Bye Bye Hillary 2024

A fixed belief system

It's no fun talking politics to someone who is certain he has all the right answers. As beliefs consolidate into sets of ideas bounded by impenetrable walls, there will be increasing little uptake of non-confirmatory data, that is, ideas that differ from what you already believe. A fixed system of beliefs that allows for no additional data to enter is clinically termed as a delusional system. In the context of political discussions, we call a fixed belief system an ideology.


Discussions in which one or both partners have fixed ideological beliefs with zero uptake of non-confirmatory data degenerate quickly into a tug-of-war about who is right and who is wrong.

Discussion in which both sides learn from each other, increasingly broadening their understandings of issues, is healthy. Debate about who is right and who is wrong by contrast produces stalemated ideas and increasingly hostile relationships.
 
Orson said:
I always thought it was comical when a man would say on tv .. 'I am a muslim'.
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60's guy said:
How many times per day have you masturbated, waiting, and hoping that eventually Hillary would be outed for being the Ma Barker of her party. Her gang.
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Actually it will just be a sigh of relief.
It buys civilization maybe another couple of years, that's all.
The patient would never survive the operation that is really needed.
I'm just wondering how far we passed the point of no return, and I'm beginning to think it's the JFK assassination followed by MLK.
Our picture was developed in the dark-rooms of our federal-cabal-agencies during the 1960s.
They hate a populist-leader elected by those smelly common people.
They're jealous AND fearful of it, because they're so much better than the rest of us.
They'll do anything to keep their powerful positions,
and boy do they have the agenda for us "domestic terrorist" parents.
Nobody voted for them.
I'm finally in agreement with Jesse Jackson. Imagine that.

 
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Court Filing Started a Furor in Right-Wing Outlets, but Their Narrative Is Off Track
The latest alarmist claims about spying on Trump appeared to be flawed, but the explanation is byzantine — underlining the challenge for journalists in deciding what merits coverage.

By Charlie Savage
Feb. 14, 2022
WASHINGTON — When John H. Durham, the Trump-era special counsel investigating the inquiry into Russia’s 2016 election interference, filed a pretrial motion on Friday night, he slipped in a few extra sentences that set off a furor among right-wing outlets about purported spying on former President Donald J. Trump.

But the entire narrative appeared to be mostly wrong or old news — the latest example of the challenge created by a barrage of similar conspiracy theories from Mr. Trump and his allies.

Upon close inspection, these narratives are often based on a misleading presentation of the facts or outright misinformation. They also tend to involve dense and obscure issues, so dissecting them requires asking readers to expend significant mental energy and time — raising the question of whether news outlets should even cover such claims. Yet Trump allies portray the news media as engaged in a cover-up if they don’t.

The latest example began with the motion Mr. Durham filed in a case he has brought against Michael A. Sussmann, a cybersecurity lawyer with links to the Democratic Party. The prosecutor has accused Mr. Sussmann of lying during a September 2016 meeting with an F.B.I. official about Mr. Trump’s possible links to Russia.

The filing was ostensibly about potential conflicts of interest. But it also recounted a meeting at which Mr. Sussmann had presented other suspicions to the government. In February 2017, Mr. Sussmann told the C.I.A. about odd internet data suggesting that someone using a Russian-made smartphone may have been connecting to networks at Trump Tower and the White House, among other places.

Mr. Sussmann had obtained that information from a client, a technology executive named Rodney Joffe. Another paragraph in the court filing said that Mr. Joffe’s company, Neustar, had helped maintain internet-related servers for the White House, and that he and his associates “exploited this arrangement” by mining certain records to gather derogatory information about Mr. Trump.

Citing this filing, Fox News inaccurately declared that Mr. Durham had said he had evidence that Hillary Clinton’s campaign had paid a technology company to “infiltrate” a White House server. The Washington Examiner claimed that this all meant there had been spying on Mr. Trump’s White House office. And when mainstream publications held back, Mr. Trump and his allies began shaming the news media.

“The press refuses to even mention the major crime that took place,” Mr. Trump said in a statement on Monday. “This in itself is a scandal, the fact that a story so big, so powerful and so important for the future of our nation is getting zero coverage from LameStream, is being talked about all over the world.”

There were many problems with all this. For one, much of this was not new: The New York Times had reported in October what Mr. Sussmann had told the C.I.A. about data suggesting that Russian-made smartphones, called YotaPhones, had been connecting to networks at Trump Tower and the White House, among other places.

The conservative media also skewed what the filing said. For example, Mr. Durham’s filing never used the word “infiltrate.” And it never claimed that Mr. Joffe’s company was being paid by the Clinton campaign.

Most important, contrary to the reporting, the filing never said the White House data that came under scrutiny was from the Trump era. According to lawyers for David Dagon, a Georgia Institute of Technology data scientist who helped develop the Yota analysis, the data — so-called DNS logs, which are records of when computers or smartphones have prepared to communicate with servers over the internet — came from Barack Obama’s presidency.

“What Trump and some news outlets are saying is wrong,” said Jody Westby and Mark Rasch, both lawyers for Mr. Dagon. “The cybersecurity researchers were investigating malware in the White House, not spying on the Trump campaign, and to our knowledge all of the data they used was nonprivate DNS data from before Trump took office.”

In a statement, a spokesperson for Mr. Joffe said that “contrary to the allegations in this recent filing,” he was apolitical, did not work for any political party, and had lawful access under a contract to work with others to analyze DNS data — including from the White House — for the purpose of hunting for security breaches or threats.

After Russians hacked networks for the White House and Democrats in 2015 and 2016, it went on, the cybersecurity researchers were “deeply concerned” to find data suggesting Russian-made YotaPhones were in proximity to the Trump campaign and the White House, so “prepared a report of their findings, which was subsequently shared with the C.I.A.”

A spokesman for Mr. Durham declined to comment.

Mr. Durham was assigned by the attorney general at the time, William P. Barr, to scour the Russia investigation for wrongdoing in May 2019 as Mr. Trump escalated his claims that he was the victim of a “deep state” conspiracy. But after nearly three years, he has not developed any cases against high-level government officials.

Instead, Mr. Durham has developed two cases against people associated with outside efforts to understand Russia’s election interference that put forward unproven, and sometimes thin or subsequently disproved, suspicions about purported links to Mr. Trump or his campaign.

Both cases are narrow — accusations of making false statements. One of those cases is against Mr. Sussmann, whom Mr. Durham has accused of lying during a September 2016 meeting with an F.B.I. official about Mr. Trump’s possible links to Russia.

(Mr. Durham says Mr. Sussmann falsely said he had no clients, but was there on behalf of both the Clinton campaign and Mr. Joffe. Mr. Sussman denies ever saying that, while maintaining he was only there on behalf of Mr. Joffe — not the campaign.)

Both Mr. Sussmann’s September 2016 meeting with the F.B.I. and the February 2017 meeting with the C.I.A. centered upon suspicions developed by cybersecurity researchers who specialize in sifting DNS data in search of hacking, botnets and other threats.

A military research organization had asked Georgia Tech researchers to help scrutinize a 2015 Russian malware attack on the White House’s network. After it emerged that Russia had hacked Democrats, they began hunting for signs of other Russian activity targeting people or organizations related to the election, using data provided by Neustar.

Mr. Sussmann’s meeting with the F.B.I. involved odd data the researchers said might indicate communications between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank, a Kremlin-linked institution. The F.B.I. dismissed suspicions of a secret communications channel as unfounded. In the indictment of Mr. Sussmann, Mr. Durham insinuated that the researchers did not believe what they were saying. But lawyers for the researchers said that was false and that their clients believed their analysis.

The meeting with the C.I.A. involved odd data the researchers said indicated there had been communications with Yota servers in Russia coming from networks serving the White House; Trump Tower; Mr. Trump’s Central Park West apartment building; and Spectrum Health, a Michigan hospital company that also played a role in the Alfa Bank matter. The researchers also collaborated on that issue, according to Ms. Westby and Mr. Rasch, and Mr. Dagon had prepared a “white paper” explaining the analysis, which Mr. Sussmann later took to the C.I.A.

Mr. Durham’s filing also cast doubt on the researchers’ suggestion that interactions between devices in the United States and Yota servers were inherently suspicious, saying that there were more than three million such DNS logs from 2014 to 2017 — and that such logs from the White House dated back at least that long.

But Ms. Westby and Mr. Rasch reiterated that YotaPhones are extremely rare in the United States and portrayed three million DNS logs over three years as “paltry and small relative to the billions and billions” of logs associated with common devices like iPhones.

“Yota lookups are extremely concerning if they emanate from sensitive networks that require protection, such as government networks or people running for federal office,” they said.
 

"For example, although the Special Counsel implies that in Mr. Sussmann’s February 9, 2017 meeting, he provided Agency-2 with EOP data from after Mr. Trump took office, the Special Counsel is well aware that the data provided to Agency-2 pertained only to the period of time before Mr. Trump took office, when Barack Obama was President. Further—and contrary to the Special Counsel’s alleged theory that Mr. Sussmann was acting in concert with the Clinton Campaign—the Motion conveniently overlooks the fact that Mr. Sussmann’s meeting with Agency-2 happened well after the 2016 presidential election, at a time when the Clinton Campaign had effectively ceased to exist. Unsurprisingly, the Motion also omits any mention of the fact that Mr. Sussmann never billed the Clinton Campaign for the work associated with the February 9, 2017 meeting, nor could he have (because there was no Clinton Campaign). See Dkt. No. 35 at 3-4. And the Special Counsel persists in alleging that Mr. Sussmann billed the Clinton Campaign for his meeting with the FBI in September 2016, when that is false as well."
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PorterhouseMusic said:
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Team-Hillary spied on a sitting-president in the White House,
and finally someone has the authority to make the indictments.
Watergate isn't much compared to this one.
It's a national security breach too -- where even the White House is not safe from foreign adversaries.
There is no telling who received the White House information -- after paying off the Clinton Foundation.
It's too bad the Washington Post can't talk about the biggest political scandal in American history because it makes them look so bad.
That's really just too bad.
 
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Hillary Clinton in 2024...
I don't think so. Her gig is up.
Even the majority of democrats want her investigated now.
 
John Durham and the Right’s Media Paranoia
They don’t understand how the press is supposed to work.
By Jonathan Chait

The conservative movement is obsessed with the power of the mainstream media, yet it has no idea how it operates. The tragic mismatch between obsessive and subject is currently on bright display through a furor over the latest missive from John Durham.

Last Friday night, Durham — who was appointed special counsel by the Trump administration to prove Trump’s allegation that he was the target of a deep state conspiracy during the Russia investigation — issued another set of charges insinuating that various bureaucrats had treated Mr. Trump very unfairly. The right immediately leapt to very dark (and, as we will see, very wrong) conclusions about what this filing showed:

Almost immediately after that, they turned to a more interesting subject: Why wasn’t the mainstream media covering this? They knew the answer, of course. It’s because the mainstream media is controlled by liberal Democrats who deliberately cover up stories that make their team look bad.

“One characteristic of Russiagate bombshells is that the mainstream press simply doesn’t cover them,” editorialized National Review. David Harsanyi lambasted “The Media’s Blackout on Durham Revelations.” “The way liberal outlets completely ignore this shows the bubble in which liberals live,” proclaimed Glenn Greenwald. “The failure of these other media outlets to cover it is only a reflection of their own complicity in the corruption of the regime and how they will do whatever it takes to control and keep power,” said Mollie Hemingway.

The list goes on and on and on, but here is one more example that is particularly instructive. Howard Kurtz, a Fox News media reporter, announced, “It’s absolutely stunning that virtually all the major newspapers and the other networks are absolutely determined to ignore this story.”

If you knew anything at all about the mainstream media, you realized immediately this hyperventilating response had no contact with reality. Durham dropped his filing on a Friday night, when reporters, like most people, are ending their workweek. More importantly, Durham has an established history of floating allegations that disintegrate upon inspection. The last time he did this, Durham got the mainstream media to quickly amplify his charges before subsequent reporting showed how weak they were.

That’s a “fool me once” trick. So now, appropriately, the media is going to perform its due diligence and look into Durham’s charges rather than echo them in credulous headlines.

Sure enough, the mainstream news has begun reporting on the filing. Here’s CNN, the Washington Post, and The New York Times. Somehow, despite its absolute determination to ignore the story, the mainstream media has wound up producing several reports covering it. The flesh is weak.

These stories completely debunk the erroneous Fox News coverage that prompted all the right’s complaints. The charges in the filing — an alleged conflict of interest by a technology executive — fell far short of the broader conspiracy Durham is insinuating. (This is in keeping with Durham’s pattern of using minuscule criminal allegations to make sweeping but unsubstantiated allegations — I described his last filing as a “Hannity monologue wrapped around a parking ticket.”)

More damning, Fox News botched even the limited charges Durham did make. The word “infiltrate,” which Fox News put in its headline in quotation marks, does not appear anywhere in the filing, and is instead the characterization offered up by Trump stooge Kash Patel.

So why was the right so convinced the mainstream media was ignoring the Durham report in a sinister plot to mislead its own audience, when there was a far more plausible explanation available?

The answer is that the right has spent years nurturing a conspiratorial view of liberal media bias. Like sports fans who complain about bad officiating, conservatives focus obsessively on biased stories against the Republican Party while ignoring biases that run the other way. And while I’d agree that there is an imbalance between stories favoring the left and stories favoring the right, and that this imbalance has grown over the last couple decades, it simply does not work anything like the way conservatives imagine it does.

The conservative media is reverse-engineered to reproduce what conservatives think the liberal media is: partisan operatives devising a political message that will gin up their own side and presenting it as “news.”

It is a mark of how deeply the right has internalized these premises that even Kurtz, whose literal job is to report on the media, genuinely persuaded them that the mainstream media was refusing to cover Durham. The unexciting reality that the mainstream media was going to wait until Monday to report Durham’s hazy allegations was not one they could imagine, because it is premised on following conventions of journalistic objectivity that they can’t fathom.
 
blah blah blah.
An IT firm spied on The White House and fabricated false IT information for the intel community.
It's in the indictments.
They were all on Hillary's payroll and Durham has the receipts for their services.
We knew it all along anyway.
The only thing new is the names, which Durham has. duh.
How much plainer can it get?
PorterhouseMusic said:
The unexciting reality that the mainstream media was going to wait until Monday to report Durham’s hazy allegations was not one they could imagine, because it is premised on following conventions of journalistic objectivity that they can’t fathom.
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That's the pot calling about 100 kettles black and then some.
How many times did the same reference lie about the Russia hoax?
Make that about 200 kettles.
 
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PorterhouseMusic said:
John Durham and the Right’s Media Paranoia
They don’t understand how the press is supposed to work.
By Jonathan Chait

The conservative movement is obsessed with the power of the mainstream media, yet it has no idea how it operates. The tragic mismatch between obsessive and subject is currently on bright display through a furor over the latest missive from John Durham.

Last Friday night, Durham — who was appointed special counsel by the Trump administration to prove Trump’s allegation that he was the target of a deep state conspiracy during the Russia investigation — issued another set of charges insinuating that various bureaucrats had treated Mr. Trump very unfairly. The right immediately leapt to very dark (and, as we will see, very wrong) conclusions about what this filing showed:

Almost immediately after that, they turned to a more interesting subject: Why wasn’t the mainstream media covering this? They knew the answer, of course. It’s because the mainstream media is controlled by liberal Democrats who deliberately cover up stories that make their team look bad.

“One characteristic of Russiagate bombshells is that the mainstream press simply doesn’t cover them,” editorialized National Review. David Harsanyi lambasted “The Media’s Blackout on Durham Revelations.” “The way liberal outlets completely ignore this shows the bubble in which liberals live,” proclaimed Glenn Greenwald. “The failure of these other media outlets to cover it is only a reflection of their own complicity in the corruption of the regime and how they will do whatever it takes to control and keep power,” said Mollie Hemingway.

The list goes on and on and on, but here is one more example that is particularly instructive. Howard Kurtz, a Fox News media reporter, announced, “It’s absolutely stunning that virtually all the major newspapers and the other networks are absolutely determined to ignore this story.”

If you knew anything at all about the mainstream media, you realized immediately this hyperventilating response had no contact with reality. Durham dropped his filing on a Friday night, when reporters, like most people, are ending their workweek. More importantly, Durham has an established history of floating allegations that disintegrate upon inspection. The last time he did this, Durham got the mainstream media to quickly amplify his charges before subsequent reporting showed how weak they were.

That’s a “fool me once” trick. So now, appropriately, the media is going to perform its due diligence and look into Durham’s charges rather than echo them in credulous headlines.

Sure enough, the mainstream news has begun reporting on the filing. Here’s CNN, the Washington Post, and The New York Times. Somehow, despite its absolute determination to ignore the story, the mainstream media has wound up producing several reports covering it. The flesh is weak.

These stories completely debunk the erroneous Fox News coverage that prompted all the right’s complaints. The charges in the filing — an alleged conflict of interest by a technology executive — fell far short of the broader conspiracy Durham is insinuating. (This is in keeping with Durham’s pattern of using minuscule criminal allegations to make sweeping but unsubstantiated allegations — I described his last filing as a “Hannity monologue wrapped around a parking ticket.”)

More damning, Fox News botched even the limited charges Durham did make. The word “infiltrate,” which Fox News put in its headline in quotation marks, does not appear anywhere in the filing, and is instead the characterization offered up by Trump stooge Kash Patel.

So why was the right so convinced the mainstream media was ignoring the Durham report in a sinister plot to mislead its own audience, when there was a far more plausible explanation available?

The answer is that the right has spent years nurturing a conspiratorial view of liberal media bias. Like sports fans who complain about bad officiating, conservatives focus obsessively on biased stories against the Republican Party while ignoring biases that run the other way. And while I’d agree that there is an imbalance between stories favoring the left and stories favoring the right, and that this imbalance has grown over the last couple decades, it simply does not work anything like the way conservatives imagine it does.

The conservative media is reverse-engineered to reproduce what conservatives think the liberal media is: partisan operatives devising a political message that will gin up their own side and presenting it as “news.”

It is a mark of how deeply the right has internalized these premises that even Kurtz, whose literal job is to report on the media, genuinely persuaded them that the mainstream media was refusing to cover Durham. The unexciting reality that the mainstream media was going to wait until Monday to report Durham’s hazy allegations was not one they could imagine, because it is premised on following conventions of journalistic objectivity that they can’t fathom.
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Not picking sides here, but both articles you posted are just opinion pieces.

Highly biased, filled with innuendo, slurs, insulting labels put onto people.

They’re not designed to inform, but manipulate and steer the reader into a certain point of view.

All bullshit. The left and right both do the same thing, and their audiences eat it up.

Real journalism has been dead for a long time.
 
PorterhouseMusic said:
The conservative media is reverse-engineered to reproduce what conservatives think the liberal media is: partisan operatives devising a political message that will gin up their own side and presenting it as “news.”
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We KNOW the liberal media is biased and ginning up their own side and presenting it as news.
Here's a headline from 2017:

www.vox.com

All of Trump’s wiretap claims have now officially been debunked by the FBI and NSA

FBI Director James Comey and National Security Agency Director Adm. Mike Rogers refuted Trump’s claims during a House Intelligence hearing.
www.vox.com www.vox.com

All of Trump’s wiretap claims have now officially been debunked by the FBI and NSA​

FBI Director James Comey and National Security Agency Director Adm. Mike Rogers refuted Trump’s claims during a House Intelligence hearing.
By Jennifer Williams@jenn_ruth Mar 20, 2017, 12:40pm EDT

Share this story​

Rogers.0.jpg


National Security Agency Director Michael Rogers, accompanied by FBI Director James Comey, testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington, Monday, March 20, 2017, before the House Intelligence hearing on allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)
It’s official: Each of President Donald Trump’s claims about President Obama wiretapping him during the presidential election has now been officially debunked, under oath, by FBI Director James Comey and National Security Agency Director Adm. Mike Rogers.
The statements came during a House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence hearing looking into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election on Monday. Comey also officially stated on the record that the FBI is in fact currently investigating links between Trump allies and Russia.
That directly undercut Trump’s longstanding claims that any talk of Russian involvement in the election was a story ginned up by Democrats for political gain or to excuse Hillary Clinton’s loss in 2016. Trump repeated that defense this morning just a short time before two of America’s top law enforcement and intelligence officials shot it down.
The Democrats made up and pushed the Russian story as an excuse for running a terrible campaign. Big advantage in Electoral College & lost!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 20, 2017
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It’s worth taking a moment to let all of this sink in. Trump leveled one of the most explosive charges in recent American history by accusing Obama of a Watergate-like crime****. The White House provided no evidence, and the Republican heads of the House and Senate Intelligence panels said there was none to be found. Now the heads of the FBI and NSA have implicitly said that Trump made the whole thing up.****
Here’s a list of the claims Trump has made about Obama wiretapping and Russian interference, along with Comey’s and Rogers’s statements directly refuting those claims:

1) Trump’s claim: Russia story is fake, created by Democrats​

Comey’s response: “[The FBI is] investigating the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government and whether there was any coordination between the campaign and Russia’s efforts.”
(To be clear, there is still no evidence that the Trump campaign colluded with the Kremlin to harm Hillary Clinton and help win the White House. But there is an investigation, which means the Russia story isn’t made up, and won’t go away.)

2) Trump’s claim: President Obama ordered a wiretap on Trump Tower during the election​

Comey’s response: “I have no information that supports those tweets, and we have looked carefully inside the FBI.”
Rogers’s response: “I have seen nothing on the NSA side that we have engaged in such activity, nor that anyone ever asked us to engage in such activity.”
Committee chair Devin Nunes had already debunked this one yesterday on Fox News Sunday: “Was there a physical wiretap of Trump Tower? No. But there never was.”
The heads of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Republican Sen. Richard Burr and Democratic Sen. Mark Warner, also said in a joint statement last week that “based on the information available to us, we see no indications that Trump Tower was the subject of surveillance by any element of the United States government either before or after Election Day 2016."

3) Trump’s claim: Britain’s top spies helped Obama with the spying​

Rogers’s response: “That would be expressly against the construct of the Five Eyes agreement that has been in place for decades.” Rogers was referring to an international agreement under which Washington and London (along with a trio of other close allies) agree not to spy on one another.

“It was an unusually blunt, at times even angry-sounding, refutation to the president of the United States,” writes Vox’s Zack Beauchamp. “It was a vivid reminder that Trump’s allegations have now been conclusively shot down by everyone in the position to know about them. And it raises still more questions about why Trump himself is stubbornly clinging on to what is now known to be a fabrication.”
The GCHQ, the British communications intelligence agency, had previously issued a statement dismissing Trump’s charges that it helped Obama spy on Trump as “nonsense.”
“They are utterly ridiculous and should be ignored,” the statement read.


**** SO WHEN WILL THE BIASED LEFTEST MEDIA LET THAT SINK IN!
Why is there a left media and a right media? Facts have no political agenda, only a factual one.
 
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