“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”
and H.L. Mencken:
“As democracy is perfected, the office of the President represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
Well she also doesn’t believe that the administration needs to apologize for tearing babies from their parents, so yeah. So much for the stern law and order facade.
“The Trump administration unveiled a proposal Thursday that would strip the Endangered Species Act of key provisions, a move that conservationists say will weaken a law enacted 45 years ago to keep plants and animals in decline from going extinct.”
“I haven’t seen any evidence that the attempts to interfere in our election infrastructure was to favor a particular political party,” she said
Rather than looking into hopelessly obscure accusations regarding an election that took place far back in the mists of time, she’s been busy making frightened people weep and imbibing their sweet, sweet tears.
If she says she really hasn’t been concerning herself with evidence of any sort, then I, for one, believe her.
Contrary to the headline, she didn’t speak of “Hacked Election”. That’s a bad choice of words as hacked has lots of overlaid meaning ranging from the computer security violation end of the spectrum to creative after-the-fact user re-purposing “I hacked my dog’s water bowl to water my flowers” end of the spectrum. Is there evidence they broke into systems and changed the vote total? Not that has been publicly disclosed.
The whole point of objecting to unauditable machine voting is that the results are absolutely unauditable. The last district to come in on PA had unauditable machines.
Short of a confession there is no way to tell.
On the other hand, why muck with voting infrastructure at all unless you intend to favor one side over the other?
As infuriated as she makes me, upon the third time reading her comments, I began to see something else. Usually my eyes glaze over when I see the “both sides,” but these two comments make it sound like she’s referring to information they have on the Republicans being hacked too. That would seem like a significant development if she is acknowledging that. Comey said so but Trump has denied it. Maybe it’s just that it’s becoming more obvious by the hour that something is being held over the heads of key Republicans and that’s why it stands out to me.
“I haven’t seen any evidence that the attempts to interfere in our election infrastructure was to favor a particular political party,” she said at the Aspen Institute’s Security Forum in Colorado. “I think what we’ve seen on the foreign influence side is they were attempting to intervene and cause chaos on both sides.”
…
“It was in an effort to attack certain political parties that we know about more than others, so we’ll continue to look and see what that means and be prepared for the next time,” she said.
I don’t think we will ever get that level of certainty. Certainly not from a statistical analysis of vote totals.
However, why is that the appropriate standard for “did Russia affect the election “?
Campaigns work very hard to project how certain groups will vote. We like to think it’s a super-secret special thing only the voter knows, but you can make a pretty good guess for most people. If you don’t actually care about voters as people it’s pretty easy to work the odds and dis -franchise your likely opponents. You may throw away a few of your own votes, but oh well. Why don’t you count preventing your opponents from voting as stealing an election?
Y’know Ms Nielsen: even IF Russia didn’t meddle (they did), and isn’t meddling today (they are), and Trump is as honest as a man can be (hahaha)… kidnapping babies and children from their parents and using those children to coerce the parents into following your orders: THATS ILLEGAL, immoral, cruel, Fascist.
Russia & Trump’s actions -good or bad- are irrelevant to the actions of your Agency. You walked into a pile of shit, and its all over you.
You harnessed your wagon to the wrong horse, Ms Nielsen.