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  1. Atypical is offline
    07-29-2017, 05:31 PM #31
    THE RIGHT WING

    The Past 5 GOP Presidents Have Used Fraud and Treason to Steer Themselves to Electoral Victory
    The deception started long before Donald Trump.


    By Thom Hartmann / AlterNet July 28, 2017

    People are wondering out loud about the parallels between today’s Republican Party and organized crime, and whether “Teflon Don” Trump will remain unscathed through his many scandals, ranging from interactions with foreign oligarchs to killing tens of thousands of Americans by denying them healthcare to stepping up the destruction of our environment and public lands.

    History suggests – even if treason can be demonstrated – that, as long as he holds onto the Republican Party (and Fox News), he’ll survive it intact. And he won’t be the first Republican president to commit high crimes to get and stay in office.

    In fact, Eisenhower was the last legitimately elected Republican president we’ve had in this country.

    Since Dwight Eisenhower left the presidency in 1961, six different Republicans have occupied the Oval Office.

    And every single one of them - from Richard Nixon to Donald Trump - have been illegitimate - ascending to the highest office in the land not through small-D democratic elections - but instead through fraud and treason.

    (And today’s GOP-controlled Congress is arguably just as corrupt and illegitimate, acting almost entirely within the boundaries set by an organized group of billionaires.)

    Let’s start at the beginning with Richard Nixon.

    In 1968 - President Lyndon Johnson was desperately trying to end the Vietnam war.

    But Richard Nixon knew that if the war continued - it would tarnish Democrat (and Vice President) Hubert Humphrey’s chances of winning the 1968 election.

    So Nixon sent envoys from his campaign to talk to South Vietnamese leaders to encourage them not to attend an upcoming peace talk in Paris.

    Nixon promised South Vietnam’s corrupt politicians that he would give them a richer deal when he was President than LBJ could give them then.

    LBJ found out about this political maneuver to prolong the Vietnam war just 3 days before the 1968 election. He phoned the Republican Senate leader Everett Dirksen – here’s an excerpt (you can listen to the entire conversation here):

    President Johnson:

    Some of our folks, including some of the old China lobby, are going to the Vietnamese embassy and saying please notify the [South Vietnamese] president that if he'll hold out 'til November the second they could get a better deal. Now, I'm reading their hand, Everett. I don't want to get this in the campaign.

    And they oughtn't to be doin' this. This is treason.

    Sen. Dirksen: I know.

    Those tapes were only released by the LBJ library in the past decade, and that’s Richard Nixon that Lyndon Johnson was accusing of treason.

    But by then - Nixon’s plan had worked.

    South Vietnam boycotted the peace talks - the war continued - and Nixon won the White House thanks to it. As a result, additional tens of thousands of American soldiers, and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese civilians, died as a result of Nixon’s treason.

    And Nixon was never held to account for it.

    Gerald Ford was the next Republican.

    After Nixon left office the same way he entered it - by virtue of breaking the law - Gerald Ford took over.

    Ford was never elected to the White House (he was appointed to replace VP Spiro Agnew, after Agnew was indicted for decades of taking bribes), and thus would never have been President had it not been for Richard Nixon’s treason.

    The third was Ronald Reagan, elected in 1980.

    He won thanks to a little something called the October Surprise - when his people sabotaged then-President Jimmy Carter’s negotiations to release American hostages in Iran.

    According to Iran’s then-president, Reagan’s people promised the Iranians that if they held off on releasing the American hostages until just after the election - then Reagan would give them a sweet weapons deal.

    In 1980 Carter thought he had reached a deal with newly-elected Iranian President Abdolhassan Bani-Sadr over the release of the fifty-two hostages held by radical students at the American Embassy in Tehran.

    Bani-Sadr was a moderate and, as he explained in an editorial for The Christian Science Monitor earlier this year, had successfully run for President on the popular position of releasing the hostages:

    "I openly opposed the hostage-taking throughout the election campaign.... I won the election with over 76 percent of the vote.... Other candidates also were openly against hostage-taking, and overall, 96 percent of votes in that election were given to candidates who were against it [hostage-taking]."

    Carter was confident that with Bani-Sadr's help, he could end the embarrassing hostage crisis that had been a thorn in his political side ever since it began in November of 1979. But Carter underestimated the lengths his opponent in the 1980 Presidential election, California Governor Ronald Reagan, would go to win an election.

    Behind Carter's back, the Reagan campaign worked out a deal with the leader of Iran's radical faction - Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini - to keep the hostages in captivity until after the 1980 Presidential election.

    This was nothing short of treason. The Reagan campaign's secret negotiations with Khomeini - the so-called "October Surprise" - sabotaged Carter and Bani-Sadr's attempts to free the hostages. And as Bani-Sadr told The Christian Science Monitor in March of 2013:

    After arriving in France [in 1981], I told a BBC reporter that I had left Iran to expose the symbiotic relationship between Khomeinism and Reaganism.

    Ayatollah Khomeini and Ronald Reagan had organized a clandestine negotiation, later known as the “October Surprise,” which prevented the attempts by myself and then-US President Jimmy Carter to free the hostages before the 1980 US presidential election took place. The fact that they were not released tipped the results of the election in favor of Reagan.

    And Reagan’s treason - just like Nixon’s treason - worked perfectly.

    The Iran hostage crisis continued and torpedoed Jimmy Carter's re-election hopes.

    And the same day Reagan took the oath of office - almost to the minute, by way of Iran’s acknowledging the deal - the American hostages in Iran were released.

    And for that, Reagan began selling the Iranians weapons and spare parts in 1981, and continued until he was busted for it in 1986, producing the so-called "Iran Contra" scandal.

    But, like Nixon, Reagan was never held to account for the criminal and treasonous actions that brought him to office.

    After Reagan - Bush senior was elected - but like Gerry Ford - Bush was really only President because he served as Vice President under Reagan.

    If the October Surprise hadn’t hoodwinked voters in 1980 - you can bet Bush senior would never have been elected in 1988. That's four illegitimate Republican presidents.

    Cont'd Below

  2. Atypical is offline
    07-29-2017, 05:32 PM #32
    Cont'd

    And that brings us to George W. Bush, the man who was given the White House by five right-wing justices on the Supreme Court.

    In the Bush v. Gore Supreme Court decision in 2000 that stopped the Florida recount and thus handed George W. Bush the presidency - Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in his opinion:

    "The counting of votes ... does in my view threaten irreparable harm to petitioner [George W. Bush], and to the country, by casting a cloud upon what he [Bush] claims to be the legitimacy of his election."

    Apparently, denying the presidency to Al Gore, the guy who actually won the most votes in Florida, did not constitute "irreparable harm" to Scalia or the media.

    And apparently it wasn't important that Scalia’s son worked for the law firm that was defending George W. Bush before the high court (thus no Scalia recusal).

    Just like it wasn't important to mention that Justice Clarence Thomas's wife worked on the Bush transition team and was busy accepting resumes from people who would serve in the Bush White House if her husband stopped the recount in Florida...which he did. (No Thomas recusal, either.)

    And more than a year after the election - a consortium of newspapers including The Washington Post, The New York Times, and USA Today did their own recount in Florida - manually counting every vote in a process that took almost a year - and concluded that Al Gore did indeed win the presidency in 2000.

    As the November 12th, 2001 article in The New York Times read:

    “If all the ballots had been reviewed under any of seven single standards and combined with the results of an examination of overvotes, Mr. Gore would have won.”

    That little bit of info was slipped into the seventeenth paragraph of the Times story on purpose so that it would attract as little attention as possible around the nation.

    Why? because the 9/11 attacks had just happened - and journalists feared that burdening Americans with the plain truth that George W. Bush actually lost the election would further hurt a nation that was already in crisis.

    And none of that even considered that Bush could only have gotten as close to Gore as he did because his brother, Florida Governor Jeb Bush, had ordered his Secretary of State, Kathrine Harris, to purge at least 57,000 mostly-Black voters from the state’s rolls just before the election.

    So for the third time in 4 decades - Republicans took the White House under illegitimate electoral circumstances. Even President Carter was shocked by the brazenness of that one.

    And Jeb Bush and the GOP were never held to account for that crime against democracy.

    Most recently, in 2016, Kris Kobach and Republican Secretaries of State across the nation used Interstate Crosscheck to purge millions of legitimate voters – most people of color – from the voting rolls just in time for the Clinton/Trump election.

    Millions of otherwise valid American voters were denied their right to vote because they didn’t own the requisite ID – a modern-day poll-tax that’s spread across every Republican state with any consequential black, elderly, urban, or college-student population (all groups less likely to have a passport or drivers’ license).

    Donald Trump still lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes, but came to power through an electoral college designed to keep slavery safe in colonial America.

    You can only wonder how much better off America would be if 6 Republican Presidents hadn't stolen or inherited a stolen White House.

    In fact - the last legitimate Republican President - Dwight Eisenhower - was unlike any other Republican president since.

    He ran for the White House on a platform of peace - that he would end the Korean War.

    This from one of his TV campaign ads:

    “The nation, haunted by the stalemate in Korea, looks to Eisenhower. Eisenhower knows how to deal with the Russians. He has met Europe leaders, has got them working with us. Elect the number one man for the number one job of our time. November 4th vote for peace. Vote for Eisenhower.”

    Two of his campaign slogans were "I like Ike" and "Vote For Peace, Vote For Eisenhower".

    Ike was a moderate Republican who stood up for working people - who kept tax rates on the rich at 91 percent - and made sure that the middle class in America was protected by FDR's New Deal policies.

    As he told his brother Edgar in 1954 in a letter:

    "Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history."

    And Eisenhower was right - the only way Republicans have been able to win the presidency since he left office in 1961 has been by outright treason, a criminal fraud involving conflicted members of the Supreme Court, or by being vice-president under an already-illegitimate president.

    And that's where we are today, dealing with the aftermath of all these Republican crimes and six illegitimate Republican presidents stacking the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary.

    And this doesn’t even begin to tell the story of how the Republican majority in the senate represents 36 million fewer Americans than do the Democrats. Or how in most elections in past decades, Democrats have gotten more votes for the House of Representatives, but Republicans have controlled it because of gerrymandering.

    This raises serious questions about the legitimacy of the modern Republican Party itself.

    They work hand-in-glove with a group of right-wing billionaires and billionaire-owned or dominated media outlets like Fox and “conservative” TV and radio outlets across the nation, along with a very well-funded network of rightwing websites.

    The Koch Network’s various groups, for example, have more money, more offices, and more staff than the Republican Party itself. Three times more employees and twice the budget, in fact. Which raises the question: which is the dog, and which is the tail?

    And, as we’ve seen so vividly in the “debate” about healthcare this year, the Republicans, like Richard Nixon, are not encumbered by the need to tell the truth.

    Whether it’s ending trade deals, bringing home jobs, protecting Social Security and Medicaid, or saving our public lands and environment – virtually every promise that Trump ran and won on is being broken. Meanwhile, the oligarchs continue to pressure Republican senators to vote their way.

    Meanwhile, a public trust that has taken 240 years to build is being destroyed, as public lands, regulatory agencies, and our courts are handed off to oligarchs and transnational corporations to exploit or destroy.

    The Trump and Republican campaign of 2016, Americans are now discovering, was nearly all lies, well-supported by a vast right-wing media machine and a timid, profit-obsessed “mainstream” corporate media. Meanwhile, it seemed that all the Democrats could say was, “The children are watching!”

    Fraud, treason, and lies have worked well for the GOP for half a century.

    Thus, the Democrats are right to now fine-tune their message to the people. But in addition to “A Better Deal,” they may want to consider adding to their agenda a solid RICO investigation into the GOP and the oligarchs who fund it.

    It’s way past time to stop the now-routine Republican practice of using treason, lies, and crime to gain and hold political power.

    http://www.alternet.org/right-wing/g...ud-and-treason

    ____________________________________
    My Comment Below
    Last edited by Atypical; 07-29-2017 at 05:45 PM.

  3. Atypical is offline
    07-29-2017, 05:36 PM #33
    Personal Comment...Posted Article Is Above And Starts At Post 31.

    Some forty plus years ago there were many stories of Republicans and Democrats enjoying each others company over drinks and dinner. There was a measure of respect and collegiality between politicians of different parties which helped get things done.

    Republicans were even active in getting Nixon to resign. The Powell Memo, unfortunately, began to change things.

    In the eighties, Reagan began purposely using careless and inflammatory language to stir emotions (e.g. welfare queens.) Aided by the newly formed “Moral Majority,” religion began to inject its lethal poison into politics. As time went on many other players were added to the conservative roster: Newt Gingrich (types), et al, corporate media and corporations that want no oversight, hate radio/hate websites* and “Think Tanks,” which were only a front for justifying baseless conservative programs and beliefs. The Tea Party arose funded by the Kochs (and others) to threaten any politician that did not hew to a far-right agenda.

    (*The long-term conservative hate-machine is wholly responsible for the polarization of the country – along with the absence of an equally energetic and articulate opposition to thwart it. Negotiation, compromise and empathy for those in need were sold as weaknesses.)

    A well-oiled propaganda apparatus was critical along the way (Frank Luntz, et al.) Over decades it repeated carefully chosen (emotional) words (e.g.death panels), half-truths, lies (e.g. trickle-down economics) and other hateful distortions to mislead and indoctrinate the public. It stifled corrective debate and rigorously opposed anything that threatened the conservative narrative. It was never effectively countered by the impotent Democrats, and all of this continues today. Gerrymandering, voting machine hacking, court decisions and the removal of properly registered voters from the rolls are also used by conservatives. These efforts, too, persist as shown by the phony “voter fraud” accusations.

    Democrats over time lost their zeal for many of their stated historical principles, becoming co-opted by corporate money, along with belief that “third-way” politics was the better option (Clinton.) Obama continued the erosion as did the party's recent self-serving and fatal decision to run an insider and unlikable candidate who almost certainly could not win rather than one that likely would but who threatened their comfortable "republican lite" existence.

    The current Republican Party bears no resemblance to what it was a few decades ago. There are few, if any, real moderates. The (religious) right-wing bomb-throwers have impeded or threatened them with retribution from their rabid base if they don't adhere to the obstructionist mindset. There are many Republicans who have been around for years that have said what is going on now is not an effort to govern fairly with compromise but only to destroy (Norman Ornstein, et.al.)

    We now have the culmination of this vicious power grab by conservatives – Trump. Because he is clearly not qualified, or even mentally capable, a few conservatives are beginning to separate themselves from him by saying he is not really a conservative (yet they still support him.) Although he appears to have little interest in policy everything he has done is on a conservative wish-list, and those he has named to various positions are rabid, incompetent conservatives or those who wholeheartedly support far-right policies.

    It is not possible to exaggerate the horror of Trump's presidency. This well-known conman has accomplished his best deception and we are all paying except those that are unable to see, hear and think. (A Pence succession would be another catastrophe)

    Conservative ideology is authoritarian, ultra-nationalistic, fanatically religious, exclusionary, destructive and frequently treasonous. It cares for nothing but power and the subjugation it allows. Greed is its icon and preventing progress (plus the Rapture) its goal.

    If only we had an assertive opposition party whose energy was being used to safeguard and build on the best of what makes this country livable and whose goals are what the most reasonable among us cherish and need.

    If only...
    Last edited by Atypical; 08-04-2017 at 07:08 PM.

  4. Atypical is offline
    08-30-2017, 06:50 PM #34
    Why experts say you shouldn’t give Houston money to the Red Cross — and 5 orgs to whom you could.


    As with every disaster both man-made and natural, people outside of Houston are scouring the web for charities to whom they can donate in the wake of the deadly Hurricane Harvey. Through the chatter, however, one theme has emerged — news organizations urging readers to avoid donating to the American Red Cross.

    News sites across the political spectrum, from Slate to the New York Times and Democracy Now! to Bloomberg, have published editorials in recent days detailing the reasons users shouldn’t give their hard-earned cash to the well-known and mostly-beloved charity. Their main evidence? The organization’s terrible response to Hurricane Katrina in 2006, the Haitian earthquake in 2010 and Hurricane Sandy in 2012.

    In an article published on Wednesday, Bloomberg noted that ProPublica has uncovered the ARC’s shady spending practices.

    “Not only is the charity less than transparent with how it has used donors’ money,” the Bloomberg report reads, “it has been intentionally misleading. Its claim that 91 cents of every dollar goes to disaster victims was called ‘not true‘ by NPR and ProPublica. The organization even went so far as to say its spending practices were ‘a trade secret.'”

    Beyond criticism of their financial structure, the organization has always been criticized for the way they handled the many climate change-fueled disasters in recent years. One of the widest-shared figures recounts how the organization claimed to have provided housing for 130,000 people in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake, but had only built six houses.

    Journalists who witnessed the ARC’s poor responses to natural disasters. Dan Gillimor, a veteran reporter and professor at Arizona State’s Walter Kronkite School of Journalism, advised people not support the organization based on their poor track record, as did Slate’s Jonathan Katz.

    “ARC was roundly blasted in the U.S. for its shambolic response to 2005’s Hurricane Katrina, with international observers warning that elements were so bad that they verged on criminal wrongdoing,” Katz, who was on the ground in Haiti when the earthquate hit, wrote. “Seven years later, despite an internal retooling effort, it failed again in 2012’s Superstorm Sandy and Hurricane Isaac. (The response was ‘worse than the storm,’ one Red Cross driver told ProPublica during its jaw-dropping investigation.)”

    The good news is that the ARC is far from the only organization providing relief to Harvey’s continuously-growing list of victims. As NPR reports, there are dozens of organizations, many specialized, that are on the ground in Houston.

    Raw Story’s picks for some of the most worthy local and national charities responding to Harvey are The Center for Disaster Philanthropy, The Greater Houston Community Foundation, Feeding Texas, the Texas Diaper Bank and Austin Pets Alive!.

    In addition to monetary donations, many people are working to donate menstrual products to people in Houston who have had to do without since the storm hit.

    You can find a search through a large list of charity organizations to donate to via Charity Navigator as well.

    http://www.rawstory.com/2017/08/why-...hom-you-could/

    __________________________________________

    This is important if you want to help those affected by this horrendous catastrophe.

  5. Atypical is offline
    10-15-2017, 05:57 PM #35
    https://youtu.be/MxxxlutsKuI


    There are people today who want...
    Last edited by Atypical; 10-15-2017 at 06:14 PM.

  6. Atypical is offline
    10-21-2017, 04:32 PM #36
    Trump is, on any non-ideological basis, the worst individual to ever inhabit the presidency. As I have said here previously, I did not vote for any of the four who ran in the past election so I have no dog in this hunt.

    Many have said that Trump should have people around him who can restrain his puerile, narcissistic tendencies. The hunger for that is so great that many are given the benefit of doubt where it is inappropriate. One who has now shown how misguided that can be is Gen. Kelly.

    John Kelly and the Language of the Military Coup

    By Masha Gessen

    Consider this nightmare scenario: a military coup. You don’t have to strain your imagination—all you have to do is watch Thursday’s White House press briefing, in which the chief of staff, John Kelly, defended President Trump’s phone call to a military widow, Myeshia Johnson. The press briefing could serve as a preview of what a military coup in this country would look like, for it was in the logic of such a coup that Kelly advanced his four arguments.

    Argument 1. Those who criticize the President don’t know what they’re talking about because they haven’t served in the military. To demonstrate how little lay people know, Kelly provided a long, detailed explanation of what happens when a soldier is killed in battle: the body is wrapped in whatever is handy, flown by helicopter, then packed in ice, then flown again, then repacked, then flown, then embalmed and dressed in uniform with medals, and then flown home. Kelly provided a similar amount of detail about how family members are notified of the death, when, and by whom. He even recommended a film that dramatized the process of transporting the body of a real-life marine, Private First Class Chance Phelps. This was a Trumpian moment, from the phrasing—“a very, very good movie”—to the message. Kelly stressed that Phelps “was killed under my command, right next to me”; in other words, Kelly’s real-life experience was recreated for television, and that, he seemed to think, bolstered his authority.

    Fallen soldiers, Kelly said, join “the best one per cent this country produces.” Here, the chief of staff again reminded his audience of its ignorance: “Most of you, as Americans, don’t know them. Many of you don’t know anyone who knows any of them. But they are the very best this country produces.”

    The one-per-cent figure is puzzling. The number of people currently serving in the military, both on active duty and in the reserves, is not even one per cent of all Americans. The number of veterans in the population is far higher: more than seven per cent. But, later in the speech, when Kelly described his own distress after hearing the criticism of Trump’s phone call, the general said that he had gone to “walk among the finest men and women on this earth. And you can always find them because they’re in Arlington National Cemetery.” So, by “the best” Americans, Kelly had meant dead Americans—specifically, fallen soldiers.

    The number of Americans killed in all the wars this nation has ever fought is indeed equal to roughly one per cent of all Americans alive today. This makes for questionable math and disturbing logic. It is in totalitarian societies, which demand complete mobilization, that dying for one’s country becomes the ultimate badge of honor. Growing up in the Soviet Union, I learned the names of ordinary soldiers who threw their bodies onto enemy tanks, becoming literal cannon fodder. All of us children had to aspire to the feat of martyrdom. No Soviet general would have dared utter the kind of statement that’s attributed to General George S. Patton: “The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.”

    2. The President did the right thing because he did exactly what his general told him to do. Kelly went on a rambling explication of speaking to the President not once but twice about how to make the call to Myeshia Johnson. After Kelly’s son was killed while serving in Afghanistan, the chief of staff recalled, his own best friend had consoled him by saying that his son “was doing exactly what he wanted to do when he was killed. He knew what he was getting into by joining that one per cent.” Trump apparently tried to replicate this message when he told Johnson that her husband, La David, had known what he was signing up for. The negative reaction to this comment, Kelly said, had “stunned” him.

    A week earlier, Kelly had taken over the White House press briefing in an attempt to quash another scandal and ended up using the phrase “I was sent in,” twice, in reference to his job in the White House. Now he seemed to be saying that, since he was sent in to control the President and the President had, this time, more or less carried out his instructions, the President should not be criticized.

    3. Communication between the President and a military widow is no one’s business but theirs. A day earlier, the Washington Post had quoted a White House official saying, “The president’s conversations with the families of American heroes who have made the ultimate sacrifice are private.” The statement contained a classic Trumpian reversal: the President was claiming for himself the right to privacy that belonged to his interlocutor. But Myeshia Johnson had apparently voluntarily shared her conversation with her mother-in-law and Congresswoman Frederica Wilson by putting the President on speakerphone.

    Now Kelly took it up a notch. Not only was he claiming that the President, communicating with a citizen in his official capacity, had a right to confidentiality—he was claiming that this right was “sacred.” Indeed, Kelly seemed to say, it was the last sacred thing in this country. He rattled off a litany of things that had lost their sanctity: women, life, religion, Gold Star families. The last of which had been profaned “in the convention over the summer,” said Kelly, although the debacle with a Gold Star family had been Trump’s doing. Now, Kelly seemed to say, we had descended into utter profanity, because the secrecy of the President’s phone call had been violated.

    4. Citizens are ranked based on their proximity to dying for their country. Kelly’s last argument was his most striking. At the end of the briefing, he said that he would take questions only from those members of the press who had a personal connection to a fallen soldier, followed by those who knew a Gold Star family. Considering that, a few minutes earlier, Kelly had said most Americans didn’t even know anyone who knew anyone who belonged to the “one per cent,” he was now explicitly denying a majority of Americans—or the journalists representing them—the right to ask questions. This was a new twist on the Trump Administration’s technique of shunning and shaming unfriendly members of the news media, except this time, it was framed explicitly in terms of national loyalty. As if on cue, the first reporter allowed to speak inserted the phrase “Semper Fi”—a literal loyalty oath—into his question.

    Cont'd Below
    Last edited by Atypical; 10-21-2017 at 04:38 PM.

  7. Atypical is offline
    10-21-2017, 04:32 PM #37
    Cont'd

    Before walking off the stage, Kelly told Americans who haven’t served in the military that he pities them. “We don’t look down upon those of you who haven’t served,” he said. “In fact, in a way we are a little bit sorry because you’ll have never have experienced the wonderful joy you get in your heart when you do the kinds of things our servicemen and women do—not for any other reason than that they love this country.”

    When Kelly replaced the ineffectual Reince Priebus as the chief of staff, a sigh of relief emerged: at least the general would impose some discipline on the Administration. Now we have a sense of what military discipline in the White House sounds like.

    https://disq.us/url?url=https%3A%2F%...-U&cuid=170935

  8. Atypical is offline
    10-29-2017, 11:50 AM #38
    This would be nice.

    https://youtu.be/d7Uy0Uznw4E

  9. Rewind is offline
    Legend
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    Joined: Oct 2017 Location: Glendale CA Posts: 12,461
    11-01-2017, 09:46 PM #39
    Atypical is a "Mentor." I hope that means he won't object to me posting this story here. I can call myself his "mentee" -- if there is such a word. We now know that Russians under the direction of Vladimir Putin created thousands of fake US accounts on Facebook, Google and Twitter and posted pro-Trump and anti-Clinton propaganda during the 2016 Presidential election. Representatives of those three companies testified today before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Here is one of the not-so-surprising revelations:

    Russia organized two sides of a Texas protest and encouraged 'both sides to battle in the streets'
    Business Insider, Nov 1 2017 7:22 PM

    Russian trolls organized a protest and counterprotest in the same place at the same time last May, Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Richard Burr said today. The revelation reveals how far Russia was willing to go to foment unrest and division in the US in the months leading up to the election. Burr said organizing and promoting these protests cost Russia "about $200."

    Russian actors organized both anti-Islam and pro-Islam protests on May 21 in the same location, using separate Facebook pages that were being operated out of a troll factory in St. Petersburg, the Senate Intelligence Committee revealed. The Heart Of Texas Facebook page, whose link to Russia was first reported by Business Insider, organized a rally at noon on May 21 at the Islamic Da'wesh Center in Houston to "Stop Islamization of Texas." Another Russia-linked account, United Muslims Of America, effectively organized a counterprotest: At noon on May 21 at the Islamic Da'wesh Center in Houston, dozens of people showed up for a "Save Islamic Knowledge" rally.

    "What neither side could have known was that Russian trolls were encouraging both sides to battle in the streets and create division between real Americans," Burr said during an open hearing with the general counsels of Facebook, Google and Twitter.

    https://www.aol.com/article/news/201...eets/23263922/

  10. Rewind is offline
    Legend
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    Joined: Oct 2017 Location: Glendale CA Posts: 12,461
    11-02-2017, 03:28 PM #40
    Women can now look forward to the year 2234.

    World Economic Forum estimates it will take 217 years for the gender pay gap to close

    http://www.newsmax.com/thewire/217-y.../02/id/823659/

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