US Politics Mega-thread - Page 9023

On October 19 2017 06:33 Danglars wrote:


Trump shifts his case for decertification more fully into the national security interests of America.

On October 19 2017 07:05 Mohdoo wrote:


If the argument had a shred of credibility, other nations would feel the same. It's not like Germany just wants to be as nice as possible to Iran and totally allow it to have nukes or something. Other countries want Iran to be benign. They support the Iran deal. If it was as bad as Trump says, it wouldn't have support. I just don't understand why people think all of these other countries, Russia included, support the plan.

On October 19 2017 07:15 farvacola wrote:
American war mongers know that maintaining one dimensional caricatures of foreign nations is the only way to keep the perpetual war machine churning. Take Israel and Iran as the best examples. Both are rife with partisan conflict in which it's obvious that significant numbers of citizens support peace and a move towards normalized relations with their supposed foes. However, if one pretends that Israel is nothing more than asshole Netanyahu and Likud shitbags or that Iran is a ranting ayatollah with hundreds chanting "death to America," it's suddenly a lot easier to scare stupid white people into supporting continued, unnecessary conflict.

On October 19 2017 08:33 Danglars wrote:

Something about tons of $$ without being called the Big Satan or Little Satan probably has a bit to do with it.

And, in general, they don't give a fuck what happens to Israel.


You draw interesting parallels between a repressive regime where partisan conflict might end in your death and a democratic regime with diverse elected representatives. You act like Iran was always inches from overthrow since the 70s and not the biggest state sponsor of terrorist attacks on planet earth for a long time running. Responsible for hundreds of American deaths or a long time ally of the west? It's just so hard to draw distinctions!

You act like Iran was always inches from overthrow since the 70s and not the biggest state sponsor of terrorist attacks on planet earth for a long time running.

On October 19 2017 09:21 GreenHorizons wrote:


Pretty sure that's the US?

Kellyanne Conway and Donald Trump Jr. pushed messages from an account operated from Russia’s “troll farm”—including allegations of voter fraud a week before Election Day.

Some of the Trump campaign’s most prominent names and supporters, including Trump’s campaign manager, digital director and son, pushed tweets from professional trolls paid by the Russian government in the heat of the 2016 election campaign.
The Twitter account @Ten_GOP, which called itself the “Unofficial Twitter account of Tennessee Republicans,” was operated from the Kremlin-backed “Russian troll farm,” or Internet Research Agency, a source familiar with the account confirmed with The Daily Beast.
The account’s origins in the Internet Research Agency were originally reported by the independent Russian news outlet RBC. @Ten_GOP was created on November 19, 2015, and accumulated over 100 thousand followers before Twitter shut it down. The Daily Beast independently confirmed the reasons for @Ten_GOP's account termination.
The discovery of the now-unavailable tweets presents the first evidence that several members of the Trump campaign pushed covert Russian propaganda on social media in the run-up to the 2016 election.
A Twitter spokesperson declined to comment, “for privacy and security reasons."
Two days before election day, Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway tweeted a post by @Ten_GOP regarding Hillary Clinton’s email.
“Mother of jailed sailor: 'Hold Hillary to same standards as my son on Classified info' #hillarysemail #WeinerGate” the tweet reads.

Three weeks before the election, Brad Parscale, the Trump campaign’s digital director, retweeted a separate post from @Ten_GOP.
“Thousands of deplorables chanting to the media: "Tell The Truth!" RT if you are also done w/ biased Media!” the tweet read.
President Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. followed the account until its closure on August 23rd of this year. Trump Jr. retweeted the account three times, including an allegation of voter fraud in Florida one week before the election.
“This vet passed away last month before he could vote for Trump.. Here he is in his #MAGA hat.. #voted #ElectionDay,” the account wrote.
Former Trump National Security Advisor Michael Flynn retweeted the Russian-backed troll account at least once. His son, Michael Flynn Jr., retweeted the account 34 times before it was removed from Twitter in August for its ties to Russian propaganda.
The account notably pushed for Flynn’s reappointment as Trump’s national security advisor, a job Flynn lost after press revelations that he’d lied about his telephone discussions with the Russian ambassador after the election hacks. It also repeatedly pushed Breitbart-backed talking points, including a fake news story about a gang rape in Twin Falls, Idaho that merited dozens of articles from Breitbart News.
Flynn Jr. will likely receive a Senate subpoena after he refused to be interviewed for the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Russia investigation, ABC News reported on Tuesday.
Former Trump campaign advisor and longtime confidante of the president Roger Stone retweeted the account three times in 2017, twice to rail against commentators on CNN.
On the same day as the account’s permanent ban, @Ten_GOP was caught passing a photo of the 2016 Cleveland Cavaliers NBA Championship parade in Cleveland as a picture of the crowd gathered outside a Trump rally in Phoenix.
Last March the account was one of the most active in promoting WikiLeaks’ first big release of CIA documents, using the occasion to float the false claim that the so-called “Vault 7” documents acquitted Russia in the hack of the Democratic National Committee. “BREAKING: Obama’s CIA posed as RUSSIAN HACKERS to disguise their dirty work,” read one of the tweets. “The ‘Russian hacking’ was a false flag by the CIA. It was done to give Obama a reason to spy on Trump!,” read another.
Overt Russian propaganda outlets Sputnik and RT frequently used @Ten_GOP’s tweets in their news stories, including a story titled “Russia has no compromising info on Trump or Clinton, report is ‘total bluff’ — Kremlin.”
Far right news sites The Gateway Pundit and InfoWars quoted the account in articles several times.
Fox News cited @Ten_GOP as its sole example of a “Trump fan” in an article titled “Trump fans call for Kellogg's boycott after brand pulls Breitbart ads” last December.
Former FBI counterterrorism agent Clint Watts, who testified to the Senate Intelligence Committee on Russian cyberattacks, told The Daily Beast that this is “exactly what I was talking about” in his testimony in March.
“If what you said is true, I’d say, ‘My job is done,’” said Watts. “If this account is definitely an (Internet Research Agency) account, it proved Russian Active Measures (like the 2016 propaganda campaign) works, because Americans will use it against other Americans.”
Watts said the content of these pages is “made to look organic” so that “Americans will use it against their political enemies.”
“If you take rumors, false information, plants, and just repeat them, you’re doing the job of a foreign country. They are seeding out information or narratives they know candidates or partisans will use. They were so effective, they had the very top people in the campaign using it,” said Watts.
“Basically, Russia loaded the gun. The Trump team fired.”
Mike Hasson, chief strategist of the Republican data analytics firm Red Metrics, said he remembered seeing the account as far back as the primaries, but became skeptical of the account due to a “couple odd things that stood out.”
“I remember seeing it in late primary season, showing up in my timeline, retweeted by ordinary grassroots people. Some of the stuff was conspiracy theorist and inflammatory, but other times the content was intended to be inspiring and heartwarming,” said Hasson.
Hasson said he became more confident of Ten_GOP’s origins after the account stopped tweeting about Tennessee and started tweeting about nationalist French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen, then tweeted several links from Russian propaganda network RT.
“For it to jump from Tennessee-related stuff and national stuff to Le Pen, that was probably the trigger point––like, ‘Ok, maybe there is something here that’s a lot worse,’” said Hasson.
“At that point, it was much more than just suspicion. That was more of a confirmation," he said, of Russia Today's frequent citation of the account. "By that point, it had accumulated enough red flags that I felt pretty sure that this was one of the bad guys.”
The account was retweeted 15 times by far-right agitator Ann Coulter, who also posted one of its tweets to her Twitter account.
Last month, after the account’s closure, someone launched a petition on the White House’s “We The People” site complaining about “a war on conservatives on Twitter.” The petition demanded the reinstatement of several alt-right Twitter accounts that had been suspended from the service, adding “My own account, @Tennessee_GOP, was banned on August the 23th.”
The petition misstates the name of the @Ten_GOP account, but came at around the same time as two more White House petitions protesting Facebook’s deletion of fake African American and progressive political accounts linked to the Russian active measures campaign. None of the petitions received enough signatures to qualify for a White House response.
Others in Trump’s inner circle, including former deputy national security advisor Sebastian Gorka, also retweeted Russian-tied Twitter accounts.
Despite posing as Tennessee Republicans, the account never hesitated to push the Kremlin’s talking points on issues like Syria and the French election. In May, the anonymous operator of a Twitter account called AltCyberCommand used Twitter’s password reset process to try and prove Russia’s involvement. A video of the hack appeared to show that TEN_GOP’s Twitter account was set up with a phone number in country code 7, indicating the Russian Federation, not Tennessee.

On October 19 2017 08:33 Danglars wrote:
And, in general, they don't give a fuck what happens to Israel.

On October 19 2017 12:55 LegalLord wrote:
The way I heard it described was this: going into the primaries, Ted Cruz was an unlikable asshole that all his coworkers hated. Upon the conclusion of the primaries, he was still an unlikable asshole that all his coworkers hated but he gained a substantial following of people who voted for him in the primaries, which definitely counts for something.

I do enjoy these Sanders-Cruz debates. They are among the few times in the country where we can forget about the drama newsverse and talk about the issues. But they're more an exception rather than the rule of how discourse looks in this country. And maybe that's why they're popular.

On October 19 2017 11:15 Nyxisto wrote:


Yes, that's totally why everybody tries to keep a deal in place that prevents Iran from developing nuclear weapons, because nobody apart from the US cares about Israel. You are really living in your own world

What exactly are you going to do if the treaty breaks and they just go down the NK route and build a bomb? Attack them? You lost a war against farmers in Vietnam but are going to take on Iran and NK solo then?

On October 19 2017 11:33 Liquid`Drone wrote:
Watching the Sanders vs Cruz debate. Been very pleased so far. Despite being political polar opposites, they are friendly and on point. And honestly, I'm finding Cruz even somewhat likable. Highlight for me is when a guy from denmark asks Bernie an absolutely on point question (one that I felt Bernie had been skirting around in the past) about how a scandinavian system requires far higher taxation levels across the board - not just of the wealthy - than what the case is for the American system. And then Sanders takes the opportunity to ask him about the cost of various services offered by the danish government, paid for by these taxes. Was a challenging question which ended up as a perfect layup.

I'm also left feeling that this debate flies straight in the face of the idea that Trump is a symptom rather than a cause of a corrupted discourse - if Bernie and Ted Cruz can have a cordial discussion, then certainly other democrats and republicans could, too. I totally disagree with Ted Cruz, and while he's guilty of the occasional misrepresentation (as is Sanders of him), I have no issues with his style. I also think he's a highly skilled debater. Trump however, is fucking poison.