Watching Maddow last night and her guest who was a top tier figure in the Clinton campaign, who described the extent of the Russian government hacking and interference in her campaign, (to which they could get no one to pay attention to by the way) I realized that she never had a chance. The Russians wanted trumPP, they wouldn’t have wanted Kasich, Jeb!, or anyone else who seemed for a moment to be viable.
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HRC had beaten the russians. comey, at the last minute, used his office to knife her in the back.
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O.T., but there’s a New Yorker article about genuine, but still crazy, billionaire, and Trump sugar daddy, Bob, Mercer. He has outlandish ideas about the relative benignity of nuclear war and nuclear radiation and a Randian-like determination of human worth. His ideas are outlandish, but through his acolytes, Bannon and Trump, they are reflected in the Trump’s regimes stated goals and attitudes. I won’t say policies, because there are none, just an array of “postures”.
Another onetime senior employee at Renaissance recalls hearing Mercer downplay the dangers posed by nuclear war. Mercer, speaking of the atomic bombs that the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, argued that, outside of the immediate blast zones, the radiation actually made Japanese citizens healthier. The National Academy of Sciences has found no evidence to support this notion. Nevertheless, according to the onetime employee, Mercer, who is a proponent of nuclear power, “was very excited about the idea, and felt that it meant nuclear accidents weren’t such a big deal.”
…
Several former colleagues of Mercer’s said that his views are akin to Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand. Magerman told me, “Bob believes that human beings have no inherent value other than how much money they make. A cat has value, he’s said, because it provides pleasure to humans. But if someone is on welfare they have negative value. If he earns a thousand times more than a schoolteacher, then he’s a thousand times more valuable.” Magerman added, “He thinks society is upside down—that government helps the weak people get strong, and makes the strong people weak by taking their money away, through taxes.” He said that this mind-set was typical of “instant billionaires” in finance, who “have no stake in society,” unlike the industrialists of the past, who “built real things.”
Dangerously antisocial, nihilistic and anarchistic.
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The humanitarian Republican acknowledges that “You don’t want to just kick them off because then where do they go?” but believes “that it’s fine if Republicans phase out Medicaid.” Apparently allowing the slow death of Medicaid will give “them” sufficient lead time to figure out where to go for the health insurance they can’t afford that will help pay for the health care they can’t afford.
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I still feel that there has not been nearly enough investigation/study/leftist acknowledgment of the influence of overseas trolls on the Stein/Sanders campaigns. The Russians have been master practitioners of propaganda for over a century, and suddenly they had the internet technology to use their expertise abroad to divide the left. Remember TPP? Or Citizens United? Funny how nobody talks about them any more. (EDIT: Although I have noticed that Chelsea Clinton is now the new target…)
EDIT 2: It worked like this: (1) trolls occupy key comment boards in large numbers, banging on about corruption, TPP, banksters, Shillary, warmonger Clinton Foundation, etc. (2) this influences all the half-baked leftists who have no grasp of the stakes of the election but enjoy the euphoria of pious accusation; (3) a strident online community comes into being; (4) the publication’s writers (I’m thinking the Guardian in particular, eg Trevor Timm) see an opportunity to get a loud fanbase and so feed the community columns it will like; (5) before you know it, thousands of young people gain the impression that Hillary is corrupt and above all uncool; (6) Jill Stein, a worthless narcissist hack hated by actual environmentalists like me, suddenly is touted as an ethical protest vote; (7) nobody who supports Clinton shows their face because it will attacked by the mob; (8) Trump is elected.
Sorry, OT, but it bothers me every day.
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Responding to criticism that the health care bill will not cover millions of people, Comrade Chaos announced a national program, to be administered through The Trump Organization and Kushner Companies, tentatively called Micturition Monuments.
“It will be very, very classy. It’ll be a tremendous program that will cover millions,” according to a White House statement. The President plans to formally unveil the program during an upcoming golfing vacation in Palm Beach.
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WHAT???
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It’s the new immunization policy.
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Echoing Reagan’s official civil-defense policy for America: Dig holes in the ground for everyone.
”[Nuclear war’s] not nearly as devastating as we had been led to believe…If there are enough shovels to go around, everybody’s going to make it…It’s the dirt that does it.‘’ – Undersecretary of Defense Thomas K. Jones.
We thought we’d driven a wooden stake through the heart of this madness…
Only to see Mercer, Bannon, et al. revive its zombie corpse.
G-d save us from these lunatics.
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He’s a genuine crazy billionaire. He also funds a climate-denying biochemist “scientist” who works out of his Oregon sheep ranch. Also, crazy billionaire fountain of youth obsession.
Mercer and his brother, Randall, who also worked at the hedge fund, sent him a paper by a scientist named Arthur Robinson, who is a biochemist, not a climate expert. “It looked like a scientific paper, but it was completely loaded with selective and biased information,” Patterson recalled. The paper argued that, if climate change were real, future generations would “enjoy an Earth with far more plant and animal life.” Robinson owns a sheep ranch in Cave Junction, Oregon, and on the property he runs a laboratory that he calls the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine. Mercer helps subsidize Robinson’s various projects, which include an effort to forestall aging.
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As much as I thought I knew I was alarmed to learn how little I really knew. The Russian trolls displayed masterful use of the Internet, and that included Guccifer 2.0 aided by Roger Stone, and of course at all times Wikileaks.
@edhedh That’s something of an oversimplification. She had not beaten the Russians. They were destroying her campaign systematically, hacking the DNC, the DCCC, and more, and there’s a risk they’ll do it again when they want to steer the direction of our elections in their favor.
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He and Mook both made one of the best points - I remember when those stories broke and purported Bernie Bros were all over the threads bitching about the contents of those leaked emails and I kept saying then - the content is not the story. The story is where these things came from.
Thanks Bernie Bros for moving that piece of propaganda right along for Putin.
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Does he save his fingernail clippings?
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It’s against my nature, but I really need to not learn too much about these fucks. Pretty much any one fact deserves them to be disappeared. After that, the full details just make me sick.
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The hacking was stage 2 of the propaganda effort, we can now see. It exploited the divisions fostered in the progressive movement by phase 1. I guess my point is that the cyberwar isn’t just about hacking, it’s about cyber-disinformation. Americans need to be educated about this–it has to become part of any educational curriculum, i.e., how to be wary of memes, themes, etc, that divide us. CalExit is another example.
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I thought of you as I watched this. Glad you saw it. It explains so much. How sad is it (sorry) that her campaign could get no one to move on it, even the administration, and journos talked only of the content of hacked emails from various people not how they were hacked.
@squirreltown Agreed. Some articles are best avoided for peace of mind. The phrase TMI didn’t become a thing because it was good for us.
@nemo I’d like to see Californians pay some attention to the bill coming out of the California legislature SB-562 Californians for a Healthy California Act. If approved, a single-payer, Medicare-for-all system would be enacted.
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It’s heartbreaking. It should never have happened.
There was a conspiracy to make sure she’d never be president. I do believe that. And there were some unwitting but extremely useful idiots who still haven’t acknowledged that fact.
I’m waiting, Bernie.
Bernie Sanders has exactly 0 credibility as far as I’m concerned.
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"He said that it’s fine if Republicans phase out Medicaid, but he warned against abruptly taking away coverage. “You don’t want to just kick them off because then where do they go?” Kasich said.
What the hell difference does it make if you “abruptly” take away coverage or gradually take away coverage. Either way, your question still applies: “then where do they go?” Well, Governor Kasich, “Where do they go?”
Edited to add that I now see coimmigrant already raised this point. Apologies for the duplication. It’s still a question that I wish our national media would raise with the so-called “moderate” Republicans like this.
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I couldn’t agree more with your entire comment.
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The article is an illustration of the old aphorism that if you’re poor and crazy, you really are crazy, but if you’re rich and crazy, you’re eccentric (reclusive?). And such information also turns around the other old aphorism. If you’re so rich, why ain’t you smart? Bad ideas, coupled with the money to promulgate them (thanks, citizens united), have always been a danger to civil society. It’s good to know what the bad ideas are.
Freedom of speech has become freedom to dissemble and spread misinformation.
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