Also at lunch yesterday, I sat with one of our poli sci professors who believes that the DNC is scrambling to find a new candidate to replace Clinton because this scandal is sinking her so badly. That they were going to get a Biden-Warren ticket going, and that Warren would somehow go along with this if she could get over her own ego. So I am recently primed to be irritated by the whole benghezmail bullshit.
I caught a CNN thing on it while eating lunch the other day. Mostly, I came away hating Wolf Blitzer for asking about it while the guy from State was trying to talk about refugees. I think I may have hated him before but forgot about it. I should find a new place for lunch, but this place has some really good pan-fried noodles for $6.
Pierce laid into the sky-high bullshit from the normally reasonable Jack Shafer. How dare her team coordinate their responses for consistency! Except for all the things they said that contradicted each other, what kind of a leader is she if she can't get her team on the same page? I bet her supporters aren't going to apologize... but if they do it clearly means there's a real scandal here so they'd better not.
I don't even like HRC, but the email thing is such a bullshit non-scandal. The Beltway media really are the worst sort of lemmings.
The only thing that worries me about Clinton is that you'd have a former president in the White House as first gentleman. I think Bill should promise to divorce her or at least go live with somebody else. I guess Geena Davis got married, but there's got to be a few good ideas he has.
She obviously received a classified email about plans to convert the embassy in Benghazi to a Planned Parenthood where they would sell baby parts to Iran in exchange for enriched uranium, but when news of this plan leaked it led to riots and the murder of Americans using weapons Eric Holder gave to Al Qaeda. The Americans could have escaped if Tom Brady hadn't let the air out of their Humvee tires.
The only evidence of this was on her personal server, so thanks to Hillary we'll never be able to prove this.
According to a very irate guy on the radio this morning, the Pats are still cheating. This time, they jammed signals.
They're probably using the hardware Hillary sold from her now-defunct server to run the visiting team's communications systems.
Speaking of email, I just got a message from my House Rep explaining why he is supporting the Iran Nuke deal. Does the House even have anything to do with this? I'm wondering if the administration isn't pulling out all the stops. I can't recall him spamming me on anything else. He barely even campaigns for his own re-election.
I often watch the Today show in the morning, where they often talk about the "e-mail scandal" without ever explaining what was scandalous.
The whole email thing (I won't call it a "scandal," because doing so is a tacit admission that there is something scandalous involved) is truly remarkable for the fact that it appears to all smoke and no fire.
I have to admit, though, I'm having a hard time getting even minimally enthusiastic about her candidacy, and the email thing is not making it any easier for me.
I had a very irritating conversation with my father over the weekend; while fully understanding that nothing actually wrong happened in relation to the emails, he's stuck on "If she'd had better judgment, she wouldn't have done something that could be made to look suspicious." He formally accepts that she's been the subject of a witch hunt for the last twenty years, but doesn't take the next step to understanding that there's pretty much no way for her not to do anything that can be made to look suspicious.
This is the most annoying thing about the Clintons -- having to vociferously defend them, despite not liking them much, because the things they get attacked for are so dumb.
This is the most annoying thing about the Clintons Democrats generally
The most annoying thing about HRC is that in any roomful of Democrats, she's the most warlike* one.
I'm annoyed by 12.2 also, but come on, let's keep our eyes on the ball.
* I don't care whether she's sincere or affecting a warlike pose to make sure no one out-warlikes her: in the end, pandering to the war lobby leads nowhere good.
My favorite Facebook conversation recently was my friend who has the weirdest, most intensely reasoned (as a result of law school) set of political beliefs, asking if Rand Paul still claims to be a "libertarian" after joining the anti-Planned Parenthood crusade.
Turns out that to the various libertarian morons he went to law school with, anything with the word "defunding" in it is obviously libertarian. Who cares what gets defunded?
14: I think you're confusing "worst" with "most annoying". Warlikeness is more importantly bad in any objective sense. But the having to get in arguments defending her just irks me in a way the warlikeness doesn't.
So since we're talking politics, is anybody predicting that the Dems have a chance to retake either the House or the Senate in '16?
If it will make you feel better, I will.
Thanks, Mobes; I feel better already.
This will be reassuring to anybody who can forget what they know about how Congress is actually elected.
17 The map looks good for the Senate, but candidate recruitment is what will make the difference, and it might be too early to tell. Beyond that, it's just wild guessing about ticket splitting in blue states.
Here's a toss-up prediction: http://www.centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/2016-senate/
The House is almost certainly remaining Republican until after the next census.
And maybe even then if some state houses don't get/stay Democratic.
Right, 2022 is the first realistic shot, but definitely no guarantee.
Are we still talking about that sliding tile game?
1: So the prerequisites for being a polisci prof at Heebie U is, what, writing a diary at Kos that almost gets front-paged, but doesn't?
9: No, the House gets their own vote, but since it's strictly majoritarian, it's a foregone conclusion, like polling a classroom on pizza or Brussels sprouts for the year-end party.
You can put Brussels sprouts on pizza, you know.
You can put pizza on Brussels sprouts, but it isn't very neat.
29 I like Brussels sprouts fine enough but why would you want to?
31: I bet it would be good. You'd want to slice them really thin, or maybe actually just separate the leaves and use those individually. Maybe toss some red onion and chili pepper flakes on there too. It would go well with the cheese and sauce.
32 actually sounds pretty damn good.
NPR has been pissing me off lately too. At this point I find them only a bit less irritating than the Economist. When I listen I just want to tell them that the faux "centrist" concern-trolling coverage isn't going to prevent the crazies from cutting their funding, so they might as well just do good journalism.
I just ate but now I'm hungry again. That does sound really good.
I stopped listening to NPR years ago. All the women sounded the same. That can't be right.
The multiplicity of irritations on this point and overall MSM malfeasance leave me too annoyed to comment directly.
I will simply point out that there is actually a pretty freaking interesting campaign story unfolding before our eyes in which a Congressional committee has shamelessly parlayed an already shameless investigation* into a diplomatic compound attack into a nearly unprecedented fishing expedition into the affairs of the leading opposition party candidate. And are lying and leaking untrue and misleading information to the media (who therefor have a front row seat). One hell of a potential abuse of governmental powers story to write... and a real one at that. Elijah Cummings has the patience of a saint.
*A reminder of how something like this was handled in the past.
Separating the leaves of Brussels sprouts is such a truly insane activity after the first couple of layers that I am inclined to doubt anyone who says they've done it for more than 6 sprouts at a time unless it was part of some ecstatic ritualistic religious devotion à la debase your existence for the swami. But benrinering the little beasties works great! And tgey make an awesome pizza topping as described above or with carmelized onions and stinky alpine cheese particularly with a nice shot of thyme.
The big Brussels sprouts are much easier to work with.
39; I'm pretty sure those are called cabbages.
28: Not true of the ultimate vote, if Obama is forced to veto the resolution. Then it takes a 2/3 vote in both houses to override, so 1/3 + 1 in either house is enough to sustain the deal. However, we never get to that point if the Senate Democrats can prevent cloture on the original resolution.
The first vote on the resolution in the House will be simple majoritarian, true, and that one is a foregone conclusion. But your Rep's vote may still matter if it comes to a veto override.
||
I find myself bummed that Serena was upset at the Open.
|>
43 me too.
"benrinering" is that what kids are calling it these days.
The first time I saw a bunch of Brussels sprout on a stalk, I was surprised. I'd always thought they were just cabbages harvested early.
45 reminds me that I neglected to plant any in the garden this year. I love that they are hardy enough that I can pick them for Thanksgiving dinner, but almost certainly too late to plant this year.
Maybe you can get some tomatoes in.
According to Farmer's Almanac, the only thing you can still plant is radishes, some lettuces, and spinach.
All the women sounded the same.
Not Diane Rehm.
Right, need to get those last two in.
Radishes, some lettuces, and spinach are all excellent.
42 - I think they just did that yesterday, didn't they? (I mean, successfully filibustered the attempt in the Senate.)
38 - There's probably some kind of trick involved, like with getting garlic out of the shells or caramelizing onions where it takes a really long time if you do it the most obvious way but if you know the trick it takes a tiny fraction of the time.
Maybe you slice the stemmy bit off the end so nothing is connecting all the slices and then just slosh them around vigorously in a pot of water or something? Once it's just a ball of leaves without a kind of stalk inside it probably takes a lot less time.
NPR has been pissing me off lately too. At this point I find them only a bit less irritating than the Economist. When I listen I just want to tell them that the faux "centrist" concern-trolling coverage isn't going to prevent the crazies from cutting their funding, so they might as well just do good journalism
This and all of Heebie and CC's comments.
NPR also pissed me off in their discussion about the Marine report. The interviewer was clearly on the side of the women can't do it camp. He kept trying to drill the Secretary of the Navy whenever he explain the problems with the report. Then they asked the stupid non-factual question of "Do the officers feel like they have to make a political decision?"
"What is the mood of [insert large group of people]?" = whatever the "reporter" wants to spin.
NPR has been pissing me off lately too. At this point I find them only a bit less irritating than the Economist. When I listen I just want to tell them that the faux "centrist" concern-trolling coverage isn't going to prevent the crazies from cutting their funding, so they might as well just do good journalism
This and all of Heebie and CC's comments.
NPR also pissed me off in their discussion about the Marine report. The interviewer was clearly on the side of the women can't do it camp. He kept trying to drill the Secretary of the Navy whenever he explain the problems with the report. Then they asked the stupid non-factual question of "Do the officers feel like they have to make a political decision?"
"What is the mood of [insert large group of people]?" = whatever the "reporter" wants to spin.
The Marine report thing was incredibly irritating! The only reason that integrated units would perform worse than all-male combat is that the women are wrecking everything. Now how can we beat the PC police and roll back integration?
And snow peas and leeks for a last harvest this year here, and lots of stuff to overwinter. And cover crops.
Let me just mention one item with regard to the OP. As most probably would not have heard, there was a definitive statement made on Wednesday by government lawyers with regard to one point in the email sag.
"There is no question that former Secretary Clinton had authority to delete personal emails without agency supervision -- she appropriately could have done so even if she were working on a government server," write the Justice Department attorneys, representing the State Department in the brief....
The administration attorneys' argument amounts to one of the most definitive government statements that Clinton was not in violation of the law in deciding to sort and delete the emails herself.OK, it is a relatively narrow point (and one that was already well-understood by all sane observers, but lied about within the Puke Funnel, and obfuscated by the self-regarding assholes at places like the Times and the Post), and nore does it speak to the current "issue" of after-the-fact classification (which is a pervasive issue across communications and even freaking press releases ...not to mention leaks to "friendly" members of the press...), but if the press is out there fucking the chicken on the "scandal" every fucking day of their miserable fucking stunted lives then one might expect (if one were a Martian I guess) that they might feel some obligation to bring this little tidbit to the public's attention. But as the Feeders of the Buzz note in opening: "In a little noticed brief," .... Now imagine how noticed it would or would not have been if it had not been such an equivocal statement.
For those who were paying too much attention to Whitewater in the '90s this is completely in line with press's (and the dog-ass NYTimes in particular) behavior back then with regard to things like the Pillsbury Report which pretty much pooh-poohed the whole initial premise as insinuated by master liar and dickhead Jeff Gerth.
The hearts of little Belgian cabbages are tight tight tight, sloshing isn't going to do it.
I don't know any trick for truly caramelizing fast, but you can always just fry which is all kinds of excellent!
50 lbs of Roma tomatoes have now been put up so pizzas and meatballs are secure for the next year and I feel like I contributed a good amount of labor. Not equal with the better half, but at least more equitable than last year. I hate feeling like a domestic slacker.
Ok. The e-mail scandal is dumb as a scandal. But I still don't get why she didn't just have a separate personal e-mail account, like other people do.
60 Yes, to both. Why an e-mail server and not just an account.
This is a big-ass nothingburger but as someone with archival training I feel whatever scandal there is here it's what's legal. That stuff should be preserved, even if it needs to be embargoed for 40 years or whatever.
60: Because she's kind of an idiot, who appoints other idiots to positions where they advise her. LB's dad is right in 12. This was so, so easy to see as a bad idea, and yet she did it. Yeah, technically legal, but still, really godamn stupid.
If Powell did the exact same thing it almost seems like it would have been more effort to switch to using the government system. New Secretary, better set up a server just like the last guy had, otherwise we have to figure out how to get everyone on the internal State system.
I forgot Condi after Powell, but reports are she didn't use email at all. In the second half of the 2000s. Right.
I'm on board with "really godamn stupid," and it fits into my personal narrative about her that she tends to make dumb decisions. And there is legit criticism around the e-mail thing.... probably about a couple news cycles worth.
But this, oooh, she's terrible, lets use this opportunity to sift through her emails to find the one she wrote condemning our patriotic troops in Bengazi - I'm tired of that shit and it needs to go away.
It would be so refreshing to have an actual, honest, critical examination of her performance as Secretary of State. But that can't happen, because it gets drowned out by this crap.
I've come full circle on HRC.
At this point in the last cycle, in 2007, I had the usual objections to her. I didn't like Obama much either, but came around on him by the beginning of the year, mostly about the war, and worked on the campaign. Those early primaries were exciting inside the campaign, there was a wonderful, effective bustle about it, and when you took a hotline call from a first-time primary voter, in state after state, and found them their polling place with only minutes to spare, the sensation was heady.
But as the campaign went on, in the late spring I thought HRC found her feet and she started to impress me. I began to like her.
And that feeling has only grown. I've watched her for twenty-five years, and have come to appreciate how much my impression of her had been manipulated, by a culture and by sources that I have come to despise.
I am at this point anomalous in my circle and family in my warm regards toward her. Pretty much everybody I know is for Sanders, whom I don't dislike nor fear, but the negative feelings about HRC which lie behind most views of the election in my subculture escape me at this point, and color my views.
I'm mentioned as the guy who likes Hillary in conversations, as if I had a rare blood type or six fingers. I may be the only one some of them know.
Announcing that one likes Hillary and other despised things like Spam, Friday the 13th sequels and paper magazines is what the Internet was made for.
Clinton is pretty inextricably tied to, well, the other, taller Clinton which doesn't really help her among non-conservative people who remember the policy stuff of the '90s. What a lot of people tell me, and may be true though I'm still a bit skeptical, is that she's distinctly to the left of Bill as far as her policies go*, which would be a positive thing.
She also does have a history of making stupid decisions, though, and not being good after the fact at recognizing that they were stupid or why, which isn't reassuring. The problem with is that for some reason (I have never been clear on why this is) she inspires such excited hate-is-a-force-that-gives-us-boners reactions among the political press that it takes massive amounts of effort to figure out which cases are ones where she really did make a bad decision/whatever**, and which cases are ones where nothing at all abnormal or dumb happened and the press is just having a really fun time spreading clearly unsubstantiated rumors about her and then blaming her for the fact that they're doing that. (Usually the answer, as far as I can tell, is that if the press seems to care in the slightest it's the latter, and if they mention it once in a bored voice and then move on it's the former.)
*She's talking like that now but she wasn't necessarily talking nearly as much like it in 2008, and she seems at least as hawkish as him if not moreso. The Iraq vote is related here, and also related to the bit that follows as well.
**The 'no one can actually come up with a straight answer as far as what was even theoretically wrong with the fact that she had her own server and also it was the common practice at the time and no one thought anything of it for the previous SoSs or even for her until right now when she was in the public eye and some unnamed source started sending delicious nonsense about it to the NYT' feature makes me suspicious of claims that this one involves a bad decision or poor judgment or something. It feels to me like someone dragged out all the whitewatergate (ugh) or Vince Foster stuff and started playing mad libs with it.
68: Yes. And had I lived First hand through the Ken Starr insanity, I would have set up my own goddamned server as well. As would anybody.
Yes to 68 and 69. (And I am somewhat in the same position as idp with respect to my family.)
69 is a really good point that I should have remembered.
I mean, I've been pretty vocal about my distrust of Hillary Clinton, but maybe nobody on Earth has had to put up with more stupid bullshit than that poor woman.
69.1: The thing that is triggering my visceral reaction of contempt and hatred is that both now and in the 90s involved utterly corrupt and illegitimate government "investigations" which themselves involved far greater abuses of power than anything under investigation--and got almost zero press scrutiny.
How shocking is it that in his role as president of Baylor one of Ken Starr's primary accomplishments has been rare-enablement? None. none less shocking.
what was even theoretically wrong with the fact that she had her own server and also it was the common practice at the time and no one thought anything of it for the previous SoSs
Is that a true fact? Did other SoSes have private email servers that they used for work instead of the .gov addresses? Or do you mean "it was common for people in general to have their own email servers"? (Which is sort of true, for some values of "common.")
I am pretty sure the first Secretary of State to have a dotgov account was John Kerry.
Powell had a private server. Rice did not use private or govt email. Other public officials (Jeb!) had private servers for govt business. And let's not forget that all of Cheneys energy task force emails were deleted in violation of records laws.
Yup!
I'm not entirely certain of Rice, but not because I think she may have used a .gov account. I vaguely remember hearing that she claimed that she never used email, in the late 2000's. But if she did it was the same way.
Mitt's MA team took their servers and destroyed them when Patrick was elected, but that was barely mentioned in the '12 race.
74: Yes, the only unique aspect was having her own server. Have at that all you want. It is a fucking nit in the scheme of things.Michael Dukakis (of course he may just be a big fucking liar ...)
"You tell me of one person in Washington, of any prominence, that doesn't have a private email which he or she uses all the time and a private cellphone as well, I mean this is absurd," he said.
"If I want to get a hold of a Cabinet secretary, I don't use the official website. I mean, you'd never get through. You pick up the phone, you call somebody who knows the Cabinet secretary and say, give me his or her private email, and you use it," Dukakis added.
One hilarious but sad and pathetic (media!) fact about the scandal is that right as it was breaking there was a simultaneous scandal about the Chinese(?) successfully hacking massive numbers of government servers and seeing peoples' emails. Somehow no one ever actually managed to relate the two front page news stories, except, I think, one time where they tried to claim that they were both examples of breaches of computer security. Clinton's server, obviously, was not one of the ones that the hackers got into.
76: Much less millions of other Rove RNC emails in the face of the US Attorney investigation. It did get noted in the press, briefly.
78: Honestly, I thought that was kind of messed up at the time. They're public records.
Or listen to Representative Stephen Lynch (also from Massachusetts so probably lying through his teeth).
Her GOP predecessors at State never turned over their private electronic correspondences despite calls for greater transparency, Lynch added.
"I haven't heard a word about Colin Powell," he said on Boston Herald Radio. "I haven't heard a word about Condoleezza Rice."
"Colin Powell did not have a goddamn email available for us," Lynch said. "Zero, zero."
"It was the same thing with Condoleezza Rice," he added. "There was not a goddamn email that was useful to the committee."...
"So why is it OK that Colin Powell, you know, in launching a war in Iraq, to not have a single available email, it's OK for that, but Hillary Clinton, you know, she turns over 30,000 of them and you know that's not enough, we want more information?" he asked.
68: Wait, everybody had their own server and mingled their personal and professional e-mail?
||
Ok. So I have a question about computer stuff.
I want to get a new iMac. I'd also like to be able to do work from home. My employer uses Windows 7. (I know, and we are one of the biggest employers in the state).
I think that you can log in to "go to my PC" remotely, but your computer has to be encrypted, because HIPAA. I'd like Tim to be able to use the computer, and I want to be able to stream video over netflix.
1.) Do I need to install Windows at all? Can I just log in remotely without it?
2.) Would it make any sense to partition the drive and install a Windows OS on one partition?
3.) Can I set it up so that the Windows partition is encrypted, but Tim can use the Mac part?
|>
84: Many did. Jeb Bush for instance.
85: I think you can log in remotely without installing Windows and that the remote access software would be all HIPAA-riffic.
I have a co-worker who logs into a Windows system on her Mac.
Yeah, it was really fucking stupid of John Kerry to have done whatever it was on that swift boat.
What's the deal with these apparent FBI screwups? Is there more to the story than is being reported, or is it really a case of "Hi, we're going to ruin your life because we're incompetent?"
It might be racism instead of incompetence.
Anyway, I mostly email Germans. I'm probably O.K.
"The" "real" "scandal" "is"* that records laws, never written that strongly, have also not been updated to take into account modern information technology. Reporting on the Clinton email scandal is unlikely to make that any better, but also not likely to change anything for the worse either because it's an inherently boring topic that will die down unless there really is some embarrassing email that gets revealed, which there probably isn't.
*By which I mean it's basically a policy problem, not a scandal.
90 serves as a nice segue to one of those other masterworks of Jeff Gerth (of Whitewater infamy) getting things massively wrong: the whole Wen Ho Lee farce from the late '90s.
(One of the core problems with the NYTs is that they seem to continue to agree with Howell Raines that Gerth was "one of the best investigative reporters ever." )
86: I still think that's dumb. Maybe it's just something that high level people do. Among the peons you can get in trouble for using work computers for personal stuff.
I'm against Clinton because she's a warmonger, but this is literally the stupidest nonscandal ever. Everyone else did the same thing and even if they hadn't its not a big deal. I'm honestly pretty shocked that that this is the best they've got. Surely she's done *something* more scandalous. The best they've got is something Jeb Bush also did? Really? I guess she runs a tighter ship than I'd have thought. Since this is obviously a below replacement value scandal it actually makes me think better of her.
BTW, I do feel compelled to mention that the NYTimes has 3 days later covered the item in 58... on page A14. (When the same reporter got a story on this so very wrong* ("Criminal probe") that it needed multiple corrections it was a rush lead on the front page.
*Almost certainly based on leaked wrong information from Trey Gowdy's committee.
I think the various things pointed to as not having gotten as much attention as the Clinton email really should have gotten more attention, while the Clinton email should get less. FOIA and public records laws aren't meaningful if they can't be enforced and public information requests can't be processed. But the system we have now, where differential application and attention are basically political tools to be exploited is crappy and I have no good solutions.
I also continue to believe it's not possible to have a productive FOIA/public records discussion in the context of the Clinton email non-scandal.
Everyone else did the same thing and even if they hadn't its not a big deal.
Gah, no. Government business is public record and no way should it be conducted on someone's private server in that fashion. Part of what's so godamn aggravating about her doing it is that her team set this up all of a year after the Bush private email thing wrt to the US attorney firings.
Personally I think it was a mistake for email to be treated like letters and not like telephone conversations. It's going to harm our government significantly that the president can't use email.
But at any rate, if anyone needs a little privacy when doing government business, surely it's our chief diplomat. Furthermore, she's been much more open about her email communications than any of her predecessors, so I still can't see why it's a big deal.
And finally, Jeb Bush did the exact same thing, so I don't think any of the people pushing this scandal actually think it's scandalous. The whole thing is complete disingenuous through and through.
Part of what's so godamn aggravating about her doing it is that her team set this up all of a year after the Bush private email thing wrt to the US attorney firings.
This. Yes, earlier government officials had used separate e-mail systems, but the country had just gone through a set of scandels in which it had basically, finally been figured out that private emails for high-level officials was not okay. Then Hillary chose to do it anyway.
As best I can remember the Bush scandal had to do with the fact that they carefully deleted all the records on their way out, not the fact that they were using a separate system or anything. Those are two pretty different things and Clinton certainly didn't do that.
Presumably a Congressional investigation is supposed to be searching for evidence of a crime, and still no one can explain what's illegal. It was legal to run through a private server. So they focused on classified info handled improperly, but haven't found any. So they're focusing on things that should have been classified and are now retroactively being classified (and it wouldn't surprise me if Republican allies in the CIA are the ones doing the classification since State disagrees with the decisions.) Yet if you ask anyone who reads the times, they'd think Hillary was guilty of all this and somehow escaping punishment.
At this point Gowdy has the Times so far down his pants that he could leak that he found an email proving the scenario in 6 above and it would be reported as front page news in an extra edition, with the correction appearing 12 days later as comment #331 responding to a story about Hungarian underwear styles.
Presidential emails have been going to NARA since the first Clinton admin, and FOIA laws have privacy and confidentiality exemptions.
100, 104- Ok, so let's say she does everything on gov't servers, right? She obviously wouldn't send personal messages through there as it would be embarrassing and probably called illegal as well (see Gore fundraising "scandal'.) So she still has a private server or account. So she is still accused of hiding things on there and gets subpoenaed and it's still a scandal. There is no point in saying "well, she could have done this" because the point of the Clinton rules is that no matter what they do it is a scandal.
108: I don't really care about the Clinton case, since if she sneezes she gets accused of favoring one nostril over the other. In general, doing public business through public email and private business through private email is a common practice commonly adhered to and commonly evaded.
I'm tired of defending Hillary Clinton. Or maybe just bored by it.
Yes, the email "scandal" is about 99 percent BS. And yes, there is a double standard (the so-called "Clinton Derangement Syndrome") when it comes to anything related to Hillary and Bill.
But it worries me that she and her team have been so obviously thrown off guard, thrown off course, by the email story. Not to get all inside-the-Beltway about it (I am pretty far from the inside, believe you me!), but it seems they have let "the narrative" (as they say inside the Beltway) get ahead of them, and are now desperately trying to play catch-up; and, frankly, it does look a bit desperate to me.
Last week's apology by HRC just made me cringe. If you haven't done anything wrong, why apologize? Would The Donald apologize? Hell no, he would not: he would bluster forth, and change the subject, and the media would follow him.
At the same time, I realize that Hillary is the only realistic shot for the Democrats in 2016. Martin O'Malley? The guy is just not happening; many people are surprised to learn that he's still in the race. Bernie Sanders? I would love to "feel the Bern," would love to live in a world where a socialist from Vermont could be elected President of the United States. But I'm pretty sure that's an alternate universe from the one I actually inhabit (would be thrilled to be proved wrong, though).
So Hillary it is, I guess. But colour me anxious about 2016.
It's hard to expect a lot, organizationally, out of someone who was apparently unable to hire campaign staff who understood how delegates were assigned in 2008.
Are there really no younger Democrats? Did the DLC and Obama crush their spirits or something?
Are there really no younger Democrats?
Seriously, this.
I love Uncle Joe (Biden) in a sentimental sort of the way (though he's at least as much of a warmonger as Hillary Clinton, and probably more so), but to hear his name bandied about as a possible replacement for HRC makes me wonder what has happened to the party, and where it is going.
Where is the new blood?!
Most sensible people don't want the job.
Everybody under 50 has pictures of their junk on Twitter or something.
Most sensible people don't want the job.
Yeah, I'm sure that's true.
The problem is: the GOP has a lot of not-very-sensible people lining up for the job.
Are there really no younger Democrats? Did the DLC and Obama crush their spirits or something?
In a way - I remember Obama appointing most of the nation's Democratic governors to cabinet positions, and your career in electoral politics usually doesn't continue at full pace after a cabinet position (exception: Elizabeth Dole?).
Where is the new blood?!
We just had new blood! I haven't tried to keep track of who are young Democrats who might run for president in 4 or 8 years, but if you'll pardon the cliche, Obama was a once-in-a-generate politician, and it's not surprising that there aren't any young Democrats with his charisma ready to run this year.
Not going to link it, or maybe it was linked above, but WaPo has a story where Republicans are talking about doing forensic data recovery on Clinton's decommissioned email server - I guess the one before they copied onto the one they used to process the email. That's just madness. At this point, shouldn't some standard like probable cause come into play?
117: But is that any way to run the joint? A once-in-a-lifetime charismatic politician wins once (or, to be fair, twice) in a lifetime, and for the rest of the time we have to hand things over to the GOP?
There has to be a better way, surely: a way to cultivate some less-than-charismatic, perhaps 'solid and middle of the road' is a better way to describe them, politicians who can actually win elections?
The problem with once-in-a-generation candidates is that they can feed on a dynamic that can hit you hard, and just when you least expect it, and that is seemingly out of your control. There is an element of unpredictability, I guess. Almost never (maybe once or twice in a lifetime, if you're lucky) will this dynamic tend toward anything good. To wit: I give you Trump.
Where is the new blood?!
Staying out of the way this time and building national profiles. They're around. Julien Castro, Kristen Gillibrand, Amy Klobuchar, maybe Gavin Newsom, Martin O'Malley, Cory Booker? I'm not saying I'd love to see them all running for president, but I think running against HRC is pretty foolish.
. . . some less-than-charismatic, perhaps 'solid and middle of the road' is a better way to describe them, politicians who can actually win elections?
And doesn't that describe Al Gore (who was good enough to win in 2000) and hopefully Hillary Clinton?
121: Yes, it does. But where are the examples who are under the age of 65? Why aren't we cultivating some new blood, in other words?
Don't get me wrong, I'd like to see the Democrats be better than they are. I'm just saying it's worth asking what reasonable expectations would be.
I also think it's important to remember that candidates always look bad after a loss. John Kerry, for example, looks weak in retrospect but, at the time also looked like a "solid and middle of the road" professional politician (and, on the Republican side, Romney looks much worse now than he did).
Romney's looked pretty bad ever since whenever he first inquired into the identity of the person or persons who allowed the dogs to exit the building.
124: I was reaching a little bit.
But, seriously, one of the problems in predicting the strength of the next-tier of Democratic presidential candidates (as the GOP are demonstrating this year) is that running for president is difficult and not something that most people have any experience with. So you're always trying to guess how somebody will do in a situation that's unpredictable and fairly different from the context of their current political career.
I think clearly Democrats are avoiding Clinton. If they don't think they can win, ok. If it's a wait your turn thing, then, seriously, fuck that.
Also, I'm bothered less by Clinton winning than by there being so little in the way of debate on the Democratic side of things. I guess I could pay attention to, and maybe even vote for, Sanders (if he's still around by then), but couldn't there be a few more people who are not Republicans talking about national policy until February 1st or so?
118: Recall this all for the victims of Benghazi. Just ask Trey Gowdy:
"Since the creation of the Select Committee, our aim has been straightforward: conduct an investigation that is worthy of the memory of those who died and worthy of the trust of our fellow citizens. Despite the Administration's obstruction and the attempts by others to distract from the investigation, this Committee has worked hard to uncover all the facts and follow where they lead.
"While much outside attention has been paid to the former Secretary, this investigation has never been about her and never will be. It is about our four fellow Americans murdered three years ago, and ensuring we provide answers for their families and loved ones."
The cynicism of the beltway in (for the most part) giving this a pass is breathtaking. A monster for our times.
I'm guessing the lack of younger candidates is largely due to the Hillary-taking-all-the-oxygen thing from a year ago or so. It's not that there weren't good candidates out there who could have run - 120 is a good list. It's that announcing a candidacy even now is a pretty big risk for anyone younger/less well established in the party, due to how locked into the senior leadership Clinton is. That's why the only person running seriously against her is Sanders, who clearly could not give a fuck what the democratic establishment thinks about him.
Klobuchar/Gillibrand/etc. would be taking a gigantic risk to their careers if they announced they were running against her right now, and would have taken an even larger risk if they'd done it a year ago (in that, a year ago powerful players in the party would have reacted even more strongly against them). The general spirit, from what I can recall, was that there had been a compromise in 2008, where we had a black president and then next it would be a woman one and that woman would be Clinton. Trying to run against her would have basically put them at odds with everyone they need to not be at odds with. At the time, and still now, I really wished that one of them would have announced a candidacy just to knock some of the 'first-woman-president' excitement out of Clinton's sails, but honestly it would have been a terrible idea for any particular candidate.
The Republican party has less of this problem right now because two thirds of them are as crazy as a bag full of snakes on methamphetamines. But even so the people actually fighting hard for the nomination (who aren't the established-beforehand-frontrunner) are either serious outsiders who aren't tied into the political power structures or are Cruz, who might as well be given how much everyone he works with openly hates him. (This is my favorite thing about Cruz. Often, like with Romney, you have to go with background gossip about how people don't like him behind the scenes. But with Cruz his (republican!) colleagues in the Senate actually have press conferences where they just straight up say "Oh I hate that guy.")
Re: Clinton news stories,
Vince Foster, White Water: extreme BS
Benghazi: BS
Voting for Iraq war, choosing Mark Penn: not BS - these indicate bad judgment
Emails: if I as a low-level government employee set up my own email server and did official government business over it, including sending sensitive information, I'd be fired and possibly jailed. It looks like one set of rules for the 1% and another for the rest of us. Why should I vote in the primaries for a 1%-er as my boss when she seems offended by even the suggestion she not get 1%-er privileges?
129- haven't said loved ones and families pretty much told Gowdy to eat a bag of dicks?
Re: 85
Just RDP in over a VPN. Acronymariffic. But that is easy, and Macs have built in VPN software, plus lots of 3rd party alternatives, and Microsoft provide an OS X version of Remote Desktop for the RDPing.
I do it all the time for work.
I think it was a mistake for email to be treated like letters and not like telephone conversations. It's going to harm our government significantly that the president can't use email.
Presidential snapchat?
133: Can my husband then use the Mac part of the computer as much as he wants? It's a hospital, so I have to say that my computer was encrypted. I suppose that he can have a separate login.
135 was I.
I do *not* love Joe Biden because of that god damn bankruptcy bill. He was representing his MBNA constituency, but I still don't think someone who supported that should be the Democratic presidential nominee.
I think that I'm going to vote for Sanders in the primary. I'll vote for Clinton when she's the nominee, but then maybe it'll be Sanders after all.
fake accent - do you know anything about the public records requests stuff going on in Canada under Harper. I heard from someone that they were doing a lot of stonewalling.
Filevault is a standard option on MacOS, if you turn it on it will be just as encrypted as your hospital's computers. Other than that, yes, separate logins would be required to satisfy the requirements.
(Apparently the original filevault had some weaknesses but the version on the newest MacOS meets NIST standards.)
128. Isn't the lack of debates just the DNC (as in, Debbie Wasserman Schultz) being in the tank for Hillary?
Both parties are in a bind this election season. The candidates the base wants are unelectable in the general, and the candidates that might possibly be centrist enough to be electable are boring, terrible campaigners, and tarnished by the past. The party establishments, who think winning is the only thing, and principle be damned, want Hillary and Jeb. Their bases are recoiling in horror. (And before comparing Jeb's minuscule support to Hillary's plurality, he might be doing as well, or poorly, as she is if the race was between him and Trump. Or not.)
I think a Trump-Sanders race would have a certain something, sort of like a Corbyn-Johnson race in the UK.
To add: by "unelectable in the general," I meant "widely believed to be ... "
136.last: I haven't paid attention to Canadian politics for a long time now. Harper stonewalling wouldn't be a surprise, though.
Promoting a candidate based on electability* always gives me flashbacks to the endlessly infuriating versions of it, especially like in 2004.
"You people to the left of center need to stop talking about wanting to vote for a candidate who reflects your policy preferences, and start acting excited about voting for a candidate who reflects my policy preferences. It's called compromise! God. That person isn't even remotely electable. I mean, if they were the nominee we would throw a snit and refuse to vote for them so you need to grow up and be mature like we are."
*I'm not, especially given 139, accusing you of it. It just always rankles whenever it comes up.
Yeah, winning isn't the only thing. It is, however, necessary even though not sufficient.
138: Their bases are recoiling in horror.
I'd be careful about this: I don't think it's the case that the Democratic 'base' is recoiling in horror at the prospect of a Clinton nomination. Some portions of the Dem. electorate (=likely voters) are less than wildly enthusiastic, finding her to be uninspiring, carrying an annoying amount of baggage etc. etc.; and some portion -- some, but by no means all, of the progressive wing -- is actually recoiling in horror, but I don't think these make up the majority of the 'base' by a long shot.
To think otherwise is to accept one of the dominant strains of the mainstream media narrative. Many African Americans are enthusiastic about Clinton, as are many young people, who, contra some of the conventional wisdom, tend to be fairly cautious.
N.B. I haven't read the thread as yet. Maybe this has been said.
Considering 138 more carefully: if the recent polls out of Iowa and NH showing Bernie in the lead over Hillary are taken to mean that the 'base' wants Bernie, uh. Iowa and NH aren't very representative of the country. Bernie's not doing so well (so far, of course, and we'll see) in South Carolina, which has more black people. Though I heard that Cornel West has started stumping for Bernie! Huh!
143. I guess a better term than "the base" might be "activist Dems/Reps"? I hear "the base" used all the time to mean the GOP right wing or the Democrat left wing. It's hard to tell what "the base" means these days. It used to mean "people who support a party come what may" With increased partisanship and ideological splintering within the parties, there are fewer and fewer "centrist" politicians these days anyway.
Trump is actually more centrist than most. He doesn't believe the GOP orthodoxy about lower taxes always being good, supports the welfare state, etc. He just hates immigration and immigrants.
I suspect that folks are to a large extent falling prey to the Narrative Demon in their assessment of Clinton as a campaigner (particularly if they are looking to Biden as an alternative--which it doesn't seem folks here are). That said, you run for President with the narrative you have not the one that you would like, and once the Goreing of a candidate begins I don't see a good way to reverse it (even if it is basically just a metastatization of duplicitous Republican focus group-tested talking points). So 2016 will certainly be a slog, as it would for any Democrat now that the MSM's investment portfolio/401Ks are back out of the danger zone and they are bored with governance. So yes, certainly cause for concern.
But I do think if there are Dems who if not "recoiling in horror" think Hillary is a terminally-flawed candidate they should examine the roots of that impression particularly if they have suffered any exposure to the NYTimes, Politico or other national new outlet.
*For those who *are* recoiling in horror, have fun storming the castle.
I really haven't seen much in the way of "recoiling in horror" - more a lot of "sighing with resignation and disappointment". "Ugghh, do we have to?" is about my reaction to her, at least.
Stormcrow: I don't know if I've ever said this before, but you comments on the topic of the media are some of the funniest things I've ever read. It's almost too enraging to find funny, but it's some of the wittiest jeremiads I've ever seen.
And now that I've complimented you, I've probably ruined it. You suck now.