And, I should say, I can't vouch for the CPR as reliable, they just popped up when I searched for a listing of competitive races. Is there anyone who knows anything about them, or can suggest a better listing?
i wouldn't count on a huge Clitnon victory.
right now, the GOP is in disarray and there's a lot of OMG-not-Trump! sentiment out there. but, given that the choice is still between a Republican and a Democrat, many Republicans will find a way to talk themselves into voting for Trump.
The first thing the Republicans will do presumably, is to try to reinvigorate the "email scandal". Can they get any mileage? How likely is it that there's still stuff to come out?
"Any" mileage is funny -- they'll get some, from the kind of people who will basically believe anything and not really care about details. The same people who think there is a Benghazi scandal.
But no, I'm pretty certain that there's no legal jeopardy, and nothing genuinely interesting still to come out. She used her personal email because she's a control freak; this didn't violate any regs and other secretaries of state have done it before; so far, the only classified material is stuff that was classified after the fact and it seems likely there's nothing significant along those lines. The optics are what they are, but there's nothing real.
I also think that while it would take an awful lot for Trump to actually win (or come especially close in the electoral college) it's likely to be a close race. Republican voters absolutely do close ranks quickly an effectively (because: authoritarians), and we're already seeing Trump's support rise as it becomes clear that he's going to win the primary. That plus the fact that Clinton genuinely is kind of a weak candidate who seems like she can't go two weeks without saying something dumb means that it's likely to be at least as close as the Obama/McCain race.
(That's not even a particularly big gaffe or anything likely to be remembered a week or two from now. But it's just a constant progression of tone deaf stuff like this.)
weak candidate who seems like she can't go two weeks without saying something dumb
This would be more worrisome if Trump could go more than 48 hours without saying something dumb. But he can't. And his dumb makes her dumb look like goddamn Einstein.
My trust in my own political predictions is weak to nonexistent. But if I were guessing, I'd guess that successfully closing ranks behind Trump isn't going to happen -- that the Republicans who aren't voting for him in the primaries aren't a little disappointed that their candidate lost, they're almost as freaked out by him as we are.
10 doesn't mesh with many conversations I've had with with conservatives. Most who hate him and think he'll be a potential disaster for the country hate Clinton even more, and when faced with a choice of one or the other will hold their nose and vote for Trump. I do think there are some republicans who will stay home, and probably a smaller number who will turn out to vote Clinton, but both of those are probably more than offset by new voters Trump will bring into the system.
Note that I don't actually think he'll win, but barring something crazy happening (which seems more possible than usual!), I don't expect a historic blowout.
9: Sure, but so far his dumb is "appeals to Republicans"/"talk radio host" dumb which is a different beast entirely. The press still seems confused about why constantly trumpeting how he said something that the Republican base loves to hear didn't hurt him back in August, but there's a lot of dumb things he can say that won't hurt him in the slightest. And the ones that do often get forgotten relatively quickly, because he says an equally dumb thing a day and a half later that might not hurt him among the base. Depending on how far he can push the 'I'm not politically correct I'm just saying what everyone thinks' stuff I don't know if it'll hurt him as much as people are certain it will.
I don't think he's likely to win, because the part of the base that actually pays attention to and approves of that stuff isn't that big of a percentage of the country, and there are a lot of decent but non-reflective Republican voters out there who are genuinely turned off by it enough that it might make them reconsider their sense of tribal identity. But it's not really parallel in the same way.
He ain't thick, it's just a trick
4. I'd like a more convincing exposition of the points you make about the email scandal, or maybe a plausible refutation of the claim that she used her own server not because she is "a control freak" but because she wanted to have complete and unsupervised control of her work-related mail.
No other Secy. of State ever did that; some have used "personal" email addresses hosted by commercial email services that they had no control over. (This is bad enough: a warning or firing offense for lesser mortals if they do business on such email accounts.) Because she had personal direct control, once she cleansed the emails using her definition of "private" emails, there was no way to determine if what she deleted was truly "private" or "embarrassing" or "evidence." As a result, it is likely that the suspicion will never go away.
That's not even going into how she and her aides (with her encouragement) performed the transmission and copying of classified information from government servers and networks to her private one, of course traversing the hosts in between. High officials have been prosecuted for similar acts in the past (Sandy Berger, for example, with paper documents). Lesser government officials have lost their jobs and sometimes gone to prison for it.
That being said, she will not be indicted (although there could be quite a stink if the FBI recommends prosecution and the Atty. General doesn't accept the recommendation).
Trump being Trump, he will still lose regardless.
The most important datapoint is that the Democratic candidate has won the popular vote 5 out of the last 6 elections, with the one loss being a 50-49 loss to an incumbent president during an active war. It was never going to be easy for a Republican to win on the 2016 map, and Trump is a particularly weak candidate.
it's likely to be at least as close as the Obama/McCain race.
That's my guess as well. I think there will be a couple of moments in the campaign where it feels like, "oh shit, if a couple of things break against the Democrats Trump could actually win this" but that the final margin won't be close.
OTOH, I think nominating Trump would have a long-term effect of making younger women even more solidly democratic.
Of course everyone took LB's call to stop talking about the presidential race as a cue to keep talking about the presidential race.
That's not even going into how she and her aides (with her encouragement) performed the transmission and copying of classified information from government servers and networks to her private one, of course traversing the hosts in between.
Yeah, this is what I meant when I said they'll get some mileage. People will say stuff along these lines, and other people will take it seriously.
But for real, all you're talking about is that she sent and received emails, a very few of which were classified after the fact, right?
18: I'd claim it was reverse psychology, but no one would believe me.
Anyway, I'm interested to see CPR has Alaska as a competitive race (though still Likely Republican). Don Young has a strong challenger this time, and his popularity has declined over the years. Not that I would bet against him.
On the Senate side, Murkowski has an independent challenger who could also turn out to be quite strong, especially if the Democrats support her rather than running their own candidate, which they might. And that's not even considering what might happen in the Republican primary, which was crazy last time.
I think a blowout is more indicated based on favorability ratings, which supposedly get more predictive this time of year, since Trump continues abysmal (although curving slightly back up last new weeks), far worse than Clinton. My guess is that although he appeals to new people, they're only in numbers sufficient to swing primary races, and in the general he turns off many more than he brings in. (In California, Latino voter registration is sharply up in the last few months.)
One issue with trying to figure out House races at this point is that a lot of states won't have their primaries for a while (many aren't until August), so it's not clear who the nominees are actually going to be.
This site has a lot more information about the individual races than CPR.
16: are you counting Gore in 2000 as a Democratic victory?
Anyway, I would gladly swap party positions and give Republicans the presidency if Democrats could have congress and control over all the state governments currently in Republican hands.
But for real, all you're talking about is that she sent and received emails
I cannot fathom why people keep hand waving this away. The Sec of State setting up a private email server in her house to handle govt business, and doing so one year after the private email US Attorney fiasco, looks shady as hell and at a minimum was a massively stupid thing to do.
Hell, Clinton has not won the nomination yet, and This Guy Says she will not, excluding superdelegates not have a majority of votes going into the convention. There is not an absurd possibility that Sanders could have a plurality. In my opinion, if there isn't a true majority, the superdelegates should be freed from commitments.
But at least we could let the remaining states, especially California, vote in conditions of respect. Saying "Clinton has it" implies that California could give all 475 of its delegates to Sanders, sending him to a majority and the party, including apparently people here, would laugh and spit in their faces.
There is a cynical comment at that site, going "C'mon, really, you know the pigs will win" meaning superdelegates are certain to subvert the process. The blogger remonstrates, saying that such cold calculations are not the tradition of the Democratic party of hope.
These are the kids you know, the Bernie supporters. They will not necessarily maturely fall into line, get real and rational, help out in the general and downticket. After having the election declared over with so many votes left to cast, by the people who have much less to lose with a Clinton presidency, I wouldn't blame them at all.
This Party ain't worth saving. Kill it dead.
And this will not be a solid beatdown, like Trump and the also rans, but a very close primary victory, like Obama Clinton. As close as it gets.
The Sanders supporters can justifiably demand at least as much as Clinton got in 2008, certainly much more than a few platform planks and lip service on issues. Booker and Castro are absolutely not acceptable (especially for an old President), and Sanders should get some cabinet appointments, major input in party organization, and a strong nod toward the heir apparent, the candidate in 2020 after Clinton loses in 2016 or miserably fails as President leaves an opening.
Or they should walk, stay home, try to generate third party or independent votes to ensure Clinton's defeat in 2016. Whatever it takes.
Sanders supporters have earned recognition as fully equal partners.
Last one:
I think y'all are wildly underestimating, if I can predict the Clinton camp acting like La Tigre, just how ugly the Philadelphia Convention will get. As in 1968 ugly, as in tens of thousands outside the hall.
The gap between old black women Clintonites and the young black women Sanders supporters is very interesting, and if you think these Black Lives Matter activists are gonna stand down, shut up, and behave because Clinton, Sanders, or their grandmothers command them to...fucking guess again.
They are pissed, getting madder, and you are not helping by telling them it's over
28: Because "looks shady to gswift" isn't a legal standard establishing any kind of wrongdoing. Sure, it looks shady to you, and to lots of people, and I'm not going to argue with you about whether you're all wrong about that. But without more, it's not going to go any further than the people who've already heard about it and think it's shady continuing to think that.
if I can predict the Clinton camp acting like La Le Tigre
This is what Democracy looks like.
I want to read more of bob's special reports from the leading edge of African-American women's political opinions.
33: Obviously, I'll vote for her, but I still don't get how it's okay. I'm sure that a lower-level State Department employee would get fired for doing this. As a legal matter, why are the rules different for her? (As a practical matter, I understand why perfectly.)
33: She might have kept it all legal, barely, and only because it pretty damn hard to know because we have to depend on the records she turns over from a personal server and there's also the hurdle of demonstrating intent. And yeah, a bunch of the govt email requirements were only policy at the time and not law until she left office. But all this dancing around by her and her team is fucking bullshit. There's no way anyone working at that level of govt could look at the FOIA, State Dept policies, etc of that time and think they were anywhere near the spirit of those things by conducting their business via a personal email server in her house. She earned every bit of this investigation.
Bob in any even remotely contested primary for the Democratic primary no one will go into the convention with a straight majority of delegates if you don't count the unpledged ones who support them. That doesn't really mean anything, because it's understood outside of the weirdest of situations that whoever gets that plurality will get unpledged ones to cover the gap because they will be the winner of the actual primary contest. I mean "hey it's mathematically possible!" is true for for now, but that's not the same as a possibility that anyone should care about.
35: Glad to help! Have some reading material. I think this is a guy. Long, hard, but worthwhile!
Afropessimism Antipolitics and the End of the World
A couple enticing teasers:
How can 'solidarity' be possible in and against the objective conditions that divide us? K. Aarons distinguishes the afropessimist position from the politics of symbolic valorisation or integration, and argues that it is not simply at odds with, but is in fact hostile to identity and privilege politics - whether Black or non-Black. It is the thought and practice of self-abolition that can hope to overcome the present anti-Black structure of humanity.
An Infernal Couple: Privilege Theory and Insurrectionalism
My title adapts a formulation from Miriame Kaba's recent photo exhibition in Chicago, No Selves to Defend, which documents the legal disqualification in the US of Black women's bodies from the right of self-defence, from the case of Celia the slave in the mid-19th century to Marissa Alexander in the present. Kaba shows how the anti-Black legal construction of the right of self-defence circumscribed this right exclusively within the symbolic framework of the human being. To have a right of self-defence first implied having a 'self' or a personhood possessing sufficient social value as to be capable of violation in the first place. Yet, as Kaba points out, 'For a Black woman, mere flesh is not a self. And for centuries, black women have had no selves to defend'
... Further down, maybe took some time, but apparently black theorists are absorbing tiqqun, TC, endnotes, Bash Back
Identity Politics are fundamentally reformist and seek to find a more favourable relationship between different subject positions rather than to abolish the structures that produce those positions from the beginning. Identity politicians oppose 'classism' while being content to leave class society intact. Any resistance to society must foreground the destruction of the subjectifying processes that reproduce society daily, and must destroy the institutions and practices that racialise and engender bodies within the social order. [...] With the revolution complete and the black flag burned, the category of queer must too be destroyed. [...] [Bash Back] isn't about sustaining identities, it's about destroying them...Queer Ultraviolence: A Bash Back! Anthology
In strategies:
3. In other words, the revolutionary process must not be understood as the constitution of a new law or constituent social body, but should rather be measured by our capacity to destitute the governmental and economic mechanisms of labour, and of the capture of life more broadly. Beyond the simple destruction of power lies its deactivation.
36, 37: Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi.
When you're the Secretary of State, you're setting State Department policies in a way that a lower-level employee isn't, and you're going to be able to decide that policies binding on lower-level employees aren't binding on you. Obama almost certainly doesn't have to remember to have his ID card on him to get back into the White House, even though staffers do. That's not even weird, it's just the nature of being in charge.
If you want to find her actions unseemly or improper, there are lots of people who are going to agree with you. But they all do already. Without something very different from what's already come out, there's noplace more for the 'scandal' to go.
Gswirt could not be more wrong. The email thing has no teeth because nearly all Americans have not heard of the attorney general fiasco (including me) and the obvious explanation is "old people are bad at technology and what's a server, anyway? Is that like a router?" That may or may not be the truth, but it's so obviously the answer everyone will supply.
40: It's still bullshit. We're talking about the handling of top secret material and the retention and accessibility of govt records, not dept rules about travel and purchasing of ink for the copiers. She absolutely should be subject to those rules and again, there's FOIA and actual legal issues in addition to policy. There's no way anyone at that level of govt in 2009 honestly thought it was a best practice or in the spirit of the law to conduct the top level State Dept business on a personal email account hosted in someone's residence.
41: You're probably right but it doesn't mean the rest of us should pretend like it was anything but a calculated move on her part. It's only one thing in a long list of reasons why I don't trust her and I won't be switching parties but this is the first election in my lifetime that I'm having thoughts of sitting it out.
Which top secret material was it? They haven't found any material on there that was classified at the time, and the government overclassifies stuff to a degree that is silly enough that it's difficult to argue that it was obvious that something later on would be.
42: Sure. Whatever. You think it's bullshit. Plenty of people agree with you already. But without some big surprise that hasn't been foreshadowed, there isn't another shoe to drop there. Anyone pissed off about this is already pissed off about it.
difficult to argue that it was obvious that something later on would be
What's difficult to argue is that it wasn't obvious that at least some of that material wouldn't end up being classified that way down the road. And as I recall there's what, 30K deleted emails they haven't released? Maybe they're all personal like she says. Time will tell.
re: 45
FWIW, it looks like bullshit to me, and I'm a disinterested* third party from another country.
* I'd rather Trump not win, obviously.
I'm not even disagreeing about whether it's bullshit. (I'm not strongly agreeing -- like, while I think it's bad record management policy, it's about 400th down the list of things that make me less excited than I might be about her.) But once you get past (1) no one's identified any violation of law, and (2) no one's identified anything particularly interesting that she seems to have been trying to conceal by doing this, I just can't see it going much further than it already has as a scandal.
Is is possible that she was hiding something interesting, and it worked -- that she has successfully concealed something through having her emails on a server she controlled? Sure. It's possible. And it's possible that she was hiding something interesting that just hasn't been found, but the ongoing investigation is going to find it any minute now? Also possible. But what's been found so far -- a small number of after-the-fact classified emails -- doesn't qualify, I don't think, as much of a scandal.
The main reason I'm angry bout HRC's e-mail is that it just such a clear indication of contempt for the public. "The rules don't apply to me" is pretty standard for politicians in her position, so it's not unique to her by any means.
But just as galling to me is the fact that she obviously didn't care at all -- and none of her political advisers forced her to care -- about the appearance of impropriety. On some level it doesn't even matter if there is a "scandal" lurking somewhere in her deleted e-mails. I think her openly disclosed foreign policy decisions on Iraq, Honduras etc are plenty scandalous enough.
"I don't have to obey the rules" is a lousy precedent. "I don't have to obey the rules and you are stupid for thinking I should" is much, much worse.
As someone here said very wisely a few months back regarding the Clinton Foundation, the problem with HRC is that she has faced so much genuinely baseless, insane criticism over the years that she has fallen into the trap of thinking that other, valid criticism is just her political enemies.
I'm going to vote for HRC in November because I'd much rather live under her Supreme Court nominees than Donald Trump's. But I'm plenty angry about the contempt for rules that the e-mail server epitomizes.
While I agree that it seems like bad policy to me, I'm not actually clear on what specific rules in existence at the time that she broke. Or, to put that more affirmatively, I don't think she did break any. I could be wrong about that though, I haven't been following this closely enough to be positive.
The email thing has no teeth because nearly all Americans have not heard of the attorney general fiasco
The ignorance of the average voter is precisely why it (can be made into something that) has teeth. At least with Trump, I'll have a president who can't possibly disappoint me.
Just voted for Bernie in the primary (we do mail-in ballots here, so you can vote well before the primary date).
Also, to bring the thread back on topic, I'm assuming that Rep. Fitzpatrick's district (R., PA) which is Bucks with a little bit of Montgomery County, will stay Republican. His brother is running to replace him.
(N.b. my political prediction record is abysmal.)
I was an employee in the executive branch, and I was given the strong impression that using private email to conduct official government business would be unthinkably unacceptable. This was before the Clinton emails.
If Clinton would have fired me for doing what she did, is it really that outlandish that I might fire her with my vote? Sure, anyone who really believes in human equality is probably a quirky Quaker (non-Nixonian), so I might still vote for HRH(ighness) and her neo-liberal entourage. But maybe I'll vote for Jill Stein to support the notion that we're a nation of laws.
to support the notion that we're a nation of laws.
The worst thing for me about the Clintons is the way I end up defending them, despite a real lack of enthusiasm globally.
But if you want to vote for Jill Stein because her policies are preferable to you, I find that commendable. If you want to vote for Jill Stein because you think that Clinton's email practices specifically were objectionable, in terms of good practices for how government documents ought to be handled, that makes sense to me if that's a hot issue for you. If you want to vote for Jill Stein to defend the principle that the head of any organization should be subject to all the same workplace policies as every other employee... that one seems a little unusual in terms of how literally every organization I've ever encountered works, but okay.
But if you're defending the principle that we're a nation of laws by not voting for Clinton, I think you should probably be able to come up with which law it is you think she violated.
If too many people jump ship to vote for a different candidate just because she's sort of repulsive we won't be a nation of laws in any practical sense.
51.1 is right, though. So far the email scandal has been in the background because of subtle yet interesting details about recent legislation concerHOLY SHIT TRUMP JUST SAID THAT PEOPLE FROM HONDURAS LOOK LIKE DOG BUTTS!
But it started out in exactly the traditional Clinton! Scandal!* that the press loves, and eventually we'll go back to it.
*Step 1: "Clinton is being investigated by the [government agency or other investigative body] as a result of credible allegations that he/she [Thing]! Reliable Sources tell [newspaper] that there is clear evidence of [Other Thing] which is the smoking gun that proves [Thing] and that he/she would face charges! Scandaloussssss!"
Step 2: "The investigation into accusations about the Clinton [Thing] continue! (as a minor correction [newspaper] has learned that [other thing] is obviously false as any idiot could have told them after reading the description of it or knowing who Reliable Source was")
Step 3: "The [government agency or other investigative body] has clarified that they are not investigating Clinton and no one has actually alleged that he/she [thing], and have made clear that there is really nothing behind silly accusations like [Thing], but questions remain...
Step 4: [Goto Step 1 with new Agency, Reliable Source, or [Other Thing].]
(And continue until everyone feels that something must have been going on even if we have no idea what it could even have been, and restart entirely when even sexier new [Thing] arrives.)
48 a small number of after-the-fact classified emails
This is certainly one of the talking points, but completely ignores the email where she instructed one of her aides to just remove the "markings" (that is, the classification markings that are required on every page of a classified document) and send them on. That document was already classified.
But once you get past (1) no one's identified any violation of law
Except possibly the FBI, which hasn't spoken yet. There are plenty of rumors in the undernews that there is an ongoing fight between them and the D0J, more specifically the Atty. General. Maybe bullshit, maybe not. (51 notwithstanding, it is the FBI that is doing the investigation and hasn't yet said anything.)
41 old people are bad at technology and what's a server, anyway? Is that like a router?
The media, in the tank for her 24/7 and desperately afraid of Bernie, haven't helped by always referring to her "private emails" rather than her "private, personal server."
So! How about those house and state leg races, where individual people can band together to leverage their power in really tangible ways to change the background level of dysfunction in the country?
I know here in TN, there are 23 women recruited to run in state house & senate races and begin to throw out the out of touch GOP supermajority that's been protecting sexual harassers among their own number and refusing to consider the Rep. governor's totally free plan to expand Medicaid.
Sydney Rogers is running against the House speaker in suburban Nashville and a few bucks couldn't hurt!
56.last: if there's one thing you can say after watching the last 25 years of U.S. politics, it's that the U.S. media is totally, uncritically supportive of the Clintons.
completely ignores the email where she instructed one of her aides to just remove the "markings" (that is, the classification markings that are required on every page of a classified document) and send them on. That document was already classified.
No, she instructed one of her aides to turn a set of talking points "into nonpaper w no identifying heading and send nonsecure". It's certainly not established that the talking points were "already classified", or that they were in fact ever sent nonsecure.
I'm not going to deny that the quote, in isolation, looks suspicious. And maybe it is an indication of wrongdoing! But anyone who's combed somebody else's emails in the course of litigation can tell you that it's easy enough to find something that looks like a smoking gun only to learn, with additional info, that it's something else entirely. The "no identifying heading" thing, for example, sounds incriminating, but appears to be a State Department term of art (s.v. "non-paper") that has nothing to do with classification markings.
I'm concerned that the reason Tigre hasn't posted in this thread yet is that just looking at it made his head explode.
57: Suburban Nashville you say -- I've got a friend who works at Vanderbilt. I think I'll make a donation on her behalf.
54: Do you really think that I as a low-level employee would have gotten away with no consequences if it were found out that I had been using an email server in my house to conduct official US government business, including transmission of records of even arguably confidential nature? Warning or firing a low-level federal employee is not the same as a court case.
"If you want to vote for Jill Stein to defend the principle that the head of any organization should be subject to all the same workplace policies as every other employee... that one seems a little unusual in terms of how literally every organization I've ever encountered works, but okay."
Strawman. Remember the organization in question here is the US government. If a policy of the US government is not specified as being applicable to only a select class, then yes, the head of a department should be subject to it.
We criticize the right for being authoritarian. But what about us? We were talking about the US government, but if you want to expand the question to something more general, are you fine with Jobs's behavior in the following story?
"Caton says she had two experiences with Jobs while at Apple. The first was when she was waiting in line for lunch and a man cut in front of her. When she turned to a coworker to ask who the "douche" was who had just cut her in line, she was informed it was Jobs."
http://bgr.com/2015/06/18/what-its-like-to-work-for-steve-jobs/
Clinton is great. I think she'll do just fine.
We were talking about the US government, but if you want to expand the question to something more general, are you fine with Jobs's behavior in the following story?
"Caton says she had two experiences with Jobs while at Apple. The first was when she was waiting in line for lunch and a man cut in front of her. When she turned to a coworker to ask who the "douche" was who had just cut her in line, she was informed it was Jobs."
Well, yeah. If this is the principle you're standing up for -- that Clinton shouldn't have set State Department policies to treat her as if her convenience/control freakery/paranoia/whatever was worthy of special consideration just because she happened to be the Secretary of State, just like Steve Jobs shouldn't have felt entitled to cut in line in the Apple cafeteria just because he happened to be the CEO -- it's a principle. I can't think of any organizations I'm familiar with that abide by that principle, but if you think they all should, and it's important enough to you to drive your voting behavior, you do you.
61: Thanks, LB! In addition to small dollar donations (which make an inordinate amount of difference at this level) folks should definitely check out good local candidates and reach out about putting in a canvassing shift or two closer to the election. I was a Field Organizer for our mayor's campaign last summer, and it's pretty amazing the difference a few committed volunteers can make in a smaller race. If you get beyond a minimum threshold for fundraising, 10-12 people going out and talking to their neighbors a couple times a week is enough to put the fear of G-d into almost any state legislator in the country.
Nobody tell Frostbite that Obama's motorcade doesn't yield to pedestrians in crosswalks, the authoritarian bastard.
are you fine with Jobs's behavior in the following story?
And just think of the horror of airplane boarding protocols.
This morning, there was a woman who just could not comprehend Southwest boarding.
The Jobs story is an analogy and therefore banned.
I haven't flown Southwest in a long time but at least the way they used to do it would be Frostbite-friendly.
teo! I guess my commenting frequency has dwindled enough that I get exclamation marks now.
57: Done! Thanks.
Also, 65 is very true. My friend who just won his election beat the machine for exactly the reasons you outlined.
She had a B4. She tried to go with the A. Then she stood at B1 (which was my number), then, because she thought it would be quicker, she stood at B31. Then she lunged at the counter when B started.
Then she asked me if I was a super delegate and, if yes, would I vote for Sanders.
||
NMM to Father Daniel Berrigan.
|>
I think just old and never flown much. She didn't seem foreign but she didn't talk much.
77: I had no idea he was alive until recently.
79: No, but I have been drinking Bud Light.
That made no sense but I've been awake for 2 hours.
60 Yeah, I'm a pretty hardcore Bernie supporter and I'm deeply suspicious of HRC, especially with regard to FP as well as her coziness with Wall Street but Frostbite's comments on this thread are beginning to make me feel the Tigre rage.
I'm repeating myself but: as a matter of policy, if you care about transparency and FOIA and that stuff, what Clinton, various governors, and other high ranking officials have done with using private email systems for public business is pretty obviously bad. But also apparently legal in the jurisdictions in question, at least at the time.
As a matter of politics, Clinton, various governors, and other high ranking officials who go ahead and use private email anyway have all correctly judged that no one will really care that much and that enough people will depend their actions like people are defending Clinton in this thread to outweigh whatever the press says, which in cases other than Clinton's hasn't been that much.
Also repeating myself by endorsing fa's 85.
What I've never been clear on is what exactly she's supposed to have been secretly trying to get away with when it comes to this stuff. It's not like she couldn't have hidden stuff on a government server almost as well just by insisting on classifying it at a really high level, which is what the government does with most of its horrible stuff - and the 'almost' is mostly because of how the government servers got hacked a few times but her private one didn't. Her story, as much as there is one, is that it was for her own convenience and I'm not clear on what secret agenda there could have been above and beyond that (given that she's, well, an older not-tech-savvy person to begin with). Is she supposed to be using it to keep secret how she was funneling state department funds into a private account to pay off the few surviving people who saw her murder Vince Foster or something?
Whatever stupidity lay behind it it seems to me to just be another example of how tightly sealed up she is in a particular rich-people-and-DC-establishment-folks bubble, and how she doesn't seem to realize that she is. It looks to me like that's the cause of most of the biweekly screwups that we've seen from her campaign, so it wouldn't surprise me at all if there was more random stuff like that just lying around waiting for someone to pick up and put in a headline.
70: new question -- no analogy.
Some of the responses are great to examine in light of the book _The Authoritarians_ by Bob Altemeyer. For example, "authoritarian followers seem to have a 'Daddy and mommy know best' attitude toward the government. They do not see laws as social standards that apply to all. Instead, they appear to think that authorities are above the law, and can decide which laws apply to them and which do not--just as parents can when one is young. But in a democracy no one is supposed to be above the law. Still, authoritarians quite easily put that aside."
According to Altemeyer, "What reasons do [social] dominators give for giving equality short-shrift? Well, they say, ultimately complete equality is a pipe dream." Further, dominators agree with statements like "'Equality' is one of those nice-sounding names for suckers. Actually only fools believe in it." LB, I hear you agreeing with that statement when you make comments like "... that one seems a little unusual in terms of how literally every organization I've ever encountered works, but okay" and "... you do you".
88: Seriously? Why not skip the intermediate steps and compare LB to Hitler?
Admittedly, LB defended Steve Jobs, which is something old Adolf never stooped to.
66: that's a funny comment, but let's remember that protecting our leaders comes at a cost:
http://www.aaas.org/news/memoriam-constance-holden%E2%80%94journalist-artist
89: because that would be a stupid thing to do. But it would be good to hear how Altemeyer's descriptions of things social dominators say:
"... complete equality is a pipe dream ... is one of those nice-sounding names for suckers."
are unlike the message of LB's comments:
"... that one seems a little unusual in terms of how literally every organization I've ever encountered works, but okay"
and
"I can't think of any organizations I'm familiar with that abide by that principle, but if you think they all should, and it's important enough to you to drive your voting behavior, you do you."
Given the excuetive's plenary powers over the classification system I'm unsure how someone working with his knowledge and approval could violate those laws. Presumably Obama or people close to him knew she had her own server.
89.1 is wrong. Frostbite isn't saying LB is Hitler, she's saying LB is a Good German. Hillary is Hitler.
90.1 is also pretty unsettling. Constance Holden as martyr to blind authoritarianism? Yeah, OK. And if a cyclist gets hit by a local bus, then we all get to blame the socialists. Asian guy tried to steal my bike a few years back, proving that uncontrolled immigration is wrong and evil. Or alternatively that Islam is a corrupt faith. Etc.
Ajay's 56 should have blown this thread to a standstill.
Its true that people at the top of organizations get privileges and exceptions not available to the peons. But those should generally be spelled out in protocols that are subject to some governance measures. The President doesn't flash his badge to get through because there are special procedures for dealing with the President's comings and goings, which I'm sure the Secret Service has spelled out in excruciating detail.
This is an institutional process, and special privileges and exceptions get granted by the institution; the people at the top don't just get to say "well, I hold this office right now, I'm just going to do take whatever exceptions I want." If Clinton wanted a more convenient email setup, it was up to her to work with State Department - of which she was the boss - to make it happen.
85 and 86, I do really agree with. I think it's perfectly reasonable to find Clinton's email practices strongly objectionable on straightforward "that's a lousy way to run things from a transparency/historical record point of view." And those are important considerations.
Back to the OP, I had a nice chat with Juneau last night -- she'd be great. Zinke brags about how many people he's killed, (74!), and shows visiting constituents his knife collection. Juneau brags about increases in the graduation rate (she's finishing her second term as superintendent of public instruction). And on the centennial of our electing the first woman to the House, electing the first Native, openly gay woman seems a natural step. Right?
Juneau is probably as reliable a vote against war as Rankin was, unlike Zinke.
(For those of you not marinating regularly in Montana politics, here's the cast: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denise_Juneau, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryan_Zinke,
and the legacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeannette_Rankin Rep Z has to brag about his "confirmed kills" because in his single state senate term and single US House term he's accomplished nothing of note.)
Stupid commas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryan_Zinke
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denise_Juneau
Although Zinke just got some news coverage for voting against his own amendment, which passed anyway. He'd co-sponsored the amendment subjecting women to draft registration as a protest to allowing women in combat roles. Take that, feminazis! Once it became clear that the thing would pass, though, he campaigned against it.
Reminiscent of how gender nondiscrimination got into the Civil Rights Act.
If we're in for six months of debate over arcane nuances of different types of malum prohibitum, I'm looking into anchoritism.
Where I come from, bragging about killing 74 people means you a sociopath.
He married a woman called Lolita Hand. Surely this is another of those made up politicians you try to get us to believe in. Wasn't Butch Otter from Montana as well?
Oh hey, the partner of one of my only good HS friends is running for state leg in Seattle. N/cole Macr/. Primarily running on housing, specifically a housing-first approach for the homeless. So if anyone who lives closer to Seattle than I do wanted to get involved, she'd be an awesome choice.
both of those are probably more than offset by new voters Trump will bring into the system.
BTW, there's actually zero evidence that Trump has brought any new voters into the system.* People say it, but there's neither direct or indirect evidence for this being true, and everyone who says it is an interested party: 1. Trump says it for obvious reasons; 2. Republicans say it because they want to imply that these racist yahoos haven't been the backbone of the Republican vote for decades; 3. the press says it because it makes a good story, and because they really really don't want top admit that Republicans have been relying on the racist yahoo vote for a long time; 4. Hillary haters say it for the reason urple just did--it gives them a story by which a guy whose favorability ratings among Republicans are worse than Clinton's favorability ratings among all voters is actually going to beat her.
But no, getting Fox viewers to vote Republican doesn't constitute the creation of new voters.
*there's also very little evidence that Bernie has, either, but his voters are at least in categories that have low turnout, so, to the extent they do turn out, they may represent new voters. But, rather obviously--and as he said the other day--if they really turned out, he wouldn't be losing.
Of course, Butch Otter's predecessor in Congress was Helen Chenoweth, who blazed new trails as an ultra-conservative FEMALE legislator who was reelected repeatedly despite revelations of extramarital affairs.
Really? I'd be happy to be wrong, but that's surprising. This Reuters story says their polling indicates he's bringing to the polls a lot of disaffected voters who hadn't bothered to vote for at least several election cycles. And that was just the first thing that came up when I googled. More generally, my understanding had been the republican primary turnouts have been shattering prior records. With record turnouts and Trump winning, it would seem like he's managing to get some new people to the polls. Although again, I'd be happy to be wrong.
111: I read a pretty good analysis about a month ago, so no chance in finding it.
The high turnout thing is the hook for the claim, but that doesn't tell you much, because it's not actually that closely tied to general election turnout.
That is--and this is the fundamental thing--getting a general election voter to turn out for the primary for the first time in years has some implications for that voter's commitment to voting in November, but is entirely different from getting a nonvoter to turn out in March or November.
The other thing that the claim is predicated on is the Myth of the Missing White Voter, which was an ex post facto, unskewed-type story about how Romney would have won if disaffected whites hadn't stayed home. But that wasn't true in any meaningful sense; certainly not enough to flip the election.
And that's what it comes down to this year: Republicans already lose presidential elections despite winning the white male vote by a ton. Given how badly Trump does with literally every other demographic, he'd have to win white males by something like 30 points to win overall. And there just aren't that many new ones out there to create that kind of lead (because remember, flipping a voter nets you two votes, while bringing out an unengaged voter gains you just one).
JRoth- It kind of seems like you are claiming that high primary turnout doesn't mean that Trump is getting new voters in the general. And that low primary turnout likely means that Sanders wouldn't be adding a lot of voters in the general. Is that fair? I'm not sure those two conclusions go together.
Can you guys give me some examples of Bernie Bros who said good government doesn't matter. Or should I just write you off as right-wing trolls. ;)
113.1: The consistent claim is that primary turnout doesn't tell you much about general turnout. IIRC 538 looked at this a little while ago, and basically there's no correlation since the dawn of the modern primary era: sometimes both are high, sometimes both are low, sometimes they're opposite of each other. As for Bernie, my point is that his claim/premise is/was that his call for revolution would drive unprecedented turnout that will overwhelm the system. I hope that you can acknowledge that this has not, in fact, come to pass; you can tell because he's losing. If he had actually generated unprecedented turnout among young and poor people, I would be very excited. He's winning young people by a lot, but there aren't meaningfully more than there have been in the past, so it kind of doesn't matter. Any Democrat who can get young people to vote* will have unlocked the ultimate power, but nobody's done it yet.
113.2: I don't have any examples; I'm reacting to MHPH (and coincidentally, Bernie fans yelling at Drum) who seems to be suggesting that anyone who wants the current system to work better is a capitalist tool. I'm perfectly happy to be told that nobody really believes that, but I am going to start asking people who insist that e.g. DeLong must be cast out of the circle how they distinguish between people who want to use a rational approach and compromise to achieve liberal goals and eeeevil neoliberals. Because I'm not sure I'm seeing a distinction drawn.
I should add here that I myself am very skeptical of Democratic technocratism and goo-goo good government types. But it's not because I think those things aren't important; it's that I think they are not ends of themselves, and that it's dangerous to mistake means for ends. The wonks work for the Tsar, and the Tsar works for the people. Too often Democrats think the way to avoid bad Tsars is to just let the wonks run everything, but it doesn't work that way.
*acknowledging voter suppression here, but there's no evidence that it's defeating a desire of young people to turn out at ~50% rates.
Oh, the other thing to 113.1: The electorates in question are different. Trump supporters are, by and large, the people who already turn out at high rates. Bernie's are decidedly not. So the presumption is that the former will vote regardless and the latter will not.
Hmm, we don't seem to really be that far apart here. Yeah I was hoping we'd get overwhelming turnout as the message got out and that never happened.