George W. Bush sneaks Michelle Obama candy during McCain's funeral

Leonthecat said:
ccelebritiesfoto4F9EA74200000578-0-image-a-8_1535844405968-400x280.jpg


That was "sweet".
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It is also more evidence that politics is theater. Behind the scenes, it is a tight-knit club, and you and I are not in it.
 
Teflon Don said:
Why?

McCain was a worthless Senator and not deserving of the three week sendoff.

Did the McShamnesty crowd thank Trump for sending Air Force 2 to pick up his dead bones and fly him to DC? No, the classless fucks used those days to trash Trump. I get it. It is like internet porn for you left wing hacks, but trust me, real Americans saw this for the distasteful trash that it was. Trump handled himself with class and dignity. He got trashed all weekend and didn't say shit about it. He just took it like a man.

Trump knows he has the last laugh over McShamnesty. Trump is President and McShamnesty never was. Fuck McShamnesty
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So worthless that you supported him throughout his presidential campaign, you lying cunt.
 
Grumpy said:
Damn not one word about the Russians swaying the vote. So let's play WHAT IF. :laugh:
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Exclusive: Russian-linked Facebook ads targeted Michigan and Wisconsin
A number of Russian-linked Facebook ads specifically targeted Michigan and Wisconsin, two states crucial to Donald Trump's victory last November, according to four sources with direct knowledge of the situation.

Some of the Russian ads appeared highly sophisticated in their targeting of key demographic groups in areas of the states that turned out to be pivotal, two of the sources said. The ads employed a series of divisive messages aimed at breaking through the clutter of campaign ads online, including promoting anti-Muslim messages, sources said.
It has been unclear until now exactly which regions of the country were targeted by the ads. And while one source said that a large number of ads appeared in areas of the country that were not heavily contested in the elections, some clearly were geared at swaying public opinion in the most heavily contested battlegrounds.
Michigan saw the closest presidential contest in the country -- Trump beat Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton by about 10,700 votes out of nearly 4.8 million ballots cast. Wisconsin was also one of the tightest states, and Trump won there by only about 22,700 votes. Both states, which Trump carried by less than 1%, were key to his victory in the Electoral College.
The sources did not specify when in 2016 the ads ran in Michigan and Wisconsin.
As part of their investigations, both special counsel Robert Mueller and congressional committees are seeking to determine whether the Russians received any help from Trump associates in where to target the ads.
White House officials could not be reached for comment on this story. The President and senior White House officials have long insisted there was never any collusion with Russia, with Trump contending the matter is a "hoax."
The focus on Michigan and Wisconsin also adds more evidence that the Russian group tied to the effort was employing a wide range of tactics potentially aimed at interfering in the election.
Warner: 'Million-dollar question' how Russians knew who to target on Facebook
Warner: 'Million-dollar question' how Russians knew who to target on Facebook
Facebook previously has acknowledged that about one quarter of the 3,000 Russian-bought ads were targeted to specific geographic locations, without detailing the locations. The company said of the ads that were geographically targeted "more ran in 2015 than 2016." In all, Facebook estimates the entire Russian effort was seen by 10 million people.
Facebook could still be weaponized again for the 2018 midterms
Rep. Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told CNN the panel was still assessing the full geographical breakdown of the Russian ads and whether there was any assistance from individuals associated with the Trump campaign.
"Obviously, we're looking at any of the targeting of the ads, as well as any targeting of efforts to push out the fake or false news or negative accounts against Hillary Clinton, to see whether they demonstrate a sophistication that would be incompatible with not having access to data analytics from the campaign," Schiff said Tuesday evening. "At this point, we still don't know."
One person with direct knowledge of the matter said that some of the ads were aimed at reaching voters who may be susceptible to anti-Muslim messages, even suggesting that Muslims were a threat to the American way of life. Such messaging could presumably appeal to voters attracted to Trump's hard-line stance against immigration and calls to ban Muslims from entering the United States.
Schiff said that the committee was planning to investigate ads that suggested Muslims supported Clinton, and how those were geared to people who had been searching online for the Muslim Brotherhood and other items to suggest they were critical of Islam.
This is how easy it is to buy a Facebook ad like the Russian 'troll farms' did
This is how easy it is to buy a Facebook ad like the Russian 'troll farms' did
The ads were part of roughly 3,000 that Facebook turned over to congressional investigators this week as part of the multiple Capitol Hill inquiries into Russia meddling in the 2016 elections.
CNN reported last week that at least one of the Facebook ads bought by Russians during the 2016 presidential campaign referenced Black Lives Matter and was specifically targeted to reach audiences in Ferguson, Missouri and Baltimore, according to sources with knowledge of the ads.
Lawmakers have only started to assess the scope of the data, and sources from both parties said the 3,000 ads touched on a range of polarizing topics, including the Second Amendment and civil rights issues. The ads were aimed at suppressing the votes and sowing discontent among the electorate, the sources said.
Members from both parties said that there was a clear sophistication in the Russian ad campaign, and they said they were only just beginning to learn the full extent of the social media efforts.
"It's consistent with everything else we've seen in terms of Russian active measures -- a combination of cyber, of propaganda and paid and social media," said Sen. John Cornyn, the No. 2 Republican who sits on both the Senate Intelligence and Judiciary panels, both of which received the Facebook ads. "So, we're just looking at the tip of the iceberg."
https://www.cnn.com/2017/10/03/politics/russian-facebook-ads-michigan-wisconsin/index.html


Russia targeted election systems in 21 states

At least 21 states were the focus on these hacking attempts, including Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Maryland, Minnesota, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia, Wisconsin and Washington, as confirmed by the Associated Press and the states themselves. States like Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin are among the swing states considered critical to an electoral college victory last year. So far, other battleground states including Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire and North Carolina are not among those confirmed in the hacking attempt.

In a message to election officials in the state of Wisconsin, Homeland Security specified that the hack was conducted by “Russian government cyber actors.” The agency first confirmed the state-level hacking attempts toward the 21 states in June, informing the Senate Intelligence Committee. At that time, the states targeted by the operation were not made public.

https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/22/electronic-voting-state-hacking-russian-government-cyber-actors/

No Impact?
Russians used the same social media tactics that worked for Trump.
By WILLIAM SALETAN

FEB 21, 20183:59 PM

On Friday, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein announced the indictment of 13 Russians for unlawfully interfering in the 2016 U.S. election. “There is no allegation in the indictment that the charged conduct altered the outcome of the 2016 election,” said Rosenstein.

President Donald Trump pounced on this statement, claiming vindication. In four tweets over the weekend, the president said the indictment, presented by special counsel Robert Mueller, proved that Russians “had no impact” on the election. His press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, repeated his message on Tuesday, saying Russia’s meddling “didn’t have an impact.” White House spokesman Hogan Gidley told Fox News: “Now we know for a fact, it didn’t affect the outcome of the election at all.”

As with everything else Trump has said about Russia, this is a lie. The indictment doesn’t say or imply, much less prove, that Russian interference didn’t affect the election. To the contrary, it shows that Russian operatives used the same social media and mobilization techniques that Trump credits for his victory.

“The fact that I have such power in terms of numbers with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.—I think it helped me win all of these races where they’re spending much more money than I spent,” Trump told 60 Minutes in November 2016, a week after winning the election. “Social media has more power than the money they spent. And I think maybe, to a certain extent, I proved that.” Trump’s digital director, Brad Parscale, told the Associated Press that in the campaign’s final days, Trump and the GOP had invested $5 million in digital ads targeted at Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Florida. “If we hadn’t spent that,” said Parscale, “we might not have won.” Or, as Parscale put it to Wired: “Facebook and Twitter were the reason we won this thing.”

Trump also credited his victory to rallies. In the campaign’s final 100 days, he visited five key states—Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Carolina, Michigan, and Wisconsin—46 more times than Hillary Clinton did. Afterward, Trump told supporters he had won because “We outworked them. Three, four, five speeches a day.”

The alleged Russian conspirators described in Friday’s indictment amplified those efforts, using the same techniques. “From at least April 2016 through November 2016,” says the indictment, the Russian operatives “began to produce, purchase, and post advertisements on U.S. social media and other online sites expressly advocating for the election of then-candidate Trump or expressly opposing Clinton.” The conspirators “conducted operations on social media platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.” They orchestrated “political rallies” in Florida, Pennsylvania, and other states.

According to the indictment, the conspirators had “an annual budget of millions of dollars,” illustrated by a monthly budget document that exceeded $1.25 million. They “employed hundreds of persons,” created “hundreds of accounts on social media networks,” and grew their “controlled groups” to “hundreds of thousands of online followers.” A sample Facebook ad “reached over 59,000 Facebook users in Florida, and over 8,300 Facebook users responded to the advertisements by clicking on it.”

The operation explicitly aimed to tip the election. Quoting a text exchange, the indictment says the conspirators followed specific advice to focus on “purple states like Colorado, Virginia & Florida.” They studied methods for maximizing “audience engagement” in the United States. And, according to the indictment, they constantly refined their techniques:

To measure the impact of their online social media operations, Defendants and their coconspirators tracked the performance of content they posted over social media. They tracked the size of the online U.S. audiences reached through posts, different types of engagement with the posts (such as likes, comments, and reposts), changes in audience size, and other metrics.

This organization is just one part of the broader Russian influence campaign. In October, Facebook reported that 10 million Americans had seen Facebook ads placed by groups connected to the Russian government. (Caveat: Only 44 percent of the ad impressions were before the election.) Some ads were targeted specifically at Michigan and Wisconsin. In addition to the ads, Russian-backed Facebook posts, including many from groups identified in the indictment, were shared hundreds of millions of times.

Last month, Twitter reported that 677,000 people in the United States had followed or retweeted at least one of 3,800 accounts linked to the troll farm. Many more liked, quoted, or otherwise circulated the Russian tweets. Beyond those 3,800 accounts, Twitter reported “a total of 50,258 automated accounts that we identified as Russian-linked and Tweeting election-related content during the election period.” Again, researchers found that exposure was more highly concentrated in key electoral states.

Russia also manipulated the election through its hacks of emails from the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. During the campaign, according to the U.S. intelligence community’s January 2017 report, Russia’s military intelligence directorate “relayed material it acquired from the DNC and senior Democratic officials to WikiLeaks.” To influence voters, says the report, the Russians used “WikiLeaks to release US victim data obtained in cyber operations publicly and in exclusives to media outlets.” Trump promoted these leaks because he knew they would hurt Clinton. In the campaign’s final month, he cited them “more than five times a day,” gloating that “Wikileaks has done a job on her.” After the election, FiveThirtyEight noted that “the timeline of Clinton’s fall in the polls roughly matches the emails’ publishing schedule.”

To believe that the Russian influence campaign had no impact, you’d have to believe that Trump won the election by going around promoting leaks that moved nobody. You’d have to believe that elections aren’t affected by hundreds of operatives, tens of thousands of social media accounts, hundreds of thousands of followers, and hundreds of millions of exposures. You’d have to believe that the $5 million Trump spent on digital ads in states like Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Florida tipped the election, but the $1.25 million spent by one Russian organization in a single month, much of it aimed at Florida and other “purple states,” made no difference.

No thinking person can believe such things. Of course the Russians affected the election. The indictment explains, in part, how they did it. They used the same tools Trump used. If it worked for Trump, it worked for Russia.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/02/how-russians-used-the-same-social-media-tactics-that-worked-for-trump.html
 
Controlled Opposition said:
You are insane. Why not just admit that there is no racism in my posts?
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Why can't you answer a simple yes or no question?

Do you believe that white people as a race, are superior to any other race of people?
Any true non-racist would have no problem answering it with one word in a heartbeat.
Yet you can't. You instead go on and on with impotent rants trying to get me to engage you in an ad hominem battle to draw attention away from the fact that you can't answer.

Want to try again?
 
Leonthecat said:
Why can't you answer a simple yes or no question?

Do you believe that white people as a race, are superior to any other race of people?
Any true non-racist would have no problem answering it with one word in a heartbeat.
Yet you can't. You instead go on and on with impotent rants trying to get me to engage you in an ad hominem battle to draw attention away from the fact that you can't answer.

Want to try again?
Click to expand...

The question is; Where is this racism you accuse me of? That's the only question that matters. I've given you several hours and you haven't posted anything I've said that is racist. Admit that you see racism everywhere, whether it exists or not.
 
Controlled Opposition said:
The question is; Where is this racism you accuse me of? That's the only question that matters. I've given you several hours and you haven't posted anything I've said that is racist. Admit that you see racism everywhere, whether it exists or not.
Click to expand...

Fail again, racist.
You are incapable of answering.

Do you believe that white people as a race, are superior to any other race of people?

A one word answer is required.
Yes or no.
 
Controlled Opposition said:
It is also more evidence that politics is theater. Behind the scenes, it is a tight-knit club, and you and I are not in it.
Click to expand...

It was supposed to be Bush-Clinton-Clinton-Bush-Bush-Obama-Obama-Clinton-Clinton. The only option was if you wanted your progressive agenda fast-tracked or slow-tracked. Same goes for regime change. Obama was every bit the neocon that Bush II—he just slow walked it. You could throw McCain right in there with them.

But the Deplorables installed Trump and it interrupted the establishment’s little monarchy—though it’s probably closer to an oligarchy.

No wonder they’d weaponize the IC to try and get rid of him.
 
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