The 2016 US Election (Part III)

[Soontir C'boath]

Don't know anything about that, but Bernie supporters had apparently taken over the media area.
TYT

[The Romulan Republic]

There will probably be some sore losers, but hopefully they're a distinct minority.

[Iroscato]

Hopefully the Dems can pull themselves together properly after tonight - the general air seems to be a pretty positive one from what I can tell. Now to take down the Orange Avenger...

[The Romulan Republic]

I'm worried that Bill and Albright speaking tonight might be a bit divisive. I recall both of them saying some rather nasty things about Sanders supporters, and Bill of course pulled his campaigning at polling places stunts, so I expect a bit of booing.

But I think we're hopefully getting on the right track.

[The Romulan Republic]

According to Politico, over 100 supporters walked out after Clinton got the nomination.

Considering how many people are there, though, and that there's no confirmation that these are actual delegates, its nothing.

Also, Politico is a source I've found to have a distinct anti-Sanders bias, so take it with a big grain of salt.

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/07/d ... 7?lo=ap_b1

More than a hundred Bernie Sanders supporters boisterously walked out of the Wells Fargo Center after Hillary Clinton won the roll call vote making her the Democratic nominee for president.

The demonstration defied the party's efforts to quell the revolt, even after Sanders himself moved to nominate Clinton by acclamation, and there were essentially no audible nays in the arena during the voice vote.


Waving "Bernie or Bust" signs and wearing gags, Robin Hood hats and at least one Princess Leia costume, the demonstrators chanted "Walk out," "This is what democracy looks like," and "We are the 99 percent," recalling the Occupy Wall Street protests of 2011. After filing out of the arena they entered the press tent in search of obliging cameras.

"The whole world is watching," they chanted. Then, "She lied, she cheated, she stole our votes."

Cops streamed in after them and shut the doors. Rifle-armed Secret Service agents watched with binoculars as a police helicopter circled overhead.

Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, tweeted, "I'm calling on all who have a conscience, who value people, planet & peace above profit, to leave the neoliberal Democratic Party."

[maraxus2]

So I'm hearing Bernie Delegate walkout on my social media not seeing any stories so minor thing or invented thing?

Basically horseshit. Small rump of delegates who were mad that they weren't allowed to pull a maneuver to get Tim Kaine off the ticket. Probably fewer than 100 delegates, if that.

I'm worried that Bill and Albright speaking tonight might be a bit divisive. I recall both of them saying some rather nasty things about Sanders supporters, and Bill of course pulled his campaigning at polling places stunts, so I expect a bit of booing.

But I think we're hopefully getting on the right track.

Why boo? There wasn't a whole lot going on during the headline speeches last night.

The protests/booing are over. No point in heckling now.

[FireNexus]

https://m.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1 ... &source=57

This amused me.

[maraxus2]

This amused me.

the "well actually" comments below the fold are slightly less amusing.

[FireNexus]

Didn't even get that far. I just like Hamilton.

[The Romulan Republic]

https://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/pr ... in-website

Republican presidential candidate Ohio Gov. John Kasich’s campaign has released a new website and video satirically touting a Trump-Putin 2016 bid for the White House.

Its slogan: “Make tyranny great again.”

“In a bold and visionary move characteristic of everything he does, today terrific billionaire Donald Trump named Russian President Vladimir Putin as his running mate in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign,” the Kasich campaign said in a news release.



The website, Trump-Putin2016.com, is a reference to Trump and Putin heaping praise on one another this week.
“By signing up you are waiving all constitutional rights, civil liberties, notion of privacy and subjecting yourself to a steady stream of hugely outrageous comments,” a disclaimer on the website reads.

I'm actually feeling a grudging respect for Kasich here.

The more I think about it, the more I think this email leak may turn into a blessing in disguise for Hillary Clinton. Because if there is one thing that can get moderate Republicans to support her, its the prospect of the President of the United States being a potential puppet of the Russian government.

This goes beyond partisanship. Its a question of the fundamental integrity of the United States government.

If there is any justice, then the Republican Party is dead. I do not see how any party can come back from being identified as the party that tried to hand the Presidency over to an ally of a foreign despot.

[Gandalf]

There's something wonderfully amusing about the US being annoyed at foreign governments possibly interfering in their elections.

[Grumman]

The more I think about it, the more I think this email leak may turn into a blessing in disguise for Hillary Clinton.

"Trump is a Russian patsy because the Democrats said so." is not a credible argument, if that's what you're suggesting. I'm sure that Trump has some emails from his Birther years saying Obama was born in Kenya, but a leak that revealed such emails wouldn't make it true.

[The Romulan Republic]

There's something wonderfully amusing about the US being annoyed at foreign governments possibly interfering in their elections.

Just because the US did it to others in the past doesn't make it right.

And, let's be honest, the potential global implications are way more serious when its happening between two major powers.

[The Romulan Republic]

The more I think about it, the more I think this email leak may turn into a blessing in disguise for Hillary Clinton.

"Trump is a Russian patsy because the Democrats said so." is not a credible argument, if that's what you're suggesting. I'm sure that Trump has some emails from his Birther years saying Obama was born in Kenya, but a leak that revealed such emails wouldn't make it true.

That is not what is being said, its certainly not what I'm saying, and I expect you to retract that immediately, as it is a dishonest argument.

Read the New York Times article I posted. Read Republican Governor John Kasich's take on the subject. Consider the fact that the FBI is currently investigating the email leak's Russian ties.

This is not a fringe conspiracy theory, and its not a Democratic talking point. This is a very real possibility of Putin trying to interfere in the election to aid a candidate who has close ties to Russia and who will favour his interests at the expense of American and its allies.

At least read the evidence before you dismiss the argument.

[The Romulan Republic]

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/27/us/po ... d-dnc.html

WASHINGTON — American intelligence agencies have told the White House they now have “high confidence” that the Russian government was behind the theft of emails and documents from the Democratic National Committee, according to federal officials who have been briefed on the evidence.

But intelligence agencies have cautioned that they are uncertain whether the electronic break-in at the committee’s computer systems was intended as fairly routine cyberespionage — of the kind the United States also conducts around the world — or as part of an effort to manipulate the 2016 presidential election.

The emails were released by WikiLeaks, whose founder, Julian Assange, has made it clear that he hoped to harm Hillary Clinton’s chances of winning the presidency. It is unclear how the documents made their way to the group. But a large sampling was published before the WikiLeaks release by several news organizations and someone who called himself “Guccifer 2.0,” who investigators now believe was an agent of the G.R.U., Russia’s military intelligence service.

The assessment by the intelligence community of Russian involvement in the D.N.C. hack, which largely echoes the findings of private cybersecurity firms that have examined the electronic fingerprints left by the intruders, leaves President Obama and his national security aides with a difficult diplomatic and political decision: Whether to publicly accuse the government of President Vladimir V. Putin of engineering the hack.

Such a public accusation could result in a further deterioration of the already icy relationship between Washington and Moscow, at a moment when the administration is trying to reach an accord with Mr. Putin on a cease-fire in Syria and on other issues. It could also doom any effort to reach some kind of agreement about acceptable behavior in cyberspace, of the kind the United States has been discussing with China.

Stealing information about another country’s political infighting is hardly new, and the United States has conducted covert collection from allies like Germany and adversaries like Russia for decades. Publishing the documents — what some have called “weaponizing” them — is a different issue. Mrs. Clinton’s campaign has suggested that Mr. Putin was trying to even the score after the former secretary of state denounced a 2011 Russian election as filled with fraud.

“The first thing that the secretary of state did was say that they were not honest and not fair, but she had not even yet received the material from the observers,” Mr. Putin said at the time. “She set the tone for some actors in our country and gave them a signal,” Mr. Putin continued. “They heard the signal and, with the support of the U.S. State Department, began active work.”

Continue reading the main story
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Campaign officials have also suggested that Mr. Putin could be trying to tilt the election to Donald J. Trump. But they acknowledge that they have no evidence.

Asked on Tuesday at the Democratic convention in Philadelphia whether “there’s more to the Trump/Russian relationship that hasn’t come out,” John Podesta, the Clinton campaign chairman, said, “Well he certainly has a bromance with Mr. Putin, so I don’t know.” Mr. Podesta said that while Russia has a “history” of interfering in democratic elections in Europe, it would be “unprecedented in the United States.”

The Republican platform, adopted last week in Cleveland, calls on the United States to “respond in kind and in greater magnitude” to cyberattacks, saying that “Russia and China see cyber operations as part of a warfare strategy during peacetime. Our response should be to cause diplomatic, financial and legal pain.”

But the Trump campaign has dismissed the accusations about Russia as a deliberate distraction, meant to draw attention away from the content of nearly 20,000 emails and documents from the Democratic committee that were released by WikiLeaks starting on Friday. They showed efforts to impugn Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont in his effort to challenge Mrs. Clinton for the nomination.

Secretary of State John Kerry raised the attack on the D.N.C. with his Russian counterpart, Sergey V. Lavrov, on Tuesday at a meeting of foreign ministers in Vientiane, Laos. Mr. Lavrov dismissed the idea that Russia was involved, telling reporters who asked about the charges: “I don’t want to use four-letter words.”

Mr. Kerry made no accusations, saying that he had to allow the F.B.I. to “do its work” before he drew “any conclusions in terms of what happened or who’s behind it.”

The federal investigation, involving the F.B.I. and the intelligence agencies, has been going on since the Democratic National Committee first called in a private cybersecurity firm, Crowdstrike, in April.

Preliminary conclusions were discussed on Thursday at a weekly cyberintelligence meeting for senior officials. The Crowdstrike report, supported by several other firms that have examined the same bits of code and telltale “metadata” left on documents that were released before WikiLeaks’ publication of the larger trove, concludes that the Federal Security Service, known as the F.S.B., entered the committee’s networks last summer.

The G.R.U., a competing, military intelligence unit, was a later arrival. Investigators believe it is the G.R.U. that has played a bigger role in releasing the emails.

In an essay published on Lawfare, a blog that often deals with cyberissues, Susan Hennessey, previously a lawyer for the National Security Agency, called the published evidence about Russian involvement “about as close to a smoking gun as can be expected when a sophisticated nation-state is involved.” Mr. Assange’s threat to release documents, she wrote, “means, put simply, that actors outside the U.S. are using criminal means to influence the outcome of a US election. That’s a problem.”

But American intelligence agencies have their doubts that the Russian intention, at least initially, was to sway the American election. The intrusion began just shortly after Mr. Trump announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination. At the time, his chances looked minuscule. One senior official noted that while the cyberattack might have been intended to embarrass Mrs. Clinton, who was the presumptive nominee, it could not have been aimed at bolstering Mr. Trump.

It is far from clear that Mr. Obama or the F.B.I. director, James Comey, would ever name Russia as the origin of the hack. Mr. Obama has only once accused a country of attacking an American organization, when he said that North Korea was the source of the 2014 attack against Sony Pictures Entertainment. But the United States has no relationship with North Korea, and there was little to lose from identifying it.

In the case of Russia and China — countries with which the United States has complex relationships — Mr. Obama has in the past made the opposite decision. He never named the Russian intelligence agencies as the perpetrators of hacks on the State Department and White House unclassified email systems, or on the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

While the administration has called out the People’s Liberation Army of China for stealing intellectual property, it never publicly accused the Chinese intelligence services of stealing the security-clearance files on more than 21 million Americans who held or applied for clearances.

By happenstance, the intelligence report on the D.N.C. hack was circulating here on the day that Mr. Obama issued a new policy, long in development, to organize the government’s response to major cyberattacks and to set up a six-point “grading system” to assess the severity of strikes against American companies, government agencies and organizations.

The action against the Democratic committee, they said, would qualify as a “significant cyber incident,” which was defined as one that causes “demonstrable harm to the national security interests, foreign relations or economy of the United States, or to the public confidence, civil liberties or public health and safety of the American people.”

Ranking the D.N.C. hack in the pantheon of other penetrated networks is difficult. The top ranking under Mr. Obama’s system would be reserved for an attack that disabled American power grids, for example, akin to the suspected Russian attack on Ukraine’s electrical system in December. The attack on the Office of Personnel Management and Sony, which destroyed 70 percent of the studio’s computers, would also rank above the “category 3” level, which defines a “significant” attack.

But the ranking system does not mandate what kind of response the president would authorize. And it was designed before many in Washington imagined the use of cyberattacks to release information in the midst of a dizzying, and volatile, presidential campaign.

More information. Its not absolutely conclusive that Russia's government was interfering in the election, but it seems very likely that the Russian government was behind the hacking, and one does wonder about how the information then reached Wikileaks (Assange admits he was trying to weaken Clinton), and about why they would release the information at that particular time.

[The Romulan Republic]

I will also point out that, as Gandalf alluded to, it is unfortunately nothing new for a nation to intervene in another's election to try to install a government more favourable or compliant to their agenda.

Its only shocking, I dare say, because too many Americans think themselves immune to this sort of thing. No doubt they think it is something that happens only to lesser, poorer, or more backward countries.

The shock is not that it appears to be happening, but that it appears to be happening between two great powers.

[The Romulan Republic]

To be clear, the Kasich parody site is actually several months old.

Which actually makes it even funnier, because it means Kasich called this way back then.

[FTeik]

How does "the russians did it" change the fact, that the leadership of the Democratic Party sabotaged (if that is what they did and were not just talking about) Bernie Sanders campaign? Wouldn't the effect have been the same, if the whistleblower had been an U.S.-citicen (perhaps even more, because now everyone is concentrating on the russian involvement)?
And could somebody make criminal charges for manipulating the election or is it treated as an inter-democratic issue?

[The Romulan Republic]

How does "the russians did it" change the fact, that the leadership of the Democratic Party sabotaged (if that is what they did and were not just talking about) Bernie Sanders campaign?

Obviously it doesn't change what the DNC did.

That said, its not going to change who the nominee is now, and it sure as hell is not worth making Trump President over, so I really hope it blows over.

We got Schultz out of the DNC, got an apology from the DNC, and have proof of what happened. That's enough compensation for me, unless evidence exists to justify further legal action.

Wouldn't the effect have been the same, if the whistleblower had been an U.S.-citicen (perhaps even more, because now everyone is concentrating on the russian involvement)?

The difference would be that it would be an internal matter, rather than evidence of another country's despot trying to highjack our election.

Also, a whole bunch of other stuff has come out about the Putin/Trump ties. The email leak is the tip of that iceberg.

And could somebody make criminal charges for manipulating the election or is it treated as an inter-democratic issue?

No idea, though as far as I know there have been no allegations of criminal manipulation of the election by anyone in the DNC related to these emails.

[Broomstick]

How does "the russians did it" change the fact, that the leadership of the Democratic Party sabotaged (if that is what they did and were not just talking about) Bernie Sanders campaign? Wouldn't the effect have been the same, if the whistleblower had been an U.S.-citicen (perhaps even more, because now everyone is concentrating on the russian involvement)?
And could somebody make criminal charges for manipulating the election or is it treated as an inter-democratic issue?

This isn't Watergate, where actual criminal acts were revealed*. What was done by members of the Democratic Party were scummy and arguably unethical but not actually illegal.

As far as I can see, it was all talk and no action. For example, there was talk of portraying Sanders as an atheist Jew but so far as I can recollect that never happened. For that matter, I don't recall his religion (had he been nominated he would have been the first non-Christian/Jew to be nominated by a major US party) or lack of it ever coming up. Unless actual evidence of actual wrong-doing is uncovered no one is going on trial for this.



* Hacking someone's e-mail might be illegal. Interesting that Watergate was also someone breaking into the Democratic Party looking for dirt on them but that was done by the Republicans, not Russia.

[The Romulan Republic]

Yeah, actually, Watergate seems an apt parallel insofar as this appears to be a political motivated break-in of the DNC. Albeit via different means (hacking vs. burglary) and apparently by a different guilty party (Russia instead of Republicans, although oddly enough, potentially Russia on behalf of Republicans).

[Flagg]

People don't seem to understand that if the DNC wanted to they could ignore every vote cast and nominate a labradoodle. Nothing illegal was done (except the hacking of the emails) and this is all a fucking sideshow.

[The Romulan Republic]

Their are, obviously, many things which are not illegal but are nonetheless significant and can have negative political ramifications.

The point is not that its illegal. Its that its unethical and confirms concerns that Sanders supporters have long had. And politically, it came at just about the worst possible time.

That said, like I said, its not worth dividing the Left further over. I'd rather not have Democrats dancing on Putin's strings.

[Flagg]

And could somebody make criminal charges for manipulating the election or is it treated as an inter-democratic issue?

The only thing criminal was the hacking of the emails. The other shit is purely intraparty shittiness and no more. Like I said, they could have ignored every primary and caucus and nominated a labradoodle instead of Clinton. Well, not really, they don't have citizenship and live to be over 35, but you get my drift.

[Flagg]

Their are, obviously, many things which are not illegal but are nonetheless significant and can have negative political ramifications.

The point is not that its illegal. Its that its unethical and confirms concerns that Sanders supporters have long had. And politically, it came at just about the worst possible time.

That said, like I said, its not worth dividing the Left further over. I'd rather not have Democrats dancing on Putin's strings.

It's unethical as all hell, I'd like to see the participants purged from the Democratic party, and the timing is perfect to help Trump. So while in the end it's much ado about nothing, the hackers need to be identified and hopefully arrested, but I doubt that will happen. If the Russian government was involved I have to give them credit, as they know a Trump led USA is a very weak USA.