US Politics Mega-thread - Page 5833

Robin Lakoff is a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Language and Woman's Place

'It's not about emails; it's about public communication by a woman’

I am mad. I am mad because I am scared. And if you are a woman, you should be, too. Emailgate is a bitch hunt, but the target is not Hillary Clinton. It’s us.

The only reason the whole email flap has legs is because the candidate is female. Can you imagine this happening to a man? Clinton is guilty of SWF (Speaking While Female), and emailgate is just a reminder to us all that she has no business doing what she’s doing and must be punished, for the sake of all decent women everywhere. There is so much of that going around.

The people are demanding Clinton act like moral exemplars, thundering from the pulpit like Jonathan Edwards or Cotton Mather. But Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, Chris Christie, Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh and their many conservative friends are not remotely Clinton’s moral superiors. They are simply bullies, using gender discrimination to give a veneer of plausibility to their accusations.

FBI Chief James Comey has shown himself to be another bully of the same kind. He has repeatedly talked down to Clinton, admonishing her as a bad parent would a 5-year-old. He has accused her of “poor judgment” and called her use of a private email server “extremely careless.” If Comey’s a Boy Scout, here’s one old lady who will never let him help her across the street.

On November 01 2016 03:36 KwarK wrote:
heh, that's a reach

Clinton is the victim of doing what everyone else does while having the last name Clinton. It's not because she's a woman, it's because she's running against a witch hunting paranoid bunch of anti-establishment lunatics who really do believe that the Jews control everything and that behind every meeting are the forces repressing the gold standard. While it's fun to blame sexism, and there certainly isn't any shortage of that among the alt-right and the Republican party in general, this would be happening either way. People want to believe that there is more to this than just an email server and so they'll make the pattern fit.

On November 01 2016 03:36 KwarK wrote:
heh, that's a reach

Clinton is the victim of doing what everyone else does while having the last name Clinton. It's not because she's a woman, it's because she's running against a witch hunting paranoid bunch of anti-establishment lunatics who really do believe that the Jews control everything and that behind every meeting are the forces repressing the gold standard. While it's fun to blame sexism, and there certainly isn't any shortage of that among the alt-right and the Republican party in general, this would be happening either way.

On November 01 2016 03:36 KwarK wrote:
heh, that's a reach

Clinton is the victim of doing what everyone else does while having the last name Clinton. It's not because she's a woman, it's because she's running against a witch hunting paranoid bunch of anti-establishment lunatics who really do believe that the Jews control everything and that behind every meeting are the forces repressing the gold standard. While it's fun to blame sexism, and there certainly isn't any shortage of that among the alt-right and the Republican party in general, this would be happening either way. People want to believe that there is more to this than just an email server and so they'll make the pattern fit.

On November 01 2016 03:52 cLutZ wrote:


Amazing how the Obama's have escaped the wrath of this right wing conspiracy of lunatics with virtually no scandals.

On November 01 2016 03:55 KwarK wrote:

Yeah. Nobody ever came up with any paranoid conspiracy theories related to Obama, his religion, place of birth or his plans to create a federal police force, attack Texas with ISIS partisans, and join forces with his old college roommate, Marshall Law, to take over the government. There is no precedent for crazy theories within the current opposition and certainly not at its head. The Republican leadership have wholeheartedly rejected the kind of lunatic who embraces all those theories and adds a few of his own relating to climate change and China, not to mention who is really behind ISIS (the answer will shock you).

A former top Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) official has accused Congress of putting pharmaceutical company profits ahead of public health in the battle to combat the US’s prescription opioid epidemic.

Joseph Rannazzisi, head of the DEA office responsible for preventing prescription medicine abuse until last year, said drug companies and their lobbyists have a “stranglehold” on Congress to protect a $9bn a year trade in opioid painkillers claiming the lives of nearly 19,000 people a year.

Rannazzisi, director of the agency’s office of diversion control for a decade, said the drug industry engineered recent legislation limiting the DEA’s powers to act against pharmacies endangering lives by dispensing disproportionately large numbers of opioids. He also accused lobbyists, who have spent hundreds of millions of dollars in recent years to influence opioid legislation and policy, of whipping up opposition to new guidelines for doctors intended to reduce the prescribing of the painkillers with a close resemblance to heroin.

“Congress would rather listen to people who had a profit motive rather than a public health and safety motive,” said Rannazzisi. “As long as the industry has this stranglehold through lobbyists, nothing’s going to change.”

The former DEA official, who is a pharmacist, was particularly scathing about politicians he said claim to be at the forefront of fighting the opioid epidemic while doing the bidding of the pharmaceutical industry in Congress.

“These congressmen and senators who are using this because they are up for re-election, it’s a sham. The congressmen and senators who are championing this fight, the ones who really believe in what they’re doing, their voices are drowned out because the industry has too much influence,” he said.

Charges that Congress is too beholden to pharmaceutical companies have been levelled for years, particularly over controversial legislation such as the law that barred the government from negotiating lower prices for drugs bought for the Medicare and Medicaid systems. But Rannazzisi says the influence on opioid policies is particularly disturbing because so many lives are being lost and he sees members of Congress claiming to take the issue seriously during election campaigns but acting differently in Washington.

That’s a criticism echoed by Democrats in the Senate, who issued a report earlier this month criticising Republicans for passing sweeping legislation in July to combat addiction, the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act (Cara), but refusing to fund it. The report, Dying Waiting for Treatment, likened the Republican response to the opioid crisis to “using a piece of chewing gum to patch a cracked dam”. “The bill was ‘comprehensive’ in name only; without funding, its policies are little more than empty promises,” the report said.

Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, who released the report, acknowledged the influence of drug companies and their lobbyists on Congress but he has also been critical of their sway over federal institutions. “There is no question that the powerful opioid manufacturers have a disproportionate voice, a disproportionate amount of influence, in these debates,” he said.

Rannazzisi clashed with Congress over a law passed in April reducing the DEA’s power to suspend the licenses of distributors and pharmacists accused of dispensing excessive amounts of opioids without abiding by regulations.

On November 01 2016 04:05 TheTenthDoc wrote:


Don't forget he's an atheist Muslim but is secretly planning to enact the radical agenda of his pastor. Or the FEMA camps.

On November 01 2016 04:28 LegalLord wrote:

The difference is in the extent to which people believe it. I could easily be convinced that Hillary is a crook - Obama just doesn't really fit his accusations.


Was it one of those death camps or the regular FEMA camps?

On November 01 2016 04:28 LegalLord wrote:

The difference is in the extent to which people believe it. I could easily be convinced that Hillary is a crook - Obama just doesn't really fit his accusations.


Was it one of those death camps or the regular FEMA camps?

On November 01 2016 04:43 cLutZ wrote:


That IS the difference. Obama has conspiratorial allegations against him, but other than blowback against his choices that he makes as President (PPACA, certain regulations being struck down by SCOTUS, Iran deal) he doesn't actually give fuel to the fire.

The closest thing Obama has had to a scandal that is Clintonian is Benghazi. Its true that even he probably regrets his choices in that situation, but the reason there is a scandal is because he and his deputies initially misled the public about what actually happened for political gain. That is a monthly occurrence for Clinton, whereas with Obama it sticks out because of its rarity.

On November 01 2016 01:36 farvacola wrote:
And LegalLord waves the white flag, as expected. Way to wuss out, though I'm sure someone can join you in short order as they too tacitly admit that they don't actually read the posts they comment on. Kwizach even provided the counterpoint to every tired forum debate escape hatch you listed.

For more on the phenomena given evidence by LegalLord's exchanges with others here, I highly recommend ChristianS' blog on Scott Adams and "the cult of suavity."

On November 01 2016 04:23 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:
Of course they're not but that's the point, the entire narrative is that the Government is bad and that privatization is the saving grace. Nothing should ever be able to change that narrative.