Morning Ed: United States {2016.10.17.M}
Like some other cities, Kansas City is awkwardly split between two states, but they’re trying to work together. Good! Both states need a strong Kansas City.
Houston needs to hire call banks out of Utah and Idaho, which have the most affordable and conscientious phone agents in the country. It might prevent things like this.
The prisoners are going on strike.
When talking about whether the media fumbled this election, it’s important to make distinctions between print media and television media. The former ran the spectrum, the latter really lost their way.
A $15 minimum wage really does seem like a bad idea to me. If you don’t trust me, trust Democratic advisors.
Broadband providers are hoping to turn poor areas into loss leaders for future profits.
These suckers need to be sent back to Australia. I mean, I don’t know that they’re from Australia or anything, but I assume.
Peter Ubel explains why he believes the government’s efforts to fix primary care came up short.
– I have mixed feelings on the minimum wage story. On the one hand, it is a little bit irresponsible for the policy wonks on the left to keep pushing the idea that raising the minimum wage is a no/low-cost way to increase the spending power of the working poor. On the other hand, at least they try to slow down the momentum before the thing gets out of hand and does real damage, unlike their compatriots on the right and the mantra of tax cuts as a no/low-cost way to boost economic growth.
– On the prison strike story, I really wish they would use less language like this:
It is fine to be supportive of the prisoners, but that I don’t really know what the word uprising means in this context. The very nature of prison is such that you are not allowed to uprise; that’s what makes it prison. If you are telling me that prisoners are trying to exercise their rights to protest and assemble and freely express themselves in certain ways and that prison officials and staff are stopping them, that’s not much of a story. It would help to know more about exactly what they are doing and what the reaction is (and yes, I understand the logistical difficulties in doing that).
In general, it is a bit ironic that they want to make the lack of major media coverage as much the story as the strike itself, which gets in the way of just telling me what the heck is going on with the strike. If you are asking why more outlets aren’t covering the strike, one obvious answer is that most people, don’t care a whole lot about what goes on in prisons. Another answer is that most media outlets are only interested in a story to the degree that it fits in with the overall narrative that it’s trying to sell, which is a function of the audience it is trying to reach. There is a reason that the NYTimes does wedding announcements on the people that it does.
And there is also a reason that The Nation is covering this story and covering it more as a meta-story than as a story.Report
Without getting in the heads of these wonks, I’ve had a related dilemma when arguing with people to my left, particularly during the primary this cycle. Suppose one thinks that a $12 minimum wage is good on net (small enough effect on employment to be worth it for the increased wages for those employed), but that a $15 minimum wage would be too much. Is advocating for $15 on the assumption that this is an opening bid that will get bargained down to $10 or $12 morally and practically commendable, or should one only advocate the thing that you think will actually be the best final outcome?Report
Depends on who you’re negotiating with, and how.
You’ve got one thing about “hey, here’s what we tell the voters” and a second thing about “here’s what we tell our fellow politicians” (and that is dependent on how much of an idiot your counterparty is).Report
I used to think it was mostly a bargaining posture. Then it started becoming serious proposals and law in entire states and ill-advised cities like St Louis. Now, I think we have to take it as a pretty serious proposal.Report
IIRC, the current Democratic plan (nationally at least, via HRC’s platform) is 12 dollars an hour, but very specifically setting it as a floor as various localities might want to pay more.
15 is more of a goal for large cities (New York, San Francisco, etc) as a local, higher minimum wage due to much higher cost of living.
10 to 12 is what, ballpark if minimum wage had kept up with inflation?Report
The historic high point is $10.50. So it would be at or above that high point. Not by as much as $15,but the “just keeping up with inflation” argument doesn’t really hold.Report
$15 would also be, by far, the highest national minimum wage in the world in PPP terms.Report
A good part of the Left does not see economics as science but as a philosophy with statistics. I believe that the economy can survive human tinkering more than some others believe but that economics laws can’t be completely disregarded either.Report
It’s kind of the same way a lot of people on the right see climate science.Report
It is but I think that climate science has some more disturbing consequences for that right than acknowledging economic laws does for the left.Report
True in the abstract, but I think it depends on how far you turn the policy knobs. Fiddling with a minimum wage that’s near the reservation wage is one thing, but totally rejecting economic realities the way some are rejecting climate science has been tried in a lot of places and the results are pretty catastrophic.Report
Like Venezuela in the present or the countries that attempted Communism in the past. That isn’t quite what I meant though. Acknowledging economic laws might hinder some Leftist policy preferences but it generally doesn’t result in the compete challenge of everything leftists believe in.
Climate science does present this for the Right. For the religious right, it can be just as challenging to their beliefs about God as evolution. It might suggest to many of them that God isn’t going to save us or might not even exist. For the anti-statists free market right, its an area where state action, and international state action, at that is necessary to at least prevent the problem from becoming worse. Most of them are very into national sovereignty.Report
The anti-evolution thing always puzzled me – seems a bit insulting to God, really, to suggest that your allegedly omnipotent creator couldn’t do a perfect break in pool – one shot, and just stand back and watch all the balls land in their pockets. No, the creationist says, God the allegedly infinitely-good-at-stuff is not that great at pool, and has to keep intervening, shot after shot after shot, to get all the balls sunk.Report
Where done by ballot initiative — Arizona, Colorado, Maine, and Washington this year — it’s an up/down yes/no vote without room for debate. Colorado’s seems likely to pass. The initiative here would probably have been defused if the legislature had considered the subject honestly over the last couple of years. But any increase was DOA in the Republican-controlled Senate (single-seat majority, but leadership has the usual disproportionate indirect power). Arizona, where the minimum wage hike is polling even better, is probably a similar story.Report
Raise the minimum wage.
Import more unskilled labor.
What could go wrong?Report
One of the things that bugs me about this whole debate is often that one can be in an area, such as the SF bay, that $15 is below the de facto minimum, but go an hour east, to stockton say, and it is an entirely different situation. There, $15 could be a real factor in businesses closing due to costs of operating. But the state has moved forward on $15, granted over 5 years. Trying to get depressed areas up to bay area wages in such a scant time frame is… Well, optimistic is probably the nicest way to describe.Report
Yeah. I’ve little objection of raising it at the local level, but unless we’re talking a really geographically and homogenous state, you should be pretty conservative about it.
Or you can do what Oregon did and just have different “zones.”Report
I use those two areas as that is the swing of my family in CA. One is super prosperous, while the other, a scant hour to the east, is dying. Now, it is dying because of its port is no longer as active as it was in the ’50’s, but that is no reason to keep hammering them.Report
The zone solution seems best because it allows for different local conditions to be taken into consideration but prevents minimum wage from being a city by city or county by county determination, which would favor the employers ability to advocate for the lowest minimum wage possible.Report
“..which would favor the employers ability to advocate for the lowest minimum wage possible.”
How so?
Imagine two companies… A and B. They both make widgets. Company A is in City X and Company B is in City Y.
If Company A lobbies City X for a lower minimum wage, they reduce their costs and can sell their widgets for a lower price OR at greater profit. I assume this is what you’re talking about.
But if Company B fails to lobby City Y for a lower wage, their wages will be higher. Over time, Company B will get better employees who are seeking higher wages. Company B’s widgets will be better.
So, maybe Company A comes out on top because of lobbying… but maybe not?Report
But if Company B fails to lobby City Y for a lower wage, their wages will be higher. Over time, Company B will get better employees who are seeking higher wages. Company B’s widgets will be better.
Landlords will have people competing with each other over apartments with better views or ones that are closer to the factory. The higher wages will go into the pockets of the landlords. Effective take-home pay after rent is paid will be equal to that of those employed by Company A.Report
So you can have an equal take home pay and live in an apartment near the factory with a great view or you can live three trains away.Report
Are you suggesting money can be used to buy improvements in material quality of life, at one’s own discretion? What are you, a communist?Report
Zones strike me as the best way to deal with this. I won’t vote for high statewide minimums.Report
This is where I default to city/county rule, ’cause there is your zone, right there. In other words, the smallest gov’t possible to make these rules is probably the best. I know that there have been problems with that in, I think the San Jose area with one city having much greater* min-wage, but that is when you revert to county, or simply deal with the edge cases. It is not like multiple counties in large metro areas don’t work together ever (see BART.)
*read relatively.Report
I’m prefer county level, for the most part. You’re dealing with a fixed number of reliable jurisdictions that almost never look like gerrymandered congressional districts.Report
I would prefer the MSA level. County and city level can get weird when dealing with citiesReport
I could get on board with multi-county municipalities going with the higher number for the sake of uniformity, if it causes bureaucratic problems. I don’t have a problem with suburbs having a slightly lower minimum wage than cities, though I would actually expect them to be pretty close.Report
If I were designing it from scratch, without political considerations, I’d like it to be more of a gradient, with hotspots having the highest and based on some measure of distance (either commute time or as the crow flies) gently reduce it until you get to areas that his the state minimum.
E.g. Minimum wage highest in Manhattan south of 79, slightly lower in the Bronx and Southern Westchester, getting lower as you go north through Westchester, continuing lower as you move through Putnam county and hitting state minimum as you head upstate.Report
If we’re working from scratch without political considerations, I’d think UBI with a low minimum wage (or no minimum wage) would make a lot more sense.Report
ThisReport
Nice gradients, so the differential isn’t steep between one side of a street and the other.
It would suck if two zones with a large difference had a road as a boundary. Everyone on the North side pays $10/hr, everyone on the South pays $15/hr.Report
Employers immediately to the North of the street are probably not going to be paying their low wage workers $10/hr, though.Report
True. My point is more about making sure the gradients are based upon the data/facts on the ground, rather than political considerations.
This hearkens back to my discussion with J_A a few posts back, about the dangers of logical technocratic policy solutions getting drafted into the culture war.Report
MSA’s cross state lines.Report
No reason why you couldn’t have a bi/multistate agreement akin to the Port Authority.Report
Depends on the county size. You lived in the west, you know how big counties can get.Report
Now that our tenants are making $15/hour at their 3 part-time jobs, we can raise rent from “an arm and a leg” to “an arm and a leg and an eye”!Report
Also, now that we’ve successfully lobbied for “granny units”, we can put a port-a-potty in the backyard and rent out the shed as a “detached bedroom” for $850 a month!Report
This is the thing that I find objectionable, because it tries to frame the minimum wage as some form of collective bargaining. As if it were we the people clawing back money from the too wealthy to transfer to the deserving/working poor. If we can’t get $15 out of ’em, we’ll settle for $12.
The reality of the minimum wage is that it’s less a transfer from the wealthy to the working poor, thank it is a transfer from one grouobofbthe working poor to the other. Firms that employ minimum wage labor tend to run on very slim margins to begin with. Hit them with higher labor costs and they are going to respond with some combination of charging higher prices or enokiyibg less labor. If you want to argue that those tradeoffs are with it, fine. Just have the honest conversation about it.
Also, if we really believe that the working poor ought to be getting some form of transfer, then we ought to just do it out if public funds. in the form if increasing the EITC or enacting some other form if negative income tax.Report
What would be an example of a transfer from the wealthy to the poor, one that isn’t paid by consumers?Report
Busing of students from that other zip code into the school in the rich zip code.Report
Pretty much any scheme that taxes high income earners and gives some sort of cash benefit to poor people. Estate tax, progressive income tax. Pick your poison. Trying to get the same result by fiddling with business operations just seems unnecessarily messy.
“Change how you do business so some of that money goes to poor people,” isn’t nearly as simple as, “Use your business to make money in a sensible way and then give some of it to poor people.”Report
Aren’t the arguments against taxing high earners just a restatement of this, that they react by shifting their assets around or passing it along in the form of higher prices?Report
No, not really. We could tax high earners more if we wanted to. Our policy makers just choose not to because there’s a lot of political push back against it. It’s not impossible to “find” that money that they’re shifting around or change the rules to get at it. And it’s certainly not difficult to simply bump up the top marginal rates. It’s just that the median policy preference of our leadership is not to do it.
I liken that argument to the argument that points out that our revenues as a percentage of GDP are pretty flat across a lot of years of policy fiddling. They seem to think it’s evidence of a 19% of GDP universal upper limit built into the fabric of the universe when in reality, it’s just what works politically in the US. Other countries have much different numbers.
Doing the redistribution by way of fiddling with internal business operations changes the political problem, but it introduces a new problem that isn’t political. It’s a fundamental problem of how businesses work and basic econ. Even if we had the political will to do it, there’s no way to make a super high minimum wage work out to be a big net positive to the poor. The best you’ll ever hope for is a small net positive or, more likely, a wash, even if we were all in total agreement on which direction to turn the minimum wage knob and how far to turn it.
The minimum wage question seems to me to be a lot like the rent control question. “We” as a society want somebody to have more money or cheap rent, but instead of everybody ponying up some tax money to make it happen, we decide to change the rules of an otherwise functioning market in hopes that a few nasty landlords or business owners will cover it. But the market reality doesn’t work out that way. In reality, we rob Peter to pay Paul, but both Peter and Paul are in the group we were hoping to help.Report
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I wonder about this question more generally in negotiations. “I want $25 so I have to ask for $40.” “I’m okay with $25 so I have to offer $10.”
You end up getting screwed by being upfront and honest. Which feels wrong. Maybe?Report
Re: Prison strike.
Yes. I’ve been following this since it started a few weeks ago and most of the sources are lefty ideological publications. On the few occasions where this has made local newspapers, the comments are uniform in a way even most local newspaper article comments aren’t. The basic idea is that anything over and above the Take the Money and Run’s “one hot meal a day: a bowl of steam.”
The Overton Window is just so far, far away from where the protesters are.
One continuing problem is that everyone has a class of prisoners they think have turned in their human being card for what they’ve done. Child molesters, rapists, cop killers, whomever. Talk is cheap when you want to release nonviolent drug offenders and lower phone rates for mothers in prison. But the second some reform applies to your chosen outgroup(s), it dies a rapid death.
Also, the strike is being framed by its proponents as connected to the 13th Amendment, since prison labor is specifically excluded from its prohibition on slavery and involuntary servitude. I think most non-black people (not using POC here is a conscious choice) tune out as soon as slavery gets mentioned. They view it as a trump card that renders all reasonable opposition as unacceptable. Reasonable or not, it reads like a more of a debate trick than anything.Report
It kind of is connected, isn’t it?
I don’t think the intent of the 13th was to allow the creation of a whole set of unpaid unwilling involuntary workers, which prison labor is creeping towards becoming.
And yes, there is a tremendous problem with the public responding with callous indifference to things that don’t affect us personally.Report
I don’t think it’s that abstract. There are few media outlets covering the prison strike, because for the most parts media outlets exist less and less to impart factual information and more and more to mirror back the version of themselves that their audiences want to see. The whole Five Ws thing seems hopelessly naive these days.
Even this article is pitched in such a way to be screaming There is a really important thing going on and we (read: you) are the only people paying attention to it.
When I first heard about the prison strike, the first thing In wondered was what exactly that meant. Was it meant to be some form of general strike among prisoners? Was it specifically a strike against unpaid/low wage prison work? Are those involved calkibg for an end to prison labor, better trades, higher pay? Ice read a few articles and in still not really sure about any of those things.
I don’t mean to criticize The Nation piece too harshly. It is coverage. And it does demonstrate exactly how difficult it is to pass on knowledge of the prison system to those of us not involved with the prison system. I just wish it would pare down the uprising/class consciousness angle and give more information in what exactly is happening.Report
911 Operator: “All calls under 20 seconds trigger a supervisory review, and Williams had thousands.” Thousands? Sounds like this has been going on for a good long time. Jeebus. But, of course, the cops have no legal responsibility to help your desperate ass do they?
CNN: I disagree. I think it was a good idea to run those rallys. It got a lot of people exposed to Trump, for good or ill. Where they may have failed, is in doing actual reporting on the guy. But now, it just smacks of ass covering.
Prisons: Funny, I’d heard this. I assume anyone listing to NPR has as well, so who’s really not heard of it?
15 dollar Minimum wage: “But over the course of a drawn-out race with rival Bernie Sanders, who supported a $15 federal minimum, Clinton shifted her position, eventually saying in April that she would sign a $15 minimum wage bill if given the opportunity. ” Because it’s the votes that count, not whether it would work, be good for the economy, or anything else. Votes baby, votes.Report
It either smacks of ass covering or being on team Hillary, or both.Report
So more reporting on Trump would have hurt HRC?Report
He was saying that they showed too much footage of the many well attended Trump rallies on CNN.Report
911 Operator: Government worker, doncha know. Gotta really make sure they need to be fired.Report
Prisons: Funny, I’d heard this. I assume anyone listing to NPR has as well, so who’s really not heard of it?
The 94% or so of Americans who don’t listen to NPR?Report
Well, to be fair, the zero percent of OT readers who don’t listen to NPR.Report
I don’t listen to NPR with only slightly less ferocity than I don’t listen to other radio stations.Report
I ferociously don’t listed to NPR during please weeks.Report
Unless it came up on Car Talk or when Teri Gross was interviewing a comedian …Report
To be fair, Car Talk is the time I am most likely to be listening (I like problem solving) And for Terri Gross, that is the only time she doesn’t come across as simpering.Report
I don’t listen to npr. no car.Report
Wasn’t that a radio thing that SNL parodied back in the Ana Gasteyer/Molly Shannon era? Back when there was radio? And Ana Gasteyer? And Molly Shannon?Report
I don’t listen to NPR either.Report
I listen to NPR but always keep in mind their biases.Report
Oh, a figurative bridge made of crony capitalism. I thought it was a real bridge to replace the many which are falling apart that cross Midwestern rivers.Report
You should see the liberty bridge here. We set the main support on fire.Report
Firebombing of Orange County GOP HQ in NC
http://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/crime/article108631592.html
Yet, we keep hearing from liberals about their fear of political terrorism from folks on the right. How ironic.Report
And yet Hillary Clinton harshly condemned the attack before Donald Trump even did. What was Trump’s response to this?
And a group of NC Dems set up a fundraiser to help the NC GOP and hit their fundraising goal in less than an hour. Do you think Trump would hold a fundraiser if a Hillary campaign office was firebombed?Report
Is that going to stop liberals from whining about being victims of those bad right wing people?Report
There are two ways to look at this.
1) Through the lens of partisanship
2) Through the lens of the whole trust/collaboration thing
I suppose it’s good that Clinton condemned it. Harshly, even.Report
To me the condemnation says less than the fact that the NC Democratic Party held a fundraiser for them to help get the NC GOP back on their feet that hit their goal in 40 minutes.Report
That was real sweet of them. In a southern sort of way. (somehow I don’t see this happening in Pennsylvania or NY).Report
Meanwhile, the twitter is fighting over whether the money ought to have gone someplace deserving instead of to a fascist, racist, sexual predator.Report
Of course, you can find every crazy view on twitter. If you replace “twitter” with “10 people at a bar” it gives you a better idea of the magnitude and quality of those thoughts.Report
Its not an outlier position. Liberals I follow out of respect (Jesse Singal) and friendship (Ryan Noonan) are taking the position, and others are saying they’re sitting it out not to get in the middle.Report
Or, better yet, describe it as some bots spurting out a decent line to catch enough viewers to get the account sold to the highest bidder.Report
This isn’t a trick question: have Republicans, in the form of national, state or even county organizations, raised money for any of the victims of unambiguously Trump-inspired political violence?
I haven’t seen it, but given the shape of my epistemic bubble, I might not see it.Report
Not that I’m aware of. Complaints (which I do think are reasonable) aside, it’s pretty great optics.Report
I’d be surprised if they have.Report
I think the donation is the right move, but I also get why people I respect (like Jesse Singal, mentioned by @will-truman) are pissed off.
It just seems like calling out liberals for not being unanimously supporting this is ensuring that no good deed goes unpunished, and inventing a new, ad hoc, standard of behavior that only applies to the left.Report
I’m not setting a standard of behavior as much as noticing that calling for scorched earth treatment is showing up in respectable circles now.
If you’re down with the whole “trust/collaboration” thing, you’ll see this as a lot more interesting than sotto voice expressions of disappointment.Report
Or that in response to increased levels of (literal!) scorched earth treatment, people are inventing new ways of signaling their commitment to not using their tactics, and it’s controversial for obvious reasons. One of those obvious reasons is that a lot of people who have very good reasons to want to defeat the NC GOP note that the form of signaling in question (monetary donations) actually hurts their efforts to vindicate their rights and interests in the policy arena.
And the folks objecting are correct, which should actually make it a more effective signal.Report
It should be a more effective signal… let’s see if it ends up actually being what it should be.
And what it means if it fails to be what it should have been.Report
LOL. Writing from a special place in hell ain’t enough of a scored earth for ya?Report
That’s kind of horrifying. It sounds almost exactly like asking whether we should be giving accused child molesters public defense funds. It doesn’t matter what you think about the people receiving that support. There’s a much, much higher principle involved here. It’s not about them. Terrorist attacks on peaceful political operations during an election is the worst sort of attack against our democracy, and we should do anything we can do to right that wrong.Report
Of course she condemned it, she is a politician.Report
This is the trap Hillary is in. No matter what she does about anything, there can never be any reading of her that allows her to be a genuine human with feelings. Everything is a calculated plot, or a smoke screen. But im pretty sure that she does not think firebombing is a legitimate political tactic.Report
Yes, Hilalry is in a trap. She will be caught, paraded down the street in front of a crowd, and a judge will sentence her to labor for the next 4 to 8 years in an thankless task.
Why are so many HRC supporters determined to convince everyone that Clinton is some huge victim? She is and always has been the presumptive front-runner. Why not just act like it?Report
Not saying she not going to win, because she is. Shes a competent politician running against a seething white hot ball of rage.
But hey shes also human. Allow for the possibility that something she says is what she believes.Report
rmass,
Of course she has feelings. They’re currently wrapped up in “why won’t they love me back???” and have her screaming at walls for hours on end.
(And this? I get from someone who works for her.)Report
For the last time kimbo, your cats do not constitute sources, no matter what they tell youReport
Then, for the love of god, stop using them as sources.
It’s simon and garfunkel, not simon and garfield.
[CAT is always right. CAT always wins the argument. do not argue with CAT.]Report
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When my parents were kids and teenagers, Hollywood studios and other people would never seek to market rebellion in any form. The entire entertainment industry saw themselves as a big advocates of American small town domesticity and civil mindedness from about the 1930s to the late 1960s. MGM and Disney were especially big advocates of this.Report
They did notably make sure that the rebel was bereft of a cause.Report
Well, except Gone with the Wind.
But realz, also Casablanca, The 10 Commandments, and Spartacus, among others. Day the Earth Stood Still, too, but now we’re getting in ‘genre’ (ditto Planet of the Apes)
Heck, throw Wizard of Oz also in there as a counterpoint to small town domesticity and civil mindedness.Report
When did Rock and/or Roll become rebellious? Woodstock?Report
By US perceptions? 1956. Elvis with hair dyed black to fit a bad-boy image, shown only from the waist up on the Ed Sullivan show. Adoption of the duck’s ass hair style, or similar, which was already a symbol of discontented/rebellious young men, by a number of early rock and roll bands at about that time.Report
@jaybird
Network TV famously refused to show Elvis from the waist down because of his gyrations. Rock n’ Roll was rebellious when it became popular because it was one of the first forms of music to truly divide generations.
The question is when did it stop being rebellious.Report
Thats an interesting question. You could argue when baby boomers started having kids but the drive to put warning stickers on labels came from Silent Generation and Baby Boomers who thought that the lyrics of 1980s music was too racy for them. A quick wikipedia search shows that Al Gore and Tipper Gore are younger than our parents but apparently easier to rile up. At the same time, plenty of other silent generation and boomer parents thought the entire warning label thing was just as ridiculous as their kids and warning labels was more muted than the original response to rock n’roll, which was to want to ban it as the devil’s music.
Rock probably started to decrease in rebelliousness during the early 1970s as the Counter Culture gave way to Disco. There were some genres that would emerge that could lead to a spike in rebelliousness like punk or rap or some lyrics or incidents like the boomers becoming parents. By th 1990s, very few people except the most conservative, and usually outside the United States to, saw rock as rebellious.Report
Invasion of the Body Snatchers, even.Report
@kolohe
Casablanca seems different because it was produced during WWII and the French were our allies.
There were always exceptions but the general consensus is that Hollywood during the mid-50s to mid-60s was generally a low point and often could not compete with TV. The belief is that Hollywood began pushing the counter-culture and loosening up on content in order to show people stuff that they could not see on TV. The first movie to do this is generally seen as being Bonnie and Clyde. IIRC Arthur Penn had to fight tooth and nail to get Bonnie and Clyde produced.Report
I don’t think the timing on this is accurate. The inflection point of TV outcompeting Hollywood was when TV in color went mainstream, which wasn’t until the late 60s. The crisis for Hollywood in the 50s was from the death of the studio system.Report
Good news! Gary Johnson and Jill Stein have gotten important enough to be totally destroyed!Report
Seriously, though, it would literally be the end of civilization if real per capita government spending were to revert to the levels seen in the dark, dark days of the Clinton administration.Report
Poor McMuffin, but you really can’t compete with Joe Exotic.Report
McMuffin has an actual strategy for becoming President! Utahans (at least) who vote for him are doing something that plausibly advances their policy preferences.Report
You know, since Nathan Johnson isn’t real, Joe Exotic could just be the VP with (yet another?) name change.Report
The four candidates: Grouchy, Hillzo, Chickpea, and Aleppo.Report
So, like, the wikileaks stuff.
The fact that it’s being released partisanly (is that a word? I guess it is now) is doing a good job of reducing the impact of the stuff contained in the emails.
I kinda wish that we had a press that would see the stuff revealed as somewhat important, but I guess I understand why they’re doing what they’re doing instead.Report
Also the fact that there’s nothing terribly interesting in the emails, either.
The most interesting thing period was a supposed heads-up that the primary Town Hall debate would have a death penalty question, but upon further digging turned out to not be the case. There’s also some Clinton Foundation stuff, like finding out they did internal audits (and external audits) to keep CF separate from their political work, complete with the usual idiot manager who thinks it’s all a pointless PITA.
Not that this is any surprise. If there was anything really interesting, it would have been released ages ago. People are already voting, and apparently Assange has a hate boner for Clinton like you wouldn’t believe.
Apparently he’s sitting on some Trump stuff, but won’t release it because “there’s already plenty out there against Trump” or logic to that effect.
Seriously, the further you dig into these emails, the less there is. It’s just…regular campaign stuff. I mean shocking to 18 year old’s who had no idea how sausage was made (apparently pooed out by unicorns or something), but even by “Clinton” standards (where the banal becomes villainous), there’s nothing at the bottom.Report
I was thinking about the quid pro quo, myself.Report
Except even THEN there’s nothing there. (Both State and the FBI deny it) The classification level wasn’t changed, and the FBI’s own statement is basically “They asked for this, and then the FBI agent mentioned he’d been trying to get someone to deal with their request for space for FBI agents assigned overseas”.
So the “quid pro quo” argument is that State asked for a classification determination to be reviewed, and apparently the FBI said “The price is you finally respond on our request for more space overseas!” — which is not only an incredibly lame attempt at quid pro quo, even if you accept it at face value, there ended up being no quid there.
(Having worked a job in my life, I can assure you that the FBI’s version is pretty common. ‘While you’re on the phone, can you go harass Bob to get off his lazy butt and deal with this freaking issue that’s been sitting in his inbox for a month now? ‘. If that’s quid pro quo, my entire adult life has been neck deep in corruption…)
Interestingly enough, while all these leaks are labeled as “Clinton leaks”, they’re not. They’re DNC leaks, State leaks, and she’s not on any of them. Not receiving, not sending. It’s internal staffers, state department employees, and such basically sending work mail.Report
Oh, State and the FBI deny the nothingburger?
This changes everything.Report
The entire supposed quid pro quo was a ludicrous one to begin with, but more importantly, since the the reclassification request resulted in no change in status, completely moot.
Quid pro quo can’t exist when one actor doesn’t actually DO the thing he’s supposed to be trading favors for.
The entirety of this story is State was asking for an email classification to be reviewed by the FBI, and the FBI wanted a pre-existing request to be followed up on, and the entire “quid pro quo” part rests on the fact that because the two groups talked about them at the same time, it was clearly “quid pro quo” and not talking about more than one topic.
And of course, then comes the punch line: While we don’t know if the FBI got the space they’d been requesting for quite some time, we DO the email’s classification wasn’t changed.
So please tell me, Jaybird, how this is concerning? Two government agencies talking about issues with the other covering more than one topic at a time? A supposed “quid pro quo” arrangement that covered something as earth-shattering as “We’d like you to review the classification, we think it’s too high” in exchange for “We’d like you to actually give us an answer on this issue we’ve been asking about for months”?
Or was it the horrible, horrible end result — in which the FBI did nothing?
Seriously, man. Where’s the fire? Do you think two different departments in government don’t routinely have discussions that boil down to “We’d like you to do this” one way and “We’d like you to do that” the other? That’s…exactly how ever interdepartmental email or meeting goes for the history of mankind.
I wrote a freaking email like that this morning, where my colleague in another company (partnership thing) in San Antonio asked me to look into an issue and I reminded him we’re still waiting on him to deal with some technical documents.
If someone took that to HR and claimed I was participating in quid pro quo with an outside company, the HR rep would laugh it out of the room.
But I’m guessing you find it very concerning.
Even by Clinton rules this is stupid.Report
Also, the idea that the FBI and the State Department might have had a dispute over the handling of classified material is not a particularly surprising thing in and of itself.Report
I just can’t wrap my head around how an email exchange wherein State asked for something totally reasonable (a classification review) that resulted in no change (same classification) somehow is ‘concerning’.
I think attaching Clinton’s name to it makes people’s brains turn off.
How long were people dumpster diving her emails? Certain, CERTAIN, that this time there’d be fire.
It’s like someone coated Lucy’s football in pure crack. It’s like addict-level refusal to learn.Report
Well, there is the fact that the FBI, itself, used the term “quid pro quo” when it talked about what the Clinton team wanted.
But this is “Martha Steward goes to jail” territory.Report
One guy is alleging this.
Against the Kerry State Department.
I’m going to repeat that: The Kerry State Department. The FBI apparently investigated it (again, as they should if there’s a complaint), and claimed there was nothing to it.
This is Clinton’s corruption how again?
Is she running the Kerry State Department and the FBI from the shadows?Report
If the email was sent in 2012, it was not the Kerry State Department.
This is measurable.
It can be measured.Report
Do you not even read these stories before you decide the outcome?
The supposed “quid pro quo” that you INITIALLY referenced happened last year, as part of wrangling over what is and isn’t “classified” in terms of Clinton’s email.
The very freaking thing you claimed you found newsworthy in the first place. Last year. When Clinton was not Secretary of State.Report
I’d like to point out exactly how you’ve morphed just one key fact here:
“The FBI itself said” — no, one FBI agent claimed that. The FBI as a whole has said it investigated it, and that it was not the case. The FBI’s actual statement is “It’s bullcrap”.
Something you actually knew, because you mocked the fact that the FBI said it was bullcrap.
The facts didn’t change in twenty minutes, but you pivoted straight to a completely contradictory fact.
That doesn’t get into the other details (the supposed quid pro quo being just as easily more than one issue being addressed, the fact that it was the Kerry State Department and not Clinton’s) that don’t fit the narrative you want to tell.
Which is that somehow the FBI claims the opposite of what it said, so that you can claim a Kerry staffer’s actions somehow make a news story that reveals Clinton’s corruption problems.Report
I just can’t wrap my head around how an email exchange wherein State asked for something totally reasonable (a classification review) that resulted in no change (same classification) somehow is ‘concerning’.
The more astonishing thing is: How would this even be illegal anyway?
I mean, seriously. The government does quid qua pro with itself all the time, between agencies.
If the FBI had requested more space in return for, I dunno, providing State with more space somewhere else where the FBI had space and State didn’t, is that somehow wrong, too? Because that sort of horse-trading literally happens all the time.
Yes, this was a sorta asshole petty-level quid quo pro ‘Maybe if you do *your* job and respond to our request, we’ll do *our* job and look at your request.’.
But I’m having a hard time even *imagining* what legal wrong-doing is supposed to be happening here.
Even if they *literally* meant ‘Yeah, we’re going to back-burner your stuff until you stop back-burnering *our* stuff.’ instead of something that is clearly just passive-aggressive nonsense, that does not actually seem to be *illegal* in any manner whatsoever, or even particularly ‘concerning’ except in some land where people are trying to invent problems.
I mean, yes, this has nothing to do with Clinton, and doesn’t even actually have anything to do with State because it was apparently the FBI that ‘did it’, which seems to make it a nothing-burger…
…but even if was Hillary Clinton descending from the sky and directly saying ‘Hey, FBI, State isn’t going to respond to a request you made for more space (Which presumably we aren’t legally required to respond to, unlike investigative requests), until you respond to *our* request for you about reviewing classifications, which is, in fact, your job.’, and she literal meant every word of it…so the fuck what?Report
wherein State asked for something totally reasonable (a classification review)
He said that he wanted the email classified as B9. The B9 classification would allow the email to be archived in the basement “never to be seen again”.
Does such a request strike you as curious?
I suppose it depends on the contents of the email.
What were the contents of the email in question?
Oh, they were related to… I guess it doesn’t matter.Report
Quid pro quo can’t exist when one actor doesn’t actually DO the thing he’s supposed to be trading favors for.
True enough, I suppose, though there is a bit of an issue as to whether the request for a quid pro quo is also, in itself, a bad thing.
But we’re in “should Martha Stewart have gone to jail for lying to the FBI territory” now.
“See! There was never a quid!” is the equivalent of pointing out that Martha Stewart didn’t break the law when she sold the stock after getting a tip (that she arguably shouldn’t have received).Report
Oh, there’s also the fact that — as I understand it — this was a discussion between the Kerry State Department and the FBI.
And again, you’re ignoring the actual supposed quid pro quo — if THAT is a quid pro quo, as noted, I do that about five times a day dealing with external companies.
I have email chains that are two part discussions — wherein they’re talking about issues they’re having with us (that they’d like resolved), and I’m talking about issues with them (that I’d like resolved). As I noted, I sent one off an hour ago (responding to a request for some work) that included a reminder that they had some stuff they needed to finish.
Which, given the situation here, means the guy that USED to have my job is guilty of quid pro quo….Report
The email was sent in 2012.
John Kerry became Secretary of State in 2013.
To argue that “He didn’t accept the bribe! Therefore there was no bribe!” is to make a very good point while ignoring another point that may or may not be good.
The fact that the guys who did not reclassify the email per the request in the 2012 email used the term “quid pro quo” might be yet another example of “never write an email that you wouldn’t want read to a jury”. Or, I suppose, printed in a newspaper.Report
Good lord, Jaybird, did you not even read the news articles?
That’s the second freakin’ fact you’ve invented. No wonder you have a problem with it! You’ve taken the story and added all sorts of “new facts” to it. Like the FBI claimed it was quid pro quo, and the fact that it happened three years earlier than it did.Report
If I offer a bribe and the bribe was not accepted, did a bribe occur?
There are reasons to say “yes” and reasons to say “no”.
The fact that the interview took place last year does not really impact when the email was sent, does it?
I mean, if the email was sent in 2012, doesn’t that mean that the email was sent when Clinton was Secretary of State EVEN IF the interview took place last year?Report
The send date of the email is immaterial to this entire issue.
This actual slap-fight was reported over a year ago, as part of a long-running spat over the retroactive classification of emails.
Clinton’s only involvement is that one of those slap fights, this one last summer, was about an email of hers (to or from) that covered Benghazi. State feels it’s erroneously classified, and part of a large number of BS classified stuff that’s just getting routinely stamped as classified higher than it should be.
During this slap fight, last summer, a member of Kerry’s state Department (a guy named Kennedy) was arguing with a FBI guy. Apparently he pushed hard to get it (and several others) reviewed for reclassification, in light of State’s position. He finally relented on the topic — as the people he was arguing with weren’t the folks who could do that — in return for the name of someone who COULD make the call.
He then calls that person. That person is, apparently, pretty annoyed because Kennedy has been ducking HIS calls for some time over the overseas space issue.
During the course of the conversation, depending on who you believe, the FBI guy either offered to review it IF State finally moved on his request — or they discussed State’s request, then the FBI guy complained about his request.
State did not offer a quid pro quo. If one was offered, it came from the FBI, per the released notes that form the basis of this claim.
The FBI apparently investigated this and went with the latter. (Which makes sense, as if I got called out of the blue by a guy I’d been failing to get ahold of for weeks who wanted something, you can darn well be sure he’d hear what I’ve been trying to tell him before he got off the phone).
In the end, the email’s classification was not changed.
At absolute worst, a senior FBI official told a State Department official he wasn’t going to move on State’s request for a review unless State got it’s thumb out of it’s butt on the FBI’s request.
At no point, from the document dump, was there even a mention of the desired results — it wasn’t “I’ll change the classification if you give me the space I want”, it was literally “I’ll make my people do their jobs, if you’ll make yours” (that is, start the review process for reclassification — which State has every authority to request — and for State to process the FBI’s request).
And all of this happened in 2015.
The discussions between Kennedy and the FBI, the discussions between Kennedy and the OTHER guy at the FBI, the other guy at the FBI yelling at Kennedy over State sitting on his request….
All in 2015. Clinton was not involved.Report
The send date of the email is immaterial to this entire issue.
I guess it depends on whether we are accusing people of making things up.Report
It seems there are two emails in question.
1.) The email whose classification was being challenged.
2.) The email seeking to challenge the classification.
Was #1 from 2012 and #2 from 2015? If that is correct, than what some may argue is a “quid pro quo” occurred in 2015 in relation to an email from 2012.
Do I have that right? If so, does that clarify things?Report
That’s my understanding. The original email was sent in 2012. The reclassification email was sent in 2015 (presumably to deal with the whole “Hillary Clinton never sent a classified email!” argument over such things as emails containing information that was classified after the fact).Report
I think once we reach the point of using words like “presumably” we are all sort of making up facts.
But it seems to me that you and @morat20 were both saying “the email” in regards to two different emails sent three years apart. Which meant you were both sorta right and both sorta wrong.Report
But Morat20 is right. If what we are talking about is the ‘alleged’ quid pro quo then when the original email is sent is immaterial. What matters is the, again, ‘alleged’ tit for tat from 2015, after Hillary had left State. Jaybird, and it seems like every headline writer in the country, has tied this to Clinton despite the fact that she has absolutely nothing to do with the alleged quid pro quo.Report
The alleged quid pro quo is over the emails sent when Hillary was Secretary of State.
“But she wasn’t Secretary of State!” is to argue against the uninteresting part of the alleged quid pro quo.Report
Huh?!?
Maybe explain what your definition of the ‘interesting part’ would be.
For me it is the allegation of an alleged quid pro quo (even if absolute bullshit). Clinton had nothing to do with that, and was not Secretary of State when it happened.
That Clinton sent an email that was retroactively classified is not that interesting to me, and has been known about forever.Report
Well, I believe it has to do with the whole “it ain’t the crime, it’s the cover up” phenomenon.
Which may or may not be a thing.Report
Which is the crime and which is the cover up?Report
But if the interesting part is the cover up, what did she have to do with it?Report
I don’t think Jaybird has internalized that the ‘cover-up’ as he’s referring to it, were events that happened with State and FBI employees in 2015.
It’s Clinton’s emails, ergo Clinton must have been involved, facts be damned.Report
@jaybird
Doesn’t this only matter for Hillary if she was somehow involved in the (supposed) quid pro quo? If she knew nothing of it, her hands are clean. Even if she benefited from it and/or it was done on her behalf.Report
Sure. I can see that.
These were the actions of an exuberant staff member and they do not and should not reflect poorly on Hillary at all.Report
I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic.
If you are being sarcastic, I think if this happened during or immediately after her tenure and involved some high ranking official, you’d at least want to call her to the carpet to answer some tough questions.
But given it happened three years later, seems to have been initiated by the other side, and there are no (evident yet) ties to her, then we are really into the weeds of idle speculation.Report
Hey, it’s agreed that it’s old news.
I do tend to think that if Wikileaks had a bombshell, we would have seen it by now.
As it is, there’s just more stuff that looks like how the sausage is made.
But you know all of the stuff that was argued that we shouldn’t criticize Obama for because Bush did it too/first? Those things will eventually become arguments about how we shouldn’t criticize (so-and-so) because Clinton did it too.Report
“But you know all of the stuff that was argued that we shouldn’t criticize Obama for because Bush did it too/first?”
Who’s this ‘we’?Report
As a society.Report
Well, you’re absolutely right. I would *never* criticize Bush for an minor departmental spat inside the Obama White House three years after Bush left office.
Yet here you sit, doing exactly that. Why, I’m not sure. Possibly because Clinton’s a witch.Report
As minor departmental spats go, spats over the reclassification of emails that exuberant staffers are trying to make sure never make it to FOIA requests qualify as reasons to point out that, hey, Colin Powell did it too.Report
I’d like to thank you for proving my point on how these things end up being nothing the longer you look into them.
When I asked what emails you thought were newsworthy, your go-to choice was — an alleged quid-pro-quo between a State department employee and an FBI employee that occurred three years after Clinton left government service.
That’s what you went to. An allegation of impropriety between two government officials years after she left government. That was your move, your best example. You chose it because it had Clinton, email, and an accusation of corruption in the headline.
And it took you hours, despite having the source documents available, to realize that the alleged quid-pro-quo happened in 2015, between two people that didn’t work for Clinton and had nothing to do with Clinton. And even that required you to simultaneously praise and damn the FBI. They reported it! But then lied and covered their own butts!
THAT is why nobody cares about the stupid emails, Jaybird. Because the second someone looks at them, instead of reading an eyeball catching headline, it turns out to be nothing.
Which you’ve helpfully demonstrated by taking a damning sounding headline and showing it was, in fact, nothing. Even if there was a quid pro quo problem, that’s Comey’s and Kerry’s problem — both of whom were running those respective shows (in Kerry’s case, for years).Report
Actually, I would criticize Obama for firing a US Attorney for refusing to influence an election.Report
But it wasn’t an “exuberant staff member”. It was a member of the FBI, and a State department official. Both of whom, afaik, predated Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State.
And whose entire slap-fight here occurred years after she left.
She had no authority over either. She was a private citizen at the time and had been for years. She hadn’t even filed her Presidential run yet.
Bluntly: You jumped to a conclusion here that was wrong. Stop digging. You’ve already had to retreat to the statement that both the FBI and the State department are lying, AND somehow it’s Clinton’s fault even though she was three years gone from the job when this happened.
All because one anonymous source made a complaint that had Clinton within several degrees of separation (“He claimed about a State official he claimed did X over a classification issue involving years old emails from Clinton’s tenure at State), which is apparently sufficient, in your mind, to determine the Truth.
And I remind you that THAT was your best, go-to example of how Clinton’s emails are raising questions. An issue that had nothing to do with her at all, because she was not involved, none of her staff was involved, and she had no authority, contact, or sway over the people involved.
And an issue that was investigated internally, again by people with no connection to Clinton, and determined to be bullcrap.Report
Morat20,
You’re not emotionally invested in the success of this Hillary Clinton person at all, are you?Report
Not really, no. I’m just flabbergasted to watch people chase the same football for two years, and not once get a bit skeptical.
Pretty much every Clinton scandal, barring a single blowjob, has had the exact same pattern. Relentlessly fanned smoke, followed by investigation, followed by the inevitable discovery of smoke that seems to come from absolutely nowhere.
It seems the human ability to recognize patterns breaks when it comes to a Clinton.Report
That makes no sense as email #2 was unclassified and the request was to classify it.Report
It’s hard to tell through the redaction, but it was retroactively classified, State was trying to unclassify it, possibly to bury possibly to release.
It was pretty apparent that the initial conversation (where Kennedy pushed hard to have the classification reviewed) had some confusion, as the FBI folks he was trying to convince weren’t sure what he meant by “B9”.Report
A bribe that doesn’t get accepted is either being viewed as an insult or as a trap-by-law-enforcement.Report
“To argue that “He didn’t accept the bribe! Therefore there was no bribe!” is to make a very good point while ignoring another point that may or may not be good.”
One might find echoes of “there’s no way I sexually harrassed her, because nobody would make a pass at a dogface like that!”Report
Since our media sucks at explaining anything more complicated than what a four year old would understand, we turn to Twitter –
Go here – twitter.com/yottapoint – Read the tweetstorm. It has pictures of the relevant emails and everything. Make your own conclusionsReport
The problem isn’t crappy media here. Jaybird clearly missed some important context when he read it. Like the actual date of the quid-pro-quo.
He saw it was a “Clinton email” and assumed the quid-pro-quo had to date to Clinton’s term. He also assumed the FBI was making the claim, rather than denying it.
In short, he saw “Clinton” and assumed the worst. Despite that being a mug’s game for the last 20 years.Report
lol. It gets better. Page 28 of the document dump?
It wasn’t Kennedy (State) that made the offer, per the FBI’s own notes. The (redacted) FBI employee was the one who made the offer.Report
Oh, now I didn’t see that. Yeah, that changes things.Report
The tweet where I get hung up is #3 and #4 and that takes me to pages 25-29 of the FBI report itself. The last paragraph of page 27 is interesting. Page 28’s 5th paragraph is also interesting.
Now, is what happened “illegal”?
Obviously not.
If it were illegal, someone would have been arrested.Report
“Since our media sucks
at explaining anything more complicated than what a four year old would understand”Fixed that…Report
“Since our broadcast media sucks at explaining anything more complicated than what a four year old would understand”
Better fix. Long form print media still has it’s shining moments.Report
One of the big problems the MSM has these days is: political journalism isn’t distinguishing itself from what former Daily Show correspondents are doing, sports journalism isn’t distinguishing itself from Bleacher Report and the MMQB, and gaming journalism frankly was a sewer a decade before the MRAs got involved.Report
Lol. it’s hilarious that you think Assange runs wikileaks.
Who the fuck has time to sit in embassies all day?
Assange makes a pretty figurehead/martyr, doesn’t he?Report
He’s got to do something when he’s not trolling kiddies online.Report
Sam Harris has been asking his followers on Twitter (among whom there are a *lot* of Trump supporters) to point him to the single most damning thing in the Clinton emails so he can evaluate it. There’s a whole lot of, “I can’t believe you’re shilling for Clinton!” and, “You’re clearly intentionally blind to all of the terrible things in those emails!” but not a whole lot of links to actual damning things in the emails.
I’m chasing down the few links people are posting, and it’s pretty pathetic. I’m absolutely willing to believe the worst about Hillary Clinton with some evidence. She comes across to me in public as the worst sort of manipulative, calculating politician who reveals absolutely nothing about her true motivations or plans. But every time people pull back the curtain, I see more or less the typical number of goofs and ethical flexibility I’d expect from a career politician combined with what appears to be a fairly competent management game and an intelligent core team. There just doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of evidence for the Great Satan hypothesis.
The latest round of emails appears to be pretty laughable as scandals go. Unless I’m missing something serious, we’ve moved into tinfoil hat territory.Report
Podesta comes across as being dumber than Walker here:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/10/12/1581767/-WikiLeaks-Released-John-Podesta-s-Apple-ID-and-Password-Enabling-Twitter-and-iCloud-Hack
Walker at least needed to be tricked into saying stuff on live airtime.Report
I’m going to file that under, “Older non-tech people are bad at infosec when computers are involved,” along with, “My dog dislikes package delivery people,” and, “Donald Trump may not have entirely enlightened views regarding women.”Report
Maybe this is just my knowledge of politics, but none of what was shown from the Clinton emails surprises me at all on the campaign side. Even in my local political circles, the same thing happened. Hell, even during high school elections, the same things happens – you whine about anybody saying anything bad about you, you try to get influencers on your side by giving the “press” easy stories to write because people are generally lazy, and you have slightly different private opinions than your public opinions to create a majority coalition.Report
Agreed. It sounds like pretty bog standard stuff for a politician. Spin your weak points, emphasize your strong points, cultivate friendly relationships in the press and exploit them. People are reacting like emails to media figures were things like, “A positive spin on this would really reduce the chance that your kids end up dead.”
This seems just like the “rigged against Bernie” nonsense. What? You mean that the party heads preferred a dyed-in-the-wool loyal Democratic party member with middle of the road policy preferences and tried to swing public opinion toward their preferred candidate? Color me shocked! But to read the kids on Twitter, you’d think we’d discovered that there were smoke-belching factories burning Sanders ballots and stamping out fake Clinton ones 24×7.Report
tf,
They did partisan things to rig the vote and run up the score for Hillary. This is not particularly newsworthy, no.
The EXTENT to which they pulled out ALL THE STOPS?
That’s newsworthy.
As always, follow the money, and follow the power.Report
Again, I’m genuinely curious about what the worst example of this is. Because as far as I can tell, “The election was rigged,” for Sanders supporters seems to mean, “Clinton had a ton more establishment supporters than Sanders did.” Which pretty much means that almost every election is always rigged.
I’m looking for the one worst thing the party leadership did and the documentation to support the accusation.
I’m not saying that I’m skeptical that a political party would do really unethical things. I just haven’t seen a lot of evidence that they did more than try to influence public opinion to support the candidate that seemed most likely to win and push the party leadership’s agenda, which seems like pretty normal behavior.Report
You mean like the DNC being in the bag for Hillary from the start but lying to everyone and saying they didn’t have a preference?Report
Indeed it is a hard to believe a party establishment favored the establishment candidate over a guy who wasn’t even a member of their party. Shocking.Report
Ummm… yeah. Pretty much that.
“In the bag” could mean anything from, “Being totally neutral but privately wishing for Clinton’s election,” to, “Holding the children and pets of superdelegates hostage to secure their support.” Which, I suppose, is why people who want to paint it as the Most Evil Thing Ever use the phrase rather than actually explaining what they think actually happened.
And even granting the most nefarious motives and mustache twirling in the DNC, none of the stories seems to explain the fact that Clinton appears to have gotten millions more votes than Sanders. Did the vote rigging start in the Democratic primary, or will it only be used against Trump?
What with Clinton being terrified of the electoral powerhouse that is Trump, I’d have expected her to use the Clinton Foundation’s power over space and time to make him lose the primary so she could face a less alpha opponent.Report
tf,
Clinton put trump in the primary (helped him with some free press) to get Bush out of the Republican nomination, who she really didn’t want to face. (I think it was the whole dynasties angle. Bush is a terrible campaigner).
So, um, Hillary Clinton’s team twisted every arm as far as they could without dislocating them. Think how Frank Underwood would make certain that he got “all da votez”. Bribes, threats (lotta threats, people have good reasons to be scared of Hillary — and no I don’t mean murder. I mean “you’ll lose your appropriations seat” or something like that. Please, this is Clinton.), smoking the mirrors (which is basically getting shills to “reverse course” to support Hillary — oh, hai, young voters, you like me because I’ve been your friend for the past 15 years? Well, now I’m switching sides and supporting Hillary. Come Join Me!).
Yes, the vote rigging started in the Democratic Primary. Yes, it’s all (mostly) legal. [And I do know someone who worked for Bernie, so yeah, he had reason to keep track.]
Democratic Machine states were where the rigging was the worst (NY being a prime example, since both Bernie and Clinton are from there. She devoutly didn’t want to lose it.).Report
” You mean that the party heads preferred a dyed-in-the-wool loyal Democratic party member”
I’m old enough to remember when Trump said that he considered loyalty to be a virtue and everyone tut-tutted about how ridiculous and authoritarian that was.Report
Loyalty isn’t a virtue, it’s a vice.Report
Loyalty is a virtue, but like respect, it’s a two way street.
Trump does not strike me as a person who is capable of giving the loyalty he expects from others.
Not that any other party power player is any better. Seems when loyalty is at cross purposes toward winning power, loyalty goes under the bus.Report
When one allows loyalty to trump ones values, then it’s no longer a virtue.
The only people that put much value on loyalty are gangsters.
For everyone else, yeah, it’s about as earned as respect, and nobody cries too much when it’s lost either.Report
When Ted Cruz runs on the Democratic ticket on a platform of tax cuts, state sponsored religion and abortion restrictions, I’ll be sure to tut-tut the party leadership for suggesting that its members vote for somebody who more closely adheres to their platform.Report
I love that Hillary keeps on accusing the Russians of being involved.
When you leave the fucking barn door open, after all the horses have jumped the fence and are out on the road? Yeah, it isn’t exactly surprising that the Russians walk into your barn and start collecting horse manure.Report
Given that Jaybird’s one example fell apart pretty completely, are there any others?
Or is it back to “she observed the same truths as Abe Lincoln about public/private differences” that we should be fainting over?Report
Eh, other examples probably amount to “how the sausage is made”, as I look through them.
Journalists coming across horribly, people talking about giving feel-goods to big donors, so on and so forth. It indicts the process, not the people.Report
I’ve been in private sector my whole life and feel if there was an email dump of pretty much any senior manager and above it would look really bad. That’s why any investigation that leads to emails being published always makes the principals look bad. Short of real criminal stuff being laid out, email dumps are a, “There by the grace of God I go,” situations.Report
See: “Ken Bone”.Report
So fair to say Hillary is a damn clean politician then?
Or are we going to pretend the hacked/dumped emails are vaguely suspicious and proof she’s dirty in some way we can’t quite put our finger on?Report
I can just point to saudi arabia and some of the gun deals she okayed while Sec of State. Quid Pro Quo — we donate XYZ to the Clinton Foundation, and you get us guns.
(No word on whether this was directly connected with Yemen, and whether Clinton was actively meddling in the succession — I kinda doubt it, ymmv).Report
I mean, seriously, House of Cards got a good deal of their background research for the Underwoods from the Clinton Foundation.Report
OK, so I’m going to be a dick and do what Sam Harris did in that twitter stream and ask, do you have a link to some actual primary source evidence that this really happened? Because everybody seems to have stories about how anybody who didn’t see it is blind but they can’t seem to locate the actual records when asked.Report
Evidence? We’ve only had hacks of the Clinton Foundation, DNC, State Department, and (probably) Clinton. Talk about unreasonable expectations.Report
It’s Kim. She’s knows a guy that told her.
That’s always Kim’s sources for the tin-foil stuff. She knows a guy, he’s in deep, he knows the real score.Report
The real score is popcorn.
[ummm…. yes, this is a reference. It’s also a good joke if you get it]Report
tf,
Yeah, I know a forensic accountant who works for Hillary (part-time), and who has been in more than one political campaign before. I trust him to smell out wrongdoing (He’s gotten some of his work published in WAPO), and to know things before they get past Wikileaks.
http://dailycaller.com/2016/05/11/exclusive-persian-gulf-sheikhs-gave-bill-hillary-100-million/
Hillary’s approval of arms sales to Saudi Arabia is public record (made the business pages of the newspaper).Report
That’s kind of what I figured.
Right. So the quid pro quo is that:
1) Clinton approved arms sales to an ally that we’ve been providing military support to for decades. This apparently would not have happened without the Clinton Foundation donation.
2) The Clinton Foundation’s roots run so deep through all of American politics that even the Republican-controlled Senate went against its better judgment and approved it.
Surely, without the tentacles of the Clinton Foundation, Saudi Arabia would be a pariah in DC, just as it was before 1997.
I’m guessing the reason Merrick Garland’s Supreme Court approval hasn’t gone through is that Clinton hasn’t had the Foundation do its Jedi mind trick on the Senate leadership because she wants to nominate somebody else in 2017.Report
What, if anything, do you know about the war and the succession?
Providing materiel takes on an entirely new cast when you’re discussing interfering(aiding) in internal politics of a dynastic kingdom.Report
Surely not nearly as much as the People You Know on the Inside.
Feel free to expand on this. I’m getting tired of asking for explanations and having a pint of tea leaves thrown out across the table for me to read.Report
Basically, you had a Warrior Prince, who was gaining followers/power via a proxy war with Iran in Yemen.
It would appear that no one has actually decided to muster the political will to get him to stop the war, long after the succession has been decided (semi-permanently).Report
… The Aristocrats!
Connect the dots for me. What does this have to do with Clinton and how does it make her behavior an obvious Clinton Foundation specific quid pro quo instead of a continuation of a long-standing policy that the entire US government appears to adhere to?Report
Um. I wasn’t discounting the idea that other people have received donations. In some cases, significant ones. The Club for Growth, for example, is heavily funded by Saudi Arabia.
http://www.ibtimes.com/clinton-foundation-donors-got-weapons-deals-hillary-clintons-state-department-1934187Report
This worked out roughly the way I expected it to. I’m trying to decide whether to keep asking for pieces of the whole shaggy dog story one cryptic line at a time or just call it a day.
If the argument is that the entire US government is bought out by Saudi Arabia, therefore Clinton is a unique monster in American political history and the Clinton Foundation is altering the direction of American government, I’m going to have to say that even granting the premise, I find the conclusion kind of hard to support.Report
The argument isn’t anything close to what you characterized it as.
Nevertheless, after having posted legit news sources, I’m not terribly concerned about whether you’ve misread my argument.
I’m not saying Clinton is a monster because she’s corrupt.
However, her corruption means that she been more desperate than anyone I can think of to actually get elected. And that’s made a material difference in her campaign.
That being said, her mental instability is of more concern if she does get elected, which seems likely.Report
You provided a link to a deal that had to be signed off by multiple parties, including the Congressional GOP and claimed what sold the deal was a donation to the Clinton Foundation.
I don’t think you understand what people are asking you for, because what you provided didn’t substantiate a dang thing you just said.
And yes Kim. Hillary’s the crazy one here.Report
morat20,
Yeah, i wasn’t calling you crazy.
If you read the link, you’ll see that it’s decently setting up the whole “Clinton Foundation sold the deal” premise. This isn’t just me saying “but there was a deal!” and then saying “Clinton made it happen!”Report
No, it doesn’t set that up. It doesn’t set that up at all.
Because the “deal” as you refer to it is a long-standing practice that predates Obama (and heck, predates Clinton’s Presidency), and requires multiple branches of government to sign off on — including Congress.
So how in the name of Zeus’s left testicle does a donation to the CF convince about three Cabinet members, the President, and a GOP Congress?
That doesn’t even get INTO how such a donation made a retroactive change to reality, so that we’ve been selling the Saudi’s weapons for decades, OR why a piddling donation to the CF would actually be a deciding factor for Clinton in the first place.
In the end, you’re not only presenting no evidence — your entire thesis requires Clinton to be ‘the deciding vote’ on an issue that had multiple veto points, but multiple actors, some of whom are ideologically opposed to anything Clinton does, even if it’s petting puppies.
Which is why we’re calling it crazy. You not only have NO evidence, the evidence you present renders your claim bluntly refuted.Report
Posting legit news sources is part of the puzzle, but I don’t think anybody was denying that the US government was selling weapons to the Saudis and has been doing so since forever.
Perhaps if you implied your argument a little more strongly or even made it explicitly I’d do a better job of following. Or maybe it’s just that I don’t know the full story of the Warrior Prince.
So her particular type of corruption causes desperation? Or the scale of it? Or the people she’s beholden to? And I thought we just agreed that the government was controlled by Saudi shills. Are the others not as desperate? It seems like the people who get campaign contributions from the Saudis would be more desperate to keep them than a person who gets money from the Saudis and gives it away.
Dare I ask how?Report
tf,
Through the Clinton Foundation, Clinton made promises, plenty of them – to be redeemed when his wife got to be President (scheduled in 2008). Some of them were cashed in upon while she was Secretary of State (which she was given as a bid to keep her from backstabbing the entire party [please do not read into this approval for the Dem Party — facts is facts]).
The Clinton Foundation, during her time in office, accepted donations from folks that she was dealing with directly in her professional capacity.
Hillary Clinton has run up a loooong tab with nasty people who would be likely to kill her (or ruin her life) if she doesn’t make it to be President. It is quite literally do or die for her.
The scale of the Clinton Foundation corruption is protecting the extent of it — in that the rest of the Democratic Party doesn’t exactly want what she’s been doing to come to light, as it’ll look bad on them too (she makes calls for them if you know what I mean).
More than half of Congress is blackmailed. This is not to say that they’re “controlled” by any one person, or even a country. Blackmail’s a decent stick, but it isn’t any carrot.Report
You realize you just went off on a laundry list of things you have no evidence for, that reads exactly like Trump blaming an international banker’s conspiracy?
It’s literally a lit of things you just made up, with no evidence, that you’re acting like is a known and accepted fact.
Even though — and this is kind of critical — it’s a big steaming pile of crazy?Report
The best I can do here is acknowledge that you have clearly stated your position and the things you believe to be true.Report
Damn clean? More like “Damn successful”.
That has a handful of things that attend. But if they only amount to “how the sausage is made”, then I guess that counts as “clean, for small values of ‘clean'”.Report
@jaybird
Let me put it this way: how many presidential candidates do you think could withstand the kind of scruitiny Clinton has faced, between decades of GOP/Gov’t-funded investigations into every claim against her, lunatic or not, and the exposure of huge troves of emails from the DNC, her campaign, and her public records, and come out looking like a successful-but-above-board person?
It definitely wouldn’t be her current opponent, but that’s the beginning rather than the end of the list.Report
Romney couldn’t. Looks like Trump can’t.
Ken Bone couldn’t.
I admit to wondering if the press isn’t treating Hillary with kid gloves, though.Report
54M+ hits for “Hillary Clinton Emails”.
16M+ hits for “Hillary Clinton Benghazi”.
Compare to
770K hits for “Donald Trump Grab Pussy”.
Now, those aren’t apples to apples comparisons as the email and Benghazi stories are much older than the Trump story. But… kids gloves? Really? Why?Report
Kid gloves are asking her easily parried questions about Benghazi and emails, instead of questions regarding her blood soaked legacy of failure at the State Department and as a US Senator.Report
“…blood soaked legacy of failure at the State Department and as a US Senator.”
Can you elaborate on this a bit?Report
I can.
What happened in Benghazi is a failure of U.S. foreign policy. Full stop. Does HRC own U.S. foreign policy outright? No, but she has certainly been a player.
The U.S. government was caught almost completely by surprise by the Arab Spring and the Libyan revolution. We didn’t know it was coming, which is excusable. But once it started, we didn’t even know who the players were. Why? Because the CIA has been diverted from its core intelligence gathering mission to spend an increasing amount of its energy on the counter-terrorist targeting program.
That is a program that HRC, as a senior Obama administration official, had a hand in implementing and one that she has said she intends to continue. In any sane election, she’d be getting at least a few questions about all of this.Report
The CIA was turned towards counter terror after 9/11. O continued that but that all started during the Bush admin.
Our intell in the Arab world seems poor in general likely since we are dependent on our allies who have far better local knowledge and contacts but also weight everything, unsurprisingly, towards their interests.Report
Yes. But what does that have to do with this election or with the future of U.S. foreign policy. We can blame GWB for the present situation of the Middle East. We can also blame the Sykes-Picot Agreement, WWI and the Ottoman Empire. None of that gets us closer to a sensible U.S. foreign policy.Report
Just pointing out where the problem you noted started. A sensible foreign policy would be nice and i’d love to see a good debate out since most of the choices are from a bucket of mediocre or poor solutions. But we aren’t even having that debate. Heck just the idea of negations and treaties has been pooped all over recently.Report
So to the question at hand, would another candidate with Hillary’s excat same record have been treated differently by the media?Report
Hillary’s treatment has almost nothing to do with her and everything to do with the dynamics of the election.
I reject both the idea that the “mainstream media” is in the bag for Hillary and the competing notion that the media is unduly scrutinizing her and questioning her qualifications because she is a woman. The media simply doesn’t have that kind of authority to go off script.Report
My sincere belief is that the vast majority of media members are working with their own best interests in mind.Report
jr,
The Powers that Be want hillary to win. So, yeah, the media is mildly in the bag for Hillary. (And mostly in the bag for “the horserace” and “please watch the election coverage”).Report
– voted for OIF
– against Iraq surge saying we should instead put more troops in Afghanistan – though both are measures to do the exact same thing
– when we finally did take troops out of Iraq and put them in Afghanistan, was negligent on the political side of the pol-mil required effort to make that worthwhile
– lead architect of the effort to intervene militarily in the Libyan civil war when the Arab Spring broke out
– again, negligent on the political side of the pol-mil required effort to make the juice worth the squeeze in post-Qaddafi Libya. (The death of the ambassador and 4 others in Benghazi is a symptom of the idea that you can do regime change without the necessary effort and constant diligence – a lesson she should have learned from Iraq, but did not)
– overall, making a general s***show of the Arab Spring, through inconsistent messaging and taking half hearted action – better would have been none at all. You can draw a straight line between the Syrian Civil War and all that misery its caused and the posture of the Clinton State Department at the launch of the Arab Spring -the Syrian rebels were emboldened by Odyssey Dawn thinking that they would get the same support to overthrow Assad, coupled with the United States being even more vocal about Assad needing to go than the US was about Qaddafi (where the US publicly said he had to merely stop his offensive, or else)
– at the same time she’s advocating beating up s***ty little countries, she showing way to much undue deference to Russia, buying into the illusion that Putin was no longer in charge and that the strained relations at the start of her tenure at State were entirely Bush’s fault.
People who are doing stuff well take credit for results (Measures of Performance). People who are not doing stuff well take credit for how hard they’re working (Measures of Effort). (and a lot of climate change in those miles, too).Report
@kolohe , @kazzy , @morat20
The thing is, the list of actions as Secretary of State that @kolohe put together at 7:36 am is a list worthy of discussion, that points to specific -and important- issues of policy in which Hillary has been on the wrong side, and she hasn’t given signs that the has learned why she was wrong then, and that she would act differently now.
And none of them have fishing anything to do with email servers, Benghazi!!, or murdering Vince Foster.
But her political adversaries would rather talk about email servers, Benghazi!!, or murdering Vince Foster. They would call Congressional investigations about email servers, Benghazi!!, or murdering Vince Foster. They would whine about the MSM not asking the hard questions on email servers, Benghazi!!, or murdering Vince Foster.
And since email servers, Benghazi!!, or murdering Vince Foster are a fishing nothinburger, people just get tired of the nothingburgering, and wouldn’t pay any attention if someone started talking about the Arab Spring, and what mixed signals we gave the Syrian opposition (too many).
But no one will start talking about the Arab Spring or the mixed signals towards the Syrian opposition. Instead they will talk for three more weeks about email servers, Benghazi!!, and murdering Vince Foster.
Is not Hillary’s fault she’s being hounded for what she didn’t do, instead of being grilled for what she did.Report
It’s completely true Hillary’s foes all seem to aim at the conspiracy stupidity instead of tangible issues. The other problem is her foes were often just as wrong as she was or wanted even worse solutions. How long have R’s been flapping their gums about getting tough on ISIS w/o defining how many thousands of troops we are to invade Syria with or what they hell they want.Report
Totally accurate
I think there’s two things in play:
1- The GOP does not want to paint a red line on what the position on Libya or Syria is, or should be, because most of the time they have been more militaristic on Syria or Libya than the Obama Administration.
2- They can’t stop going on on email servers, Benghazi!!, Vince Foster was murdered because they fed that crap to their base for 20 years, the bases believes it, and would not understand it not been the basis of the campaign against her, if it was SOOOOOOO importantReport
So the things that had multiple GOP Congressional investigations, an FBI investigation, an 11 hour hearing….that’s kid gloves?
That’s a very unusual definition.Report
FWIW, Jay referred specifically to the media.
Kolohe, that all seeens like stuff we should be talking about. Do you think if a different candidate had HRC’s record, we’d be discussing that stuff more, less, or about the same?
My hunch is it’d be about the same. Which may still qualify as kids’ gloves but if everyone gets that treatment, pointing it out now doesn’t offer much.
The media being derelict in their duties does not necesdarily equate to them being biased for or against a particular candidate.Report
Yes but the media reported on it extensively. The first debate, the one on foreign policy, spent like a full third of Clinton’s time on email.
To say the media “treated it with kid gloves” is to be from an alternative reality entirely.
They spent months hammering on ALL of those things, either on their own or in response to constant leaks and Congressional hearings.Report
@morat20
Well, that is the argument I’m putting forth as well. We can argue about whether the media was as thorough as they should have been. Or whether they glommed onto superficial silliness while larger issues went unexplored. I mean, this is the media in 2016 we’re talking about… there are myriad ways in which they could have fucked this up.
But that wasn’t the criticism. @jaybird ‘s specific criticism was “kids’ gloves” which I can only take to mean he feels the media went soft on Hillary. I don’t think the evidence backs that up. At least not relative to other politicians.
I think what we are really trying to get at is whether the media treated Clinton differently than it did/does/would have treated other candidates. I just don’t think there is much to support that claim. But maybe Jay has more to say.Report
This is an interesting question. A deep discussion of important decisions she made as Secretary of State would probably have brought to light more *real* issues with her leadership than questions about Benghazi! and her email server, but would it have been more damaging? It seems like superficial but bad-sounding stuff is harder on a politician than a nuanced discussion of their real failures.
So is it kid gloves in the “this is actually valid criticism” sense or kid gloves in the “this may actually lose her votes” sense? I’d say yes to the former but no to the latter–the focus on catchy bullshit might have hurt her more than even a very thoughtful indictment of her real policy failures probably would have.Report
You hold an election with the media you have, not the media you might want or wish to have from an earlier time. Bush eventually got hammered on Iraq being a complete clusterfish, but the truly horrific thing — the complete lack of planning for the occupation because it would have been politically damaging to admit there would be one — wasn’t the reason.Report
But even that’s opaque — she was SoS, not President. How much of what got enacted was HER call?
You can’t lay the entirety of foreign policy at her door, because absent Obama laying bare his internal deliberations, you can’t tell what was her call or his call. And that doesn’t get into things like playing Devil’s Advocate, or the basic politics of large scale decisions, which means you’re hard pressed to find out what she really thinks or what she’d have done in his shoes.
In the end, on any important call, State does what the President says — no matter what the Secretary personally thinks.
So there’s a lot of noise, and you’re still stuck with overly simplistic answers.Report
She can’t take credit for Osama Bin Laden becoming fish food but avoid any of the blame that comes with being the nexus of US Foreign policy.Report
She’s also directly said “I’m not running for Barack Obama’s or Bill Clinton’s third term – I’m running for my first term”
Which is fine. That’s how it should be.
But nobody has asked her, “ok, when you’re at the Resolute desk where the buck does stop, what are going to do differently than Obama?” Alternatively a question along the lines of “As someone who has been on the inside of Obama’s foreign policy decisions for half his term, what should he have done differently either when you where there, or since then??Report
They should, because wanting to know how she might differ from Obama on policy is important. (Although knowing Clinton, you can probably find plenty of details on her website for practically anything. Perhaps another reason the media doesn’t bother).
Instead, we get nebulous accounts that she’s more “hawkish” based on tea-leaf readings of what little internal discussions got leaked.
It’s just a fact, distilled from thin air, that any breaks she’d have from Obama’s foreign policy would involve more bombs.Report
When has HRC taken credit for Osama? I’m not being flip… I havent heard her do so but maybe i missed it.Report
Obama got credit for that, quite clearly. I mean, as in “loudly and repeatedly said so”.
She was involved yes — as she would be in ANY decision involving foreign affairs — but quite a few people seem to think she’s the decider for every bit of foreign policy they dislike, while crediting Obama for every bit they like.
Clearly hypocritical, yet common enough.Report
http://www.lifezette.com/polizette/wikileaks-liberal-columnist-tried-trojan-horse-bernie/
So, um, smoking the mirrors. Now in print.Report
Well, if a Huffington Post blogger told HRC’s campaign he was fluffing Bernie, clearly the election was rigged.
From a position of such power comes… something something.Report
Warming Alarmists Redefine What A Hurricane Is So We’ll Have More Of Them
http://www.investors.com/politics/commentary/warming-alarmists-redefine-what-a-hurricane-is-so-well-have-more-of-them/
It’s clever.Report
I’m glad that link deals with the actual arguments for and against changing the metrics we use to judge hurricanes. It would be pretty useless if it just strawmanned the worst possible motivations onto their opponents.Report
What do you think their motivations are? We’ve gone 11 years without a hurricane and the when we finally get one, Gore and the others are tripping over themselves to tie it to global warming.Report
What do you mean “we,” white man?Report
Financial in nature. Getting the first shitstorm blamed on an Act of God (that’s what hurricanes are, aren’t they?) means that the insurance companies don’t have to pay.Report
*without a hurricane hitting land. And, regarding Gore and Co., so what?
The question is, are there more informative ways to measure hurricanes? That debate has been going on for quite some time in the scientific community. Your article links to a Mashable post on the topic discussing some of the science (in a public friendly way). which notes that this may be one of the most destructive in North Carolina history despite being only a Cat. I when it did most of its damage. Your article could deal with the actual arguments being made or engage in ad hominem based on the perceived motivations of their opponents. It chose the latter. I choose to give it the time and attention an article like that deserves.Report
If a hurricane doesn’t reach land, does anyone hear it? Or care for that matter?
It’s been so long since a hurricane hit the U.S. that certain groups want to capitalize on it.Report
I honestly don’t know why I bother interacting with you.Report
Ummm, guys, I thought the argument that the emails didn’t prove much were more-or-less on the square, but this s**t here is pretty damning:
Report
Wikileaks must still be holding the emails where Clinton requests front row seats to the Creed concert.Report
with over 9000 fans.Report
They don’t know who Dave Brubeck is either. All the pieces are doing together!Report
I hear you’re mad about Brubeck
I like your eyes, I like him too
He’s an artist, a pioneer
We’ve got to have some music on the new frontierReport
Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
– George CarlinReport
Think of all the people trying to make it big in right-wing media, and realize that Sean Hannity is near the top.
–meReport