Russia Picked Donald Trump And Ran Him For President....
Dec 27, 2018 21:54:04 #
Twardlow
Loc: Arkansas
Russia Picked Donald Trump and Ran Him for President, Former Israeli Intelligence Officer Says
"Officials in Moscow looked at the 2016 U.S. presidential race and asked, 'Which candidate would we like to have sitting in the White House?'" former Mossad chief Tamir Pardo said.
By Christina Mazda
December 27, 2018
Russia chose Donald Trump as the U.S. presidential candidate who would be most advantageous to Moscow, and used online tactics to win him the presidency, according to a former agent of the Israeli intelligence agency the Mossad.
"Officials in Moscow looked at the 2016 U.S. presidential race and asked, 'Which candidate would we like to have sitting in the White House? Who will help us achieve our goals?' And they chose him. From that moment, they deployed a system [of bots] for the length of the elections, and ran him for president," former Mossad chief Tamir Pardo told the audience at the Marker's digital conference in Israel on Monday, where experts gathered to discuss online disinformation campaigns and bots.
"What we've seen so far with respect to bots and the distortion of information is just the tip of the iceberg. It is the greatest threat of recent years, and it threatens the basic values that we share—democracy and the world order created since World War Two," Pardo noted, according to Haaretz.
Earlier this month, two Senate-commissioned reports recently determined that Russia had used every social media tool available to influence the U.S. 2016 presidential election in favor of Trump. One of the reports, completed by the company New Knowledge, detailed the wide reach of the Russian troll farm called the Internet Research Agency (IRA).
"Run like a sophisticated marketing agency in a centralized office environment, the IRA employed and trained over a thousand people to engage in round-the-clock influence operations, first targeting Ukrainian and Russian citizens, and then, well before the 2016 US election, Americans. The scale of their operation was unprecedented—they reached 126 million people on Facebook, at least 20 million users on Instagram, 1.4 million users on Twitter, and uploaded over 1,000 videos to YouTube," the New Knowledge report stated.
Indictments from the Department of Justice recently revealed that the Internet Research Agency had a budget of over $25 million and continued to operate well into 2018.
The second report, authored by Oxford University and the company Graphica, noted that Russian influence operations attempted to sow divisions in U.S. society and promote Trump's candidacy.
"On Facebook, the five most shared and the five most liked posts focused on divisive issues, with pro-gun ownership content, anti-immigration content pitting immigrants against veterans, content decrying police violence against African Americans, and content that was anti-Muslim, anti-refugee, anti-Obama, and pro-Trump," the report read.
It is unclear, however, whether these efforts succeeded in swaying voters.
https://www.newsweek.com/russia-picked-donald-trump-and-ran-him-president-former-israeli-intelligence-1273009
GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN
Trump Is Losing the Shutdown Fight in a Rout
By Eric Levitz
Donald Trump entered the holiday season with a bulletproof plan for advancing his electoral and legislative goals: He would sabotage the basic functioning of the government that he presides over, so as to draw attention to the fact that the Democratic Party does not support an extremely unpopular immigration policy. Or, more concretely, he would refuse to fund the federal government until congressional Democrats agreed to appropriate upwards of $5 billion for his border wall (even though the Republican Senate had already signaled that it was willing to fund the government without such an appropriation, and Democrats would only need to wait a matter of days before they assumed control of the House).
And yet, somehow, the government has been (partially) shuttered for six days now — and the Democrats have yet to surrender.
The president took to Twitter Thursday morning to express his incredulity, writing, “Have the Democrats finally realized that we desperately need Border Security and a Wall on the Southern Border…Do the Dems realize that most of the people not getting paid are Democrats?”
The latter half of this missive makes little sense as a public argument for Trump’s position. “My political opponents are putting their principles above the special interests of their constituents” is not typically an attack-line in American politics. The president’s observation that federal workers are more Democratic than Republican serves no argumentative purpose; it is, ostensibly, a mere expression of exasperation at his rivals’ perseverance (one reminiscent of another infamous spoiler of the Christmas season).
Alas, as I’ve already insinuated, the causes of Chuck Schumer’s intransigence shouldn’t be hard for the president to understand. The American public has long been inclined to blame presidents for any governmental dysfunction that transpires on their watch (this insight was the cornerstone of Mitch McConnell’s rationale for adopting a posture of unwavering obstruction during the Obama presidency). A large majority of Americans has long opposed both Trump’s border wall, and the use of government shutdowns as a legislative tactic. So, the president’s plan to pin responsibility for this week’s chaos on Democrats was a long shot even before he announced, on live television, that voters should blame him for the shutdown.
A new Reuters/Ipsos poll confirms that Trump has not been able to overcome a flawed strategy through the strength of his execution:
More Americans blame President Donald Trump than congressional Democrats for the partial U.S. government shutdown … forty-seven percent of adults hold Trump responsible, while 33 percent blame Democrats in Congress, according to the Dec. 21-25 poll, conducted mostly after the shutdown began.
… Just 35 percent of those surveyed in the Reuters/Ipsos poll said they backed including money for the wall in a congressional spending bill. Only 25 percent said they supported Trump shutting down the government over the matter.
Meanwhile, Trump’s approval rating in Morning Consult’s polling just dipped below 40 percent for the first time since he defended the “very fine” neo-Nazis who marched in Charlottesville in the summer of 2017.
Granted, it’s possible that Trump never intended this shutdown to yield funding for his border wall, or a bump in his approval rating. The president’s aim may have been merely to retain the enthusiastic support of his base. Trump has long jealously guarded the adoration of those who attend his rallies, and the White House’s resident nativists have proven quite effective at persuading the president that any conciliatory gesture on immigration would irrevocably alienate his core supporters.
Nevertheless, a president with a 40 percent approval rating — who just suffered a historic rebuke in a midterm election — should not be sacrificing his standing with the general public for the sake of waging a doomed crusade on behalf of his loyalists.
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/polls-trump-is-losing-the-government-shutdown-fight-in-a-rout.html
"Officials in Moscow looked at the 2016 U.S. presidential race and asked, 'Which candidate would we like to have sitting in the White House?'" former Mossad chief Tamir Pardo said.
By Christina Mazda
December 27, 2018
Russia chose Donald Trump as the U.S. presidential candidate who would be most advantageous to Moscow, and used online tactics to win him the presidency, according to a former agent of the Israeli intelligence agency the Mossad.
"Officials in Moscow looked at the 2016 U.S. presidential race and asked, 'Which candidate would we like to have sitting in the White House? Who will help us achieve our goals?' And they chose him. From that moment, they deployed a system [of bots] for the length of the elections, and ran him for president," former Mossad chief Tamir Pardo told the audience at the Marker's digital conference in Israel on Monday, where experts gathered to discuss online disinformation campaigns and bots.
"What we've seen so far with respect to bots and the distortion of information is just the tip of the iceberg. It is the greatest threat of recent years, and it threatens the basic values that we share—democracy and the world order created since World War Two," Pardo noted, according to Haaretz.
Earlier this month, two Senate-commissioned reports recently determined that Russia had used every social media tool available to influence the U.S. 2016 presidential election in favor of Trump. One of the reports, completed by the company New Knowledge, detailed the wide reach of the Russian troll farm called the Internet Research Agency (IRA).
"Run like a sophisticated marketing agency in a centralized office environment, the IRA employed and trained over a thousand people to engage in round-the-clock influence operations, first targeting Ukrainian and Russian citizens, and then, well before the 2016 US election, Americans. The scale of their operation was unprecedented—they reached 126 million people on Facebook, at least 20 million users on Instagram, 1.4 million users on Twitter, and uploaded over 1,000 videos to YouTube," the New Knowledge report stated.
Indictments from the Department of Justice recently revealed that the Internet Research Agency had a budget of over $25 million and continued to operate well into 2018.
The second report, authored by Oxford University and the company Graphica, noted that Russian influence operations attempted to sow divisions in U.S. society and promote Trump's candidacy.
"On Facebook, the five most shared and the five most liked posts focused on divisive issues, with pro-gun ownership content, anti-immigration content pitting immigrants against veterans, content decrying police violence against African Americans, and content that was anti-Muslim, anti-refugee, anti-Obama, and pro-Trump," the report read.
It is unclear, however, whether these efforts succeeded in swaying voters.
https://www.newsweek.com/russia-picked-donald-trump-and-ran-him-president-former-israeli-intelligence-1273009
GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN
Trump Is Losing the Shutdown Fight in a Rout
By Eric Levitz
Donald Trump entered the holiday season with a bulletproof plan for advancing his electoral and legislative goals: He would sabotage the basic functioning of the government that he presides over, so as to draw attention to the fact that the Democratic Party does not support an extremely unpopular immigration policy. Or, more concretely, he would refuse to fund the federal government until congressional Democrats agreed to appropriate upwards of $5 billion for his border wall (even though the Republican Senate had already signaled that it was willing to fund the government without such an appropriation, and Democrats would only need to wait a matter of days before they assumed control of the House).
And yet, somehow, the government has been (partially) shuttered for six days now — and the Democrats have yet to surrender.
The president took to Twitter Thursday morning to express his incredulity, writing, “Have the Democrats finally realized that we desperately need Border Security and a Wall on the Southern Border…Do the Dems realize that most of the people not getting paid are Democrats?”
The latter half of this missive makes little sense as a public argument for Trump’s position. “My political opponents are putting their principles above the special interests of their constituents” is not typically an attack-line in American politics. The president’s observation that federal workers are more Democratic than Republican serves no argumentative purpose; it is, ostensibly, a mere expression of exasperation at his rivals’ perseverance (one reminiscent of another infamous spoiler of the Christmas season).
Alas, as I’ve already insinuated, the causes of Chuck Schumer’s intransigence shouldn’t be hard for the president to understand. The American public has long been inclined to blame presidents for any governmental dysfunction that transpires on their watch (this insight was the cornerstone of Mitch McConnell’s rationale for adopting a posture of unwavering obstruction during the Obama presidency). A large majority of Americans has long opposed both Trump’s border wall, and the use of government shutdowns as a legislative tactic. So, the president’s plan to pin responsibility for this week’s chaos on Democrats was a long shot even before he announced, on live television, that voters should blame him for the shutdown.
A new Reuters/Ipsos poll confirms that Trump has not been able to overcome a flawed strategy through the strength of his execution:
More Americans blame President Donald Trump than congressional Democrats for the partial U.S. government shutdown … forty-seven percent of adults hold Trump responsible, while 33 percent blame Democrats in Congress, according to the Dec. 21-25 poll, conducted mostly after the shutdown began.
… Just 35 percent of those surveyed in the Reuters/Ipsos poll said they backed including money for the wall in a congressional spending bill. Only 25 percent said they supported Trump shutting down the government over the matter.
Meanwhile, Trump’s approval rating in Morning Consult’s polling just dipped below 40 percent for the first time since he defended the “very fine” neo-Nazis who marched in Charlottesville in the summer of 2017.
Granted, it’s possible that Trump never intended this shutdown to yield funding for his border wall, or a bump in his approval rating. The president’s aim may have been merely to retain the enthusiastic support of his base. Trump has long jealously guarded the adoration of those who attend his rallies, and the White House’s resident nativists have proven quite effective at persuading the president that any conciliatory gesture on immigration would irrevocably alienate his core supporters.
Nevertheless, a president with a 40 percent approval rating — who just suffered a historic rebuke in a midterm election — should not be sacrificing his standing with the general public for the sake of waging a doomed crusade on behalf of his loyalists.
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/polls-trump-is-losing-the-government-shutdown-fight-in-a-rout.html
Dec 27, 2018 22:28:59 #
Twardlow wrote:
b Russia Picked Donald Trump and Ran Him for Pres... (show quote)
Lol slow fake news day eh?
Dec 28, 2018 08:53:19 #
EyeSawYou wrote:
Lol slow fake news day eh?
It's never slow when the wannabe strongman opens his mouth.
Speaking to troops at Al Asad Air Base during his surprise visit to Iraq, Trump told troops: "You protect us. We are always going to protect you. And you just saw that, 'cause you just got one of the biggest pay raises you've ever received. ... You haven't gotten one in more than 10 years. More than 10 years. And we got you a big one. I got you a big one. I got you a big one."
"They had plenty of people that came up, they said, 'You know, we could make it smaller. We could make it 3%, we could make it 2%, we could make it 4%,'" Trump told the troops about the latest pay raise. "I said, 'No. Make it 10%. Make it more than 10%.'"
'Cause it's been a long time, it's been more than 10 years. Been more than 10 years, that's a long time," Trump said, repeating the false claim.
Dec 28, 2018 15:30:13 #
Shutterbug1697
Loc: Northeast
Twardlow wrote:
b Russia Picked Donald Trump and Ran Him for Pres... (show quote)
They sure got the puppet on a string that they hoped for!
With every Russian backed phone call that trump gets, he bends over backwards to do their bidding,
And every time he does, he puts the United States in further peril for an attack!
Dec 28, 2018 15:43:41 #
Shutterbug1697 wrote:
They sure got the puppet on a string that they hoped for!
With every Russian backed phone call that trump gets, he bends over backwards to do their bidding,
And every time he does, he puts the United States in further peril for an attack!
With every Russian backed phone call that trump gets, he bends over backwards to do their bidding,
And every time he does, he puts the United States in further peril for an attack!
Did the same thing happen when we helped Yeltsin get elected? Or when we helped anyone else get elected? Did Yeltsin bend over backwards to do Clinton's bidding? Or anyone else we helped to elect?
Dec 28, 2018 16:16:56 #
Twardlow
Loc: Arkansas
Shutterbug1697 wrote:
They sure got the puppet on a string that they hoped for!
With every Russian backed phone call that trump gets, he bends over backwards to do their bidding,
And every time he does, he puts the United States in further peril for an attack!
With every Russian backed phone call that trump gets, he bends over backwards to do their bidding,
And every time he does, he puts the United States in further peril for an attack!
A b s o l u t e l y ! ! !
Dec 28, 2018 18:35:57 #
Shutterbug1697 wrote:
They sure got the puppet on a string that they hoped for!
With every Russian backed phone call that trump gets, he bends over backwards to do their bidding,
And every time he does, he puts the United States in further peril for an attack!
With every Russian backed phone call that trump gets, he bends over backwards to do their bidding,
And every time he does, he puts the United States in further peril for an attack!
Three Hundred Pounds of Clay ... the joyous song of the MAGA warriors.
With just three hundred pounds of clay
He made my life worth livin'
And I will thank Him every day
For every kiss you're givin'
And I'll thank Him every night
For the arms that are holdin' me tight
And He did it all with just three hundred pounds of clay
Yes he did, whoa-oh, yes He did
Dec 28, 2018 18:41:52 #
Texcaster wrote:
It's never slow when the wannabe strongman opens h... (show quote)
Is no one insulted by these lies? Military pay raises every year; they've gotten larger raises in 3 of the past 10 years, and it ain't nowhere near 10%.
I say Trump has dementia. Time for some tests.
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