable
• Inside Hillary Clinton’s Secret Takeover of the DNC
• Wikileaks Proves Primary Was Rigged: DNC Undermined Democracy
• 18 revelations from Wikileaks' hacked Clinton emails
• Here are the latest, most damaging things in the DNC’s leaked emails
• Democratic National Committee Fraud Lawsuit Is the Biggest Story in Politics That No One Is Talking About
• The Dismissed DNC Fraud Lawsuit Explained
• The AP's call for Hillary Clinton ruined California's election party--and here’s why that matters

Let's play silly buggers.

The Russian influence thing is getting a lot out of hand. I say this because someone tried to say Hillary Clinton has never been under investigation, but Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein are currently.

You kind of wonder what rock this person has been hiding under since Clinton has been under quite a lot of investigation.  The only reason that the insider trading thing didn't result in charges during Whitewater was that the statute of limitations had long passed.  But that is one of many issues that I hope went away: although someone mentioned She might run again in 2020.

PLEASE DON'T!!!

Anyway, the mood of the day is to not try to address the flaws in the US system of elections: in particular the electoral college.

This needs to be hammered into some people's heads before someone truly fucked up wins:

The Fact is Hillary Clinton won the popular vote with 65,853,516 (48.5% votes) to Trump's 62,984,825 (46.4% votes), but lost in the electoral college by receiving 232 (43.1%) of the electoral votes to Trump's 306 (56.8%) votes.

Anyway, the above photo is of Emir Kusterica, a Serbian filmmaker, actor and musician, with Vladimir Putin. You also see the back of Jill Stein's head. The picture has been cropped so that Mike Flynn is not seen at the same table. Kusterica is sitting next to Putin: as opposed to Stein who is a few seats away.

Kusterica starred in the Widow of St. Pierre, along with Juliette Binoche and Daniel Auteuil, FRENCH PEOPLE!!!!

I won't hold Time of the Gypsies against Kusterica.

Let's go full McCarthyism and blame me for not being very patriotic (nationalism isn't my strong suit) and liking French movies. The Widow of St. Pierre is up there on my list of fav films and can be taken as anti-capital punishment (the widow in question is slang for the guillotine).

We can get into the Serb-Russian connection as well. The people at the table could just as well be discussing punk rock. For all we know, Putin could be saying how brilliant he thought Time of the Gypsies was.

Who is who at the table.

 On the other hand, isn't the electoral college supposed to prevent foreign interference in this process (not to mention preventing someone who is dangerous from being president)?

Seriously, Kusterica should be called in for questioning if mere association is enough to charge someone with guilt.

Somehow that seems to me to be a violation of the First Amendment and the right of peaceable assembly.

Anyway, blame is the game of the day in US politics. So don't expect too much for serious matters to be addressed.

See also:

• From Whitewater to Benghazi: A Clinton-Scandal Primer 
• It's time for a special counsel on Hillary Clinton's Russia scandal
• Guess Who Came to Dinner With Flynn and Putin
• Jill Stein Denounces Probe over 'Collusion with Russians'

Bibi's Bummer Rally

At 8 pm this past Sunday night, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu headed up a rally in Tel Aviv at the same square where Anti-Bibi protesters of the Likud regime  had shown up in roughly double numbers (15, 000-20,000 for Bibi, 30,000-40,000 against).

If Bibi and his far right Likud party lose the election, Bibi has been openly threatened with losing his party leadership. So, like conservatives DO, Bibi’s solution is to be a one-trick pony, doubling down on a strategy that isn’t working. Not only have many voters left Bibi and his party, but many of his political allies are fed up and bailing on him as well. Nobody likes to be tainted with the stink of failure, and the disapproval following Bibi’s congressional speech on Iran (criticized as lies by his own head of Mossad, siding with the opposition in Israel at the bigger rally) is just the latest, not the ‘onliest’ failure that stinks.

The only message Bibi had to offer — don’t-let-in-the-lefties, and fear-fear-fear-fear-fear, topped with a dollop of “I’m the only hero who can save you”. Add to that, allegations and investigations that government tax dollars have been misused, including to fund the campaign, including the Sunday night rally. All part of Bibi’s government-for-special-interests- problem with voters. As noted by Salon, back in a February article:

A Shapira spokesman told the Israeli daily Haaretz that the comptroller sees sufficient evidence to consider a criminal investigation.

Like the boy who cried wolf, the anti-Iran, everybody-is-against-us, it’s-always-someone-else’s- fault message is wearing thin, resulting in a fear fatigue.  Further, like the conservatives here in the US and elsewhere, conservative policies in Israel have produced poor economic outcomes, with a large part of the economic problems directly caused by excessive military spending (just like here in the US). As noted by Paul Krugman:

Economic happiness is not the usual mainstream story we hear about Israel. The country is a high-technology powerhouse and its economy has grown rapidly, barely affected by the worldwide recession starting in 2008. But the spoils of that growth have gone disproportionately to Israel’s own version of the one percent. According to Krugman, since the early 1990s,

Israel has experienced a dramatic widening of income disparities. Key measures of inequality have soared; Israel is now right up there with America as one of the most unequal societies in the advanced world. And Israel’s experience shows that this matters, that extreme inequality has a corrosive effect on social and political life.

Consider what has happened at either end of the spectrum — the growth in poverty, on one side, and extreme wealth, on the other.
According to Luxembourg Income Study data, the share of Israel’s population living on less than half the country’s median income — a widely accepted definition of relative poverty — more than doubled, to 20.5 percent from 10.2 percent, between 1992 and 2010. The share of children in poverty almost quadrupled, to 27.4 percent from 7.8 percent. Both numbers are the worst in the advanced world, by a large margin.
And when it comes to children, in particular, relative poverty is the right concept. Families that live on much lower incomes than those of their fellow citizens will, in important ways, be alienated from the society around them, unable to participate fully in the life of the nation. Children growing up in such families will surely be placed at a permanent disadvantage.
At the other end, while the available data — puzzlingly — don’t show an especially large share of income going to the top 1 percent, there is an extreme concentration of wealth and power among a tiny group of people at the top. And I mean tiny. According to the Bank of Israel, roughly 20 families control companies that account for half the total value of Israel’s stock market. The nature of that control is convoluted and obscure, working through “pyramids” in which a family controls a firm that in turn controls other firms and so on. Although the Bank of Israel is circumspect in its language, it is clearly worried about the potential this concentration of control creates for self-dealing.
The widening inequality in Israel, like that in the U.S. is the result of policy decisions, not just some naturally occurring phenomenon that free marketeers like to claim. Shockingly, according to Krugman, “Israel does less to lift people out of poverty than any other advanced country — yes, even less than the United States.” Now that is saying something. And those living in poverty are not just Israel’s oppressed Arab population and ulta-Orthodox Jews.
Israel’s oligarchs, like Russia’s, managed to gain control of businesses that were privatized in the 1980s. That control enables them outsized influence on policy. Works every time. Netanyahu is a big advocate for policies that keep them sitting pretty, and like New Jersey’s Chris Christie, the Israeli P.M. enjoys sitting and traveling pretty himself, often on the taxpayer’s dime.

Putting it all in simpler terms we’ve heard before, harkening back to Bill Clinton: “It’s the economy stupid.”

It is truly amazing how in lock-step conservatives are, here in the US and in Israel.  In both, for example, we have Sheldon Adelman spending obscene amounts of money to control politics that cater to special interests.  That is never good for ordinary people, but it has been the blubbery  kiss of death for right wingers for a while now.