Octopus Overlords

El Guapo wrote:Yeah there's nowhere to go from here.

Max Peck wrote:

El Guapo wrote:Yeah there's nowhere to go from here.

There's prison, if Trump keeps his promise to persecute prosecute and convict her.

Defiant wrote:I do wonder if there's a good resource for distinguishing between good sources and non-good sources online. It would be very useful.

(Not as in CNN vs Fox News, but CNN or Fox News as opposed to something not composed of journalists at all. Something like that would be very beneficial for Google or Facebook to implement)

L – Left Bias
LC – Left-Center Bias
C – Center (Least Biased)
RC – Right-Center Bias
R – Right Bias
PS – Pro-Science
CP – Conspiracy-Pseudoscience
S – Satire

Kraken wrote:Pro-Science is a political bias? That is so whacked.

gilraen wrote:SNL: Kate McKinnon cold open - 'Hallelujah'

Skinypupy wrote:

gilraen wrote:SNL: Kate McKinnon cold open - 'Hallelujah'

I've never been an SNL watcher, but have become entirely smitten with Kate McKinnon throughout the election season. That was fantastic way to close it out.

Rip wrote:I thought parodies were supposed to be funny?

Rip wrote:Excuse.

Zarathud wrote:Interesting read. Clinton was supposed to have the best ground game, but that doesn't pay off if you don't pay attention to the ball and adjust your game. Clinton could have won if not for this unforced error on the ground.

Rip wrote:Or.

http://theweek.com/speedreads/667301/cl ... n-election

Moliere wrote:How A Single Typo Led To The Unraveling Of Hillary Clinton’s Campaign

Everyone has a theory on why she lost...

Here’s a quick rundown of 13 major moments where Clinton’s seemingly invincible presidential campaign was brought down thanks Russian hacking efforts:

1996: Russian Spetsnaz special forces pepper Clinton with sniper rifle fire as she lands in Sarajevo after the Bosnian War. Shortly after, Russian hackers destroy all video footage of this event, replacing it with fake news accounts that Clinton’s visit was peaceful. Clinton’s unbelievable bravery in Bosnia is subsequently disbelieved.

Jan. 28, 2009: Russia-financed black hat hackers in Donetsk, Ukraine, hack Clinton’s personal Blackberry and modify the emails she sends. An email demanding that Clinton follow all Department of State email rules is quietly deleted, and replaced with a spoof email demanding the creation of a private email server stored at her personal home in New York.

May 2013: A Russian hack of Clinton’s teleprompter modifies her speech to Banco Itau, altering her speech to say that her dream is “open borders” with the entire Western Hemisphere, instead of her original dream of “safe, well-regulated borders.”

February 2015: Chinese hackers in the employ of Moscow penetrate the Clinton Foundation and alter its payroll to pay men far more than women, causing the Clinton campaign embarrassment when this big imbalance is brought up, undermining their efforts to run a campaign on closing the pay gap.

May, 2015: Rudolph Epstein, a minor Clinton staffer co-opted by a Russian hacker’s girlfriend, convinces Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook to outsource the campaign’s decision-making to a computer program named Ada. The program, though, is simply the work of hackers from Novosibirsk, who use it as a vehicle to sabotage Clinton’s campaign while promoting various fake news storylines. The program steadily supplies Clinton with terrible ideas, such as printing off literal “woman cards” and joking about wiping her email server “with a cloth.”

Dec. 22, 2015: A group of Moscow hackers gain access to Clinton’s campaign website, posting an embarrassing fake news article about how “Hillary Clinton is just like your abuela.” This fake news damages Clinton’s campaign by causing an unjustified backlash from the public who regard it as ethnic pandering by Clinton.

March 13, 2016: A Russian spy in Clinton’s campaign swaps out her primary debate notes with doctored copies produced by Russian intelligence. The doctored notes include a line saying Clinton wants to put coal miners out of work, which Clinton mistakenly reads, alienating working class whites across the country.

March 15, 2016: The same Russian spy implants electrodes on an unsuspecting Clinton’s neck as she takes a nap, causing her to later bark like a dog during a rally in Reno, Nevada.

April 10, 2016: Russian agents in New York City advance $4 million into Bill de Blasio’s bank account, bribing him to make a joke about being on “C.P time” (colored people time) in his delayed endorsement of Clinton for president. The nefarious ploy costs Clinton thousands of black voters in swing states.

Sept. 7, 2016: Revolutionary Russian technology allows hackers to “hack” Clinton’s memories, causing her to forget entirely about the Benghazi attack and claim no Americans have died in Libya.

Sept. 11, 2016: Biologists tied to the Russian space agency, Roscosmos, use satellites to broadcast damaging rays directly into Clinton’s brain stem, causing her to abruptly collapse at a Sept. 11 memorial service after just 90 minutes outside in mild weather.

Oct. 18, 2016: Armenian hackers tied to Moscow burrow into Clinton’s campaign bank account, diverting $1 million meant for voter turnout operations in Michigan to the non-competitive states of Indiana and Missouri. For good measure, the hackers also cancel a $2 million ad buy in Pennsylvania and Florida, buying replacement ads in Arizona instead.

Nov. 2, 2016: A hacker collective in Smolensk diverts Clinton’s campaign plane away from General Mitchell International Airport in Milwaukee, forcing her to instead land in Tempe, Arizona, and campaign there. Thanks to this interference, Clinton doesn’t have a single campaign stop in Wisconsin and narrowly loses the state to Donald Trump.

A federal judge ordered the Department of Justice (DOJ) Tuesday to produce FBI records related to the Hillary Clinton email investigation in a case brought by E. Randol Schoenberg, a prominent Holocaust-claims lawyer in Los Angeles.

Schoenberg first got involved in the Clinton emails case when he read a New York Times story in the waning days of the presidential campaign reporting the FBI had obtained a warrant to seize new material in the case.
“Normally you have to show probable cause. That’s what it says in the Fourth Amendment,” he told the Journal.
But beyond the Times story, he’d seen nothing reported about the FBI’s justification for the warrant, nor had the FBI been forthcoming with that information.
So he decided to wage a citizen’s campaign to uncover the documents. He got in touch with David B. Rankin, a government transparency lawyer in New York, and filed an information request with the FBI under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) on Nov. 12. The FBI has so far denied his request, saying Abedin’s privacy outweighs the public interest.
Schoenberg has filed suit to make the FBI comply with his request, but he said the other court case is more likely to yield timely results.
Schoenberg speculated one of two things happened to enable the FBI to obtain a search warrant in the first place: Either a lax judge didn’t care enough to scrutinize the warrant application, or “it could be something more nefarious.” Not unlikely, by his estimation, is that somebody provided the FBI allegedly incriminating information that turned out to be untrue.

The current spectacle has little to do with Russian intelligence — it’s about Democrats wanting an election do-over. The hypocrisy oozing from the peddling of this week’s narrative about Russian “meddling” in the U.S. presidential election is thick even by the sorry standards of modern American politics.

I feel entitled to be amused, having maintained, through a decade of bipartisan idiocy, that Putin’s thug-ocracy is an enemy of the United States: from the Bush-administration howler that Russia is our “strategic partner,” through eight years of the Obama-Hillary “reset”; from Obama’s mumbling as Putin annexed Crimea and other swathes of Ukraine (after Obama, as a senator, joined with senior Republicans to disarm Ukraine), through Bush’s mumbling as Putin annexed swathes of Georgia.

I saw Russia as a major problem long before it began violating the “new START” treaty that Obama signed and Republicans approved; before Secretary Clinton helped Putin cronies acquire a major slice of American uranium stock; and before Obama’s promise to Vlad (communicated through Putin-puppet Medvedev) that he’d have “more flexibility” to cut deals after the 2012 election.

Suffice it to say that if the American political class is suddenly worried about Russian aggression, deceit, cyber-espionage, and collaboration with Iran (in order to — get this! — fight terrorism), I welcome it to the club. And if the gray beards are fretting over Donald Trump’s potential coziness with our enemies, that’s good to hear . . . although it would have been nice to have a fraction of that fretting when it came to the Obama-Clinton operational coziness with our enemies.


All that said, the Democrats’ Chicken Little routine can’t be serious, nor is the chattering class that pretends to take it seriously. To begin with, it would be shocking if the Russians had not attempted to meddle in our election. Historically, they’ve done it countless times (I assume, every time).

That’s what hostiles do, they make mischief when and where they can. Democrats, moreover, conveniently forget that they’ve historically welcomed such mischief-making — such as when Jimmy Carter pleaded with Leonid Brezhnev for Soviet help in the futile effort to defeat Ronald Reagan in 1980 and when Ted Kennedy pleaded with Yuri Andropov for Soviet help in the futile effort to defeat Reagan in 1984.

In point of fact, though, they don’t even have proof that pins hacking on Putin’s regime. The main heavy breathing comes from the Washington Post. If you invest the time it takes to read through the first 26 paragraphs of its explosive report, you are finally told that the Post’s sources — anonymous “intelligence officials” — admit that the “actors” who came into possession of hacked files are “‘one step’ removed from the Russian government.”

They may have “affiliations” to Russian intelligence services, but what exactly that means the sources can’t say. No wonder that the FBI, which is expected to be able to prove the allegations it makes, disagrees with the Post’s unidentified leakers.

No wonder that other intelligence sources tell the Wall Street Journal’s editors that the leakers’ evidence is “thin.” (Since this column was written, the New York Times has published a lengthy report to undergird the “Russia Hacked the Election” narrative; I had a brief reaction to it on the Corner this morning.)

Combustible Lemur wrote:Something something tertiary sources.

Defiant wrote:

A federal judge ordered the Department of Justice (DOJ) Tuesday to produce FBI records related to the Hillary Clinton email investigation in a case brought by E. Randol Schoenberg, a prominent Holocaust-claims lawyer in Los Angeles.

.

Schoenberg first got involved in the Clinton emails case when he read a New York Times story in the waning days of the presidential campaign reporting the FBI had obtained a warrant to seize new material in the case.
“Normally you have to show probable cause. That’s what it says in the Fourth Amendment,” he told the Journal.
But beyond the Times story, he’d seen nothing reported about the FBI’s justification for the warrant, nor had the FBI been forthcoming with that information.
So he decided to wage a citizen’s campaign to uncover the documents. He got in touch with David B. Rankin, a government transparency lawyer in New York, and filed an information request with the FBI under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) on Nov. 12. The FBI has so far denied his request, saying Abedin’s privacy outweighs the public interest.
Schoenberg has filed suit to make the FBI comply with his request, but he said the other court case is more likely to yield timely results.
Schoenberg speculated one of two things happened to enable the FBI to obtain a search warrant in the first place: Either a lax judge didn’t care enough to scrutinize the warrant application, or “it could be something more nefarious.” Not unlikely, by his estimation, is that somebody provided the FBI allegedly incriminating information that turned out to be untrue.

link

The FBI warrant that shook Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign in its final two weeks has been unsealed, and the lawyer who requested it says it offers "nothing at all" to merit the agency's actions leading up to the Nov. 8 election.

"I see nothing at all in the search warrant application that would give rise to probable cause, nothing that would make anyone suspect that there was anything on the laptop beyond what the FBI had already searched and determined not to be evidence of a crime, nothing to suggest that there would be anything other than routine correspondence between" Clinton and Abedin, Schoenberg said in an email to USA TODAY. It remains unknown "why they thought they might find evidence of a crime, why they felt it necessary to inform Congress, and why they even sought this search warrant," he said. "I am appalled." The FBI's Manhattan office did not immediately return a call seeking comment.

Schoenberg said more information needs to be made public before the matter is put to rest. "The FBI agent’s name has not been disclosed, but I think that it may be appropriate to find out his/her name and determine what the motivations were, since it must have been obvious to the FBI that there was no real probable cause to believe they would find evidence of a crime," he said in a follow-up email. "It was very wrong for Director Comey to give that impression."

Holman wrote: Thank God we dodged THAT bullet.