Seth Abramson
@SethAbramson
Please remember: the man who fired McCabe for a single act of “lack of candor” not only was recused from all election-related cases and therefore without authority to issue that firing, but also perjured himself multiple times before Congress.
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Former CIA Director
John O. Brennan
@JohnBrennan
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12h
When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history. You may scapegoat Andy McCabe, but you will not destroy America…America will triumph over you.
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Brennan’s thoughts are always interesting given his career.
Far more interesting to me however is watching someone like Joe Walsh, a fmr Republican congressman who was pretty much all-in on Trump for a long time and is certainly very Right/Conservative, react to Trump’s tweets about Mueller now and the FBI previously. Says Trump’s Mueller tweets amount to obstruction, and that a move against the Special Counsel should lead to impeachment.
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John Brennan going at trump hey?
When a dude who oversaw, lied about, covered up, and defended CIA torture consistently during his tenure as director is calling the president out for ‘moral turpitude’ I’m not sure how to feel tbh.
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This article is incredible in its attention to detail and background research. In an election effectively ‘won’ by 78,000 votes in 3 states the impact of targeting millions through what is essentially psychographic warfare can not be underestimated. And the threads to Russia are deeper than we have imagined. BUT, ultimately it is the complicity of facebook and it’s willful ignorance of what was happening that is the root cause.
Some pertinent excerpts:
Trump is like a pair of Uggs, or Crocs, basically. So how do you get from people thinking ‘Ugh. Totally ugly’ to the moment when everyone is wearing them?
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“Computer-based personality judgments are more accurate than those made by humans”.
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Kogan was able to throw money at the hard problem of acquiring personal data: he advertised for people who were willing to be paid to take a personality quiz on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and Qualtrics. At the end of which Kogan’s app, called thisismydigitallife, gave him permission to access their Facebook profiles. And not just theirs, but their friends’ too. On average, each “seeder” – the people who had taken the personality test, around 320,000 in total – unwittingly gave access to at least 160 other people’s profiles, none of whom would have known or had reason to suspect.
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“It didn’t make any sense to me,” says Wylie. “I didn’t understand either the email or the pitch presentation we did. Why would a Russian oil company want to target information on American voters?”
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Russia, Facebook, Trump, Mercer, Bannon, Brexit. Every one of these threads runs through Cambridge Analytica. Even in the past few weeks, it seems as if the understanding of Facebook’s role has broadened and deepened. The Mueller indictments were part of that, but Paul-Olivier Dehaye – a data expert and academic based in Switzerland, who published some of the first research into Cambridge Analytica’s processes – says it’s become increasingly apparent that Facebook is “abusive by design”. If there is evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, it will be in the platform’s data flows, he says. And Wylie’s revelations only move it on again
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Again, three different agencies approved his dismissal. That would mean there were multiple people from multiple agencies all in cahoots with Trump to get rid of someone.
I know some of you TDS sufferers like a good conspiracy but even for you guys, this takes it to a new level.
IF ONLY I HAD SOME KIND OF CORROBORATING EVIDENCE!!!
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LOL - I assume you’re an Arts student and not a lawyer.
Pls accept your pwning with the good humour to which we have all become accustomed
When will Democrats stop blaming everyone else (Russia, deplorables, Faceplant, red-necks, etc, ect) for them losing an election they should have won?
If they had bothered voting (which they now seem to want to do coming towards mid-terms) then all of this would never have happened.
When will they own that piece of fact?
That is a bit of a red herring though isn’t it? The Dems did outvote the Republicans by 3m votes. Pretty decent fact in my opinion.
But yeah, if only 79k MORE Dems had voted in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania it would have mattered. So, we will have to outvote the Republicans by 4m votes next time. And, do it in the right states. The Republicans sure got that right.
There is a fair amount of introspection going on in the Democratic ranks. At the same time one can not turn a blind eye to what occurred.
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That’s business as usual for the CIA. If somebody with that much laundary in the landfill is having a crack we’re truly a few rings into Hell. Feel bad.
Not really. Hillary and her lot thought they would just get the win. They showed utter disdain for anyone who wasn’t Democrat and educated and not living in a city. It was pathetic behaviour and drove a lot of the deplorables to come out and vote. She still won’t own that, there is always another excuse.
You take the most classic example of stupid arrogance amongst Democrat voters: Kapernick. Hates Trump, stood (knelt) against him and the treatment of blacks. Spoke out about Trump, then didn’t vote.
How many others were the same? The Dems may have had more voters, but in reality they should have had a crap load more. They ASSUMED they would win, and like everyone else, were shocked when they didn’t. Since then it has been about blaming everyone but themselves.
If you (plural) honestly think the Russians ACTUALLY impacted on the election (I am not talking about whether they tried to) then you have been sucked in by the machine PR.
Why did McCabe wait until he was sacked before providing all his evidence about Trump to Mueller?
He didn’t. His notes stay at the FBI. Mueller can access them.
Oh, all the articles I read said he handed them over after he was sacked. Fair enough. Seems strange Mueller didn’t already have them.
Something as big and complex and with as many inputs as a US election result never has a single cause or deciding factor.
Russian propaganda and manipulation WAS one factor in turning the election result. So was Comey coming out a week before the election and announcing Clinton was under investigation while staying silent about the much bigger and more serious investigation looking into Trump. So was the Democrats nominating a candidate who basically had ‘establishment’ tattooed on her forehead when the prevailing opinion was crying out against conventional politics and the failure of economic orthodoxy. So was the widespread paranoid delusions about the perfidy of the Clinton family dating back to the 90s where the looney right was losing it mind over Vince Foster. So was the fact that under Obama the democrats abandoned any claim to the moral high ground by refusing to hold crooked bankers or CIA torturers to account. So was the miserable failure of the press as an institution - everyone knows that Fox is a pack of propaganda hacks, but there was an analysis recently that showed even a ‘lefty’ outlet like the New York Times published many times more articles about Clinton’s email server than it did about every policy issue combined. So was the flagrant gerrymandering in many states (that is now starting to be address by the courts) that contributed to the candidate who won by a considerable margin in the popular vote losing the electoral college. So did the broken primary system that led to two awful candidates being put forward, and the more generally broken system which pretty effectively locks third parties out of the political process.
All of these are real issues and had a real impact on the election. The Dems would obviously prefer to focus on the Russia stuff because big public scandalous revelations of wrongdoing on the part of Trump and his merry band of scum and morons is a path back to power for them, and because they’ve were all there during the mistakes that Obama made and a lot were there for Clinton’s campaign too, and that’s all history they’d prefer to ignore right now. Which is very dumb in the long run but very human in the short term.
But no mistakes that the Dems (voters or pollies) made makes Russian interference in the election any less of a problem for the US (especially if the current president and/or his campaign were in on it). It’s a very serious matter and it SHOULD be focused on heavily. The democrats misadventures are their own problem. Russian interference is a problem for the whole country.
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Amazing how this has been largely forgotten in the conversation. Did untold damage.
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IT, I am going to stop you right there as you have taken shots at Kap in the past.
Firstly, Kap is not a democrat. And, he is not stupid. Or arrogant. It takes courage to sacrifice one’s career (as he most certainly has), put one’s money where one’s mouth is (Kap has donated $1m of his own money to equality issues), to take a stand on a what should be a non-political issue. Black people should not be getting shot by the police for no reason other than the color of their skin. Trump had NOTHING to do with his protest. Until, of course, Trump waded into it and made it about himself.
Second, while I don’t agree with Kap not voting, he very firmly stated his view that “both candidates are liars”. That is his prerogative though I tend to personally think one candidate was a tad worse than the other.
He could very easily have kept his mouth shut and not have had to watch QB after QB with less than a tenth of his talent or accomplishments sucking it up last year. But no, he stuck to his principles.
I wish I was as “stupid” and “arrogant” as him.
you are