Neoliberal investigation, neoliberal results.
Apparently Bill had a very productive private meeting with Loretta Lynch, and rumour has it she will continue on in the next administration.
Well, just as in the case of the Bush administration torturers and the banksters after the crash, that the Obama Justice Dept didn't prosecute HRC guarantees she is clean as driven snow.
Glenn Greenwald sure isn't covering himself in glory in response to this.
I don't think it's a nothingburger that senior officials are setting up insecure email servers instead of using properly secured ones provided by the Feds. That's just asking to get hacked. I'm willing to bet the FSB has all of Clinton's emails. It should not be legal to set up such a server in the first place. The problem isn't that Clinton violated some law, it's that what's legal is bloody stupid. Clinton was arrogant to go her own way with the emails and ignorant to think it was a good idea, but it's whoever is in charge of government IT infrastructure who should be crucified.
Somebody claimed that the State Department has been hacked, because their security is so poor, and Clinton's never was.
Well, I'm relieved. Hopefully this will result in even more people coming down from Bull Shit Mountain. Now that she's clearly going to be the nominee it's becoming clear who the contrarian dipshits are among the friends of mine who recently got interested in politics.
Many of them are extremely this guy right now:
https://twitter.com/carl_diggler/status/750357885461401600
1) There's a cost-benefit analysis to be worked out over whether it serves the greater good to charge Clinton with a crime for this stuff, if there was a plausible crime, at this particular moment. Is this one of the reasons Sanders has waited to concede? It's not a bad reason to wait.
2) I am not in any particular sense a Clinton supporter, a Sanders supporter, a conspiracy theorist, or a person with any power except the mighty power of complicity through inaction. But did anyone here think she might actually get charged? I would have been shocked.
So Bill told Loretta Lynch that Hillary was gonna do to her what she did to Vince Foster if she didn't relent and now look where we are. Neoliberals!
I was surprised by how strongly worded the FBI statement was. "Extremely poor judgment" (or whatever the exact phrase was). To be clear, does the FBI think that Powell also had extremely poor judgment, or just Clinton? (And if just Clinton, why?)
I always thought this case was bullshit so I'm glad it came out this way, but a lot of people it my facebook feed are posting a meme of HRC laughing and saying "SILLY AMERICANS LAWS ARE FOR POOR PEOPLE TO OBEY." It's not like I can disagree with that.
Did we need Hills to know that laws are for poor people? The head of the CIA gave classified documents to his mistress so she could write a hagiography, and he got let off with a misdemeanor (over career prosecutor objections).
No, that's true, that's why I have to agree.
It's really weird to have the FBI issue a statement like this. Prosecution decisions aren't their job. Of course, it's Comey doing it, and he used to be the DAG, so it's not like he hasn't worn the right hat for the decision. He's just not wearing it now. And even for a prosecutor this would be a weird speech -- effectively a declination of prosecution coupled with public criticism of the former target.
I assume part of the thinking is that the public criticism will help put this to bed by making Comey look more independent and credible (and therefore shoring up his substantive result). Or he has line agents who are very unhappy about this result and he wants to keep them from going public. Or he just really doesn't like HRC. (Or more than one of the above in whatever combination you like.)
A former DOJ official said the whole idea of giving a press conference, in addition to the tsk tsk, is bullshit (and, sweet irony, potentially a violation of the letter of the law governing such investigations.) FBI refers to DOJ who make the decision.
And the whole "above the law" meme is bullshit too. Every single person in this country has broken some law that could be prosecuted, and probably everyone on this blog has broken some letter of some computer security law. If you don't like prosecutorial discretion fix the laws so they're not so broad, but acting shocked when people are technically violating a law but aren't prosecuted is... some other word because I've already used bullshit twice.
14 strikes me as right re: Comey's decisionmaking. As to the decision itself, while I appreciate some of the ironies involved re Clinton's own hostility to leakers, I think they're weaker than Greenwald suggests; there's a meaningful distinction between planned leaks and arguable violations of information-handling policy. In any event, I'm mostly struck by differences in scale: It would be tragic if these sort of fairly run-of-the-mill infractions of relatively minor parts of our government institutions were the tool Trump used to lever his way into power, thereby splintering the institutions that critics of Clinton claim to defend.
12
Clinton didn't even get a misdemeanor, though. Yeah, it's totally a DeLong "the cossacks work for the tsar" thing, and I thought there was little or no chance she would be prosecuted, but it's disappointing regardless.
Establishing that the nomenklatura are immune from the law is not a good thing. We've been skating down that slippery slope for way too long, fueled mostly by "Yay, my team!"
17 makes perfect sense except for the "not actually breaking any law" part. Charge her with a misdemeanor violation anyway! Fuck it!
Really the law should be "what does some ill-informed IT guy think is best procedure," because that's how the criminal justice system works.
"No one is above this law that doesn't actually exist!"
17: Yes, apart from the part where Petraeus intentionally misused classified information and then lied to the FBI about it, the two cases are practically indistinguishable.
17: Yes, apart from the part where Petraeus intentionally misused classified information and then lied to the FBI about it, the two cases are practically indistinguishable.
He is saying that Clinton broke no laws, not that Petraeus broke no laws.
If she was Hillary Smith, random person with a clearance, she'd be out on her ear at minimum, or facing prosecution. I'm sorry, I can't subscribe to the "she's not Trump, therefore it was nothing" school of thought.
As for 22, she deliberately misused classified information, for just as trivial a reason as Petraeus did, but with more world-wide exposure. Note the careful phrasing of the FBI statement. It is pretty clear that Russia, China, and probably your local teenage hacker have most or all of those emails.
I endorse 17, 18, and 19. Lawyers unite.
Comey used to be in Richmond. There are zero lawyers in this area who doubt his integrity. Zero.
17 finds it disappointing that Clinton wasn't even charged with a misdemeanor, even though the reason she wasn't charged with even a misdemeanor was that the FBI concluded that she didn't commit one (or, more precisely, that no reasonable prosecutor could undertake to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that she'd committed one). In my world, not charging someone with a crime when the evidence doesn't establish that a crime was committed is not cause for disappointment, nor does it suggest that the powerful are above the law.
23: What is your basis for believing that to be true?
The distributed being that is DaveL is an AP system, it appears.
26 - he knows the law of his gut, so who cares that there was no law broken. "No one person is above the law that I incorrectly believe exists."
26,27
Hmm. Which part of "that" are you wondering about? Do you suggest that people who violate the rules about classified info aren't at best stripped of their clearances and at worst prosecuted? Nope, that can't be it, it's commonplace. The "deliberately" part is basically stipulated, so that can't be it. So what is it?
(I am reminded of "Vacuum Flowers," by Michael Swanwick, where a planet-wide AI-hive-mind, called "Earth," rather than "DaveL*" in the novel, has issues with the fact that due to light-speed limitations, one part of the world sometimes disagrees with another for a few milliseconds.)
29: Give me a break. You are alleging that the FBI director reached the wrong conclusion on the application of criminal statutes. Please explain the factual and legal basis for that conclusion, without reporting to silly overgeneralizations or moving the goalposts. Hint: distinguish clearly between "some people are stripped of clearances or prosecuted for some violations of some rules about classified info," which requires you to explain your disagreement with the FBI director, and "all people who violate any rule about classified information in any way are stripped of clearances or prosecuted," which appears to be your position, but which is silly.
Does one of you have a mustache? I get confused some times.
One is apparently a drooling semi-sentient halfwit, the other lives in Hawaii.
According to his statement, Comey did not reach any conclusions about whether the alleged conduct that no reasonable prosecutor would prosecute (which in itself is a very strange standard, it sounds like a mutant version of summary judgment) would have led to administrative measures like clearance-stripping. But if there's anyone reading this thread who's able to give an informed opinion about the administrative standard for clearance-stripping (I'm certainly not), they probably shouldn't be commenting. Because, you know, they might get their clearance stripped for doing something like that.
35: With no knowledge of such administrative measures but some experience of large organizations, I would be very surprised if there is a single, universally understood, consistently applied standard across all branches of the federal government.
I'm now going to picture DaveLHI with a mustache, because Magnum PI.
Not everyone in Hawaii has mustaches, Moby. That's a neoliberal stereotype.
I settled for the Ferrari and let Selleck keep the mustache.
||
So, this Saddam thing--it makes no sense, right? Unless Trump realizes we're about to be hit with an unstoppable wave of 90s nostalgia. Expect to hear "Y'know, Saddam really wasn't so bad" on the Sunday morning shows. Invest in pogs now.
|>
You could have a Lemmy mustache, if that fits better.
Just have never seen the need. My shirt works just fine for storing lunch crumbs.
Are you hanging around in my id, Moby, or what?
Please explain the factual and legal basis for that conclusion, without reporting to silly overgeneralizations or moving the goalposts.
This is the kind of disingenuous bull shit obscurantism that water carriers use to lend legitimacy to fascist regimes, and you should be ashamed of yourself for resorting to it. These institutions are subject to democratic audit from people other than lawyers. The specifics of the laws and the institutions that enforce them are means to the ends of a society that the voters can hopefully agree more often that not is just and fair. The laws and institutions are valid only insofar as we agree they are and we should be pragmatic and open to discarding or reforming them when they fail to meet this standard.
It is fucking shameful that people on the left would resort to this kind of disingenuous defense of power for its own sake. Our government chose not to prosecute anyone in the Bush administration over Iraq, Abu-Ghraib, and warrantless wiretapping. Are we all supposed to blithely shrug our shoulders when some fuckwit reactionary asks us the precise statute which they violated? No, we should go right on questioning the legitimacy of a system that allows for such egregious abuses of power and start asking questions about how to reform it.
You don't need to question a specific law to call into question the legitimacy of a system that retroactively classified information and prosecuted a senior member of the rank-and-file for half of a decade for bringing them bad press[1], yet fines David Petraeus a small fraction ($100k) of what he is likely to be making at his new job at a private equity firm for sharing state secrets with his mistress. The problem isn't that Hillary did or did not violate an individual statute. The problem is that we have very little faith that it matters whether she did or not or if there even exist standards of accountability for checking her in the case that she did. Asking laymen about specific statutes that were violated when they express doubts about the basic fairness of the system is unhelpful and anti-Democratic.
[1] He was eventually pled guilty to a misdemeanor of "exceeding his authorized access to government computers", as per the article; former members of the KGB living in the United States must be hugely proud!
Classification is 95% bullshit, in my mostly uninformed opinion. Were the bits of information on HRC's computer items that, if disclosed, would cause serious damage to the national security? Really?
44: Wait, where did that come from? Taking issue with the assertion that HRC should have been charged despite the absence of evidence of a crime makes me an apologist for fascism? WTF?
I completely agree that there are huge problems with how classification works and who gets punished for breaking the rules. That has precisely nothing to do with the issues in dispute above, which are whether Hillary Clinton got away with something that Petraeus didn't and whether my counterpart in Mass has any basis for thinking the FBI bent rules on her behalf.
I expect to see proof of Big Foot before I see proof of a Clinton doing anything illegal except second degree receiving stolen blow job. The Big Foot people don't have the budget of the people looking into the Clintons, but they have heart.
But if there's anyone reading this thread who's able to give an informed opinion about the administrative standard for clearance-stripping (I'm certainly not), they probably shouldn't be commenting.
I've had a clearance (which is no longer active), and I think I can reasonably say that if I set up a private server and sent work-related emails over it that were retroactively classified, I would have been fired. A better question would be whether if my boss's boss's boss would have been fired for doing something similar.
Let's even ignore Petraeus (although we shouldn't; his behavior was qualitatively worse than Clinton, which strikes me as more along the lines of a managerial clusterfuck than anything else). When Sandy Berger walked out of the National Archives with classified documents relating to the 9/11 attacks stuffed in his pants, he got stripped of his security clearance and fined $50,000. When Scooter Libby leaked the name of a clandestine CIA agent, he was fined $250,000 and sentenced to 30 months in jail (which GWB commuted). You don't have to look at Hillary's pointy-haired bossism to conclude that the system works one way for political appointees and another way for regular people.
This is, of course, part of the neoliberal plan.
This is the kind of disingenuous bull shit obscurantism that water carriers use to lend legitimacy to fascist regimes, and you should be ashamed of yourself for resorting to it.
Hello, Godwin. Goodbye.
What I've always wondered is how much of the material in dispute was stuff like newspaper articles discussing the classified documents that were published by Wikileaks. Which (to my limited understanding) is all technically still classified as far as the government is concerned, but which you could very easily imagine people discussing freely in nonsecure e-mails, and which of course poses no threat to national security.
The disingenuous bullshit obscurantism is coming from the people still desperately trying to fan the embers of a nontroversy that any informed person should have known from the start was never going anywhere. About the most the FBI investigation brought to light is that overclassification -- and the use and misuse of classification rules in attempts to embarrass rivals rather than protect national security -- is a problem in Washington. You can whinge all you want about "defending power for its own sake," Trivers, but the simple fact of the matter is that there is simply nothing there to "defend" or to be indignant about as regards Clinton.
The conspiracy-mongering here was every bit as stupid, fucked up, and thoroughly dishonest as any of the fake Clinton scandals ever were, point blank, and the Sandernista left should be heartily ashamed for ever having fallen for a single second of it. It's a worthwhile reminder that the left is just as capable as the right of producing fact-free echo chambers powered by wilful self-delusion. If you fell into that trap, don't go taking it out on anybody else. The fault is yours.
My understanding--and I haven't been following the story closely, because I felt that it was transparently obvious that Clinton wasn't going to get indicted--is that there's some of that, and also email threads discussing classified material which was not itself marked classified; the senders, if they had been read into the classified information, therefore have a duty to treat it as classified even if it isn't so marked, pending discussion with a security officer. My security training was pretty far afield of this sort of thing (secret only, and related to intra-agency financial transactions rather than anything to do with national security [that is, I had access to government credit card numbers, which are actually the lower classification "confidential" rather than "secret"]), and it's more than a decade ago that I had to do any of this, so take it with a yuuuge grain of salt.
If government credit card numbers were secret, you couldn't buy anything with them.
You can buy toilet lids, but only the $3000 ones.
To clarify, my point has little to do with the Clinton scandal. My point is that telling someone who is expressing doubts that the legal system is functioning fairly that their concern is unwarranted unless they can do what Dave is asking (to paraphrase "you must explain the legal and factual basis for your assertion that a high-level bureaucrat came to the wrong legal conclusion") in 30 is wrong and undemocratic.
At work, they installed a new toilet tank without changing the bowl and now the lid (and hence, the seat) won't stay up. I had to switch toilets.
If you had access to a government credit card, you could be the office hero.
I'm a little surprised I haven't seen the idea rolled out that this was an affirmatively good plan on Clinton's part. As noted above, the State Department's system actually was hacked, and it's probably not hard to notice that the Department's IT was serving some goal other than awesome security for its users.
Faced with using the likely-to-be-hackable Department system, setting up your own thing is an easier and certainly faster path to security than the Herculean task of reforming the IT universe within the Department, even if the latter would be a nice thing to do.
The fact that the Secretary of State can make that choice, while the Department staff would get in trouble for doing exactly the same thing, is a problem - but most staff can legitimately claim to be at the mercy of the provided infrastructure's security, while the person at the top can't.
(In reality, I bet this analysis didn't happen, but that doesn't make it false).
No, we should go right on questioning the legitimacy of a system that allows for such egregious abuses of power and start asking questions about how to reform it.
Let's jump ahead to that second part. Unless the answer is "ardently contested presidential primaries." I feel we have discussed that one... sufficiently for now.
60
Yeah, I agree with you, which is what makes me so dejected. But we shouldn't have any such barriers to discussing such things on Unfogged. It is exceedingly unlikely to become a boon to the forces of reaction that a concern for civil liberties and accountability at the highest levels of government and industry led some people to be critical of Hillary Clinton on a blog that runs well left of the American center.
56: Still bullshit. We're not talking about whether the world is just, but about whether the FBI made the wrong decision on the facts and law before them. "The system is unfair" is not sufficient justification for concluding that they did.
56: If you're going to claim some kind of miscarriage of justice has gone on, certainly it would seem helpful to have some factual basis for that claim. "Legal" is a bit trickier because of course it's perfectly possible to legalize immoral and unjust behaviours, but if one is going to claim that an officer of the law has misjudged whether something "illegal" has happened -- which the person DaveLHI responding to was inf act doing -- then it's probably useful to be able to back that up, too. I don't see what the problem is, and I don't see why it's coming up with Maximum Shrill and a side order of Godwin here if your'e acknowledging that none of this has anything to do with Clinton.
59- You should get that spin to Clinton headquarters, they need your help.
Jet fuel can't melt steel beams.
64: Yeah, camp Clinton is clearly underwater.
I'm not going to argue about what DaveLMA meant as I presume he'll show up here sometime and clear this up, but I have a hard time reading it as "she broke the law and they didn't punish Clinton" instead of as "the laws and their enforcing institutions exist to punish the rank-and-file and shield the powerful when necessary and they didn't punish Clinton". It is perfectly reasonable to respond to the former with 30. The latter not so much.
Quit the Godwin concern-trolling unless you want to convince me that I shouldn't be extra-concerned about the way that the left talks about the institutions that exist to hold the powerful accountable when we're a few rounds of major corporate layoffs from electing Trump.
67: Quit the Godwin concern-trolling
The best weapon against electing the likes of Trump is being clear-headed and responsible, rather than wild-eyed and asinine. You don't get a pass on the latter Because Trump, quite the reverse.
The best weapon against electing the likes of Trump is being clear-headed and responsible, rather than wild-eyed and asinine.
To be fair, that didn't work so well for the Remainers. (Not that I disagree in the Trump case.)
Based on my extensive efforts in trying not to get pulled into learning the details, my half-assed hot take is that the classification aspect of the case is and has always been bullshit; the records management aspect of the case is legitimate, except the rules are such garbage that what Clinton did, and what any previous secretary of state since the invention of email could have done, was legal*; and the political campaign aspect of the case so overwhelms everything else that the only hope is that we escape making things worse when it comes to government records and accountability.
*And I think if it wasn't, she wouldn't have done the same thing. She probably would have pushed the limits of what was legal but I don't think she would have simply broken the law outright.
69: True. Addendum: "and also not complacent."
69
You're right. Broad concerns about accountability at the highest levels of American government and industry are for children and are only to be used against the other team. My bad!
Nobody's disagreeing that broad concerns about accountability at the highest levels of government are valid.
72: Broad concern about accountability are best based on fact and not buttressed with nutcase-level nonsense, but keep on dancing.
I'm not super motivated to wade in here, but I guess I have 2 cents worth. I had a clearance when I was in the Air Force. If I had done what Hillary did I would certainly have gone to jail for more than a decade. That doesn't mean she should. Top Secret is defined as would cause extremely grave damage to national security if released. We all know that thing are classified as top secret frivolously. Articles published in newspapers have been classified by analysts. Not just the specific arrangement of words in a classified document are protected, but the actual information content, ALL OF IT, is. That means that a policymaker with a lot of access to intelligence is in an impossible position. They know a huge amount of information, the overwhelming majority of which could be gotten through ordinary means, which is classified and protected at the highest level. Almost any email from such a policy maker if it is not at the level of 'hi how are you?' will contain information which for which it is arguably a serious crime to divulge.
There was never any way that HRC's 10s of thousands of emails didn't contain highly classified information. We can never be sure the Russians or Chinese don't have them although we may find out they do. It is also possible she could be blackmailed about this or Clinton Foundation information.
I don't see how given these facts her prosecution could be anything other than the most political of decisions.
Given that what numerous Republicans did was unquestionably similar and worse, and the fact that the Clintons are no longer suitable test cases for 'we'll start enforcing this stuff with them and get around to the others.' I'll be OK with giving HRC a slap on the wrist for this stuff the day after I've watched GWB's execution for the 100th time.
I think what's remarkable in all this is that it's a considerable victory for hacker trolling. The Guccifer hacker (who really was the actual story in all this Sturm und Drang about classified e-mails and leakage) casually dropped the claim back in May that he'd hacked Clinton's server -- a claim that's never been substantiated -- and basically set swathes of American anti-Clintonia chasing its collective tails for over two months while events played out to an entirely predictable and undramatic conclusion. The guy has to be laughing his ass off.
59: tptacek is on the case: https://twitter.com/tqbf/status/750405243305730048
76.1: At the risk of being fascist again, which part of "what Hillary did" do you believe would have been a certain prison sentence for you? I'm genuinely curious. There are huge numbers of US service members, among others, who have access to classified information, and if every conversation that strays into classified territory on an unsecure phone line or email account was getting prosecuted, I would have expected there to be a lot more stories than we've seen.
Why even bother looking at either the facts or the law? Doing so makes you fascist. The best evidence is uninformed lay people's senses of what the law must be, as applied to a factual scenario they barely understand. This place has always been contentious, but when did it get filled with people who are just so deeply stupid? I mean say what you want about eg stras or James B Shearer, but they weren't this level of dumb.
I mean bizarrely RTCB, who is a genuinely disgusting worthless human being of the bitter old man variety, is actually being smarter than Trivers on this thread. Fuck this place, you idiots can have it.
Oh, Shearer was most certainly this level of dumb. But Trivers gives him a run for his money, it can't be denied.
This election season does seem to be bringing us at least a local maximum of stupid vitriolic arguments here (but let's not pretend we haven't had some at least as stupid and vitriolic at various times in the past). Especially now, when there's basically nothing substantive left to argue about so it's just stupid vitriol all around.
I think the stupid vitriol makes people who aren't into that less likely to comment, too. (That's not MY excuse, though.)
I believe it's obligatory to say "fuck off" to 83. And I bet one of you assholes will be the one to do it.
80: Brother, you might be overstating things a bit. Setting up that server in that manner in 2008 in light of FOIA, the US Attorney scandal, etc was either straight up shady as shit or at a minimum grossly incompetent. I don't know what you and the other commenters have experience wise with federal prosecutors but out here there's a tendency to shoot down anything that's not overwhelmingly in their favor. To me, Comey's statement has "there's probable cause but we don't think it's a slam dunk at trial" written all over it.
85: I'm tired of being dull and complaining about my life, the preoccupations that take up most of my brain, and it doesn't seem worth inflicting that on others more often than is necessary or maybe at least amusing.
88: Fair enough. Now what's your excuse for being up this late?
I admit I did suspect Trivers of being under the influence of certain liquid intoxicants for portions of this thread. If not, well, everyone gets punchy.
89: Late coffee, no children in the bed, reading Kate Millett, no work tomorrow (though tons to do) and that sort of thing
Also, 81 is way over the line even for comment-tantrum histrionics. Roger, I am unilaterally downgrading you from "disgusting worthless human being" to "genuinely concerned person who may at times engage in concern trolling." Good night everyone and chill tf out.
So, speaking of rich people and the rule of law, I've discovered that people are oddly invested in the rules of primogeniture. My current procrastination technique is to read "Game of Thrones" discussion threads. A surprisingly large number of people complain about someone becoming monarch despite being a woman or an illegitimate son. How could this happen?, they ask, when the answer is right there in the show: they control the army.
Though to be fair, thanks to the rigor of medieval law, the real Middle Ages were peaceful and free of wars of succession.
Setting up your own chainmail server was not something to be taken lightly by your opposition.
They didn't have neoliberalism in the Middle Ages, fa.
94 - have you see In the matter of the Baronetcy of Pringle of Stichill?
The court has missed a trick, and an opportunity to increase relevance in these Game of Thrones-obsessed times, by not referring to either claimant as "the Bastard of Pringle".
79- Basically 87 has at least a grain of what you are looking for. To answer more thoroughly; I was in a situation where someone in my chain of command was looking for ways to screw me within the laws and regulations, and I couldn't afford a lawyer. A bad and somewhat uncommon situation. HRC has a lot of powerful people looking out for her as well as the ability to afford the best lawyers money can buy, she faces a completely different justice system.
(I didn't actually get in trouble for handling of classified documents but it wouldn't have taken much.)
I don't care about how Clinton had her email server set up. This whole thing was a joke.
It isn't crazy for there to be different convenience/security trade offs for the secretary of state and for random dudes. They probably wouldn't let some random dude do this type of thing but imaybe it is a good idea to have things set up so the secretary of state can gets some shit done. ( Although Clinton loves war so what she got done is more war- but theoretically I have no problem with secretaries of states being more productive)
Yeah, that's my reaction. She really doesn't seem to have broken the law. People like Roger and Gswift who are fixating on how anyone at a lower level would have totally gotten in trouble for not following standard procedures seem to me to be misunderstanding the nature of the relationship of the leader of an organization to standard procedures, in a way that's either just confused, or a product of some kind of Clinton-related animus: if you're running the place, you get to set procedures for your own convenience in a way that most workers don't.
Separately, the unofficial email thing was probably abstractly a bad thing from the point of view of IT security and archiving historical information, and she gets dinged for bad judgment in both of those areas. But neither of them seem like a particularly big deal in relation to the job she's going for now.
Also, ref. 99: so, you're saying that you mishandled classified documents, but you didn't get in trouble for it, even though you were being unjustly persecuted by someone who was looking for any excuse to get you in trouble. And you think it's unfair that Clinton mishandled classified documents, but didn't get in trouble for it, even though she was being unjustly persecuted by someone who was looking for any excuse to get her in trouble.
102: I was thinking of making that comment, but come to think he might have meant that he only avoided trouble by never mishandling anything, and he would have been persecuted for the slightest slip.
Also, RTCB's right that "she faces a completely different justice system" but not in the way he thinks, unless RTCB was also the subject of a four-year investigation by a Senate subcommittee with subpoena powers, a nine-figure budget, an effectively boundless brief and zero scope restrictions. I suspect that, instead, RTCB was the subject of "a junior manager who didn't like him".
It's true that people who can't afford a lawyer are looking at a very different legal system, for civil and administrative matters at least, than people/entities that can. We may actually have to many lawyers, but the bigger problem is that too many people with legal issues can't afford to pay enough for their lawyers to make a living.
This doesn't have anything to do with Clinton.
I don't know if Sanders was going this way -- probably not -- but fully funding legal services such that anyone under 200% of poverty would get nearly free representation (some sliding deductible and co-pays to keep folks from getting abusive) for debt/landlord tenant/employment under a certain amount/etc would actually be transformative.
104:
Basically the same thing.
"The Clintons get away with everything!" is such bullshit for the reasons spelled out in 104.
The next universe over, we're arguing that Clinton's decision to use the compromised and insecure State Department email, which was then hacked and leaked and which gave House Republicans with subpoena power the chance to lauch a years-long investigation into her mismanagement of low-level IT policy, shows an immense lack of judgment even if no laws were technically broken.
debt/landlord tenant/employment
Please no. Landlord/tenant, debt, and employment cases would overwhelm the courts if the cost of a lawyer didnt prevent cases. Given a free weapon, people will use it.
Even "nearly free" would be a mess without retainers. They are being sued mostly bc they can't pay their bills. They certainly aren't going to pay a lawyer bill.
Maybe free lawyers in consumer loan cases like high interest car loans or payday lender cases.
101: Still nonsense! We're not talking about the allowed number of plants you can have at your cubicle. The rules for records keeping and handling classified information are not different for people at the top. Which is why, as 48 pointed out, we've seen top level people get dinged for these kinds of violations before.
108 I'm thinking the lawyers would be on salary. You'd want to have 'death panels' of some kind, sure. But a whole lot of legitimate needs go unmet, and 'the cost of a lawyer' enables a certain amount of injustice.
And I'm not arguing she should be criminally prosecuted but the hand waving by the Democrats on this is bullshit. I'll concede some Clinton animus because they're shady as fuck. But I'm also not going to be tolerant of the claims that this is nothing because it's not. There's a reason that Comey's statement was "you people are borderline criminal morons who mishandled classified material" and not "hey man, the people at the top get to do their own thing".
The rules for records keeping and handling classified information are not different for people at the top.
What rules are you talking about? I mean, specifically, what rules that she broke that apply to her? She had some classified communications on her personal server, which was an error, and the FBI decided it was inadvertent and therefore not criminal. But in terms of using the personal email/server for government work at all, what rules did she break?
To answer my own rhetorical question, I don't think there were any applicable rules that she did break. But if you're going to say 'the rules' are not different for the people at the top, you have to have some concrete idea of what the rules are that you're talking about.
111: gswift, just to pin this down, are you claiming that setting up an email server by which emails containing sensitive information (without classified markings, although the people who sent them should have known better) were sent to the Secretary of State is the equivalent of the head of the CIA giving properly marked classified briefings to his mistress, to a political operative leaking the name of a CIA asset to a friendly reporter, or to the former National Security Advisor walking out of the National Archives with classified documents literally stuffed down his pants?
or to the former National Security Advisor walking out of the National Archives with classified documents literally stuffed down his pants
Well, that one is clearly the funniest.
101- I'm not fixating on anything. I explicitly said she shouldn't be punished for this, and that managers who get a lot of classified information are in an unfair situation regarding this stuff.
104- You are just stupid sometimes so I'll spell it out : The UCMJ is explicitly a different justice system. My manager didn't have a budget of millions to screw me with it is true, but he didn't need one since he wasn't a stupid incompetent grand stander and had ready access to all the information he needed.
Coherent advocacy for the rule of law (or for equal treatment under law) does involve a certain amount of thinking about what the law actually says and how it applies to particular cases.
I haven't really looked at this seriously, and many participants in this thread may already know this, but maybe it wouldn't hurt to look at the actual rule here. This NPR article says the potentially relevant criminal statute is 18 USC 1924(a). That statute provides:
Whoever, being an officer, employee, contractor, or consultant of the United States, and, by virtue of his office, employment, position, or contract, becomes possessed of documents or materials containing classified information of the United States, knowingly removes such documents or materials without authority and with the intent to retain such documents or materials at an unauthorized location shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for not more than one year, or both.
(Emphasis mine.) That is, the statute requires not merely knowledge that particular documents or materials were classified, but also a specific intent to retain those materials in an unauthorized location.
HRC's defense is that she didn't know any relevant materials were classified and certainly didn't intend to use her private e-mail server for classified information. Comey's statement says that HRC and her colleagues were "extremely careless," which is short of even knowing misconduct. And there doesn't seem to be any evidence at all of specific intent to retain classified materials in an unauthorized location. If anything her critics have been complaining that she was too eager to delete things.
If other people have been charged under this statute for conduct that wasn't knowing and intentional (and I'm not sure they have been, but assuming it for the sake of argument) then the problem was the charges against them, not the failure to charge Clinton. Certainly the Berger, Libby, and Petraeus cases all seem clearly distinguishable.
What rules are you talking about? I mean, specifically, what rules that she broke that apply to her?
I'm talking about Federal Records Act and the availability of records to FOIA requests. There's a reason why there's a job called "records officer" at the various federal agencies. Conducting business exclusively through a private email hosted at your house where you and your private staffers are deciding what is and isn't a govt record is an obvious end run around federal records regs and FOIA.
This is going to be a not very charitable drop-in but it's hilarious that it has twice come up that the nefarious activities of Russian hackers are a problem with the private server given that the official state department email -- which she would have otherwise been using, presumably -- was totally fucking owned by Russian hackers. (That article claims that it was after HRC's tenure at state but uh do you trust the forensics of the people who just got totally fucking owned? I do not.)
I really did not expect this to be a contentious topic.
115: My manager didn't have a budget of millions to screw me with it is true, but he didn't need one since he wasn't a stupid incompetent grand stander and had ready access to all the information he needed.
I am perfectly prepared to believe that your manager was easily able to come up with all sorts of evidence that you were incompetent, malicious, dishonest or criminal.
Separately, the unofficial email thing was probably abstractly a bad thing from the point of view of IT security and archiving historical information, and she gets dinged for bad judgment in both of those areas. But neither of them seem like a particularly big deal in relation to the job she's going for now.
Thanks to Nixon plus a later presidential email scandal, the rules are much stricter for the job she's going for, so the president has less discretion over how something becomes a record.
117: Once you're getting into "Obvious end run around", no, it really isn't obvious. There's nothing in the Federal Records Act or in FOIA prohibiting using non-government email for government business.
You're inventing policies that you think are good policies in terms of enforcing the law. And sure, they're probably good practice. But the fact that Clinton didn't abide by your view of best practices doesn't make her a rulebreaker.
no, it really isn't obvious
Maybe not in 1998, but in 2008 no way was that not a calculated move.
Obviously it was intentional, but not everything that's intentional is lawbreaking, or even rule-breaking.
122- Nice one. No he couldn't.
He would have been delighted to have found something as easy to prove as your religious bigotry. http://www.unfogged.com/archives/comments_15467.html #39 is a delight.
122 I see no evidence of religious bigotry in that comment.
128- You don't think insulting terrorists by referring to them humbling themselves before God, as headbanging shows religious bigotry? I disagree. I think there are better things to criticize terrorist for than their religion.
127: sigh. Keep chasing after the uptake, it's sure to tire eventually.
"Headbanger" is a slang term for "aggressive maniac" and has no religious connotations, you clot.
Although Halford did object to it as a slur against his co-religionists, later in the thread.
I've been reading the blog too long that Halford's gotten to me and I took it as an inexplicable heavy metal reference. I take your point.
No slur was intended against metallists either, but for fear of giving offence to this worthy group I have now retired the term from my vocabulary.
134 before seeing 132. That makes sense and is how I took it.
125: Funny that you bring up Bush, because I've seen no evidence and no claims that Clinton was using a private server to evade the detection of criminal activity, which was what the RNC was suspected of doing during that controversy. What's a calculated move there is your attempt to imply an equivalency that you have to know is false.
130, 132: In roger's defense, I've never heard 'headbanger' the way you used it. I read it as you meant it from context, bu that must be a UK usage that isn't common at all over here.
132: It's a poor word choice given the context. I understood it the same way RTCB did when I first read it and found it unpleasant. This may partially be another of those transoceanic differences in language.
Come on, it's not as though we're so short of rude words for Muslims that I need to go and invent more.
In the spirit of 'can't we all just be brothers' -- to someone who's never heard 'headbanger' as a term of abuse at all (which is most Americans, I think), you're either inventing a term of abuse for some category of people, or using a term that's conventional to you, but unfamiliar to the hearer. There's nothing about that making applying it to Muslims rather than violent people generally more or less likely.
I read you correctly, because I've been reading you for years not using random slurs, so it didn't occur to me that you would be, but with less baseline familiarity it'd be a perfectly reasonable guess.
If you do a search for muslim headbangers you definitely get results, including the first, that are using it in a pejorative sense that in context is derived from Muslim practice. (Admittedly in some the context is unclear and they could be using it in the same sense you are.) Thankfully, you also get a lot of results that use "headbanger" in the Halfordian sense. There are some very metal Muslims out there.
I know you didn't mean that and I blame my USAianness on the misunderstanding.
Further to 125 before I head out because I've got things to do but the entire point of the National Archives regs are that the records are readily available for examination and subject to scrutiny. I'm also sure Clinton and her people were well aware of the Supreme Court precedent that agencies aren't required to search for and produce records they don't possess and control. You know, like a godamn private email server at someone's house.
She maybe barely dodged breaking the law and looking at Comey's statement I'm not even sure of that. That setup was a deliberate underhanded move and various lefties and Democrats are not covering themselves in glory making excuses for it.
s/"Muslim practice"/"Islamic practice"/
because I've seen no evidence and no claims that Clinton was using a private server to evade the detection of criminal activity
Please, tell us more about your cave of no right wing media or commentators.
145: "And no credible claims," my bad. I'm not counting fiction or right-wing media (but I repeat myself).
143: She maybe barely dodged breaking the law and looking at Comey's statement I'm not even sure of that.
You mean the statement that explicitly said she didn't break the law? You're hilarious.
Sorry I didn't get back sooner after making a post that caused a lot of pearl-clutching.
My position on why she wasn't indicted is basically what gswift said: To me, Comey's statement has "there's probable cause but we don't think it's a slam dunk at trial" written all over it. Beyond that, the FBI isn't completely immune from political pressure. Anyone who thinks she didn't get the benefit of massive lobbying in her favor and massive effort to view everything in the best possible light is, well, dim.
So, no, I think Comey made the decision I expected him to make. Neoliberals around the world all breathed a sigh of relief and government accountability took another bullet. So it goes.
Oh, yeah: I don't have a mustache either.
So on a completely unrelated topic, anyone read all 30,000 words of the Chilcott report yet?
So you agree with gswift that she should have been indicted for some sort of apparently non-existent criminal violations of public records laws, rather than the classified information violations that were actually investigated? Sorry, I can't keep up, other than HILLARY = BAD.
Thanks for 116, widget. Other pieces I've seen explaining the actual statutes in play regarding Clinton's email server are from Ian Millhiser at ThinkProgress, and from the Huffington Post.
Interestingly, Juan Cole calls for the repeal of the Espionage Act of 1919 (1917?).
I don't pretend to have waded into this in any real way; I assume there are more thorough, detailed analyses/discussions about it than those I just linked. Nonetheless, it does appear that Clinton's private server doesn't meet the requirements for prosecutable offense outlined in the relevant statutes, and if people in this thread (and elsewhere!) are arguing that they do, the burden's on them to explain how; if they're arguing that they should, the task is to take a hard look at the existing statutes and decide how they'd like them to be changed.
It's not so much the server itself as the fact that she used it to retroactively put a hit on Vince Foster.
Oh, hey, Castock. I'm off here shortly, I'm afraid, but I've been meaning to ask: the polling results you've linked to a couple of times in recent threads showing Clinton in a very strong lead -- do those polls include as an option the third- and fourth-party candidates, the Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson, and Green Party candidate Jill Stein?
I'm concerned about the peel-off of otherwise Democratic voters to Johnson or Stein, you see. This past U.S. Fourth of July weekend provided me with input from four (4!) acquaintances who are, essentially, NeverHillary persons: 3 of them going for Stein, 1 for Johnson. Gah. They seem intractable (and dense, and behaving as though they're 12 years old, etc.)
In any case, the polling results to pay attention to are those that include more than just Trump v. Clinton, I think. Caution.
155: From RCP's simple averages, adding options lowers percentages, but doesn't seem to be making a lot of difference as far as ultimate margins.
Clinton vs. Trump alone: +4.6
vs. Trump and Johnson: +4.8
vs. Trump, Johnson, and Stein: +4.8
My hunch has always been that the BernieOrBust people were of two sorts: 1) people who vote green every year anyway 2) people who usually don't vote anyway 3) people who are bluffing as a last grasp and moving the party left. It's not at all surprising to me that spreads between HRC and Trump are unchanged with Stein and Johnson in.
Personally I'd like to see her win by a lot more than 5 points. It's not enough to beat Trumpism. It must be thoroughly and utterly demolished. The silent majority plurality of the Republican Party that finds anything redeemable about Trump needs to be embarrassed back into silence for the rest of our lifetimes.
If Trump loses it just means he wasn't a true conservative, and they'll try again with another dimwit. Embarrassment? What's that?
It's come to my attention that Obama hasn't stopped for a red light in almost 8 years, but if I did that, I'd be arrested. Neoliberalism is, indeed, everywhere.
Yeah, 160 is true. Even the yahoos who are his most fervent followers wouldn't be embarrassed by him losing by 10 points*. They'll just wash their hands of him and double down on Tea Party garbage.
I did think that it was possible that within the party, a crushing defeat of Cruz would have some effect. That is, that such a thing would put a scare into enough actual officeholders that they might back off some of their worst tendencies.
One of the great frustrations of American politics is that we actually know that hoi polloi takes their lead from party leaders (because hoi polloi doesn't follow any particular issue in detail, so all they do is look at the position of whomever they respect), but we pretend they don't, whether because we want to tell a democratic fairy tale (the people lead the politicians!) or because we want to excuse the evil motherfuckers who make bad policy because they're just doing whatever the voters want.
I'm not exactly sure what my solution to this conundrum is--it's not as if I think it's realistic to just say that leaders should lead better**--but it's a frustrating dynamic to see in action, as if the average Trump voter has a precise set of policy preferences that could be met by some other candidate. It's sort of the free market fallacy: if X isn't being offered, it must be because there's no market for X.
*Maybe--maybe--a 70-30 defeat, if not a 60-40 defeat, would break through, if only as some sort of hint that the so-called silent majority really, really isn't one.
**and not do stuff like pretend foreign aid is 5% of the budget, or that we're taxed more than anyone else, or that free trade is some panacea
embarrassed back into silence
This would require at least a passing acquaintance with shame, which has seldom been in evidence in those circles.
160 I'd like to give 159 a real try, though.
We know Republicans will take the Senate back in 2018. So it's a short window, before the Village narrative turns to Failed Presidency. (That's the latest. She may have a Failed Presidency inside of 100 days, a historic first.)
Somewhat unrelated, but has either Hillary or Bernie actually said Trump is a racist yet? There tends to be a lot of dancing around of the form "he is saying racially motivated things" or "he is stirring up the fires of racism" but I can't remember if either of them explicitly said "Donald is a racist". I ask because Gary Johnson actually did say those magic words on CNN the other day, which was refreshing to hear somebody say. And then I think he went back to talking about abolishing the fed and bragging about how he cut the budget in New Mexico with private prisons.
There tends to be a lot of dancing around of the form "he is saying racially motivated things" or "he is stirring up the fires of racism" but I can't remember if either of them explicitly said "Donald is a racist".
Previous discussion on unfogged has convinced me that, for most purposes it's better to say, "so-and-so is doing or saying racist things" rather than "so-and-so is a racist." (because the latter, by implying that being a racist is a permanent and unchanging state invites responses of the form, "but, here's an example of when they weren't a racist").
Previous discussion on unfogged has convinced me that, for most purposes it's better to say, "so-and-so is doing or saying racist things" rather than "so-and-so is a racist."
In fact, for all purposes it's better to say that, and it is never good to divide the world into "racists" and "non-racists".
I think 162 underestimates the extent that the members of Republican base, while maniacs, are still ultimately human beings. First they had to endure eight years of Black Hitler. At least he was a charismatic demagogue. At the moment they think they're going to take their country back. When they lose to an uncharismatic old lady that they're sure everyone hates, some of them will break. They'll be completely demoralized.
166, 167:
I'm generally in agreement with you here, but I do think consistent pattern of saying racist things and cozying up with honest-to-god white supremacists ought to get one labeled a racist.
They'll be completely demoralized.
WE CAN WIN THE WAR IN VIETNAM! IRAQ! AFGHANISTAN! IRAN SYRIA! TBD!
168: More likely they will be outraged at the obvious theft of the election by somebody that *nobody they know* voted for. ACORN! ACORN!
171: But even so, they'll begin to think they can't win. You can't fight ACORN, just like you can't fight City Hall.
The value would be in convincing Republicans in national politics that you will, in fact, lose by more than 10 points nationally if you talk this way and you may even have your career ruined for associating with someone who does this.
Or instead of getting disheartened enough to tune out politics entirely they'll just get madder and try even harder to take it out on the less powerful people around them the way Fox News and that nice man on the radio encourage them to do.
And a segment of them will, guaranteed, become convinced that they aren't winning because of something-something-tyranny-second-amendment, and we'll see some already uncomfortably large domestic right wing terrorist organizations get even bigger and more dangerous.
I don't see much likelihood that, having been successfully driven to the level of hysteria that they have been* that they're just going to shrug and go away sadly if the fact that they are neither silent nor the majority gets rubbed in their faces good and hard. It's still good to do it, I mean, but let's not imagine that it would solve the problem posed by having such a large chunk of the population happily out of their minds.
*Or, heck, 'were by 2009'.
40:
Trump Adviser: "Ok Donald they didn't find anything in there but Comey was still nice enough to say that Clinton acted badly and was reckless when it came to national security, so all we
need to do right now is sit back a bit and let the media go nuts about...
Donald Trump: "SADDAM HUSSEIN WAS A PRETTY GREAT GUY WASN'T HE!?"
it is never good to divide the world into "racists" and "non-racists".
That's what you racists always say.
I do think consistent pattern of saying racist things and cozying up with honest-to-god white supremacists ought to get one labeled a racist.
I honestly think that the only productive, true thing to be said on this front is along the lines of "genuine, no-doubt racists/white supremacists like David Duke think Donald Trump is great. That doesn't mean that all of his supporters are racists/white supremacists, but it does suggest that his appeals are beyond the pale/are stirring up America's ugliest past/something."
The creatives need to step up here: just as Tina Fey basically defined Palin for all time, a really effective depiction of the situation* could be extremely helpful (that sounds silly, I guess, but seriously: there've been lots of times when on-spot satire essentially defines a public figure's character; it doesn't, in today's parlance, "destroy" him or her, but it gives permission for ostensible supporters to run like hell). It's not that you literally change minds--I used to support Trump, but now I'm with her!"--it's that you give voice to underlying discomfort. Some chunk of Trump supporters (maybe I should say voters--people who wouldn't attend a rally, but thank voting for him is worth it to stop That Woman) probably have felt a moment's pause at how things have gone, but are setting that aside because of 24 years of hating Hillary. But if that pause is amplified....
*I'm thinking along the lines of a salt-of-the-earth American marching for Trump, then he notices some fellow marchers are a bit off, then some who are out there, and then some are in robes on horseback; point being, the viewer is encouraged to identify/sympathize with the guy who thinks he's just engaging in legit political activity, then grows increasingly alarmed to see who's joining. In general I'm tired of MSM normalizing Trump types, but the guy hasn't gotten to 40% by appealing solely to KKK types. Illustrating the median Trump supporter as a well-meaning, patriotic American who is nonetheless unhappy to march with unambiguous bad guys strikes me as possibly resonant. I mean, what do I know? But this seems more fruitful than most anti-Trump satires.
174: I don' know if this really is with or against what you're saying, but I will note that the militias actually did recede for awhile, and it wasn't the election of W that did it. I mean, I guess it was mostly that OKC didn't result in a mass uprising that did, but my point is that we shouldn't paint these groups as eternally more aggrieved and growing. They ebb and flow, and maybe a Trump smackdown will actually do something.
Academics openly acknowledge that republicans have been trying, successfully, to get racists to vote for them ever since LBJ signed the 1964 voting rights act.
You cannot say that as a pundit on tv and get invited back. You are talking about (evil) values and acknowledging the existence of an asymmetry.
So many in the public who consider themselves informed - they watch tv news every day - find this a puzzling claim.
When a person who rarely does or says racist things does or says a racist thing, it's helpful to say that they merely did or said a racist thing.
When a bloc of people have built their identities around voting for and supporting either coded or open racism for fifty years or longer (or much longer), it's pretty fair to say that they're racists. (Also sexists and a bunch of other shitty things, but it's more than plain where they get their biggest high.) They've made that an axis of who they are as people -- quite plainly a more fundamental one than all the smoke and mirrors of market worship or evangelical pseudo-faith that dressed up the Southern Strategy and helped its architects to bilk these rubes of everything they had -- and that fact should be plainly recognized and faced up to. One has either to challenge these people to change, or to recognize they aren't changing any time soon and to aggressively deny them a place in polite mainstream society; and to stop trying to make them part of political coalitions given that literally all they have to say at this point is that blacks, Hispanics, Jews, Muslims, other miscellaneous foreigners and minorities, liberals and women must kneel before Zod, that they're being stripped of their "freedom" if they don't have their boots on everyone else's neck.
#NotAllTrumpers, obviously, some of these people just seem to think of Trump as entertainment and don't grasp the gravity of what they're doing. But the really rabid Trumpers? Oh hell yes, that shoe fits and then some. Absolutely everything about his movement is dripping with it.
Thanks 156 for the informative answer to 155. That's a useful additional dimension I hadn't really accounted for.
175: It has to be performance art, right? It's like this crazy river where around every turn is a newer and stranger fish.
I spent a summer in college shredding State dept. phone directories. It was a big shredding machine and I must have almost lost my fingers like a hundred times. Don't put your fingers in the shredder when the phone book is stuck in there. So I like to think I did my part for national security, maybe I can get a job in the Clinton administration, I've got experience.
175, 181: The weirdest part is that he was specifically praising Saddam for being willing to commit human rights violations. So it's not "yeah, this guy was a repressive dictator, but he also did unrelated stuff that was good" but "yeah, this guy was a repressive dictator and he was awesome at it, you guys!" Not exactly surprising from Trump at this point given his whole shtick of saying the quiet part loud, but yeesh.
Newt is going to be the VP candidate and then try to get Trump arrested so he can take over, right?
Yep. I bet he's been watching House of Cards.
I really think that Trump has had a change of heart and doesn't want to be President, if indeed he ever did. This campaign is so awful and so disorganized it's hard to believe it isn't deliberate. And on the policies that affect his net worth he might really be closer to Hillary Clinton than whatever other abomination the Republican Party would barf up in his place. By that I mean that as a real estate developer it's very, very clear to him that this policy of "downsize the government out of existence through a combination of tax and spending cuts" is actually pretty bad for his line of business.
He's well to the right of Hillary Clinton on the whole racism thing, though.
I am sorry for dropping the f-bomb in 44. Even on top of not sleeping very much and overworking myself, I've had a very difficult couple of weeks so I'm very irritable and not thinking terribly clearly. An older family member who was a big role model of mine is on the verge of passing away and the other two remaining grandparents can't be far behind.
I'm going to lay off the national politics stuff on here for at least a week.
I am sorry for making this more contentious than there was any real reason for it to be.
Sorry to hear you're going through a rough time, Trivers. I've been having a hard time myself lately, though in a different way.
Thanks, teo. Sorry things are rough on your end, too.
Thanks. I'll be okay, and I hope (and believe) you will be too, at least in the long run.
I will be. Death happens and I've been incredibly lucky to have lost so few loved ones at this age. But that can't last, obviously.
I was telling Barry Freed when we met up at the Metrograph that my favorite thing about Unfogged and the thing that drew me in is that it almost everyone was both older than me and really very candid in speaking about both the mundane and the existential things that affect us all as we move through life. I harbor a lot of anxiety about the future so it gives me a lot of comfort to see that despite all of the problems life throws everyone's way that they find ways to make it work and have this kind of community anyway.
189: My thoughts and sympathies, and no hard feelings whatsoever (I started with "canonically, fuck you anyway," but deleted lest that be misconstrued (and then I put it back in a parenthetical)). Death does happen and every fucking one sucks.
And to teo, latitudinally excessive though you may be.
(Actually, I rather like Alaska, from limited contact with the Panhandle.)
The Panhandle's okay, but rather warm and wet compared to the rest of the state. (Low-hanging fruit acknowledged.)
Yes, but it's as far up as I've been. Maybe one of these days I'll go for one of those ORD-ANC-HNL connections Alaska Airlines wants to sell me.
How far up the Panhandle have you been? The northern part tends to be less rainy. Anyway, Southcentral Alaska does have a lot of interesting sites that are not necessarily worth visiting in and of themselves, but definitely worth it in the context of a larger trip.
And I'll totally show you around Anchorage if you do make it up here. It really is pretty nice.
I'm sorry, Trivers. It's true you didn't quite seem like your usual self upthread. That combination of personal tragedy and political anxiety is wretched: my maternal grandmother died a few weeks before 9/11, which in turn was four days before I had to leave an excellent full-time summer job and go back to the uncertainty and penury of my final year of college, and holy shit was I a basket case that fall. It's a terrible lens. I wish you strength and useful political distraction. Downticket races, party-building, coalition building, reading about faraway times and places in U.S. history (and other history)? More theoretical stuff?
And teo, good luck getting through it.
Only as far as Sitka. Awesome fishing, not a lot of time spent on other things, although what there was, was nice. And I will take you up on Anchorage when/if I get there. A buddy from law school was from there and I always meant to get up, but he's been in Seattle since forever and I can't even seem to catch him there.
Sympathies, Trivers. What lurid said about the combination of personal and political anxiety, an oddly neglected subject in literature, even though the opposite in-that-dawn-to-be-alive-and-getting-laid condition is pretty well documented.
Sitka is indeed quite nice. Anchorage can't match it for historical interest, of course, but it still has its attractions (including fishing). Definitely let me know if you're ever headed up here. It's now looking like I'll be here for a while longer, which has not always been clear over the past few months.
I'll be thinking of you and your family, Trivers.
teo, it looks like I'll be in Fairbanks around the second week of August. Too far for a meetup?
It's a bit far, but not necessarily undoable. I've been thinking I should take some time off anyway, and while I was thinking more of late July, I have a lot of leave saved up and Fairbanks is only a short flight.
174: But they're still ultimately human beings. They don't infinite amounts of will to persevere in the face of defeat. Do you have infinite will? Do you know anyone with infinite will? They won't just shrug and give up, of course. They will break. They will cry, retreat to their exurban fastnesses, and swear they never cared about politics that much anyway.
Do you remember when Bush I beat Dukakis? It wasn't clear to me at the time, but that was the death of old-style liberalism. When Reagan got reelected, we could tell ourselves it was because it was the Teflon President, etc. When a charisma-less noodle like Bush won, there was nothing we could tell ourselves. It will be just like that, except this time it's happening to the bad guys.
I think the same thing would have happened if Gore had won. When just before the election Gore was ahead in the polls, the level of despair on the right was delicious. Religious conservatives were talking about how they had to give up on America, and retreat lest they be infected with the sickness that was infecting America. It will be like that. Don't let the door hit you the ass, guys. America is ours now, and they will know it.
I don't necessarily disagree with 206, but I also feel like the racist asshole wing of the right isn't going to go down without beating the fuck out of a lot of black people, Mexicans, and Muslims/Sikhs/other brown people who dress distinctively. Trump has emboldened the violent racist asshole contingent of American society (which, to be clear, has always existed and isn't going away anytime soon), and they're not going to fade back into obscurity without brutalizing some Others.
the other two remaining grandparents can't be far behind
I'm sorry to hear this. I went from three living grandparents to none between 2012 and 2015. It was quite jarring, even though they had all beaten the actuarial tables by many years and were in rapid decline.
Sorry for your troubles, Trivers. And I retract my harsh words upthread. Hope things get better.
Trivers, sorry about your troubles. Like lk, I've been in a similar place. Get some rest and be good to yourself.
Sorry to hear that, Trivers (and teo, too). Seems to be an unfortunate summer for many of us.
And don't worry about the occasional f-bomb.
177.last: Saturday Night Live did one.
I know this part of the thread is dead but wanted to point out that following on widget's 14 et seq, that outside of the evil asshat Republicans*, moronic asshats in the media**, and other assorted asshats, it is clear that Comey really did do something unusual and by normal standards quite wrong. This article is a bit over the top, but it includes a a good compendium of links. Additionally, some of his characterizations have come into serious question; for instance State Dept. rejoining that the 2 (two) emails claimed as marked were not marked as such.
And -Carp's 45 is exactly right.
* No idea what he will say on the Hill today but Greg Sargent has it right: So weird. Instead of "FBI says Clinton exposed top secrets" ,Rs go with "guy who sharply criticized Clinton conduct is corrupt."
**Of course by nature of their work, theirs is the one that is "out there."
And was always the "danger" in this thing the Reps are going for the perjury trap--want FBI to investigate whether she lied to Congress. Every single one of us would have inadvertently "perjured" ourselves under the circumstances.
This is why I get totally chapped by the fucking fuckwads who want to handwring--this is total fucking war, need to acknowledge the massive asymmetry of this kind of thing. Sure bring up "she should have known because of the Bush/Rove" email thing, but read this description of the incredible difference in scrutiny and coverage of the two situations and please acknowledge that if you are not baking that into your response you are part of the problem and most likely a massive self-righteous douchebag.
Comey, BTW, was a special counsel to the dogass Whitewater Senate committee. But in this instance since he did not abandon *all* professionalism in pursuit of partisan gain in this instance he is under attack from the Republicans in Congress.
213-1 I'm not sure I know what you mean here, and if I do I think I may disagree.
Comey doesn't think a prosecutor should be interested and people say that's not his call, but it seems to me that law enforcement is always making that call.
Or maybe you are just objecting to the press conference, but a lot of people were going to be demanding an explanation. I dunno.
Sorry Trivers. Glad to see Stormcrow back on the case for this one.
On the personal / political thing, so far in the last 30 days, Brexit just completely destroyed my entire career, I lost my last and closest grandparent unexpectedly*, a family member with deteriorating mental health problems has gone missing on another continent, my partner lost a pregnancy**, I had a motorbike accident***, and I also had a load of money stolen.
Not posting under my usual pseud in case that will further anger whichever deity I've upset. On the plus side, I did find some pot on a beach.
* and took the call, and had to call my parents to give them the news while they were on holiday.
** although it wasn't planned, and was at a very very early stage - she told me after it had happened.
*** while riding an expensive bike that I bought through shrewd conversion of Euros into sterling a few days before Brexit
"So far in the last 30 days" doesn't really make sense, but then again neither does much of anything at the moment
Wow, that's terrible. Um, you clearly survived the motorcycle accident without significant head trauma?
Oh, man, that's all pretty awful.
That was the worst sympathy ever. Imagine I was good at being sensitively sympathetic?
Sorry about the shit month, P.E.I.A. At least you found some weed. Jah clearly isn't the deity you pissed off.
Wow much much sympathy, so hope at least personal improves. Political outlook seems grim for the foreseeable.
I'm sorry that everything is awful for everyone.
219.last: were you able to follow the footprints to find the dog that crapped it?
Ye gods, that is worse than my worst month by a mile. Tons of sympathy. Let us know if we can somehow help you network your way out of career brexecution.
How awful, Mr. President. Sympathies. Hope the things that can be fixed resolve themselves.
That rots, PEIA. I was thinking of your grandparent the other day as a person who just keeps going.
223: You were going for silver linings, I totally got it. Of course I'm not strong on sensitivity either.
Sorry to hear about your mense horriblis, Mr. Prez. Having something like Brexit come in like a comet atop all the other troubles is extra-appalling. (We were very fortunately spared that sort of pain this side of the pond -- by 1 point, no less -- when Canada almost ran onto the rocks of similar idiocy in the Nineties.)
That's awful, P. e. i. a., my condolences.
Sorry about that President E.I.A.
My condolences, PEIA. Thanks to everyone for being so nice.
Yikes! Sorry to hear about all that, PEIA.
Thanks, all. Mostly it's things that are really unpleasant, but not great, and it's just that they've all come at once. But Brexit is a simultaneous personal, professional and political disaster and sort of looms over and exacerbates everything else. (Particularly it makes money worries worse.) On the other hand, the pseud is an exaggeration. Aside from the unexpected pot find, I have a lot of things to be thankful for in life and that's helping.
Incidentally, I dont think I know anybody personally / IRL here - I was just using the opportunity to get stuff off my chest semi-anonymously. Apologies for any confusion.
(And there was a minor head injury involved LB, as the handlebars struck me in the nose and gave me a spectacular in-helmet nosebleed.)
Jeez, PEIA. That is a huge amount of shitty stuff. I'm sorry.
OUch, PEIA yours has indeed been a completely fucking dreadful month. The deity who sent the dope is one to keep in with, though.
Well, well, well...
After three weeks of private preparations, Senator Bernie Sanders is expected to endorse Hillary Clinton on Tuesday at a campaign event in New Hampshire, according to three Democrats who have been involved in the planning.
The Clinton campaign on Thursday announced the New Hampshire trip but did not provide details, including any mention of Mr. Sanders.
Mr. Sanders, in an interview Thursday with Bloomberg View's Al Hunt, came as close to endorsing Mrs. Clinton as he ever has, saying: "We have got to do everything that we can to defeat Donald Trump and elect Hillary Clinton. I don't honestly know how we would survive four years of a Donald Trump as president."
The timing makes me half consider if he was waiting until it was certain there would be no indictment.
241 sounds like a good idea. I don't know how such a moronic egomaniac had one.
Shocking!
I doubt the indictment was his reason, if only because the likelihood of an indictment seemed pretty low and if there had been one it's not like he couldn't have jumped right back in. My guess is that the recent policy concessions (and hiring of members of his campaign by hers) and some even more recent meetings means that they'd finalized the deal and figured that by this point there had been enough time for any of his remaining* supporters to move easily from his camp to Clinton's, if they were ever going to. I'll be curious to see if we see any more things show up that were likely part of a deal he had struck with her campaign in the future.
*And of course that most of the ones who were ever going to vote for a Democratic party candidate in the first place had already done so.
Bernie cannot have believed the indictment talk, surely. I get that it was fun to throw out as chum for his more rab... uh, dedicated supporters who didn't know better, but I have to strongly doubt anyone in Washington was really expecting it.
242: Alternate possible explanation: he wasn't actually a moronic egomaniac who wouldn't endorse Clinton like the people whining about him insisted.
I'm curious to see what strategies the bitter enders resort to in order to keep their outrage high going after the endorsement.
"Did you see the expression on his face during the endorsement speech? I can just tell that he didn't really mean it!"
Sorry to hear about the series of unfortunate events! I hope that there will be unexpected opportunities that come out of what seems like such a giant disaster.
I also think you should focus on how lucky you are not to have seriously injured yourself in your bike accident. I had a friend who had a very serious TBI and while he's made a totally miraculously recovery 2 years later, he's permanently lost most of his sense of smell, which I guess is really common with TBIs. Any time you smell or taste something delicious, just remember how much worse your life could be.
Yeah, only half considered. I was less confident in the non-indictment because Comey is a Republican.
247.2: similarly, any time you face any difficulty in your life, you should focus on how you don't live in North Korea or Syria. Buck up!
Or maybe Sanders is an egomaniac who nonetheless has realized that he's extracted as much in terms of platform and policy concessions as he can from Clinton and, further, reached the end of his window of opportunity to seem like a team player and not piss off people he has to work with at his day job. I can't really believe someone with a big ego who plays political hardball would find a home in the U.S. Senate, though.
OMFG! A politician is an egomaniac? I woulda never suspected.
Does anyone seriously think that, purely as a tactical matter, he didn't fuck up by waiting this long? Whatever "leverage" he had has long since passed, and he gets no credit now for being a minimal non-shithead. My own take was not only "egomaniac" and "not a team player" (both are clearly true, though as 250 says not exactly unknown among politicians) but also "extremely ineffective politician who is shit at actually accomplishing major goals as opposed to talking about thrm" and it's hard to see clearer confirmation of that than the past few weeks. Enjoy the remnants of your conplete failure of an insurgency while real people get things done, asshole! You got to be a big deal for people on the internet for a few months, and your legacy will have been to make people angrier and stupider. Good job.
I'm curious to see what strategies the bitter enders resort to in order to keep their outrage high going after the endorsement.
"Did you see the expression on his face during the endorsement speech? I can just tell that he didn't really mean it!"
As we can see from 252, the bitter enders are somehow even angrier at him than ever. You'd think the condescension and gloating would replace anger, but they all feed on each other.
I hope that there will be unexpected opportunities that come out of what seems like such a giant disaster.
Not quite sure that's the right line to take...
I'm just angry because I had to waste so much emotional time and energy, and have so many friends revealed as idiots, because of this ineffective fool's vanity campaign. His legacy is a bunch of hurt feelings, a mild [don't want to overstate this, but it's real] discrediting of the "left" among the mainstream of a leftward-trending party, and nothing more. A better politician would have figured out a way to get a better legacy, but that's not Bernie.
Tigre's insistence that negotiations to which he had no access went a very specific way for no reasons whatsoever has been impressive, and also impressively consistent. Why, he even had the forethought to be saying the exact same thing weeks ago - before the reason he's claiming it now!
"Haha loser, you said this campaign was about getting the Democratic party to prioritize your issues, and now the Democratic party is prioritizing your issues and you aren't getting credit for it."
Not sure I want to get into it, but it's quite clear that he would have done much better for any cause he cares about to have quit weeks (or months) ago, when his campaign still had a fig leaf of being about ideas. He's now at the point (with Warren et al enthusiastically backing Clinton) where he has nowhere else to turn. That anyone thought this guy was competent to be President was, is and remains stunning.
257 - evidence not provided. If you mean Hillary's college plan, which was apparently the fig-leaf concession required to get him out, it was basically the plan she'd had before and shares with the administration )and which unlike his idea for "free college"'through a financial transactions tax that couldn't remotely come close to paying for it). Nice work, shithead!
255 and 259 are exactly right.
259 could stand to go back and reread the initial set of concessions we saw from a while ago, as well as remembering the really obvious fucking fact that non-obvious/public concessions don't get openly announced or made clear until later on. (Or was the idea that the continued series of meetings between the two candidates was just for kicks and no further negotiating was happening? Apparently so, inferred from the fact that Sanderses we hates them we hates them my precious.) Not to mention going back and reading the campaign coverage from before the Sanders campaign unexpectedly took off and Clinton was forced to refocus her campaign on a different set of issues (which, you know, was what 257 said.)
How about this: If you actually care about the "left" and are actually unhappy because you actually believe it is "discredited" by having as its figurehead an incompetent and megalomaniacal buffoon who has been discredited and loathed (by Democratic politicians) for 30 years, maybe the people you should be angry at are the Democratic politicians who AREN'T discredited and incompetent arrogant buffoons and could have served as that figurehead but chose not to. You doomed the left for another generation, Elizabeth Warren or Sherrod Brown or whoever.
your legacy will have been to make people angrier and stupider.
Evidently.
His legacy also includes forcing centrist-curious Democrats to realize that hippie punching may have electoral consequences.
I'm sincerely trying to be less of a dick, but can't we all agree that the minor changes to the (near-meaningless) Democratic "platform" aren't worth a hill of beans? I
To 262, I think both Brown and Warren are good politicians who (correctly) concluded that they personally and the policies they support would be better served working in a coalition than in running a primary campaign.
If 264 is true and has any staying power he'll have justified his entire political career with that alone. I'm curious to see who Clinton picks as VP: if it's a Perez or a Warren type then I'm guessing it's true and that that's significantly creditable to Sanders. If it's a Kaine, Booker, or Castro type maybe less so, or at least there wouldn't be really strong evidence that he had that effect.
I'm not seeing how Bernie discredited the left. He ran a primary campaign, lost, and now he's edging up to endorsing the winner. His campaign raised issues and ideas that would not have been addressed if he hadn't run. He engaged in some bullshit process arguments about superdelegates and such, which only the most politics-obsessed people in any of the camps will remember for very long. And some of his supporters are irritating or crazy or too far left to be comfortable in the Democratic party. So what's the problem?
a mild [don't want to overstate this, but it's real] discrediting of the "left" among the mainstream of a leftward-trending party
You seem to think you're being generous by not overstating this, but I don't think you're right that there was any discrediting at all.
I mean, what's the counterfactual? A primary just between Clinton and O'Malley? There's just no way that would be better for the left. (Throughout this comment I'm assuming that "the left" means something like "people who care about economic inequality." I know that's not the only definition but it seems like the relevant one here.) Unless there's some double-reverse-three-dimensional chess scenario where being completely excluded from something means you're about to win it completely, then I'm just not seeing it. The left gets ignored in the primary and that's it. Beyond that, the primary gets less media coverage overall, which to borrow your phrasing has a mild but real impact on the general election. Or is the counterfactual a primary with the same people we had or similar, but Sanders being a better candidate in some inchoate way? I'd agree that that would have been better for the left in any reasonable scenario. He and/or his campaign definitely made mistakes, some preventable. No argument. But if there were any epic failures or any beyond the pale choices made I'm not aware of them, he just wasn't the best.
268 cont'd:... anyone who feels that "the left" is discredited for that was probably just looking for an excuse to do so all along.
I mean, losers can "drop out" of the race and endorse the winner any time before the convention and it still works, I think. That's why there's a convention -- it's a (ceremonial) marker of the end of the nomination contest and the beginning of the general-election campaign.
It's just not worth spending emotional time and energy worrying about it.
I think 264 was what motivated his supporters, but it's not actually, you know, true (or more accurately it's no more or less true than it was before Sanders ran, ie it's true that hippie punching has consequences in some places but not others). Is Heidi Heitkamp moving to the left? Joe Manchin? McCaskill? Those are both states that Sanders won overwhelmingly. Corey Booker?
Of course, the party as a whole has moved substantially to the left since 2000 in general.
I don't think you're right that there was any discrediting at all.
When Sanders' base went off the deep end after he lost -- actually it started while it was clear he was losing, but it got really bad after his defeat and the surreal non-concession speech accurately lampooned here -- and took a long swirl down the conspiracy theory toilet bowl, the whole phenomenon went pretty quickly from inspirational to farcical. Yes, that's discrediting as hell, although hopefully the damage isn't permanent (and the real extent to which the Sanders base represents a "left" is complex, though they're certainly identified with it in popular assumption).
272 is all describing a bunch of inside baseball. Andy Borowitz? So it's "farcical" and "discredited" among a bunch of New Yorker readers like RT who saw it as farcical and discredited from Day One anyway. People have not decided that their enthusiasm, for a cause that always seemed very unlikely, was misplaced because the timing of some speech was wrong or because there is a "base" that "went off the deep end" in such a way as to annoy political pundits via Twitter.
People have not decided that their enthusiasm, for a cause that always seemed very unlikely, was misplaced
Depends on which "people" you're talking about. The "people" who are still pretending to themselves that there was never such a thing as Bernie Bro, say, might not be able to perceive a problem. But as a former Sandernista fellow-traveller from north of the border who was rooting for him through the early to mid primary, I can certainly tell you that the avalanche of stupid bullshit alienated me and I know damned well I'm not alone.
(and the real extent to which the Sanders base represents a "left" is complex, though they're certainly identified with it in popular assumption).
The Sanders base is young people. They are on the left. They are also the Elizabeth Warren base.
There were also a lot of Sanders voters who were just desperate to vote against Clinton because she personally is very unpopular (see the results among white people in North Dakota and West Virginia and wherever else). Seems like a good thing that those votes went to someone expressing uncompromising left-wing principles instead of whatever jerk was expected to be the doomed primary opponent, Jim Webb or whoever.
I'm actually not convinced that the ones who were eventually in the tank for every anti-Clinton conspiracy theory and moronic lying meme under the sun were really on "the left" or are part of the "Warren base." They turned on Warren with knives out too when she declared for Clinton.
There were many genuine leftists, of course, most of whom saw the writing on the wall and went over to Clinton long before Bernie condescended to do so.
267 - I don't want to overstate the "discredited" point-- mostly I think his legacy is nothing except making people angry and stupid, and the problem is mostly completely wasted time and emotional energy, not hurting the "left" as a whole. An embittering waste of time, but not discrediting for left-wing people who aren't Sanders himself or his absolute most die-hard insane supporters.
With that said, impressionistically I think that some generally left-leaning folks in the Dem party have taken away from his campaign "there's a whole wing of people who are fools who hate and you can't work with, so why try" as well as enhancing their self-identification as non-whatever Sanders is. This could be wrong and over-generalizing, but I think not. Speaking only personally, I'm much more skeptical of Sanders-identified purportedly "left" commentary, positions, and people now than I was a year ago (for lack of realism, not as a matter of general principle). That definitely may be my own poor judgment. But something like it seems to be shared by people I know, some of whom plausibly are in the Dem "establishment," whatever that is. In terms of actual policy preferences or results this probably won't matter at all, since I don't think it's an issue of becoming more right wing as much as it is disliking a swath of people who call themselves "left wing." But maybe it will. There's a legacy of bitterness there, for nothing gained.
Ned is right; I would only add that young people have very very good reasons for wanting big, ambitious things done. Economic outlooks for the 20-30 age range are extremely bleak no matter how you cut it. Coupled with rising living costs in major economic centers, this has created a world in which young people's' economic prospects are determined almost chiefly by how long their parents can afford to pay for their living expenses in a major economic center while they look for work. Even the winners of this game (and I count myself a winner) are mostly tired and burnt out on playing it.
Tangentially related: peoples' reactions to Warren endorsing HRC were good quick-and-dirty litmus tests. Anyone who called her a corporate sellout is someone I will never take seriously again.
To elaborate on 280, you can debate the merits (and reasonable people can disagree) of Bernie's and Hillary's actual abilities to materially help millennials, but you can hardly blame them for overwhelmingly lining up behind the guy who is offering the biggest imaginable programs for tackling the problems facing them.
I'm basically a single issue voter at this point, and my single issue is climate change. I have doubts about whether Sanders would have done anything useful to help, but I would at least have felt some hope about the possibility of some meaningful action. Whereas I really have very little doubt that Clinton will be terrible on this issue. (By "terrible" I mean take marginal steps at best.) I've said this before, but at this point in my mind there is no possible environmental protection/climate change mitigation plan that is too radical. A massive economic collapse (which is highly unlikely, but even if it happened) followed by decades of rebuilding would be preferable to the status quo, where the status quo is that an even more massive economic collapse and global societal disruption and breakdown are coming anyway if we don't do anything, and if we don't do something soon it will be irreversible. (In some ways it already is irreversible, of course. But eight more years without meaningful action? At that point we're probably done.)
I was going to add that it seems most left-leaning young people I talk to recently roughly feel the same way, which I thought made this relevant to the thread somehow, but now that I've typed it all out I've lost whatever connection I was trying to draw.
My single issue is not opening the Seventh Seal and unleashing the Apocalypse.
And I heard a great voice out of the temple saying to the seven angels, Go your ways, and pour out the vials of the wrath of God* upon the earth.
*rated at negative infinity rat orgasms
But does that mean you vote for or against opening the seventh seal?
After all, one of those positions comes with a unified voting bloc.
282
I feel somewhat similarly, except I'm fatalistic about the ability for anything to happen, so I'm not a single issue voter. Shit is going to get real far more quickly than people imagined. Upper predictions are a sea level rise of 1.5-2 meters by 2100, and so far reality has been worse than the models. Say goodbye to a large chunk of current landmass. I'm sure our population of 9 billion will be able to cooperate and peacefully figure out a solution to share increasingly scarce resources and redraw political and national boundaries once whole countries are underwater.
I personally think the primary system is kind of insane, but one virtue it has is that the person likeliest to be skilled at making something happen in the American political system is -- at least as regards primaries in actually functioning parties -- likely to win. Bernie was not the person to save the world from climate change (frankly nobody is, seems to me it passed the point of no return a decade ago), but at any rate if you're looking for someone to mitigate the damage and look toward a changing world I don't see how Hillary's platform on the issue is supposed to be somehow unambitious.
If only there was someone in the Senate who could push legislation on these issues.
/broken record
I don't think the Sanders campaign has been a complete failure, and don't think anyone credible has been discredited. The next nominee will be well to the left of HRC, and that's just fine.
This could make me go full Halford on Bernie.
Stein said she had made her offer directly to Sanders in an email at the end of the primary season, although she had not received a response.
Yeah, I'm not too worried about this one. Also, does Larry Sabato really think the Republican party was established in the 1880s? That's got to be an error on the Guardian's part, right?
And I'm sure Stormcrow will be along soon enough to unload on Sabato in general.
I'm not too worried, either, but if it were to occur it could genuinely make stuff worse. But I don't think he's quite that egotistical.
1880s vs 1850s must be a typo or other transcription error.
Anyway, to urple's 282, I don't think there was actually much difference between Sanders's and Clinton's climate change policies (and it wasn't a major point of difference either of them emphasized). To the extent there were differences they actually favored Clinton, since Sanders, in true Vermont hippie style, opposes nuclear power, which I think anyone who is actually serious about climate change realizes is a crucial component of a post-carbon energy future. We've definitely passed a point of no return already with climate change, and the effects are clearly apparent in the Arctic already, but there is still the opportunity for mitigation of the worst effects elsewhere, and the Obama administration has made a good start that Clinton promises to continue. The Paris agreement and the Clean Power Plan are real achievements. They definitely don't go far enough on their own, but they establish a starting point for further efforts that really can do a lot of good.
Do you recall the proximate cause of my Sabato hatred?
Who doesn't hate pizza and pasta that sit for so long under warming lights?
Does "Pale Ale" now mean "let's see how many fucking hops we can put in this"?
300, that's what India Pale Ale means.
It's not India Pale Ale. Just regular Pale Ale. It has a picture of Cleveland's most joked about environmental disaster on the bottle.
A drawing, not a picture. Because nothing says good beer like a drawing of a river so polluted it can burn.
298: It happened in Chama NM After a great vacation day in August 2004. Stupidly turned on CNN to learn of the renewed flare up of the Swift Boat thing (we had been media-free for a few days before that) with him chortling about it.
I did remember that there was some NM connection.
I think there's been at least some agreement among the fussy-beer breweries that beer that is basically just hop water spiked with some vodka or something isn't the only, or even the primary, thing that beer is, which is nice. There's still plenty of hoppy beer out there, and American beer is just generally hoppier than beer from other places across all styles*, but it has been toned down a lot since when it first started showing up.**
*I mean, come on does a darkish brown ale need a kick of citrusy hops? No. No it does not. And yet...
**Local fancy brewery Surly*** made its name with a nice but pretty hoppy IPA (Furious), but since then they've been releasing less and less hoppy beers.
***Totally unrelated to local fancy bikery of the same name. I have no idea what's up with that since if I had to describe characteristics of people living in the Twin Cities "surly" wouldn't show up very high on the list.
Also at some point certain people who have said a bunch of stuff about the race over the last nearly-a-year that have turned out to be false are going to be reassessing their priors and the extent to which they actually understand what's going on compared to the idiots and fools who have turned out to be right about all that stuff, right?
Sanders has been seeking policy concessions from Clinton on college tuition -- which happened Wednesday, as Clinton rolled out a proposal to make tuition free at in-state public colleges and universities for those earning less than $125,000 per year for a family of four. Also on Sanders' wish list: A commitment on health care to allow those aged 55 and older to buy into Medicare...And
The Democrats also said that the Sanders campaign was eager to see Mrs. Clinton take another step toward him on the issue of health care, perhaps by making a new commitment to press Congress to add a "public option" to the Affordable Care Act.Saturday
On Saturday morning, Hillary Clinton released a new health care policy proposal that emphasized several major progressive priorities, including a public option and increased funding for community health centers.
In the proposal, Clinton pledged:
To give Americans in every state a "public option" health insurance plan
To let Americans as young as 55 years old opt in to Medicare
And to double funding for primary care services at community health centers
And also also, as per that last item:
Clinton's campaign noted that Sanders had promoted doubling money for primary care services at federally qualified health centers. Money for these centers was increased under the Affordable Care Act, an effort led by the Vermont senator.And
Sanders scored a major victory Friday when the committee approved an amendment calling for increasing the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour.
The self-described "democratic socialist" had repeatedly called for the increase during his surprisingly strong campaign for the Democratic nomination. Clinton, had backed a $12 minimum wage, while saying she approved a $15 minimum wage in certain places.
An early draft of the platform contained language more consistent with Clinton's position, saying that "Americans should earn at least $15 an hour" without explicitly calling for that to be the new federal minimum.
However, the 187-member committee approved an amendment saying an increase from the current federal minimum of $7.25 an hour to $15 should happen "over time."
The Revolution is clearly at hand!