The 2016 US Election (Part III)

[Patroklos]

Its not hysteria. Its anger and contempt. Learn the difference, asshole.

Hysteria, anger and contempt are not mutually exclusive. Though I am glad to admit you are in fact angry and contemptuous. Another thing you have in common with the worst of the Trump (or anyone's) supporters.

And yes, you are guilty of apologism, for the reasons I stated.

No, you haven't. Quote exactly where I apologize for anything he said.

Protip. Apologism would be me saying "Yes, he did call for people to murder Clinton, and its okay because XY&Z." I have simply said you are ascribing a meaning to his speech that is supported by neither the context or the actual text. Not the same thing.

For another example, idiots similar to yourself who like to make unreasonable conclusions based on asinine parsing of language jumped on Hillary saying she wants to raise taxes on the middle class. The people who came to her defense did so by saying that's not what she meant to say and it was a mistake/or she didn't enunciate well are not apologists. People who maintain she did mean to say that and justify it are.

Funny how everyone else seems to acknowledge that it can be interpreted in that manner. You're the only exception here.

That's actually not whats happening. Again as per your own article they didn't report that Trump called for people to murder Clinton. They said it can be interpreted that way. The only reason to say it that way is because that's not the likely meaning.

And just because something can be interpreted that way does not mean it is reasonable to do so.

It couldn't possibly be because you're a habitual apologist for the far Right, could it?

I am? If that's the case find me any quote where I offer support for Donald Trump. Ever. Last week, last year, last decade.

However, since you are a two faced weaselly shitbag, I will lower the bar for you. Find a post by me where I am an apologist (the actual meaning I educated you on above, not your BS made up hysterical invention) for any far right thing in the last month.

Happy hunting.

It can easily be interrupted that way. And that's the problem. It is an irresponsible comment that will be interpreted that way by those who might act accordingly on it, and Trump either knows it, or is too stupid to know or care.

Easily? Yes, you have proven that in spades. Reasonably? No, you have proven that in spades.

Lets get to the heart to this. If you really in your brain, as opposed to your angry and contemptuous heart, believe Trump called for people to murder Hillary. Wants people to murder Hillary. How does that help him?

Lie.

Source for molotov cocktails?

This demonstrates you are unserious in your politics. Molotov cocktails are common thing for lefties (relative to anyone else) of many strips. These are both very recent:

http://www.cnn.com/2016/05/02/us/seattl ... index.html

http://kstp.com/news/4th-precinct-prote ... s/3972478/

Even if that is verified, suggesting that all the violence is coming from the Left is flat-out false, a generic and dishonest Right wing talking point that seeks to deflect blame for their own actions by attacking others. Their are numerous documented cases of violence from the far Right and Trump supporters in particular.

Exclusively left? No. Overwhelming left? Yes. Get back to me when any Clinton supporter looks like this simply for showing up to listen peacefully to a speech:



http://downstreampolitics.com/2016/04/2 ... esa-video/

Show me where any Clinton supporter has been beaten bloody:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/mor ... ide-rally/

Beaten with a crowbar in public:
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/201 ... r-outside/

The fact is that the left is awash in violence. There is nothing comparable to the above from an Trump rally, or any main stream right wing event period. And this is without getting into all the destroyed cop cars, eggings (still assault), property damage, etc. that are commonly committed against peaceful right leaning citizens.

Now I am sure you were going (maybe still will?) to try and roll out some old guy shoving someone or somebody getting yelled at all mean like, but that just highlights the disparity that exists.

Also, their is a very significant difference between violence on the Left and violence on the Right. Both are, of course, deplorable, but only the latter is done with the incitement and open sympathy of the candidate.

There is a very significant difference. The difference is these lefties committing violence are seeking out targets and assaulting them. They are showing up to the opposition events to do this. There are no right wing types showing up to Hillary events and committing violence against them.

If the right is so violent, if they are so angry and belligerent and somehow being instigated by right wing leaders to be thus, why is it the left that is seeking out the other and beating them bloody? You are so worried about words making post after post about invented slights of speech, but only give lip service to actual violence. Why do all of these instances of massive, serious lefty violence have to be told to you if you care about political violence so much?

[The Romulan Republic]

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/08/d ... ein-226806

The venues that will host the presidential debates are drawing up plans for a three-person forum that would provide a lectern for a third-party candidate to stand on stage next to Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

The directive comes from producers working for the Commission on Presidential Debates and it’s meant, they say, to force the university hosts to be prepared and not as a reflection of the state of the race. But it could give supporters of Libertarian Gary Johnson and Green Party nominee Jill Stein hope as they push an alternative to the historically unpopular major party nominees.


“With [former Gov.] Gary Johnson polling in some places more than double digits, they might have, some of our production people may have said, ‘Just in case, you need to plan out what that might look like,’” Commission on Presidential Debates co-chair and former Bill Clinton White House Press Secretary Mike McCurry told POLITICO. "We won’t know the number of invitations we extend until mid-September."

To participate in one of the four general-election debates (three for president, one for vice president), candidates must be eligible for the presidency and "appear on a sufficient number of state ballots to have a mathematical chance of winning a majority vote in the Electoral College,” the commission announced last year. They also must have a level of support nationally of at least 15 percent as "determined by five selected national public opinion polling organizations, using the average of those organizations' most recently publicly-reported results at the time of the determination."

Johnson is hovering around 8.8 percent in national polls, according to RealClearPolitics’ average, whereas Stein, when included in polling, is at around 3.8 percent. Despite being below the 15 percent cutoff, there might be some flexibility in getting someone like Johnson on stage. Frank Fahrenkopf, McCurry’s Republican counterpart and co-chair on the commission, told CNBC last week that the commission may “consider giving an inch” to a third-party candidate if he or she is close enough to the cutoff point.

160805_scher_jillstein_ap.jpg
2016
Can the Green Party Win With ‘Jill, Not Hill’?
By BILL SCHER
"If someone came in and let's say he was [polling] at 14.5 percent and the margin of error in five polls was 3 points, we are going to have to sit down and look at it," Fahrenkopf said. "But right now that person would not be included."

Representatives for the debate sites of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and Washington University in St. Louis directed inquiries to the Commission on Presidential Debates. Hofstra University did not respond to a request for comment.

Late last month, Trump and the RNC also expressed displeasure at the debate commission’s schedule because two debates are scheduled the same night as NFL games.

But despite complaints and promises from the Trump campaign manager that a meeting would be scheduled, no meeting appears to have been set yet, McCurry said. Campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks did not respond to questions on Monday, though last week she said she would keep reporters apprised of any scheduled meetings.

Beyond the statement last week on how the debate schedule is set, the commission doesn’t plan to get more involved as it tries to avoid sparking a debate on the debates, the commission has repeatedly asserted. And even if there were more discussions to take place, they’d have to be directly between the campaigns, McCurry said.

If the two campaigns decide to have on their own a separate set of discussions about terms, the commission then considers their requests, McCurry said, something often called a “memorandum of understanding” that is traditionally drawn up between the two campaigns.

Libertarian candidates talk about voting for them
2016
Clinton's third-party headache
By STEVEN SHEPARD
But it’s unlikely to change the schedule. Between sports, religious holidays, avoiding Fridays and Saturdays and scheduling the debate on a variety of days so as not to continuously harm one night of network prime-time lineups, the debate commission said it did the best it could with its Sunday, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday debate days.

Typically both campaigns accept the commission’s debate schedule as nearly sacrosanct. In 2012, the campaigns did not protest the debate schedule when each of the debates fell on big game days. Instead, the Romney and Obama campaigns negotiated directly with one another and developed the memorandum of understanding which they sent to the commission. The memorandum included such requests as the moderator not asking the candidates for a "show of hands" or similar calls for response and that the dressing rooms would be “comparable in size and in quality and proximity to the debate stage.”

McCurry said there’s been no formal meeting planned and only informal contact between the co-chairs and the Trump, Clinton and Johnson campaigns. The Trump campaign is in the process of trying to reach out to the Clinton campaign, McCurry noted, though representatives for the Trump, Clinton and Johnson campaigns did not respond to requests for comment.

“Our posture is we design something we think is in the best interest of American citizens. It’s based on a lot of experience over time and we kind of set the table for the candidates and expect them to show up. We don't take the posture that there’s a lot to negotiate except over simple logistics,” McCurry said.

Libertarian VP Weld: Trump has ‘a screw loose’
Libertarian VP Weld: Trump has ‘a screw loose’
By CRISTIANO LIMA
But not everyone is criticizing Trump’s objection to the schedule. Prominent Republican lawyer Ben Ginsberg, who helped in the negotiations during the primary debates among the various campaigns, suggested Trump has a point.

“The commission selects debate dates a year in advance so it can lock up venues and corporate sponsorships,” Ginsberg said in an interview recently. "This year, that’s a down side for a candidate wanting to get the maximum number of voters engaged in the debates since two conflict with NFL games. There’s nothing magic about needing a large venue and corporate sponsorships for a presidential debate. If those two dates are a problem for a candidate, they could be replaced by a television studio debate on days that would attract the maximum number of viewers to these events so crucial to Americans choosing their president."

For its part, Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta gave an official statement on Monday evening saying they’ve accepted and will be at all the debates.

"Secretary Clinton looks forward to participating in all three presidential debates scheduled by the independent debate commission,” Podesta said. “With so much at stake in the fall elections, she believes these debates will provide the American people with an important opportunity to hear from the candidates on issues critical to the country's future. It is concerning that the Trump campaign is already engaged in shenanigans around these debates. It is not clear if he is trying to avoid debates, or merely toying with the press to create more drama."

"Either way, our campaign is not interested in playing along with a debate about debates or bargaining around them," he continued. "The only issue now is whether Donald Trump is going to show up to debate at the date, times, places and formats set by the commission last year through a bipartisan process. We will accept the commission's invitation and expect Donald Trump to do the same."

I'd actually be interested to see Johnson on the big stage, partly because I consider the Libertarians a potential successor party if the Republican collapse continues.

[TimothyC]

Yoga and wedding stuff. Did anyone actually believe that?

WASHINGTON (AP) — The State Department has turned over 44 previously-unreleased Hillary Clinton email exchanges that the Democratic presidential nominee failed to include among the 30,000 private messages she turned over to the government last year. They show her interacting with lobbyists, political and Clinton Foundation donors and business interests as secretary of state.

The conservative legal group Judicial Watch obtained the emails as part of its lawsuit against the State Department. They cover Clinton's first three months as secretary of state in early 2009, a period for which Clinton did not turn over any emails to the State Department last year. The government found the newly disclosed messages during a search of agency computer files from longtime Clinton aide Huma Abedin.

In one instance, Clinton exchanged messages with a senior Morgan Stanley investment executive whom she met with later that year at her office in Washington. They were among 246 pages of Abedin messages turned over to Judicial Watch.

Clinton campaign officials did not immediately answer questions about the issue.

The emails are separate from a larger batch of several thousand work-related emails that FBI officials recovered from Clinton's private server. Clinton's legal team turned over more than 30,000 emails from her server to the State Department last March but only after deleting another 30,000 messages that Clinton's team deemed private and personal. The FBI plans to turn over the reconstructed Clinton emails to the State Department for public release.

The new Clinton emails include a February 2009 message to her from Stephen Roach, then-chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia, saying he planned to testify to Congress that week and was "happy to help in any way I can." Roach later met with Clinton over the summer for 30 minutes, according to Clinton calendars obtained by The Associated Press.

In another email, Clinton's chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, informed her that National Security Agency and State Department officials discussed an attempt to develop a modified blackberry for Clinton that might be used when she worked in a restricted State Department office that did not allow private phones.

Clinton called the development "good news," but she continued using a private Blackberry tied to her private server.

[Alyrium Denryle]

Soooo in the middle of an international banking crisis, a bank executive communicated with the secretary of state and met with her after testifying in congress.

Stop the presses!

[Patroklos]

Whether the meeting was improper is not the point. The point is that these were emails dealing with government business that are required by law to be logged and maintained and made available to the public. Not only that, they were not delivered as required by court order. And to top it all off, they were not about yoga, which is odd since Hillary told us the emails she withheld (and mostly destroyed, again in violation of court orders) were of that character. OOPS!

[Grumman]

Just returning to Trump's Second Amendment comments for a second... it's still bullshit even if it's not a dog whistle, because Trump wants to abolish the Second Amendment too. Both Trump and Hillary are on record saying that people on the No-Fly List - a list which included Ted Kennedy at one point - should be denied their constitutional rights.

[Flagg]

No one but gadflies, Clinton haters, and Trump supporters give 2 shits about the fucking emails. She will never be prosecuted for it no matter how much that hurts your balloon knots, get over it.

[The Romulan Republic]

Hysteria, anger and contempt are not mutually exclusive. Though I am glad to admit you are in fact angry and contemptuous.

Why would I not acknowledge it?

Another thing you have in common with the worst of the Trump (or anyone's) supporters.

You can justly compare me to Trump supports when I am supporting despotism, blatant bigotry, or political violence. Such a comparison is a false attempt to troll me, and I will henceforth ignore it as such.

No, you haven't. Quote exactly where I apologize for anything he said.

Right here in this thread, for a start. You are making excuses for his rhetoric which can easily be taken as encouraging murder should Clinton win the election.

Protip. Apologism would be me saying "Yes, he did call for people to murder Clinton, and its okay because XY&Z." I have simply said you are ascribing a meaning to his speech that is supported by neither the context or the actual text. Not the same thing.

Your condescension aside, their are two kinds of apologists. Those who embrace something indefensible for what it is, and those who try to falsely downplay how bad it is. To take an extreme example, you'll get your really out their neo-Nazi who will actually try to defend the Holocaust, but a lot of them just try to pretend it didn't happen or that their weren't as many dead as the facts show, try to blame the Jews for supposedly faking it, etc.

I would call either example an apologist. You can draw your own conclusions as to which is worse- the former is more extreme and vitriolic in their views, but at least has more honesty and more spine.

And no, before you jump to conclusions, that's not my way of calling you a Nazi or a Holocaust denier. Its just an obvious, extreme example of the tactic to illustrate a point.

For another example, idiots similar to yourself who like to make unreasonable conclusions based on asinine parsing of language jumped on Hillary saying she wants to raise taxes on the middle class. The people who came to her defense did so by saying that's not what she meant to say and it was a mistake/or she didn't enunciate well are not apologists. People who maintain she did mean to say that and justify it are.

See above.

That's actually not whats happening. Again as per your own article they didn't report that Trump called for people to murder Clinton. They said it can be interpreted that way. The only reason to say it that way is because that's not the likely meaning.

Or because they're playing it safe to avoid being seen as alarmist or Trump suing them if they call it like it is.

Of course he didn't explicitly say that people should commit murder. But he said something that heavily implied it, and pretty much everyone here but you seems to feel justified in calling him out for that.

And just because something can be interpreted that way does not mean it is reasonable to do so.

The fact that Trump said something that can so easily be interpreted in that light shows that he either intended to say something that could be interpreted in that light, didn't care, or is just too stupid/careless to understand the implications.

And you are familiar with the concept of a dog whistle, yes? Or subtext?

I am? If that's the case find me any quote where I offer support for Donald Trump. Ever. Last week, last year, last decade.

You may not intend to vote for him or want him to win (I neither know nor particularly care), but you are going to great lengths to downplay and rationalize his deplorable words.

However, since you are a two faced weaselly shitbag, I will lower the bar for you. Find a post by me where I am an apologist (the actual meaning I educated you on above, not your BS made up hysterical invention) for any far right thing in the last month.

Happy hunting.

In other words, I must accept your terms and your definitions (designed to favour you) without objection, and debate on your terms, or I am dishonest?

Aside from those ludicrous terms, this is just more tired personal insults/dishonesty instead of substance.

Easily? Yes, you have proven that in spades. Reasonably? No, you have proven that in spades.

If it can be easily interpreted as implying/suggesting violence (by me and everyone but you in this thread, apparently), you can bet some of his more trigger happy supporters will. Which is the fucking problem.

Lets get to the heart to this. If you really in your brain, as opposed to your angry and contemptuous heart, believe Trump called for people to murder Hillary. Wants people to murder Hillary. How does that help him?

Trump has repeatedly shared his thoughts/wishes about committing violence, so I don't really doubt that he regularly fantasizes about such things and might do them if he thought that he could get away with it out of pure spite/ego. I'm not sure that he's really a rational man.

Leaving that aside, I doubt he much cares weather Clinton is shot. He's just playing with fire to stir up his base, knowing he's being vague enough, and is rich and powerful enough, that he is unlikely to be held accountable for it.

This demonstrates you are unserious in your politics. Molotov cocktails are common thing for lefties (relative to anyone else) of many strips. These are both very recent:

http://www.cnn.com/2016/05/02/us/seattl ... index.html

http://kstp.com/news/4th-precinct-prote ... s/3972478/

I'm not aware of Molotov cocktails (currently, at any rate- I can't speak for all of history on this subject) having any particular association with the Left. This seems like a cowardly and despicable attempt to brand the Left as terrorists by false association.

In any case, I don't doubt that some on the Left have used them. And certainly my point, if it was unclear, was not to argue weather they had ever been used by the Left in history. I was referring specifically to violence in this election cycle (i.e. the topic at hand).

I really don't think you want this to become a discussion weighing all the crimes committed by people on the Left or the Right throughout history.

Exclusively left? No. Overwhelming left? Yes. Get back to me when any Clinton supporter looks like this simply for showing up to listen peacefully to a speech:



http://downstreampolitics.com/2016/04/2 ... esa-video/

Show me where any Clinton supporter has been beaten bloody:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/mor ... ide-rally/

Beaten with a crowbar in public:
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/201 ... r-outside/

The fact is that the left is awash in violence. There is nothing comparable to the above from an Trump rally, or any main stream right wing event period. And this is without getting into all the destroyed cop cars, eggings (still assault), property damage, etc. that are commonly committed against peaceful right leaning citizens.

Those acts of violence that you linked too are despicable. To suggest that they are representative of or typical of the Left is also despicable.

God, the persecution complex of much of the Right would be laughable if it wasn't so dangerous. The notion that the Left is generally violent, and engaged in large scale violent persecution of conservatives, is farcical.

Now I am sure you were going (maybe still will?) to try and roll out some old guy shoving someone or somebody getting yelled at all mean like, but that just highlights the disparity that exists.

http://www.cnn.com/2015/11/22/politics/ ... index.html
http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politic ... as-n480056
https://gawker.com/fbi-arrests-veterans ... 1762703370
http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/2016-c ... ts-n613601

These are only selective examples. There was a long, documented string of Trump supporter-linked violence, long before the rioting against Trump started appearing on the news.

There is a very significant difference. The difference is these lefties committing violence are seeking out targets and assaulting them. They are showing up to the opposition events to do this. There are no right wing types showing up to Hillary events and committing violence against them.

And its okay for your side to be violent if you don't do it at our rallies?

Also, its interesting how you just hand wave away (without rebuttal) the fact that the most significant Right wing candidate is openly encouraging this shit, while the major candidates on the Left are not.

If the right is so violent, if they are so angry and belligerent and somehow being instigated by right wing leaders to be thus, why is it the left that is seeking out the other and beating them bloody?

To suggest that "the left" as a whole is doing so is, again, despicable. To deny that any (or many) on the Right have done so is apologism.

You are so worried about words making post after post about invented slights of speech, but only give lip service to actual violence.

I have repeatedly condemned violence/support for violence from people on the Left. What more can I do?

If you are attempting to accuse me of condoning political violence from the Left, I will consider that defamation.

Why do all of these instances of massive, serious lefty violence have to be told to you if you care about political violence so much?

There is nothing "invented" about Trump's words here, or their implications. Nor have I ever denied the existence of, or defended, political violence on the Left. I have condemned it.

Right wing violence, however, concerns me more, in part because Left wing violence is not as organized, and does not have tacit backing from the mainstream party ideology and machinery, or the open backing of a major Left wing candidate.

Edit: And I do apologize for the length of this post. I wished to cover everything thoroughly, and overlook nothing significant. I will endeavour to keep any further replies more succinct.

[Flagg]

Just returning to Trump's Second Amendment comments for a second... it's still bullshit even if it's not a dog whistle, because Trump wants to abolish the Second Amendment too. Both Trump and Hillary are on record saying that people on the No-Fly List - a list which included Ted Kennedy at one point - should be denied their constitutional rights.

Trump has held thirteen positions on every subject over the years hasn't he? I mean he's never been consistent in temperament and seems to just take a "Whatever <insert name and position the person I'm publicly feuding with at this point in time has here>, mine is the opposite, that <insert childish, offensive, screaming into a hurricane, insult here>!" stance over the years he's been orally defecating into a microphone or camera for decades.

And was it the no fly list (which is ridiculous) or the terrorism watch list?

[Simon_Jester]

Whether the meeting was improper is not the point. The point is that these were emails dealing with government business that are required by law to be logged and maintained and made available to the public. Not only that, they were not delivered as required by court order. And to top it all off, they were not about yoga, which is odd since Hillary told us the emails she withheld (and mostly destroyed, again in violation of court orders) were of that character. OOPS!

Some day, someone who does not have an incentive to cherrypick is going to read all thirty thousand of those emails, count what percentage of them had to do with State Department business, and count what percentage of them had to do with private business.

Once I know what those percentages look like, I will know whether or not to care.

I personally would be very hard pressed to select thousands of emails in my Inbox, select every relevant one to be forwarded to a third party, while not selecting any irrelevant one. Some relevant ones would get missed, some irrelevant ones would get sent. None of the evidence I've actually seen indicates that this explanation isn't a plausible one for any specific cases where a "Secretary Clinton" email was 'withheld' from the courts. While it is certainly bad if that happened, it does not reflect any malfeasance on Clinton's part, nor is it at all atypical of the usual standard of competence I have come to expect from highly placed individuals handling their email.

The simple, critical question is: did Secretary Clinton act in bad faith by using her private email account as a separate channel to transact business the public would reasonably object to, and did she act in bad faith by trying to withhold specific emails from the public? This question cannot be answered just because a self-appointed watchdog group states, without quoting the text of the message, the Clinton exchanged emails with someone and then failed to report that communication.

It could be that the contents of those emails represent Clinton acting in bad faith out of corrupt motives and abusing her office.

On the other hand, it could also be that those emails represent Clinton acting in good faith out of basically honest motives and failing to report the email because she (unwisely) used private email to transact professional business and then failed to sweep every email from her private inbox into the "share with public" folder.

I have no way of knowing.

And frankly, the sheer amount of artificial smoke that has been generated around Clinton and her reputation, in an attempt by Republicans to claim that because there is smoke there must be fire, has made me deeply suspicious of this entire category of 'investigation.' There would be Republicans accusing Clinton of malfeasance and crimes whether she committed them or not. And whether there were convincing evidence of them or not. We know this because that is exactly what happened with Benghazi, and with a string of other incidents stretching back into the 1990s and arguably even earlier.

Which means I am going to ask for quite strong evidence before believing Clinton guilty of anything more than "being an arrogantly IT-clueless senior executive who acts accordingly."

[TimothyC]

Some day, someone who does not have an incentive to cherrypick is going to read all thirty thousand of those emails, count what percentage of them had to do with State Department business, and count what percentage of them had to do with private business.

Once I know what those percentages look like, I will know whether or not to care.

*Cough*

<Snip>

The emails are separate from a larger batch of several thousand work-related emails that FBI officials recovered from Clinton's private server. Clinton's legal team turned over more than 30,000 emails from her server to the State Department last March but only after deleting another 30,000 messages that Clinton's team deemed private and personal. The FBI plans to turn over the reconstructed Clinton emails to the State Department for public release.
<Snip>

Now, "several" thousand could seriously be anywhere between two to five thousand emails. If we presume it's three thousand (conservatively), then that's 9% of all not-private emails.

I love how everyone here wants to thrash Trump on everything he's done wrong (and boy, there are so many things), but Clinton, can't touch her!

[Flagg]

I'll give a small tiny rabbit poop of a shit about improper email usage when the ones so hell bent on nailing Clinton over it demand we have US Marshals go to the homes of, arrest, and put black hoods over the heads of anyone in the Bush 43 Administration that played even a cunthairs part in starting an illegal war of aggression in Iraq, the use of torture, and any officers in the military who took part in war crimes and send them to The Hague.

[Grumman]

I'll give a small tiny rabbit poop of a shit about improper email usage when the ones so hell bent on nailing Clinton over it demand we have US Marshals go to the homes of, arrest, and put black hoods over the heads of anyone in the Bush 43 Administration that played even a cunthairs part in starting an illegal war of aggression in Iraq...

We can't even get you people to agree not to elect one of those assholes as President, and you think we've got enough support to get them arrested for crimes against peace?

[Grumman]

And was it the no fly list (which is ridiculous) or the terrorism watch list?

Both.

I will be meeting with the NRA, who has endorsed me, about not allowing people on the terrorist watch list, or the no fly list, to buy guns.

(Also, Twitter is shit.)

[Flagg]

I'll give a small tiny rabbit poop of a shit about improper email usage when the ones so hell bent on nailing Clinton over it demand we have US Marshals go to the homes of, arrest, and put black hoods over the heads of anyone in the Bush 43 Administration that played even a cunthairs part in starting an illegal war of aggression in Iraq...

We can't even get you people to agree not to elect one of those assholes as President, and you think we've got enough support to get them arrested for crimes against peace?

I think you missed my point. The same assholes going after Clinton not only don't give a shit about what the blatant crimes and criminals I brought up, but most of them actually support and defend them and said crimes. But Hillary Clinton did something no one gives a shit about that doesn't come close to sanctioning and using torture and they are on her like vultures.

[Flagg]

And was it the no fly list (which is ridiculous) or the terrorism watch list?

Both.

I will be meeting with the NRA, who has endorsed me, about not allowing people on the terrorist watch list, or the no fly list, to buy guns.

(Also, Twitter is shit.)

I don't know what criteria is used for the watch list, but the no fly list is ridiculously broken.

[Simon_Jester]

Now, "several" thousand could seriously be anywhere between two to five thousand emails. If we presume it's three thousand (conservatively), then that's 9% of all not-private emails.

Unless there is some gross error in the interpretation of the text that I am missing, you are correct. That is too large a total fraction of work-related emails to simply be missed, it suggests either complete incompetence on the part of whoever was digging through this inbox, or deliberate intent to avoid sending certain emails.

I love how everyone here wants to thrash Trump on everything he's done wrong (and boy, there are so many things), but Clinton, can't touch her!

You're misunderstanding the motivation, at least on my part.

It's a straightforward case of "the boy who cried wolf." We've heard Clinton accused of everything from A to Z (well, A to W, Assassinations to Whitewater, anyway). We've heard her accused of deliberately abandoning American soldiers to die in Benghazi because, apparently, she's a Saturday morning cartoon villain who doesn't need motives to do things. We've heard her accused of innumerable things... and yet somehow the charges never stick, real investigators never find sufficient evidence to convince a real court.

For a certain number of Americans, myself included, this makes the bar for evidence of wrongdoing higher. I don't want to be the guy who correctly shrugged off the first fifteen trumped-up charges against Hillary Clinton only to fall for the sixteenth due to the sheer dogged persistence of the million dollar industry of professional Clinton-defamers.

Basically, if I want people to believe me when I accuse a politician of middling-level corruption, it helps if I haven't been making these accusations for twenty years without ever being able to make a charge stick.

[Flagg]

Simon, these are people with no real principles.

We can tell this because they care more about destroying Hillary Rodham Clinton over some stupid small time email bullshit no one who doesn't hate Clinton gives a fuck about that took years of costly nonstop investigations to find, but most never called for anyone in the Bush Administration to be charged over shit they outright admitted to doing.

You cannot reason with them because they lack the ability to reason.

[Alyrium Denryle]

Some day, someone who does not have an incentive to cherrypick is going to read all thirty thousand of those emails, count what percentage of them had to do with State Department business, and count what percentage of them had to do with private business.

Once I know what those percentages look like, I will know whether or not to care.

*Cough*

<Snip>

The emails are separate from a larger batch of several thousand work-related emails that FBI officials recovered from Clinton's private server. Clinton's legal team turned over more than 30,000 emails from her server to the State Department last March but only after deleting another 30,000 messages that Clinton's team deemed private and personal. The FBI plans to turn over the reconstructed Clinton emails to the State Department for public release.
<Snip>

Now, "several" thousand could seriously be anywhere between two to five thousand emails. If we presume it's three thousand (conservatively), then that's 9% of all not-private emails.

I love how everyone here wants to thrash Trump on everything he's done wrong (and boy, there are so many things), but Clinton, can't touch her!

Soooo out of tens of thousands of emails where personal and work related material is mixed, some did not get turned over. OK. Now, I am coming at this from someone who's work related email was subject to FOIA requests. My faculty account was used for both personal and work related business over the course of 7 years. My student account was the same thing because the university email system was cocked up (blackboard would not let me switch my default email from my student email to faculty, so students would email me through blackboard to my student account irrespective of WTF I told them on the god damned syllabus).

So there are hundreds of thousands of emails in total I would have to sift through to comply with such a request. Enough that I cannot sift through them by reading the emails. I have to go by subject line, sort them into folders, and then go through the ones in my High Probability folder for specific things related to the request and sort them into a sub folder.

But I am going to miss things. I will have a false-negative rate. Say I have a hundred thousand emails with a 50/50 work/personal split, and 2500 emails that I miss. That is a 5% false negative rate, which is pretty damn good outside things like medical diagnostics and it does not indicate anything except for human limitations.

Even an automated system can only search for key words, and as a result its false positive and false negative rates will probably be higher than that.

To violate a court order there has to be INTENT to violate the court order. A false negative rate does not indicate that. "This is work related, but completely banal. Why would she hide this?" the answer is she would not. She or her staff just missed it, and in order to protect her privacy, deleted the non-work emails. Thus deleting some some work related ones by accident. It happens, but it is not a crime.

Now, if there were a large number of damning emails in there like her discussing bribery arrangements with the Saudi government or whatever the hell else the tinfoil hat nutters are going to accuse her of this week, sure. The argument could be made that her intent was to violate a court order in order to conceal other wrong-doing.

But if the worst thing people have is that a bank executive emailed her to let her know he was going to testify before congress and that he would cooperate with the Obama administration... no. That is completely fucking banal. There is no reason to hide it, and therefore she just missed it. The only reason she would hide it is if she takes some perverse joy in hiding banal shit. And if you are arguing that, you might as well argue that gay people choose to be gay because they take some sort of perverse joy in displeasing god. It makes no fucking sense.

[Alyrium Denryle]

I'll give a small tiny rabbit poop of a shit about improper email usage when the ones so hell bent on nailing Clinton over it demand we have US Marshals go to the homes of, arrest, and put black hoods over the heads of anyone in the Bush 43 Administration that played even a cunthairs part in starting an illegal war of aggression in Iraq...

We can't even get you people to agree not to elect one of those assholes as President, and you think we've got enough support to get them arrested for crimes against peace?

Bit of a difference between the People Who Lied to Start the War, and the People Who Were Lied To, in Order to Start the War.

Congress was lied to, in several ways. The first about the WMD intelligence, and then with the purpose of the force authorization (threat, rather than intent to actually use).

[Simon_Jester]

Hm.

Alyrium, I suppose I figured that 9% was too high of a false negative rate for Clinton's emails for the following reasons:

...

1) If making a good faith attempt to comply with a court order, it would seem prudent to CHECK that one's search for work-related emails had turned up everything, by looking at a reasonable sample of emails. If I've done keyword searches to identify work-related emails and sent them all on, that leaves behind the ones that were not flagged by the search. I should at least take some time to check some of those emails- just to see if I missed an obvious keyword or some such.

And if she checked, say, two dozen of those "non-work" emails before telling the court she was done sending emails... it would have been immediately obvious to her that some of the "non-work" emails were in fact "work" emails.

...

2) Hillary Clinton is fairly wealthy. Wealthy enough to hire lawyers or other discreet people to go through her email and identify which ones look work-related. She would not have personally read all thirty thousand emails. She could, reasonably, have just paid a few people to spend a week or two digging through them, and if they found any ambiguous ones they could then flag them so that she could spend a day working on them. This is a court order, she should be expected to take reasonable measures proportionate to the means at her disposal to comply.

In which case if the false negative rate is 9%, then the people she would have hired would have to be fairly incompetent.

...

Now ultimately, all this is something of a moot point, because as you correctly point out, Alyrium, if the worst emails we can find are like this... And you KNOW they're the worst, or a group like Judicial Watch would have picked something dirtier if they had it...

Well.

In one instance, Clinton exchanged messages with a senior Morgan Stanley investment executive whom she met with later that year at her office in Washington. They were among 246 pages of Abedin messages turned over to Judicial Watch.

Clinton campaign officials did not immediately answer questions about the issue.

Honestly, I suspect they didn't immediately answer questions because no one involved, except Clinton and maybe a few of the most financial-inclined people on her staff, remembers who this guy from Morgan Stanley is. They don't have a prepared answer because Clinton didn't expect to need one, because she has no particular reason to think anyone could reasonably accuse her of wrongdoing.

The new Clinton emails include a February 2009 message to her from Stephen Roach, then-chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia, saying he planned to testify to Congress that week and was "happy to help in any way I can." Roach later met with Clinton over the summer for 30 minutes, according to Clinton calendars obtained by The Associated Press.

So, he's the head of the Asian branch of a major investment firm, and you're wondering why he gets a thirty minute meeting with the secretary of state? I can think of a lot of reasons. Now, would I be interested to know what went down during that meeting? Yes- but I'd be equally interested to know what went down during every meeting between Morgan Stanley executives and various public officials during the Bush administration, and between all sorts of Wall Street firms and public officials. Because I still wonder just how the hell the Bush administration allowed the financial sector to lose the plot badly enough to bring about the 2008 crash.

If I don't get to know that, I don't see why I anyone else should get to be unduly concerned about Clinton meeting with this Roach.

In another email, Clinton's chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, informed her that National Security Agency and State Department officials discussed an attempt to develop a modified blackberry for Clinton that might be used when she worked in a restricted State Department office that did not allow private phones.

Clinton called the development "good news," but she continued using a private Blackberry tied to her private server.

So we know that Clinton was informed of a discussion about this...

This is something that was already known and discussed in threads on this very forum! It is not news. Clinton asked about a modified Blackberry that she could use, similar to the one the president uses, and she was unable to obtain one. As I recall, her (poor) decision to use her private email as a vehicle for work-related communication was related to this very fact!

So we cannot use "Clinton tried to get a modified secure Blackberry, and her chief of staff told her that discussions were ongoing, but she kept using her private Blackberry" as evidence of anything other than "Clinton felt she had reason to get a modified secure Blackberry, like the president's, but was not allowed one."

I mean, if I had a cell phone, and I worked for the NSA, I could ask some IT guy "can I get some kind of phone that I'm allowed to use inside the NSA just to call my wife and ask what we're having for dinner?" And the IT guy would probably say something like "you're a moron, no, you're lucky I didn't report you to your boss for being a moron." And I would go "crud," and keep not using my phone in the NSA. Thing is, I'd still be using it when I wasn't at the NSA. I'd be using it at home, I'd be using it when I was at the grocery store, and so on.

But then if we read my emails, and knew I still used a cell phone, someone could say:

"Jester was informed of the results of discussion about an attempt to obtain a modified cell phone that might be used when he worked in a restricted government facility that did not allow private phones. He was denied permission for such a device, but he kept using his own cell phone." It'd sound like I was willfully violating NSA policy for nefarious reasons. But I wasn't; there was no willfulness or nefarious intent, and for that matter there wasn't even a violation!

So even if Clinton were doing literally nothing wrong it would still be possible to lawyer this into something that sounded wrong.
_________________________________________

If this is one of the 44 email exchanges that features her "interacting with lobbyists, political and Clinton Foundation donors and business interests as secretary of state..." it is a rather disappointing one. Why did they see fit to include this?

This further reinforces Alyrium's point that the "dirt" being revealed on Clinton is in fact extremely banal and irrelevant material which has little or no bearing on her fitness for public office. We're not getting "she took a bribe from the Chinese to sell out American interests."

We're getting "the Secretary of State meets with the executives of the foreign branches of major American investment firms- oh, and said executives send the Secretary emails when they're about to testify before Congress."

We're getting "she couldn't get an upgrade to her cell phone."

If this is all they've got, on further reflection I hesitate to say they've got anything.

[The Romulan Republic]

In other news, the Donald is polling fourth with black voters, behind Clinton, Johnson, and Stein.

Jesus, you know someone sucks when they're losing to Stein.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/tr ... ck-voters/

It wasn’t that long ago that Donald Trump liked to boast about his support from black voters. And although Trump had a history of controversy on issues of race, it wasn’t that crazy to think he could at least outperform the GOP’s last two presidential nominees, John McCain and Mitt Romney, with black voters. After all, McCain and Romney were polling at less than 5 percent among black voters after their conventions, and Trump isn’t facing off against the first black presidential nominee of a major party.

But Trump is polling worse among black voters than almost every single Republican presidential nominee since 1948 in polls taken between the party conventions and Election Day.

Trump is currently in fourth place among black voters. You read that correctly: He’s trailing Hillary Clinton, Libertarian Gary Johnson and Green Party nominee Jill Stein. Any one national poll typically has only about 100 African-American respondents — too small a sample to make much of the results. So here’s an average of the four live-interview surveys taken since the conventions, from ABC News/Washington Post, Fox News, Marist, and NBC News/Wall Street Journal:

POLLSTER CLINTON JOHNSON STEIN TRUMP
ABC News/Washington Post 83% 4% 8% 2%
Fox News 85 7 — 1
Marist 89 5 3 2
NBC News/Wall Street Journal 86 0 4 1
Average 86 4 5 2
Trump is in fourth place among black voters
Fox News did not include Jill Stein in its horse-race question.

Trump’s 2 percent is just flat-out awful.1 And it doesn’t seem like a statistical fluke: Trump’s lack of appeal among black voters is pretty consistent, at 1 percent to 2 percent across the polls, and he trails Stein in the three post-convention surveys that included her.

To find out how Trump is doing compared with past Republican nominees, I looked at the American National Election Studies surveys since 1948. Some 2016 voters haven’t decided who they’re going to vote for, so to be fair to Trump, I looked at only the pre-election surveys (as opposed to the post-election ANES surveys), because they allowed respondents to indicate they were undecided. It’s not pretty.

enten-blackvoters-1
Since 1948, the average Republican nominee earned about 10 percent of the black vote. Even since the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, when black voters began moving into the Democratic Party, the average Republican nominee got an average of about 7 percent. Trump is pulling in about one-fifth of that.2

Black voters will probably account for 10 percent to 15 percent of all voters this year, so Trump will really have to overperform with other voters to have a chance of winning the White House.

Trump’s poor polling puts him in un-welcome company. Barry Goldwater is the only candidate whose pre-election support among African-Americans was worse than Trump’s is; he received the support of no African-American respondents in the 1964 ANES survey. Goldwater, of course, stood in opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act. McCain was at 1.4 percent in 2008, just about what Trump is getting now. But McCain, as I mentioned, was running against the first major-party black nominee.

Trump isn’t widely known for opposing major civil rights legislation, and he isn’t facing Obama. But perhaps because he’s made so many racially charged comments, including as a leading voice of the birther movement, he is so disliked by black voters that he’s the first Republican nominee since 1948 to be polling below second place among them before the election. (He’s the first to be polling in fourth.) Johnson and Stein, whom most voters have never even heard of, are ahead of Trump. For a Republican Party that wanted to reach out to minority voters after the 2012 election, that’s not good.

Remember when he made his comments about "my negro" supporter? Turns out using the singular rather than plural was pretty much right on the ball.

Edit: fixed minor grammatical error.

[Darth Holbytlan]

Related to the deleted email discussion.

I should add here that we found no evidence that any of the additional work-related e-mails were intentionally deleted in an effort to conceal them. Our assessment is that, like many e-mail users, Secretary Clinton periodically deleted e-mails or e-mails were purged from the system when devices were changed. Because she was not using a government account—or even a commercial account like Gmail—there was no archiving at all of her e-mails, so it is not surprising that we discovered e-mails that were not on Secretary Clinton’s system in 2014, when she produced the 30,000 e-mails to the State Department.

The lawyers doing the sorting for Secretary Clinton in 2014 did not individually read the content of all of her e-mails, as we did for those available to us; instead, they relied on header information and used search terms to try to find all work-related e-mails among the reportedly more than 60,000 total e-mails remaining on Secretary Clinton’s personal system in 2014. It is highly likely their search terms missed some work-related e-mails, and that we later found them, for example, in the mailboxes of other officials or in the slack space of a server.

It is also likely that there are other work-related e-mails that they did not produce to State and that we did not find elsewhere, and that are now gone because they deleted all e-mails they did not return to State, and the lawyers cleaned their devices in such a way as to preclude complete forensic recovery.

"[Clinton] then was asked by her lawyers at the end, 'Do you want us to keep the personal emails?' And she said, 'I have no use for them anymore.' It's then that they issued the direction that the technical people delete them ... [and] wipe them away," Comey testified.

He said that the FBI investigation found that Clinton didn't know her legal team had deleted those emails and that she didn't know her lawyers had cleaned the devices in such a way to preclude forensic recovery. The goal was to delete just personal emails, but more than personal emails ended up being deleted, he said.

In other words, many of the deleted emails were not reviewed for deletion but just deleted in the ordinary course of business or lost. The ones that were being reviewed were reviewed by lawyers (not Clinton) using search terms rather than individually reading them, and it was they who decided to delete and wipe the emails without telling her. She is certainly to blame for using a private email server without proper archival for government business, but it's harder to blame her for the loss of any specific emails beyond that.

[Flagg]

Related to the deleted email discussion.

I should add here that we found no evidence that any of the additional work-related e-mails were intentionally deleted in an effort to conceal them. Our assessment is that, like many e-mail users, Secretary Clinton periodically deleted e-mails or e-mails were purged from the system when devices were changed. Because she was not using a government account—or even a commercial account like Gmail—there was no archiving at all of her e-mails, so it is not surprising that we discovered e-mails that were not on Secretary Clinton’s system in 2014, when she produced the 30,000 e-mails to the State Department.

The lawyers doing the sorting for Secretary Clinton in 2014 did not individually read the content of all of her e-mails, as we did for those available to us; instead, they relied on header information and used search terms to try to find all work-related e-mails among the reportedly more than 60,000 total e-mails remaining on Secretary Clinton’s personal system in 2014. It is highly likely their search terms missed some work-related e-mails, and that we later found them, for example, in the mailboxes of other officials or in the slack space of a server.

It is also likely that there are other work-related e-mails that they did not produce to State and that we did not find elsewhere, and that are now gone because they deleted all e-mails they did not return to State, and the lawyers cleaned their devices in such a way as to preclude complete forensic recovery.

"[Clinton] then was asked by her lawyers at the end, 'Do you want us to keep the personal emails?' And she said, 'I have no use for them anymore.' It's then that they issued the direction that the technical people delete them ... [and] wipe them away," Comey testified.

He said that the FBI investigation found that Clinton didn't know her legal team had deleted those emails and that she didn't know her lawyers had cleaned the devices in such a way to preclude forensic recovery. The goal was to delete just personal emails, but more than personal emails ended up being deleted, he said.

In other words, many of the deleted emails were not reviewed for deletion but just deleted in the ordinary course of business or lost. The ones that were being reviewed were reviewed by lawyers (not Clinton) using search terms rather than individually reading them, and it was they who decided to delete and wipe the emails without telling her. She is certainly to blame for using a private email server without proper archival for government business, but it's harder to blame her for the loss of any specific emails beyond that.

Most if not all of the emails are really unimportant, too. Asking her what an email was about 4 years after sending/reading it is like asking what you had for lunch on this exact day in the year 2006 and when you can't remember because nobody fucking remembers or cares about that shit, you get called a liar who must be hiding incriminating evidence about shooting a watermelon carved to resemble Vince Foster.

And I'll cop to it that it may have been illegal for her to use private email accounts, but since everything was so banal it in no way benefits anyone for her to be prosecuted which is why we have such things as prosecutorial discretion. Like how the Bushy Bunch weren't charged with the downright horrid shit they did because "the nation had to heal, bullshit, and bullshit. Plus bullshit".

[Simon_Jester]

This sounds like a big part of the reason why (and this is important) the FBI, who had full access to virtually every relevant fact about the entire matter, decided not to prosecute and did not judge Clinton as having deliberately withheld information from them.

Bad email handling is hardly unusual, proving that there was any nefarious intent is difficult, and (like anyone with a brain and the resources to do so) Hillary delegated the actual task of identifying work-related emails and sending them in rather than trying to read sixty thousand emails herself.

Which means that if you're looking for real dirt on Clinton over this, you're going to have to look very hard and probably make a pretty respectable mountain out of the molehills you find. Which is why we get "The head of Asian investments for a major investment firm told the secretary of state he was going to testify before Congress and later that year had a meeting with the secretary oh my God the conspiracy!" There are a lot of very plausible, mundane, and boring explanations for why those two things could have happened, and no obvious reason to suspect that the boring explanation isn't true.

But when things like that are all you have in the way of evidence that anything actually wrong happened, and you've spent twenty years trying to make your target out as the Antichrist... you use what you have, even if it makes you look foolish.