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Canada11279 Posts
You know, the schedule thing makes a lot of sense, particularly with a young family. I mean, that was one of the big reasons Jon Stewart stepped down. And I have known several bands that had members that stepped back for a few years and then came back- some of these jobs are so all consuming, that if people want to be an involved parent and not an absentee parent, the career needs to take a temporary hit. I think this is quite laudable. Because I somewhat wonder the same thing as xDaunt- if this is purely a career move, could she simply just be burning her bridges on the left and the right and rather than bridge both sides, simply find herself on the outside from everyone.
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On January 04 2017 10:55 kwizach wrote:Show nested quote +On January 03 2017 18:00 GreenHorizons wrote:On January 03 2017 15:24 ChristianS wrote:On January 03 2017 13:44 GreenHorizons wrote:On January 03 2017 12:07 ChristianS wrote:On January 03 2017 11:10 GreenHorizons wrote:On January 03 2017 11:03 ChristianS wrote:
@GH: so the primary wasn't an election now? Seemed like there was an awful lot of voting taking place.
@LL: I said trite, not trivial. Cybersecurity is important, but "get better cybersecurity" is not very helpful advice. And your suggested relationship between candidate popularity and leak vulnerability is purely asserted. We could just as easily imagine that popular candidates have more to lose. I suspect it varies more on a case-by-case basis than predictably versus popularity. No, it never has been. Are you not familiar with the history of the primary process? I suspect we're using different definitions of "election" too. It's a broad, systematic process for allowing a population to vote in order to fill a position of power. That it's not a government running it, or that it has other factors in determining it besides raw popular vote does not make it not an election. The ACS held elections recently for a new president; as a member, I was entitled to vote for an ACS president. That's still an "election." I feel like we're going in circles a bit. The emphasis on it not being an "election" in the sense that the general election is an election, is because we have laws that apply to elections (in part to ensure they are free and fair), that were violated by the DNC, but since the DNC is not really holding an "election", it's not illegal. Are we on the same page so far? Maybe? You're probably more knowledgeable on the specifics of the DNC leaks, what behavior of theirs would be illegal if it were done in a general election? Well setting up a fundraising apparatus that favored one candidate over another would be one obvious to me ( the state party money funneling. To be clear, it would be like if Trump could use all the states Republicans control and Hillary only the ones Democrats control). That is a completely false description of what happened, and you know it to be false because we already discussed it here. The Hillary Victory Fund was a joint fund-raising committee which raised money for HRC's campaign, for the DNC and for Democratic committees in various states (which largely transferred the money to the DNC so that it could allocate it strategically for the elections). Its purpose was to raise money simultaneously for those various entities. Obama had the Obama Victory Fund which served the same purpose, and Sanders had one as well, except he never actually decided to engage in fundraising for the Democratic party, preferring to focus only on his own campaign (and to ask his supporters to give money to a handful of candidates down-ballot that he endorsed). None of the money that went to the DNC and to state committees was used to campaign for HRC in the primary (it was all to be used for general election efforts, which means Sanders would have benefited from the fundraising if he had become the nominee), which makes your general election parallel completely bogus. It's absolutely nothing like "if Trump could use all the states Republicans control and Hillary only the ones Democrats control". That has literally nothing to do with what we're talking about. Also, federal rules still apply to campaign contributions made during the primary (notice how they call primaries "elections", by the way?), which makes your initial claim is even more spurious. And we already know which candidate received month after month from the FEC the longest lists of violations with regards to campaign contributions, and that's Sanders. We also already know which candidate avoided compliance with federal law with regards to the disclosure of the details of his personal finances as a candidate in the primary, and that's Sanders again. Show nested quote +On January 03 2017 18:00 GreenHorizons wrote:
Also, if we make the parallel between delegates and electors, super delegates would basically be like the controlling side of congress getting ~20% of the electoral college vote. The superdelegates didn't win HRC the nomination -- voters did. Again, there's only one candidate who said superdelegates should overturn the will of the voters if the other candidate received more votes and pledged delegates than him, and that's Sanders. There was also one poster in this thread who supported doing so, and that's you. Show nested quote +On January 03 2017 18:00 GreenHorizons wrote:
But if we're sticking specifically to what came out of the DNC leaks that would be illegal, one would be breaking the debate contract stipulating that none of the questions be given to candidates beforehand. I'm not sure Brazile would have been bound by any contract -- she wasn't a moderator. And although what she did was wrong, she apparently linked a total of two primary debate questions to the HRC campaign (one of which was about the fact they'd be asked about the water in Flint for the debate in... Flint), and the e-mails showed it was Brazile who took the initiative by herself without anyone asking for it -- it wasn't a DNC operation at all. Here is also what the Sanders campaign had to say about the issue: For all you know, she reached out to them with questions as well. We can't tell, because there's only one camp whose e-mails were leaked, so the best we can do is rely on Devine's assessment that Brazile was fair to them. Show nested quote +On January 03 2017 18:00 GreenHorizons wrote:
There's more examples like the people rushing into the Nevada caucus with no records of their registration, and really a crap ton of violations around the country at the local level that the DNC ignored but I'm not really interested in rehashing. There were plenty of accusations made by Sanders supporters unfamiliar with the rules and with the process, that much is true. There were also sometimes human and computer errors, as well as some unacceptable issues with the number of voting booths in some counties, like in Arizona -- something that was completely out of the control of the DNC, handled by the state officials, and which actually harmed HRC more so than Sanders. Yet there was zero evidence of any unfair manipulation of the election process by the DNC. Zero. Show nested quote +On January 03 2017 18:00 GreenHorizons wrote:
As for the "free" part, in New York, one had to know you wanted to vote in the Democratic primary in October of 2015 for their primary in April. And that you wouldn't be able to vote in the Democratic primary months later. You may remember the first debate wasn't until October... While I support election-day registration, the existence of such registration requirements obviously predates this primary by a long time. You're confusing "this particular rule was inconvenient for some of the supporters of my candidate who decided too late that they would like to vote in the Democratic primary" with "this was unfair/not free". What is interesting, though, is that you're for some weird reason not bringing up the most disenfranchising aspect of the primary: the existence of caucuses. Could it be because caucuses actually helped Sanders by a huge margin? Indeed, allow me to quote my previous post (written on the 26th of May) on the issue, to highlight why the format of the Democratic primary actually favored Sanders rather than Clinton: Show nested quote +Sanders actually benefited substantially from the format of the primaries. The first two states were very unrepresentative of the Democratic (and US) electorate in terms of demographics, and favorable to Sanders in that regard, giving his campaign a boost. When it comes to open contests, if you take away caucuses, Clinton has won thirteen open primaries to Sanders' six. The only type of format which actually benefited Sanders by a sizeable margin was the open caucuses, which is actually the kind of format which disenfranchises voters the most. See for example the caucuses in Nebraska and Washington -- Sanders won the two caucuses 57,1% to 42,9% and 72,7% to 27,1%, respectively. Yet those two states also held primaries (which didn't award delegates, however), in which a lot more people participated, and Clinton won both contests: 53% to 47% in Nebraska, and 53% to 47% as well in Washington. About 230,000 people voted in the Washington caucuses, while more than 719,000 people voted in the states primary -- more than three times as much. The same is true of the attendance of the Nebraska contests. Sanders was therefore in reality incredibly favored by the existence of caucuses. See this map: 538 have actually just released an analysis of this exact matter: see here. I'll quote them: Sanders fans have claimed that because caucuses have lower turnout the current national caucus and primary vote underrates how well Sanders is doing. In fact, the opposite is true. When we switch all caucuses over to primaries, Sanders actually does worse. Clinton’s lead in the popular vote would grow from 2.9 to 3.3 million votes. Moreover, her edge in elected delegates would expand significantly. Instead of her current lead of 272 elected delegates, Clinton would be ahead by 424. Some states that were won by Sanders in caucuses, including Colorado and Minnesota, would be won by Clinton in primaries, according to our calculations.[...]
In fact, if all states held primaries open to independents — instead of closed primaries, or caucuses of any kind — Clinton might have a larger lead in elected delegates than she does now. The model indicates that Clinton would have a lead of 294 elected delegates, compared with the 272 she holds now. [...] Realistically, if you throw everything together, the math suggests that Sanders doesn’t have much to complain about. If the Democratic nomination were open to as many Democrats as possible — through closed primaries — Clinton would be dominating Sanders. And if the nomination were open to as many voters as possible — through open primaries — she’d still be winning. Another important point to take into account to examine who the system benefited is the ratio of votes received to the ratio of delegates received. Sanders has received around 43% of the vote so far, yet he has received about 46% of delegates. And if the Democrats were using the same rules as the Republicans in terms of delegate allocation, Clinton would have won the nomination a long time ago. Sanders is getting the best possible system to help him remain competitive. "What about superdelegates?", you ask? Well, despite Clinton having an overwhelming majority of superdelegates in her camp, superdelegates have never flipped a nomination against the candidate who had won the most pledged delegates, and there's nothing that indicates they would have done so if Sanders had been in Clinton's position with a majority of pledged delegates and a huge advantage in the popular vote -- in fact, many have said that they would follow the will of the voters even if they initially announced they were supporting another candidate. What matters is therefore who is getting a majority of pledged delegates, and that's Clinton by a sizeable margin, not Sanders. He's the one who's trying to get the superdelegates to overturn the will of the voters, not Clinton. Another argument coming from the Sanders camp is that he would win if the voting started now, since voters have gotten to know him better, but that's just as fallacious. First, if he needed more time, perhaps he could have joined the Democratic party and started campaigning earlier -- that's on him. The same is true of him not having her name recognition. Second, he has been lagging behind Clinton throughout the primaries, and the closest he came to her was an average of a five percentage point difference in polls. That difference is now of almost ten percentage points. I'll close by mentioning the debates -- the DNC did try to limit the number of unsanctioned debates in this election, just like the RNC did, because the main takeaway from the 2012 Republican primary was that too many debates could seriously hurt the eventual nominee. This would have made Sanders' task of introducing himself to the electorate slightly more difficult, if they hadn't ended up scheduling more debates anyway. Sanders had every opportunity to present himself to the electorate, and spent even more money than Hillary's campaign throughout the primaries -- with the advantage of not having a history (and a present!) of being attacked by the Republicans due to being their biggest threat in the general election. As I showed, he has still remained behind Clinton in polls throughout the primaries. In short, the actual process never substantially disadvantaged Sanders, and he's the one who actually benefited from it, most importantly through the caucuses which disenfranchised Clinton voters by huge margins. The announcement on the number of sanctioned debates was made on the 5th of May 2015, weeks before Sanders even announced his candidacy. The DNC did try to limit the number of debates in this election, just like the RNC did, because the main takeaway from the 2012 Republican primary was that too many debates could seriously hurt the eventual nominee. This would have been true regardless of who was running. Show nested quote +On January 03 2017 18:00 GreenHorizons wrote:
Seriously, can you just acknowledge that the primary process wasn't fair and we could move on? I'll acknowledge that Sanders lost a fair primary election to Clinton, who defeated him soundly with 55,2% of the vote to Sanders' 43,1% of the vote, which translated to a gap of more than 3,7 million votes in Clinton's favor. In other words, it was a blowout -- Sanders certainly did much better than people expected when he first announced his candidacy, but it was still a blowout. Stop pretending that the primary was rigged, or that Sanders would have won if not for the DNC. The voters chose Clinton over him, period.
I understand the confusion but that was a lot of wasted effort. Much of it is refuting a point I wasn't making in the conversation. The big one being that you were trying to refute that the DNC primary was fair to Bernie, the point I was making was that it's not a "free and fair election" regardless of the specifics of Bernie's race.
There's some separate aspects that you seem to have missed in the analogy too. Like the DNC would be the equivalent of some combination of the FEC and Congress as they were the ones who set the rules at the national level, while the state parties would be the equivalent of individual state governments. Where exactly that places Donna is something else. It would also make the DNC charter/bylaws basically the constitution (as far as elections).
*figured I'd add: Yes, FEC does regulate primary campaign contributions. I'm not saying Bernie's fundraising was perfect, but holy crap if you think Hillary's isn't much, much, worse, I don't think you get the point of folks problem with campaign finance.
I mean you are well informed, surely you know the primaries weren't intended to be elections in the first place, and were never formalized to a degree that would be considered a legal election at the national level? Not to mention that the legal documents I mentioned earlier mentions it's the legal opinion of the DNC that the whole thing is just political hot air and they can't be legally held to it?
Where I am particularly interested in your opinion though, is why do you think even Harry Reid says Bernie didn't get a fair deal?
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On January 04 2017 12:22 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On January 04 2017 10:55 kwizach wrote:On January 03 2017 18:00 GreenHorizons wrote:On January 03 2017 15:24 ChristianS wrote:On January 03 2017 13:44 GreenHorizons wrote:On January 03 2017 12:07 ChristianS wrote:On January 03 2017 11:10 GreenHorizons wrote:On January 03 2017 11:03 ChristianS wrote:
@GH: so the primary wasn't an election now? Seemed like there was an awful lot of voting taking place.
@LL: I said trite, not trivial. Cybersecurity is important, but "get better cybersecurity" is not very helpful advice. And your suggested relationship between candidate popularity and leak vulnerability is purely asserted. We could just as easily imagine that popular candidates have more to lose. I suspect it varies more on a case-by-case basis than predictably versus popularity. No, it never has been. Are you not familiar with the history of the primary process? I suspect we're using different definitions of "election" too. It's a broad, systematic process for allowing a population to vote in order to fill a position of power. That it's not a government running it, or that it has other factors in determining it besides raw popular vote does not make it not an election. The ACS held elections recently for a new president; as a member, I was entitled to vote for an ACS president. That's still an "election." I feel like we're going in circles a bit. The emphasis on it not being an "election" in the sense that the general election is an election, is because we have laws that apply to elections (in part to ensure they are free and fair), that were violated by the DNC, but since the DNC is not really holding an "election", it's not illegal. Are we on the same page so far? Maybe? You're probably more knowledgeable on the specifics of the DNC leaks, what behavior of theirs would be illegal if it were done in a general election? Well setting up a fundraising apparatus that favored one candidate over another would be one obvious to me ( the state party money funneling. To be clear, it would be like if Trump could use all the states Republicans control and Hillary only the ones Democrats control). That is a completely false description of what happened, and you know it to be false because we already discussed it here. The Hillary Victory Fund was a joint fund-raising committee which raised money for HRC's campaign, for the DNC and for Democratic committees in various states (which largely transferred the money to the DNC so that it could allocate it strategically for the elections). Its purpose was to raise money simultaneously for those various entities. Obama had the Obama Victory Fund which served the same purpose, and Sanders had one as well, except he never actually decided to engage in fundraising for the Democratic party, preferring to focus only on his own campaign (and to ask his supporters to give money to a handful of candidates down-ballot that he endorsed). None of the money that went to the DNC and to state committees was used to campaign for HRC in the primary (it was all to be used for general election efforts, which means Sanders would have benefited from the fundraising if he had become the nominee), which makes your general election parallel completely bogus. It's absolutely nothing like "if Trump could use all the states Republicans control and Hillary only the ones Democrats control". That has literally nothing to do with what we're talking about. Also, federal rules still apply to campaign contributions made during the primary (notice how they call primaries "elections", by the way?), which makes your initial claim is even more spurious. And we already know which candidate received month after month from the FEC the longest lists of violations with regards to campaign contributions, and that's Sanders. We also already know which candidate avoided compliance with federal law with regards to the disclosure of the details of his personal finances as a candidate in the primary, and that's Sanders again. On January 03 2017 18:00 GreenHorizons wrote:
Also, if we make the parallel between delegates and electors, super delegates would basically be like the controlling side of congress getting ~20% of the electoral college vote. The superdelegates didn't win HRC the nomination -- voters did. Again, there's only one candidate who said superdelegates should overturn the will of the voters if the other candidate received more votes and pledged delegates than him, and that's Sanders. There was also one poster in this thread who supported doing so, and that's you. On January 03 2017 18:00 GreenHorizons wrote:
But if we're sticking specifically to what came out of the DNC leaks that would be illegal, one would be breaking the debate contract stipulating that none of the questions be given to candidates beforehand. I'm not sure Brazile would have been bound by any contract -- she wasn't a moderator. And although what she did was wrong, she apparently linked a total of two primary debate questions to the HRC campaign (one of which was about the fact they'd be asked about the water in Flint for the debate in... Flint), and the e-mails showed it was Brazile who took the initiative by herself without anyone asking for it -- it wasn't a DNC operation at all. Here is also what the Sanders campaign had to say about the issue: https://twitter.com/taddevine/status/786195317775532033For all you know, she reached out to them with questions as well. We can't tell, because there's only one camp whose e-mails were leaked, so the best we can do is rely on Devine's assessment that Brazile was fair to them. On January 03 2017 18:00 GreenHorizons wrote:
There's more examples like the people rushing into the Nevada caucus with no records of their registration, and really a crap ton of violations around the country at the local level that the DNC ignored but I'm not really interested in rehashing. There were plenty of accusations made by Sanders supporters unfamiliar with the rules and with the process, that much is true. There were also sometimes human and computer errors, as well as some unacceptable issues with the number of voting booths in some counties, like in Arizona -- something that was completely out of the control of the DNC, handled by the state officials, and which actually harmed HRC more so than Sanders. Yet there was zero evidence of any unfair manipulation of the election process by the DNC. Zero. On January 03 2017 18:00 GreenHorizons wrote:
As for the "free" part, in New York, one had to know you wanted to vote in the Democratic primary in October of 2015 for their primary in April. And that you wouldn't be able to vote in the Democratic primary months later. You may remember the first debate wasn't until October... While I support election-day registration, the existence of such registration requirements obviously predates this primary by a long time. You're confusing "this particular rule was inconvenient for some of the supporters of my candidate who decided too late that they would like to vote in the Democratic primary" with "this was unfair/not free". What is interesting, though, is that you're for some weird reason not bringing up the most disenfranchising aspect of the primary: the existence of caucuses. Could it be because caucuses actually helped Sanders by a huge margin? Indeed, allow me to quote my previous post (written on the 26th of May) on the issue, to highlight why the format of the Democratic primary actually favored Sanders rather than Clinton: Sanders actually benefited substantially from the format of the primaries. The first two states were very unrepresentative of the Democratic (and US) electorate in terms of demographics, and favorable to Sanders in that regard, giving his campaign a boost. When it comes to open contests, if you take away caucuses, Clinton has won thirteen open primaries to Sanders' six. The only type of format which actually benefited Sanders by a sizeable margin was the open caucuses, which is actually the kind of format which disenfranchises voters the most. See for example the caucuses in Nebraska and Washington -- Sanders won the two caucuses 57,1% to 42,9% and 72,7% to 27,1%, respectively. Yet those two states also held primaries (which didn't award delegates, however), in which a lot more people participated, and Clinton won both contests: 53% to 47% in Nebraska, and 53% to 47% as well in Washington. About 230,000 people voted in the Washington caucuses, while more than 719,000 people voted in the states primary -- more than three times as much. The same is true of the attendance of the Nebraska contests. Sanders was therefore in reality incredibly favored by the existence of caucuses. See this map: https://twitter.com/Nate_Cohn/status/735316545434451968538 have actually just released an analysis of this exact matter: see here. I'll quote them: Sanders fans have claimed that because caucuses have lower turnout the current national caucus and primary vote underrates how well Sanders is doing. In fact, the opposite is true. When we switch all caucuses over to primaries, Sanders actually does worse. Clinton’s lead in the popular vote would grow from 2.9 to 3.3 million votes. Moreover, her edge in elected delegates would expand significantly. Instead of her current lead of 272 elected delegates, Clinton would be ahead by 424. Some states that were won by Sanders in caucuses, including Colorado and Minnesota, would be won by Clinton in primaries, according to our calculations.[...]
In fact, if all states held primaries open to independents — instead of closed primaries, or caucuses of any kind — Clinton might have a larger lead in elected delegates than she does now. The model indicates that Clinton would have a lead of 294 elected delegates, compared with the 272 she holds now. [...] Realistically, if you throw everything together, the math suggests that Sanders doesn’t have much to complain about. If the Democratic nomination were open to as many Democrats as possible — through closed primaries — Clinton would be dominating Sanders. And if the nomination were open to as many voters as possible — through open primaries — she’d still be winning. Another important point to take into account to examine who the system benefited is the ratio of votes received to the ratio of delegates received. Sanders has received around 43% of the vote so far, yet he has received about 46% of delegates. And if the Democrats were using the same rules as the Republicans in terms of delegate allocation, Clinton would have won the nomination a long time ago. Sanders is getting the best possible system to help him remain competitive. "What about superdelegates?", you ask? Well, despite Clinton having an overwhelming majority of superdelegates in her camp, superdelegates have never flipped a nomination against the candidate who had won the most pledged delegates, and there's nothing that indicates they would have done so if Sanders had been in Clinton's position with a majority of pledged delegates and a huge advantage in the popular vote -- in fact, many have said that they would follow the will of the voters even if they initially announced they were supporting another candidate. What matters is therefore who is getting a majority of pledged delegates, and that's Clinton by a sizeable margin, not Sanders. He's the one who's trying to get the superdelegates to overturn the will of the voters, not Clinton. Another argument coming from the Sanders camp is that he would win if the voting started now, since voters have gotten to know him better, but that's just as fallacious. First, if he needed more time, perhaps he could have joined the Democratic party and started campaigning earlier -- that's on him. The same is true of him not having her name recognition. Second, he has been lagging behind Clinton throughout the primaries, and the closest he came to her was an average of a five percentage point difference in polls. That difference is now of almost ten percentage points. I'll close by mentioning the debates -- the DNC did try to limit the number of unsanctioned debates in this election, just like the RNC did, because the main takeaway from the 2012 Republican primary was that too many debates could seriously hurt the eventual nominee. This would have made Sanders' task of introducing himself to the electorate slightly more difficult, if they hadn't ended up scheduling more debates anyway. Sanders had every opportunity to present himself to the electorate, and spent even more money than Hillary's campaign throughout the primaries -- with the advantage of not having a history (and a present!) of being attacked by the Republicans due to being their biggest threat in the general election. As I showed, he has still remained behind Clinton in polls throughout the primaries. In short, the actual process never substantially disadvantaged Sanders, and he's the one who actually benefited from it, most importantly through the caucuses which disenfranchised Clinton voters by huge margins. The announcement on the number of sanctioned debates was made on the 5th of May 2015, weeks before Sanders even announced his candidacy. The DNC did try to limit the number of debates in this election, just like the RNC did, because the main takeaway from the 2012 Republican primary was that too many debates could seriously hurt the eventual nominee. This would have been true regardless of who was running. On January 03 2017 18:00 GreenHorizons wrote:
Seriously, can you just acknowledge that the primary process wasn't fair and we could move on? I'll acknowledge that Sanders lost a fair primary election to Clinton, who defeated him soundly with 55,2% of the vote to Sanders' 43,1% of the vote, which translated to a gap of more than 3,7 million votes in Clinton's favor. In other words, it was a blowout -- Sanders certainly did much better than people expected when he first announced his candidacy, but it was still a blowout. Stop pretending that the primary was rigged, or that Sanders would have won if not for the DNC. The voters chose Clinton over him, period. I understand the confusion but that was a lot of wasted effort. Much of it is refuting a point I wasn't making in the conversation. The big one being that you were trying to refute that the DNC primary was fair to Bernie, the point I was making was that it's not a "free and fair election" regardless of the specifics of Bernie's race. There's some separate aspects that you seem to have missed in the analogy too. Like the DNC would be the equivalent of some combination of the FEC and Congress as they were the ones who set the rules at the national level, while the state parties would be the equivalent of individual state governments. Where exactly that places Donna is something else. It would also make the DNC charter/bylaws basically the constitution (as far as elections). I mean you are well informed, surely you know the primaries weren't intended to be elections in the first place, and were never formalized to a degree that would be considered a legal election at the national level? Not to mention that the legal documents I mentioned earlier mentions it's the legal opinion of the DNC that the whole thing is just political hot air and they can't be legally held to it? Where I am particularly interested in your opinion though, is why do you think even Harry Reid says Bernie didn't get a fair deal?
No, that was not a wasted effort, since I refuted the points you raised to support your case. Feel free to defend them, such as your completely fallacious misrepresentation of what the Hillary Victory Fund was about.
It was a fair and free process, and saying that every aspect of the primaries did not follow the federal laws governing the presidential election is an apples to oranges comparison, because the entire point is that the two processes are different -- one serves to determine one party's nominee, the other serves to determine the next president. The fact that the two processes vary in some aspects doesn't make the primary process unfair, and especially not unfair against Sanders (there are plenty of things I would change about the primaries, starting with the existence of caucuses, but that doesn't make them unfair against Sanders). The primary is still an election if we use the definition provided by the Collins dictionary, which is "the selection by vote of a person or persons from among candidates for a position, esp a political office". The position in question is being the nominee of the party for the presidential election. Stop arguing semantics, in particular to push the idea that the process was unfair to Sanders/rigged by the DNC. Can you acknowledge that Sanders lost the primary because Clinton got more pledged delegates than him due to primary voters preferring her over Sanders by a substantial margin?
Harry Reid said Sanders didn't get a "fair deal" from Debbie Wasserman Schultz specifically, after the e-mails showed her criticizing him for his attacks on the DNC, because he was trying to turn the page of the primary and assuage the Sanders supporters by agreeing that Schultz should be criticized. He never brought up any actual rigging or unfair proceedings, only that "Bernie deserved somebody that was not critical to[ward] him" as head of the DNC.
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On January 04 2017 12:22 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On January 04 2017 10:55 kwizach wrote:On January 03 2017 18:00 GreenHorizons wrote:On January 03 2017 15:24 ChristianS wrote:On January 03 2017 13:44 GreenHorizons wrote:On January 03 2017 12:07 ChristianS wrote:On January 03 2017 11:10 GreenHorizons wrote:On January 03 2017 11:03 ChristianS wrote:
@GH: so the primary wasn't an election now? Seemed like there was an awful lot of voting taking place.
@LL: I said trite, not trivial. Cybersecurity is important, but "get better cybersecurity" is not very helpful advice. And your suggested relationship between candidate popularity and leak vulnerability is purely asserted. We could just as easily imagine that popular candidates have more to lose. I suspect it varies more on a case-by-case basis than predictably versus popularity. No, it never has been. Are you not familiar with the history of the primary process? I suspect we're using different definitions of "election" too. It's a broad, systematic process for allowing a population to vote in order to fill a position of power. That it's not a government running it, or that it has other factors in determining it besides raw popular vote does not make it not an election. The ACS held elections recently for a new president; as a member, I was entitled to vote for an ACS president. That's still an "election." I feel like we're going in circles a bit. The emphasis on it not being an "election" in the sense that the general election is an election, is because we have laws that apply to elections (in part to ensure they are free and fair), that were violated by the DNC, but since the DNC is not really holding an "election", it's not illegal. Are we on the same page so far? Maybe? You're probably more knowledgeable on the specifics of the DNC leaks, what behavior of theirs would be illegal if it were done in a general election? Well setting up a fundraising apparatus that favored one candidate over another would be one obvious to me ( the state party money funneling. To be clear, it would be like if Trump could use all the states Republicans control and Hillary only the ones Democrats control). That is a completely false description of what happened, and you know it to be false because we already discussed it here. The Hillary Victory Fund was a joint fund-raising committee which raised money for HRC's campaign, for the DNC and for Democratic committees in various states (which largely transferred the money to the DNC so that it could allocate it strategically for the elections). Its purpose was to raise money simultaneously for those various entities. Obama had the Obama Victory Fund which served the same purpose, and Sanders had one as well, except he never actually decided to engage in fundraising for the Democratic party, preferring to focus only on his own campaign (and to ask his supporters to give money to a handful of candidates down-ballot that he endorsed). None of the money that went to the DNC and to state committees was used to campaign for HRC in the primary (it was all to be used for general election efforts, which means Sanders would have benefited from the fundraising if he had become the nominee), which makes your general election parallel completely bogus. It's absolutely nothing like "if Trump could use all the states Republicans control and Hillary only the ones Democrats control". That has literally nothing to do with what we're talking about. Also, federal rules still apply to campaign contributions made during the primary (notice how they call primaries "elections", by the way?), which makes your initial claim is even more spurious. And we already know which candidate received month after month from the FEC the longest lists of violations with regards to campaign contributions, and that's Sanders. We also already know which candidate avoided compliance with federal law with regards to the disclosure of the details of his personal finances as a candidate in the primary, and that's Sanders again. On January 03 2017 18:00 GreenHorizons wrote:
Also, if we make the parallel between delegates and electors, super delegates would basically be like the controlling side of congress getting ~20% of the electoral college vote. The superdelegates didn't win HRC the nomination -- voters did. Again, there's only one candidate who said superdelegates should overturn the will of the voters if the other candidate received more votes and pledged delegates than him, and that's Sanders. There was also one poster in this thread who supported doing so, and that's you. On January 03 2017 18:00 GreenHorizons wrote:
But if we're sticking specifically to what came out of the DNC leaks that would be illegal, one would be breaking the debate contract stipulating that none of the questions be given to candidates beforehand. I'm not sure Brazile would have been bound by any contract -- she wasn't a moderator. And although what she did was wrong, she apparently linked a total of two primary debate questions to the HRC campaign (one of which was about the fact they'd be asked about the water in Flint for the debate in... Flint), and the e-mails showed it was Brazile who took the initiative by herself without anyone asking for it -- it wasn't a DNC operation at all. Here is also what the Sanders campaign had to say about the issue: https://twitter.com/taddevine/status/786195317775532033For all you know, she reached out to them with questions as well. We can't tell, because there's only one camp whose e-mails were leaked, so the best we can do is rely on Devine's assessment that Brazile was fair to them. On January 03 2017 18:00 GreenHorizons wrote:
There's more examples like the people rushing into the Nevada caucus with no records of their registration, and really a crap ton of violations around the country at the local level that the DNC ignored but I'm not really interested in rehashing. There were plenty of accusations made by Sanders supporters unfamiliar with the rules and with the process, that much is true. There were also sometimes human and computer errors, as well as some unacceptable issues with the number of voting booths in some counties, like in Arizona -- something that was completely out of the control of the DNC, handled by the state officials, and which actually harmed HRC more so than Sanders. Yet there was zero evidence of any unfair manipulation of the election process by the DNC. Zero. On January 03 2017 18:00 GreenHorizons wrote:
As for the "free" part, in New York, one had to know you wanted to vote in the Democratic primary in October of 2015 for their primary in April. And that you wouldn't be able to vote in the Democratic primary months later. You may remember the first debate wasn't until October... While I support election-day registration, the existence of such registration requirements obviously predates this primary by a long time. You're confusing "this particular rule was inconvenient for some of the supporters of my candidate who decided too late that they would like to vote in the Democratic primary" with "this was unfair/not free". What is interesting, though, is that you're for some weird reason not bringing up the most disenfranchising aspect of the primary: the existence of caucuses. Could it be because caucuses actually helped Sanders by a huge margin? Indeed, allow me to quote my previous post (written on the 26th of May) on the issue, to highlight why the format of the Democratic primary actually favored Sanders rather than Clinton: Sanders actually benefited substantially from the format of the primaries. The first two states were very unrepresentative of the Democratic (and US) electorate in terms of demographics, and favorable to Sanders in that regard, giving his campaign a boost. When it comes to open contests, if you take away caucuses, Clinton has won thirteen open primaries to Sanders' six. The only type of format which actually benefited Sanders by a sizeable margin was the open caucuses, which is actually the kind of format which disenfranchises voters the most. See for example the caucuses in Nebraska and Washington -- Sanders won the two caucuses 57,1% to 42,9% and 72,7% to 27,1%, respectively. Yet those two states also held primaries (which didn't award delegates, however), in which a lot more people participated, and Clinton won both contests: 53% to 47% in Nebraska, and 53% to 47% as well in Washington. About 230,000 people voted in the Washington caucuses, while more than 719,000 people voted in the states primary -- more than three times as much. The same is true of the attendance of the Nebraska contests. Sanders was therefore in reality incredibly favored by the existence of caucuses. See this map: https://twitter.com/Nate_Cohn/status/735316545434451968538 have actually just released an analysis of this exact matter: see here. I'll quote them: Sanders fans have claimed that because caucuses have lower turnout the current national caucus and primary vote underrates how well Sanders is doing. In fact, the opposite is true. When we switch all caucuses over to primaries, Sanders actually does worse. Clinton’s lead in the popular vote would grow from 2.9 to 3.3 million votes. Moreover, her edge in elected delegates would expand significantly. Instead of her current lead of 272 elected delegates, Clinton would be ahead by 424. Some states that were won by Sanders in caucuses, including Colorado and Minnesota, would be won by Clinton in primaries, according to our calculations.[...]
In fact, if all states held primaries open to independents — instead of closed primaries, or caucuses of any kind — Clinton might have a larger lead in elected delegates than she does now. The model indicates that Clinton would have a lead of 294 elected delegates, compared with the 272 she holds now. [...] Realistically, if you throw everything together, the math suggests that Sanders doesn’t have much to complain about. If the Democratic nomination were open to as many Democrats as possible — through closed primaries — Clinton would be dominating Sanders. And if the nomination were open to as many voters as possible — through open primaries — she’d still be winning. Another important point to take into account to examine who the system benefited is the ratio of votes received to the ratio of delegates received. Sanders has received around 43% of the vote so far, yet he has received about 46% of delegates. And if the Democrats were using the same rules as the Republicans in terms of delegate allocation, Clinton would have won the nomination a long time ago. Sanders is getting the best possible system to help him remain competitive. "What about superdelegates?", you ask? Well, despite Clinton having an overwhelming majority of superdelegates in her camp, superdelegates have never flipped a nomination against the candidate who had won the most pledged delegates, and there's nothing that indicates they would have done so if Sanders had been in Clinton's position with a majority of pledged delegates and a huge advantage in the popular vote -- in fact, many have said that they would follow the will of the voters even if they initially announced they were supporting another candidate. What matters is therefore who is getting a majority of pledged delegates, and that's Clinton by a sizeable margin, not Sanders. He's the one who's trying to get the superdelegates to overturn the will of the voters, not Clinton. Another argument coming from the Sanders camp is that he would win if the voting started now, since voters have gotten to know him better, but that's just as fallacious. First, if he needed more time, perhaps he could have joined the Democratic party and started campaigning earlier -- that's on him. The same is true of him not having her name recognition. Second, he has been lagging behind Clinton throughout the primaries, and the closest he came to her was an average of a five percentage point difference in polls. That difference is now of almost ten percentage points. I'll close by mentioning the debates -- the DNC did try to limit the number of unsanctioned debates in this election, just like the RNC did, because the main takeaway from the 2012 Republican primary was that too many debates could seriously hurt the eventual nominee. This would have made Sanders' task of introducing himself to the electorate slightly more difficult, if they hadn't ended up scheduling more debates anyway. Sanders had every opportunity to present himself to the electorate, and spent even more money than Hillary's campaign throughout the primaries -- with the advantage of not having a history (and a present!) of being attacked by the Republicans due to being their biggest threat in the general election. As I showed, he has still remained behind Clinton in polls throughout the primaries. In short, the actual process never substantially disadvantaged Sanders, and he's the one who actually benefited from it, most importantly through the caucuses which disenfranchised Clinton voters by huge margins. The announcement on the number of sanctioned debates was made on the 5th of May 2015, weeks before Sanders even announced his candidacy. The DNC did try to limit the number of debates in this election, just like the RNC did, because the main takeaway from the 2012 Republican primary was that too many debates could seriously hurt the eventual nominee. This would have been true regardless of who was running. On January 03 2017 18:00 GreenHorizons wrote:
Seriously, can you just acknowledge that the primary process wasn't fair and we could move on? I'll acknowledge that Sanders lost a fair primary election to Clinton, who defeated him soundly with 55,2% of the vote to Sanders' 43,1% of the vote, which translated to a gap of more than 3,7 million votes in Clinton's favor. In other words, it was a blowout -- Sanders certainly did much better than people expected when he first announced his candidacy, but it was still a blowout. Stop pretending that the primary was rigged, or that Sanders would have won if not for the DNC. The voters chose Clinton over him, period. I understand the confusion but that was a lot of wasted effort. Much of it is refuting a point I wasn't making in the conversation. The big one being that you were trying to refute that the DNC primary was fair to Bernie, the point I was making was that it's not a "free and fair election" regardless of the specifics of Bernie's race. There's some separate aspects that you seem to have missed in the analogy too. Like the DNC would be the equivalent of some combination of the FEC and Congress as they were the ones who set the rules at the national level, while the state parties would be the equivalent of individual state governments. Where exactly that places Donna is something else. It would also make the DNC charter/bylaws basically the constitution (as far as elections). *figured I'd add: Yes, FEC does regulate primary campaign contributions. I'm not saying Bernie's fundraising was perfect, but holy crap if you think Hillary's isn't much, much, worse, I don't think you get the point of folks problem with campaign finance. I mean you are well informed, surely you know the primaries weren't intended to be elections in the first place, and were never formalized to a degree that would be considered a legal election at the national level? Not to mention that the legal documents I mentioned earlier mentions it's the legal opinion of the DNC that the whole thing is just political hot air and they can't be legally held to it? Where I am particularly interested in your opinion though, is why do you think even Harry Reid says Bernie didn't get a fair deal?
Why would anyone give a shit about what Reid thinks? I'm of the opinion that the Democrats can run each state however they want.
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On January 04 2017 12:52 kwizach wrote:Show nested quote +On January 04 2017 12:22 GreenHorizons wrote:On January 04 2017 10:55 kwizach wrote:On January 03 2017 18:00 GreenHorizons wrote:On January 03 2017 15:24 ChristianS wrote:On January 03 2017 13:44 GreenHorizons wrote:On January 03 2017 12:07 ChristianS wrote:On January 03 2017 11:10 GreenHorizons wrote:On January 03 2017 11:03 ChristianS wrote:
@GH: so the primary wasn't an election now? Seemed like there was an awful lot of voting taking place.
@LL: I said trite, not trivial. Cybersecurity is important, but "get better cybersecurity" is not very helpful advice. And your suggested relationship between candidate popularity and leak vulnerability is purely asserted. We could just as easily imagine that popular candidates have more to lose. I suspect it varies more on a case-by-case basis than predictably versus popularity. No, it never has been. Are you not familiar with the history of the primary process? I suspect we're using different definitions of "election" too. It's a broad, systematic process for allowing a population to vote in order to fill a position of power. That it's not a government running it, or that it has other factors in determining it besides raw popular vote does not make it not an election. The ACS held elections recently for a new president; as a member, I was entitled to vote for an ACS president. That's still an "election." I feel like we're going in circles a bit. The emphasis on it not being an "election" in the sense that the general election is an election, is because we have laws that apply to elections (in part to ensure they are free and fair), that were violated by the DNC, but since the DNC is not really holding an "election", it's not illegal. Are we on the same page so far? Maybe? You're probably more knowledgeable on the specifics of the DNC leaks, what behavior of theirs would be illegal if it were done in a general election? Well setting up a fundraising apparatus that favored one candidate over another would be one obvious to me ( the state party money funneling. To be clear, it would be like if Trump could use all the states Republicans control and Hillary only the ones Democrats control). That is a completely false description of what happened, and you know it to be false because we already discussed it here. The Hillary Victory Fund was a joint fund-raising committee which raised money for HRC's campaign, for the DNC and for Democratic committees in various states (which largely transferred the money to the DNC so that it could allocate it strategically for the elections). Its purpose was to raise money simultaneously for those various entities. Obama had the Obama Victory Fund which served the same purpose, and Sanders had one as well, except he never actually decided to engage in fundraising for the Democratic party, preferring to focus only on his own campaign (and to ask his supporters to give money to a handful of candidates down-ballot that he endorsed). None of the money that went to the DNC and to state committees was used to campaign for HRC in the primary (it was all to be used for general election efforts, which means Sanders would have benefited from the fundraising if he had become the nominee), which makes your general election parallel completely bogus. It's absolutely nothing like "if Trump could use all the states Republicans control and Hillary only the ones Democrats control". That has literally nothing to do with what we're talking about. Also, federal rules still apply to campaign contributions made during the primary (notice how they call primaries "elections", by the way?), which makes your initial claim is even more spurious. And we already know which candidate received month after month from the FEC the longest lists of violations with regards to campaign contributions, and that's Sanders. We also already know which candidate avoided compliance with federal law with regards to the disclosure of the details of his personal finances as a candidate in the primary, and that's Sanders again. On January 03 2017 18:00 GreenHorizons wrote:
Also, if we make the parallel between delegates and electors, super delegates would basically be like the controlling side of congress getting ~20% of the electoral college vote. The superdelegates didn't win HRC the nomination -- voters did. Again, there's only one candidate who said superdelegates should overturn the will of the voters if the other candidate received more votes and pledged delegates than him, and that's Sanders. There was also one poster in this thread who supported doing so, and that's you. On January 03 2017 18:00 GreenHorizons wrote:
But if we're sticking specifically to what came out of the DNC leaks that would be illegal, one would be breaking the debate contract stipulating that none of the questions be given to candidates beforehand. I'm not sure Brazile would have been bound by any contract -- she wasn't a moderator. And although what she did was wrong, she apparently linked a total of two primary debate questions to the HRC campaign (one of which was about the fact they'd be asked about the water in Flint for the debate in... Flint), and the e-mails showed it was Brazile who took the initiative by herself without anyone asking for it -- it wasn't a DNC operation at all. Here is also what the Sanders campaign had to say about the issue: https://twitter.com/taddevine/status/786195317775532033For all you know, she reached out to them with questions as well. We can't tell, because there's only one camp whose e-mails were leaked, so the best we can do is rely on Devine's assessment that Brazile was fair to them. On January 03 2017 18:00 GreenHorizons wrote:
There's more examples like the people rushing into the Nevada caucus with no records of their registration, and really a crap ton of violations around the country at the local level that the DNC ignored but I'm not really interested in rehashing. There were plenty of accusations made by Sanders supporters unfamiliar with the rules and with the process, that much is true. There were also sometimes human and computer errors, as well as some unacceptable issues with the number of voting booths in some counties, like in Arizona -- something that was completely out of the control of the DNC, handled by the state officials, and which actually harmed HRC more so than Sanders. Yet there was zero evidence of any unfair manipulation of the election process by the DNC. Zero. On January 03 2017 18:00 GreenHorizons wrote:
As for the "free" part, in New York, one had to know you wanted to vote in the Democratic primary in October of 2015 for their primary in April. And that you wouldn't be able to vote in the Democratic primary months later. You may remember the first debate wasn't until October... While I support election-day registration, the existence of such registration requirements obviously predates this primary by a long time. You're confusing "this particular rule was inconvenient for some of the supporters of my candidate who decided too late that they would like to vote in the Democratic primary" with "this was unfair/not free". What is interesting, though, is that you're for some weird reason not bringing up the most disenfranchising aspect of the primary: the existence of caucuses. Could it be because caucuses actually helped Sanders by a huge margin? Indeed, allow me to quote my previous post (written on the 26th of May) on the issue, to highlight why the format of the Democratic primary actually favored Sanders rather than Clinton: Sanders actually benefited substantially from the format of the primaries. The first two states were very unrepresentative of the Democratic (and US) electorate in terms of demographics, and favorable to Sanders in that regard, giving his campaign a boost. When it comes to open contests, if you take away caucuses, Clinton has won thirteen open primaries to Sanders' six. The only type of format which actually benefited Sanders by a sizeable margin was the open caucuses, which is actually the kind of format which disenfranchises voters the most. See for example the caucuses in Nebraska and Washington -- Sanders won the two caucuses 57,1% to 42,9% and 72,7% to 27,1%, respectively. Yet those two states also held primaries (which didn't award delegates, however), in which a lot more people participated, and Clinton won both contests: 53% to 47% in Nebraska, and 53% to 47% as well in Washington. About 230,000 people voted in the Washington caucuses, while more than 719,000 people voted in the states primary -- more than three times as much. The same is true of the attendance of the Nebraska contests. Sanders was therefore in reality incredibly favored by the existence of caucuses. See this map: https://twitter.com/Nate_Cohn/status/735316545434451968538 have actually just released an analysis of this exact matter: see here. I'll quote them: Sanders fans have claimed that because caucuses have lower turnout the current national caucus and primary vote underrates how well Sanders is doing. In fact, the opposite is true. When we switch all caucuses over to primaries, Sanders actually does worse. Clinton’s lead in the popular vote would grow from 2.9 to 3.3 million votes. Moreover, her edge in elected delegates would expand significantly. Instead of her current lead of 272 elected delegates, Clinton would be ahead by 424. Some states that were won by Sanders in caucuses, including Colorado and Minnesota, would be won by Clinton in primaries, according to our calculations.[...]
In fact, if all states held primaries open to independents — instead of closed primaries, or caucuses of any kind — Clinton might have a larger lead in elected delegates than she does now. The model indicates that Clinton would have a lead of 294 elected delegates, compared with the 272 she holds now. [...] Realistically, if you throw everything together, the math suggests that Sanders doesn’t have much to complain about. If the Democratic nomination were open to as many Democrats as possible — through closed primaries — Clinton would be dominating Sanders. And if the nomination were open to as many voters as possible — through open primaries — she’d still be winning. Another important point to take into account to examine who the system benefited is the ratio of votes received to the ratio of delegates received. Sanders has received around 43% of the vote so far, yet he has received about 46% of delegates. And if the Democrats were using the same rules as the Republicans in terms of delegate allocation, Clinton would have won the nomination a long time ago. Sanders is getting the best possible system to help him remain competitive. "What about superdelegates?", you ask? Well, despite Clinton having an overwhelming majority of superdelegates in her camp, superdelegates have never flipped a nomination against the candidate who had won the most pledged delegates, and there's nothing that indicates they would have done so if Sanders had been in Clinton's position with a majority of pledged delegates and a huge advantage in the popular vote -- in fact, many have said that they would follow the will of the voters even if they initially announced they were supporting another candidate. What matters is therefore who is getting a majority of pledged delegates, and that's Clinton by a sizeable margin, not Sanders. He's the one who's trying to get the superdelegates to overturn the will of the voters, not Clinton. Another argument coming from the Sanders camp is that he would win if the voting started now, since voters have gotten to know him better, but that's just as fallacious. First, if he needed more time, perhaps he could have joined the Democratic party and started campaigning earlier -- that's on him. The same is true of him not having her name recognition. Second, he has been lagging behind Clinton throughout the primaries, and the closest he came to her was an average of a five percentage point difference in polls. That difference is now of almost ten percentage points. I'll close by mentioning the debates -- the DNC did try to limit the number of unsanctioned debates in this election, just like the RNC did, because the main takeaway from the 2012 Republican primary was that too many debates could seriously hurt the eventual nominee. This would have made Sanders' task of introducing himself to the electorate slightly more difficult, if they hadn't ended up scheduling more debates anyway. Sanders had every opportunity to present himself to the electorate, and spent even more money than Hillary's campaign throughout the primaries -- with the advantage of not having a history (and a present!) of being attacked by the Republicans due to being their biggest threat in the general election. As I showed, he has still remained behind Clinton in polls throughout the primaries. In short, the actual process never substantially disadvantaged Sanders, and he's the one who actually benefited from it, most importantly through the caucuses which disenfranchised Clinton voters by huge margins. The announcement on the number of sanctioned debates was made on the 5th of May 2015, weeks before Sanders even announced his candidacy. The DNC did try to limit the number of debates in this election, just like the RNC did, because the main takeaway from the 2012 Republican primary was that too many debates could seriously hurt the eventual nominee. This would have been true regardless of who was running. On January 03 2017 18:00 GreenHorizons wrote:
Seriously, can you just acknowledge that the primary process wasn't fair and we could move on? I'll acknowledge that Sanders lost a fair primary election to Clinton, who defeated him soundly with 55,2% of the vote to Sanders' 43,1% of the vote, which translated to a gap of more than 3,7 million votes in Clinton's favor. In other words, it was a blowout -- Sanders certainly did much better than people expected when he first announced his candidacy, but it was still a blowout. Stop pretending that the primary was rigged, or that Sanders would have won if not for the DNC. The voters chose Clinton over him, period. I understand the confusion but that was a lot of wasted effort. Much of it is refuting a point I wasn't making in the conversation. The big one being that you were trying to refute that the DNC primary was fair to Bernie, the point I was making was that it's not a "free and fair election" regardless of the specifics of Bernie's race. There's some separate aspects that you seem to have missed in the analogy too. Like the DNC would be the equivalent of some combination of the FEC and Congress as they were the ones who set the rules at the national level, while the state parties would be the equivalent of individual state governments. Where exactly that places Donna is something else. It would also make the DNC charter/bylaws basically the constitution (as far as elections). I mean you are well informed, surely you know the primaries weren't intended to be elections in the first place, and were never formalized to a degree that would be considered a legal election at the national level? Not to mention that the legal documents I mentioned earlier mentions it's the legal opinion of the DNC that the whole thing is just political hot air and they can't be legally held to it? Where I am particularly interested in your opinion though, is why do you think even Harry Reid says Bernie didn't get a fair deal? No, that was not a wasted effort, since I refuted the points you raised to support your case. Feel free to defend them, such as your completely fallacious misrepresentation of what the Hillary Victory Fund was about. It was a fair and free process, and saying that every aspect of the primaries did not follow the federal laws governing the presidential election is an apples to oranges comparison, because the entire point is that the two processes are different -- one serves to determine one party's nominee, the other serves to determine the next president. The fact that the two processes vary in some aspects doesn't make the primary process unfair, and especially not unfair against Sanders (there are plenty of things I would change about the primaries, starting with the existence of caucuses, but that doesn't make them unfair against Sanders). The primary is still an election if we use the definition provided by the Collins dictionary, which is "the selection by vote of a person or persons from among candidates for a position, esp a political office". The position in question is being the nominee of the party for the presidential election. Stop arguing semantics, in particular to push the idea that the process was unfair to Sanders/rigged by the DNC. Can you acknowledge that Sanders lost the primary because Clinton got more pledged delegates than him due to primary voters preferring her over Sanders by a substantial margin? Harry Reid said Sanders didn't get a "fair deal" from Debbie Wasserman Schultz specifically, after the e-mails showed her criticizing him for his attacks on the DNC, because he was trying to turn the page of the primary and assuage the Sanders supporters by agreeing that Schultz should be criticized. He never brought up any actual rigging or unfair proceedings, only that "Bernie deserved somebody that was not critical to[ward] him" as head of the DNC.
Goodness. I know you believe it, but I'm not even sure Ticklish would cosign that.
Your refutation for DWS lying about the debates was that the schedule was set before Bernie was in it. How does that in any way refute that she was lying about why the schedule was the way it was?
You keep referring to Bernie's announce date like no one would have any clue he was running before that.
And just to touch back on the Harry Reid thing. It wasn't just DWS. There were 3 resignations before her.
"Oh but just 3 people at the DNC doesn't mean the DNC wasn't fair, what roles did they have?"
CEO Amy Dacey, communications director Luis Miranda and chief financial officer Brad Marshall.
So that means the CEO, Comms Director, CFO, and Chair all had to resign because, as Harry Reid puts it, "everyone knew he wasn't getting a fair deal". Then the top Chair is replaced with someone Hillary's camp knew had cheated for them, then stayed quiet while they knew she was on air/twitter lying about doing it. Still haven't condemned it and Donna's not sorry
But yeah, surely none of that bled into their decisions like the debates and whether to change the schedule, since it was clear that was totally doable. Like when for months people were saying that it's stupid to not have a debate well before the registration deadline in New York (which was absurdly far away from the vote in the first place), instead of lying about why the schedule was dumb, everyone could have been working on things like changing the debate schedule (which they did later anyway).
But now (long after we told you what it looked like) we find out the CEO, Comms Dir, CFO, and Chair all were soiled enough with what Reid says everyone knew when we were saying it, wasn't fair play, they resigned. But here you are still trying to tell us that that it was fair and try to minimize what happened.
Yeah, if that's where the Democrats are heading, you all are hosed. Because even if somehow you appealed to someone like me at the intellectual level with the whole "fall in line" garbage reasoning, you all will never get back the people you lost to Trump/apathy (unless Republicans give them away), and you're going to lose even more.
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I suppose the big thing here for me is that I might find the Democratic primary process imperfect, but I don't think those imperfections changed the outcome. There's a certain tendency of Bernie supporters to want to say "Hillary stole the primary" or "Bernie should have been the nominee" that is neither helpful nor grounded in evidence. I don't know exactly where it comes from - a lot of people might still be pretty heated about a divisive primary, I guess, and it's hard to let that go. It's also easy to look for a scapegoat when something terrible happens, and the election of Donald Trump is a terrible outcome for any real progressive.
In that light it feels to me like a lot of these sentiments - "Bernie would have won," "Fuck HRC for claiming to be 'electable,' " "Donald Trump is the fault of the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party" - seem more like coping mechanisms than anything else. The evidence isn't there, and the animosity seems both unwarranted and irrelevant to present circumstances. (Worth noting that I don't mean to strawman anyone in particular ITT - I've seen these sentiments from Bernie supporters among my friends and around the internet, I don't know if anyone here shares them.)
From where I'm standing, it seems like Hillary won the primary by convincing voters to vote for her. That was along many grounds, including executive experience and "electability" (and certainly conventional wisdom was that she stood a better chance in the general), but also just trying to present herself positively as a candidate. Bernie made a strong case, but ultimately voters chose her. Then in the general she did her best to beat Donald Trump, but ultimately narrowly lost.
Which brings us to the most important point: none of this matters now anyway. She lost. Maybe she'll get a job as a lobbyist or something, but for the forseeable future there are many more important people to discuss than Hillary Rodham Clinton, chief among them being Donald Trump. And somehow, in their animosity for former HRC supporters, Bernie supporters wind up not caring that much about Donald Trump's actions, or even defending him, if they're not too busy berating HRC supporters for having disagreed with them in the past. If nothing else, are they not committing the same crime they accuse HRC of - alienating a lot of potential voters by criticizing them so heavily instead of trying to find common ground?
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On January 04 2017 14:24 ChristianS wrote:
I suppose the big thing here for me is that I might find the Democratic primary process imperfect, but I don't think those imperfections changed the outcome. There's a certain tendency of Bernie supporters to want to say "Hillary stole the primary" or "Bernie should have been the nominee" that is neither helpful nor grounded in evidence. I don't know exactly where it comes from - a lot of people might still be pretty heated about a divisive primary, I guess, and it's hard to let that go. It's also easy to look for a scapegoat when something terrible happens, and the election of Donald Trump is a terrible outcome for any real progressive.
In that light it feels to me like a lot of these sentiments - "Bernie would have won," "Fuck HRC for claiming to be 'electable,' " "Donald Trump is the fault of the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party" - seem more like coping mechanisms than anything else. The evidence isn't there, and the animosity seems both unwarranted and irrelevant to present circumstances. (Worth noting that I don't mean to strawman anyone in particular ITT - I've seen these sentiments from Bernie supporters among my friends and around the internet, I don't know if anyone here shares them.)
From where I'm standing, it seems like Hillary won the primary by convincing voters to vote for her. That was along many grounds, including executive experience and "electability" (and certainly conventional wisdom was that she stood a better chance in the general), but also just trying to present herself positively as a candidate. Bernie made a strong case, but ultimately voters chose her. Then in the general she did her best to beat Donald Trump, but ultimately narrowly lost.
Which brings us to the most important point: none of this matters now anyway. She lost. Maybe she'll get a job as a lobbyist or something, but for the forseeable future there are many more important people to discuss than Hillary Rodham Clinton, chief among them being Donald Trump. And somehow, in their animosity for former HRC supporters, Bernie supporters wind up not caring that much about Donald Trump's actions, or even defending him, if they're not too busy berating HRC supporters for having disagreed with them in the past. If nothing else, are they not committing the same crime they accuse HRC of - alienating a lot of potential voters by criticizing them so heavily instead of trying to find common ground?
Brother, the DNC's CEO, CFO, Comms Dir. and Chair all had to resign, the new Chair was a known cheater for HRC, and they still want to tell us it was a fair primary. If they can't recognize when they screw up like that, then they don't represent what Bernie's supporters were after at a fundamental level and it's just a matter of what they think will win them elections.
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GH, you place a lot of evidenciary value on resignations as proof of guilt. Let's suppose for the moment you're right about this these DNC devils: they're soulless power seekers that just want to win elections. Why, then, would they require guilt to ask for resignations? Surely you don't think they Obama and Hillary and the rest demanded resignations because they had moral objections to those people's actions - they forced them out because they thought it would help win elections. Why wouldn't that logic apply even if nothing improper had been done? Voters were angry, they were taking a hit in the polls, they thought it would help if they kicked a few people out to appease voters. Whether they thought the voters were right to be angry is beside the point.
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On January 04 2017 14:15 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On January 04 2017 12:52 kwizach wrote:On January 04 2017 12:22 GreenHorizons wrote:On January 04 2017 10:55 kwizach wrote:On January 03 2017 18:00 GreenHorizons wrote:On January 03 2017 15:24 ChristianS wrote:On January 03 2017 13:44 GreenHorizons wrote:On January 03 2017 12:07 ChristianS wrote:On January 03 2017 11:10 GreenHorizons wrote:On January 03 2017 11:03 ChristianS wrote:
@GH: so the primary wasn't an election now? Seemed like there was an awful lot of voting taking place.
@LL: I said trite, not trivial. Cybersecurity is important, but "get better cybersecurity" is not very helpful advice. And your suggested relationship between candidate popularity and leak vulnerability is purely asserted. We could just as easily imagine that popular candidates have more to lose. I suspect it varies more on a case-by-case basis than predictably versus popularity. No, it never has been. Are you not familiar with the history of the primary process? I suspect we're using different definitions of "election" too. It's a broad, systematic process for allowing a population to vote in order to fill a position of power. That it's not a government running it, or that it has other factors in determining it besides raw popular vote does not make it not an election. The ACS held elections recently for a new president; as a member, I was entitled to vote for an ACS president. That's still an "election." I feel like we're going in circles a bit. The emphasis on it not being an "election" in the sense that the general election is an election, is because we have laws that apply to elections (in part to ensure they are free and fair), that were violated by the DNC, but since the DNC is not really holding an "election", it's not illegal. Are we on the same page so far? Maybe? You're probably more knowledgeable on the specifics of the DNC leaks, what behavior of theirs would be illegal if it were done in a general election? Well setting up a fundraising apparatus that favored one candidate over another would be one obvious to me ( the state party money funneling. To be clear, it would be like if Trump could use all the states Republicans control and Hillary only the ones Democrats control). That is a completely false description of what happened, and you know it to be false because we already discussed it here. The Hillary Victory Fund was a joint fund-raising committee which raised money for HRC's campaign, for the DNC and for Democratic committees in various states (which largely transferred the money to the DNC so that it could allocate it strategically for the elections). Its purpose was to raise money simultaneously for those various entities. Obama had the Obama Victory Fund which served the same purpose, and Sanders had one as well, except he never actually decided to engage in fundraising for the Democratic party, preferring to focus only on his own campaign (and to ask his supporters to give money to a handful of candidates down-ballot that he endorsed). None of the money that went to the DNC and to state committees was used to campaign for HRC in the primary (it was all to be used for general election efforts, which means Sanders would have benefited from the fundraising if he had become the nominee), which makes your general election parallel completely bogus. It's absolutely nothing like "if Trump could use all the states Republicans control and Hillary only the ones Democrats control". That has literally nothing to do with what we're talking about. Also, federal rules still apply to campaign contributions made during the primary (notice how they call primaries "elections", by the way?), which makes your initial claim is even more spurious. And we already know which candidate received month after month from the FEC the longest lists of violations with regards to campaign contributions, and that's Sanders. We also already know which candidate avoided compliance with federal law with regards to the disclosure of the details of his personal finances as a candidate in the primary, and that's Sanders again. On January 03 2017 18:00 GreenHorizons wrote:
Also, if we make the parallel between delegates and electors, super delegates would basically be like the controlling side of congress getting ~20% of the electoral college vote. The superdelegates didn't win HRC the nomination -- voters did. Again, there's only one candidate who said superdelegates should overturn the will of the voters if the other candidate received more votes and pledged delegates than him, and that's Sanders. There was also one poster in this thread who supported doing so, and that's you. On January 03 2017 18:00 GreenHorizons wrote:
But if we're sticking specifically to what came out of the DNC leaks that would be illegal, one would be breaking the debate contract stipulating that none of the questions be given to candidates beforehand. I'm not sure Brazile would have been bound by any contract -- she wasn't a moderator. And although what she did was wrong, she apparently linked a total of two primary debate questions to the HRC campaign (one of which was about the fact they'd be asked about the water in Flint for the debate in... Flint), and the e-mails showed it was Brazile who took the initiative by herself without anyone asking for it -- it wasn't a DNC operation at all. Here is also what the Sanders campaign had to say about the issue: https://twitter.com/taddevine/status/786195317775532033For all you know, she reached out to them with questions as well. We can't tell, because there's only one camp whose e-mails were leaked, so the best we can do is rely on Devine's assessment that Brazile was fair to them. On January 03 2017 18:00 GreenHorizons wrote:
There's more examples like the people rushing into the Nevada caucus with no records of their registration, and really a crap ton of violations around the country at the local level that the DNC ignored but I'm not really interested in rehashing. There were plenty of accusations made by Sanders supporters unfamiliar with the rules and with the process, that much is true. There were also sometimes human and computer errors, as well as some unacceptable issues with the number of voting booths in some counties, like in Arizona -- something that was completely out of the control of the DNC, handled by the state officials, and which actually harmed HRC more so than Sanders. Yet there was zero evidence of any unfair manipulation of the election process by the DNC. Zero. On January 03 2017 18:00 GreenHorizons wrote:
As for the "free" part, in New York, one had to know you wanted to vote in the Democratic primary in October of 2015 for their primary in April. And that you wouldn't be able to vote in the Democratic primary months later. You may remember the first debate wasn't until October... While I support election-day registration, the existence of such registration requirements obviously predates this primary by a long time. You're confusing "this particular rule was inconvenient for some of the supporters of my candidate who decided too late that they would like to vote in the Democratic primary" with "this was unfair/not free". What is interesting, though, is that you're for some weird reason not bringing up the most disenfranchising aspect of the primary: the existence of caucuses. Could it be because caucuses actually helped Sanders by a huge margin? Indeed, allow me to quote my previous post (written on the 26th of May) on the issue, to highlight why the format of the Democratic primary actually favored Sanders rather than Clinton: Sanders actually benefited substantially from the format of the primaries. The first two states were very unrepresentative of the Democratic (and US) electorate in terms of demographics, and favorable to Sanders in that regard, giving his campaign a boost. When it comes to open contests, if you take away caucuses, Clinton has won thirteen open primaries to Sanders' six. The only type of format which actually benefited Sanders by a sizeable margin was the open caucuses, which is actually the kind of format which disenfranchises voters the most. See for example the caucuses in Nebraska and Washington -- Sanders won the two caucuses 57,1% to 42,9% and 72,7% to 27,1%, respectively. Yet those two states also held primaries (which didn't award delegates, however), in which a lot more people participated, and Clinton won both contests: 53% to 47% in Nebraska, and 53% to 47% as well in Washington. About 230,000 people voted in the Washington caucuses, while more than 719,000 people voted in the states primary -- more than three times as much. The same is true of the attendance of the Nebraska contests. Sanders was therefore in reality incredibly favored by the existence of caucuses. See this map: https://twitter.com/Nate_Cohn/status/735316545434451968538 have actually just released an analysis of this exact matter: see here. I'll quote them: Sanders fans have claimed that because caucuses have lower turnout the current national caucus and primary vote underrates how well Sanders is doing. In fact, the opposite is true. When we switch all caucuses over to primaries, Sanders actually does worse. Clinton’s lead in the popular vote would grow from 2.9 to 3.3 million votes. Moreover, her edge in elected delegates would expand significantly. Instead of her current lead of 272 elected delegates, Clinton would be ahead by 424. Some states that were won by Sanders in caucuses, including Colorado and Minnesota, would be won by Clinton in primaries, according to our calculations.[...]
In fact, if all states held primaries open to independents — instead of closed primaries, or caucuses of any kind — Clinton might have a larger lead in elected delegates than she does now. The model indicates that Clinton would have a lead of 294 elected delegates, compared with the 272 she holds now. [...] Realistically, if you throw everything together, the math suggests that Sanders doesn’t have much to complain about. If the Democratic nomination were open to as many Democrats as possible — through closed primaries — Clinton would be dominating Sanders. And if the nomination were open to as many voters as possible — through open primaries — she’d still be winning. Another important point to take into account to examine who the system benefited is the ratio of votes received to the ratio of delegates received. Sanders has received around 43% of the vote so far, yet he has received about 46% of delegates. And if the Democrats were using the same rules as the Republicans in terms of delegate allocation, Clinton would have won the nomination a long time ago. Sanders is getting the best possible system to help him remain competitive. "What about superdelegates?", you ask? Well, despite Clinton having an overwhelming majority of superdelegates in her camp, superdelegates have never flipped a nomination against the candidate who had won the most pledged delegates, and there's nothing that indicates they would have done so if Sanders had been in Clinton's position with a majority of pledged delegates and a huge advantage in the popular vote -- in fact, many have said that they would follow the will of the voters even if they initially announced they were supporting another candidate. What matters is therefore who is getting a majority of pledged delegates, and that's Clinton by a sizeable margin, not Sanders. He's the one who's trying to get the superdelegates to overturn the will of the voters, not Clinton. Another argument coming from the Sanders camp is that he would win if the voting started now, since voters have gotten to know him better, but that's just as fallacious. First, if he needed more time, perhaps he could have joined the Democratic party and started campaigning earlier -- that's on him. The same is true of him not having her name recognition. Second, he has been lagging behind Clinton throughout the primaries, and the closest he came to her was an average of a five percentage point difference in polls. That difference is now of almost ten percentage points. I'll close by mentioning the debates -- the DNC did try to limit the number of unsanctioned debates in this election, just like the RNC did, because the main takeaway from the 2012 Republican primary was that too many debates could seriously hurt the eventual nominee. This would have made Sanders' task of introducing himself to the electorate slightly more difficult, if they hadn't ended up scheduling more debates anyway. Sanders had every opportunity to present himself to the electorate, and spent even more money than Hillary's campaign throughout the primaries -- with the advantage of not having a history (and a present!) of being attacked by the Republicans due to being their biggest threat in the general election. As I showed, he has still remained behind Clinton in polls throughout the primaries. In short, the actual process never substantially disadvantaged Sanders, and he's the one who actually benefited from it, most importantly through the caucuses which disenfranchised Clinton voters by huge margins. The announcement on the number of sanctioned debates was made on the 5th of May 2015, weeks before Sanders even announced his candidacy. The DNC did try to limit the number of debates in this election, just like the RNC did, because the main takeaway from the 2012 Republican primary was that too many debates could seriously hurt the eventual nominee. This would have been true regardless of who was running. On January 03 2017 18:00 GreenHorizons wrote:
Seriously, can you just acknowledge that the primary process wasn't fair and we could move on? I'll acknowledge that Sanders lost a fair primary election to Clinton, who defeated him soundly with 55,2% of the vote to Sanders' 43,1% of the vote, which translated to a gap of more than 3,7 million votes in Clinton's favor. In other words, it was a blowout -- Sanders certainly did much better than people expected when he first announced his candidacy, but it was still a blowout. Stop pretending that the primary was rigged, or that Sanders would have won if not for the DNC. The voters chose Clinton over him, period. I understand the confusion but that was a lot of wasted effort. Much of it is refuting a point I wasn't making in the conversation. The big one being that you were trying to refute that the DNC primary was fair to Bernie, the point I was making was that it's not a "free and fair election" regardless of the specifics of Bernie's race. There's some separate aspects that you seem to have missed in the analogy too. Like the DNC would be the equivalent of some combination of the FEC and Congress as they were the ones who set the rules at the national level, while the state parties would be the equivalent of individual state governments. Where exactly that places Donna is something else. It would also make the DNC charter/bylaws basically the constitution (as far as elections). I mean you are well informed, surely you know the primaries weren't intended to be elections in the first place, and were never formalized to a degree that would be considered a legal election at the national level? Not to mention that the legal documents I mentioned earlier mentions it's the legal opinion of the DNC that the whole thing is just political hot air and they can't be legally held to it? Where I am particularly interested in your opinion though, is why do you think even Harry Reid says Bernie didn't get a fair deal? No, that was not a wasted effort, since I refuted the points you raised to support your case. Feel free to defend them, such as your completely fallacious misrepresentation of what the Hillary Victory Fund was about. It was a fair and free process, and saying that every aspect of the primaries did not follow the federal laws governing the presidential election is an apples to oranges comparison, because the entire point is that the two processes are different -- one serves to determine one party's nominee, the other serves to determine the next president. The fact that the two processes vary in some aspects doesn't make the primary process unfair, and especially not unfair against Sanders (there are plenty of things I would change about the primaries, starting with the existence of caucuses, but that doesn't make them unfair against Sanders). The primary is still an election if we use the definition provided by the Collins dictionary, which is "the selection by vote of a person or persons from among candidates for a position, esp a political office". The position in question is being the nominee of the party for the presidential election. Stop arguing semantics, in particular to push the idea that the process was unfair to Sanders/rigged by the DNC. Can you acknowledge that Sanders lost the primary because Clinton got more pledged delegates than him due to primary voters preferring her over Sanders by a substantial margin? Harry Reid said Sanders didn't get a "fair deal" from Debbie Wasserman Schultz specifically, after the e-mails showed her criticizing him for his attacks on the DNC, because he was trying to turn the page of the primary and assuage the Sanders supporters by agreeing that Schultz should be criticized. He never brought up any actual rigging or unfair proceedings, only that "Bernie deserved somebody that was not critical to[ward] him" as head of the DNC. Goodness. I know you believe it, but I'm not even sure Ticklish would cosign that. Your refutation for DWS lying about the debates was that the schedule was set before Bernie was in it. How does that in any way refute that she was lying about why the schedule was the way it was? You keep referring to Bernie's announce date like no one would have any clue he was running before that.
I am addressing the idea that the debate schedule was set up the way it was to be unfair to Sanders, because that is what is being discussed. I don't know if anyone had any clue he would be running or not, but what is for certain is that even if some people knew he would be running by the time the debate schedule was being decided, nobody (and probably not even Sanders himself) expected him to be a serious contender. Like I said, the DNC did try to limit the number of debates in this election, just like the RNC did, because the main takeaway from the 2012 Republican primary was that too many debates could seriously hurt the eventual nominee. This would have been true regardless of who was running.
On January 04 2017 14:15 GreenHorizons wrote:And just to touch back on the Harry Reid thing. It wasn't just DWS. There were 3 resignations before her. "Oh but just 3 people at the DNC doesn't mean the DNC wasn't fair, what roles did they have?" CEO Amy Dacey, communications director Luis Miranda and chief financial officer Brad Marshall.
So that means the CEO, Comms Director, CFO, and Chair all had to resign because, as Harry Reid puts it, "everyone knew he wasn't getting a fair deal". Then the top Chair is replaced with someone Hillary's camp knew had cheated for them, then stayed quiet while they knew she was on air/twitter lying about doing it. Still haven't condemned it and Donna's not sorryBut yeah, surely none of that bled into their decisions like the debates and whether to change the schedule, since it was clear that was totally doable. Like when for months people were saying that it's stupid to not have a debate well before the registration deadline in New York (which was absurdly far away from the vote in the first place), instead of lying about why the schedule was dumb, everyone could have been working on things like changing the debate schedule (which they did later anyway). But now (long after we told you what it looked like) we find out the CEO, Comms Dir, CFO, and Chair all were soiled enough with what Reid says everyone knew when we were saying it, wasn't fair play, they resigned. But here you are still trying to tell us that that it was fair and try to minimize what happened.
You are deliberately conflating different issues, muddling the events, and avoiding any mention of actual examples of the primary process being unfair to Sanders other than your accusation about the debate schedule. That is because you can't actually come up with anything factual. So, let's address what you bring up here.
Amy Dacey, Luis Miranda and Brad Marshall all resigned because of this e-mail. In it, the sender writes that "he" (presumably Sanders) should be asked about his religion (or lack thereof), because this might influence some voters. This was not unacceptable, so when the e-mail was released, they resigned. However, there is zero indication that this private exchange ever led to anything -- I certainly don't remember anyone asking Sanders a question like that after the 5th of May. For all you know, one of the recipients replied "cut it out, that's inappropriate", and that was the end of it. If you have any evidence that this actually impacted the primary, please provide us with that evidence. Until then, that looks like a private exchange between two people which did not lead to anything.
To address your other point, nobody is denying that the DNC is made of individuals who had personal preferences among the candidates -- the same is obviously true of the RNC. It is clear that the overwhelming majority of DNC staffers and officials preferred Clinton over Sanders. That is because she had been a Democrat for decades (instead of opportunistically joining the party right before the primary to receive some of the spotlight like Sanders), she had helped and supported the Democratic party for ages, and she was seen as more competent, knowledgeable and accomplished than Sanders. What matters is not whether or not DNC officials had personal preferences between the two, however: what matters is whether or not these personal preferences were translated into concrete actions by those officials to rig the primary against Sanders and for Clinton. This was not the case.
Let's sum up the list of actual grievances you've brought up so far to defend the idea that the primary was unfairly rigged against Sanders:
- The debates were not numerous enough and did not reach enough people. I addressed this above.
- Donna Brazile sent the Clinton campaign two debate questions (one of which ended up not being asked) in advance: I addressed this here -- what Brazile did was wrong, but it had virtually no impact and the Sanders camp actually said she had been fair to them in response to the controversy.
- Some registration deadlines for individual states (you mentioned NY, which Sanders lost by sixteen points) were too early for your liking.
That's it. That's all you have. Those are the only examples of supposed unfairness in the process that you have put forward thus far. Any impartial observer should recognize that the idea that this is what led to Clinton winning 3,7 million more votes than Sanders (getting 55,2% of the vote to Sanders' 43,1% of the vote) is laughable. It is especially laughable if you compare it to the impact that the existence of caucuses (which heavily favored Sanders) had on the final results, for example. The primary was not unfairly rigged against Sanders. Clinton defeated him soundly and fairly. The end.
On January 04 2017 14:15 GreenHorizons wrote:
Yeah, if that's where the Democrats are heading, you all are hosed. Because even if somehow you appealed to someone like me at the intellectual level with the whole "fall in line" garbage reasoning, you all will never get back the people you lost to Trump (unless Republicans give them away), and you're going to lose even more.
I'm heading to where people making claims need to substantiate them with evidence to be taken seriously.
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I'm heading to where people making claims need to substantiate them with evidence to be taken seriously.
Good luck with that.
I get you guys think whatever was done was not important enough for Hillary to address publicly, and that you don't think it would have changed the outcome, and that you think people will just get shamed and browbeaten into buying into the idea that the primaries being rigged against candidates like Bernie Sanders by design (much of it long before he was running) is acceptable, and so on. But you're not going to win elections like that, unless Republicans manage to go even further out of their way to lose voters.
It's not even that the primary was as bad as many of us Bernie supporters who followed it closely think, it's the immediately putting DWS (the one I think we're all willing to admit was generally screwing up) back on her team immediately after her resignation. It's the not understanding that if Hillary is gone, and they really do want to win, even if they disagree, they should be conceding the point that it wasn't fair. If for no other reason than it would help them win the next election.
That's why I keep saying Hillary isn't going to go, she's going to be sticking around, and I'd be surprised if she doesn't run again.
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On January 04 2017 15:31 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +I'm heading to where people making claims need to substantiate them with evidence to be taken seriously. Good luck with that. I get you guys think whatever was done was not important enough for Hillary to address publicly, and that you don't think it would have changed the outcome, and that you think people will just get shamed and brow beaten into buying into the idea that the primaries being rigged against Bernie Sanders by design (much of it long before he was running) is acceptable, and so on. But you're not going to win elections like that, unless Republicans manage to go even further out of their way to lose voters. It's not even that the primary was as bad as many of us Bernie supporters who followed it closely think, it's the immediately putting DWS (the one I think we're all willing to admit was generally screwing up) back on her team immediately after her resignation.
No, see, it is about whether or not "the primary was as bad as many of [you] [...] think", because that is the argument that you decided to make again in the last few pages. And as usual, when you're pressed to discuss the specifics of your accusations, you deflect and change the subject. It has happened throughout the entire year, and a month from now we're going to be right back where we started, with you claiming again that the primary was unfair. So if you want to start again with that claim, please do so with actual evidence that goes beyond what I just summed up, otherwise we're getting nowhere.
The position Schultz got was "honorary chair" of the campaign. Schultz resigned not because of wrongdoing but to appease Sanders and his supporters. She received the same position Eva Longoria had in 2012 with the Obama campaign. It's a meaningless title. As explained here, it was a courtesy to not completely throw under the bus someone HRC knew and supported in her reelection campaign against her Republican challenger. And there is more to politics and human relations than "optics".
On January 04 2017 15:31 GreenHorizons wrote:
It's the not understanding that if Hillary is gone, and they really do want to win, even if they disagree, they should be conceding the point that it wasn't fair. If for no other reason than it would help them win the next election.
No, there really is no point in conceding something that isn't true, except to validate the fantasies of people who will be even more convinced that they were right all along when they weren't, and further entrench them in their paranoia. There's no real reason to think this would make a positive difference for future elections. The opposite could be argued (edit: see ChristianS' post below).
On January 04 2017 15:31 GreenHorizons wrote:
That's why I keep saying Hillary isn't going to go, she's going to be sticking around, and I'd be surprised if she doesn't run again.
HRC is probably not going to completely disappear out of public life, because she happens to be someone who likes to defend and work for the causes she believes in. That doesn't mean she's going to run again.
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I don't see the political advantage in Democrats roundly questioning the legitimacy of their election process right now, particularly without good evidence. If anything, that helps legitimize Donald Trump's presidency by making people think he was the only legitimate alternative. That's simply not true. In fact I'd guess delegitimizing the primary process without clear descriptions of what, specifically, made this primary illegitimate just makes it easier to question the legitimacy of future Democratic nominees.
The goal would presumably be to win back the type of voters that would have liked Bernie, but I think in this case we're suffering from something day-to-day political discussion usually suffers from: short-sightedness. Sure, it might win a few back in the short term, but the outcomes of elections in 2018 and 2020 will, in all likelihood, be determined primarily by the events of the Trump presidency. If the next two years go badly enough, Democrats shouldn't have to deny the legitimacy of the Clinton nomination to convince people they should vote in Democrats. Every indication I've seen suggests that the Trump administration will be either a massive trainwreck or some kind of authoritarian nightmare. Those will be the political realities that will determine what strategies for Democrats will be effective, not the aftermath and Monday-morning quarterbacking of the 2016 election.
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GH pretending evidence doesn't matter again? So typical.
User was warned for this post
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Norway28563 Posts
On January 04 2017 10:00 xDaunt wrote:Show nested quote +On January 04 2017 09:52 Danglars wrote:On January 04 2017 08:05 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:Some prominent conservatives have signed on to a letter warning President-elect Donald Trump that he needs to sell off his businesses to address his many conflicts of interest.
"Respectfully, you cannot serve the country as president and also own a world-wide business enterprise, without seriously damaging the presidency," says a letter sent Monday by a bipartisan group of politicians, ethics advocates and academics.
The letter was signed by several moderate Republicans, including former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, former Minnesota Gov. Arne Carlson and former Rep. Mickey Edwards of Oklahoma, who was chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee.
But the signers also include some further-right conservatives, including Peter Schweizer, president of the Government Accountability Institute, and political consultant John Pudner of Take Back Our Republic, which seeks to build GOP support for campaign finance reform.
Pudner was instrumental in the successful Tea Party-backed effort to unseat then-House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, a Virginia Republican. He also is a contributor to Breitbart News, which has been managed in recent years by Trump's senior counselor, Stephen Bannon.
A Trump supporter, Pudner said that cleaning up Washington had been a central part of the president-elect's campaign and that now he needs to follow through.
"He made such a theme of things like the revolving door and the ways in which decisions can be influenced, not for the public good," Pudner said. "If you have the presidency and people are going to question every week, 'Why is he making this decision? Is there some business angle on it?' I just think it undercuts so much of the reason that people did support him."
Other signatories included several good-government groups, such as People for the American Way, Public Citizen, Common Cause and the Revolving Door Project, as well as liberal Democrats such as Zephyr Teachout of Columbia Law School and Harvard Law School's Laurence H. Tribe.
Trump senior adviser Kellyanne Conway told CNN on Monday that a news conference is planned for Jan. 11 to address conflicts of interest. But she added that the date might shift, depending upon the advice of Trump's lawyers. Source Oh, "Some prominent conservatives" have done this, according to NPR. Let's see if there's any truth to it. Nope. It was signed by some very obscure conservatives, the closest to relevance was lending his name third-party to a recognizable conservative "instrumental in the successful Tea Party-backed effort to unseat then-House Majority Leader Eric Cantor." (ala who? oh his mother's uncle!) Dishonest on its face; par for NPR. The title was a little more credulous. Prominent Trump Backers. This is a recent Democrat-turned-Republican and the American people wouldn't certainly know who was prominent or not for this one campaign. But STILL there wasn't a name any Trump voter in this forum or elsewhere could write on a list of prominent Trump backers. So that one's out the window too. Two points for fake news, zero for professional journalism. If we theorized that an editor could've spot corrected some truth into the article and put "several Trump backers" and later named the "left-of-center and right-of-center nonprofits," they could've nailed it. Oh, and guess who was the one prominent signer on the letter? Yes, that would be the Center for American Progress. Even if you lived under a rock for twenty years and only surfaced six months ago, that would be one name you would have a chance to spot and recognize on that list. A prominent progressive advocacy organization with a record of influence and forty five billion+ at its helm. I wonder how much longer that it will take the liberal media to regret making the "fake news" label a thing. They are going to eat it every time that they push an article like the one above.
This is 'news with a slant/bias'. There's a mountainous difference between this and what people refer to as fake news. Fox has never been accused of being 'fake news', but they frequently put this kind of untruthful spin to both articles and news segments.
Like, you and danglars' disagreement with that article is that the conservatives referred to as prominent are actually not prominent. When liberals talk about 'fake news', it's the 'POPE FRANCIS BACKS DONALD TRUMP' from 'DAILYPRESSER' and stuff like that.
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On January 04 2017 17:20 Liquid`Drone wrote:Show nested quote +On January 04 2017 10:00 xDaunt wrote:On January 04 2017 09:52 Danglars wrote:On January 04 2017 08:05 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:Some prominent conservatives have signed on to a letter warning President-elect Donald Trump that he needs to sell off his businesses to address his many conflicts of interest.
"Respectfully, you cannot serve the country as president and also own a world-wide business enterprise, without seriously damaging the presidency," says a letter sent Monday by a bipartisan group of politicians, ethics advocates and academics.
The letter was signed by several moderate Republicans, including former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, former Minnesota Gov. Arne Carlson and former Rep. Mickey Edwards of Oklahoma, who was chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee.
But the signers also include some further-right conservatives, including Peter Schweizer, president of the Government Accountability Institute, and political consultant John Pudner of Take Back Our Republic, which seeks to build GOP support for campaign finance reform.
Pudner was instrumental in the successful Tea Party-backed effort to unseat then-House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, a Virginia Republican. He also is a contributor to Breitbart News, which has been managed in recent years by Trump's senior counselor, Stephen Bannon.
A Trump supporter, Pudner said that cleaning up Washington had been a central part of the president-elect's campaign and that now he needs to follow through.
"He made such a theme of things like the revolving door and the ways in which decisions can be influenced, not for the public good," Pudner said. "If you have the presidency and people are going to question every week, 'Why is he making this decision? Is there some business angle on it?' I just think it undercuts so much of the reason that people did support him."
Other signatories included several good-government groups, such as People for the American Way, Public Citizen, Common Cause and the Revolving Door Project, as well as liberal Democrats such as Zephyr Teachout of Columbia Law School and Harvard Law School's Laurence H. Tribe.
Trump senior adviser Kellyanne Conway told CNN on Monday that a news conference is planned for Jan. 11 to address conflicts of interest. But she added that the date might shift, depending upon the advice of Trump's lawyers. Source Oh, "Some prominent conservatives" have done this, according to NPR. Let's see if there's any truth to it. Nope. It was signed by some very obscure conservatives, the closest to relevance was lending his name third-party to a recognizable conservative "instrumental in the successful Tea Party-backed effort to unseat then-House Majority Leader Eric Cantor." (ala who? oh his mother's uncle!) Dishonest on its face; par for NPR. The title was a little more credulous. Prominent Trump Backers. This is a recent Democrat-turned-Republican and the American people wouldn't certainly know who was prominent or not for this one campaign. But STILL there wasn't a name any Trump voter in this forum or elsewhere could write on a list of prominent Trump backers. So that one's out the window too. Two points for fake news, zero for professional journalism. If we theorized that an editor could've spot corrected some truth into the article and put "several Trump backers" and later named the "left-of-center and right-of-center nonprofits," they could've nailed it. Oh, and guess who was the one prominent signer on the letter? Yes, that would be the Center for American Progress. Even if you lived under a rock for twenty years and only surfaced six months ago, that would be one name you would have a chance to spot and recognize on that list. A prominent progressive advocacy organization with a record of influence and forty five billion+ at its helm. I wonder how much longer that it will take the liberal media to regret making the "fake news" label a thing. They are going to eat it every time that they push an article like the one above. This is 'news with a slant/bias'. There's a mountainous difference between this and what people refer to as fake news. Fox has never been accused of being 'fake news', but they frequently put this kind of untruthful spin to both articles and news segments. Like, you and danglars' disagreement with that article is that the conservatives referred to as prominent are actually not prominent. When liberals talk about 'fake news', it's the 'POPE FRANCIS BACKS DONALD TRUMP' from 'DAILYPRESSER' and stuff like that.
Like I have said before, I view the "Pope Francis back Donald Trump" type of fake news to be less harmful than the "bullshit narrative" variety of fake news. The "bullshit narrative" fake news is insidious in that it is cloaked in the authority of legacy media, which gives it real weight and influence.
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Norway28563 Posts
But the 'real fake news' has gotten real influence. There's an alarmingly huge number of Trump supporters (and his supporters genuinely are 'worse' than others in this regard) who believe stuff that's just flat out bullshit. Trump's Alex Jones 'there are fish people' endorsement is leagues worse than NPR claiming obscure conservatives are prominent.
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On January 04 2017 17:32 Liquid`Drone wrote:
But the 'real fake news' has gotten real influence. There's an alarmingly huge number of Trump supporters (and his supporters genuinely are 'worse' than others in this regard) who believe stuff that's just flat out bullshit. Trump's Alex Jones 'there are fish people' endorsement is leagues worse than NPR claiming obscure conservatives are prominent.
There is a very nice article in 538 about fake news and how fact checking alone won't solve the problem.
"Despite the consequences, some readers don’t seem to care. In a recent poll from Pew Research Center, 88 percent of respondents said fake news is a source of at least some confusion. But 23 percent admitted to sharing fake news, and 14 percent said they shared a story they knew was fake. Against this backdrop, President-elect Donald Trump can unapologetically make outlandish claims that can be easily proved wrong."
Interestingly, 538 mentions that fake news purveyors have aleady started to use the term themselves. Alex Jones made a list of the fake news website with the NYT and the Post at the top of the list.
I think the big story in this election is that we have a whole party and half the country that totally stopped caring about the truth. Trump has been saying one completely false thing after the next and basically managed to bullshit his way to the white house. If americans don't consider that someone who makes stuff up all the time is not the ideal person to run the place, the country is heading for disaster. Fake news is just a symptom of that more general problem.
I am not surprised to see xDaunt and Danglar saying that an inaccuracy makes a liberal media "fake news". But guys, we talk pizzagate here.
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Sanya12364 Posts
I just don't see why one form of misinformation should be tolerated over another and the established media has been at the misinformation than any of the other outlets. They will be around pushing their misinformation to more people than any of the other outlets.
The establishment and the establishment media only started complaining about the "fake news" form of misinformation because it did not suit their purpose. The establishment has always used the media to narrow the range of acceptable political views, "filter out the rabble," and to create narratives that are fake and frame the debate in a way that favors the establishment.
The "fake news" outrage has been more about command and control and power rather than genuine desire for truth and rigorous journalism. The counter current of response is exactly how outlets like those of Alex Jones would bend the commentary right back on the establishment.
@Biff you're not showing an understanding of the fundamental nature of politics. Lies, misrepresentations, and myth-making have central roles in the political discourse of nation-states.
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The "fake news" outrage has been more about command and control and power rather than genuine desire for truth and rigorous journalism.
That's just it. It's all this "but we're better then them so..." It's only a matter of time until "well in order to compete with Republicans we can't disarm ourselves unilaterally. We have to have fake news too, just not quite as bad as Alex Jones"
+ Show Spoiler +Also none of these people were mad about the lie from Capehart during the primary.
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On January 04 2017 23:08 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +The "fake news" outrage has been more about command and control and power rather than genuine desire for truth and rigorous journalism. That's just it. It's all this "but I'm better then them so..." It's only a matter of time until "well in order to compete with Republicans we can't disarm ourselves unilaterally. We have to have fake news too"
David brock launching a brietbart of the left is unintentionally hilarious for a number of reasons, this being one of the key ones. The others are mostly to do with how poor the implementation has been and the fundamental misunderstandings leading to those problems. For instance, not having a comments section.
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EPT
