America's retaliation against Russian hacking.

Heh, Ollie, as is often the case, you presume to confidently and accurately speak about things that you don't know, can't possibly know, and are wrong about in any event. Breaking news: YOU are not "everybody."

I read the emails.

Oh oh, you read thousands of emails huh? Did the school master give you a reading assignment or what?

I never said I read them all.

"Totally irrelevant to anything" is a serious overstatement. Certainly the President and most of his Democrat apopogists wouldn't agree with you. The facts that Podesta's and other e mails confirmed the earlier reported collusion of ther DNC & thre Hillary campaign during the primary and the subsequent relay of information from a media moderator on expected questions in a debate with Trump, were widewly reported. The effect on voting in both elections can't be measured, but there is no evidence of a significan effect I'm aware of.

The RNC claims its server wasan't hacked and the investigation revealed the lack of even business normal security provisions on the DNC server, and the fact thaty they ignored repeated efforts of an FBI monitor to waren them od both their vulnerability and the fact that hacking attempts had been observed.

The event revealed several important things including; (1) the chldish over reaction of The President and still bewildered Hillary supporters;(2) the continuing worldwide hazards of hacking the Administration had previously ignorted; and (3) the further careless ineptitude of progressive seers like Podesta who are sure they know how to organize our lives far better than the rest of us.

The key phrase in your post is: "earlier reported".

Who needed the Podesta emails to realize that the DNC favoured Clinton??? Nobody. Not any body in good faith, at least. It wasn't anything new.

The content of those emails did not matter. What had (most likely) an impact was the mere evocation of thousands more Clinton emails hacked, and the FBI reopening its probe.

The sooner we realize that such hacking can and does affect elections, the sooner we can do something about it. The longer Trump and the little trumpettes deny it, the more unchecked influence they will allow to Russia or tomorrow to China.

Yeah yeah yeah, you read a couple of paragraphs cherry-picked by your handlers, as always.

Therefore, you did not read the Podesta emails. Not any more than I can pretend to have read Hamlet just because i can quote "to be or not to be, that is the question". QED.

I generally agree. However the central issue here, and certainly the issue that caused all the FBI actions, including the one you cited, was the ongoing Clinton campaign conspiracies with both the DNC and some media sources to distort the election process from start to finish.

That, and not the Russian hacking is the siugnificant event here.

There have been numerous episodes of truly harmful foreign hacking of public, corporate and private computer files in the last several years and, until this one, our current president said, and appeared to do, nothing about it. We certainly need to quickly asnd forcefully address this long-standing problem.

However that is not the central issue in this little teapot tempest.

Says who? The FBI motives for reopening their enquiry have been flimsy. I suspect a very long turf war between her Dprt of State and the FBI in the past as the reason why they had to reopen a closed investigation days from the election, and then, the very Sunday before the election, conclude that:



The reopening is what people remembered. The story that the FBI found nothing wrong got drawn in the newsfeed... but Comey did nothing illegal or even reproachable.

So I agree the Russian hacking did not determine the outcome of the election, it seems clear to me that Wikileaks was instrumentalized by the Russians to influence the US presidential election. That in itself is grave enough. It merits more attention from the US govt than North Korea hacking SONY or other such precedents.

Hilda is basically a female version of Al Capone, except that Al Capone wasn''t a war monger....

To the extent that the Russians were responsible for exposing the Podesta & DNC email to the public they were, in part, indirectly responsible for her loss. It's questionable how much of an impact the email content had on the election, but without that damaging content, the Russians could have leaked every email a Democrat ever wrote and it wouldn't have had an effect. No content, no help to Trump.

It seems as though this issue is rife with nitpicking and faux outrage, which to some extent is true, but there are two take-aways, not one.

The first is as you indicated: Our electronic systems are too vulnerable to domestic or foreign hacking

The second relates to Puntin's comment about our being a Banana Republic:

It's irritating to see and hear Democrats and Clinton supporters blame Russia for her defeat, but if they come to the 2020 campaign having only made their email more secure from hacking they will lose again. There are many other lessons they need to learn from this election, but I'll be happy if they don't.

What is very concerning to me is how this issue is deliberately being used to cast doubt on the legitimacy of Trump victory, and the Banana Republic reference is accurate if you believe, as I do, that the effort is engaged in by the Democrat Party, large segments of the media, and even individuals or factions within the intelligence agencies.

It's clearly not an attempted coup, but it is close enough to be disturbing.
That our political environment has become this savage is very troubling as it goes well beyond "hardball," and each new outrageous act is certain to elicit a similar or escalated response from the other side.

To be sure, the effectiveness of this particular scheme has been enhanced by the foolish response by Trump. If a trap was set for him, he jumped into it with both feet. I'm prepared to chalk this up to a) political inexperience and b) a head swelled beyond it's normally large size by a stunning victory, however, he or his advisers should have seen the trap being laid for him and easily avoided it. That he stepped into it tells me that he either doesn't have savvy advisers or that he won't listen to them when he should. I tend to believe it is far more the latter than the former.

If it develops, over time, that Trump can so easily be played with either insults or praise, then he will not be an effective leader and could get us into some seriously hot spots. It's way too early though to predict anything like this. We know he has had successes in business and a huge political one that was not the doing of the Russians. His personality is so out in front that past adversaries must have deduced that they might be able to manipulate him with insults or compliments, but it's certainly not obvious that he has suffered major defeats as a result (Cruz tried the compliment route and Rubio and others went with insults. Trump won and they lost)

Trump is neither the political genius so many of his team try to paint him as, or a blundering, out-of-control buffoon as his opponents want us to believe. He is canny and he is cunning and both of those traits could serve us well in a President, but he would make things easier for himself and his supporters if he learned to resist his impulse to lash out whenever challenged, and even on the most minor of issues. If after the backlash he wakes up to what he's done and listens to his advisers then he still can be successful because of the very solid support he has among most of the folks who voted for him, but these people are going to get tired of watching him hand his adversaries ammo to use against him, and ultimately them if he is their champion.

It seems like such a small flaw to overcome, but many a person in power has been brought down by flaws that, unlike most of the people around them, they can't overcome. And to be fair to some of his critics the lashing out, even if only verbally on twitter, could create some serious foreign policy issues. They won't start WWIII or result in the overthrow of an ally's democratic government, but they could nudge our foreign adversaries towards actions that aren't in our best interests and interfere with cooperative efforts with friendly nations.

I literally only decided to vote for Trump on the day I cast my vote. I've been critical of him in this forum and there are aspects about him that still cause me concern, but unlike most of his critics who reside on the left side of the spectrum, I've, largely, been impressed with his selection for key spots in his administration and I continue to see signs of someone who is a fast learner when it comes to politics. Because he is so different from anyone whose been elected in the past, a true outsider from the inner circles of power, despite whatever his wealth may be, I think he has a great chance of creating the necessary, fundamental change our corrupted government needs. He isn't likely to succeed because he is a crusading reformer, but because he is canny and cunning and he gets things done. I do think he sincerely feels like his job is to advance the interests of the American people; at least the people who voted for him, and he will devote whatever skills and talent he has to getting the things done that are required to make good on his promises.

Whether or not he succeeds is something we are going to have to wait and see on, but this entire imbroglio regarding Russian hacking should be just a footnote to the 2016 election. If it is not and it takes on greater relevance, it will be because it is merely the opening salvo of a loose alliance of very powerful forces determined not only to obstruct him, but to take him down. We know from the leaked e-mail that the Democrats (and especially the Clinton Democrats) have had a very cozy relationship with large MSM players, and to the extent where the journalistic integrity of these players is seriously called into question. These two have been allied for a long time against Republicans and conservative so their joint venture is no surprise, however whenever a status quo that underpins the power of established forces is threatened, those forces are likely to try and preserve their foundation. This opens the door to strange bedfellows becoming aligned against Trump the "Swamp Drainer" and none are more strange than liberal Democrats and the CIA.

It's the sort of thing that happens in a Banana Republic and it's a bit frightening.

The Russians forced the democrats to more transparent than they ever planned to be, this is a good thing.

The Democrats' "transparency" wasn't voluntary or induced. They resisted it every way they could (except competent IT security), but the curtains were stripped from them.

This raises an important question upon which reasonable minds can disagree: What effect does the fact that the information was stolen from the DNC and Podesta have on our consideration of it?

Personally, I think the sin of stealing the information and the sins revealed in the information are distinct and have no bearing on one another, but so far, the minds that I have seen disagreeing with me primarily motivated by their displeasure with Clinton's loss. Not a reasonable impetus I would argue.

I have seen a few conservatives who were clearly not Clinton supporters make the argument that the fact that the information was obtained through criminal action with essentially malevolent intent has to be considered. Unfortunately, none of them have provided a satisfactory explanation of what that consideration might look like.

Once the email were leaked, the horse left the barn, and the Genie escaped the bottle. You can't unlearn something you've learned and even if you could, why would you want to try? I don't imagine too many people would have an ethical problem with acting on stolen information that revealed a plot to explode a backpack nuke in Downtown NYC, so the people who argue for consideration of the sin in obtainment (unless they insanely suggest authorities should not act on the hypothetical nuke plot) need to establish the bright line between the level of criminality which requires consideration and that level that allows action. An impossible task I would say.

The man is a proven liar. Case closed.

The intelligence report shows who’s to blame for Russian hacking, and it’s Barack Obama

This is actually true. The most sensitive information can only be transmitted on a network that is completely separate from the internet the public uses. At my job, computers that can access the internet are in different areas than the secure terminals. Sensitive work is still done on desk tops, analysts are not using laptops. Many government agencies have posted information on the internet so that the public can access job vacancies, or apply for jobs, things of a general nature, but that's about it. Our biggest breach of security occurred when Snowden downloaded massive amounts of operational information on sensitive projects and fled to Hong Kong then on to Russia. He had access to internal equipment, he did not maneuver thru wireless to steal materials.

What "damaging content" are you talking about? Podesta's risotto recipee?

Faux outrage indeed.

There was nothing new in those emails. That the DNC would root for a democrat candidate.... oh now that's a scandal of such yüüüge proportion that it dwarfs the Russian govt attempting to covertly influence an american election.

Really? Can you say this **** without chuckling?

Can you even START to imagine what runcus you would throw if it was vice versa? If it turned out that some Putin minion had hacked the RNC emails and published them in an attempt to help Hillary??? Trump's twitter account would explode, you would be pucking all over the place, Frugal would be peeing in his pants with joy, and George would be tsk-tsk-tsking us with his half-backed sophisms till Kingdom come.

Remember, Olly, that the word was out about Putin's support for the Don well before the election.

And wikileaks' Assange (with a 100% accuracy rating to date) has categorically denied any link to any Russian agency, in regards to the emails that were released, proving the corruption within the DNC.

Computer boffins have also chipped in with their two bob's worth, stating that the software used for the "hack" was already over a year old, and it was highly improbable, if not laughable, to suggest that an international espionage group would even bother using such an amateur attempt.

The fact that this software hack worked, is testament only to the completely farcical lack of security (HRC's own guy okayed Podesta's aide to open that crude phishing email) of the US of A's seceratary of state, and her staff.

Several pundits have actually suggested that the door was left so wide ajar, quite possibly for financial reasons, but that is pure conjecture.

That doesn't make it true. Assange is holed up in an embassy in London, he can't be too sure about anything.

In fact, the Wikileaks intrumentalization is IMO one of the important lessons here: that source is not as reliable and neutral as it used to be, it's been compromised. It was only a matter of time for Wikileaks to get played by one big power or another. This is the real world, where angels don't survive very long unless they are extremely lucky or cautious. Assange was neither.

Let's be clear: Trump was Moscow's candidate.