When will Hillary Clinton give up her candidacy ? Part 2

Intelligence officials — including NSA Director Adm. Michael Rogers and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper — have long argued that data manipulation more broadly is a disturbing possibility, and potentially the next front in both cybercrime and the budding digital warfare between countries.

Last month, a bipartisan group of 32 national security experts at the Aspen Institute Homeland Security Group warned of a specific type of fakery following the DNC hack, arguing that the suspected Russian hackers who struck the DNC and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee could “salt the files they release with plausible forgeries.”

But hacking specialists say the most harmful information might not even be genuine.

“You may have material that’s 95 percent authentic, but 5 percent is modified, and you’ll never actually be able to prove a negative, that you never wrote what’s in that material,” CrowdStrike co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch told POLITICO. “Even if you released the original email, how will you prove that it’s not doctored? It’s sort of damned if you do, damned if you don’t."

Several Democratic operatives said they even expect fake information, though mixed with enough truth to cause damage.

In 2013, Syrian hackers backing embattled President Bashar Assad hijacked The Associated Press’ Twitter account, tweeting out falsified reports of two explosions at the White House that had injured Obama. The Dow plummeted in minutes, wiping out $136 billion in market value, according to Bloomberg. It stabilized shortly thereafter, once the report was revealed to be a hoax.

Russia has long been known for engaging in such propaganda warfare, going back to the days of the Soviet Union, when the KGB spread conspiracy theories about the FBI and CIA’s involvement in President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. In the 1980s, the KGB planted newspaper articles alleging that the U.S. had invented HIV during a biological weapons research project.

The security agency also secretly helped an East German journalist write a book, “Who’s Who in the CIA,” that accurately outed numerous undercover CIA agents but also intentionally included a raft of people who were simply American officials stationed overseas, according to a former top Soviet security official.

In the weeks since the DNC email leaks, cyber specialists on Twitter have been circulating a passage from the memoirs of a former East German spymaster who wrote about the “creative” use of forgeries in conjunction with genuine leaks.

“Embarrassed by the publication of genuine but suppressed information, the targets were badly placed to defend themselves against the other, more damaging accusations that had been invented,” wrote Markus Wolf, who had headed East Germany’s foreign intelligence division for more than three decades. (On the other hand, he added that, “my principle was to stick as close to the truth as possible, especially when there was so much of it that could easily further the department’s aims.”)

Some might argue that with Hillary you don't need to make this **** up.

Bernie Sanders’s initial efforts on behalf of his former primary rival Hillary Clinton were not, at least in my opinion, very impressive; they made it sound like electing Clinton president was an unpleasant but necessary chore to get out of the way before his “political revolution” could resume.

Now Sanders is back on the trail not just on Clinton’s behalf but by her side, beginning with an appearance in New Hampshire last night. And his message is significantly more focused on her agenda, and not just as an afterthought. It helped that their speeches at the University of New Hampshire concentrated on a topic on which they’ve always been close and now have a jointly endorsed proposal: college tuition relief. But they sounded much more like teammates working together than former antagonists forced to combine forces against a common enemy.

Bernie’s new assistance to Clinton comes at a good time and place. As Sasha Issenberg and Steven Yaccino explain in the latest installment of their very granular look at battleground states, New Hampshire is prominent in a tier of northern states where former Sanders supporters are central to Clinton’s potential margin of victory.

[T]hese Berniependents represent eight percent of the total expected votes Clinton will need to win the state, a figure well larger than the margin in most current polls (though not all of them will turn out). In Durham, where Clinton and Sanders have scheduled their joint appearance, Berniependents are equal to more than one out of five Democratic primary voters.

Issenberg and Yaccino go on to show that Sanders “holdouts” are also a problem for Clinton in Minnesota and Wisconsin, states where she has led in every poll but not always by comfortable margins. A joint Clinton-Sanders appearance at the University of Wisconsin, for example, could do a lot to put that state away.

Aside from targeted campaigning, a sharpening of the Sanders message for Clinton, which seemed to be developing in New Hampshire, would be helpful just about everywhere. His new rap about the consequences of a Donald Trump victory, which makes sitting out the election a great moral error, is pretty strong. He might want to add in some reminders of the kind of world Libertarians like Gary Johnson want to build, where, yeah, you can smoke weed, but you’re totally on your own in facing life’s vicissitudes.

In any event, it seems the bad feelings and genuine differences of opinion of the 2016 Democratic primaries are finally fading to the point where Bernie Sanders is an indispensable asset for Clinton. If the race stays close, it could matter a lot.

The first post-debate battleground polls are out today, courtesy of Public Policy Polling. The firm surveyed five states, with Hillary Clinton leading by three to seven points in a two-way race; two to six points when 3rd party candidates are named. In all five states, by a margin of about 20 points, respondents felt Clinton was the winner of Monday's debate.

If its up to me he wont be president

Bernie Sanders’s initial efforts on behalf of his former primary rival Hillary Clinton were not, at least in my opinion, very impressive;

Best you can do?

Probably about the same amount your being paid to support tRump.