US Politics Mega-thread - Page 5648

It’s an odd feeling to be working for the election of someone you know dislikes you and your colleagues. I’ve spent a good chunk of this month trying to register voters on campuses in Pennsylvania and Ohio—registering them to vote against Donald Trump, which means pushing for the election of Hillary Clinton. It wasn’t how I wanted to spend the fall—I’d much rather have been campaigning for Bernie Sanders.

It didn’t get any easier when Wikileaks released a tape of Clinton talking to backers in the building-trades unions about the environmental work so many of us (including much of the rest of organized labor) have been engaged in for the last few years. “They come to my rallies and they yell at me and, you know, all the rest of it. They say, ‘Will you promise never to take any fossil fuels out of the earth ever again?’ No. I won’t promise that. Get a life, you know.”

I know the young people Clinton was talking about, and they weren’t demanding she somehow wave a wand and stop the fossil-fuel age overnight. They were asking her about the scientific studies showing that we can’t actually keep mining and drilling new supplies of coal, oil, and gas if we’re going to meet the temperature targets set with such fanfare in Paris last year. They were asking her to support the “Keep It In the Ground” Act introduced by Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon and endorsed by a passel of other senators, from Barbara Boxer of California to Kirsten Gillibrand of New York. (Oh yeah, and that guy Bernie.) They were also asking her to take a stand against fracking, since new studies demonstrate quite clearly that the release of methane from the use of natural gas makes climate change worse. Publicly, she hemmed and hawed. When Bernie said in a debate that he was against fracking, period, Clinton said, “By the time we get through all of my conditions, I do not think there will be many places in America where fracking will continue to take place.” That was a pretty weak hedge to begin with, but we now know that privately she reassured the building trades unions: “My view is, I want to defend natural gas…. I want to defend fracking.”

Truth be told, these aren’t revelations. All of us working on climate issues have known this is how Clinton feels; she set up a whole wing of the State Department devoted to spreading fracking around the world. She’d favored the Keystone Pipeline from the start, and it was abundantly clear that only Sanders’s unexpected success in the primaries convinced her she’d have to change. (And it was only his refusal to endorse her until after the platform was agreed upon that made the platform into the fairly progressive document that it is, on climate and other issues). Still, it stings to see in black and white exactly how little regard she has for people fighting pipelines, frack wells, coal ports. Though truth be told, that was no huge surprise either: Politicians are forever saying they want people engaged in the political process, but most of them really just want people to vote and then go home.

So why are many of us out there working to beat Trump and elect her? Because Trump is truly a horror. He’s man who looks at fourth-grade girls and imagines that he’ll be dating them in ten years. He’s a racist. He knows next to nothing and lacks the intellectual curiosity to find out more. He’s a bully. He’s almost a cartoonish villain: If a writer invented a character this evil, no one would believe them. But he’s very nearly president.

Because environmentalists are not just concerned about the climate—we have allies and friends whom we support. And on some of those issues Clinton actually seems sincere: She clearly cares about women’s issues and understands that we are a nation of immigrants.

Because if Trump wins, we backslide on the small gains we’ve made. We’ve forced Clinton to say through gritted teeth that she opposes Keystone, for instance. She can’t, I think, go back on that. Trump has made it clear he’ll permit that and every other pipeline, just as soon as he’s done tearing up the Paris climate accord.

But none of that makes it easy to go out and support her. We’ve watched all fall as she’s maintained a studied silence about the most dramatic and important fossil-fuel fight of the moment, the Dakota Access Pipeline. Even the sight of attack dogs being used on peaceful Native American protesters didn’t move her to break ranks with her industry allies and that fraction of the labor movement that still wants to build pipelines. That’s craven on her part, pure and simple.

And so the good news is that when she wins, none of us will be under the slightest illusion about who she is. The honeymoon won’t last 10 minutes; on November 9 we’ll be organizing for science and human rights and against the timid incrementalism that marks her approach. It’s clear that we need to beat the creepy perv she’s running against. It’s also clear that we then need to press harder than ever for real progress on the biggest crisis the world has ever faced.

“Get a life”? We’ve got a planet, just one.

On October 20 2016 00:20 Mohdoo wrote:
After how well Trump's plan of "go ape shit" during the second debate panned out, I'm starting to wonder if the wild idea of just trying to talk policy and be a decent human being might be what he tries tonight. Is it possible he could stop hemorrhaging support by just trying to play it cool and be respectable?

On October 20 2016 01:06 KwarK wrote:
I expect no changes from Clinton. Why would she adjust a winning strategy? This election is pretty much done at this point. We're less than 3 weeks out and Texas is looking more competitive than Pennsylvania (Trump has gone allin on flipping PA, even though PA isn't a swing state, it's a bold strategy Cotton). Even if a new strategy for Clinton is low risk/high reward the current strategy is no risk/same reward. She can't become double President, there really isn't much more room for her to improve from her current 340ish electoral college vote cushion.

On October 20 2016 01:08 Mohdoo wrote:


Not to say this is entirely a proper comparison, but in many competitive games, being up 2-0 in a BO5 often makes it a great idea to go wild in game 3. Giving your opponent a second opportunity to properly adapt can sometimes backfire.

On October 19 2016 19:42 Biff The Understudy wrote:

Nobel prize is clearly worth nothing, u right bro. Especially stuff like chemistry, economics or physics.

On October 20 2016 01:08 Mohdoo wrote:


Not to say this is entirely a proper comparison, but in many competitive games, being up 2-0 in a BO5 often makes it a great idea to go wild in game 3. Giving your opponent a second opportunity to properly adapt can sometimes backfire.

On October 20 2016 01:06 KwarK wrote:
I expect no changes from Clinton. Why would she adjust a winning strategy? This election is pretty much done at this point. We're less than 3 weeks out and Texas is looking more competitive than Pennsylvania (Trump has gone allin on flipping PA, even though PA isn't a swing state, it's a bold strategy Cotton). Even if a new strategy for Clinton is low risk/high reward the current strategy is no risk/same reward. She can't become double President, there really isn't much more room for her to improve from her current 340ish electoral college vote cushion.

When I first started defending WikiLeaks back in 2010, one of my primary arguments was that WikiLeaks, contrary to the way they were being depicted by the U.S. intelligence community and their friends, was not some reckless rogue agent running around sociopathically dumping information on the internet without concern about who might be endangered. And in fact, if you look at how the biggest WikiLeaks releases were handled early on — the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs, as well as the State Department cables — not only did they redact huge numbers of documents on the grounds that doing so was necessary to protect the welfare of innocent people, they actually requested that the State Department meet with them to help them figure out what kind of information should be withheld on the grounds that it could endanger innocent people.

So they were very much an ardent and enthusiastic proponent of that model — that when you get tons of information that belongs in the public eye, you have the corresponding responsibility to protect not only people’s physical security but also their privacy. I used to defend them on that all the time.

Somewhere along the way, WikiLeaks and Julian decided, and they’ve said this explicitly, that they changed their mind on that question — they no longer believe in redactions or withholding documents of any kind.

During our reporting on the Snowden material, we did not just take the archive and dump it on the internet, as a lot of people called for. We spent years very carefully curating it and keeping parts of it secret that might endanger individual privacy, harm people’s reputations unjustifiably, or otherwise put them in harm’s way. And WikiLeaks publicly and viciously attacked us for years. They continue to, actually, over the fact that we were the so-called gatekeepers of information. It was always my view — and continues to be — that it would have been incredibly hypocritical for us to say that these documents need to see the light of day because people’s privacy is being compromised, and then in the same breath, release documents that would destroy people’s privacy because they’re too lazy or don’t think it’s justifiable to go through and redact.

So there’s debate, even among people who believe in radical transparency, over the proper way to handle information like this. I think WikiLeaks more or less at this point stands alone in believing that these kinds of dumps are ethically — never mind journalistically — just ethically, as a human being, justifiable. I think that debate has been vibrant and healthy, and I do think you’re probably right that it needs to be even more so now that we have so many more examples, like the leak of climate scientists, of Sony executives, and other leaks that are inevitably coming.

On October 20 2016 01:21 Logo wrote:


I don't think there's any style that she CAN change into without alienating some people outside of minor adjustments (like having quips similar to the first debate). Anything that deviates from what she's already shown in the debates will just be interpreted as her being a bitch or emotional or failing that pretentious.

On October 20 2016 00:20 Mohdoo wrote:
After how well Trump's plan of "go ape shit" during the second debate panned out, I'm starting to wonder if the wild idea of just trying to talk policy and be a decent human being might be what he tries tonight. Is it possible he could stop hemorrhaging support by just trying to play it cool and be respectable?