Mourning in America - Trump Year One: November '16 to

VOA is the official US broadcaster everywhere from Serbia to South Sudan. It's not really intended for a US audience.

― Bubba H.O.T.A.P.E (ShariVari), Monday, December 12, 2016 10:30 AM (eleven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Under § 501 of the Smith–Mundt Act of 1948, Voice of America was forbidden to broadcast directly to American citizens until July 2013[3] when it was repealed in the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act provision of the National Defense Authorization Act for 2013.[4] The intent of the legislation in 1948 was to protect the American public from propaganda actions by its own government.[35]

Isn't VOA already a propaganda operation?

yes, and one that until recently was explicitly forbidden from broadcasting to american citizens, and insulated from direct executive control

i have no idea how many people around the world pay any attn to RFE/VOA

http://www.voanews.com/z/1456.html

Hey folks, in recent years I have listened to this on occasion here:

Music Time in Africa is VOA’s longest running English language program. Since 1965, this award-winning program has featured pan African music that spans all genres and generations. Ethnomusicologist and Host Heather Maxwell keeps you up to date on what’s happening in African music with exclusive interviews, cultural information, and of course, great music -- including rare recordings from the Leo Sarkisian Library of African Music.

the insanity of the reaction to the wapo CIA/putin story is really not encouraging.

(if you still think sam wang has any cred) it looks like the comey announcements about hillary's lingering server issue had an effect on opinion:

http://election.princeton.edu/2016/12/10/the-comey-effect/#more-18959

but did wikileaks dump of podesta/DNC emails? these two things keep getting run together. it's a much more gradual drip-effect if so. it's important to figure out if russia was trying to tip public opinion in an election -- i just don't know if they actually did.

and no, nude spock, it's not "red baiting" to pin blame on putin, the autocratic nationalist

it's also not putin's fault that hillary left herself in striking distance across the midwest

enjoying all these headlines talking about a risk of war with china!

never thought I would be thankful for Marco fucking Rubio but if he, McCain and Graham (and I would suspect Paul, as well?) come out against Tillerson that's his nomination sunk

Paul opposes him and Bolton:

During an interview on ABC's "This Week," Paul said that he would oppose Bolton's nomination to serve under Tillerson.

"I do know that John Bolton doesn’t get it. He still believes in regime change. He’s still a big cheerleader for the Iraq war. He’s promoted a nuclear attack by Israel on Iran. He wants to do regime change in Iran," he said. "So, I think John Bolton is so far out of it and has such a naive understanding of the world. If he were to be the assistant or the undersecretary for Tillerson, I’m an out automatic no on Bolton. He should get nowhere close to the State Department if anybody with the same worldview is in charge."

oh shit iago is nude spock? that makes so much sense

@tinyrevolution
It's an emergency if Russia interfered with the election or if the CIA's making bogus claims it did. Obama must declassify everything.

I hope at this point we can all acknowledge that America has a deep state and its game is on point

Feel like there are a lot of surprising 'enemy of my enemy' moments to come over the next several years.

hey it happened during the New Deal

oh shit iago is nude spock? that makes so much sense

haha wow I hadn't put this together either

:O

@DougHenwood
This is just too damn funny

Ex-CIA operative Robert Baer made headlines on CNN insisting that the breach was grounds for a new election in the United States. "But I'll tell you, having worked in the CIA, if we had been caught in interfering in European elections or Asian elections or anywhere in the world, those countries would call for new elections,"

https://twitter.com/DougHenwood/status/807952268918226944

oh ffs

what you mean like Chile

oh I guess that's not Asia or Europe lol

"... if we had been caught in interfering in European elections or Asian elections or anywhere in the world..."

that said i'm not with all of the leftist chortling about this. our own domestic nationalism is nuts enough without the russian version getting into the act.

steve bannon talked glowingly about alexander dugin in an interview -- why would russian intelligence even need to warp american opinion? that had already happened willingly

Yeah, these people engaging in 'but what about all of the governments/elections the US has meddled with, hmmmmmm?' smugness needs to fuck off. You can have qualms about how our government has historically operated AND call out Russian interference as unacceptable. I mean, were you sagely nodding your head on 9/11 and smarmily declaring that we totally asked for it? You get that the actions of governments are separate from the populations who are adversely affected by those actions, yes?

twitter rumor: carly fiorina for DNI

lol

were you sagely nodding your head on 9/11 and smarmily declaring that we totally asked for it?

actually i was kinda screaming it as i was choking on the cloud of WTC dust that might've given me cancer.

anyway, this seems like the salient point

@tinyrevolution
A good lesson for Americans to take away from this is that it feels like shit to wonder if another country's influencing who governs you

Too true. I'm already rethinking the coup some of my buddies and I had planned.

pretty sure the fiorina thing is just trump trolling his adversaries but ughhhhhh. sadly if you fail as DNI your prize isnt a golden parachute and a job on fox. its a bunch of dead americans.

pretty sure the Fiorina thing everything he says or does is just trump trolling his adversaries

Yeah, these people engaging in 'but what about all of the governments/elections the US has meddled with, hmmmmmm?' smugness needs to fuck off.

Maybe it's not smugness but the hope that Democrats in the future will take a more skeptical view of the US's actions around the world... but nah, nobody actually believes they will.

these people engaging in 'but what about all of the governments/elections the US has meddled with, hmmmmmm?' smugness needs to fuck off. You can have qualms about how our government has historically operated AND call out Russian interference as unacceptable.

i agree with the second part. so how can you voice qualms about how our government has historically operated WITHOUT saying "but what about all of the governments/elections the US has meddled with?" the knowledge that the US/CIA has repeatedly fucked with internal affairs of other countries has out there for a long time, and i'm preeeeeetty much no one here cares outside of the usual leftist circles. either the information doesn't get through somehow, or it does and we don't care. now we get a taste of election-fuckery in the U.S. - and just a taste, because it's hard to pinpoint the actual loss of the election on the wikileaks stuff, and as others have mentioned, Clinton, you know, won the election by 2.5+ million votes - and it draws comparisons to hiroshima and nagasaki. that's great! it's great that people are really, really pissed off about it. they should be. since it has opened up a brief, rarely-seen-IRL "national conversation" about it, a term that usually makes me puke in my mouth a little, maybe it might be a good time to mention the united states' historical acts. as far as i can see, that whole historical angle has taken up maybe 0.1% of the conversation about the russian hacking, so i don't think it's a zero sum game situation.

when would be the more appropriate and effective time to mention such things, other than now? is it better to wait 3 years for errol morris or someone to make a really kickass documentary about it, after the election-hacking prime has been pumped, but enough time has passed to let things settle down a little? hey, maybe it would be, i don't know, but from just a regular old non-famous filmmaker standpoint, now seems like a good time

i liked when hillary put bernie on blast for having been anti-contra in his wild youth

anyway, i completely agree with this - You can have qualms about how our government has historically operated AND call out Russian interference as unacceptable .

xpost or the henry kissinger moment during the debate. i was so glad he mentioned that and stood his fucking ground

last thing from me on this because i know it's annoying - now is a great time to talk about the voter ID bullshit, too

at least we might be able to actually DO something about that

The Republican sponsors of a so-called "religious freedom" bill plan on re-introducing the legislation next year in the hopes that Donald Trump's election will boost chances for the bill to be signed into law, Buzzfeed News reported.

The bill, the First Amendment Defense Act, would ban the federal government from revoking tax exemptions from or denying grants to individuals or corporations with religious or "moral" beliefs opposing same-sex marriage.

Couldn't you argue neglecting to prosecute someone for their religious beliefs could result in de facto SHARIA LAW???????????????????

Nah, 'cuz the Mohammedan religion is not a real religion.

How many posts are we at here? At this rate this should get a weekly reboot.

Heard most of the daily briefing from Josh Earnest (who eerily mimics Obama's halting speech cadences). A reporter asked him if he was directly claiming on behalf of the White House that the hacks/leaks/cyber-meddling were explicitly done to help Trump, at the expense of Clinton, or if this latest news undermines his incoming presidency. and while he wouldn't exactly say yes, he did go on at length with a litany of all of Trump's (familiar to us) connections to Russia, emphasizing, repeatedly (and I paraphrase), that all this stuff was out there and reported on for months, how none of it was secret or stemmed from the intelligence community, that none of it had yet to be disputed, and that all of Trump's supporters in the GOP who backed him knowing full well his ample connections to Russia now have to justify that support in the face of belatedly acknowledging this suspicious at the least and damning at worst stuff.

as alarming as this all is---and deserving of investigation---nothing even suggested would actually make trump's electoral win illegitimate in a legal sense, right? the russians didn't hack the voting machines, and they didn't invent the electoral college. short of demonstrated and provable-in-court collusion with moscow, i don't see how a trump presidency is avoidable. and somehow i doubt that the FSB would be dumb enough to actually work with trump directly---he's just a useful idiot

I'm wondering if McConnell approving the investigation is just a tactic to blame Obama for Russia's meddling

i wouldn't doubt it! if he had taken a firmer stance w russia this never would have happened, etc

I'd assume gamesmanship to work on keeping Trump in line with Congress's designs.

Don't want him acting like a populist again if his poll numbers dive when they start trying to privatize Medicare.

what's the point of blaming obama more at this point

KM, I would love if we (the people) could both talk about how fucked US foreign policy has been AND acknowledge the bullshit game Russia is playing, but attention is in short supply as always and I would hate to see the latter get subsumed by a thoughtful exegesis of the former. I've seen just a few too many responses that were quick to dismiss the situation which is happening right now and which seems the most important in terms of immediate scrutiny.

what's the point of blaming obama more at this point

obviously because it shifts blame away from Trump

acknowledging that our foreign policy was bad and wrong does, you know, shore up the morality of the point yr trying to make w/r/t russia

The nonsensical Fox News headline: 'Sore loser Obama turns to Russian hacking to delegitimize Trump's triumph'

I actually have no idea what the accusations even fully comprise, or at least if there is anything more to them than just the Podesta/DNC stuff. Like, clearly there is classified info that the public is not privy to. But hearing a summation of all the Russian connections laid out as they were by Earnest was pretty surreal, just so many individually bad sounding things in a row, all related to Russia, none contradicted, all having preceded the election by months, topped by more recent news (however redundant) that Russia had a direct role, to some extent, in influencing the election, consensus revelations which came within days of Trump floating a guy for SoS who has full-on Russian ties and considers Putin a friend. It's just all too much.

or at least if there is anything more to them than just the Podesta/DNC stuff

the info that they hacked GOP servers too is new, afaict