Exactly what I have been saying! The mob winning Chicago for JFK might have been with ghost voters back in the early '60's. I think this Ruskie "hack" is all about story plants and billboards,which is the title of my book.

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favrefan said:"Chris Coghlan isn't gonna pay your rent, Jimmy."

That is the definition of Fake News. Trumpets have taken the term over to pervert the meaning.

SAD

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the onion is fake news. trump trying to co-opt the term to fit his own personal definition is lame. he's a narcissistic crybaby.

Heck, I recall Obama sticking his two cents in the Brexit vote, urging people to choose “Remain” and threatening them economically if they didn’t.

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That's correct.

You don't say?

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Elections have consequences.

Okay, so everybody has their own definition of 'hacked'. How unsurprising.

Quit using it then. Use plain language, not some vague, fungible buzzword as a means of giving oneself wiggle room to amend what they (purportedly) meant to say later in the debate.

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Power is always in the hands of the masses of men. What oppresses the masses is their own ignorance, their own short-sighted selfishness.
- Henry George

I've never taken it to mean that and most of the reporting of it doesn't really suggest it either. I don't think people believe that the Riussians changed actual votes but they did attempt to influence the election. That much is clear. If Trump colluded with them in order to win then there needs to be an investigation.

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That's Zippy's argument which he wanted to pretend as if I didn't understand. I do understand that take, but I disagree. Donald Trump popularized the term "fake news". The popular usage now simply means a news story that is not true. But that's really just a semantic argument that is beyond the point. We should all be able to agree that a subtle false story like "the election was hacked" is far more dangerous than a sensational National Examiner-style headline like "Clinton and Abedin Decapitate Babies in Pizza Parlor!"

Anyway, I want to go back to that sentence in the NYT piece linked above: "Officers of the Russian intelligence agency formerly known as the G.R.U. had plotted with groups like WikiLeaks on how to release the email stash."

I've always been fascinated by words and the way we put them together to communicate. That's probably why I was an English major. Look at that sentence. What is the author saying? What is he trying to say? Assange has repeatedly denied that any of his information came from the Russian government. I believe him. That sentence doesn't actually say that Russian intelligence colluded with Wikileaks but it damn sure means to suggest it. Most people won't notice that. They'll just read the article and then link it on a message board saying, "Look, Wikileaks and the Russians tried to take down Hillary Clinton." That sentence is no different than this one: Members of the Manson Family had plotted with people like Zippy The Pinhead on how to murder Sharon Tate.

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Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

This election and every other election since at least WWII. We just never made such a big deal about it until Hillary Clinton cried.

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Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

I feel like people who came of age with the internet as new frontier and all sorts of accompanying bad TV about evil hackers (so I guess people my age +10, -5?) think of hacking as the infiltration of a computer system. But now there's "hack" as in "life hack," where you just, I dunno, do something better or more efficiently. It's altogether a pretty gauzy term, so I guess I can see how "hacking the election" can be understood as "getting what you want out of the election" or something without suggesting the changing of computer data, but I don't like it and I don't think it should be used that way, because "Russians went in and changed your vote for Hillary to a vote for Trump" is a much more intuitive understanding of the term.

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This thread is the first I heard about this "hacking" confusion. Emails were "hacked" and leaked at opportune moments is what the story has consistently been about.

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Hillary coined it and started to popularize it, then Trump stole it. She really can't catch a break against this guy.

I agree that subtle disinformation is more dangerous than the out-and-out tabloid shit that fools Facebook Moms, I just think we should reserve "fake news" for the latter. Or not use it at all; it's a clunky and awkward phrase (no wonder Hillary coined it).

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But even that part of the "hacking" wasn't as nefarious as they would want you to believe. This was not some group of scientists in a bunker using sophisticated technology to break into DNC mainframes. This was a blanket phishing expedition where certain Dems fell for it (i.e., they clicked on a bogus e-mail or link and exposed their passwords etc) whereas the GOP staffers didn't. I think it's likely if the GOP staffers had been duped as well, their info would have been leaked too.

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Its only a big deal if Trump worked with him in order to do it. Trump and his curious behavior is also a reason that its a big deal.

Trump is more conciliatory towards Putin than Truman was towards Stalin and Truman had more reason to behave that way since the U.S.S.R is the reason we won WWII.

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I would say it's highly likely that GOP emails and systems were also hacked into. This info was not leaked because it would have damaged the side the Russians wanted to win. They'll just hold onto it until they can use it to sow more division.

Imagine all the backroom emailing that must have been flying around the RNC and upper levels of the GOP trying to figure out a way to derail the Trump train.

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I don't think I'm giving either side as being more tech savvy then the other. I'd guess they infiltrated both sides equally and have stuff on both sides. What is released and what is withheld is what speaks volumes

For example, our president at Helisnki.

As with everything history will tell us soon enough more or less what the reality was.

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Elections have consequences.

Its amazing that Trump brought up Russian tampering in the first place. Obama knew about it but ridiculed Trump for "whining" about it before the election. People like Clinton, Podesta, and their aides both violated established policies regarding securing classified information and destroyed government servers and other electronic devises to cover up their crimes. And SOMEHOW the media say that it is TRUMP'S FAULT??? It is all bullshit.

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An Ode to the Texas man who shot an Antifa terrorist:

Oh, he might have went on livin'
But he made one fatal slip
When he tried to match the Ranger
With the big iron on his hip

You don't say?

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Elections have consequences.

I don't think they ever really wanted to. The Republicans have a clearer understanding of electoral politics than the Democrats do: they offered a wide (or as wide as an ideological fringe like today's GOP can represent) range of candidates and more or less let the process play out. They liked the guy who got votes, what a concept.

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I don't know whether the Russians wanted Trump to win (it's not like Obama had stopped Putin in Crimea or that Hillary would have been bad for them). And as you said, the RNC wasn't exactly promoting Trump either.

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The RNC didn't promote Trump -- they left that to Hillary's confederates in journalism -- but nor did they ratfuck him. Fittingly, it was a real laissez-faire approach.

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The truth of the matter is the Democrat party et al understands exactly why and how they lost to Trump. At least internally they do that is if they are honest with their selves. If they would just have been more honest publicly they might be a lot better off. To just drag this conspiracy screaming at level 10 for four years just makes people not listen after some time. I think we see this now.

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Elections have consequences.

1) Don't say "Democrat Party," it's hella lame, almost as lame as me using "hella"

2) They do know in their hearts, but the donors and Hillary/Obama people still wield too much power to clearly avoid history repeating itself. The minimization of superdelegates is a promising step forward, though.

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Missed that. What did they do?

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Elections have consequences.

No superdelegates on the first ballot. I guess I should have said "diminished" instead of "minimized," because with proportional allocation in every primary contest (Republicans still have winner-take-all states), it's not unthinkable to go to a second ballot and wind up with whoever the DNC wanted all along.

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To be honest, it's hard for the RNC to ratfuck a candidate when they don't have super-delegates.

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“When I walked in this morning, and saw the flag was at half mast, I thought 'alright another bureaucrat ate it.'" - Ron Swanson

This is bigger than simply wanting to install Hillary Clinton as President. People for the most part have moved on from that. I have.


You are asking for them to overlook the possibility that Trump acted corruptly. You wouldn't be making similar requests if it were Hillary or even Obama.

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The term "fake news" is such an inarticulate description that it seems only fitting that its use would be championed by Trump.

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O judgment! Thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason.