This election is batshit.
Like all the other allegations against Trump, true or otherwise, it won’t make any difference.
I have a lot of trouble putting Slate at the same “liberal” level as Mother Jones.
What you call “boring”, we call… well, also “boring”, but also indicative of a sane, rational, responsible government that can wrap up an entire election campaign in less three months, and sometimes less than two.
I admit this particular election of yours is more interesting than most because the potential for utter disaster is higher than usual. By fivethiryeight’s latest numbers, you’re playing Russian Roulette with 24.6% of the chambers loaded.
What it is is frightening.
From your link:
He’s pushing legal marijuana and doing shirtless photo bombs of weddings, having just finished surfing. Which N. Dakota politician would you say is more exciting?
Not a peep on CNN. They’re too busy running a lead article on rising Obamacare costs, and a side article quoting at length the totally unhinged loon Gary Johnson claiming that if Hillary is elected, it will be years of Watergate-type chaos eventually ending in impeachment. Johnson’s irresponsible and pointless bloviations directly contradict his own VP.
Yep.
I went over to GoogleNews and found this: “Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia”
If that’s “blowing up all over Google News”, I think that’s a different meaning of “blowing up” than people would think reading asahi’s post. That might also explain why other news sources, including MSNBC based on their web site, aren’t jumping all over this.
I agree. That said, Slate is much more openly partisan this year, whereas in past years, they tended to be more ‘contrarian.’ I’ve actually started reading it less as it seems more and more like an echo chamber of my head.
No.
I suspect this story is more likely to gain traction than Huma’s e-mails. The latter is just too vague and disconnected from Clinton. This story has bad-hair-guy’s name literally stamped right on it. And some of us nerds find the details intriguing. And, really, it has a sort of salacious quality that Weiner’s dick cannot even match.
Some people may respect a strong leader like Putin. But nobody respects the guy that Putin is using.
That article is from the NYT, here -
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/01/us/politics/fbi-russia-election-donald-trump.html
The problem with that article is that it doesn’t directly address the issues in the Slate article. The NYT article, for example, says that the FBI decided that perhaps an innocent explanation, such as email spam, exists for the server between Trump Tower and Alfa Bank. But it doesn’t explain why the FBI thinks the connection between a spike in communication activity during major US political events is unimportant. Nor does the NYT article address the assertion, which I quoted in the OP, that this was clearly not the work of bots, but represented human communication.
The NYT merely reports that the FBI did not find the communication between the servers to be a smoking, but it’s notable that the FBI doesn’t disagree that there was, in fact, a direct server connection from Trump Tower to Alfa Bank at one time, or that the connection was changed after people started asking questions.
The NYT article and the FBI don’t do a good job of addressing the people and their concerns about the server connection which were published in the Slate article.
It’s all well and good to say, “well, maybe there’s an innocent explanation”, but in fact, no actual explanation, innocent or otherwise, has been proposed by the folks at Trump Tower, Alfa Bank, or the FBI themselves. So far, the best explanation is 1) a Russian mobster, or 2. The Lord of Gifts. Either way, it’s not comforting.
OK, but this is the same FBI that just said essentially the same thing about the newly discovered emails on the dick-texter’s laptop – that there is no clear link to anything relevant to the Hillary email investigation; they just don’t know. Yet that one seems to have exploded into the biggest pre-election bombshell in living memory.
If it is a mobster, the public will be indifferent. A few decades ago, there was a mobster who visited the Whitehouse with great frequency. Spent quite a lot of time with the First Lady. No one seemed to be bothered by it. Except for one cartoonist.
I work in this field. I have worked with these technologies for decades so I understand exactly what all that data says.
Somebody used the five-letter combination “trump” when configuring some software somewhere. That’s the entirety of the connection to Trump in this data.
This blog post is the correct explanation of the data found by those researchers.
Trump may well have any number of connections to Russia but this particular artificial scandal is a big nothingburger.
Watching CNN now. The show into teased a Russia/Trump link “story”. Let’s see what they report.
ETA: Harry Reid charges that the FBI has information about a Russia/Trump link, and is sitting on the information.
The story cooled off overnight. Will wait to see if it pops up into the conversation today.
The fact that the Slate headline is a question (“Was a Trump Server Communicating With Russia?”) already ought to raise suspicions about the strength of their evidence. It does seem to be a rule of thumb that the answer to any such headlines is usually “No”.
And in addition to the NYT story The Guardiantried and failed to independently confirm the Slate report. Absent more substantive data, while personally I’m fairly sure Trump is heavily in debt (morally and financially) to Russia I’m not seeing a story here. It’d be nice to have a smoking gun but this isn’t even a gun; it’s a doodle of a gun.
If more evidence turns up, I’ll reconsider.
“The Trump is a Russian puppet! Down with the Trump!”
[/Iran 1979]