Today's Divide-N-Conquer

Christian Science Monitor:

If you search Twitter for the hashtag #FamiliesBelongTogether, a tag created by activists opposing the forcible separation of migrant children from their parents, you might be in for a pop proofreading quiz.

That’s because, in some locations in the United States, the top trending term, the one that Twitter automatically predicts as you type it, contains a small typo, like #FamiliesBelongTogther.

The misspelled hashtag, and others like it, have enjoyed unusual popularity on the social platform.

- and -

This is not an accident, say data scientists, but the result of a deliberate, automated misinformation campaign. The misspelled hashtags are decoys, aimed at diffusing the reach of the original by breaking the conversation into smaller groups. These decoys can dilute certain voices and distort public perception of beliefs and values.

“This is becoming more like a mind game,” says Onur Varol, a postdoctoral researcher at Northeastern University’s Network Science Institute. “If they can reach a good amount of activity, they are changing the conversation from one hashtag to another.”

It's a very old problem-solving metaphor: Try to eat the whole steak all at once, and you choke on it. So you cut in into bite-sized chunks - and enjoy your meal.

hat tip = Blue Gal

Show Up Or Shut Up

The Brennan Center For Justice (PDF):

On April 19, 2016, thousands of eligible Brooklyn voters dutifully showed up to cast their ballots in the presidential primary, only to find their

names missing from the voter lists. An investigation by the New York state attorney general found that New York City’s Board of Elections had improperly deleted more than 200,000 names from the voter rolls.

In June 2016, the Arkansas secretary of state provided a list to the state’s 75 county clerks suggesting that more than 7,700 names be removed from the rolls because of supposed felony convictions. That roster was highly inac- curate; it included people who had never been convicted of a felony, as well as persons with past convictions whose voting rights had been restored.

And in Virginia in 2013, nearly 39,000 voters were removed from the rolls when the state relied on a faulty database to delete voters who allegedly had moved out of the commonwealth. Error rates in some counties ran as high as 17 percent.

These voters were victims of purges — the some- times-flawed process by which election officials attempt to remove ineligible names from voter registration lists. When done correctly, purges ensure the voter rolls are accurate and up-to-date. When done incorrectly, purges disenfranchise legitimate voters (often when it is too close to an election to rectify the mistake), causing confusion and delay at the polls.

Ahead of upcoming midterm elections, a new Brennan Center investigation has examined data for more than 6,600 jurisdictions that report purge rates to the Election Assistance Commission and calculated purge rates for 49 states.

We found that between 2014 and 2016, states removed almost 16 million voters from the rolls, and every state in the country can and should do more to protect voters from improper purges.2

Almost 4 million more names were purged from the rolls between 2014 and 2016 than between 2006 and 2008.3This growth in the number of removed voters represented an increase of 33 percent — far outstripping growth in both total registered voters (18 percent) and total population (6 percent).

Some of the more egregious highlights (per The Root):

• In June 2016, the Arkansas secretary of state gave a list of 7,700 names to county clerks to be removed from the rolls because of supposed felony convictions. That list included people who had never been convicted of a felony and formerly convicted persons whose voting rights had been restored.
• In 2013, Virginia deleted 39,000 names from its voting roster. In some counties, the mistakes on the list were as high as 17 percent.
• A federal court halted a purge after Hurricane Katrina after justices found that one-third of the purged names came from a majority black parish in of New Orleans.
• After the Shelby v. Holder decision, Texas purged 363,000 more voters than it did the election cycle before the case. Georgia purged 1.5 million more voters.
• Alabama, Indiana and Maine have illegally instituted the widely ridiculed Crosscheck system (on which Charles D. Ellison previously reported on for The Root) that purges voters without federally-mandated notification.
• In 1986, one Louisiana official remarked that a voter purge effort “could really keep the black vote down considerably.”
• Instead of checking out inequities, Jeff Sessions’ Department of Justice has been urging states to do more purging.

Making a habit of voting every chance you get is sine qua non in a democracy. Now you have to make it a habit to check to make sure some asshole Republican isn't rat-fucking you out of your right to self-government.

vote.org

"Nobody will ever deprive the American people of the right to vote except the American people themselves, and the only way they could do this is by not voting."

--Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Some Homework For Ya

From The Atlantic via Soundcloud:



Don't be surprised by anything that happens to (or because of) Paul Manafort.

More On Why - or - Why, Moron?

Evan Osnos, The New Yorker:

The power of anonymity. In a section titled “Use of U.S. Computer Infrastructure,” prosecutors noted that some of the defendants and co-conspirators “purchased space on computer servers located inside the United States in order to set up virtual private networks.” Once they had those, they could create social-media accounts and communicate with American campaign activists “while masking the Russian origin and control of the activity.” What obligation do campaigns have to vet the people and information they encounter? Under current law, campaigns must document the sources of their funding (to insure, among other things, that they receive no foreign donations, which are against the law).

The power of voter suppression. To promote Trump, the Internet Research Agency did not just amplify his supporters’ enthusiasm; it actively sought to deter others from participating in the democratic process. Months before Election Day, Russian trolls “began to encourage U.S. minority groups not to vote in the 2016 US. presidential election or to vote for a third-party US. presidential candidate.” In one case, a Russian-controlled account on Instagram, with the name “Woke Blacks,” posted, “[A] particular hype and hatred for Trump is misleading the people and forcing Blacks to vote Killary. We cannot resort to the lesser of two devils. Then we’d surely be better off without voting AT ALL.”

The power of news illiteracy. At the heart of the Russian fraud is an essential, embarrassing insight into American life: large numbers of Americans are ill-equipped to assess the credibility of the things they read. The willingness to believe purported news stories, often riddled with typos or coming from unfamiliar outlets, is a liability of today’s fragmented media and polarized politics. Even the trolls themselves were surprised at what Americans would believe. According to the indictment, in September, 2017, once U.S. authorities had begun to crack down on the fraud, one of the defendants, Irina Viktorovna Kaverzina, e-mailed a family member, saying, “We had a slight crisis here at work: the FBI busted our activity (not a joke). So, I got preoccupied with covering tracks together with the colleagues.” She went on, “I created all these pictures and posts, and the Americans believed that it was written by their people.”
Let's review, shall we?

A Few Observations

"Conservatives" love to bitch about the timelines of the Mueller investigation. They contend (eg) that the investigation started before 45* began his run, and somehow, that means he couldn't possibly have anything to do with the Ruskies' rat-fucking.

Here's a tiny hint: "Make America Great Again" - Trump applied for a patent on that slogan in November of 2012.

Another one: The rat-fucking began (more or less) in 2014, but Trump claims he wasn't even running, and besides, he'd never had anything to do with the Ruskies back then - The 2013 Miss Universe Meat Parade was held in Moscow, and Trump was there, having boasted about doing "a lot of business with the Russians" and that he'd met Putin.

The indictment published 16FEB2018 is an interesting 'next step'.

U.S. law bans foreign nationals from making certain expenditures or financial disbursements for the purpose of influencing federal elections. U.S. law also bars agents of any foreign entity from engaging in political activities within the United States without first registering with the Attorney General.
Previous indictments have established that there were people inside the Trump campaign, doing dirty things, possibly in cahoots with "the Russians".

This new indictment tells us who "the Russians" are, links them to people in this country, and tells us how the Rat-Fucking crosses the threshold into Unlawful Campaign Activity.

We ain't there yet, but just like Grandma said: "Oh honey, If that thing had fangs and a rattle, you'd be close to dead now."

Rhyming History

A nice little history lesson. I remember "knowing" Martha Mitchell was whacky - ie: I was being told she was whacky every day.

This is the first of a series - Slow Burn, a podcast about Watergate



First, never underestimate the power of denial on the part of a voter who just can't accept the evidence that he got played, and voted for a bad guy.

In a letter-to-the-editor in 1973, my grandpa wrote this:

..."Just before the election five or six boys thought it would be fun to bug the Democratic headquarters in the plush Watergate hotel and got caught. With the gleeful help of the biased news media, a few senators are again trying to wreck the American government and slap the American people in the face for their choice of the best man we have had in the White House for a generation - a man who can talk to the Communists and have their respect. But the news media is still using the same underhanded, childish, dirty methods of unfounded rumors, ;ies and half-truths - going so far as to attack the President, his family and friends."...

Second, sometimes when it looks like somebody's going crazy - it's really just their attempt to get un-crazy.

Today's Daddy State

The Rat-Fucking never ends.

WaPo:

A woman who falsely claimed to The Washington Post that Roy Moore, the Republican U.S. Senate candidate in Alabama, impregnated her as a teenager appears to work with an organization that uses deceptive tactics to secretly record conversations in an effort to embarrass its targets.

In a series of interviews over two weeks, the woman shared a dramatic story about an alleged sexual relationship with Moore in 1992 that led to an abortion when she was 15. During the interviews, she repeatedly pressed Post reporters to give their opinions on the effects that her claims could have on Moore’s candidacy if she went public.

The Post did not publish an article based on her unsubstantiated account. When Post reporters confronted her with inconsistencies in her story and an Internet posting that raised doubts about her motivations, she insisted that she was not working with any organization that targets journalists.

But on Monday morning, Post reporters saw her walking into the New York offices of Project Veritas, an organization that targets the mainstream news media and left-leaning groups. The organization sets up undercover “stings” that involve using false cover stories and covert video recordings meant to expose what the group says is media bias.

Think about how often we hear about "false flag" attacks or operations.  Once you've made the accusation - and doesn't really matter who you've thrown it at - once you've accused somebody of something, it's harder for anybody to accuse you of the same thing.

Daddy State Rule #1:

Every accusation is a confession

We Will Get Fooled Again

Fool you once - shame on them.

Fool you twice - shame on you.

Fool you repeatedly - you end up with President 45*.

Take lessons from Frank Luntz and Newt Gingrich for a few years - tune in to Limbaugh and Savage and Hannity regularly for the Hate Du Jour.

Filter it down to 12 or 15 key triggers - Sharia Law, Illegal Immigrants, Shall Not Be Infringed, Hillary Killed Vince Foster, Socialism, Leftwing Intolerance, Reverse Racism, FemiNazi, Sidney Blumenthal Started Birtherism, Black-On-Black Crime, etc.

Create fake accounts on Google and YouTube, and every social media platform you come across.

Set up your algorithms and your AdBots, and send 'em out with the shittiest memes you can think of.

Such as like for example, per The Guardian:

Police have identified Stephen Paddock as the suspect who opened fire from a high-rise hotel room, killing scores and injuring hundreds more. But before authorities named the 64-year-old Nevada man, some on the far right falsely identified the man behind the deadliest mass shooting in modern US history as Geary Danley. It’s unclear where exactly the hoax originated, but rightwing users aggressively promoted his name, seizing on evidence that he was a liberal.
On 4chan, the anonymous message board and a favorite platform of the “alt-right”, some noted that Danley was a registered Democrat. Soon after, Gateway Pundit, a conspiracy-laden blog that earned White House credentials under Trump, published an evidence-free story headlined, “Las Vegas Shooter Reportedly a Democrat Who Liked Rachel Maddow, MoveOn.org and Associated with Anti-Trump Army”. The piece was based on a review of Facebook “likes”.

Check out their Fake News Archive

Some titilating titles at Snopes:

Is There an ‘Epidemic of Child Abduction’ in Kansas?

Democrat Principal Defecates In Front Of Students During Pledge Of Allegiance?

Was White Supremacist Who Killed Protester a Democrat Who Visited Obama in Oval Office?
And a few more interesting oddities:

I guess I could've shortened this post quite a lot with a simple reminder: Check your bias and your source.

And, especially in light of what we're learning, don't assume anything negative isn't coming from Moscow.

Today's Tweet

Obviously it's coming from the blue side of the aisle, and this "new development" is speculative for now, but holy fuck - this sounds a lot like they're zeroing in. 

We're not talking about whether or not the rat-fucking took the form of direct interference. 

We're not asking, "did that interference take the form of illegal/criminal activity?"  

It's not even, "How did Russia manage to target their shit so perfectly?"

Yes, it was direct interference
Yes, it's criminal.
Yes, the Russians had to have someone helping them from the inside.

Merkley is now asking, "Who provided the analytics the Russians had to have in order to put just the right messages in front of just the right eyeballs?"

“Very likely” that American citizens helped Russia hack the 2016 election -@SenJeffMerkley on #TheBeat https://t.co/j2feNG4bgK

— Justin Hendrix (@justinhendrix) October 5, 2017

A Pox On All Their Houses

Keep in mind The Daily Beast has been very much like that one mean girl who is kinda the champion mean girl, pretending not to be a mean girl at all, while constantly stirring the shit between rival cliques of mean girls, in order to assert her supremacy as Queen O' The Mean, even as she operates from a position of stealthy independence. 

They are less so now that Tina Brown is gone - but still - this could easily be an exercise in cat-fighting, which seems altogether fitting since that was pretty much the main objective of Russian Fuckery last year.

I've had this whole thing rattling around in my head for quite a while, and much of it fits with everybody's suspicions that The Bernie Bros and The HillBots and The Evil Duopoly crowd (and and and) were all stoked by the Russian rat-fuckers working overtime just to disrupt the process. 

Anyway, this piece has value - I just have to remind myself to check my Confirmation Bias regularly.

The Daily Beast:

Moscow’s attempts to cultivate America’s far-left long predate the presidency of Vladimir Putin. The Kremlin, according to available evidence, donated more funds per capita to the U.S. Communist Party than any other communist claque during the Soviet period, when Moscow’s intelligence operations against the “main adversary” involved recruiting agents of influence and spies of a progressive background who were sympathetic to the Soviet cause. But the past 18 months have seen a noted spike in information warfare aimed at gulling the Bernie Bros and Occupy-besotted alternative-media set, which saw Clinton as more of a political danger than it did Trump.

Perhaps the starkest case in point is Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein and her constituency. In December 2015, the Kremlin feted Stein by inviting her to the gala celebrating the 10-year anniversary of Kremlin-funded propaganda network RT. Over a year later, it remains unclear who paid for Stein’s trip to Moscow and her accommodations there. Her campaign ignored multiple questions on this score. We do know, however, that Stein sat at the same table as both Putin and Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn, Trump’s soon-to-be national security adviser. She further spoke at an RT-sponsored panel, using her presence to criticize the U.S.’s “disastrous militarism.” Afterward, straddling Moscow’s Red Square, Stein described the panel as “inspiring,” going on to claim that Putin, whom she painted as a political novice, told her he “agree[d]” with her “on many issues.”

Stein presents herself as a champion of the underclass and the environment, and an opponent of the surveillance state and corporate media, and yet she seemed to take pleasure in her marriage of true minds with a kleptocratic intelligence officer who levels forests and arrests or kills critical journalists and invades foreign countries. Their true commonality, of course, is that both Putin and Stein are dogged opponents of U.S. foreign policy.

Minimizing

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Hillary In Retrospect

Some interesting points made here.

"She was a horrible candidate". Maybe some of the perception regarding Hillary is due to our perception of how thoroughly horrible Trump is, and we're judging her relative to that. ie: "she was up against the worst person in the world and she lost, so she has to be the worst of everything ever..."

Plenty of "bad candidates" have been in office for some very long stretches of time.

New York Magazine:

Affection for her campaign staff is one reason Clinton claims she will not point fingers at her own team in assessing her loss. “I will never say anything other than positive things about my campaign,” she tells me in Chappaqua. “Because I love the people that led it, worked in it.”

Besides, she argues, “what I was doing was working. I would have won had I not been subjected to the unprecedented attacks by Comey and the Russians, aided and abetted by the suppression of the vote, particularly in Wisconsin.” She agrees that there are lessons to be learned from her campaign, just not the same ones her critics would cite. “Whoever comes next, this is not going to end. Republicans learned that if you suppress votes you win … So take me out of the equation as a candidate. You know, I’m not running for anything. Put me into the equation as somebody who has lived the lessons that people who care about this country should probably pay attention to.”
--and--

She was still in the ritualistic-process mode when she attended Trump’s inauguration. People close to her told me that she’d had doubts about being able to make it through without visibly losing control. “Oh,” says Clinton, “it was hard. It was really … difficult.” But “at the time, we hoped that there would be a different agenda for governing than there had been for running.”

Of course, it quickly became clear from Trump’s speech that there would be no change in strategy. A look of disgust crosses Clinton’s face as she recalls it. “It was a really painful cry to his hard-core supporters that he wasn’t changing,” she says. “The ‘carnage’ in our country? It was a very disturbing moment. I caught Michelle Obama’s eye, like, What is going on here? I was sitting next to George and Laura Bush, and we have our political differences, but this was beyond any experience any of us had ever had.”

I ask her about the report that Bush had said of the speech, “That was some weird shit,” and her eyes light up. “Put it in your article,” she says. “They tried to walk back from it, but …” Did she hear it herself? I ask. She raises her eyebrows and grins.

--and--

The unusually prolonged pummeling is partly because Clinton’s Election Day loss was not just hers but the nation’s; her defeat this time left us not with an Obama presidency but with an out-of-control administration led by a man so inept — and so reviled — that even (some) Republicans are voicing concerns. The nation is grasping for a way to understand how we got here, and blaming Clinton wholly and neatly takes the heat off everyone else who contributed: from the critics who derided her supporters as empty-headed shills to those supporters who were cowed into secret Facebook groups; from the journalists who treated Trump as a ratings-pumping sideshow and Clinton as the suspiciously presumptive president to all of us who permitted cheerful stories about America’s progress on gender and race to blot out the real and lingering inequities in this country.

Wow - Look Who Just Caught Up

Raw Story:

Professional presidential campaign staff for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) confirmed to the Huffington Post that Russian trolls were responsible for pushing out anti-Hillary Clinton memes and social media content.

The shocking series of interviews revealed large Facebook groups supporting Sanders were inundated with content from people with no ties to the regions in which the pages were located. Former reporter John Mattes explained that his San Diego page became overwhelmed with anti-Clinton memes with messages he’d never heard coming out of the Sanders campaign. Instead, they were memes alleging Clinton used body doubles and murdered political opponents.

He initially suspected the posts were coming from anti-Clinton sites run by 1990s Clinton opponents, but he quickly found out that domain names were registered in Macedonia and Albania. Websites like WorldPoliticus.com, TrumpVision365.com, USConservativeToday.com, DonaldTrumpNews.co and USADailyPolitics.com are just a few of the sites that trafficked in fake news against Clinton. By the end of October he traced at least 40 percent of the domain registrations of the fake news sites on pro-Sanders pages back to Eastern Europe. Some others were based in Panama and the U.S. or untraceable.

In the context of Divide-n-Conquer tactics, this happens a lot under normal circumstances. But these are not normal circumstances. This shit at this level is killing this republic.

Today's Tweet

Russian Propaganda Campaign Was Extensive. pic.twitter.com/seTjuSXzc8

— Tomthunkit™ (@TomthunkitsMind) February 9, 2017

Inside Out

I can't keep up. The twists and turns just in this one angle of this one story is enough to overload my circuits - which I think is mostly the point.  And unfortunately, it seems to be working pretty well.

HuffPo:

Two brief quotes from Breitbart’s interview with Prince should suffice:

Prince claimed he had insider knowledge of the investigation that could help explain why FBI Director James Comey had to announce he was reopening the investigation into Clinton’s email server last week....”[NYPD] found a lot of other really damning criminal information [on Weiner’s computer], including money laundering, including the fact that Hillary went to this sex island with convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Bill Clinton went there more than twenty times. Hillary Clinton went there at least six times,” he said. “The amount of garbage that they found in these emails, of criminal activity by Hillary, by her immediate circle, and even by other Democratic members of Congress, was so disgusting they gave it to the FBI, and they said, ‘We’re going to go public with this if you don’t reopen the investigation and you don’t do the right thing with timely indictments,’” Prince explained. “I believe—I know, and this is from a very well-placed source of mine at One Police Plaza in New York—the NYPD wanted to do a press conference announcing the warrants and the additional arrests they were making in this investigation, and they’ve gotten huge pushback, to the point of coercion, from the Justice Department.”

Virtually all of this is untrue. Prince continued:

“So NYPD first gets that computer. They see how disgusting it is. They keep a copy of everything, and they pass a copy on to the FBI, which finally pushes the FBI off their chairs, making Comey reopen that investigation, which was indicated in the letter last week. The point being, NYPD has all the information, and they will pursue justice within their rights if the FBI doesn’t. There is all kinds of criminal culpability through all the emails they’ve seen of that 650,000, including money laundering, underage sex, pay-for-play, and, of course, plenty of proof of inappropriate handling, sending/receiving of classified information, up to Special Access Programs....The point being, fortunately, it’s not just the FBI; five different offices are in the hunt for justice, but the NYPD has it as well....From what I understand, up to the commissioner or at least the chief level in NYPD, they wanted to have a press conference, and DOJ, Washington people, political appointees have been exerting all kinds of undue pressure on them to back down....This kind of evil, this kind of true dirt on Hillary Clinton—look, you don’t have to make any judgments. Just release the emails. Just dump them. Let them out there. Let people see the light of truth.”

Prince’s statements of November 4th—whether given with the knowledge that they were untrue or without any knowledge of their accuracy whatsoever—underscore the sort of disinformation Comey feared would be given to voters, and, more importantly, believed by voters, if he did not complete his investigation into the duplicate emails and announce his findings before Election Day. This alone explains his deviation from FBI protocol prohibiting discussion of open cases (and announcements regarding major investigations within two months of a general election).

While I guess you could make the point that this has happened more than once before, if you're making that argument as a way to shrug it off and rationalize your indifference to it - well, to be as polite and as diplomatic and as non-threatening as I think the situation requires - go fuck yourself with a dry pinecone.

Curiouser

It's one guy - and it's CNN - but there seems to be an increasing amount of smoke.

Dmitri Alperovitch said that their firm did, in fact, catch 2 groups associated w Russian intelligence agencies in the act#TrumpLeaks pic.twitter.com/jJDyfBwUmM

— Khary Penebaker (@kharyp) December 13, 2016

Today's Chart

It's the Rat-Fucking, stupid.

Presto Change-O Followup

In a post I put up a few days ago, I postulated that rat-fucking played a key role in electing Trump.

I'm not a big fan of Greg Palast - I have to wonder about a guy who wears that 1950s Reporter Costume on a regular basis - but he's managed to do some decent work on occasion and if he's uncovered something worth looking at, I wanna look at it.

So:

Before a single vote was cast, the election was fixed by GOP and Trump operatives.

Starting in 2013 – just as the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act – a coterie of Trump operatives, under the direction of Kris Kobach, Kansas Secretary of State, created a system to purge 1.1 million Americans of color from the voter rolls of GOP–controlled states.

The system, called Crosscheck, is detailed in my Rolling Stone report,

“The GOP’s Stealth War on Voters,” 8/24/2016.

Crosscheck in action:

Trump victory margin in Michigan: 13,107

Michigan Crosscheck purge list: 449,922

Trump victory margin in Arizona: 85,257

 Arizona Crosscheck purge list: 270,824

Trump victory margin in North Carolina: 177,008

North Carolina Crosscheck purge list: 589,393

On Tuesday, we saw Crosscheck elect a Republican Senate and as President, Donald Trump. The electoral putsch was aided by nine other methods of attacking the right to vote of Black, Latino and Asian-American voters, methods detailed in my book and film, including “Caging,” “purging,” blocking legitimate registrations, and wrongly shunting millions to “provisional” ballots that will never be counted.

It's shitty, and it's underhanded, and it's dirty, and it's perfectly legal. This is where we are now.

Presto Change-O

How could the pollsters have gotten it so wrong?

You call a jillion registered voters, and they tell you they're ready to go, and they shake out like: Hillary's up by 5 points or Hillary's up by 8 points or 2 points or whatever.

But then, on the big day, it goes in the shitter and nobody can figure it out - it must be because those Black Voters Under-Performed (and don'tcha just love that kinda language?  "We lost - let's blame the Black People!")

"No, man, it was those stoopid fuckin' Protest Voters!"

"It was because Hillary's a lousy candidate and she failed to connect with blah blah blah - it never woulda happened with Bernie...I told ya so, man".

Fuck that noise.  Fuck all that noise.

Plus FL, NC, PA, and MI
All GOP-dominated, all rat-fucked for the same result
If they let everybody vote, they lose https://t.co/64fbP4H1Td

— Mike Roberts (@eVilleMike) November 10, 2016

How many voters showed up in Florida only to get turned away because of Voter ID or some such?

How many were a little skittish about it in the first place and finally decided just to stay home because they were afraid of being hassled?

Then Virginia (not enough to swing it, but holy fuck did they come close)
Then North Carolina (kind of a toss-up anyway, but she was trending)
Then Pennsylvania - fuck
Then Michigan - fuck
Then Wisconsin - fuck!

I wonder what the arithmetic looks like if you convert the final Polling Numbers for those states into an actual number of votes (X), minus Trump's margin of victory (Y), and compared that difference to the numbers of Registered Voters who turned out, but were denied their right to exercise the franchise.

And what the fuck is up with this apparent rash of No Vote at the top of the ticket?

Where did Kellyanne Conway send Trump in the last coupla weeks of his Scampaign®? 

What the hell was he doing in places that "Hillary had all sewed up"?

The pollsters weren't all that wrong.

There was no massive Bradley Effect.

Plenty of Black and Latin Voters turned out, and Women did their thing for her.

Hillary didn't blow it, and "Those Shitty Little Millennials" didn't blow it for her.

A combination of 
Voter ID Laws 
+ Fewer Polling Stations 
+ Purging Registration Rolls 
+ SCOTUS ruling against The Voting Rights Act
+ Rumors of Fraud and Rigged Elections
+ Threats of intimidation
+ Fliers and Text messages directing people to wrong or non-existent precincts
+ That world-famous Voter Apathy here in USAmerica Inc.
+ etc etc etc
= President-Elect Trump

This looks to me like a perfectly legal rat-fucking of the highest possible order, having been well-targeted and executed down to the last tiny detail - which includes knowing how to play the Electoral College Game.

And it keeps working for as long as voters have to be spoon-fed by the candidates; for as long as we can't be bothered to figure shit out for ourselves; for as long as we insist that we have to be inspired and uplifted by some Great Leader Of The New And Awesomely Stupendous and Tremendous Movement - for as long as we're not willing to hold this system to the standards laid out by the guys who wrote up the original instruction manual for us.  There's some pretty good shit at the end of the first paragraph.

It may sound like I'm being nostalgic; yearning for some golden age that never really existed. I'm not. There may never have been an election that was perfectly Free-n-Fair, and there may never be one. But can't we try to make the next one a bit "more perfect" than the last one? And the one after that?

PS) Hillary got the most votes. A lousy candidate with a bad message and a clunky disconnected style doesn't get the most votes. Don't fucking forget that.

PPS) This is fucked up and complicated - and since it didn't suddenly get all fucked up and complicated yesterday, we're not gonna un-fucking-complicate it by tomorrow.

We got Rat-Fucked, and now we get to wonder if the rubes will ever become aware that the Big Bamboozle is back in full swing.

Today's Keith

That the FBI is rat-fucking for Trump should be the biggest of the big-time Holy Fucks, and as Keith says, those agents should be fired as of at least last week, and it should be reflected on their records to the point they'll be forever hard-pressed even to land jobs as crossing guards or Port-A-Potty attendants or javelin catchers.

The saving grace is that they are, after all - wait for it - Gubmint Employees, and therefor - wait for it again - a buncha fuckin' idiots.

Makes me wonder why Republicans in particular would trust them to pull it off.

How to spend the weekend? FIGHTING THE GODDAMNED MORON FASCISTS! pic.twitter.com/tELbvcpxpQ

— Keith Olbermann (@KeithOlbermann) November 4, 2016