Early Retirement Extreme Forums

Kriegsspiel wrote: ↑

Tue Jan 15, 2019 2:15 pm

Jean wrote: ↑

Wed Jan 16, 2019 12:15 pm

Ain't that what trump did?

There was a GOP primary debate that night in Greenville, South Carolina, so every Republican in Washington was watching. Seemingly out of nowhere, Trump articulated something that no party leader had ever said out loud. "We should never have been in Iraq," Trump announced, his voice rising. "We have destabilized the Middle East."

Many in the crowd booed, but Trump kept going: "They lied, They said there were weapons of mass destruction. There were none. And they knew there were none."

Pandemonium seemed to erupt in the hall, and on television. Shocked political analysts declared that the Trump presidential effort had just euthanized itself. Republican voters, they said with certainty, would never accept attacks on policies their party had espoused and carried out.

Back in Washington, rival GOP campaigns frantically searched for ways to discredit what Trump had said. They found what they considered a silver bullet in a recording of an episode of the Howard Stern radio show from 2002, in which Trump seemed to approve of the idea of overthrowing Saddam.

By Washington standards, this qualified as a kill shot. The candidate had once uttered complimentary words about a war that had not yet started. Therefore, he had no right to criticize the same war fourteen years later, after it had proved disastrous. . . . Republican voters had a different reaction. They understood that adults sometimes change their minds based on evidence. They themselves had come to understand that the Iraq War was a mistake. They appreciated hearing something verboten but true. . . . Trump won the South Carolina primary, and shortly after that, the Republican nomination.

This political position held until 2012, when she made an about face and declared she supported gay rights— just in time for the election for Hawaii’s 2nd District. And that wasn’t the first time she had shed a piece of her past in order to make herself more palatable to voters. link

Conducted in September, it is the first scientific breakdown of voting preferences among service members, and includes more than 2,200 responses from active-duty troops. And it shows a very different race than the one playing out on the broader national stage.

Among the entire military force, Trump leads Johnson 37.6 percent to 36.5 percent, within the study’s 2 percent margin of error. Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton trails as a distant third-place choice, with only 16.3 percent of troops' support.
. . .
Perhaps most notably, there is a sharp split between enlisted personnel and the military's officer corps, which directs day-to-day operations and implements policy. Among the officers surveyed, Johnson is the clear choice, commanding support from 38.6 percent of respondents. Clinton actually outpaces Trump in that group, with nearly 28 percent support for the former secretary of State compared to the New York business mogul’s 26 percent. link

Kriegsspiel wrote: ↑

Thu Jan 17, 2019 1:11 pm

I am a former troop and I voted for Gary Johnson.

Let Putin decide the Democratic candidate. Then in 2020 it will be Putin versus Putin.

Riggerjack wrote: ↑

Fri Jan 18, 2019 7:47 am

You mean like the last election, and the one before that, and all the rest? We haven't had an election free from Russian influence since the great depression. Which only seems fair, since there has never been a Russian election free from American influence. This outrage over politics as usual seems... Misplaced.

fiby41 wrote: ↑

Sun Jan 20, 2019 8:15 am

Tulsi v/s Nikki 2020

As Russia’s online election machinations came to light last year, a group of Democratic tech experts decided to try out similarly deceptive tactics in the fiercely contested Alabama Senate race, according to people familiar with the effort and a report on its results.

The secret project, carried out on Facebook and Twitter, was likely too small to have a significant effect on the race, in which the Democratic candidate it was designed to help, Doug Jones, edged out the Republican, Roy S. Moore. But it was a sign that American political operatives of both parties have paid close attention to the Russian methods, which some fear may come to taint elections in the United States.

One participant in the Alabama project, Jonathon Morgan, is the chief executive of New Knowledge, a small cyber security firm that wrote a scathing account of Russia’s social media operations in the 2016 election that was released this week by the Senate Intelligence Committee.

An internal report on the Alabama effort, obtained by The New York Times, says explicitly that it “experimented with many of the tactics now understood to have influenced the 2016 elections.”

The project’s operators created a Facebook page on which they posed as conservative Alabamians, using it to try to divide Republicans and even to endorse a write-in candidate to draw votes from Mr. Moore. It involved a scheme to link the Moore campaign to thousands of Russian accounts that suddenly began following the Republican candidate on Twitter, a development that drew national media attention.

“We orchestrated an elaborate ‘false flag’ operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet,” the report says.

Analysts at New Knowledge, the company the Senate Intelligence Committee used to track Russian activities in the 2016 election, told NBC News they've spotted "chatter" related to Gabbard in anonymous online message boards, including those known for fomenting right-wing troll campaigns. The chatter discussed Gabbard's usefulness.

Kriegsspiel wrote: ↑

Thu Feb 14, 2019 4:52 pm

How that's not a crime is beyond me. That's interfering in elections. And we know it.