whether or not the election was "rigged" is beside the point. given comey's last minute announcement and the FBI's conduct re: publicizing the investigation into hillary (which turned out to be a nothingburger) while suppressing any hint of an investigation into donald trump's campaign (which is now picking up steam), was unfair at best, and very much colored public perception in a way that was unfair to democrats, and helpful to republicans. it's not a far stretch to claim the election was rigged, altho it's not the choice of words that i prefer to use.

I do not think the elections were rigged.
However I do believe the Trump team knowingly received and welcomed outside foreign help to win the election for $$$.

and fly basically ponied me on why i dont go around saying the election was rigged.

Trump taps Kushner to lead a SWAT team to fix government with business ideas

“We should have excellence in government,” Kushner said Sunday in an interview in his West Wing office. “The government should be run like a great American company. Our hope is that we can achieve successes and efficiencies for our customers, who are the citizens.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...=.4897e565d9ad

These people are so dumb. Pretty sure that "customer service" has been a government priority for at least 20 years (less so for programs for poor people). But it has to be done within the constraints of, um, governing.

The sole and exclusive purpose of business according to republican ideology is separating people from their money (NOT benefitting employees or the public other than as an incidental consequence of the profit motive) while avoiding responsibility for any externalities. "Customer service" is supplied as a means to that end.

So if government is going to be "run like a great American company", what does that imply? Shipping government jobs overseas? Overcharging citizens for no-bid contracts for government work? Offering FDA approval or research grants on a pay-to-play basis?

I mean this "major" policy initiative from one of the president's "top" advisors is amateurish, sophomoric, and literally incoherent. And this is the BEST Trump and his brain trust can come up with. They know literally nothing.

More:

"Kushner’s ambitions for what the new office can achieve are grand. At least to start, the team plans to focus its attention on reimagining Veterans Affairs; modernizing the technology and data infrastructure of every federal department and agency; remodeling workforce-training programs; and developing “transformative projects” under the banner of Trump’s $1 trillion infrastructure plan, such as providing broadband Internet service to every American."

It's so much easier to imagine great things like perpetual motion machines (which are banned from submission to the patent office) and faster than light travel or cheaper and better healthcare for all without cutting Medicaid when you are not constrained by the mundane dictates of reality.

This is why I don't often call Trump a liar. He doesn't know or understand enough to realize that he's completely full of ****.

Dvaut and others have explained this in better detail than me, and though I disagree with him about how easily Trump's Russia ties can fit into a narrative of Trump being incompetent and more interested in his bank account than helping people get health care, he's essentially right that the stuff you are trying to claim is "rigging" is a giant nothingburger as far as being something completely outside the norms of elections. Yes, Russia is a hostile foreign power, but obtaining oppo, dumping it to favorable media outlets, and spinning unflattering narratives is bog standard campaign tactics. Like, I'd be willing to be Republican super pacs spent way more money on this election than Putin did in his "rigging."

This.

Except what the Russians did involved multiple felonies, which are not a standard part of elections.

Hey guys Chelsea Clinton needs our help. She doesn't know whether Abraham Lincoln wore a MAGA hat or if the photo showing him do so was photoshopped. She tweeted her confusion about this and I think we should help her get to the correct answer.

We should be calling our President President not-Hillary because he won because Putin just hated Hillary and was willing to do whatever he could to defeat her, and the guy who won just happened to be the guy who was in position to benefit from Putin's efforts.

I hope President not-Hillary does good for the country, because he is the only President we have.

this. it's also not standard for one of the campaigning parties/entities to coordinate with and possibly even engage in this felonious behavior

I hope I start ****ting 24k gold and I believe that is more likely than he will be good for the country by any metric.

What's the difference between a national and international golf club? Is it like airports and the national ones only take US citizens as members or something?

Hillary intervened in the Russian election of March 2012 by making comments in December 2011. Hillary intervened in a foreign election long before Putin intervened in ours. The connection is Hillary-Putin as battling foreign election interveners. Here is an excerpt from a TIME article from Dec 2011:

All the Wrong Moves: Putin Plots His Strategy Against the Protesters

On Thursday morning, while the Russian opposition was busy preparing another wave of demonstrations in Moscow and more than 70 other cities, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin met with his team of imagemakers to discuss their counterstrategy. They chose to envision their dilemma as a game of chess. "We need to look at the chessboard," Putin said, "where all the moves are clear, both the white and the black." The opponent in this game, as Putin went on to explain, is not so much local opposition leaders, who this week organized the largest protests ever against his rule, but the "American partners" moving them around like pawns.

He referred in particular to U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who expressed "serious concerns" this week about the fairness of Russia's parliamentary elections, held on Sunday, Dec. 4. The vote allowed Putin's United Russia party to hang on to a slim majority, but well-substantiated claims of voter fraud drove thousands of Russians to the streets of Moscow and other cities to protest on Monday and Tuesday. "She set the tone for certain actors inside the country; she gave the signal," Putin said of Clinton on Thursday. "They heard this signal and, with the support of the U.S. State Department, started actively doing their work."

Committing a felony to gain oppo research isn't novel and it certainly isn't rigging an election, ffs.

FYP

Interesting fact from New Yorker article/NPR interview about billionaire Mercer family (http://www.npr.org/2017/03/22/521083...plan-for-years).

Apparently, they are full on Clinton conspiracy theorists, one of the reasons they supported Trump and Breitbart and Bannon. They think the Clinton's literally murder their enemies, like wannabe Putins or something. Clinton derangement syndrome is a powerful drug.

One of the (few) things I'm mad at Billy C. about is attending Richard Mellon-Scaife's funeral and saying nice things about him. Mellon-Scaife was a major funder of anti-Clinton fake news and right wing BS generally. I'm getting tired of dems not playing hardball with these people. Where is the dems version of the Koch organization or the Mercer's? They mainly put that $ into helping the poor or encouraging good government. I think 10% should go toward outing these fascists.

This rigging was so serious that Hillary could have won simply by campaigning in a few different states, i.e. Running a better campaign. Serious stuff.

It was enough to destroy Nixon.

WE'RE NOT TALKING ABOUT THE ELECTION BEING RIGGED, STFU ABOUT THIS ALREADY

Hillary is responsible for hiring bad personal associates. It is Huma and Weiner that created the situation requiring Comey's involvement. That is on Hillary.

For the sake of argument, I'm willing to concede whatever Trump/Manafort/Kelly did with the Russians didn't affect the outcome of the election. Hell, I can even assume Trump may not have even known that his entire campaign was composed of grifters, criminals, hucksters, and other villainous scum. I mean, he's that dumb, but I think he is "smart" enough to look for that not-so-legal edge whenever possible.

But not every bank robber actually makes off with cash, and often when they do there are sometimes dye packs. That doesn't allow them to avoid prosecution.

https://www.fastcompany.com/3046756/obama-and-his-geeks

Problem is there is no future for either centrist Dems or BernieBros if this continues for 4 years and is normalized. America has failed, sorry
Independent investigations
Tax returns
or banana republix

That was a different time. Bill Clinton taught us how to ride a scandal wave and avoid all consequences except for one.

The one thing you can't totally avoid is voter intelligence in future elections, they can punish you for scandalous misdeeds, as Hillary found out last year.

Putting aside whatever happened with Russia and Comey, it's a very tough needle to thread. Because our democracy IS essentially broken, although yelling "rigged" is a vast undersimplification. The Electoral College, Gerrymandering, and Super PACs are the main reason our democracy is broken, not Russian hacking. I do think Trump's activities need to be fully investigated, but we do ourselves a disservice if we don't realize that OUR SYSTEM IN PLACE, THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE, WAS BOUND TO GIVE AWFUL OUTCOMES LIKE THIS EVENTUALLY. We could have seen it coming back in 2000, or perhaps way before then. But until we can actually admit that the Electoral College is a huge problem within our system and get to work on changing it, changing redistricting (California is a good model for this) to a nonpartisan process, and bringing back Voting Rights in a real way, our elections will continue to be "rigged." Republicans are working overtime right now figuring out how they can rig new Voter ID laws to suppress the vote and keep them in power even though their ideas are very unpopular. Unless we actually address these issues in our democracy, our elections will continue to not reflect the will of the people, and governance will continue to suffer.