21st June 2016, 11:11 PM
22nd June 2016, 7:28 AM
That's true, but the no-fly list is still incredibly problematic, with no due-process at all, or a way to challenge being put on it, or any way to ever be taken off of it. The no-fly list is, frankly, unconstitutional. At best, a bill to keep anyone on the list from being able to buy the gun at least makes it less hypocritical.
Your argument for superdelegates seems to break down to: "Superdelegates: Don't you worry your pretty little heads, we know what's best for you."
And on Bernie not giving up, well, we'll see how the wind blows there (he is a politician after all, and ultimately I'm sure he'll fall in line), but is that really a reason to hate those who supported him? Sure, you'll pick candidates regardless of that, but you really seem to have a major bone to pick with Bernie on reasons of... well, "he's getting in the way". He attacked Hillary, yes, but he made some good points, and it's a political debate! What did you EXPECT? He's causing the democratic party problems, so you hate him. Well, parties SHOULD have problems, they SHOULD be challenged, and Bernie should serve, if nothing else, as a constant reminder that there's people who aren't happy with how things currently are, and how things really do seem to be controlled by a couple of warring factions, with the primary motivations being maintaining power, with actually serving the people secondary. Hillary is going to do more things for the people than Trump, that's a fact, but the reason I supported Bernie was that he actually seemed like he would do MORE of those things. I have little doubt that, push comes to serve, power will come first with both current candidates.
I've said all this to you, but I'm arguing the opposite with my family. You see, I'm stuck in the terrible position of having to get all the Bernie supporters in my family to vote anyway, on an "anti-Trump" platform. That's not easy, because historical "anti-other candidate" platforms lose, but this is the position we're in. Bernie fired up the base far more than Hillary did, and now he's out, so their position is "4 years of Trump might teach the democrats a lesson that we want real change". My uncle, for example, believes that Trump would cause less damage by sheer virtue of both sides of the aisle completely deadlocking him at every single point, so Trump would be put in a worse position than Obama was and ultimately be diffused. THIS is where we are, and you can kick and scream and say it's all Bernie's fault for making Hillary seem untrustworthy, but that's myopic. People have distrusted Hillary right from the start. Yes, some of it is the sexist block, but a lot of it comes down purely to the thing you keep pretending doesn't exist, Hillary's connections to big money. Why did people trust Sanders? He's run the platform he's run entirely on campaign donations. Regardless of how much of that is just a stunt carefully engineered to make him look the part vs how much was him genuinely sticking to his beliefs, the end result is the same. He's not going to serve the interests of major companies. If he's going to betray us, it'll be purely out of his own heart, a genuine betrayal just like mother used to make, and none of that corporate factory produced betrayal. Hillary will do some good things, but it's all those things she won't do, the feet she's never going to dare step on (to make sure those funds come back in for her second term run) that terrify the Bernie supporter so much. It's the big problem with the parties as they stand. They're far more interested in winning than in the policies. The republicans don't hate Trump because he's a bigoted idiot, but because that bigotry and idiocy will lose him the general election.
You're in a bad position here. There are a number of voters out there who, seeing two candidates they don't trust, are weary of being told "please just vote for the lesser of two evils one more time, NEXT time actual change will happen I promise!". A number are willing to watch the current political scene BURN TO THE GROUND so that we can just rebuild it from scratch, and I'm desperately trying to convince them just to keep things stable. You're dealing with a large number of liberal voters who think change can only now come when the current party system gets taken down, and Trump seems just the sort of natural disaster to make that happen. My only argument against them is that while Trump may very well implode the Republican party, the Democratic party will be completely unscathed and perhaps stronger after a Trump presidency. We would then have a de-facto one party system forever. I don't care how much you support the democrats "no matter what" (you can't seem to answer my question), you MUST admit that if the democrats were the only choice that could actually win elections, it would render democracy invalid and the democratic party would go full-corrupt within a few terms.
Your argument for superdelegates seems to break down to: "Superdelegates: Don't you worry your pretty little heads, we know what's best for you."
And on Bernie not giving up, well, we'll see how the wind blows there (he is a politician after all, and ultimately I'm sure he'll fall in line), but is that really a reason to hate those who supported him? Sure, you'll pick candidates regardless of that, but you really seem to have a major bone to pick with Bernie on reasons of... well, "he's getting in the way". He attacked Hillary, yes, but he made some good points, and it's a political debate! What did you EXPECT? He's causing the democratic party problems, so you hate him. Well, parties SHOULD have problems, they SHOULD be challenged, and Bernie should serve, if nothing else, as a constant reminder that there's people who aren't happy with how things currently are, and how things really do seem to be controlled by a couple of warring factions, with the primary motivations being maintaining power, with actually serving the people secondary. Hillary is going to do more things for the people than Trump, that's a fact, but the reason I supported Bernie was that he actually seemed like he would do MORE of those things. I have little doubt that, push comes to serve, power will come first with both current candidates.
I've said all this to you, but I'm arguing the opposite with my family. You see, I'm stuck in the terrible position of having to get all the Bernie supporters in my family to vote anyway, on an "anti-Trump" platform. That's not easy, because historical "anti-other candidate" platforms lose, but this is the position we're in. Bernie fired up the base far more than Hillary did, and now he's out, so their position is "4 years of Trump might teach the democrats a lesson that we want real change". My uncle, for example, believes that Trump would cause less damage by sheer virtue of both sides of the aisle completely deadlocking him at every single point, so Trump would be put in a worse position than Obama was and ultimately be diffused. THIS is where we are, and you can kick and scream and say it's all Bernie's fault for making Hillary seem untrustworthy, but that's myopic. People have distrusted Hillary right from the start. Yes, some of it is the sexist block, but a lot of it comes down purely to the thing you keep pretending doesn't exist, Hillary's connections to big money. Why did people trust Sanders? He's run the platform he's run entirely on campaign donations. Regardless of how much of that is just a stunt carefully engineered to make him look the part vs how much was him genuinely sticking to his beliefs, the end result is the same. He's not going to serve the interests of major companies. If he's going to betray us, it'll be purely out of his own heart, a genuine betrayal just like mother used to make, and none of that corporate factory produced betrayal. Hillary will do some good things, but it's all those things she won't do, the feet she's never going to dare step on (to make sure those funds come back in for her second term run) that terrify the Bernie supporter so much. It's the big problem with the parties as they stand. They're far more interested in winning than in the policies. The republicans don't hate Trump because he's a bigoted idiot, but because that bigotry and idiocy will lose him the general election.
You're in a bad position here. There are a number of voters out there who, seeing two candidates they don't trust, are weary of being told "please just vote for the lesser of two evils one more time, NEXT time actual change will happen I promise!". A number are willing to watch the current political scene BURN TO THE GROUND so that we can just rebuild it from scratch, and I'm desperately trying to convince them just to keep things stable. You're dealing with a large number of liberal voters who think change can only now come when the current party system gets taken down, and Trump seems just the sort of natural disaster to make that happen. My only argument against them is that while Trump may very well implode the Republican party, the Democratic party will be completely unscathed and perhaps stronger after a Trump presidency. We would then have a de-facto one party system forever. I don't care how much you support the democrats "no matter what" (you can't seem to answer my question), you MUST admit that if the democrats were the only choice that could actually win elections, it would render democracy invalid and the democratic party would go full-corrupt within a few terms.
22nd June 2016, 7:26 PM
Dark Jaguar Wrote:That's true, but the no-fly list is still incredibly problematic, with no due-process at all, or a way to challenge being put on it, or any way to ever be taken off of it. The no-fly list is, frankly, unconstitutional. At best, a bill to keep anyone on the list from being able to buy the gun at least makes it less hypocritical.We need to do something to combat things like 9/11 or shootings like this, though...
Quote:Your argument for superdelegates seems to break down to: "Superdelegates: Don't you worry your pretty little heads, we know what's best for you."Oh come on, that's not it at all. You REALLY think that it'd be good for this country if we had more insane, lie-driven hate campaigns like Trump's taking over both parties, instead of just one? I sure don't. And the Republican Party doesn't either, which is why many in that party are still talking about changing the convention rules to stop Trump even though he clearly won their nomination by the current rules.
But to defend superdelegates more directly, this is a representative democracy, you know. Representative, as in, we choose people who vote for us, instead of every citizen voting on every bill, classical Athenian-style. Superdelegates are mostly current for former state representatives, congresspeople, senators, governors, and the like -- the kinds of people who have been voted in to office to represent their party's supporters. I would expect them to know more about the system than random voter Q, yes. That doesn't mean they're always right of course, and that's why we have a primary s & caucus system now instead of the old smoke-filled back rooms where parties chose their candidates, but again, superdelegates have so far been a paper tiger, a threat to the primary vote that is never real because they haven't overturned the will of the voters. And they won't, unless there is an extraordinarily bad candidate. "Superdelegates: we're irrelevbant unless the party goes as insane as the Republicans have" would be a better way to sum them up, I would say. :)
Quote:And on Bernie not giving up, well, we'll see how the wind blows there (he is a politician after all, and ultimately I'm sure he'll fall in line), but is that really a reason to hate those who supported him? Sure, you'll pick candidates regardless of that, but you really seem to have a major bone to pick with Bernie on reasons of... well, "he's getting in the way". He attacked Hillary, yes, but he made some good points, and it's a political debate! What did you EXPECT? He's causing the democratic party problems, so you hate him. Well, parties SHOULD have problems, they SHOULD be challenged, and Bernie should serve, if nothing else, as a constant reminder that there's people who aren't happy with how things currently are, and how things really do seem to be controlled by a couple of warring factions, with the primary motivations being maintaining power, with actually serving the people secondary. Hillary is going to do more things for the people than Trump, that's a fact, but the reason I supported Bernie was that he actually seemed like he would do MORE of those things. I have little doubt that, push comes to serve, power will come first with both current candidates.Your hate for all political parties is as usual very far off-base, but beyond that, there is a key thing here that you miss -- there is a HUGE difference between the things said during a campaign, and those said after it. If you look at 2008, the Obama-Clinton race was heated. Both said nasty things about the other, and indeed by some measures it was a more negative race than 2016 has been. There were negative TV ads in the Democratic primaries in '08 for example, while this year there were none; the attacks this time were in person, online, and such, but not in television ads. And Hillary did not concede until all of the states had voted, breaking the usual precedent of giving up once it's probable you are going to lose. Maybe you forget how negative 2008 was, but it got bad at times, just as things did this year.
But once all the votes were cast, Hillary conceded defeat, endorsed Obama, and went on to be his Secretary of State. She did not throw an absurd fit like Bernie has been by refusing to concede; she did not continue promising a contested convention, but instead, at the 2008 convention, called for a unanimous vote for Obama as a show of unity, and that is indeed what happened; and she campaigned hard for him for the rest of that year. This is what you do when you want your party to win an election: even if you lost the primary, you do everything possible to help your nominee win, because they're still way better than whoever the other party's candidate is.
But Bernie? Bernie's being a sore loser. He lost, but is refusing to concede or endorse. Instead, he throws demands at Hillary as conditions for his support, as if the winner must concede to the loser instead of the other way around! It's ridiculous. Hillary would never behave like this if she lost, as you see from what she did in '08. Bernie's not getting much press anymore, and has said that he is committed to defeating Donald Trump in November, but it's been weeks now since the final votes and months since it became obvious who would win based on votes cast so far, and he's still promising a floor fight at the convention. I've wondered for months now, who would get more votes at their convention, Hillary or Trump? If Bernie's delegates are as recalcitrant as Bernie is, it could go either way. All of this is exactly the kind of party infighting that helped make Reagan's 1980 victory much easier. The Republicans must be furious that instead of having a good chance they're stuck with an openly racist lunatic... but even so you can never take anything for granted, and Bernie IS now hurting the party by not conceding. We need to work to unite to win in November, not fight over minor issues which are pretty unimportant compared to the vast gulf between the two parties on almost every issue now.
Why hasn't he conceded? It's probably partially just not wanting to give up on a campaign that has brought him so much farther than anyone could have guessed at the beginning, yes. But also, Bernie's always been a purist, for good or ill. Ever since at least the early '90s, he's projected that aura of "if you disagree with me you're probably corrupt", as Barney Frank hit him for back in '91 (quote earlier in the thread). Or for a concrete example,. in 1993, Bernie opposed Hillary's health care bill, the great failed effort of Bill Clinton's first term in office, because it wasn't single payer. He chose to make the perfect the enemy of the good, and opposed a good bill because it wasn't perfect enough for him. When you're in congress you absolutely should push for the best bill you can get, but sometimes you need to support what results because it's as good a bill as can actually happen. His wasn't the deciding vote, but still, that attitude has negative consequences. It did in '93, and wee're seeing it again as he makes conditional demands for his support.
Lood, I do like Berni. I admire his advocacy for the poor and middle class, I absolutely think we need single-payer health care, and yes, the big banks are too powerful. But he lost, and if he keeps this up it'll hurt as his remaining supporters continue to cling to Bernie instead of accepting the will of the voters. And many people HAVE done that switch -- as Bernie stubbornly stayed in the race, attacking Hillary in the later votes even though the end result was clear, more and more of his supporters have abandoned him. I read Daily Kos every day, and as you may know that site explicitly is a pro-Democratic Party site, and many Bernie supporters eventually left because of the tenor of the campaign and his refusal to quit. Of course many others online and off till stick to hitting Hillary from the left, but there has been a definite reaction against Bernie because of the nature of the later parts of his campaign, starting with the negative attacks on Clinton and ending with this. Bernie is a great advocate for his causes, but the best way to do that now is not still as a Presidential candidate for 2016.
Quote:THIS is where we are, and you can kick and scream and say it's all Bernie's fault for making Hillary seem untrustworthy, but that's myopic. People have distrusted Hillary right from the start.Indeed, because as the evidence proves (the links I provided previously and more along those lines), too many people believe the Republican Party's 24-year-long sexism-based hate campaign Hillary has been subjected to. You absolutely cannot separate gender from this mythical "she's actually corrupt" falsehood, because if she were male she wouldn't be treated like this.
Quote:Yes, some of it is the sexist block,More like most of it.
Quote:but a lot of it comes down purely to the thing you keep pretending doesn't exist, Hillary's connections to big money.The ridiculous myth that Hillary is corrupt is an interesting one because when you ask anyone for examples, they don't have any. She's corrupt because... well, as Bernie says, because she's been given money by rich people, which means that maybe she'll vote the way those rich people want and not the way I, Bernie Sanders, would in that instance! But the problem is, he has no proof, because there is none. Hillary is not corrupt, and does not do anything that is not something all candidates do -- take money from the people willing to give it so that you can afford the insanely expensive process of running a modern political campaign. Hillary's counterpoint to Bernie's insinuations along this like in the debates, that Obama took a lot of money from bankers and then passed some pretty solid banking reforms regardless of what Wall Street thought, was a very good one in my view, and shows how wrong this line of thinking is. Yes, corruption is possible, and I'm sure there are corrupt Democrats. But do not accuse people of corruption with no proof, without even the suggestion of any actual corruption beyond normal campaign contributions and paid speechgiving! Come on, that's absolutely ridiculous. Hillary is as trustworthy as most any politician today, which means she mostly tells the truth. Not always of course, but mostly. Her truth-to-lie ratios (from links I gave previously) are good, and she was quite liberal as a US Senator from 2000-2008, one of the more liberal senators during that time.
Quote:Why did people trust Sanders? He's run the platform he's run entirely on campaign donations. Regardless of how much of that is just a stunt carefully engineered to make him look the part vs how much was him genuinely sticking to his beliefs, the end result is the same. He's not going to serve the interests of major companies. If he's going to betray us, it'll be purely out of his own heart, a genuine betrayal just like mother used to make, and none of that corporate factory produced betrayal. Hillary will do some good things, but it's all those things she won't do, the feet she's never going to dare step on (to make sure those funds come back in for her second term run) that terrify the Bernie supporter so much. It's the big problem with the parties as they stand. They're far more interested in winning than in the policies. The republicans don't hate Trump because he's a bigoted idiot, but because that bigotry and idiocy will lose him the general election.You're far too cynical about how much we can get done. Do you think Obama got almost nothing done either? Hillary will be at least as liberal as Obama, maybe more so depending on the issue.
Quote:You're in a bad position here. There are a number of voters out there who, seeing two candidates they don't trust, are weary of being told "please just vote for the lesser of two evils one more time, NEXT time actual change will happen I promise!". A number are willing to watch the current political scene BURN TO THE GROUND so that we can just rebuild it from scratch, and I'm desperately trying to convince them just to keep things stable. You're dealing with a large number of liberal voters who think change can only now come when the current party system gets taken down, and Trump seems just the sort of natural disaster to make that happen.Anyone who even vaguely pretends to be "liberal" would never, ever support Trump. Never. Neofascist autocracy is not the way to make America a better democracy, fairly obviously...
Quote: My only argument against them is that while Trump may very well implode the Republican party, the Democratic party will be completely unscathed and perhaps stronger after a Trump presidency. We would then have a de-facto one party system forever. I don't care how much you support the democrats "no matter what" (you can't seem to answer my question), you MUST admit that if the democrats were the only choice that could actually win elections, it would render democracy invalid and the democratic party would go full-corrupt within a few terms.Of course you need two parties, yes. Look at China, even though its government now is not as awful as it once was, the one-party state is still very corrupt and not a good government. That's why the Republican Party's collapse has been so unfortunate -- you need competition to have a functioning democracy, and with their party descending into racist borderline fascism and absolute "give us 100% of what we want or we give you nothing" idiocy that goes vastly far beyond Bernies' predilections in the opposite direction, we're losing that. But indeed, you need competition to have a good government... so what do you do? Just continue hoping \that someday the Republicans come to their senses and decide to allow government to function again? Remember, "let's make sure nothing happens" has been the Republicans' primary governing principle throughout Obama's entire presidency. Here's hoping someday they become a normal party again, but beyond hope I don't know if there's anything much else that we can do, besides defeat Trump hopefully crushingly and try to squish the crazy-racist wing of their party in the fallout.
23rd June 2016, 9:52 AM
You know why Clinton conceded so easily eight years ago? The only point to her running is to satisfy her tremendous sense of personal ambition. There was always next time. She wasn't advocating for transformative change that is decades overdue and the plight of millions working their hands to the bone just to make ends meet is not a plight that carries any meaning to her (why would it? She has no personal experience with actually struggling). It was just an unfortunate defeat for a career politician in the American Game of Thrones, suffered because having the first black president was a bigger deal to America than the first woman president.
Mark my words, her entire campaign from now going forward is going to be anti-Trump sentiment, scaring the electorate to vote against Trump because it's a lot easier than coming up with good reasons to vote for her. Now that she has purchased the nomination, she does not have to waste any time making promises she has no intention of keeping to the progressives she and the Democratic machine helped to quash for now. She's just another politician, completely lacking in sincerity or core beliefs.
Mark my words, her entire campaign from now going forward is going to be anti-Trump sentiment, scaring the electorate to vote against Trump because it's a lot easier than coming up with good reasons to vote for her. Now that she has purchased the nomination, she does not have to waste any time making promises she has no intention of keeping to the progressives she and the Democratic machine helped to quash for now. She's just another politician, completely lacking in sincerity or core beliefs.
23rd June 2016, 7:45 PM
Weltall Wrote:You know why Clinton conceded so easily eight years ago?Hillary Clinton conceded late eight years ago, in fact. She waited all the way until every vote had been cast until she finally surrendered to the obvious and admitted defeat! That's not what candidates normally do; normally, candidates in both parties concede once their defeat is near-certain. This comes long before all votes have been cast. For a good example of this, look at all of the Republicans this year. They each gave up once it was obvious they were going to lose, excepting Kasich I guess but he wasn't a strong enough candidate to matter much outside of Ohio. Holding on until all the votes have been counted even though defeat is near-certain does happen every so often, Jerry Brown did that in '92 running against Bill Clinton, but more common is campaigns like Bill Bradley's in '00 or Howard Dean's in '04, candidates who conceded once they knew they couldn't win. Saying that Hillary conceded "easily" or "early" is bizarre and the opposite of what she did.
Quote:The only point to her running is to satisfy her tremendous sense of personal ambition. There was always next time. She wasn't advocating for transformative change that is decades overdue and the plight of millions working their hands to the bone just to make ends meet is not a plight that carries any meaning to her (why would it? She has no personal experience with actually struggling). It was just an unfortunate defeat for a career politician in the American Game of Thrones,I'm sorry, but I don't think there is any possible way that anyone would be criticizing a man for being ambitious as people, sadly including you, are critical of Hillary for. It's a purely sexist charge as far as I am concerned. I have never seen any male politician have this charge aimed at him like it is at Hillary, and I do think there's a gender-based reason for that.
Beyond that, you under-estimate Hillary's liberalism. You do know that Hillary was running to Obama's left on health care in '08 for example, yes? Between the two of them, Obama was slightly more to the left on foreign affairs, and Hillary more to the left on domestic affairs, I would say. But both were VERY close on most issues; the differences between them are relatively minor for the most part.
Quote:suffered because having the first black president was a bigger deal to America than the first woman president.I'd say that it's more that his victory showed that black men, despite being black, when compared to any woman still have the huge electoral advantage of being male.
Quote:Mark my words, her entire campaign from now going forward is going to be anti-Trump sentiment, scaring the electorate to vote against Trump because it's a lot easier than coming up with good reasons to vote for her. Now that she has purchased the nomination, she does not have to waste any time making promises she has no intention of keeping to the progressives she and the Democratic machine helped to quash for now. She's just another politician, completely lacking in sincerity or core beliefs.It is incredibly sad that you believe things like these... :bummed: Did you read any of the things I linked for you before?
A Black Falcon Wrote:http://www.vox.com/2016/2/3/10909354/mor...b-woodward - That Bob Woodward video was pretty shocking, seeing a famous journalist being so blatantly sexist like that...Look at that second article in particular. To repeat myself, because I don't see a response to my last post, Hillary won because she worked very hard for this through the normal way people gain support within a party, by building relationships -- see the second link above for more on this. You warp this into "buying the election" in a failed attempt to make success look bad. She won the election fair and square through the normal political processes. And while as president I'm sure she will sometimes frustrate, as Obama has, she will also bring through a lot of important changes, as Obama has.
http://www.vox.com/2016/6/7/11879728/hil...nomination - Research shows that women's voices are looked on negatively when they speak like we expect men to. Also, Hillary doesn't get the credit she deserves for her political skills.
http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/6/1...linton-won - And yet somehow it's HER who needs to make the changes to meet the man's demands, something Obama did not have pressed on him back in 2008 when he won.
Etc etc. You cannot say that gender has been an incredibly huge drag on her candidacy, it would not be true. This sketch from Jimmy Kimmel's show (with Hillary as the guest) a few months ago remains one of the best explanations out there of the problem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2wBpYT6Zlo
As for her campaign, she will run a campaign partially positive and partially negative, the way campaigns always are. There are a lot of positives to focus on -- appealing to women as the first woman with a major party's nomination, telling her personal story (about her mother, etc.), and such. For issue ads, I think that talking about gun control (I'm very happy to see this sit-in in the House, we need more things like this, to finally push this country to doing something about guns again!) will be something she surely mentions often. She'll also have ads about health care, education, etc., of course. And yes, there will be ads against Trump, if he is indeed the Republicans' nominee, but there are so many reason to vote FOR Hillary that it'd be quite foolish to run an all-negative campaign! And it wouldn't work either, people do not like too-negative politicial campaigns.
24th June 2016, 5:02 PM
ABF, we don't need proof that Clinton has actually made some promises to the people giving her money. We would if we were going to try and indite her, but that's not the issue here.
The issue is one of conflicting interests. It's a matter of trust. Yes, she may not actually be doing anything for these groups giving her money, but I'm less inclined to trust someone taking money from these groups than I am someone who is not taking that money.
By now, you should be aware enough to realize money doesn't change hands like that for no reason. It's suspect, and worth doubting. Try applying that sort of blind trust in the face of suspicious activity to other authorities. Republicans are taking money from gun rights lobbyists. Are you going to tell me "sure, but there's no proof that they are basing their policies on those funds"? No, of course not. It's a conflict of interest. It's the same reason judges can't accept "gifts" from people who's cases they are or might preside over. Yes, you COULD say "this gift will have no effect on my ruling", but you know very well that's naive. If Clinton decides NOT to favor these major companies with policies they like, if she goes against them, she won't be getting their money in her second term election. She "owes" them, in a way Bernie does not. It doesn't matter that no concrete deal was made, the seeds have been sown.
Anyway, Bernie has come out and said he's voting for Clinton. He wasn't giving his resounding support for her, but rather saying basically "don't let Trump win". I suppose next you'll be saying you're mad at Bernie for not fawning over Clinton and singing her praises to the masses like he's supposed to.
Oh, and thank you for making it clear that there are conditions where you would reject the democrats. It is VERY important that you don't treat being a democrat as part of your own identity, at the very least. Trust me, when you attach yourself to a group, or rather the name of a group, as a fundamental aspect of your core identity, it makes it very hard to break away when that group goes bad (or is exposed to have always been bad).
The issue is one of conflicting interests. It's a matter of trust. Yes, she may not actually be doing anything for these groups giving her money, but I'm less inclined to trust someone taking money from these groups than I am someone who is not taking that money.
By now, you should be aware enough to realize money doesn't change hands like that for no reason. It's suspect, and worth doubting. Try applying that sort of blind trust in the face of suspicious activity to other authorities. Republicans are taking money from gun rights lobbyists. Are you going to tell me "sure, but there's no proof that they are basing their policies on those funds"? No, of course not. It's a conflict of interest. It's the same reason judges can't accept "gifts" from people who's cases they are or might preside over. Yes, you COULD say "this gift will have no effect on my ruling", but you know very well that's naive. If Clinton decides NOT to favor these major companies with policies they like, if she goes against them, she won't be getting their money in her second term election. She "owes" them, in a way Bernie does not. It doesn't matter that no concrete deal was made, the seeds have been sown.
Anyway, Bernie has come out and said he's voting for Clinton. He wasn't giving his resounding support for her, but rather saying basically "don't let Trump win". I suppose next you'll be saying you're mad at Bernie for not fawning over Clinton and singing her praises to the masses like he's supposed to.
Oh, and thank you for making it clear that there are conditions where you would reject the democrats. It is VERY important that you don't treat being a democrat as part of your own identity, at the very least. Trust me, when you attach yourself to a group, or rather the name of a group, as a fundamental aspect of your core identity, it makes it very hard to break away when that group goes bad (or is exposed to have always been bad).
24th June 2016, 9:01 PM
On the note of Hillary and trust, this is a very good long post in defense of Hillary, and it looks into why Hillary is hated. And yes, it's because of sexism. In short, Hillary's poll numbers go up when she's not running for an office, but go down while she is running for any higher office because people punish her for being a woman with ambition. But the article's great and goes into a lot of detail, so just read it:
Oh, and as for trust? The first mention of "Hillary as liar" that the author found was an editorial written in 1996 by right-winger William Safire. None of his claims were in any way true, but the Republicans loved it and immediately started repeating that lie, and 20 years of that Republican repetition have convinced even some liberals that she has a truth problem that does not exist in reality. This shows the power of the right-wing PR machine!
http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/6/1...-ever-seen
Collecting money from people is not in and of itself suspicious, it's trying to win an election! There is only one way to win in this country: raise a lot of money. A LOT of money. In 2012 at least a billion dollars were spent for example, between both sides. You cannot pay all of those bills from $27 donations from average people. And yes, sometimes this leads to corruption, to people doing things for their donors that they shouldn't, but blaming all for the actions of some is wrong, and without MASSIVE campaign finance reform it is the only way to run political campaigns in this country. I'd love to see that reform, money in politics is one of the biggest problems in hour democracy this side of gerrymandering, but for now, all we can do is take money from those who want to help defeat the worse party. And as I pointed out last time donors do not always get what they want, as you see with Obama taking lots of money from people in banks, and then passing decently good new banking regulations. Just because you take money from people does not mean you're obligated to support them, and politicians often do things some of their donors oppose. Yes, the powerful do have influence and there is no way to entirely negate that (money talks; the concept of all people having equal influence on politicians seems impossible), but crying corruption with ABSOLUTELY NO PROOF is wrong! And there isn't just no proof, there is the opposite, such as that Politifact determined that Hillary was the most truthful candidate running for president this cycle. You're making impossible demands solely to tear down Hillary, and political parties in general. (And no, I do not thing Bernie is some innocent, somehow unchanged by his over 25 years as an elected representative and senator in Washington. Yeah, right.)
Or at the article I linked earlier in this post says it:
Oh, and as for trust? The first mention of "Hillary as liar" that the author found was an editorial written in 1996 by right-winger William Safire. None of his claims were in any way true, but the Republicans loved it and immediately started repeating that lie, and 20 years of that Republican repetition have convinced even some liberals that she has a truth problem that does not exist in reality. This shows the power of the right-wing PR machine!
http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/6/1...-ever-seen
Dark Jaguar Wrote:Anyway, Bernie has come out and said he's voting for Clinton. He wasn't giving his resounding support for her, but rather saying basically "don't let Trump win". I suppose next you'll be saying you're mad at Bernie for not fawning over Clinton and singing her praises to the masses like he's supposed to.It's a step, but he still has not conceded or endorsed her, so it's kind of a half step forward, without doing all of what's needed. Better than nothing though, sure.
Quote:The issue is one of conflicting interests. It's a matter of trust. Yes, she may not actually be doing anything for these groups giving her money, but I'm less inclined to trust someone taking money from these groups than I am someone who is not taking that money.This is holding Hillary to a standard that no major Presidential candidate has ever been held to before. Surely you can see the gender-based double standard in that fact! (See link above also.)
By now, you should be aware enough to realize money doesn't change hands like that for no reason. It's suspect, and worth doubting. Try applying that sort of blind trust in the face of suspicious activity to other authorities. Republicans are taking money from gun rights lobbyists. Are you going to tell me "sure, but there's no proof that they are basing their policies on those funds"? No, of course not. It's a conflict of interest. It's the same reason judges can't accept "gifts" from people who's cases they are or might preside over. Yes, you COULD say "this gift will have no effect on my ruling", but you know very well that's naive. If Clinton decides NOT to favor these major companies with policies they like, if she goes against them, she won't be getting their money in her second term election. She "owes" them, in a way Bernie does not. It doesn't matter that no concrete deal was made, the seeds have been sown.
Collecting money from people is not in and of itself suspicious, it's trying to win an election! There is only one way to win in this country: raise a lot of money. A LOT of money. In 2012 at least a billion dollars were spent for example, between both sides. You cannot pay all of those bills from $27 donations from average people. And yes, sometimes this leads to corruption, to people doing things for their donors that they shouldn't, but blaming all for the actions of some is wrong, and without MASSIVE campaign finance reform it is the only way to run political campaigns in this country. I'd love to see that reform, money in politics is one of the biggest problems in hour democracy this side of gerrymandering, but for now, all we can do is take money from those who want to help defeat the worse party. And as I pointed out last time donors do not always get what they want, as you see with Obama taking lots of money from people in banks, and then passing decently good new banking regulations. Just because you take money from people does not mean you're obligated to support them, and politicians often do things some of their donors oppose. Yes, the powerful do have influence and there is no way to entirely negate that (money talks; the concept of all people having equal influence on politicians seems impossible), but crying corruption with ABSOLUTELY NO PROOF is wrong! And there isn't just no proof, there is the opposite, such as that Politifact determined that Hillary was the most truthful candidate running for president this cycle. You're making impossible demands solely to tear down Hillary, and political parties in general. (And no, I do not thing Bernie is some innocent, somehow unchanged by his over 25 years as an elected representative and senator in Washington. Yeah, right.)
Quote:If Clinton decides NOT to favor these major companies with policies they like, if she goes against them, she won't be getting their money in her second term election.This is not true. When deciding to give money, the thought process is similar to when you choose how to vote -- you look at the candidates, and support the best one. Liberal bankers who dislike some strict new banking rule would almost certainly still financially support the Democratic candidate because the Republicans would be far, far worse.
Or at the article I linked earlier in this post says it:
Quote:3) Money — OK let’s talk about her money. Hillary has a lot of it. And she has earned most of it through well-paid speaking fees. And the idea of getting paid $200,000 or more for a single speech seems so ludicrous to many people that they assume that it simply must be some form of bribery. But the truth is that there is a large, well-established and extremely lucrative industry for speaking and appearance fees. And within that industry many celebrities, sports stars, business leaders and former politicians get paid very well. At her most popular for example, Paris Hilton was being paid as much as $750,000 just to make an appearance. Kylie Jenner was once paid over $100,000 to go to her own birthday party, and to this day Vanilla Ice gets $15,000 simply to show up with his hat turned sideways.
And let’s talk about the more cerebral cousin of the appearance agreement, which is the speaking engagement. Is $200k really that unusual? In fact “All American Speakers”, the agency that represents Clinton, currently represents 135 people whose MINIMUM speaking fee is $200,000. Some of the luminaries that get paid this much include: Guy Fieri, Ang Lee, Carla Delevingne, Chelsea Handler, Elon Musk, Mehmet Oz, Michael Phelps, Nate Berkus, and “Larry the Cable Guy”. And no that last one is not a joke. And if you drop the speaking fee to $100k, the number of people they represent jumps to over 500. At $50,000 the number jumps to over 1,200. And All American Speakers are obviously not the only agency that represents speakers. So there are in fact thousands of people getting paid this kind of money to give a speech.
For millions of Americans struggling to pay their bills, the very idea that someone can make $100,000 or more for just giving a speech or hanging out at a Vegas nightclub is obscene. But as Richard Nixon used to say, “don’t hate the player, hate the game.” Hillary didn’t invent the speaking engagement industry, and she isn’t anywhere near the first person to make a lot of money from it. And while her fees are in the upper range of what speakers make, neither they nor the total amount of money she has made are unusual. It’s just unusual FOR A WOMAN.
And yes, I’m back on that, because I feel compelled to point out that before he ran for President in 2007, Rudy Giuliani was making about $700,000 a month in speaking fees with an average of $270k per speech. It’s estimated that in the 5 years before his run he earned as much as $40 million in speaking fees. Nobody cared, no accusations of impropriety were made, and there was almost no media interest. So why did Giuliani get a pass, while Hillary stands accused of inherent corruption for making less money doing the same thing?
And speaking of corruption, after leaving the Florida governor’s office Jeb Bush made millions of dollars in paid speeches. This includes large sums he collected from a South Korean metals company that reaped over a BILLION dollars in contracts from his brother’s presidential administration. Speaking to an Indian newspaper about this type of thing Bush said, “This is the life of being the brother of the president.” Do you remember reading all about that while Jeb was running for President? I didn’t think so. Jeb got a pass too.
So if this discussion is really about money in politics that’s fine. But I’m going to need someone to explain to me why we only seem to focus on it when the person making the money has a vagina.
4) Wall Street — First things first. No, the majority of the money Clinton has made from speaking fees did not come from Wall Street. In fact it’s not even close. She has given nearly 100 paid speeches since leaving the State Dept., and only 8 were to “Wall Street” banks. Nearly all of her speeches were to organizations like American Camping Association, Ebay, Cisco, Xerox, Cardiovascular Research Foundation, United Fresh Produce Association, International Deli-Dairy-Bakery Association, California Medial Association, A&E Television Networks, Massachusetts Conference for Women, U.S. Green Building Council, National Association of Realtors, American Society of Travel Agents, Gap, National Association of Convenience Stores, the National Association of Chain Drug Stores, Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries, etc.
Corporations and Associations pay large fees for important speakers all of the time. And Hillary got booked fairly often because she is interesting and popular, and because there’s a great deal of status attached to having her speak at an event. Ignoring all of this however, a large contingent of anti-Hillary people continue to insist that all speaker’s fees from Wall Street banks were bribes, and that because of this they “own” her. But by that logic shouldn’t we all be asking what the fuck the American Camping Association is up to?
Also, with the possible exception of one speech given to Deutsche Bank, all of Hillary’s 8 speeches to Wall Street were for a speaking fee of $225,000. That does not even break the top 20 of her highest paid speeches. For example she received over $275,000 each in three speeches she gave to The Vancouver Board of Trade, the Board of Trade of Metropolitan Montreal, and Canada 2020. So apparently Canadians also “own” her. And I don’t know what those nefarious Canadians are up to, but it probably has something to do with goddamn poutine. Which would really piss me off except I just remembered that I kind of like poutine so never mind.
Listen, does Wall Street have influence with Hillary? Grow up, of course they do. Wall Street is one of the key engines of the American economy, and as such has enormous influence with everyone. EVERYONE. Don’t kid yourself on that point. And aside from anything else, she was a 2-term Senator of New York, and this made Wall Street an important corporate member of her constituency. The issue is not influence. The issue is whether or not paid speeches and campaign donations alone are proof of corruption. And they’re not. And the last time I checked there was an important difference between association and guilt, between proof and slander.
And again: why is Hillary being held to a standard that never appears to be applied to her male counterparts? Am I not supposed to notice that a media frenzy has been aimed at Hillary Clinton for accepting speaking fees of $225,000 while Donald Trump has been paid $1.5 MILLION on numerous occasions with hardly a word said about it? Am I supposed to not notice that we are now in an election season in which Donald Trump, a proud scam artist whose involvement in “Trump University” alone is being defined by the New York Attorney General as “straight-up fraud”, is regularly calling Hillary Clinton “Crooked Hillary” and getting away with it?
What the actual fuck is going on here? What’s going on is what we all know, but mostly don’t want to admit: presidential campaigns favor men, and the men who campaign in them are rewarded for those traits perceived as being “manly” - physical size, charisma, forceful personality, assertiveness, boldness and volume. Women who evince those same traits however are usually punished rather than rewarded, and a lot of the negativity aimed at Hillary over the years, especially when she is seeking office, has been due to these underlying biases. There is simply no question that Hillary has for years been on the business end of an unrelenting double standard. And her battle with societal sexism isn’t going to stop because of her success anymore than Obama’s battle with racism stopped once he was elected. These are generational issues, and we are who we are.
25th June 2016, 4:35 PM
Is it holding her to a standard no one has been held to before? Absolutely! We've all been fools not to consider it important! I can't say if it's sexism that's fueling lots of this sort of comment on her or not (I'm sure it is), but there's another factor. This is the first time in a good long while we've had two major candidates that AREN'T being funded by major political interest groups, at least as far as I know. When the entire field was taking all these donations from the special interest groups, it wasn't something we could use to filter it, but now we've got that. Obama certainly was taking a lot of these donations, and well, Obama has been a bit disappointing and isn't the golden hope we were all dreaming of. I'm not saying Obama has done nothing, but face facts, Obama didn't need congress' permission to close all the camps in Guantanamo Bay. He could have closed Echo with a single executive order, but didn't. Anyway, I'm not going to let the perfect be the enemy of the good here. Voting for Clinton is better than Trump. PLENTY of sexists have been slamming Clinton unfairly. That's a fact, but my criticism of her isn't because I'm suddenly picking nits I never picked on before. It's because I WOKE UP. I've realized the systemic problems the entire system has. I'm not claiming conspiracy. I'm claiming far too many politicians are acting in their own selfish interests resulting in a massive mess. No need for conspiracy there, it's just a bunch of random people plotting a bunch of conflicting nonsense that ultimately hurts us far too often, and for decades. So, I've decided the best way to put a stop to it is to start looking for conflicts of interest in candidates and pick accordingly. It's something we SHOULD have been doing all along. But, I'll give you this. 4 years from now, you can gladly take me to task on this. If I'm just letting these conflicts of interest slide in 4 years' time, get on me for my hypocrisy.
As for the gun issue, I have to say this, I've changed my mind on the no guns for those on the no fly list. On the face of it, it's blindly true that possible terrorists shouldn't be getting guns. Everyone can agree on that (and most Americans do), but the problem is the no-fly list is horrible government overreach, and when we say "okay, in this case, let's go ahead and expand it", we're tacitly saying "okay, it's fine to have a lack of due process for this". There's hypocrisy in it, but this is one of the few times when the slope really is slippery. Gun rights need answers, and the Dem's OTHER bill was a no brainer that should have passed.
Now, the FBI's most-wanted list DOES have oversight on it. Let's use that as our model instead and ban anyone on the most-wanted list from buying a gun.
As for the gun issue, I have to say this, I've changed my mind on the no guns for those on the no fly list. On the face of it, it's blindly true that possible terrorists shouldn't be getting guns. Everyone can agree on that (and most Americans do), but the problem is the no-fly list is horrible government overreach, and when we say "okay, in this case, let's go ahead and expand it", we're tacitly saying "okay, it's fine to have a lack of due process for this". There's hypocrisy in it, but this is one of the few times when the slope really is slippery. Gun rights need answers, and the Dem's OTHER bill was a no brainer that should have passed.
Now, the FBI's most-wanted list DOES have oversight on it. Let's use that as our model instead and ban anyone on the most-wanted list from buying a gun.
27th June 2016, 8:29 PM
Dark Jaguar Wrote:Is it holding her to a standard no one has been held to before? Absolutely! We've all been fools not to consider it important! I can't say if it's sexism that's fueling lots of this sort of comment on her or not (I'm sure it is), but there's another factor. This is the first time in a good long while we've had two major candidates that AREN'T being funded by major political interest groups, at least as far as I know. When the entire field was taking all these donations from the special interest groups, it wasn't something we could use to filter it, but now we've got that.So what's your plan to fund a $500 million to a billion dollar presidental election cycle through $27 donations only? It'd never haoppen. The only way to get money out of politics would be ot have rules like England's, where political campaign ads aren't allowed except in certain, limited preset times... but with our stronger First Amendment rights, that'd never pass muster here I think. Alternatively, what? Mandate public funding of campaigns? But SuperPACs, etc, exist, and for every campaign-funding loophole you close, rich people find another way to spend money to influence elections. We badly need to reign in PACs and such, but that'll only happen with a Supreme Court willing to overturn Citizen's United -- and even then we still have VERY expensive election cycles, as there is next to no chance of getting rid of the current ad model of presidential campaigning, where campaigns, PACs, and the like all pay TV stations individually for ad time and there is no limit to how many ads they can play.
Personally, on free speech grounds, I do think that Britain-like restrictions on advertising probably would not hold up here. So facing that, what can you do? Overturning Citizen's United and mandating strong disclosure rules for all groups advertising (so they have to say where they're getting their money from, specifically, up front) are key, but again, you still would need lots of money to run a campaign, and that money has to come from somewhere -- and it won't be exclusively small donations, that does not add up to enough.
So yeah, I agree that the influence of money over politicians is a concern, it always is, but I don't see any way around it. And as for Bernie, yes, he had a very well-funded primary campaign, but could his "small donations only" campaign actually have kept pace in November? Sure, Trump's campaign is a mess financially, but the RNC, the Kochs, and such sure aren't!
Quote:Obama certainly was taking a lot of these donations, and well, Obama has been a bit disappointing and isn't the golden hope we were all dreaming of.While I was hopeful for Obama, I wasn't one of his big fans, of course; I wanted Hillary to win the Democratic nomination that year. As for what I think though, he's mostly been a pretty good president, except for one big problem: so, SO many times, he'd compromise before a debate even took place! He seems to think that if you offer someone a good deal they will take it, but with the Republicans as they are, that was an incredibly naive belief, and indeed it did not happen. There is a definite draw to his hopeful optimism, but it's got a downside too. I saw this coming in the primaries; for example, again, Obama's health-care plan was a bit to Hillary's right as an attempt to start with a 'bill that could pass', as if the Republicans care about things such as supporting iteas that were theirs ~20-odd years ago... yeah, right! He consistently under-estimated Republican intransigence because of his too-optimistic world view, basically. Hillary's much more realistic about the state of the opposition, so I think despite surely facing a similarly unending wave of Republican hate and governmental inaction, she might have gotten more done. But we'll see which way that goes soon, since the Republican Party sure isn't getting more reasonable as time goes on and she is our likely next president.
Quote:I'm not saying Obama has done nothing, but face facts, Obama didn't need congress' permission to close all the camps in Guantanamo Bay. He could have closed Echo with a single executive order, but didn't.Well, maybe he could have closed it, but congress, and the Republicans in congress particularly, made it near-impossible to move the prisoners there anywhere else and you can't just release them as the people still there mostly are definite terrorists, so what could he do? It is definitely frustratiing that Guantanamo didn't close, but I blame the Republicans for this first, since they blocked moving the prisoners.
Quote:Anyway, I'm not going to let the perfect be the enemy of the good here. Voting for Clinton is better than Trump. PLENTY of sexists have been slamming Clinton unfairly. That's a fact, but my criticism of her isn't because I'm suddenly picking nits I never picked on before. It's because I WOKE UP. I've realized the systemic problems the entire system has. I'm not claiming conspiracy. I'm claiming far too many politicians are acting in their own selfish interests resulting in a massive mess. No need for conspiracy there, it's just a bunch of random people plotting a bunch of conflicting nonsense that ultimately hurts us far too often, and for decades. So, I've decided the best way to put a stop to it is to start looking for conflicts of interest in candidates and pick accordingly. It's something we SHOULD have been doing all along. But, I'll give you this. 4 years from now, you can gladly take me to task on this. If I'm just letting these conflicts of interest slide in 4 years' time, get on me for my hypocrisy.Well, at least you admit you've changed your standards this cycle.
Quote:As for the gun issue, I have to say this, I've changed my mind on the no guns for those on the no fly list. On the face of it, it's blindly true that possible terrorists shouldn't be getting guns. Everyone can agree on that (and most Americans do), but the problem is the no-fly list is horrible government overreach, and when we say "okay, in this case, let's go ahead and expand it", we're tacitly saying "okay, it's fine to have a lack of due process for this". There's hypocrisy in it, but this is one of the few times when the slope really is slippery. Gun rights need answers, and the Dem's OTHER bill was a no brainer that should have passed.Owning assault rifles and other such weapons should be illegal, so anything which reduces their ownership sounds good to me!
Now, the FBI's most-wanted list DOES have oversight on it. Let's use that as our model instead and ban anyone on the most-wanted list from buying a gun.
28th June 2016, 7:39 AM
Why do you think she needs a million dollar campaign anyway? She'll have free news coverage because she's a major candidate.
Here's a secret: I've never once seen a political ad, at least not as an actual ad (I've seen them mocked on The Daily Show, for example). They are absolutely ridiculous. The reason I don't see them is because Oklahoma isn't considered a swing state, so no one ever bothers putting political ads on TV around here. Even on cable, the advertising "slots" seem to be adjustable, because again, never seen one. I still am able to make informed decisions on which candidate I want to vote for though. Fancy that! What is the worst that you think might happen if a presidential candidate didn't bother with millions of dollars of ad spending, anyway? Also, you're ignoring that Sanders has managed to fire up a whole voting block without getting those millions.
Anyway, I think we've reached an understanding on most of this, but I wanted to focus on your "anything that reduces ownership sounds good to me" comment. Yes, it's a serious issue and real legislation needs to happen. Yes, the NRA has way too many politicians in their cold dead hands. Yes, that sit in was disappointing. BUT, don't ever go down the "no matter the cost" road. I've seen what happens when we go down that road. The Patriot Act and the Iraq war come to mind, and the NRA's ridiculously huge program to spy on American citizens that is only defended using said Patriot Act.
You said you are nervous about how we go about restricting political ad campaigns, and frankly the only citizens that affects are the people in charge to begin with. I'm not about to say gun regulations are "an attack on civil liberties" (heck, the second amendment specifically states that the militia should be "well regulated"). BUT, the no-fly list is a big problem. The moment we decide to start adding restrictions to that list is the moment all the people in charge can say "the American people have tacitly confirmed that we need extra-judiciary power, FOR SAFETY)". The no-fly list needs to be massively overhauled, with proper due process applied so that people can actually go to court over it and so the people in charge of that list answer to the citizens. Without that, I don't want a single power added to that list, even if it's as sensible as "terrorists shouldn't have guns". Again, there is a way out of this. Add that oversight to the no-fly list, and I'll certainly be willing to add things to it. Or, if that's a political impossibility right now, go with my other suggestion and add that restriction to the FBI's most-wanted list, which actually has some oversight (as far as I understand it at least). It's worth noting how racist the current no-fly list has ended up, with a disproportionate number of middle-eastern people stuck on it.
Oh, and I thought I should add this. The Republican committee that were so desperate to indite Clinton have concluded two things. One: Yes there was a lot of incompetence involved in the Benghazi attacks. Plenty of blame to go around. Two: Hillary isn't a part of that blame though, as the report clears her of responsibility. Coming from the Republican group formed specifically to attack her, that's saying something. Too bad Fox News is going to ignore it. Three: A group of soldiers working for the leadership America overthrew are the ones that saved the soldiers that survived the attack. I like stories like that.
Here's a secret: I've never once seen a political ad, at least not as an actual ad (I've seen them mocked on The Daily Show, for example). They are absolutely ridiculous. The reason I don't see them is because Oklahoma isn't considered a swing state, so no one ever bothers putting political ads on TV around here. Even on cable, the advertising "slots" seem to be adjustable, because again, never seen one. I still am able to make informed decisions on which candidate I want to vote for though. Fancy that! What is the worst that you think might happen if a presidential candidate didn't bother with millions of dollars of ad spending, anyway? Also, you're ignoring that Sanders has managed to fire up a whole voting block without getting those millions.
Anyway, I think we've reached an understanding on most of this, but I wanted to focus on your "anything that reduces ownership sounds good to me" comment. Yes, it's a serious issue and real legislation needs to happen. Yes, the NRA has way too many politicians in their cold dead hands. Yes, that sit in was disappointing. BUT, don't ever go down the "no matter the cost" road. I've seen what happens when we go down that road. The Patriot Act and the Iraq war come to mind, and the NRA's ridiculously huge program to spy on American citizens that is only defended using said Patriot Act.
You said you are nervous about how we go about restricting political ad campaigns, and frankly the only citizens that affects are the people in charge to begin with. I'm not about to say gun regulations are "an attack on civil liberties" (heck, the second amendment specifically states that the militia should be "well regulated"). BUT, the no-fly list is a big problem. The moment we decide to start adding restrictions to that list is the moment all the people in charge can say "the American people have tacitly confirmed that we need extra-judiciary power, FOR SAFETY)". The no-fly list needs to be massively overhauled, with proper due process applied so that people can actually go to court over it and so the people in charge of that list answer to the citizens. Without that, I don't want a single power added to that list, even if it's as sensible as "terrorists shouldn't have guns". Again, there is a way out of this. Add that oversight to the no-fly list, and I'll certainly be willing to add things to it. Or, if that's a political impossibility right now, go with my other suggestion and add that restriction to the FBI's most-wanted list, which actually has some oversight (as far as I understand it at least). It's worth noting how racist the current no-fly list has ended up, with a disproportionate number of middle-eastern people stuck on it.
Oh, and I thought I should add this. The Republican committee that were so desperate to indite Clinton have concluded two things. One: Yes there was a lot of incompetence involved in the Benghazi attacks. Plenty of blame to go around. Two: Hillary isn't a part of that blame though, as the report clears her of responsibility. Coming from the Republican group formed specifically to attack her, that's saying something. Too bad Fox News is going to ignore it. Three: A group of soldiers working for the leadership America overthrew are the ones that saved the soldiers that survived the attack. I like stories like that.
28th June 2016, 8:04 PM
Dark Jaguar Wrote:Why do you think she needs a million dollar campaign anyway? She'll have free news coverage because she's a major candidate.Multi hundreds of millions of dollars campaign, not just a "million dollar campaign". That wouldn't get you anywhere.
Quote:Here's a secret: I've never once seen a political ad, at least not as an actual ad (I've seen them mocked on The Daily Show, for example). They are absolutely ridiculous. The reason I don't see them is because Oklahoma isn't considered a swing state, so no one ever bothers putting political ads on TV around here. Even on cable, the advertising "slots" seem to be adjustable, because again, never seen one.Huh, that's kind of crazy, even if I assume that you mean you've never seen a presidential TV ad; I'm sure there are state and local races (governor, US House or Senate, state house/senate, etc.) races in Oklahoma that have had plenty of TV ads. But yeah, it does make sense that no Presidential campaign would waste money on one of the most Republican states in the country, that is true.
Quote:I still am able to make informed decisions on which candidate I want to vote for though. Fancy that!TV ads are generally targeted at not so highly-informed voters. There are a lot of them, sadly.
Quote:What is the worst that you think might happen if a presidential candidate didn't bother with millions of dollars of ad spending, anyway?You would lose, simple as that. It is possible for insurgent, poorly-funded campaigns to win some races, if they either get really lucky or have enough money to compete even if the other person has more, in lower-level races. Chipman had a lot less money than Russell, for example, in that recent Dem primary here, but he had enough to compete. Russel had more and larger flyers, but Chipman had some too so it wasn't a hopeless funding gap. In contrast, the local State House race had two people running, but only one had the money to run a credible campaign; I got only one flyer from the other guy, and no phone calls, versus some of both for his opponent, and I saw only one sign around with his name on it, versus lots for the guy with money. And indeed, as expected the guy with an actual campaign won by a wide margin.
But at a presidential level, you need a LOT of money. There are a lot of things to spend it on -- campaign offices and staffers in at minimum all competitive states and maybe all states; TV, radio, and internet ad campaigns; your core campaign staff at the main office; and more. TV ads are the most expensive part of that, the thing which drain hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars out of political campaign coffers every other year, but all of that stuff costs money. So, campaigns raise lots of money to pay those bills, because while ads are usually just ignored, if your opponent is on TV and you aren't it makes you look bad and probably will hurt you at the polls.
This year, however, we're seeing a campaign running a race that will answer your question here, "what will happen if you don't spend that kind of money?" That candidate is Donald Trump. Between his idiosyncratic [racist] campaign focused mostly on himself and his inability or unwillingness to ingratiate himself with the traditional core Republican donor base, Trump has only a tiny fraction the amount of money Hillary has right now. He has only a tiny fraction the number of staffers nationwide that she has, very few campaign offices in key states, and very few TV ads. And with Trump's refusal to do the kind of "be on the phone a lot and go to lots of big-dollar fundraisers" campaigning that is sadly required to make money to fund American campaigns today, this disparity looks set to continue. Sure, Republican PACs will flood TV with ads -- the Kochs some time back promised to spend $900 million on this year's campaigns, for example, and no liberal PAC will have anywhere REMOTELY near that kind of money -- but the Kochs don't love Trump, so that money is more likely to mostly be spent trying to save the Republican's majorities in the House and Senate, and to win state-level races. The Kochs have been extremely successful at winning congressional, state, and local races with their money, but we'll see how well it works this year, given the huge drag Trump is likely to be on everyone below him. I'm sure at least some Koch money will go into anti-Hillary attack ads, though, regardless of if they try to defend Trump.
But yes, this Trump campaign is very interesting from a political-science perspective, which is something I've seen remarked on -- it'll show us what happens when a candidate refuses to run a normal political campaign, and relies almost exclusively on their national and state parties for local offices, volunteers, and staffers, instead of doing that themself. The expected result is that this will significantly hurt Trump versus how well he would have done with a full normal campaign, but we'll see. I sure hope it hurts him! It should, though.
Quote:Also, you're ignoring that Sanders has managed to fire up a whole voting block without getting those millions.Primary campaigns cost only a small fraction of what general election campaigns do. He got plenty of money to have a well-funded primary campaign, but funding a whole presidential campaign from only small donors would have been a huge struggle that probably would have failed to raise the kinds of money you want.
Quote:Anyway, I think we've reached an understanding on most of this, but I wanted to focus on your "anything that reduces ownership sounds good to me" comment. Yes, it's a serious issue and real legislation needs to happen. Yes, the NRA has way too many politicians in their cold dead hands. Yes, that sit in was disappointing. BUT, don't ever go down the "no matter the cost" road. I've seen what happens when we go down that road. The Patriot Act and the Iraq war come to mind, and the NRA's ridiculously huge program to spy on American citizens that is only defended using said Patriot Act.Sure, the no-fly list should have oversight, but it's not an issue I have looked into much. How racist is it really to consider religion in such things, though? Yes, most mass shootings in this country are not committed by religious Muslims, but of the crimes made in the name of religion worldwide, a whole lot of the worst ones, and a lot of the ongoing wars today, involve Islamic extremism. While incorrectly targeting people who are in the large majority of Muslims who do not support such things is unfortunate and should be improved on, you can't just pretend that all religions are the same where violent terrorism is concerned, I don't think it's true. There is a bad vicious-cycle element to this, though, where some people get alienated by that stuff and turn to terrorism, but you can't just ignore terrorism, that's not helpful and probably opens you up to attack from more committed terrorists. (See: 9/11) Hopefully eventually most of the Islamic world modernizes as the Christian world has over the past 500 years or so, but they're still in the difficult period of that, unfortunately. That kind of change needs to come from within of course, not from us, but there are liberalizing forces in the Islamic world... the problem is that the ones standing against them have a lot of adherents, and weapons.
You said you are nervous about how we go about restricting political ad campaigns, and frankly the only citizens that affects are the people in charge to begin with. I'm not about to say gun regulations are "an attack on civil liberties" (heck, the second amendment specifically states that the militia should be "well regulated"). BUT, the no-fly list is a big problem. The moment we decide to start adding restrictions to that list is the moment all the people in charge can say "the American people have tacitly confirmed that we need extra-judiciary power, FOR SAFETY)". The no-fly list needs to be massively overhauled, with proper due process applied so that people can actually go to court over it and so the people in charge of that list answer to the citizens. Without that, I don't want a single power added to that list, even if it's as sensible as "terrorists shouldn't have guns". Again, there is a way out of this. Add that oversight to the no-fly list, and I'll certainly be willing to add things to it. Or, if that's a political impossibility right now, go with my other suggestion and add that restriction to the FBI's most-wanted list, which actually has some oversight (as far as I understand it at least). It's worth noting how racist the current no-fly list has ended up, with a disproportionate number of middle-eastern people stuck on it.
Quote:Oh, and I thought I should add this. The Republican committee that were so desperate to indite Clinton have concluded two things. One: Yes there was a lot of incompetence involved in the Benghazi attacks. Plenty of blame to go around. Two: Hillary isn't a part of that blame though, as the report clears her of responsibility. Coming from the Republican group formed specifically to attack her, that's saying something. Too bad Fox News is going to ignore it. Three: A group of soldiers working for the leadership America overthrew are the ones that saved the soldiers that survived the attack. I like stories like that.Yeah, it's pretty amusing that they finally gave up and admitted she did nothing wrong. :)
29th June 2016, 7:12 AM
Not even local elections really ever bother to run TV ads around here. For example, I had to be reminded to go vote for a state senator yesterday because there's been zero ads for it. I mean, there's been yard signs everywhere, but none of those signs bothered putting a date on them. I'm not saying we have NO political ads of ANY sort. I recall there being a lot of oil company funded ads about passing the pipe line legislation, for example, but that's basically all you see is ads from lobbying campaigns on specific issues, and they're as ridiculous as you might expect.
But, what you never ever see on the air waves in Oklahoma is your stereotypical "Candidate A SAYS they don't eat babies, but what's the REAL truth? Out of context quote from old news headline. What ELSE aren't you telling us, Candidate A? Sponsored by the heartland organization for betterment of Candidate B." style ad. I can't imagine those ads would do well here anyway, since the entirely of our state's exposure to them has been in the form of parody. As for presidential ads not targetting us, yes, we've got a Republican majority base. But, don't overstate it. We aren't "one of the most republican states in the union". There are at least 5s of states ahead of us on that list :D. At least a third of our population routinely vote democrat, and there's still a solid liberal voting block here, which is something, say, Mississippi can't attest to (even typing that state is exhausting), plus there's the gerrymandering that hurts any attempt to make even local change.
Oh! Here's a frustrating thing. As an independent, I was told I had to pick which thing I got to vote for. I could EITHER vote for a local position, OR I could vote for state senator. What? I really do hate "closed party" voting a lot... It really makes it very hard for liberal Oklahomans to make even nominal changes to the politics around here...
But, what you never ever see on the air waves in Oklahoma is your stereotypical "Candidate A SAYS they don't eat babies, but what's the REAL truth? Out of context quote from old news headline. What ELSE aren't you telling us, Candidate A? Sponsored by the heartland organization for betterment of Candidate B." style ad. I can't imagine those ads would do well here anyway, since the entirely of our state's exposure to them has been in the form of parody. As for presidential ads not targetting us, yes, we've got a Republican majority base. But, don't overstate it. We aren't "one of the most republican states in the union". There are at least 5s of states ahead of us on that list :D. At least a third of our population routinely vote democrat, and there's still a solid liberal voting block here, which is something, say, Mississippi can't attest to (even typing that state is exhausting), plus there's the gerrymandering that hurts any attempt to make even local change.
Oh! Here's a frustrating thing. As an independent, I was told I had to pick which thing I got to vote for. I could EITHER vote for a local position, OR I could vote for state senator. What? I really do hate "closed party" voting a lot... It really makes it very hard for liberal Oklahomans to make even nominal changes to the politics around here...
29th June 2016, 9:04 PM
Quote: We aren't "one of the most republican states in the union". There are at least 5s of states ahead of us on that list . At least a third of our population routinely vote democrat, and there's still a solid liberal voting block here, which is something, say, Mississippi can't attest to (even typing that state is exhausting), plus there's the gerrymandering that hurts any attempt to make even local change.
I'm sorry, DJ, but 538 has Oklahoma as tied for the second-highest-Trump-win-percent state in their now-launched analysis of this presidential campaign: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/dona...president/ And didn't Obama get some of his lowest percents there too? I'm sure there is a solid, small base of liberal votes, but "small" is the operative term there, unfortunately.
Quote: Oh! Here's a frustrating thing. As an independent, I was told I had to pick which thing I got to vote for. I could EITHER vote for a local position, OR I could vote for state senator. What? I really do hate "closed party" voting a lot... It really makes it very hard for liberal Oklahomans to make even nominal changes to the politics around here...Why should parties allow people who don't even want to join their party to vote in their internal elections? That doesn't make any sense! I think closed primaries are good.
Quote: Not even local elections really ever bother to run TV ads around here. For example, I had to be reminded to go vote for a state senator yesterday because there's been zero ads for it. I mean, there's been yard signs everywhere, but none of those signs bothered putting a date on them. I'm not saying we have NO political ads of ANY sort. I recall there being a lot of oil company funded ads about passing the pipe line legislation, for example, but that's basically all you see is ads from lobbying campaigns on specific issues, and they're as ridiculous as you might expect.Have you not even had a competitive governor's race?
30th June 2016, 5:22 AM
Your resentment of independents has already been noted. I skew on the side of states that have "open" primaries myself. Letting everyone have a say leads to a healthier democracy, that makes sense to me.
We do have governor's races with more than one candidate, but I'm not sure what you mean by "competitive". Are you seriously saying "all real campaigns need TV ads to succeed. Oh, you don't have TV ads? Ah, then you must not have serious campaigns." Consider something ABF. How much longer are TV ads even going to be a viable way of reaching the public? Full disclosure, I haven't seen a televised ad in over a year. I have Netflix and ad-free Hulu. When I say I haven't seen any political ads, I'm actually talking about my past experience in Oklahoma, not my current experience.
In Oklahoma, when I want to get information on candidates, including presidential, I watch the news, or more commonly the comedy news (where more people get their news than... probably should). But, in reality, I tend to get much MORE information outside of TV, on the internet, where I can also watch the Daily Show.
Incidentally, the 538 results only demonstrate that the right wing in Oklahoma are pretty heavily right wing and skew towards exactly the sort of people Trump is trying to appeal to. It doesn't say a thing about the liberal side of OK or even the independents. I should tell you a peculiar quirk of the Oklahoma primary rules. They are "closed with opt-in". That means a party can indicate that they WANT to allow independents to vote in their primaries. It was a big to-do that showed how selfish that system is. Anyway, the democratic party that you said shouldn't let non-party citizens vote in it's primaries let non-party citizens vote in the Oklahoma primaries. It's thought that this is the reason Sanders won so handily in Oklahoma (that and he had a pretty big rally in Tulsa that day). The Republicans on the other hand wanted their's to be closed off, so while I got to help pick who would represent the democrats, I couldn't weigh in on who should represent the republicans. I have to wonder if Trump would have won if the independents were allowed to vote in that one.
This is EXACTLY why "closed primaries" are a bad idea. You can talk about how the parties should be allowed to exclude outsiders all you want, but there are REAL WORLD CONSEQUENCES for that sort of policy! Freedom of an organization to run themselves as they so choose is one thing, but when those parties get to decide exactly who we vote on, it's nice for voters to be able to have more of a say in who they actually get to choose from on election day. Before you start in on how every good citizen needs to join a party or whatever, do you honestly think having everyone sign themselves away to a party, with ZERO independents left over to maybe point out how neither party is really working for them, is a good idea? Having independents is a HEALTHY THING!
We do have governor's races with more than one candidate, but I'm not sure what you mean by "competitive". Are you seriously saying "all real campaigns need TV ads to succeed. Oh, you don't have TV ads? Ah, then you must not have serious campaigns." Consider something ABF. How much longer are TV ads even going to be a viable way of reaching the public? Full disclosure, I haven't seen a televised ad in over a year. I have Netflix and ad-free Hulu. When I say I haven't seen any political ads, I'm actually talking about my past experience in Oklahoma, not my current experience.
In Oklahoma, when I want to get information on candidates, including presidential, I watch the news, or more commonly the comedy news (where more people get their news than... probably should). But, in reality, I tend to get much MORE information outside of TV, on the internet, where I can also watch the Daily Show.
Incidentally, the 538 results only demonstrate that the right wing in Oklahoma are pretty heavily right wing and skew towards exactly the sort of people Trump is trying to appeal to. It doesn't say a thing about the liberal side of OK or even the independents. I should tell you a peculiar quirk of the Oklahoma primary rules. They are "closed with opt-in". That means a party can indicate that they WANT to allow independents to vote in their primaries. It was a big to-do that showed how selfish that system is. Anyway, the democratic party that you said shouldn't let non-party citizens vote in it's primaries let non-party citizens vote in the Oklahoma primaries. It's thought that this is the reason Sanders won so handily in Oklahoma (that and he had a pretty big rally in Tulsa that day). The Republicans on the other hand wanted their's to be closed off, so while I got to help pick who would represent the democrats, I couldn't weigh in on who should represent the republicans. I have to wonder if Trump would have won if the independents were allowed to vote in that one.
This is EXACTLY why "closed primaries" are a bad idea. You can talk about how the parties should be allowed to exclude outsiders all you want, but there are REAL WORLD CONSEQUENCES for that sort of policy! Freedom of an organization to run themselves as they so choose is one thing, but when those parties get to decide exactly who we vote on, it's nice for voters to be able to have more of a say in who they actually get to choose from on election day. Before you start in on how every good citizen needs to join a party or whatever, do you honestly think having everyone sign themselves away to a party, with ZERO independents left over to maybe point out how neither party is really working for them, is a good idea? Having independents is a HEALTHY THING!
30th June 2016, 11:27 AM
Quote:Why should parties allow people who don't even want to join their party to vote in their internal elections? That doesn't make any sense! I think closed primaries are good.
Because the results of those elections, rather than staying internal, eventually affect the entire country. Closed primaries exist for only one reason: to ensure that the people who are in control of the party suffer as little challenge as possible. Closed primaries protect the elite, so that they can continue to be the quasi-nobility they feel entitled to be. It's not any different in practice from requiring ID to vote and I feel exactly the same about proponents of both policies. The point is to disenfranchise. And it works.
For now.
btw: Hillary's margin-of-error lead over Trump is certainly inspiring.
30th June 2016, 3:12 PM
I agree with everything you've said Weltall except for that last bit.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/dona...president/
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/dona...president/
30th June 2016, 8:58 PM
Dark Jaguar Wrote:Full disclosure, I haven't seen a televised ad in over a year. I have Netflix and ad-free Hulu. When I say I haven't seen any political ads, I'm actually talking about my past experience in Oklahoma, not my current experience.Ah. I don't watch TV much anymore either, yeah. Between Youtube, other online streaming video things, etc, you don't need it much anymore...
In Oklahoma, when I want to get information on candidates, including presidential, I watch the news, or more commonly the comedy news (where more people get their news than... probably should). But, in reality, I tend to get much MORE information outside of TV, on the internet, where I can also watch the Daily Show.
Quote:This is EXACTLY why "closed primaries" are a bad idea. You can talk about how the parties should be allowed to exclude outsiders all you want, but there are REAL WORLD CONSEQUENCES for that sort of policy!Having candidates who actually reflect their party is the best possible kind of "real world consequence". And if you want a say, join the party. There are literally zero reasons not to.
Weltall Wrote:[COLOR=#333333]Absolutely not. Closed primaries serve to ensure that the people who actually support a party are the ones whose views are reflected in their nominees. If you are planning on supporting a party, then JOIN THAT PARTY! It's free and extremely easy to do, and there is absolutely no reason whatsoever to not join the party you identify with. I have no sympathy for your and DJ's arguments here because there is literally no reason to not just join a party and have as much influence over primary elections as every other party member: a vote.
Because the results of those elections, rather than staying internal, eventually affect the entire country. Closed primaries exist for only one reason: to ensure that the people who are in control of the party suffer as little challenge as possible. Closed primaries protect the elite, so that they can continue to be the quasi-nobility they feel entitled to be.
Quote: It's not any different in practice from requiring ID to vote and I feel exactly the same about proponents of both policies. The point is to disenfranchise. And it works.This is a crazy, insulting comparison! Voter-ID laws exist to make it so that fewer people who are likely to support the Democratic Party vote. That is their reason for existence. These rules can be hard for people because they require things which certain voters are unlikely to have.
For now.
Closed primaries, however, exist so that a party's members, the people who care enough about it to join, are the ones whose views are reflected in their candidates. Any voter can be a party member for free, all you do is just check a box on the voter-registration card. Calling this somehow similar to voter-ID laws is ludicrous.
Here is why Markos Mouslitsas, kos of the Daily Kos, supports closing all primaries:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/06/20...-primaries
Quote:Close all primaries, certainly. If you want to participate in a primary, pick a party. If you are too good or pure or perfect or iconoclastic to be a member of a party, then you don’t get a primary choice. Simple enough. Don’t worry! You still get to vote in November. And everyone will ooh and ahh at your rugged individualism and give you ponies and blue ribbons. But party members should get to choose their party leadership. (And eventually, I hope the party takes over the entire process for itself, which would simplify pretty much everything.)
He is absolutely right.
1st July 2016, 6:57 AM
That was pretty insulting there. You can't say there's "literally zero reason not to join a party" after everything we've said up until now. If nothing else, joining one party locks you out of any say in the other party. Isn't it better, regardless of your political leanings, to be able to have a say in the other side's selection process so you don't get a Trump as candidate?
Also, that person's idea that the party should "take over the whole process"? That's pretty terrifying. So, leave the state governments ENTIRELY out of the selection process the two de facto ruling parties have? No thank you.
But yes, please reduce our complaints about the party system down to "you're just iconoclastic rebellious teenagers who haven't learned to grow up and pick a side".
Also, that person's idea that the party should "take over the whole process"? That's pretty terrifying. So, leave the state governments ENTIRELY out of the selection process the two de facto ruling parties have? No thank you.
But yes, please reduce our complaints about the party system down to "you're just iconoclastic rebellious teenagers who haven't learned to grow up and pick a side".
1st July 2016, 7:43 AM
I remember when Markos railed against the Third Way Democrats, and now he shouts to the world that he's proud to be one of them. His site is full of "lol look what cartoonishly evil thing the dumb republicans did this week" so as to keep people from paying attention to how the party is full of rot and is falling apart at a pivotal moment.
The whole point of voter ID laws is so that Republicans can keep their political opponents out of the democratic process unless they satisfy an arbitrary demand. The whole point of closed primaries is for the dominant party of the state (out of 33 states with closed or mixed primaries, only six of them are "swing states") to keep their political opponents out of the democratic process unless they satisfy an arbitrary demand. From where I stand, both positions are separate but equally disenfranchising, and the end result for both parties is the same: it allows the mismanaging elites of both parties safety from outside challenge. As Markos' final statement makes perfectly clear, he wants those elites to fear no democratic challenge at all, not even from the likes of loyal partisans like you who invest their time and money.
But go on telling yourself it's because Hillary Clinton is a woman.
The whole point of voter ID laws is so that Republicans can keep their political opponents out of the democratic process unless they satisfy an arbitrary demand. The whole point of closed primaries is for the dominant party of the state (out of 33 states with closed or mixed primaries, only six of them are "swing states") to keep their political opponents out of the democratic process unless they satisfy an arbitrary demand. From where I stand, both positions are separate but equally disenfranchising, and the end result for both parties is the same: it allows the mismanaging elites of both parties safety from outside challenge. As Markos' final statement makes perfectly clear, he wants those elites to fear no democratic challenge at all, not even from the likes of loyal partisans like you who invest their time and money.
But go on telling yourself it's because Hillary Clinton is a woman.
1st July 2016, 7:53 PM
Dark Jaguar Wrote:That was pretty insulting there. You can't say there's "literally zero reason not to join a party" after everything we've said up until now."Everything"? You've got nothing beyond absurd conspiracy theories about"how corrupt parties are" which don't hold up one bit when you look at them once.
Sure, I would not have used a tone as insulting as kos's, but he's not wrong.
Quote:If nothing else, joining one party locks you out of any say in the other party. Isn't it better, regardless of your political leanings, to be able to have a say in the other side's selection process so you don't get a Trump as candidate?"Dirty tricks" like trying to get people from your party to vote in the other primary to get an opponent you more want to face is a thing done sometimes in this country, but we'd be better off without it, overall.
Quote:Also, that person's idea that the party should "take over the whole process"? That's pretty terrifying. So, leave the state governments ENTIRELY out of the selection process the two de facto ruling parties have? No thank you.No, I think you misunderstand. What he means is that the national parties should set standards for primary elections that would be used in all states, instead of every state having different rules. Every four years we are reminded of how ridiculous our primary/caucus system is, how needlessly complicated it is, how every single state party gets to set different rules making things incredibly confusing... and while that's a very American way to do things, I'm not opposed to setting some more standards. Things like caucuses need to go, certainly! All states should have primaries, caucuses are extremely unrepresentative -- very few people vote in them compared to primaries. Reducing overdone, unnecessary confusion is not necessarily "scary". (And remember, right now, state governments themselves have no say in how primary or caucus elections are held. It's the state PARTIES that control that.)
But yes, please reduce our complaints about the party system down to "you're just iconoclastic rebellious teenagers who haven't learned to grow up and pick a side".[/QUOTE]
Well, it's either that or you're right down there with 9/11 Truthers or something, people making wildly false claims because of that age-old American trend of hating and not trusting the government...
Seriously, the stuff you say about parties, as if they're all corrupt (so very wrong!) and by not joining one you somehow "keep things more honest" or something? That's not how it works. That sounds like someone saying "I hate the system so I don't vote in elections" (meaning November ones here). The problem is, that only helps perpetuate the system, not change it! Not voting does not change things. VOTING changes things.
1st July 2016, 11:00 PM
Open primaries are such a common idea worldwide that the US might be the only country that allows an idea as crazy as open primaries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_primary Note how the article doesn't mention even one other place that has them, since they probably don't. When Britain has its party leadership elections later this year for example, only members of each party will be allowed to vote. Other countries are either the same, or dispense with any democracy and just have party leaders choose the nominees. The former is good, the latter bad (the people should have a say!).
Beyond that, saying that anyone who supports Hillary is "Third Way" is both quite insulting and patently absurd.
Beyond that, saying that anyone who supports Hillary is "Third Way" is both quite insulting and patently absurd.
Weltall Wrote:how the party is full of rot and is falling apart at a pivotal moment.This is exactly the kind of crazy conspiratorial nonsense I refer to in my previous post. There is one party in trouble now, but it's not ours! It's Trump's, as he tears apart that party. We're doing fine, apart from the constant failures to come up with a way to get Democratic voters to vote on off-year elections. But this is a presidential year, so no such issue this time! It's going to be a good election, I think, and all the polling is looking good as well. The Dems should pick up multiple Senate seats, have a good chance at winning back the Senate majority, will probably win the Presidency by a wide margin, and we should gain in the House and in state-level races, too. Things are going well, for now.
Quote:But go on telling yourself it's because Hillary Clinton is a woman.Because people have done such a good job of proving the truth of that claim. Or have yo ustill not bothered to read anything I linked about all the sexism Hillary is facing?
2nd July 2016, 8:00 AM
A Black Falcon Wrote:Open primaries are such a common idea worldwide that the US might be the only country that allows an idea as crazy as open primaries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_primary Note how the article doesn't mention even one other place that has them, since they probably don't. When Britain has its party leadership elections later this year for example, only members of each party will be allowed to vote.
Being common doesn't make it good or right.
Quote:Other countries are either the same, or dispense with any democracy and just have party leaders choose the nominees. The former is good, the latter bad (the people should have a say!).
You just quoted Kos advocating dispensing with democracy and your reaction was "He is absolutely right".
Quote:Beyond that, saying that anyone who supports Hillary is "Third Way" is both quite insulting and patently absurd.
The Third Way exists to pull the Democratic Party away from the progressive 'fringe' and more towards a moderate and centrist platform (out of the belief that America is still a center-right country) so to call you and your candidate 'Third Way' is definitely an insult but it is also a precise and accurate description.
Quote:This is exactly the kind of crazy conspiratorial nonsense I refer to in my previous post. There is one party in trouble now, but it's not ours! It's Trump's, as he tears apart that party. We're doing fine, apart from the constant failures to come up with a way to get Democratic voters to vote on off-year elections. But this is a presidential year, so no such issue this time! It's going to be a good election, I think, and all the polling is looking good as well. The Dems should pick up multiple Senate seats, have a good chance at winning back the Senate majority, will probably win the Presidency by a wide margin, and we should gain in the House and in state-level races, too. Things are going well, for now.
Yeah, you tell yourself that if it makes you feel better. Things are going so well that the Party is struggling to hold onto the only branch of government Republicans don't dominate outright.
But, young voters, those who are our age and younger, whose who, in the next two decades will become the majority of the electorate, rejected your candidate and your politics resoundingly. Clinton was not even remotely competitive in the 17-29 demographic and the 30-44 demo was still overwhelmingly embracing of a major paradigm shift. You think that bodes well for the future of a party that has put a lot more effort into telling them their opinions don't matter? Think they'll forget how their incompetence and sloth has facilitated and helped the Tea Party Republicans to take over huge swatches of the country without even pretending to fight? You think they'll forget and just fall into line?
The GOP is fucked right now. The Democrats are fucked maybe in a few years. The only way that is averted is by overthrowing the chumps running it now, because they've done an abominable job of it.
Quote:Because people have done such a good job of proving the truth of that claim. Or have yo ustill not bothered to read anything I linked about all the sexism Hillary is facing?
I don't question that she faces sexism. I deny that Bernie Sanders transformed this election because the overwhelming majority (or even a noteworthy minority) of voters under 50 are against the idea of a woman president.
2nd July 2016, 9:43 PM
of US states does things.
As for slightly older audiences, the fact is that Bernie supporters have actually moved over to supporting Hillary even more quickly than Hillary voters moved over to Obama in '08. Your intransigence is, thankfully, out of the norm for Bernie supporters.
But as for the future, yes, Bernie's success is a sign that the party will continue to move to the left, as it has done since the '00s. Hillary has moved to the left along with the base, and future candidates will do that as well, or come from the left as Bernie has. That's just fine, it'd be good to see a more liberal government than we have seen. But you're very wrong in your assumption that "if Bernie didn't win his voters will give up on the Democrats". Fact is most aren't giving up on the party, and that's good because it's essential to us winning this year, and to continuing progressive pressure on candidates to not compromise away too much, as Democrats are wont to do at times.
Beyond that, the whole concept that she's untrustworthy is based on a Republican lie campaign, and yet liberals believe it? Come on, if she was male the attack would never have gotten off the ground, beyond the basic "all politicians bend the truth sometimes" element. She's better than most on that score, but isn't perfect of course'; no politician is. She does have the best rating of any politician running for president this cycle, though, from at least one of the fact-check organizations. But no, because of Republican lies people have bought the "she's untrustworthy" story. Sad stuff, particularly if they vote for Trump instead, probably the most inveterate liar ever to run for president on a major-party ticket! Or at least, he's right up there with who, Nixon or something?
Also, you imply intent here -- people saying to themselves "I will not support her because she is a woman". While some such people are out there, many others are biased against her for other more subtle sexist reasons they may or may not recognize.
And last, it is noteworthy that most of the most ardent Bernie supporters are male.
Weltall Wrote:Being common doesn't make it good or right.Just saying, you're acting like it's some super-weird thing, when actually it's the way everyone except for a handful of US states does things.
Quote:You just quoted Kos advocating dispensing with democracy and your reaction was "He is absolutely right".Requiring that you join a party before participating in its private elections in absolutely no way "dispenses with democracy".
Quote:The Third Way exists to pull the Democratic Party away from the progressive 'fringe' and more towards a moderate and centrist platform (out of the belief that America is still a center-right country) so to call you and your candidate 'Third Way' is definitely an insult but it is also a precise and accurate description.The actual "Third Way" is a pretty-much-dead organization that peaked in the '90s and has since faded to near-irrelevance. Progressives have won, which is why both of our candidates this time have run as strong progressives. Try looking up Hillary's actual positions on the issues this election, she in no way resembles any kind of "third way" candidate, if such things even still existed.
Quote:Yeah, you tell yourself that if it makes you feel better. Things are going so well that the Party is struggling to hold onto the only branch of government Republicans don't dominate outright.Most 17-29 year olds don't vote yet, so what the party has done doesn't matter much for them because younger people usually don't vote. This is why we can't win off-year elections, by the way, younger people don't care enough to vote.
But, young voters, those who are our age and younger, whose who, in the next two decades will become the majority of the electorate, rejected your candidate and your politics resoundingly. Clinton was not even remotely competitive in the 17-29 demographic and the 30-44 demo was still overwhelmingly embracing of a major paradigm shift. You think that bodes well for the future of a party that has put a lot more effort into telling them their opinions don't matter? Think they'll forget how their incompetence and sloth has facilitated and helped the Tea Party Republicans to take over huge swatches of the country without even pretending to fight? You think they'll forget and just fall into line?
As for slightly older audiences, the fact is that Bernie supporters have actually moved over to supporting Hillary even more quickly than Hillary voters moved over to Obama in '08. Your intransigence is, thankfully, out of the norm for Bernie supporters.
But as for the future, yes, Bernie's success is a sign that the party will continue to move to the left, as it has done since the '00s. Hillary has moved to the left along with the base, and future candidates will do that as well, or come from the left as Bernie has. That's just fine, it'd be good to see a more liberal government than we have seen. But you're very wrong in your assumption that "if Bernie didn't win his voters will give up on the Democrats". Fact is most aren't giving up on the party, and that's good because it's essential to us winning this year, and to continuing progressive pressure on candidates to not compromise away too much, as Democrats are wont to do at times.
Quote:The GOP is fucked right now. The Democrats are fucked maybe in a few years. The only way that is averted is by overthrowing the chumps running it now, because they've done an abominable job of it.The Democratic Party isn't just fine, it's on the upswing. So long as the Republicans continue to be crazy-racist fools, the Dems have the minority vote locked up, and in a country where minorities are growing steadily this is not good for them! The Republicans only have a chance for the future if they abandon their racism, but it's so ingrained into their party now that that would be quite difficult to do.
Quote:I don't question that she faces sexism. I deny that Bernie Sanders transformed this election because the overwhelming majority (or even a noteworthy minority) of voters under 50 are against the idea of a woman president.It's not something that direct. It's learned or inherent sexism coloring peoples' views against her. The best proof of this is that her favorability ratings go down whenever she runs for a higher office, then back up when she's in that office, as people punish her for going farther into traditionally male roles, but lots of other things are good proof of it.
Beyond that, the whole concept that she's untrustworthy is based on a Republican lie campaign, and yet liberals believe it? Come on, if she was male the attack would never have gotten off the ground, beyond the basic "all politicians bend the truth sometimes" element. She's better than most on that score, but isn't perfect of course'; no politician is. She does have the best rating of any politician running for president this cycle, though, from at least one of the fact-check organizations. But no, because of Republican lies people have bought the "she's untrustworthy" story. Sad stuff, particularly if they vote for Trump instead, probably the most inveterate liar ever to run for president on a major-party ticket! Or at least, he's right up there with who, Nixon or something?
Also, you imply intent here -- people saying to themselves "I will not support her because she is a woman". While some such people are out there, many others are biased against her for other more subtle sexist reasons they may or may not recognize.
And last, it is noteworthy that most of the most ardent Bernie supporters are male.
6th July 2016, 5:28 AM
Clinton's other investigation, regarding that cell phone business, is now closed. This one is a bit less satisfying than the last though. While the FBI won't be pressing charges, they did make it clear that there's enough evidence to say Clinton was extremely careless in managing her e-mails. Not really sure what to make of that one. If it was true carelessness, I wouldn't be surprised. Old people are notoriously out of touch with technology and many out of touch users in larger settings notoriously take IT requirements as suggestions they can ignore the very first time it becomes an inconvenience. I have little doubt the same would apply to equally old Bernie, I'm sad to say. Aside from the judge that recently made a ruling on the Google v Oracle case, very few politicians seem willing to take the time to learn about anything tech related.
I wanted to clear one thing up. I am not suggesting any vast conspiracies here. I'm suggesting a bunch of really tiny conspiracies, the sort that actually do exist in the real world. That is, of the back room "you scratch my back, I'll scratch your's" type that define a lot of politics. The main difference is that I don't think anyone has any huge plans. These are purely "in the moment" conspiracies that have no real goals beyond the next election cycle, and all of these backroom deals all conflict with each other because, again, it's all a bunch of tiny machinations, Game of Thrones style. That said, the vast majority of government's injustice has less to do with those backroom deals and more to do with sheer incompetence on a large scale.
I wanted to clear one thing up. I am not suggesting any vast conspiracies here. I'm suggesting a bunch of really tiny conspiracies, the sort that actually do exist in the real world. That is, of the back room "you scratch my back, I'll scratch your's" type that define a lot of politics. The main difference is that I don't think anyone has any huge plans. These are purely "in the moment" conspiracies that have no real goals beyond the next election cycle, and all of these backroom deals all conflict with each other because, again, it's all a bunch of tiny machinations, Game of Thrones style. That said, the vast majority of government's injustice has less to do with those backroom deals and more to do with sheer incompetence on a large scale.
6th July 2016, 7:42 PM
Dark Jaguar Wrote:Clinton's other investigation, regarding that cell phone business, is now closed. This one is a bit less satisfying than the last though. While the FBI won't be pressing charges, they did make it clear that there's enough evidence to say Clinton was extremely careless in managing her e-mails. Not really sure what to make of that one. If it was true carelessness, I wouldn't be surprised. Old people are notoriously out of touch with technology and many out of touch users in larger settings notoriously take IT requirements as suggestions they can ignore the very first time it becomes an inconvenience. I have little doubt the same would apply to equally old Bernie, I'm sad to say. Aside from the judge that recently made a ruling on the Google v Oracle case, very few politicians seem willing to take the time to learn about anything tech related.I would say that there are three major causes of this email scandal.
1) The State Department's diplomats and the FBI's spies have a major, longstanding disagreement over what should be considered classified. Basically, diplomats want to actually talk about things, while spies want everything possible to be kept as secret as possible. As a result there is a natural conflict there, as diplomats use not-fully-secure systems to discuss things the spies wish they would only email about under strict security. I am most definitely on State's side here, we call far too many things "secret" in this country! See this article for another example of this issue, not related to Hillary's email server: http://www.wsj.com/articles/clinton-emai...1465509863
So, for me, the one maybe valid question about this mostly-irrelevant "scandal" is this: are any of the so-called classified things in this report actually things that State also thought should be classified at the time, or are they just things that the FBI did but State did not? I expect most, if not all, of it to be the latter, since that certainly fits with the pattern we know of, of diplomats wanting to actually discuss things versus the FBI wanting everything to be secret. I think diplomats should be able to discuss things with eachother without insane layers of secrecy attached to every discussion of things that are in the public record whether or not the FBI wishes they weren't.
2) Old people don't understand the internet; this is surely part of why Hillary had her own server. Also, government systems are not always great; apparently State's secure email system was kind of a pain to use, or something.
3) The Republican Party is going to massively exaggerate anything they can about the Clintons, as they have since 1992. Even beyond the FBI v. State conflict, the FBI director himself is a Republican Bush appointee who Obama kept for some reason, so he probably is biased against Hillary to at least some degree. It's quite noteworthy that he could not come up with any grounds to indict, despite all that.
So ultimately, I still think that this whole scandal doesn't really matter. I've never cared if she used a private email server or not, beyond how it opened her up to this line of attack, and this report doesn't change my mind on that. The most that will come out of this are more Republican wastes of taxpayer money on failed anti-Clinton investigations and some attack ads this election that won't go anywhere due to their candidate being Trump.
Quote:I wanted to clear one thing up. I am not suggesting any vast conspiracies here. I'm suggesting a bunch of really tiny conspiracies, the sort that actually do exist in the real world. That is, of the back room "you scratch my back, I'll scratch your's" type that define a lot of politics. The main difference is that I don't think anyone has any huge plans. These are purely "in the moment" conspiracies that have no real goals beyond the next election cycle, and all of these backroom deals all conflict with each other because, again, it's all a bunch of tiny machinations, Game of Thrones style. That said, the vast majority of government's injustice has less to do with those backroom deals and more to do with sheer incompetence on a large scale.Okay. Well, it is true that government officials often do do things that could be seen as corrupt for money or political support -- the old "war on pork" is an example of fighting this, though that had some negative unintended consequences, as pork programs like those were a good way to get someone to support a bill (by putting in something for their district into the bill), which now are much harder to pull off. But actual full-on corruption? Yes, it happens of course, but I don't think it's quite as common as you seem to.
7th July 2016, 5:17 AM
"Could be seen as corrupt"? Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.... mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm....
I don't care if it's normal, or if it works, corruption is corruption, and these "tiny little deals" are the sort of corruption I'm talking about. In fact, that's what "corruption" kinda means. What to an outsider would be a conflict of interest becomes "normalized" over the years until the insiders all say "that's just how it works, no one outside would understand, so we have to keep it a secret". If it's so innocent, why not just record all these backroom deals and put them on Youtube, for all to see and judge for themselves?
I don't care if it's normal, or if it works, corruption is corruption, and these "tiny little deals" are the sort of corruption I'm talking about. In fact, that's what "corruption" kinda means. What to an outsider would be a conflict of interest becomes "normalized" over the years until the insiders all say "that's just how it works, no one outside would understand, so we have to keep it a secret". If it's so innocent, why not just record all these backroom deals and put them on Youtube, for all to see and judge for themselves?
7th July 2016, 8:43 AM
Damn.... it...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/07/us/hil....html?_r=0
This has been making the rounds, a direct comparison of Hillary's statements a year ago and the FBI's new report.
And... well she was lying. There's no getting around it, she was clearly lying about a LOT of things. Yes, all politicians lie, but that's not something we should just accept.
So, we have Trump, who by all appearances seems to honestly believe every single thing he says, even the stuff that contradicts the other stuff, because he's a narcissistic idiot with no concept of the ability of memory to change. He's also a racist xenophobe with a lot of promises to do stuff that will actively harm lots of people.
Then we have Clinton, who now really does seem as dishonest as they say, but due to sheer political expedience will be actively doing some good things for people, though not nearly as much as I think a good politician should.
And the Libertarian party can be dismissed as "Objectivism light".
There's no possible way I'd ever vote for Trump, and I don't want to just stay home and not vote at all, but it's getting really REALLY hard to vote for the lesser of two evils over and over again... and again... and again... and again...
That green party is sure looking compelling, even if throwing my vote their way would be little more than a signal to the two big parties to pay more attention. But, then ABF would find me personally responsible for Trump winning, even tough it's only because people voted for Trump that he'd potentially win. I'm sick of that particular blame game set up entirely to disenfranchise third parties.
Who am I kidding? I'm voting for Hillary anyway because in Oklahoma, I can't vote for anyone but the two major parties. That's part of our state constitution. ABF probably thinks that's a great idea too.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/07/us/hil....html?_r=0
This has been making the rounds, a direct comparison of Hillary's statements a year ago and the FBI's new report.
And... well she was lying. There's no getting around it, she was clearly lying about a LOT of things. Yes, all politicians lie, but that's not something we should just accept.
So, we have Trump, who by all appearances seems to honestly believe every single thing he says, even the stuff that contradicts the other stuff, because he's a narcissistic idiot with no concept of the ability of memory to change. He's also a racist xenophobe with a lot of promises to do stuff that will actively harm lots of people.
Then we have Clinton, who now really does seem as dishonest as they say, but due to sheer political expedience will be actively doing some good things for people, though not nearly as much as I think a good politician should.
And the Libertarian party can be dismissed as "Objectivism light".
There's no possible way I'd ever vote for Trump, and I don't want to just stay home and not vote at all, but it's getting really REALLY hard to vote for the lesser of two evils over and over again... and again... and again... and again...
That green party is sure looking compelling, even if throwing my vote their way would be little more than a signal to the two big parties to pay more attention. But, then ABF would find me personally responsible for Trump winning, even tough it's only because people voted for Trump that he'd potentially win. I'm sick of that particular blame game set up entirely to disenfranchise third parties.
Who am I kidding? I'm voting for Hillary anyway because in Oklahoma, I can't vote for anyone but the two major parties. That's part of our state constitution. ABF probably thinks that's a great idea too.
8th July 2016, 6:31 PM
Dark Jaguar Wrote:Damn.... it...No, there is getting around it, and in my previous post I explain most of the discrepancy between the two sets of statements -- Hillary is going by State's standards, and Comey the FBI's. Please also see that link in my previous post.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/07/us/hil....html?_r=0
This has been making the rounds, a direct comparison of Hillary's statements a year ago and the FBI's new report.
And... well she was lying. There's no getting around it, she was clearly lying about a LOT of things. Yes, all politicians lie, but that's not something we should just accept.
For instance:
Quote:here is no classified material.v
Quote:seven email chains concern matters that were classified at the Top Secret/Special Access Program level when they were sent and received.Note a few things here -- from previous articles, these issues which "concern matters that were classified" are most likely those emails about news reports about classified programs. That info's already out there, who cares if you classify your emails about it, FBI?
That is, Comey's description of what those were is long because it was not a situation of clear-cut classified emails on this system; classified information has a completely different system, and Hillary has said that she did not use email for that, she'd read printouts and whatnot.
Quote: And there were no security breaches.”v
Quote:We do assess that hostile actors gained access to the private commercial email accounts of people with whom Secretary Clinton was in regular contact from her personal account.Clinton said that there were no security breaches on her private email server. Comey never provides the slightest shred of evidence against her assertion. What he says here is entirely unrelated to her statement.
Quote:I responded right away and provided all my emails that could possibly be work-related, which totaled roughly 55,000 printed pages,v
Quote:MR. COMEY: “The F.B.I. also discovered several thousand work-related emails that were not in the group of 30,000 that were returned by Secretary Clinton to State in 2014.Given that Hillary is not the most technically-inclined person, any emails forgotten on previous systems and not carried over to a new one surely are her tech peoples' fault and not her own. If what she said here was untrue, I highly doubt she knew that.
Quote:“A separate, closed system was used by the Department for the sole purpose of handling classified communicationsv
Quote: the security culture of the State Department in general, and with respect to use of unclassified email systems in particular, was generally lacking in the kind of care for classified informationAnd for this see my previous post, where I go over this issue in detail. Spies v. diplomats, discussion v. overdone secrecy, that linked article about diplomats in Pakistan, etc. Personally I am much more sympathetic to State than the FBI on this.
Now, I'm not saying everything Hillary said about the emails is completely true, but that there was no indictment, no proof of any foreign hacking of her server, and no clear-cut emails about things which should have been classified by State's standards says a LOT. Remember, Obama may have kept the guy on for some reason, but Comey is a Republican Bush appointee known to have donated to Republican candidates in the past! He surely wanted to indict if he could.
8th July 2016, 7:04 PM
Comey is defending his decision to not indict to angry Republicans: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/08/us/pol...mails.html
9th July 2016, 8:50 AM
And in spite of all of that, the fact remains she said things that were demonstrably untrue a year ago. You may be willing to come up with excuse after excuse for each individual untruth, but I'm not. At a certain point, you just have to admit she's a politician being a politician, that is, lying to cover her arse.
9th July 2016, 9:09 AM
Quote:Given that Hillay is not the most technically-inclined person...
...she had no business setting up a private email server for official State Department use?
The legality of what she did is rather beside the point. That's just terrible judgment, if it wasn't outright malfeasance. Trump isn't qualified to be president, but Clinton makes very bad judgment calls too often for me to be comfortable.
FTR: I don't care in the slightest about Ben Gozzey and it has nothing to do with my opinion of Clinton in any way.
9th July 2016, 12:22 PM
Dark Jaguar Wrote:And in spite of all of that, the fact remains she said things that were demonstrably untrue a year ago.I don't agree. She is just defending the position of the agency she was a part of, against the FBI's overdone, unnecessary instincts to make far more things secret than need to, or should, be.
Weltall Wrote:...she had no business setting up a private email server for official State Department use?Apparently the official government system wasn't very good, though.
I just don't understand, why do people actually care if she used a private server or the government one, if the results are the same either way? And, as far as we know, they are. If classified things were being sent from private email I could understand, but State had a separate system for that, and as this review has shown it was kept there; those few possible exceptions Comey mentions are sketchy cases, not clear emailing secrets on an unsecure system. So I don't care one bit what email she used.
9th July 2016, 2:11 PM
Quote:I just don't understand, why do people actually care if she used a private server or the government one, if the results are the same either way? And, as far as we know, they are. If classified things were being sent from private email I could understand, but State had a separate system for that, and as this review has shown it was kept there; those few possible exceptions Comey mentions are sketchy cases, not clear emailing secrets on an unsecure system. So I don't care one bit what email she used.
Of course not. You don't care that her husband met with the attorney general in private. You don't care that she voted to authorize a war that has destabilized the Middle East. You don't care that Clinton makes amazingly high-paid private speeches to the most powerful financial giants in the world or that she backs a trade deal that will open further unregulated labor markets so that American workers will be forced to accept further wage and benefits decreases if they want to continue working at all.
She could shoot someone and not lose your vote, to coin a phrase.
9th July 2016, 6:33 PM
Weltall Wrote:I don't really care about this because even if he said something about it (we don't know), what influence would she have over this anyway? Comey made his decision independently, and Lynch just supported it. I guess it looks a little bad for Bill to do that, but I don't see any possible effect from it.
Of course not. You don't care that her husband met with the attorney general in private.
Quote:You don't care that she voted to authorize a war that has destabilized the Middle East.... What? Of COURSE I care about this! Her Iraq vote always has been the biggest negative about Hillary for me. I'm just willing to support her anyway because I believe that she would not have made that decision with all the intelligence the Bush Administration had, that the Senate was lied to by the Bush Administration in an effort to get them to support a disastrously bad war Bush & co. were determined to start, and that she only voted that way (and again, Kerry, Biden, and more all voted the same way!) as a political maneuver to not oppose something they all thought was going to be a political negative to vote against.
Quote:You don't care that Clinton makes amazingly high-paid private speeches to the most powerful financial giants in the worldHigh-ranking ex-government officials give paid speeches ALL THE TIME, and it's not corruption. Not in any way. It's just making money by giving a speech, and if you can get paid for that, why not?
Quote:or that she backs a trade deal that will open further unregulated labor markets so that American workers will be forced to accept further wage and benefits decreases if they want to continue working at all.Hillary's current position is that she opposes TPP, you know. I hope that doesn't change, because I agree that it is a bad deal which needs to be stopped. I think it would be hard for her to switch sides on TPP now, after running for president opposing it... but unfortunately, my guess is that Obama gets it through in the lame-duck session in January, since he for whatever reason supports the thing and wants it passed, and that's probably the best shot for passing it.
Quote:She could shoot someone and not lose your vote, to coin a phrase.Don't say something this absurd, it's totally ridiculous.
11th July 2016, 3:09 PM
Honestly, there's things that were clearly untrue beyond the differences between state and FBI standards, but that's neither here nor there.
Here's the big news. Sanders negotiated hard with Clinton over what it'd take to get his support, and the result is that the democratic party has been forced to adopt a platform a lot more progressive than originally planned.
I love it.
For all your complaints about Sanders ABF, I'm sure you can appreciate that Sanders was doing the right thing in this case by withholding support until certain key points were adopted by the democratic platform.
Anyway, so that's that. Clinton has my conditional support. So long as she doesn't go back on this deal (and that's always an option, since platform statements don't necessarily reflect what a politician will actually do), I'm voting for her. So hip hip hurray! It's something!
Here's the big news. Sanders negotiated hard with Clinton over what it'd take to get his support, and the result is that the democratic party has been forced to adopt a platform a lot more progressive than originally planned.
I love it.
For all your complaints about Sanders ABF, I'm sure you can appreciate that Sanders was doing the right thing in this case by withholding support until certain key points were adopted by the democratic platform.
Anyway, so that's that. Clinton has my conditional support. So long as she doesn't go back on this deal (and that's always an option, since platform statements don't necessarily reflect what a politician will actually do), I'm voting for her. So hip hip hurray! It's something!
12th July 2016, 11:58 AM
A Black Falcon Wrote:... What? Of COURSE I care about this! Her Iraq vote always has been the biggest negative about Hillary for me. I'm just willing to support her anyway because I believe that she would not have made that decision with all the intelligence the Bush Administration had, that the Senate was lied to by the Bush Administration in an effort to get them to support a disastrously bad war Bush & co. were determined to start, and that she only voted that way (and again, Kerry, Biden, and more all voted the same way!) as a political maneuver to not oppose something they all thought was going to be a political negative to vote against.
Bernie Sanders had access to no more intelligence than Clinton did, and he made the right decision because the war was a moral wrong and a political disaster waiting to happen regardless of how valid the administration's intelligence was on the subject of Hussein's supposed weapons of mass destruction. Sanders understood that, and exercised better judgment when it came up for a vote. The base assumption that Clinton was more qualified than Sanders on the issue of foreign policy is debunked by that example alone. Sanders reasoned out what the consequences would be before it happened and that is a crucial element of leadership Hillary Clinton exercises too infrequently to make me comfortable. You better believe that a hypothetical Secretary of State Bernie Sanders would have never set up a private email server to handle official State Department correspondence and classified materials, because how on earth could that have possibly sounded like a good idea?
Quote:High-ranking ex-government officials give paid speeches ALL THE TIME, and it's not corruption. Not in any way. It's just making money by giving a speech, and if you can get paid for that, why not?
I can count on one finger the number of people who honestly felt like Hillary Clinton was done with her political ambitions when she gave those speeches. It's the guy who seriously just stated that these speeches are never done for nefarious reasons or political favors but probably forgot to add "except when Republicans do it".
Let's forget the gifts from Wall Street execs. Or how Prince Muhammad of Saudi Arabia claims that his country is funding 20% of Clinton's election expenses.
![[Image: screenshot.jpg]](http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user5/imageroot/2016/06/04/screenshot.jpg)
Myseriously, 'hackers' 'hacked' the news site which posted this report and planted it there. The 'true' story is that the amount was 'undisclosed'. Nonetheless, the alleged progressive candidate (representing the alleged progressive party) is being funded, in part, by an 'undisclosed' amount of donations from everyone's favorite progressive desert kingdom that definitely doesn't also fund global Islamic terror organizations.
I'm sure they have only the purest of intentions.
Quote:I think it would be hard for her to switch sides on TPP now, after running for president opposing it.
I think it would be the easiest thing in the world for her to do, and the non-Fox News media will never seriously grill her about it. The Fox News media won't grill her too hard on that particular issue since they are fine with her cooperation on that particular issue.
Quote:Don't say something this absurd, it's totally ridiculous.
I wasn't being literal, but you have an unusual number of blind spots for this candidate.
12th July 2016, 8:16 PM
Dark Jaguar Wrote:Honestly, there's things that were clearly untrue beyond the differences between state and FBI standards, but that's neither here nor there.Like what? State is now saying that at least two of the three emails on her server marked classified actually should not have been marked classified, and that the server probably didn't have anything they would call classified on it: http://www.factcheck.org/2016/07/revisit...formation/ This kind of thing really reinforces to me that the main issue is the inter-agency argument...
Quote:Here's the big news. Sanders negotiated hard with Clinton over what it'd take to get his support, and the result is that the democratic party has been forced to adopt a platform a lot more progressive than originally planned.What I've seen of the platform this year sounds pretty good, yes. It looks like they took many of the better ideas from both candidates, and apart from wishing that anti-TPP plank could have been there (but Obama's support for TPP made that very unlikely) I like what I've heard. Of course party platforms don't actually matter, candidates usually ignore them, but it is something.
I love it.
Quote:For all your complaints about Sanders ABF, I'm sure you can appreciate that Sanders was doing the right thing in this case by withholding support until certain key points were adopted by the democratic platform.Considering that this race has been over for months and you can still argue for a more liberal platform as a Hillary supporter, no, how does holding out until now really make sense?
Quote:Anyway, so that's that. Clinton has my conditional support. So long as she doesn't go back on this deal (and that's always an option, since platform statements don't necessarily reflect what a politician will actually do), I'm voting for her. So hip hip hurray! It's something!Yeah, it is something.
Weltall, have you noticed? Bernie endorsed Hillary now, finally. The primaries are over and the party is unifying. Did you watch video of their event together in New Hampshire? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NGosB4ieTE
Weltall Wrote:Bernie Sanders had access to no more intelligence than Clinton did,Bernie was in the House then, so he likely had less? The Senate had the key vote, from what I remember.
Quote:and he made the right decision because the war was a moral wrong and a political disaster waiting to happen regardless of how valid the administration's intelligence was on the subject of Hussein's supposed weapons of mass destruction. Sanders understood that, and exercised better judgment when it came up for a vote.Bernie was far from the only person on the right side of the Iraq issue, you know. And if you hate her so much for supporting it, were you also vocal in opposing Biden for VP and Kerry for current Secretary of State since both of them voted the same as she did on that vote?
Quote:The base assumption that Clinton was more qualified than Sanders on the issue of foreign policy is debunked by that example alone.Bernie kept trying to use this nonstarter of a point in the Democratic debates, and it just made him look desperate. It doesn't just strain credibility to say "I agree with most of the things you say about foreign policy but we can't trust you because you voted wrong on one vote 12 years ago". That's an obviously deeply flawed argument when you have NO major differences on actual current foreign policy issues, and when Hillary crushed him on the details in every single foreign policy section in the Democratic debates.
Quote:Sanders reasoned out what the consequences would be before it happened and that is a crucial element of leadership Hillary Clinton exercises too infrequently to make me comfortable.Actually, literally his entire case against her on the foreign policy front began and ended with "but she voted wrong on Iraq". There was NOTHING else there because they agree on everything else to a much greater extent. Those foreign policy debates were interesting because of how rarely they actually disagreed about much... she's more vocal about supporting Israel (I'm entirely on her side of this one, I REALLY dislike the anti-Israel trend of some people on the left today -- but even there Bernie himself isn't as extreme on this issue as some of his supporters are), they have some slight wording differences about Iran... was there even anything else of note? If you can't come up with any actual current issue you think she's really wrong about, it's hard to make the case that you can't trust her you know!
Quote:You better believe that a hypothetical Secretary of State Bernie Sanders would have never set up a private email server to handle official State Department correspondenceYou never know. Does he use email at all? Old people...
Quote:and classified materials, because how on earth could that have possibly sounded like a good idea?She did not do that. The State Department has now said that those three emails known to have been marked as classified were actually marked that way in error, or two of them were for sure and the third probably was as well. Information State actually considered classified did not go onto Hillary's server. http://www.factcheck.org/2016/07/revisit...formation/
You could make that case that State did not want to call everything classified that the FBI does, because that's very clearly true, but that is a very different thing from claiming that she or her people sent emails her department considered classified to her server; they didn't.
Quote:I count on one finger the number of people who honestly felt like Hillary Clinton was done with her political ambitions when she gave those speeches. It's the guy who seriously just stated that these speeches are never done for nefarious reasons or political favors but probably forgot to add "except when Republicans do it".
Let's forget the gifts from Wall Street execs. Or how Prince Muhammad of Saudi Arabia claims that his country is funding 20% of Clinton's election expenses.
[IMG]http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user5/imageroot/2016/06/04/screenshot.jpg
Myseriously, 'hackers' 'hacked' the news site which posted this report and planted it there. The 'true' story is that the amount was 'undisclosed'. Nonetheless, the alleged progressive candidate (representing the alleged progressive party) is being funded, in part, by an 'undisclosed' amount of donations from everyone's favorite progressive desert kingdom that definitely doesn't also fund global Islamic terror organizations.
I'm sure they have only the purest of intentions.
So now you're repeating ludicrous, blatantly false conspiracy theories? I'd have hoped for better than repeating obvious falsehoods. I do not believe in conspiracy theories and you shouldn't either.As for the speeches, you are not beholden to a group just because you spoke before them.
Quote:I think it would be the easiest thing in the world for her to do, and the non-Fox News media will never seriously grill her about it. The Fox News media won't grill her too hard on that particular issue since they are fine with her cooperation on that particular issue.You do know she is currently explicitly running as being against TPP, yes? It's not just a line on her website, she's actually saying it in speeches and such. People are watching.
Quote:I wasn't being literal, but you have an unusual number of blind spots for this candidate.This is the internet, it's hard to tell when someone is being serious when it's only text... and I often do take things literally when I read them.
Beyond that though, no, I don't have a blind spot for her; I'm actually looking at reality, instead of warped Hillary-hating-land stuff from Republican websites and whatever.
13th July 2016, 9:15 AM
Eh there's no point in watching that rally video. That rally is just typical fluff. It's the more concrete news about shifting policies that I'm interested in.
13th July 2016, 12:43 PM
Quote:Weltall, have you noticed? Bernie endorsed Hillary now, finally. The primaries are over and the party is unifying. Did you watch video of their event together in New Hampshire? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NGosB4ieTE
The Party is unifying in fear of Donald Trump. Fear of the GOP is the only unifying force this party has. Unfortunately, they have unified around a candidate that might not beat him.
Quote:Bernie was in the House then, so he likely had less? The Senate had the key vote, from what I remember.That's my point. It should have been a no-brainer for someone as intelligent as Clinton to see that it was a bad idea... unless you feel beholden to the same interests that require endless war for their perpetual enrichment. Bad judgment or corruption? Which is it, and which is worse?
Quote:Bernie was far from the only person on the right side of the Iraq issue, you know. And if you hate her so much for supporting it, were you also vocal in opposing Biden for VP and Kerry for current Secretary of State since both of them voted the same as she did on that vote?
VP is not an important position (and I was not left-leaning in 2008 anyway) and I was not a fan of John Kerry as SoS. Another weaksauce Democrat who lost a winnable election because he was too timid to fight for progressive principles.
Quote:Bernie kept trying to use this nonstarter of a point in the Democratic debates, and it just made him look desperate. It doesn't just strain credibility to say "I agree with most of the things you say about foreign policy but we can't trust you because you voted wrong on one vote 12 years ago". That's an obviously deeply flawed argument when you have NO major differences on actual current foreign policy issues, and when Hillary crushed him on the details in every single foreign policy section in the Democratic debates.
On one vote that has cascaded into a worldwide clusterfuck the likes of which will continue to cause problems for decades to come? Yeah, just a little matter.
Quote:Actually, literally his entire case against her on the foreign policy front began and ended with "but she voted wrong on Iraq". There was NOTHING else there because they agree on everything else to a much greater extent. Those foreign policy debates were interesting because of how rarely they actually disagreed about much... she's more vocal about supporting Israel (I'm entirely on her side of this one, I REALLY dislike the anti-Israel trend of some people on the left today -- but even there Bernie himself isn't as extreme on this issue as some of his supporters are), they have some slight wording differences about Iran... was there even anything else of note? If you can't come up with any actual current issue you think she's really wrong about, it's hard to make the case that you can't trust her you know!
What of her foreign policy experience is worth bragging about? A four year stint as SoS? In which we saw the Middle East collapse even further into anarchy because of our assistance in overthrowing dictators? What was accomplished under her watch, exactly? She has that small amount of experience and it's not really that great a body of work.
Hillary is an old Democrat in the mindset that you can't appear to be weak on crime or on defense. So expect more 'interventions' and the defense budget bloat to continue unabated.
Quote:You never know. Does he use email at all? Old people...
I believe he would not because it's a bad idea too obvious for anyone but Clinton to attempt. Or maybe Trump. Who knows. We're so fucked.
Quote:She did not do that. The State Department has now said that those three emails known to have been marked as classified were actually marked that way in error, or two of them were for sure and the third probably was as well. Information State actually considered classified did not go onto Hillary's server. http://www.factcheck.org/2016/07/revisit...formation/
You could make that case that State did not want to call everything classified that the FBI does, because that's very clearly true, but that is a very different thing from claiming that she or her people sent emails her department considered classified to her server; they didn't.
Neatly wrapped up in a bow so that the secretary of state would face no legal penalties. Plenty of underlings to throw under the bus, after all.
Quote:
The conspiracy theory here is that the statement from the prince was made up by 'hackers' and I don't believe that for a hot second.
Quote:As for the speeches, you are not beholden to a group just because you spoke before them.
Like Republicans and their speaking fees to finance and petroleum and assorted Jesus banger groups?
Clinton is a classic American politician. It would be folly to assume she is not on the take because that is what politicians do.
Quote:You do know she is currently explicitly running as being against TPP, yes? It's not just a line on her website, she's actually saying it in speeches and such. People are watching.That is what she is saying today, when she needs votes. Again, at best, she's just your average politician who thrives in the slime. If Obama pushes it through, who believes for a moment she'll try to undo it?
She was wholeheartedly on board with NAFTA and defended it for two decades. In 2016, people have come to understand that free trade agreements with unregulated labor markets are bad for American workers and all of a sudden Clinton agrees?
How crazy that no one outside of the cult of Clinton finds this new stance sincere.
13th July 2016, 5:22 PM
I don't know if it's sincere or not myself Weltall, because as you say Clinton has shown that a good number of her positions shift with the wind. She's generally more left leaning than all of the republican candidates, but it's very clear she's a centrist like Obama more than anything else, and I also don't think for a second that the Third Way group has diminished. The news still listens to them, like when they just recently criticized Bernie for forcing the democratic platform further left, since it goes against their oh-so successful "always compromise and meet in the middle" political style. ABF is right though in that Bernie's knowledge of foreign policy is his biggest weak point compared to Clinton.
Although, I gotta add these:
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/...l-defense/
For example, Clinton says she thought it would be easier to carry just one device as a defense, but the FBI found she used numerous devices. ABF, you can come up with a lot of defenses, and I'm sure you'll find a way to make this out not to be a lie, but unless you're claiming the FBI are the ones lying, there's very little wiggle room here.
All that said, sincere or not, she's a lot more likely to actually act on these issues than Trump is. I for one supported Sanders, but if truth be told I'd much rather have voted for Warren had she decided to run. There's a good chance she'll end up on the Clinton ticket, and that's all well and good, but that's why I say the next big fight needs to be for a legislature stacked with as many progressive candidates as possible. They'll be able to not only keep the republicans under control, but also keep Clinton in check and on track to actually keep her campaign promises. Warren, if she runs with Clinton, would also be in a good position to put pressure on Clinton.
It's not the best situation, but I'm not about to go with the alternative. This isn't quite Sophie's choice.
Although, I gotta add these:
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/...l-defense/
For example, Clinton says she thought it would be easier to carry just one device as a defense, but the FBI found she used numerous devices. ABF, you can come up with a lot of defenses, and I'm sure you'll find a way to make this out not to be a lie, but unless you're claiming the FBI are the ones lying, there's very little wiggle room here.
All that said, sincere or not, she's a lot more likely to actually act on these issues than Trump is. I for one supported Sanders, but if truth be told I'd much rather have voted for Warren had she decided to run. There's a good chance she'll end up on the Clinton ticket, and that's all well and good, but that's why I say the next big fight needs to be for a legislature stacked with as many progressive candidates as possible. They'll be able to not only keep the republicans under control, but also keep Clinton in check and on track to actually keep her campaign promises. Warren, if she runs with Clinton, would also be in a good position to put pressure on Clinton.
It's not the best situation, but I'm not about to go with the alternative. This isn't quite Sophie's choice.
13th July 2016, 5:53 PM
Weltall Wrote:The Party is unifying in fear of Donald Trump. Fear of the GOP is the only unifying force this party has. Unfortunately, they have unified around a candidate that might not beat him.What the heck? No, of course not. The party is unifying because parties almost always unify once they have chosen a candidate. Unless something incredibly unlikely happens to split a party (slavery in the 1850s, for the biggest example), parties unify once they choose a candidate. The unification for the Democrats this year is proceeding faster than it did in '08 probably partially thanks to fear of Trump, but it'd happen regardless, it always does.
Quote:That's my point. It should have been a no-brainer for someone as intelligent as Clinton to see that it was a bad idea... unless you feel beholden to the same interests that require endless war for their perpetual enrichment. Bad judgment or corruption? Which is it, and which is worse?No, you're missing the point. The Senate, particularly, was lied to by the Bush Administration in order to get that vote through successfully. House members were not pressured nearly as much as Senators, were not shown classified briefings skewed with half-truths (at best) to convince them to support it, etc. Sure, the Senators should have been able to see how bad an idea it was despite all that, but their exposure to all that pressure and intelligence had an impact which it would not have had on a House member. I've heard some explanations that the Democrats who supported the bill voted that way not only because of fear of voting against what they thought would be, and was at the time, a popular bill, but also because of everything they had been shown, believing that this special info was real and not just a pack of lies put together to get the desired result.
They absolutely should have known better, but blame the Bush Administration for that, not the Democrats in the Senate who voted for that bill -- which, remember, was not a final "we will go to war with Iraq" bill, just a step towards that that they should have known probably would lead to war. But again, it's the Bush team who are to blame here! I imagine that however that vote had gone Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld would have come up with a way for them to start that war anyway. They REALLY wanted it.
Quote:VP is not an important position (and I was not left-leaning in 2008 anyway) and I was not a fan of John Kerry as SoS. Another weaksauce Democrat who lost a winnable election because he was too timid to fight for progressive principles.Kerry is the current SoS you know, and I think he's doing a very good job! Hillary was also good, and Kerry has done a great job so far.
As for Kerry in '04, yeah that was a disappointing campaign. It should say a lot about how popular that war still was at that point that his major introductory line at the Democratic Convention that year was "reporting for duty" with a salute... I still remember that, it was not a great moment. But he was a good Senator, and has been a good Secretary of State as well.
Quote:On one vote that has cascaded into a worldwide clusterfuck the likes of which will continue to cause problems for decades to come? Yeah, just a little matter.Again I blame Bush for all this, he and his team initiated these policies. And do you really think that losing that vote would have completely derailed their plans to invade Iraq? They'd have found a way...
Quote:What of her foreign policy experience is worth bragging about? A four year stint as SoS? In which we saw the Middle East collapse even further into anarchy because of our assistance in overthrowing dictators? What was accomplished under her watch, exactly? She has that small amount of experience and it's not really that great a body of work.On the subject of crime, she's right on target with where the Democratic Party is now in wanting reforms to do what we can to reduce how much nonwhite people are unfairly penalized by the justice system. She's no "old Democrat" on that, not now anyway.
Hillary is an old Democrat in the mindset that you can't appear to be weak on crime or on defense. So expect more 'interventions' and the defense budget bloat to continue unabated.
As for foreign policy, America is, like it or not, the most powerful country in the world. If we ignore that and stick our heads in the sand it does nobody any good. You need to use your power wisely, as the disastrous decision to invade Iraq shows, but you can't just stay at home, that helps make things worse. Probably the biggest negative event of Hillary's time as SoS was/is the collapse of Syria, and the decision to NOT intervene there in the early days was made by Obama... a decision that might have been a poor one, considering the direction that country has gone in since. We certainly should not have sent ground troops to Syria, but we could have done more than Obama allowed. Maybe things would have ended up just as bad as they have, but you never know. But anyway, yes, the actual issue is pretty much the opposite from how you describe it. As for actual interventions, Libya has indeed sort of collapsed, but I do think that intervention was more good than bad; Quaddafi was a very bad leader, and stopping him from slaughtering lots of people, and helping take him down, when there was hope for a better Libya was a chance worth taking. Of course, even anti-intevention Obama supported Libya. Bernie didn't really oppose it either, I think, which is why he didn't hit her hard on Libya in the debates.
Quote:oI believe he would not because it's a bad idea too obvious for anyone but Clinton to attempt. Or maybe Trump. Who knows. We're so fucked.... And you've already forgotten that Colin Powell also used private email sometimes while Secretary of State? Come on, she wasn't the only one. And her email server may well have been more secure than the governments', you never know...
Quote:Neatly wrapped up in a bow so that the secretary of state would face no legal penalties. Plenty of underlings to throw under the bus, after all.No underlings are being thrown under any busses because no one broke any laws.
Quote:The conspiracy theory here is that the statement from the prince was made up by 'hackers' and I don't believe that for a hot second.No, the conspiracy theory would be that it's real.
Quote:Like Republicans and their speaking fees to finance and petroleum and assorted Jesus banger groups?Well, what is corruption? I guess you think that the regular order of the way politics works is all corrupt, while I'd say that only actual corruption -- that is, people illegally taking money they aren't allowed to -- is corruption, while the rest is the effects of a broken campaign finance system that we need to reform. I know that Washington has an effect on people the longer they are there, as exposure to lots of lobbyists but not so many normal people has its effect, and yes, special interests do have an outsize influence on policy, on a broader level I do not agree with the idea that politicians are all corrupt. I think most are not corrupt, and only the rare exceptions are actually corrupt. Speaking fees and the like are not corruption, it's just a speech. Most people would not change their vote for that "small" an amount of money!
Clinton is a classic American politician. It would be folly to assume she is not on the take because that is what politicians do.
So yes, special interests pushing an agenda get members of congress to support unpopular things, such as the NRA, because of the outsize influence of lobbyists and their money, but I would not call that all corruption; that's using a far too broad definition of the term. That's just an unfortunate result of having a representative democracy. There's no way to make it so that people with more money don't have more influence than people with less money, that's an impossibility. We could do a lot better job than we do, yes -- we need campaign finance reform, to overturn Citizen's United, to require disclosure of where all money is coming from, to crack down on or ban SuperPACs, to make it easier to stop clearly false attack ads (I mean ones based on actual lies -- think Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, etc.), and more -- but in some way, there are going to be people whose job it is to try to influence legislators' votes.
But as they say, Democracy is the worst political system ever... except for all the other ones. :p
Quote:That is what she is saying today, when she needs votes. Again, at best, she's just your average politician who thrives in the slime. If Obama pushes it through, who believes for a moment she'll try to undo it?We'll see, but I'd hope she would do something, and while politicians do sometimes campaign for something and then do the opposite, it hurts them politically to do so and she knows that.
She was wholeheartedly on board with NAFTA and defended it for two decades. In 2016, people have come to understand that free trade agreements with unregulated labor markets are bad for American workers and all of a sudden Clinton agrees?
Quote:How crazy that no one outside of the cult of Clinton finds this new stance sincere.It's disappointing that you can't see how much sexism is behind most attacks on Hillary. People can't change their views on a thing? It happens all the time, though. Yes, she is more pro-trade than Bernie, that is true, though, no question. But the main reasons I dislike TPP aren't just for trade reasons -- you can try to make an argument that people in other nations are helped by this kind of deal, maybe doing more overall good worldwide than harm -- but for the weak environmental, labor, etc. parts in the deal. NAFTA is similar, it hasn't been great, but maybe could have been better... or maybe we'd have been better off without it, I don't know. I am terrible at economics and always have been, so I'm not going to be the one to try to make that analysis. (I like foreign policy MUCH more than economics...)
22nd July 2016, 5:27 PM
A Black Falcon Wrote:What the heck? No, of course not. The party is unifying because parties almost always unify once they have chosen a candidate. Unless something incredibly unlikely happens to split a party (slavery in the 1850s, for the biggest example), parties unify once they choose a candidate. The unification for the Democrats this year is proceeding faster than it did in '08 probably partially thanks to fear of Trump, but it'd happen regardless, it always does.
Something has happened, perhaps not bad enough to physically split the party, definitely bad enough that Clinton polls roughly even with a literal TV character. And that 538 forecast has dropped Clinton's chances from 80% to 60%. What does she do better than start with a huge lead and gradually leak it away throughout a contest?
Quote:No, you're missing the point. The Senate, particularly, was lied to by the Bush Administration in order to get that vote through successfully. House members were not pressured nearly as much as Senators, were not shown classified briefings skewed with half-truths (at best) to convince them to support it, etc.
As a defense, Clinton and other Democrats being too gullible and scared to make the right choice is not really that much better than making the wrong choice on purpose.
Quote:They absolutely should have known better, but blame the Bush Administration for that, not the Democrats in the Senate who voted for that bill -- which, remember, was not a final "we will go to war with Iraq" bill, just a step towards that that they should have known probably would lead to war. But again, it's the Bush team who are to blame here! I imagine that however that vote had gone Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld would have come up with a way for them to start that war anyway. They REALLY wanted it.
Of course they wanted it and of course they would have gone to any lengths to get that war going. That does not excuse Senate Democrats for making it easier for them.
Quote:Again I blame Bush for all this, he and his team initiated these policies. And do you really think that losing that vote would have completely derailed their plans to invade Iraq? They'd have found a way...
Whether they would have defeated the Bush administration in stopping the war is not important. The fact that they gave him what he wanted without a fight speaks terribly of every Democrat who cast votes which did so. That includes your candidate of choice, and it was not an aberration on her part. She is generally pro-war and pro-intervention, cut from the same Cold War stripe most politicians of her era were, and guilty of the same lack of imagination which is necessary to adapt to a world in which America's foreign policy challenges, specifically in regards to the use of military force, do not involve competing superpower states.
And that assessment is the generous one, which assumes that Clinton and like-minded Democrats aren't acting as willing instruments of the military-industrial complex, as they are of the financial industry. Clinton picked my former governor Tim Kaine as VP, a man who is all about deregulating the finance industry. I'm sure that's just because he's getting bad intelligence.
Quote:On the subject of crime, she's right on target with where the Democratic Party is now in wanting reforms to do what we can to reduce how much nonwhite people are unfairly penalized by the justice system. She's no "old Democrat" on that, not now anyway.
That's not where the Democratic Party needs to be. It needs to be wanting reforms that reduce how many people of any demographic are unfairly penalized by the justice system, having lives ruined and fortunes destroyed because of non-violent offenses. America has the largest rate of incarceration of any country in the world by a huge measure. Clinton and the Democratic Party do not recognize this fact as problematic and indeed are still, as a party, not yet willing to embrace decriminalization of drugs and the legalization of cannabis in particular. Too many special interests don't want this to happen, from law enforcement to private prison corporations, which all rely on a steady stream of inmates to sustain a business model/funding.
Clinton is right on target for her party, the party is way behind and progressing only because of people like Bernie Sanders making people aware of what's happening.
[/quote]As for foreign policy, America is, like it or not, the most powerful country in the world. If we ignore that and stick our heads in the sand it does nobody any good. You need to use your power wisely, as the disastrous decision to invade Iraq shows, but you can't just stay at home, that helps make things worse.[/quote]
Can you point to any significant foreign intervention America has participated in since the second World War that resulted in a better and more peaceful world? I mean maybe Korea counts.
Note: I don't mean those that saw immediate success, but lasting success. Desert Storm was a walkover that sowed the seeds for global Islamic terror and a badly destabilized region.
Quote:... And you've already forgotten that Colin Powell also used private email sometimes while Secretary of State? Come on, she wasn't the only one. And her email server may well have been more secure than the governments', you never know...
This makes it okay?
Quote:No underlings are being thrown under any busses because no one broke any laws.
"Several dozen" top Clinton aides may find themselves unable to gain higher security clearance because of their involvement. Clinton herself faces only herself as an obstacle in her pursuit of the ultimate security clearance. The bus has plenty of room underneath.
Quote:Well, what is corruption? I guess you think that the regular order of the way politics works is all corrupt, while I'd say that only actual corruption -- that is, people illegally taking money they aren't allowed to -- is corruption, while the rest is the effects of a broken campaign finance system that we need to reform. I know that Washington has an effect on people the longer they are there, as exposure to lots of lobbyists but not so many normal people has its effect, and yes, special interests do have an outsize influence on policy, on a broader level I do not agree with the idea that politicians are all corrupt. I think most are not corrupt, and only the rare exceptions are actually corrupt. Speaking fees and the like are not corruption, it's just a speech. Most people would not change their vote for that "small" an amount of money!
There are people who murder other people over chump change, and $250,000 is not chump change. No one who takes money in that amount from corporations who have vested interests in manipulating the political system should be allowed to participate in it as a public servant. You trust a candidate because they have a D rather than an R, that's folly.
Quote:We could do a lot better job than we do, yes -- we need campaign finance reform, to overturn Citizen's United, to require disclosure of where all money is coming from, to crack down on or ban SuperPACs, to make it easier to stop clearly false attack ads (I mean ones based on actual lies -- think Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, etc.), and more -- but in some way, there are going to be people whose job it is to try to influence legislators' votes.
One candidate made this an issue during the primary and one didn't. So yeah, these things need to happen, but the majority of Democratic voters didn't think they were that important. Structural reform of our political process? Nah, I'd rather have a woman president.
Quote:We'll see, but I'd hope she would do something, and while politicians do sometimes campaign for something and then do the opposite, it hurts them politically to do so and she knows that.
"I'd love to but republican obstructionism" followed by a wink you can't see but you can almost hear.
Quote:It's disappointing that you can't see how much sexism is behind most attacks on Hillary.
As disappointing that you don't see how bad an idea it is to nominate a candidate who is trusted by 33% of Americans whatever the reasons (and it's not because 66% of America is sexist).
22nd July 2016, 7:51 PM
Weltall Wrote:Something has happened, perhaps not bad enough to physically split the party, definitely bad enough that Clinton polls roughly even with a literal TV character. And that 538 forecast has dropped Clinton's chances from 80% to 60%. What does she do better than start with a huge lead and gradually leak it away throughout a contest?Trump is getting the usual convention bounce. It'll recede very soon as we head into the Democratic convention.
Quote:As a defense, Clinton and other Democrats being too gullible and scared to make the right choice is not really that much better than making the wrong choice on purpose.'
I do somewhat agree, but still I have always mostly blamed Bush & co., not the Democrats, because the war was his and Cheney's idea. I very much believe that no Democratic president would ever have gone to war with Iraq then, no way. And Hillary would not do that today either. Senate Democrats do deserve some blame, but Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld deserve almost all of it. Remember how they got Colin Powell to lie to the UN to help their case, even!
Quote:Of course they wanted it and of course they would have gone to any lengths to get that war going. That does not excuse Senate Democrats for making it easier for them.Sure, but if it was going to happen either way that vote doesn't matter as much as if it could have actually stopped the war.
Quote:Whether they would have defeated the Bush administration in stopping the war is not important. The fact that they gave him what he wanted without a fight speaks terribly of every Democrat who cast votes which did so. That includes your candidate of choice, and it was not an aberration on her part. She is generally pro-war and pro-intervention, cut from the same Cold War stripe most politicians of her era were, and guilty of the same lack of imagination which is necessary to adapt to a world in which America's foreign policy challenges, specifically in regards to the use of military force, do not involve competing superpower states.For all of our failings America has done a great deal to make this world a better place, and unfortunately sometimes that requires a military element. Of course there have been some disastrous failures, most notably Iraq and Vietam, but there are also successes. You sound WAY too isolationist here for me. I am not an isolationist.
Quote:And that assessment is the generous one, which assumes that Clinton and like-minded Democrats aren't acting as willing instruments of the military-industrial complex, as they are of the financial industry. Clinton picked my former governor Tim Kaine as VP, a man who is all about deregulating the finance industry. I'm sure that's just because he's getting bad intelligence.I agree that the Kaine choice is a bit disappointing, but he is a liberal with good ratings from all the major liberal rating groups. He may help with some groups Hillary is struggling with too, who knows. I would have liked to see Elizabeth Warren, but hopefully he'll be fine.
Quote:That's not where the Democratic Party needs to be. It needs to be wanting reforms that reduce how many people of any demographic are unfairly penalized by the justice system, having lives ruined and fortunes destroyed because of non-violent offenses. America has the largest rate of incarceration of any country in the world by a huge measure. Clinton and the Democratic Party do not recognize this fact as problematic and indeed are still, as a party, not yet willing to embrace decriminalization of drugs and the legalization of cannabis in particular. Too many special interests don't want this to happen, from law enforcement to private prison corporations, which all rely on a steady stream of inmates to sustain a business model/funding.As you may recall, I have always strongly opposed legalizing any illegal drugs. If it was up to me tobacco would be illegal too, and you can make a good case for alcohol as well (on the one hand it doesn't automatically hurt others, but on the other hand it is the most deadly drug in the country in terms of the number of people it kills...). My opinion on drugs has not changed over the years, I've always been against drug legalization. It's been sad to see America head towards legalizing marijuana, it's a mistake.
Clinton is right on target for her party, the party is way behind and progressing only because of people like Bernie Sanders making people aware of what's happening.
As for sentencing, though, America often sentences people too harshly, but Europe seems to often sentence too lightly. The ideal is probably somewhere in between, and of course without any racial bias in sentencing as currently exists.
Quote:Can you point to any significant foreign intervention America has participated in since the second World War that resulted in a better and more peaceful world? I mean maybe Korea counts.You think the first Iraq War "sowed the seeds for global Islamic terror"? I don't know about that. It was the second Iraq war, not Desert Storm, that did that. I think the first Gulf War was a success and did make the world a better place, in keeping Sadaam from destroying Kuwait, in showing that the US and Russia could actually work together in the new post-Cold War world, and more. I thought that the economic sanctions, blockade, and partial no-fly zone of Sadaam's Iraq that the US imposed between the two wars did more good than bad, overall, as well; for example it kept Sadaam from rebuilding any chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons programs as he had had before, thankfully, among other things. Some did suffer there because of it, but there was also a benefit.
Note: I don't mean those that saw immediate success, but lasting success. Desert Storm was a walkover that sowed the seeds for global Islamic terror and a badly destabilized region
For some more, you mention it, but the Korean War is a clear-cut case of American intervention making things better. South Korea only exists today as a free nation because of us. A Kim dynasty ruling unified Korea would be a worse world for sure!
And for another easy example, Kosovo was a very successful and badly-needed campaign which I supported at the time, and it helped finally stabilize Eastern Europe after nearly a decade of war. Remember I lived in Slovenia in 1990-'91 as Yugoslavia fell apart, and it was frustrating to see the US not do enough for so long, until the '95 Dayton Accords and then again the '99 bombing campaign to stop Serbia from attacking Kosovo. It was a great success and directly led to Milosevich's much-needed ouster.
I imagine there are probably more than these, and there definitely are if you include things like economic sanctions (Obama's sanctions on Iran to get them to the nuclear deal were a very good move!), but for military actions, those are the ones that come to mind. Of course there are others which were bad to awful ideas, mostly Cold War actions such as Vietnam, Granada, Cuba, Iran (overthrowing Mussadeh is one of our bigger foreign policy mistakes of the Cold War, perhaps), etc, but it certainly was not all bad.
Quote:This makes it okay?As I said I have never once cared what email server she used or uses, so long as it was secure, so sure.
Quote:"Several dozen" top Clinton aides may find themselves unable to gain higher security clearance because of their involvement. Clinton herself faces only herself as an obstacle in her pursuit of the ultimate security clearance. The bus has plenty of room underneath.Yeah, I'm sure that's going to go real far in a Clinton administration...
Quote:There are people who murder other people over chump change, and $250,000 is not chump change. No one who takes money in that amount from corporations who have vested interests in manipulating the political system should be allowed to participate in it as a public servant. You trust a candidate because they have a D rather than an R, that's folly.The much bigger folly is saying that every single member of congress is corrupt, which is what you are saying if you believe what you say here. Influenced, yes. Corrupt, absolutely not. And while it is huge, big-money lobbyists are not the only influence our members of congress see.
On the other hand though, I would love to see a campaign finance system which does not require all House members to spend multiple hours almost every day calling donors begging for money, as we have. That is a terrible system which really should not be... but those people aren't all corrupt because they're asking for money, no way.
Quote:One candidate made this an issue during the primary and one didn't. So yeah, these things need to happen, but the majority of Democratic voters didn't think they were that important. Structural reform of our political process? Nah, I'd rather have a woman president.This is completely false; Hillary has made campaign finance reform, and overturning Citizen's United, important elements of her campaign. The Democratic Party's position on SuperPACs basically is "we'll use them because we have to to win, but what we really want is a better campaign finance system that gets rid of this stuff".
Quote:"I'd love to but republican obstructionism" followed by a wink you can't see but you can almost hear.What wink? The Republicans today are the most obstructionist any party has ever been in this nation's history. But she will try anyway. This is one reason we really need to win back the Senate this November, that would be a huge help!
Quote:As disappointing that you don't see how bad an idea it is to nominate a candidate who is trusted by 33% of Americans whatever the reasons (and it's not because 66% of America is sexist).Everybody unconsciously believes some kind of negative gender stereotypes I am sure, you can't escape the culture you grow up in.
And as for trust, her numbers will go up once she's elected.
23rd July 2016, 9:32 PM
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2016/07/d...going-well
Read this plz ABF, every word. It speaks my own thoughts most eloquently.
Read this plz ABF, every word. It speaks my own thoughts most eloquently.
23rd July 2016, 11:16 PM
I read it, or at least enough of it, and don't agree with much there. The general tone of the article discounts the Democratic Party and its policy positions, and that's wrong. If Bernie and his "message above policy" focus was oh so great, Bernie would be the nominee now, not Hillary. He isn't. And as someone who cares a lot about policy myself, I want to see people who care about policy in office! So yeah, I strongly disagree with that part of the article. Hillary does not need to turn into Bernie to win in November; she beat him as she is. And the vast majority of Bernie supporters now support Hillary, a very important point this long article totally fails to mention. This article reads like it's still March or something, not July! Come on.
And beyond that, we won't win this election by trying to win West Virginia, that state is gone. Yes, the economy is important and people are struggling, but Hillary and Obama's message, that things are actually getting better, is the right one. Focus on optimism, not fear! People like optimism, particularly when the message is true. The economy IS better than the Republicans say, and pointing that out is a good way to start pushing back against Trump's lies. And on that note, yes, publicly fact-checking Trump's lies is similarly important and must be done. And returning to the policy-wonk issue from earlier, I presume this guy says bad things about them because Hillary is one and Bernie isn't, but we need people who actually understand the issues.
And on that note, while I do agree that Kaine may not be the best, he is liberal on most issues and has very good scores from liberal ranking groups. His selection also emphasizes how Hillary is focusing a lot on gun control, as Kaine also strongly supports that very important issue. And for another positive about Kaine, he has already drawn good statements from some Republican senators, a good sign for Hillary getting things done in the Senate, importantly!
The author is also wrong on racism, it isn't "pointless" to "scoff at" "Leave" voters for being racists. Yes, you need to argue against policy too, but it is incredibly important to take on the racism as well. People are not only supporting Trump for economic reasons, but for explicitly racist ones because he is running a racist campaign. Making a big point of this helps the Democrats as there are more people in this nation who oppose such racism as there are who support it. Trump's extreme racist campaign must lose.
Etc, etc. I agree with a few things there, sure -- yes, we need a strong economic message to help convince people to vote Democratic as the economy is always the most important issue, and progressive policies must be advanced, but this article, is it legitimate, or just bitter Bernie-fan concern-trolling aimed the Clinton campaign? She's doing much better than this article suggests, as we will see next week in Philly.
Meanwhile, in the world outside of articles by bitter Bernie fans:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/trum...ly-a-thing This somewhat scary article points out Trump's financial ties to people close to Vladmir Putin. Trump doesn't just say nice things about Putin, he takes a lot of money from Russia since American banks won't give him money thanks to some of his bankruptcies in the past. And I didn't know this, but his current acting campaign chair Paul Manafort was for years a top campaign adviser for Victor Yanukovich, the ex-president of the Ukraine who is very strongly pro-Putin, did stuff that helped set off the Ukraine crisis, his top foreign policy adviser on Europe is a guy with deep ties to Gazprom, the Kremlin-controlled Russian energy company, and more! It's amusing seeing a Republican with such deep pro-Russia ties, given their party's history of Russia-hating through the Cold War, but it's scary stuff -- this explains why he says "we wouldn't necessarily defend the Baltic States [against Russia] even though we have a NATO obligation to do that", etc.
No, just "be scared of Trump" is not a campaign, but it needs to be one part of it. Two focuses, then -- 'oppose Trump because he is uniquely dangerous for America', and 'vote for Hillary because she will make America better'.
And beyond that, we won't win this election by trying to win West Virginia, that state is gone. Yes, the economy is important and people are struggling, but Hillary and Obama's message, that things are actually getting better, is the right one. Focus on optimism, not fear! People like optimism, particularly when the message is true. The economy IS better than the Republicans say, and pointing that out is a good way to start pushing back against Trump's lies. And on that note, yes, publicly fact-checking Trump's lies is similarly important and must be done. And returning to the policy-wonk issue from earlier, I presume this guy says bad things about them because Hillary is one and Bernie isn't, but we need people who actually understand the issues.
And on that note, while I do agree that Kaine may not be the best, he is liberal on most issues and has very good scores from liberal ranking groups. His selection also emphasizes how Hillary is focusing a lot on gun control, as Kaine also strongly supports that very important issue. And for another positive about Kaine, he has already drawn good statements from some Republican senators, a good sign for Hillary getting things done in the Senate, importantly!
The author is also wrong on racism, it isn't "pointless" to "scoff at" "Leave" voters for being racists. Yes, you need to argue against policy too, but it is incredibly important to take on the racism as well. People are not only supporting Trump for economic reasons, but for explicitly racist ones because he is running a racist campaign. Making a big point of this helps the Democrats as there are more people in this nation who oppose such racism as there are who support it. Trump's extreme racist campaign must lose.
Etc, etc. I agree with a few things there, sure -- yes, we need a strong economic message to help convince people to vote Democratic as the economy is always the most important issue, and progressive policies must be advanced, but this article, is it legitimate, or just bitter Bernie-fan concern-trolling aimed the Clinton campaign? She's doing much better than this article suggests, as we will see next week in Philly.
Meanwhile, in the world outside of articles by bitter Bernie fans:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/trum...ly-a-thing This somewhat scary article points out Trump's financial ties to people close to Vladmir Putin. Trump doesn't just say nice things about Putin, he takes a lot of money from Russia since American banks won't give him money thanks to some of his bankruptcies in the past. And I didn't know this, but his current acting campaign chair Paul Manafort was for years a top campaign adviser for Victor Yanukovich, the ex-president of the Ukraine who is very strongly pro-Putin, did stuff that helped set off the Ukraine crisis, his top foreign policy adviser on Europe is a guy with deep ties to Gazprom, the Kremlin-controlled Russian energy company, and more! It's amusing seeing a Republican with such deep pro-Russia ties, given their party's history of Russia-hating through the Cold War, but it's scary stuff -- this explains why he says "we wouldn't necessarily defend the Baltic States [against Russia] even though we have a NATO obligation to do that", etc.
No, just "be scared of Trump" is not a campaign, but it needs to be one part of it. Two focuses, then -- 'oppose Trump because he is uniquely dangerous for America', and 'vote for Hillary because she will make America better'.
24th July 2016, 4:10 PM
Looks like someone poofed on the house of cards.
25th July 2016, 4:41 PM
![[Image: 538_nowcast.jpg?1469461373]](http://images.dailykos.com/images/278343/large/538_nowcast.jpg?1469461373)
There's that post-convention bump.
Keep assuming he has hit his peak. It's a mistake that, so far, 16 candidates in this election made.
25th July 2016, 5:45 PM
... Except that literally every single cycle candidates get a bump after their convention. At this point in '08 McCain was polling ahead.
Now, if in a week or two Trump is STILL polling well, then I'll be worried. I don't like that the polling is close and can't really understand why people would vote for someone as horrendous as Trump, but this bad polling will fade; it always does.
Now, if in a week or two Trump is STILL polling well, then I'll be worried. I don't like that the polling is close and can't really understand why people would vote for someone as horrendous as Trump, but this bad polling will fade; it always does.
25th July 2016, 6:49 PM
That poll shows a 20 point swing since you made your last post remarking about the post-convention bump.
Every one of Trump's vanquished opponents thought the same thing.
Because Hillary Clinton is a divisive figure trusted only by her supporters and even if that mistrust isn't always deserved or based on facts, it still boggles the mind that the party would fast-track a nominee that is deeply unpopular whatever the reason. I thought the point was to win.
Quote:it always does
Every one of Trump's vanquished opponents thought the same thing.
Quote:can't really understand why people would vote for someone as horrendous as Trump
Because Hillary Clinton is a divisive figure trusted only by her supporters and even if that mistrust isn't always deserved or based on facts, it still boggles the mind that the party would fast-track a nominee that is deeply unpopular whatever the reason. I thought the point was to win.
26th July 2016, 8:40 PM
Bill';s absolutely superb speech a few hours ago existed to help address some of that mistrust and reverse it. Did you watch? Bill is probably the best public speaker alive today, and has been for a long time now, and this speech is another reminder of just how amazing a speaker he is. He went over the decades he's known Hillary, talking about all the ways she has made things better for people. He discussed her fighting to desegregate schools in the South, improve education in Arkansas, get the children's health insurance bill passed, etc etc, and all in that amazing way he has of speaking, leading up to his core stateemnt that the 'real Hillary' is the one he described, while the 'fake Hillary' is the one the Republicans have created as an invented 'cartoon villain'. Good message there for sure. The speech was apparently partly ad-libbed too, which isn't surprising, but is always cool to hear about.
So, if the polling is again not wrong, we have seen a normal (if maybe a little small) convention bounce for Trump. It's been frustrating to see, as as I said I can't see any appeal whatsoever in his message, but he got that bounce, and it'll go down now as it always does. I like that our convention is second, that's the place you want to be in...
Quote: That poll shows a 20 point swing since you made your last post remarking about the post-convention bump.Look at the polling average, not any one single poll. Trump has gained a few points on Hillary since his convention, but nothing out of the ordinary for a convention bump. And with how well the Democratic convention is going so far, with the good to great speeches last night and Bill's tonight, and with President Obama and Hillary yet to come in the next two days, I think we will see that bump abate quickly.
Quote: Every one of Trump's vanquished opponents thought the same thing.Then they weren't looking at the polls, because ever since last summer polling of the Republican primary campaign was very consistent and mostly accurate: Trump was ahead, by a lot. The polling was not wrong.
So, if the polling is again not wrong, we have seen a normal (if maybe a little small) convention bounce for Trump. It's been frustrating to see, as as I said I can't see any appeal whatsoever in his message, but he got that bounce, and it'll go down now as it always does. I like that our convention is second, that's the place you want to be in...