Lol at Asange being interviewed by Hannity. Time really is a flat circle.

I mean, I'm happy to acknowledge that the average American voter isn't the brightest. I just think this story only gains traction with people already disposed to think of Clinton as hopelessly corrupt, i.e. people who were going to vote Trump anyway (or not vote).

In other words, does anyone have data on voters (in key states) who were otherwise leaning Clinton who went Trump as a result of the email story?

It is pretty amazing, that.

Is Craig Murray someone I should be aware of?

Here's 538's analysis:

It would certainly be a big deal for FSB hackers to being doing oppo for the Trump campaign even if their methods weren't effective though. They're a hostile foreign intelligence agency!

Hmm, okay. Like most of 538's analysis, this doesn't shed all that much light IMHO. "When people decided" is such a noisy data point, especially since people can just say they've decided but later change their minds. Plus there's no way to say whether the timing of their decisions is related to what's in the news cycle. But I appreciate the link (and the writer's attempt to answer the question).

I agree with this part. Obama's sanctions seem like a reasonable response to me.

yeah I don't get the "who really cares" attitude. Even if Hillary won it's not like we were gonna say "ah well, no harm no foul".

He's the ex-British ambassador to Uzbekistan and got sacked basically for speaking the truth about the place (i.e. that it's a monstrous dictatorship and that MI6 was accepting intelligence obtained via torture). I believe he was a contemporaneous critic of the Iraq WMD intelligence. Since then he's been a political activist for various causes.

He's not a crank or anything and generally supports good causes, but there's a whiff of bull**** about him. He appears to have a tendency to self importance. This sentence from his piece on Obama and Russia is an example of the FryNarrowedEyes.jpg I sometimes get when reading his stuff:

1) Why the **** would hackers attack his blog?

2) Does his blog have a full-time security staff, logging intrusion attempts and identifying their country of origin?

This. The GOP had done so much work riling up their base about Hillary's emails that this news about some other emails only tangentially related struck the same chord with people who couldn't be bothered to actually understand the different stories. Pretty sure lots of people believe that the Russian hack is actually about the Russians having hacked Hillary's private email server and stolen the classified info there. But the biggest effect is not that people even really understood what was going on, but that it generated tons of round the clock negative coverage about Hillary.

And the side effect of the emails "proving" the primary was "rigged".

Like even in the ****ing question in the OP here the interviewer is asking about the Podesta hack(phishing, AFAIK no Russian connection) and the DNC leak(unknown method, more credibly linked to the Russians).

But DrModern is also right. Democrats need to slow their roll on starting a New Cold War over a mild propaganda campaign and instead ask themselves what they can do to better message an insanely incompetent media and an electorate that is shockingly open to conspiracy theories.

This is an excellent point.

One thing I wonder about, though, is the fact that, despite that coverage, polling data consistently showed Hillary Clinton ahead. Are polls perhaps more reflective of nationwide trends (witness Clinton's popular vote win) and less reflective of what will happen state-by-state? If you're sampling 1k adults per state, say, is that really enough? Or maybe I should ask: Where were the effects of this negative coverage on voting behavior most visible?

Thank you! This is what I'm saying, yes. We should also consider the effect of the goddamn think-pieces IMO.

thread title is obviously misleading. Assange never said any such thing, just that he personally wasn't handed the info by someone he knew was absolutely, 100% a Russian agent

Russian groups were linked to the Podesta phishing attack as well:

I don't think anyone is starting a new cold war, but it's clear that Russia can't be allowed to get away with this kind of thing without any consequences.

I don't really understand the New Cold War concern. U.S. foreign policy is about to pass into the hands of the most Russophile administration in a century or more. The rush to judgment on the Russia hacking is a matter of getting information to the public domain and imposing some consequences on Russia before Trump shuts everything down and Munichs eastern Europe.

Is Putin going to read a couple think-pieces and invade another sovereign nation? You know that we have already hit Russia with devastating financial sanctions, right? I can't imagine a think-piece being the proverbial last straw, but this whole thing has been so weird that I can't rule it out either.

And if Russia is guilty of hacking, what does whitewashing it or minimizing it accomplish exactly? Doing nothing or staying quiet about what's happening has consequences as well.

Not really disagreeing that we should be careful and thoughtful, but ignoring Russian interference could be just as big of a mistake here as overreacting.

Sorry, not what I meant. I meant something like "the effect of think-piecery in general on public opinion about the candidates," i.e. the expansion of the category of "the media" to include "anyone with a keyboard and a flair for self-promotion." Cf. this genre of """"""humor"""""" writing.

I'm not trying to minimize it. I'm literally trying to understand the scale, impact, and supposed mechanism here. My initial guess is that Russian propaganda mattered far less than voters' ideological orientations.

And again, I feel that Obama's sanctions were a reasonable, measured response to the situation.

And maybe if Hillary hadn't been so careless/negligent with her email set-up in the first place none of this "confusion" and negative coverage would have occurred.

But no it's either Comey's fault or dumb conservatives not understanding the finer details.

Hillary had nothing to do with it.

lol at you

Fair enough.

Okay, on that scale, absolutely. And probably less than lots of other things. But not inconsequential, especially as it speaks to their ability to influence policy.

Imagine if Russian hacking uncovered actual criminal activity by someone on Trump's team, or anyone of any political persuasion who holds power. The potential for blackmail is real and troubling.

We didn't need to have Russians hack trumps campaign to know he was breaking the law in his bid for president.

http://www.salon.com/2016/11/21/fec-...-finance-laws/

Somehow no one cares about trumps lawlessness.

Major actual news outlets just say things akin to 'Russians Hacked the Election' and whatnot, it is pretty crazy.

DrModern, Wookie, Fly, BroadwaySushy, you are all partially right (imo) and I agree with your basic points.

The Champstarks and Noodle's of the world? Not so much.


The anti-Russian drum-beating from the establishment 'left' was concerning enough during the general election, but it seems to have been doubled down on since the Trump victory and is manifesting itself in varied ways. War-mongering neoliberals and neoconservatives coming together at the behest of the corporate establishment and military industrial complex, who woulda thunk it.

The statements *could* be consistent, but if they weren't I'm kind of surprised people here are more inclined to believe the CIA over Wikileaks. One has a perfect track record in accuracy and abides by very clear & strict principles (publicize all information), and one has a track record of shady dealings and murky agendas.

What are the major lies of the CIA during obamas presidency?

And how many times has a Russian propaganda network scooped a release from the CIA?

Wikileaks giddily spread the "#spiritcooking" nonsense and tweeted out a thinly veiled antisemitic attack on its critics. Assange, who never reveals his sources, implied that Seth Rich was his source, and that he was murdered for leaking information.

At least I know not to trust the CIA. People who think Wikileaks is 100% trustworthy are not paying attention.

one is a collection of thousands of trained professionals working with an annual budget in the billions, doing their best as patriotic americans. the other is an offshore website that publishes thousands of pieces of stolen private correspondence, almost all of it containing no news value whatsoever