Wikileaks announced for weeks when they were releasing the emails. It was a pre-planned event that the entire world was waiting for.
The Trump tape, which had obviously been saved for a rainy day, was trotted out to distract from the pre-announced Wikileaks release.
This level of premeditated collusion with the media is not even up for debate at this point, since the very emails they are trying to distract us from, detail instance after instance after instance of such collusion.
I share your concern that we'll ever get honest reporting from the media again, and I have to wonder how many years (decades?) this has been occurring.
The trust I have had in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, ABC/NBC/CBS, Democratic and Republican parties has been irreparably damaged.
I've been a cord cutter for over a decade. This year I graduated to pitying people who repeat the latest front page story as naive fear-junkies. Everything is suspect. Why burn processing cycles reading stories that on their face are actually stupid with conclusions that are unsupported by verifiable facts? (http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/cia-prepping-possible-cy...)
Between the Sponsored Content, Native Ads and all of the investigative journalists who (according to DNC emails) are labeled as "friends," I have no choice but to say "I quit." They are pretty lies that don't nourish!
There is no truth in "The Truth" and there are no news in "The News".
Update: Added links to wikipedia
To borrow a phrase that usually makes me think of a milennial with a punchable face, "This^100."
I always held those news organizations skeptically in the back of my mind as Every Educated Person Ought To, but this is just...unbelievable.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/16/world/rise-of-saudi-prince...
I could be as much skeptic as you and I can draw my own conclusions for why this particular story might have been published now and not before, and for what purpose, but this doesn't stop me from enjoying reading it and absorbing its juicy details and knowledge.
I'm still thankful for NYT for dedicating time and effort to expose this person as a fraud and hypocrite and I'm looking forward to reading more of these in the future for other despicable figures.
Maybe none. But one way the times could re establish credibility with me is to be transparent about how much the writer engaged with pr reps or communications teams in each story. It doesn't have to be exhaustive.
By the way- Part of my journey to this level of skepticism was "Trust me, I'm Lying" by Ryan Holiday https://www.amazon.com/Trust-Me-Lying-Confessions-Manipulato...
That would be the worst PR piece you could ask for, unless you mean that you suspect that his political foes were the ones behind this story which is not unlikely but again not a deal-breaker and what's only important to me is the question, were the details listed in the piece factual or not?
Nothing more.
For a long time now, all forms of traditional media have had a bent. It's just gotten very monied and politicized as of late.
That's what's really depressing about this: it is absurdly easy to get to the bottom of whether a fricking blender is worth buying, but important events happening in the world? Get your researchin' shoes on.
By the way, thank you very much for your input - your experience in that arena is unique and very valuable to the discussion.
Given my position, I think it's useful to state what would undermine the credibility of an institution of journalism. It's actually really simple: if it persistently reports incidents for which there is no proof, or if it reports incidents in such a way that obscures the facts themselves (spin). Any institution that regularly confuses editorializing for journalism losses its credibility. By these rules there are many institutions that are not trustworthy (e.g. Fox) but there are many institutions that are (the NYT).
I just can't understand how this does not scare people. How is this different from the state run media in third-world countries we used to laugh at as kids?
It may be working out for your team _this_time_, but the same behavior will almost certainly be used against you in the future.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWKwEBIkYhI [2] https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/5205
In fact, I think they were going on in the 15 years before that as well, though they were less pronounced, less obvious and less extreme. The media has probably always been a bit of a propaganda organ... it's just that the voices were a lot more diverse.
The really alarming thing we've seen this year is Google, Facebook and Reddit starting to use algorithms to suppress some voices and amplify others. Combine that with "Correct The Record" (the army of paid hillary shills who have taken over at least reddit) and the internet is no longer the alternative where you can have a reasonable discussion.
Why participate when your opponent is most likely a hired troll?
Your <s>'tinfoil hat conspiracy theory'</s> is anything but. Balanced, objective reporting in the US died in 1987, the very day it was no longer required by law:
The NYT frequently publishes articles critical of Hillary Clinton. Here are several hundred: https://www.reddit.com/search?q=subreddit%3Athe_donald+site%...
I'm using this example as an internet community that curates information critical to Hillary Clinton and Democratic Party campaigns. In that list are several that discuss content within the email leaks in a fashion critical to Hillary Clinton.
Publications should be permitted to publish stories critical of both major political parties.
The paper has also declined to collaborate with Assange to release stories about many other leaks. The NYT is America's Pravda.
By the establishment and for the establishment... the definition of conservative.
To think of all those who undertook personal risk over the years to build a great news organization! Too much competition from buzzfeed seems to have left the paper toothless and officious.
Historians will likely view the gutting of the adversarial, investigative press as the factor that accelerated our civilization's return to authoritarianism.
The Post has three stories based on emails in the last 48 hours:
- State pressuring FBI: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/docum...
- Goldman Transcripts: https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/10/17/...
- Foreign Government Donations (story originated on Reuters): https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hacked-emails-show-e...
It's disingenuous to pretend the mainstream media is not covering the email leaks.
Inter-agency conflict and negotiation happens all the time within the federal government. It's not corruption because both sides are career civil service. For there to be a serious story here, the Post would need to have some evidence that Clinton asked Kennedy to do this, which they don't.
The NYT has not run any stories about the content of the emails on its front page in the last ten days. The stories people have linked are buried deep behind the paywall.
Where's the story about the machinations to deliberately harm the Sanders campaign? Where's the interview with Sanders asking what he'd have done if the emails had been leaked a few weeks earlier? Where is the headline "DNC corruption widespread", etc.
The purpose of an adversarial press (and press freedom in general) is to ask the very tough questions. The NYT has been derelict in its failure to do this when it comes to the leaked emails.
Yes, we all knew the likely content of the Goldman speeches. But the story has to do with how the HRC campaign went to great lengths to please Wall Street while also dealing with the Sanders left which was pretty strongly anti-Wall Street. Is there historical precedent for a politician to speak out of both sides of their mouth to this degree on a fairly important issue (highly likely laws will be passed pertaining to wall street reforms (or lack thereof) during her term in office, in contrast to many other wedge issues where the probability of laws being passed is next to nil)?
There has been a tremendous need for top-tier reporting on the leaked emails. You point out three stories, but there have been stories on less than 30% of the newsworthy items, vs 10-20 stories on the single incident of Trump's lewd remarks. Incidentally, the remarks speak for themselves and there is little a "journalist" can do other than quote them and let people be (appropriately) horrified.
Perhaps with respect to the lewd comments, an interactive timeline of each accuser and a status of any legal action pertaining to the claims would be helpful, but is it seriously deserving of 3-4 front page slots on the NYT every day for the past week?
Also, there has been no serious coverage of the third party candidates' positions on key issues. Frankly in spite of the few awkward aspects of each, both of them are far more impressive (and seem significantly more intelligent) making ad-hoc comments about nearly any issue.
There is nothing wrong with a news organization presenting its political opinions -- on the opinion page! The rest should be old fashioned factual reporting intended to enrich the discussion not color it or focus it on a subset of issues.
I brought up Buzzfeed simply because I fear that too much of the NYT focus has become about the number of online views/clicks a story gets, to the point where this has impacted page layout, headline copy, etc.
You assume they are newsworthy. Most of what I've seen, from a running tally Politico is doing as they go through them, doesn't seem overly newsworthy. The ones that have been reported seem to be mostly explainable, and look much worse when you assume context rather than put it in context, or allow the Podesta to put it in context.
> vs 10-20 stories on the single incident of Trump's lewd remarks.
Many people are very upset about those "lewd remarks". Possibly because they admit to real actions of misconduct. I think there's a false equivalence going on here. One situation is about a staffer for the Clinton campaign with lots of emails that sometimes seem to allege something, but are generally somewhat informal and it's hard to pin down specifics, and the other is about Trump himself admitting to sexual assault on tape, and then saying it was just words and he never would do something like that, and then people coming forward saying he specifically did it to them. For many people, a single true instance of this is enough to immediately discount him as a possible candidate they could vote for. That's a big story, and will get a lot of attention, as much as you might like it not to.
> Many of these are old and do not address the content of the emails. There are perhaps 100 significant stories that could have been written based on the information leaked in the past 10 days. We got zero.
I found this after 1 second of internet searching: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/10/us/politics/hillary-clinto....
> Too much competition from buzzfeed seems to have left the paper toothless and officious.
Buzzfeed has a substantial investigative reporting arm; its depth has been lauded frequently on HN: https://www.buzzfeed.com/news
For someone ragging on the lack of investigation the press are doing, you're doing a poor job of it yourself. Simply googling 'nyt clinton email' comes up with a handful of stories from the past 10 days (there's also a lot of stories older than 10 days in the search).
I'm no fan of Trump and would never vote for him, but the free and adversarial press is a crucial aspect of democracy which is not doing its job.
The fact that the emails were LEAKED OMG is not the newsworthy part. It is what is in them. And largely speaking, there's not much news in them.
IMO a major problem in the U.S. today is that not many people understand how political campaigns or the federal government actually work. So a lot of people can be led to believe that boringly standard practices like revising talking points over email, and getting updates on court hearings, are actually proof of corruption. But they're not.
I've not heard anywhere that they were leaked, which suggests a disgruntled insider. The US government claims that they were hacked, and apparently that information was communicate to both Trump and Clinton in their national security briefings.
Assange has not been forthcoming about the source of the emails.
Is a conspiracy by top officials at the DNC to harm a party candidate during the primary a minor deal? To me this is corruption at close to the highest level. Yes, it's a private org, but one that is critical to the functioning of our democracy.
Is a candidate making promises to wall street that directly contradict her campaign promises a minor deal? Well, we can cynically assume all pols are dishonest, or the press can help us simply hold all pols accountable for their promises. I'd like to see fewer promises made and more promises kept. It was frankly a bit shady that HRC refused to release the transcripts, and I think there is a newsworthy story detailing the interest groups she was courting and why they are so influential in American politics.
I've looked through the Goldman transcripts, and maybe I'm stupid, but I didn't see her making any promises. If you've got a direct quote, lay it on me.
I'm not holding my breath, though, since so far you only seem interested in vague concern-trolling.
Yes, followed by the person who was forced to step down being immediately re-hired by the HRC campaign. What is troubling about it is what it suggests about HRC -- that she got cronies into powerful positions in the DNC, that they helped subvert the primary process in her favor, and that she re-hired the disgraced DNC leader, signaling to any other cronies that she'd have their back if they got caught, too.
The issue is institutional corruption, and it should be the main story out of the leaked emails. Politics can get ugly, but the purpose of the primary is to vet the candidates that have pledged allegiance to the party by letting party members vote in the primary election.
In my opinion, HRC should have been put on the spot to answer for why the corruption that benefitted her happened, and why she re-hired DWS the next day.
I'm not aligned with either party so I don't care so much who the candidate is, but I do care about the quality of the institutions that are part of our democratic system. We should all care, because the institutions (and their lack of corruption) is more important than who wins any single election (primary or secondary).
When you think about all the idealistic Sanders supporters who donated money and time only to have their trusted DNC leaders try to sabotage their preferred candidate, the amount of harm done to our democracy by this was substantial. Think of the cynicism and frustration it created, all so that HRC would be a few percent more likely to win the nomination, and win it in an unfair way.
Politics is a long term game. Partisans like to tell us it's urgent and that we must act immediately (regardless of the costs) to impact the most important election in history. This fake urgency is the technique GWB used to sell the Iraq war. It's an effective but embarrassingly dishonest propaganda technique.
Even when I do agree with their positions, it is disconcerting to feel like I am being spoonfed political ideology.
https://medium.com/@Starkweather/new-york-times-edited-berni...
EDIT: for context, if you go read the actual emails, what you see are totally bog-standard comments of a PR team reacting to a story once it posted, and again when the NYT updated it, as the NYT (and other papers) often do.
Edit: for context "We were able to keep him from including more on the JVF, it has a mention in there, but between us and a conversation he had with Marc Elias he finally backed off from focusing too much on that."
This email chain is a total non-story. The NYTimes called the DNC for comment, and the DNC attempted to shape the story. That is basic PR 101.
We know the Sanders campaign did the same thing, because the story includes confidential information from his campaign, and comments from his surrogates. We just don't have Wikileaks access to the emails from his campaign (thank goodness).
That being said, I read the Goldman transcripts and other things that were supposed to be so damaging, and they really weren't that bad, beyond any other typical politician. Is she corrupt, absolutely. Is there a giant media conspiracy (now including SNL) against Trump? Ridiculous. He makes his own wounds.
In addition, even Mike Pence has now admitted Russia is disseminating information to Wikileaks. So we have a clear connection between Russia / Putin and Trump. I don't believe it's as far as many think with them working together, but clearly someone as thin skinned and easily manipulated as Trump would be a total win for Putin. We can talk about Hillary's collusion, Clinton Foundation corruptness and such, but how the Putin pro Trump position is not as relevant is beyond me, if not the deal breaker considering the state of Russia / American current affairs.
Wikileaks' current agenda appears to be to disrupt Western governments through leaking damaging information. I don't see a clear preference for political parties; the Manning leaks were damaging to the Republican Bush administration.
I believe that the most probable source of the DNC leaks is Russian government units, but not for the purposes of election manipulation. Here is an article that most credibly posits this theory: https://themoscowtimes.com/articles/russian-spycraft-how-kre....
I had mixed feeling about Wikileaks before (as I think anyone should, since it's a very complex topic), but any thoughts I had as to him be impartial in any way (as a good journalist should be) are now out the window.
Honestly, Assange shouldn't have been the face behind the leaks. It should've been the agency's "face", and it should've been dumped all at once, like most of their past releases.
Also, think of the political dynamic. There isn't much difference between one huge scandal and ten - there's still only so much airtime. Anything leaked as a unit can be responded to as a unit.
Anyone could anonymously create a torrent and paste it in some related thread, the important thing, and why people go to Wikileaks, is getting it read faster than "they" can delete it.
One look at Assange's Twitter is all it takes to see the obvious anti-Hillary bias. The shrill "Hillary's got an earpiece!" post is one of the most glaring examples.
Perhaps you can provide more info on exactly what documents you think Putin is not happy about?
There are multiple access points, some within Federal Government.
Also there's no real need to take anti-Trump info to Wikileaks. The NYT was willing to publish one of Trump's tax returns from the 90s and those are legally protected. You can take anti-trump documents to any major newspaper.
The current angle is that Trump is a bad guy, and you just have to look at the photos of him to get the angle - 99% of him making a weird face.
It does not make the story false, but there is an angle.
And then some of the women show up on TV with their lawyer, Gloria Allred, who is in close connection with HRCs campaign(as attested by the Podesta wikileaks) and has vowed her support for HRC to win. And then there is strange behavior from some of the accusers, like begging Trump to visit their restaurant/business, which would be a strange thing to do to someone who sexually assaulted you(not impossible behavior, but all of these things add up)
My counterpoint: http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/09/29/technology/yahoo-data-b...
Anonymous quotes. Unsourced claims. Revisionist history designed to tear down one individual (Mayer) to protect another (Stamos)
If you are not one of those 1-2%, how would you know about it?
You missed out the most important thing which would undermine the credibility of an institution of journalism. And it is the the most common one which is the most heavily engaged in. And that is choosing not to report certain stories and facts, even though they are of great significance.
Is anyone else doing this?
it is similar to reading financial news or watching CNBC with the mindset of reading between the lines, wondering who and why is interested in propagating such stories.
Why would you trust them? You think they would go through all that shit to give you information and work for you for a few pennies or for free? When they could be working for the rich and powerful to become one of them... all while getting your pennies?
Was it actually week(s) plural? I thought they only came out about a week late.
> The Trump tape, which had obviously been saved for a rainy day, was trotted out to distract from the pre-announced Wikileaks release.
I think this is a little much. Some cast and crew from The Apprentice made some noise about how generally unpleasant Donald Trump was, and multiple parties started seeking unused footage from that show. NBC also had the Access Hollywood video and were preparing it for release, but got scooped when someone leaked it to the Washington Post reporter who investigated the Tump Foundation.
No event in the chain happened without precedence and, to be perfectly frank, none of the information that has come out has been a genuine shock. The overwhelming majority of the damage done by the Access Hollywood footage has been because Donald Trump a) did a very poor job in delivering his apology, strategically speaking and b) from a), set himself up to have yet more sunlight disinfect his past.
> This level of premeditated collusion with the media is not even up for debate at this point
Ooh, me, me, I debate it. This is a dumb thing to say and you should feel dumb for saying it. It makes no sense and is not based on anything.
> I have to wonder how many years (decades?) this has been occurring.
Probably ever since the industry started to consolidate. Just because it happens doesn't mean that it happening means what you think it means, if that makes any sense [1].
[1] http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/477656-when-you-re-young-you...
Insults do not qualify as debate. His claim is based on, or should include, the portions of the Podesta emails that have showed a dismaying amount of coordination with the press. Approving quotes, approving stories, printing talking points. Compare their behavior against the guidelines set out by the Society of Professional Journalists. It's a disgrace.
Those media organizations and those journalists may have editorial and personal opinions on who they would prefer to win the election, but there's one thing they care more about than any of those preferences: access.
The idea that the press wouldn't or shouldn't care about vacuuming up every talking point that a campaign is willing to spit out, no matter how obviously-canned it is, is to fundamentally misunderstand the operations of the 24 hour news cycle.
This isn't happening because journos care about Hillary Clinton. This is an alignment of the incentives of politicians and journalists that ultimately reduces transparency and harms public discourse. The fact that the same thing likely isn't happening with the Trump campaign says more about the peculiarities of that campaign than it says anything about the same media companies' willingness to play the same game of ball with Generic Q. Republican.
Glenn Thrush, Politco's Chief Political Correspondent, decided to make it crystal clear in the
following email to Podesta back in April 2015 in which he admits that he has "become a hack."
The email below from Thrush was sent to get guidance related to an article he published the
very next day entitled "Hillary's Big-Money Dilemma."
Because I have become a hack I will send u the whole section that pertains to u
Please don't share or tell anyone I did this
Tell me if I fucked up anythingThe whole purpose the press existence is to be an independent check on government and to pose to politicians the questions that the electorate cares about.
edit: Just to be clear, nobody (or nearly so) finds your claim controversial or new. It's flaw isn't that it's incorrect, it's that it isn't useful*.
The rhetoric I was replying to implied that the politicians and the journalists are on the same team because they have the same goals. That's not the case. I think keeping that in mind is plenty useful.
Of course, as The Center for Public Integrity [1] recently pointed out, "journalists" aren't just
making "in-kind" contributions to the Clinton campaign, they're donating real cash as well.
In fact, according the their review of political contributions made by people working in
various media outlets, 96% were found to go to Hillary while only 4% accrued to the benefit
of the Trump campaign.
If they were motivated purely by money, they'd all be promoting Trump. He has driven a shocking amount of traffic / wealth to all journalist outlets. Stories they write on him are massively more popular, and he's demonstrated he'll cut off access for their lying. So if it was just money, pussy grabbing would be a good thing.
They did not mention that the deleted emails were deleted AFTER the subpoena was issued [1]. They did not mention that Clinton aides carried hammers with them to destroy phones in case the phones were demanded by the FBI. They did not comment on the number of "I don't remember" answers that Clinton gave to the FBI. They did not comment on the fact that Clinton claimed to not remember what a "c" meant on documents. They did not comment on the fact that Clinton claimed to have no memory of receiving training on the handling of sensitive documents. I could go on for pages, but I have work to do.
Suffice it to say that the media have been complicit in matters dating back years before Podesta emails, not days or weeks. Your contention that they just aren't reporting the Podesta emails because they're boring (they are not, they are dynamite) is false on it's face.
[1] http://www.empirestatenews.net/2016/10/16/worse-than-waterga...
Yet they were requested to be deleted long before the subpoena was issued[1]. Specifically:
In December 2014, after the work-related emails were preserved, Mills told Platte River Networks – which at the time was managing Clinton’s private server – that Clinton “decided she no longer needed access to any of her e-mails older than 60 days.” Mills instructed the PRN employee — who was not identified — “to modify the e-mail retention policy” on Clinton’s server “to reflect this change,” the FBI said.
But the PRN employee mistakenly did not make the retention-policy change and did not delete the old emails until sometime between March 25 and March 31, even though Mills had sent PRN an email on March 9 that mentioned the committee’s request to preserve emails.
The PRN employee who deleted the emails was a recipient of Mills’ message. However, the employee told the FBI that “he had an ‘oh shit’ moment and sometime between March 25-31, 2015 deleted the Clinton archive mailbox from the PRN server and used BleachBit to delete the exported .PST files he had created on the server containing Clinton’s e-mails.”
Read into that whatever you want, but the fact that it's not really true might have something to do with why it isn't being reported on.
> They did not mention that Clinton aides carried hammers with them to destroy phones in case the phones were demanded by the FBI.
That's not what happened[2]. As secretary of defense, she had old phones after she switched destroyed.
> I could go on for pages, but I have work to do.
You could substantiate your statements with sources. You could have done that from the beginning. Perhaps if you looked for less biased and more fact based sources rather than blogs that feature a giant picture of Clinton snapped in an inopportune moment with giant neon green letters saying "LOL!" photoshopped on.
> Your contention that they just aren't reporting the Podesta emails because they're boring (they are not, they are dynamite) is false on it's face.
Well, I've been following and reading reporting on the emails. It's all pretty ho-hum and what I would expect from any campaign so far. Of course, it's easy to taking boring things out of context and imagine salacious components to them. That doesn't make them any more damning in reality though.
1: http://www.factcheck.org/2016/09/the-fbi-files-on-clintons-e...
2: http://www.businessinsider.com/how-hillary-clinton-aide-dest...
Further, she didn't just delete emails, she went and wiped the hard drive. Perhaps just good data practice, but, when it comes to politics and public servants I'm far too cynical to believe that. Finally, she determined what was considered private and deleted it. Do you really trust that? Do you really think that things that were work related wouldn't get swept up with the personal stuff while they were going about deleting things?
Either way, I've heard rumors they've been recovered, so disagreements there could be resolved in due time. If not, we can argue then :)
If they are personal records, she does, because they are her personal property, and are covered under her fourth amendment rights until they are specifically requested by subpoena. I'm not sure if the subpoena requested all email, or work email. The question really being asked usually is whether they were all actually personal emails or not.
I think it's worth noting that her behavior with regard to deleting personal emails is not out of what would be considered normal for someone completely innocent. If I knew I was innocent but was under subpoena for work email and I had personal email that I would really rather not get out, I might delete them as well before turning everything over. Unless specififed not to, there's nothing illegal with doing so, as long as you can whether any flak if people want to cast doubt.
It's worth noting the Podesta emails address this[1]. One of the interesting thing about the Podesta email summaries I've seen is how they don't really corroborate any of the accusations we've seen.
> Further, she claims she wanted them deleted then, but never clarifies if they were deleted at the time of request or when the subpoena arrived.
It seems pretty well covered to me. She specified she wanted them deleted months prior to the subpoena, but the employee did not act on that command until much later (after the subpoena arrived). So, emails were deleted after a subpoena arrived, but the request to do so happened long prior to that.
> Further, she didn't just delete emails, she went and wiped the hard drive. Perhaps just good data practice, but, when it comes to politics and public servants I'm far too cynical to believe that.
It's your right to be cynical. That said, as I mentioned above, unless the subpoena should have covered personal emails, I'm not sure what she did was wrong, even if it does cast doubt on whether we can be sure we got all the work emails.
> Finally, she determined what was considered private and deleted it. Do you really trust that? Do you really think that things that were work related wouldn't get swept up with the personal stuff while they were going about deleting things?
Actually, I believe her lawyers determined that. They didn't actually read all the emails though, they used Subject lines and addresses. That said, while it might have miscategorized some (and some were lost prior to that for reasons explained in that summary), that process is unlikely to have randomly happened to remove all majorly incriminating emails, so you're still left with whether you trust the lawyers tasked with reviewing them or not.
What this all really comes down to is whether you think someone can really get away with criminal activity at this level for decades. My belief is that if there was real evidence in any of the umpteen things she's been investigated for, we'd have seen it. Instead, we have lots of accusations, but nothing ever seems to add up to anything. This lends itself to two conclusions, either the Clintons are masterminds at committing crime and never getting caught, or they have been a favored political target due to their high political profile for an extended period of time. Considering I think even if they originally where complicit in a problem or too long in their past, the return on investment for piddly amounts of money (to them) for what amount to favors seems a stupid trade-off. If you make millions of dollars a year, and are already one of the most powerful people in the world, why would you get caught up in the stupid things she's accused of, like taking a large donation to her charity, which she can't really use, in order to get a meeting? To my sensibilities, it's much more likely that someone donated to one of her charities in hope that it would help (or on bad info that it would help), and maybe it did help, but in the same way that donating to the Red Cross would have, by showing the person was a philanthropist and making a good impression that way.
1: http://www.politico.com/live-blog-updates/2016/10/john-podes...
Agreed.
>Those media organizations and those journalists may have editorial and personal opinions on who they would prefer to win the election, but there's one thing they care more about than any of those preferences: access. The idea that the press wouldn't or shouldn't care about vacuuming up every talking point that a campaign is willing to spit out, no matter how obviously-canned it is, is to fundamentally misunderstand the operations of the 24 hour news cycle.
I was trained as a journalist before I became an engineer. I'd argue I understand this stuff better than most. Perhaps I had the benefit of a journalism program that was better than it had any right to be, but we had ethics drilled into us pretty heavily. I can assure you the things in those emails between the press and the Clinton campaign are shameful on a journalistic ethics front.
Further, if you want to buy into the philosophy behind the press and why it's given so much leeway in American law, then their fundamental role is to serve as the fourth estate. It's supposed to be the role of the press to take an adversarial stance to government and hold them accountable. Clearly this doesn't happen much, but worse still, the Podesta emails reveal that they're actively facilitating the goals of a presidential nominee. That's horrible. If you want an off-topic thing to look into for this, look up Amber Lyons. I had her in the 'maybe she's credible' pile until this came out. Now she's in the 'There's something to her claims' pile.
>the peculiarities of that campaign than it says anything about the same media companies' willingness to play the same game of ball with Generic Q. Republican.
Most news organizations are staffed with people who lean fairly heavily to the left. It sounds like you might be surprised to find out just how much. It used to be the case, and was what I was taught, that you fought your bias as much as possible, did your best to avoid editorializing and didn't let yourself just become a mouth piece. There's a reason why someone picks up the New York Times rather than combing through the press releases from the Clinton & Trump campaigns. Obviously Fox News is the notable dissenter in providing this kind of service to Republican candidates. Still, if you run the numbers it's something like 80% / 20%.
Overall, the thing that has been pretty evident to me during this campaign, even before the Podesta leaks, is that the bulk of the press has decided to burn their credibility in promoting Clinton. This even goes back to when she was campaigning against Sanders for the nomination, though to a lesser extent. I think the moment something smelled off to me was when she won the six coin tosses in Iowa (?) to begin the primaries and I didn't see many eyebrows raised in the reporting I looked at. Maybe I missed it, but since then They've held to a pretty consistent pattern of burning bridges to protect her.
> I can assure you the things in those emails between the press and the Clinton campaign are shameful on a journalistic ethics front.
And programmers get taught to write documentation and not make things work with hacks or produce spaghetti code. The way the sausage gets made not comporting with professional standards is neither unheard of nor is it isolated to journalism.
They're being shameful, yes. But they're doing it because it's a living, not because they have an agenda.
> if you want to buy into the philosophy behind the press and why it's given so much leeway in American law, then their fundamental role is to serve as the fourth estate
Off-topic, but I don't. I view all media -- explicitly biased and ostensibly not alike -- as fully protected under the umbrella of free speech, for which I am an irrationally ardent proponent.
We can make objective claims about our present media not doing a very good job at informing society without getting into that, though. Our principal disagreement seems to be about why that's happening. You seem to want to ascribe agency to it. I think that's a mistake, in the aggregate. Maybe I'm just being a cynic, but I don't think so.
> the bulk of the press has decided to burn their credibility in promoting Clinton
I'm not a fan of Clinton by any stretch of the imagination. I see how Clinton scandals get significantly less airtime than Trump scandals, but I have a hard time believing that isn't being driven by ratings. Trump has been graded on a heck of a curve at times, in ways that can't be considered "objective."
And it was seven coin tosses ;-)
I'm honestly unsure at this point how to take any specific cry about a Clinton scandal, and it's a problem of the Republicans' (and Trump's) making. You can only cry wolf so many times, so loudly, again and again for the exact same incident even, until people assume you can't be trusted to watch for wolves at all.
>And programmers get taught to write documentation
That isn't an ethics issue, it's disingenuous to compare the two (not trying to ascribe malice to you). I do recognize the point you're trying to make in terms of quality being sacrificed to business concerns, and I'll touch on that (a bit indirectly) in a moment.
>Off-topic, but I don't. I view all media -- explicitly biased and ostensibly not alike -- as fully protected under the umbrella of free speech
Two things here. 1.) You (presumably) aren't and have never been a journalist or tried to be one. I assure you that this is a thing that sits at the heart of American Journalist philosophy, at least as I experienced it. I probably shouldn't have phrased it in a way that let you have an opinion. Also, sorry for the appeal to authority :) 2.) The first amendment specifically calls out religion, press and assembly. There was a vision for the role of press in government; they aren't within a country mile of living up to that but still enjoy the freedom. 2a.) We can agree on rabid amounts of free speech at least, and despite press failings I don't want to take away their freedom to print whatever.
>We can make objective claims about our present media not doing a very good job at informing society without getting into that, though. Our principal disagreement seems to be about why that's happening.
Yeah, that would just be a diversion. Let's leave it, as I imagine we agree anyway.
>You seem to want to ascribe agency to it
Well, to cheat and be a jerk: All people have agency. To be more honest, I think there's a mix of business concerns and ideology. As I was trying to point out, Trump has made them a shitload of money. He's probably the best thing that's ever happened to print and cable news, at least in the last decade. Even were they to report on him honestly, he would make them a shitload of money. He's controversial without them needing to help.
This might just be something that I will fail to convey to you, but my experience from a (kind of) insider's view, is that most journalists are partisan. Nobody has to love that, it's an acknowledged reality, and uncontroversial (for any journalist with credibility). The trouble is that the effort or even pretense of trying to mitigate bias has gone away, which I don't think you disagree with. Something that might be less known to you is that most credible news outlets try to make it a point to separate the business concerns from editorial concerns for just this reason. At least publicly that is certainly the case. Theoretically there's a publicist and an executive editor, and the two manage their respective departments without consultation. We're probably both cynical enough to realize they're full of shit, but that rule didn't come out of a vacuum and was adhered to in the one paper I wrote for (though I was freelancing / interning so obviously my insight was limited). Additionally, you might be familiar with the idea of an ombudsman. Theoretically, this is a person who is paid by the paper to shit all over it when it fucks up. It's painful but necessary. Clearly these people aren't doing their jobs.
My point is that, at least historically, and recently at that, papers have acknowledged bias and at least made a reasonable effort to counter it. In another comment, maybe from you, business concerns have taken a toll. Consolidation mixed with adopting modern, short-sighted executive level business decisions have had a deleterious effect on quality. C-levels aren't trained in, and don't care about, the ethics training journalists get, and anyone given free reign to indulge their bias is going to struggle to resist that. I guess I'm not saying that you're necessarily wrong, but rather that there's been a decay in journalism (caused by your opinion) that's resulted in the present conditions (caused by my opinion).
This is already so long 90% of people aren't going to read it, so I'll leave it here: Because of my previous passion for journalism, the current failures deeply pain me, and have been more of my focus than the candidates. The failure is not caused just by business concerns, but people gleefully letting their bias loose and enjoying their ethical lapse. We can probably both agree it's a disservice to the country and will hasten the demise of print and cable news. But in the meantime they will reap the seductive gains of short term thinking. I'll save predictions for the future for another time.
I hope you're stuck on a bus or something where this screed is a welcome diversion :)
"She’s saying Russia, Russia, Russia… It could also be China… It could also be somebody sitting on their bed who weighs 400 pounds."
"If I were running ‘The View’, I’d fire Rosie O’Donnell. I mean, I’d look at her right in that fat, ugly face of hers, I’d say ‘Rosie, you’re fired’"
"I have never seen a thin person drinking Diet Coke."
"She doesn’t have the look [...] She doesn’t have the stamina."
"How is Bernie Sanders going to defend our country if he can't even defend his own microphone?"
"Everybody is laughing at Jeb Bush [...] A pathetic figure!"
Indeed, they do not.
>> This level of premeditated collusion with the media is not even up for debate at this point.
>Ooh, me, me, I debate it. This is a dumb thing to say and you should feel dumb for saying it. It makes no sense and is not based on anything.
To which you respond with a bunch of Trump quotes. How did they address at all the point of media collusion with the Clinton campaign? How is this not just an attempt at ideological bickering used to redirect the conversation to something you presume I'm interested in arguing about rather than focus on something pretty damning?
The bus tape was archival footage. If you're suggesting that every hour of archival audio and video of Mr. Trump should have been sought after as soon as he became the nominee, then, again, you're underestimating just how volatile and fickle the news cycle is.
The plausibility of "the official story" (to reiterate: that the footage became an object of interest for NBC after former cast and crew from The Apprentice came forward to disclose his ill manner on the set of that show) seems pretty plain to me. Occam's razor defeats your conspiratorial thinking without breaking a sweat.
Regarding Stern, CNN had as "BREAKING NEWS!@!" that Trump told Stern it was OK to call Ivanka a piece of ass. Possibly CNN was lying about presenting this as something they just discovered; is that what you are claiming?
Yes, I am suggesting that every show would have stuck someone (more likely, a team) on reviewing their material (prioritizing the outtake material, if anything) on Trump as soon as it turned out he was a big deal. I am not clear as to why you think this would not have occurred; why Occam's razor supports that viewpoint. The bus tape would have been a huge story at any time and would not have required building off interest in other stories to investigate (e.g. "Gee whiz, we should look at the archival footage and see what we have! Why didn't we think of this before!")
Because those "teams" live from headline to headline and those sorts of fishing expeditions are expensive.
WashPo released it on the same day that they got it, after several hours verifying it's authenticity.
That's not evidence to fit your claim of premeditated collusion.
And it's not like the nomination process is sacrosanct. For many years primaries were ignored altogether in favor of smoke filled rooms. That only started changing in 1968. It was made more democratic in 1972, which resulted in the nomination of George McGovern, who got his clock cleaned in the general. Sometimes party elites do know better.
At least they pretend to be so now. Traditionally, newspapers were not terribly concerned with that, and didn't even bother much to hide this fact.
It's actually better than it's ever been. Not that it's good now; it was just much worse before.
another way in which Trump is a political tsunami... to paraphrase Warren Buffett: when the tide goes out, you can see who's been swimming naked
I have no doubt that they will rig the election if the media doesn't get the job done. How else could they let Hillary run? They must be pretty confident that it doesn't matter that most people hate her.
Regarding the media, all are culprits in biased news coverage whether those on the right like Breitbart or Fox News or on the left like NYT or Washington Post but this held belief that you should expect nothing less than 100% impartial coverage of the elections when they endorse their favorite candidate publicly is also a bit misplaced.
[1] http://www.infowars.com/expose-rapist-bill-clinton-win-5k/
Infowars does not hide it - it is on their website.
Clinton campaign's plots/schemes would have remained unknown to the public, if not for Wikileaks.
I encourage anyone reading to watch the video, acknowledge it's biased and draw your own conclusions.
You can't edit words into someone's mouth.
I think this is the soundest advice here. The formatting of the video makes it obvious that there is a partisan motivation behind this investigation. However, the video also provides a certain amount of raw and non-processed evidence that can be judged on their own merits.
I know you're trying to be dismissive with your glib comment but let me tell you: I do hold him to the same standard and I find him to be a jackass.
That doesn't change the fact that James O'Keefe is a convicted criminal (attempted to wiretap Sen. Mary Landrieu's office).
It also doesn't change the fact that he heavily edited the ACORN video to skew the story, nor that they were humoring him and reported his nonsense to the police. Conservatives wanted to believe his lies so they did.
O'Keefe has zero credibility.
As a simple example, in a narrative film I'll cut from angle to another when actor A takes a drink from a glass of water. The reason I want to cut is that I have begun to feel bored by shot #1 already for whatever reason - actor A may not be that good looking, or not a great actor, or the scripted dialog may be dull, whatever. It's boring, and that means you the viewer will be bored with it soon too. But I can't just cut away or you'll know what I'm up to. I'll wait until actor A engages in a physical movement and your visual cortex will quietly paper over the transition for me. Hmm, Actor A drank from the glass at different times during different takes, and the action of drinking doesn't line up with the dialog? No problem, I'll just cut briefly to a shot of actor B reacting to actor A (and by exploiting the Kuliekov effect, I can significantly change the meaning of the scene depending on what facial expression I choose to show on actor B) and then I'll cut back to actor A talking again from the new angle.
You would be surprised how many movie scenes depicting two people in a room were shot across 2 different days with the actors never actually meeting in person. Likewise you would be astonished at the number of ways the same footage could be combined to tell radically different stories. I have made edits where I have run pieces of footage backwards and not even the director noticed until I pointed it out. Don't think you can't be fooled by even a semi-skillful editor, your brain has been trained in how to watch TV and movies probably from infancy, and while it is not too hard to break free of that training, nor is it hard for others to manipulate your pre-existing mental reflexes.
The hidden video he released today looks incontrovertible. One can only imagine all the other things these dark political operatives do if they were willing to discuss what they did so explictly with people they presumably don't know well.
Could you elaborate on the Kuliekov effect? Couldn't find anything related with a quick google search.
I remain in awe of the state apparatus, and the cynical brilliance required to run it all (assuming there is such a central clique).
I mean, how brilliant you have to be to hire a person that would go to reddit to ask about how to cover up your tracks? Or claim you forgot everything about it when asked, including seeing documents that bear your signature? A five year old could do such performance.
I'd discount some of the paranoia around the FRB, but the modern monetary system appears to be a very very clever way of herding a population; really if you control the banks, you essentially control a population (since loans become the only way to obtain currency). Taxes then for instance would be superfluous were it not necessary to bring a currency into circulation and to avoid inflation (and thus avoid seditious movements).
I've been trying to find mathematics that describes the banking system, but it appears there are none (other than such hand-wavy deductions).
This is like in football (soccer) where it's against the rules to grab your opponent inside the box when they're taking a free kick on your goal but everyone is doing it anyway, it becomes pointless to complain and moan about it. The same goes for hand-checking in basketball and I'm sure you could find analogies in American football as well.
Of course, everyone knows that in a presidential race, things get pretty heated up. However, the violence of the conflict between the two campaigns goes well beyond the violence I anticipated. It seems that everything is now fair game.
More importantly, it is clear that there is a huge collusion between the mediatic and political sphere. Again, on a magnitude that goes well beyond what was suspected. Finally, it is quite disturbing - again, from a contemplative PoV - that high-ranking party officials and a candidate themself actually take an active role in this. Before watching this, I would have expected some shady consulting firm running through an ocean of intermediaries and headed by a "special advisor" to some high-ranking DNC official. No, in fact the hierarchy height is much smaller.
PS: As far as voting is concerned, I'm still in information collection mode and don't support any candidate at this point.
For instance, the comment about public/private positions is one of the most common ones you hear people complain about (and Clinton was asked about it during the debate). Here's the full statement:
"You just have to sort of figure out how to -- getting back to that word, "balance" -- how to balance the public and the private efforts that are necessary to be successful, politically, and that's not just a comment about today. That, I think, has probably been true for all of our history, and if you saw the Spielberg movie, Lincoln, and how he was maneuvering and working to get the 13th Amendment passed, and he called one of my favorite predecessors, Secretary Seward, who had been the governor and senator from New York, ran against Lincoln for president, and he told Seward, I need your help to get this done. And Seward called some of his lobbyist friends who knew how to make a deal, and they just kept going at it. I mean, politics is like sausage being made. It is unsavory, and it always has been that way, but we usually end up where we need to be. But if everybody's watching, you know, all of the back room discussions and the deals, you know, then people get a little nervous, to say the least. So, you need both a public and a private position. And finally, I think -- I believe in evidence-based decision making. I want to know what the facts are. I mean, it's like when you guys go into some kind of a deal, you know, are you going to do that development or not, are you going to do that renovation or not, you know, you look at the numbers. You try to figure out what's going to work and what's not going to work."
I would encourage everyone to look at the original source anytime someone makes a claim about what was said in the e-mail.
That's my main problem with all these arguments «false equivalency» in their pursuit of seeming and sounding fair, balanced and impartial, they resort to equate all the horrendous things that Trump said or did with these harmless details that Hillary or her chief of staff said behind closed doors or in private emails.
It's just not right and unfair for Hillary and her campaign.
1. Having read the emails I disagree that there is anything damning in them. Even when campaign staffers suggested bad things they got shot down. The email releases have been one big nothing-burger after another. The media is like a toddler... unless you have something interesting going on their attention wanes quickly.
2. The Trump sexual assault tape is not bad because he had a foul mouth. In some cases focusing on that is a deliberate effort at mis-direction. Trump can swear all he likes and no one except a few pearl-clutching grandmas care. What is gross is Trump boasting that he commits sexual assault against women and they let him get away with it because he's rich and famous. That's what was so offensive about that video.
Now they're releasing the emails in parcels to manipulate the 24 hour news cycle - e.g. "More Hillary Emails leaked!"
There's no smoking gun in those emails, and the majority of the "There's a lot there" statements boil down to examples like this: http://i.imgur.com/eRRc02n.png?1
That's be the tail wagging the dog.
They release daily to participate in the 24h news cycle.
If there was any actual news in the emails, released each day, then it wouldn't be manipulation. It would be news, like how WashPo released the Trump sex assault tape the same day they got it.
As it is now, they're withholding empty, hacked information and timing the releases to participate and manipulate headlines during the U.S. election period.
Empty information? What does that even mean?
So you think it was fine for the current head of the DNC to leak questions from CNN to hillary during the primary?
And you think it's fine for the under secretary of state to be trying to bribe the FBI to reduce the classification of emails found on her server? Personally I don't see how that isn't a crime.
A subpoena was already in place for those documents, it's tampering with evidence.
Wow.
Trump is a buffoon; I'm sure you can scour the public record for innumerous idiotic things he's said over the years. What do you expect from the guy?
Clinton, on the other hand, is a career politician and public servant. I think those behind-the-scenes dealings are far more dangerous.
Trump is the Republican nominee for the 2016 US presidential elections which means that he's as much a politician as Hillary or Obama is and should be held against the same set of standards like every politician does and this notion that since he's novice in this field he deserves to get preferential treatment and be forgiven for all his mistakes and wrongdoings is bit disingenuous.
I hope you're kidding when you say he's as much a politician as Hilary. He has very limited political experience. She's been doing it for 30+ years.
He's a candidate, but has held precisely zero public offices thus far.
>this notion that since he's novice in this field he deserves to get preferential treatment and be forgiven for all his mistakes and wrongdoings is bit disingenuous.
What preferential treatment are you talking about? Who said anything about "forgiving" him? I'm saying, "what on earth do you expect by nominating a TV personality"? I expect more from my politicians. Apparently you don't. Perhaps that's why your election is a mess?
This is not a game. This is a real and serious national election for a superpower, and this levity when dealing with these matters is not helpful.
Your position seems to be along those lines above. If not, please clarify.
Unless your single source of news is the Trump sub-reddit, most of the mainstream media does nothing but rip Trump.
>This is a real and serious national election for a superpower, and this levity when dealing with these matters is not helpful.
Don't lecture me, my country isn't having this issue. You put a bizarre TV personality up for president, not me. Citizens get the government they deserve.
> Who said anything about "forgiving" him? ... I expect more from my politicians.
gotchange's point is that some people give Trump a lower bar of expectations because he's an 'outsider' or 'new at this' - that difference in expectations is forgiving him to a certain degree. Like a handicap at sport.
gotchange's whole point is about expecting more from politicians, and asking why the expectations are lowered on the Trump side.
To argue that he's remotely as experienced as Hilary Clinton is simply disingenuous.
>gotchange's whole point is about expecting more from politicians, and asking why the expectations are lowered on the Trump side.
gotchange's whole point was that somehow, something (not sure what) is biased against Hilary here. Trump is being skewered about this on every channel, on every website. What more do you want? This is a massive scandal, and I'm sure there's more to come.
>gotchange's point is that some people give Trump a lower bar of expectations because he's an 'outsider' or 'new at this'
No, my expectations are lower for Trump because he has a history of being a buffoon. But you do realize there's a difference between "expectation" and "acceptance"?
For what it's worth, I think they are both terrible candidates. I have no idea how Trump got this far, but I don't think there's another candidate that Hilary could have possibly beat.
No-one is saying that. I just said that he's not "very limited".
> Trump is being skewered about this on every channel, on every website. What more do you want? ... my expectations are lower for Trump because ... realize there's a difference between "expectation" and "acceptance"
The fact that despite all his mess, he is still a serious contender in the competition, and that means plenty of people are forgiving him and accepting him, despite the media coverage, and regardless of your personal opinion. It's actually a pretty shameful indictment on the American public, that so many of them support such a candidate.
I'm not sure why that's a bad thing?
Not saying it is.
https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/57vefh/podesta_...
Some of the things found were:
1. The Goldman Sachs speeches, showing that Hillary has a "public and private position", is still against gay marriage, wants open borders, wants to enact gun bans, and wants to establish a hemispheric common market.
2. John Podesta (Hillary's campaign chair) giving a list of "needy latinos" to call.
3. The DNC planning fake Trump assault scandals
4. Clinton Campaign Discusses Which Emails To "Hold" Hours After Subpoena
...all among many, many other things. We still have another 10k Podesta emails to go.
With the exception of a common market I must strongly disagree with your assessments.
I'll also point out that everyone has public and private positions and everyone except the most socially inept tries to tailor what they say to their audience to get a better reception. That's half of being a politician: glad-handing and smooth-talking your constituents and colleagues into going along with your plan.
> 2. John Podesta (Hillary's campaign chair) giving a list of "needy latinos" to call.
What's your point? Is that supposed to compare to calling Mexicans rapists, saying more countries should have nuclear weapons, calling for a ban on muslim immigrants, saying you want veto-power over the press, claiming US elections are illegitimate, attacking a Gold Star family, ... I mean I could go on and on and on here.
> 3. The DNC planning fake Trump assault scandals
I haven't seen anything legit on this. Care to elaborate? I know some campaign staffers have occasionally proposed really stupid ideas but they were always shot down. If there is proof that anyone actually carried out such a plan please let us know.
> 4. Clinton Campaign Discusses Which Emails To "Hold" Hours After Subpoena
This is standard practice. It's called a document retention notice and every single company in the US follows this exact procedures. The court orders you to deliver evidence and you must figure out which documents are covered under that order. If you just backed up all your servers and dumped them on the court wholesale you'd be held in contempt.
2. Current DNC chair (then CNN analyst) Donna Brazile giving Hillary Townhall questions early http://www.politico.com/blogs/on-media/2016/10/roland-martin...
3. Hillary admitting that our greatest allies Qatar and Saudia Barbaria fund ISIS https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/3774
4. Bill Clinton getting a $1m birthday gift from Qatar for access http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/oct/13/wikileaks-em...
But I guess who can use the toilet where is more important than spying on people, taking away their freedom, being habitual liar and hypocrite by taking money from the people who are supposed to be everything you believe in against.
How is Trump any worse? He is just smart enough to think what he's saying, all in all they would make a great team with Hillary.
In the end, I've been voting Libertarian and/or "not the incumbent" for a few years now, and wish more people would do so.
I found this site which summarizes the finding (tweeted by a Trump supporter): http://www.vaskal.ca/podestafiles
The Clinton Foundation is the new SuperPAC.
At what point is a $1 million birthday gift seen as a gift from a friend? Or a "charitable donation" ?
Sure, there's no evidence of pay for play in explicit terms. Doing so would be tantamount for a legal definition of bribery. However, consider the natural progression of the PAC if it were to use the same loophole of charity instead. Would a charity request for money be considered access, at the same level as PAC influence?
At some point, the foundation should be considered a profitable business rather than a charity, given the immense staffing and expenditures of operation in a billion dollar+ charity organization.
It's not trivial to ignore the oddities that abound when it does not operate like any other charity organization. Plane tickets for Hillary and Chelsea, car expenses, six figure living expenses, etc.
The grey area of having ~70 year billionaires running for president is when you see just how they live and work, and how they got there... It's usually disgusting or disappointing. It almost always has to be.
If you disagree, examine what it is you believe is good about the process of allowing, then choosing between the richest of egomaniacs, to lead a nation with a sense of morality or ethical standards. The democratic process is acutely broken by any standard if you believe that PACs and now, "charity organizations" is a net benefit.
Considering all of the organizations affiliated with the Clinton Foundation, he said, CharityWatch concluded about 89 percent of its budget is spent on programs. That’s the amount it spent on charity in 2013, he said.
We looked at the consolidated financial statements (see page 4) and calculated that in 2013, 88.3 percent of spending was designated as going toward program services — $196.6 million out of $222.6 million in reported expenses.
We can’t vouch for the effectiveness of the programming expenses listed in the report, but it is clear that the claim that the Clinton Foundation only steers 6 percent of its donations to charity is wrong, and amounts to a misunderstanding of how public charities work.
> Would a charity request for money be considered access, at the same level as PAC influence?
Is it pay of play in the same way if a donation was made to a completely unaffiliated charity, such as the American Red Cross? What if the donation is made first, and the politician notices and it happens to make them look favorably on a meeting because it bodes well for the character of the person in question?
> At what point is a $1 million birthday gift seen as a gift from a friend? Or a "charitable donation" ?
It's a gift to you when it's actually to you, and not to a separate organization that spends it on things that aren't for your own benefit.
> At some point, the foundation should be considered a profitable business rather than a charity, given the immense staffing and expenditures of operation in a billion dollar+ charity organization.
I'm not sure you understand how charities work. They are generally rated by how much money donated goes back out in programs, services or donations to other organizations to achieve the same.
> It's not trivial to ignore the oddities that abound when it does not operate like any other charity organization. Plane tickets for Hillary and Chelsea, car expenses, six figure living expenses, etc.
You should substantiate statements like that with references. Preferably to trusted sources.
> The democratic process is acutely broken by any standard if you believe that PACs and now, "charity organizations" is a net benefit.
I don't believe charity organizations working as a PAC is beneficial, but I haven't seen any evidence of that either.
As some one coming to US from mainland China, I find this collusion between the media and the Democratic party familiar, yet the case with US is much more disturbing. Because in China, the relationship between CCP and the press is out in the open, people knew the press is the mouthpiece of the party and treat the information they receive from the press accordingly. Here in US, people do not know. This is truly frightening.
If you have some time, scroll through the Wikileaks Twitter. Very little noise, mostly content. https://twitter.com/wikileaks
Why does this canard keep coming up? This isn't 1973. The Middle East does not have the West by the balls with respect to energy anymore. We're invested in Saudi Arabia to keep it from imploding, not for natural resources. Not directly, at least, since oil money is one of the few things keeping it from imploding.
The US may well be largely energy independent but a large number of significant client states within its sphere of influence are not. The viability of those client states goes directly to the global effectiveness of US hegemony.
Is evidence of financial ties of Clinton and foundation aides to Russian oligarchy damaging? Depends on whether you think being financially tied to Putin and claiming Trump is in Putin's pocket in the same time is something bad to do or a clever game?
Is evidence of pay-for-play arrangements between State Dept., Clinton foundation and foreign investors - including same persons working for both at the same time - damaging or just a successful charity that nobody has to be ashamed of?
Is revelation that the president knew what he claimed to have no knowledge of damaging or just a clever tactic to defeat attacks?
Is revelation that Supreme Court was (successfully) pressured into making certain decisions by threatening to make it a campaign issue otherwise damaging or just a successful management?
Is calling your voters "needy latinos"[2] and Catholics "amazing bastardization of the faith"[3] damaging or just funny banter?
Is telling "we've all been quite content to demean government, drop civics and in general conspire to produce an unaware and compliant citizenry"[4] and complaining "compliance is obviously fading rapidly" damaging or accurate assessment of their electoral strategy?
It all depends on your point of view, I guess.
[1] https://theintercept.com/2016/10/09/exclusive-new-email-leak...
[2] https://theintercept.com/2016/10/09/exclusive-new-email-leak...
[3] http://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/oct/12/hillary-clinto...
For my part, I do both. I have bitched and kvetched at times about my clients being cripplingly needy, aggressively brain dead, and the like. I certainly wouldn't say it to their faces, and it doesn't mean I don't rely on their dollars to support my business. Nor either does it mean I am producing lesser-quality work for them.
This is a non-issue. People everywhere bitch about the outsiders they have to deal with in language that would never be used in business proper.
It is a massive chasm of difference between calling a group "needy" and categorizing them as illegals, rapists and murderers.
Now, if I were talking one on one with peers over beers, that's a different matter. There is much more freedom and it would allow some things said which are not meant to be heard by anybody not in the audience.
> People everywhere bitch about the outsiders they have to deal with in language that would never be used in business proper.
This is not exactly business - those are people that pretend to be champions of those "needy latinos" and represent them. It's a higher bar than just business transaction - I would have no problem doing business with a person I disagree with on everything and who maybe secretly hates me, as long as the business end is fine I'm fine. But I probably prefer to choose somebody else to represent me and speak for me.
The most damaging thing at the moment would have to be the attempted bribery from the under secretary to the FBI. Even in their excuse they are kind of admitting they attempted to bribe, but it just failed so we shouldn't worry.
The other part that really gets me is the death penalty question that the head of the DNC smuggled out of CNN when she was working there. I don't know how she hasn't resigned when you have been caught working within the media to manipulate things to benefit your prefered candidate.
And that skips over the whole issue of how the DNC was bias against bernie, it's just pilling on now how rigged the system was against him.
The Trump tapes? You mean that one 11-year-old video that shows him talking very crudely about sexual escapades?
Sure, that's reprehensible. Is it worse than what past presidents have done while in office? If not, why is it a problem now?
Why is one candidate's personal sex life a bigger problem than collusion with the media during the campaign and using a cabinet-level position to enrich oneself? That is, why is his sex life a bigger problem than her corruption exhibited while in public office, as well as her criminal mishandling of classified material, which directly harmed U.S. interests abroad, when many have been jailed for less (including since Comey's press conference)?
> PS: As far as voting is concerned, I'm still in information collection mode and don't support any candidate at this point.
That's nice. A suggestion: if you really care about who wins, look less at the candidates and more the platforms of them and their parties. The media makes it appear that this election is a contest between two people--but it's actually a contest between two competing worldviews which are vastly different from one another. You could swap any other Democrat for her and any Republican for him (though any actual Republican would differ much more from Trump than any other Democrat would differ from Clinton), and the underlying issues would be the same. The individual candidates are virtually a facade, a distraction from the real issues at stake.
a) mishandling of classified information
b) insisting that as commander-in-chief, you will order the US military to commit war crimes
Which do you think more directly harms US interests abroad?
If you're prepared to dismiss allegations of (and supporting boasts about) sexual molestation to simply be "his personal sex life" you have a very screwed up idea of sex and personal space.
Did you see the Project Veritas stuff? You know, where the Democratic campaign staffers confess to having hired mentally ill people to commit acts of violence at Trump rallies? And to hiring people to vote out-of-state, specifically using their own cars or rentals to avoid the obvious concern that would be generated by busing them in?
So think about this: if you have at least one of the campaigns having confessed to criminal electioneering, why would you believe anything they say? Why would you believe anyone they bring forward to slander the opposing candidate?
I don't support any such boasts. I support healthy skepticism. NBC didn't have any problem with Trump's conduct when he was a TV star raking in millions for them, but now that he's opposing Dear Leader, the evidence must be brought forward.
And you try to turn this around and make it about me? You're clearly not interested in truth of any kind.
Agreed. It's like some people somewhere woke up and realized hiring some script kiddies to hack old people that use the same password for all their accounts is a lot cheaper and easier than old-fashioned espionage.
The frenzied pace at which all of this is happening reminds me a child with a new toy.
>gaslighting from both sides
I disagree that Clinton is trying to distort reality. She is more old school - she just stright up lies from time to time. Trump, on the other hand, is quite literally trying to create an alternate reality.
The view the plebs demands often don't align with either the politicians vision for the country, what's possible near or long term, or the people you are indebted to (donors, etc).
In many cases it's acceptable and even advisable, in my opinion.
A head of state has insight into facts and knowledge of others about realities and facts that most will / can / not understand (and SOMETIMES shouldn't even be known publicly).
What's not acceptable is if a politician is a puppet for donors.
The amount of money and network it takes to become president in the US is ridiculous, and basically necessitates being dirty and indebted.
---
Also, Clinton is most likely no worse than most previous presidents. There's just considerably more information about her.
But if you have the choice between that and Trump, I cannot imagine how you could choose the latter.
Status quo vs. something different. The status quo is that Obama/Hillary have destabilised countless countries, and are sabre rattling against Russia, possibly leading to an eventual nuclear war.
By contrast, Trump is promising less wars, less interventionism, and otherwise is a relative wildcard with a penchant towards pragmatism and deal-making.
I'm not American, but on paper, it looks like Trump would be an improvement as far as world stability goes, I'd vote for him based on his policy concerning Russia alone.
The Clinton/Bush/Obama dynasties have not made the world a better place, have not contributed to anything positive IMO, and judging by all the leaked emails, they're all corrupt as well.
Also, I wouldn't call what Obama did sable rattling. Russia did invade several countries in the last years (Georgia, Ukraine, and maybe I'm missing one more?). If you don't have a good response for that, then how can you be trusted to defend your other allies (Poland, etc.)
Again, both actions you cite were reactions to US meddling in the region in the first place.
The fact Trump hasn't threatened any new invasions is already an improvement.
PS. Do you know who Mikheil Saakashvili is, what he did, where he is now, and why he's exiled from his own country? And have you seen Victor Yushchenko's face recently, what it looks like? The answers to both of these questions give a lot of insight into US actions in the region.
Right -- the several thousand army and special forces troops that Putin has since openly acknowledged sending there to size buildings and other strategic checkpoints were just out on vacation.
Either way -- the main point is (and presumably you do know this), the leased military base at Sevastopol != the Crimean peninsula.
Trump would improve relations with Russia.
I'm struggling to comprehend how you can look at Trump's statements and come out thinking that he'll improve world stability. Trump thinks that NATO is obsolete - he's happy for the US to abandon it and totally change the balance of power in Europe. He has stated that nuclear proliferation is a good thing, even encouraging an Asian nuclear arms race between the DPRK and ROK/Japan. He's asked, "why can't [the US] use nuclear weapons?"
I truly believe Trump is a populist reformer, trying to help the Everyman.
But keep in mind that even though the Populares were nominally "for the people", they only used them for their own ends. They were very much as political as the Optimates.
It's a sad state of affairs when a relative madman looks like a saner alternative to a truly sick and twisted authoritarian war-hawk.
But perhaps a madman is needed to tear down this malfunctioning and corrupt system where a few elites benefit at the expense of the common man.
It wouldn't surprise me if this election is the last one we'll ever have.
Populists can be dangerous, but they can also do a lot of good. It seems worth a chance in the current environment, though ever since I read this passage from http://www.constitution.org/eng/patriarcha.htm I've been wary of those with mass support: "Nero, Heliogabalus, Otho, Vitellius, and such other monsters of nature, were the minions of the multitude and set up by them. Pertinax, Alexander, Severus, Gordianus, Gallus, Emilianus, Quintilius, Aurelianus, Tacitus, Probus, and Numerianus, all of them good emperors in the judgment of all historians, yet murdered by the multitude."
The POTUS can literally end humanity with a few words. That's not an exaggeration. I want change as much as the next guy, but not if it means handing the power to start the apocalypse to a man like Donald Trump.
She tries to run on anti-establishment but there is no-one that is more establishment than her.
She tries to run on fighting for women's rights but she is an apologist for her husband's sordid history of sexual abuse towards other women, and not only that but she will readily accept funds from people that are the most misogynistic on the face of the Earth (the Gulf monarchies).
The difference is her stance is opposite from what she campaigns on -- there is a word for this: hypocrite. She clearly has no moral center.
Source?
> She tries to run on anti-establishment but there is no-one that is more establishment than her.
Sure, but that's just marketing, not substance.
> She tries to run on fighting for women's rights but she is an apologist for her husband's sordid history of sexual abuse towards other women, and not only that but she will readily accept funds from people that are the most misogynistic on the face of the Earth (the Gulf monarchies).
It is not clear that Clinton ever sexually abused women. He cheated on his wife, yes. But that is a far cry from 'sexual abuse'.
Re: gay rights.
How about that cackle?
What is a political opportunist? The Clintons have always operated via the polls. Against gay marriage when being against it was popular, now an ardent supporter.
> her private positions is nothing short of abject disdain for LGTBs.
You recognize and admit (as you have no choice doing, after the mountain of proof) that the media willingly prostitutes itself to further the cause of the current administration, with no regard for actual truth.
But you allow yourself to be influenced in your opinion of Donald Trump by that same media.
Imagine if a mean girl in your office told everybody that you were a brown-nosing little weasel who stared at her all the time, even though it's not true. Nobody will sit next to you at lunch, and you refuse to sit next to Billy, since that same girl said he picks is nose and eats it. Can't you understand that once you know she's a liar, you can't trust her about Billy either?
Watching a video of one of his rallies or a debate is sufficient to form my own opinion.
He (is)
- lies or distorts the truth almost everytime he opens his mouth
- extremely authoritarian
- very anti free media (at his rallys, media is cordoned off and he gets the crowd to yell at them for minutes. that is if the outlet hasn't been banned for reporting the truth. I wonder why the media is anti Trump...)
- sexist and abusive (enough evidence there, he says so himself)
- racist (again, no more evidence needed, he said it all)
- only cares about his own interests (yay, big tax cuts for the rich are his tax plan)
- very uneducated and uninformed on the actual issues
and just generally a disgusting man (my opinion).
It might very well be that he is not actually racist and that a lot of what he says is just what works with the crowds. That really doesn't matter much, though.
He is a populist par excellence. You can't trust anything he says.
And a very dangerous man to be the head of state in a country where that position holds so much power.
Were I American, I'd have a hard time voting for Clinton too. But that more than 40% would even consider voting for Trump scares me.
>racist (again, no more evidence needed, he said it all)
Trump has more support of black and hispanic people than any other Republican presidential nominee. [1] He has that because the ones who speak English (not getting their news only from Univision) understand that he wants to help Americans of all ethnic groups.
The co-opting of minority votes by the democratic machine is legendary, but it's over. Those minority AMERICANS that are getting the message undistorted by the media are understanding that their lives are made worse by liberal policies, not better.
It's not racist to wish to enforce current immigration law. It's not racist to wish to protect the jobs and lives of American citizens. If you're reading HN, I know you actually understand this, but choose to spit venom anyway.
[1] http://truthfeed.com/trump-surging-with-black-americans-beat...
The only way you can defend this kind of claim is cherry picking a high outlier poll against the comparable-time polling consensus (or low outliers) for previous GOP nominees.
http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2016/08/donald-trump-continu...
Is it your contention that any poll that doesn't support your thesis is an "outlier poll"?
1: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/13/upshot/how-one-19-year-old...
You can actually read the sampling percentages yourself, on most of them.
Anyway, I'll just leave this here. http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2016/10/actuarial-review-of-...
Truthfeed pointed out that NBC/WSJ didn’t mention that the poll was created by a Hillary Super PAC.
The sourced article does not prove that. It proves that the polling organization that did the polling received money. Now, as a rational person, I might think that was money required to actually run a poll, since they aren't free, and cost money to run. Zero consideration was given to this, no follow up was done with the polling organization to ask them what this money was for, nor to ask them if they received money from other organizations (from ones supporting Trump, for example).
A partisan blog is very low journalistic standards sourcing its news from another blog with both low journalistic and low investigative standards should not be your source of news. Seriously, how can you put forward a link like this with a straight face? Did you actually look into this at all, or did you just take what was written on random blogs as de facto truth, and completely suspend all disbelief?
It’s also well known that the Monmouth University poll is run by a Hillary Huckster who recently was caught manipulating a poll and then lied about it.
Already off to a good start! Such unbiased reporting, referring to a "Hillary Huckster". This claim, that they only weighted based on party affiliate, is easily proven false. I downloaded the PDF with the poll results in question[1], located the tables references, and ran some numbers. No weighting is immediately apparent by gender, but the gender breakdown is close to the actual makeup of the country/region, so none may have been needed (or it may have been small enough to be undetectable). There is definitely weighting by age and race, and of course past political affiliation. The claims that only political affiliation were weighted for are provably false. Even by the data shown in the blog, if anyone had bothered to actually look, rather than just take what was said at face value.
With all the liberal distortions and dishonesty we decided to have a small team of actuarial and statistics professionals take a look at a couple of the recent polls to get their take on the reliability of these polls.
Good! That sounds like a good way to investigate this. So who are these actuaries and statisticians? They aren't ever identified. See, this is where a real journalist would be called out for sloppy reporting. Are these actuarial and statistician professionals "self-professed", or are they recognized in their fields? Do they even really exist? We have no way to know for sure, beyond "this blog referenced them".
By selecting more Dems the polls are designed to provide a Dem result.
Actually, that's what the weighting is for. You know, the thing this blog recently calling out as unfair? The whole purpose is to account for random sampling error. If the population was split evenly at 50% Democrat and 50% Republican, but your sample showed of the 100 people you asked a question, 45 were Democrat and 55 were Republican, due purely to chance and the fact you are sampling, not asking every person, how do you propose we would adjust for that to account for how we think it would really break down on election day? We weight the Democrats up to 50%, and the Republicans down to 50%. In reality, it's not obviously not 50%, but that's the point of weighting a poll.
Let me put it very simply. If your news sources refer to Clinton as "Crooked Hillary" or alternatively to Trump as "The Donald", or refers to "The Democrats" or "The Republicans" as a singular force that can be corrupt, or make blanket statements like "Let’s face it NOBODY likes Hillary and NOBODY trusts Hillary" or reference blogs as their source that do any of those things, you can't really trust them to give you an honest, impartial view of anything. You may think the MSM is biased, but usually what I hear as evidence of that assertion is that they aren't reporting on "news" such as this, when it's very cleat this isn't "news", by any journalistic standard. The MSM might be somewhat biased, but I think it's clear they are definitively less biased than the source you referenced, which ranges between referencing other sources that are plain wrong and itself making unsubstantiated statements without evidence.
If you want info on polls to trust, it's not too hard to find people willing to look into them with a more balanced approach[2].
1: https://www.monmouth.edu/polling-institute/reports/MonmouthP... PDF at bottom.
I guess you haven't been paying attention. Trump was, for many years, a celebrity, making millions of dollars for NBC with his TV shows. Everything about him that they complain about now they happily accepted then, when it suited them.
For example, where was this 11-year-old video during the primaries? Answer that question and you will begin to understand what's going on here.
This "anti-free-media" claim is weird when you compare it to Clinton's campaign. For nearly a year she had zero press conferences--not even giving the media a chance. Now we find that her campaign specifically wanted to avoid answering any questions, to prevent the media from having a chance to question her about inconvenient stories. And we discover that the mainstream media is actively colluding with her campaign, giving them veto power over stories and quotes, etc.
So shouldn't you at least claim that she is as anti-free-media as he is?
> But that more than 40% would even consider voting for Trump scares me.
There is much more at stake here than these two individual people running for the office. The real contest here is between the movements they represent.
One of these two campaigns has been co-opted by a candidate who is not even a member of it. How did this candidate do so? With the help of the media, which vehemently attacked all other candidates during the primaries.
Now that same media is trying to destroy that candidate. That candidate is virtually a strawman candidate, set up for the sake of being torn down.
So, what does that tell you? Based on that, which candidate--which movement--should one vote for?
Seriously, can you provide references to back up some of this? The only thing I've heard about it so far is that in a profile piece, a portion was talked about off the record, and the reporter requested the use of some of the off the record material, and gave them a chance to review what could be used, since it was at their discretion it be used at all. The same reporter explained that there was a portion of his profile of Trump earlier he didn't use because it was off the record as well. The reporter is on record explaining this[1].
If there are other instances, please explain them, otherwise people are going to assume you are referring to this, which I think is pretty well explained. This is the reason people keep asking for sources. Without sources, it's just hearsay.
1: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/14/magazine/anatomy-of-a-medi...
How about Jake Tapper of CNN describing one of the events described in the emails about a question being leaked to the clinton campaign as "Journalistically it’s horrifying"?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2016/10/...
A Democratic Party official suggested the question was actually prep for a panel Brazile was set to appear on, saying Brazile normally checked with both Democratic candidates for their positions. The day after the email was sent, Brazile appeared on ABC's "This Week" as a panelist.
Now, this isn't the best excuse, so I'm not sure I believe it, but I'm also not sure what I'm supposed to expect the Clinton campaign to have done. Loudly proclaim they got a town hall question beforehand when Brazile may have been misinterpreted, or wrong? Denounce her afterwards when they had already benefited from the knowledge, so people would vilify them anyway? If this was as bad as it looks, I'm still left concluding it was, until proven otherwise, and isolated incident, and one in which I think the campaign may have benefited, but ultimately didn't act in any way I wouldn't have expected them to (barring further information, such as them pumping her for more info). I also don't harbor any fantasies that the Trump campaign would have acted any differently.
Finally, I agree, it is journalistically horrifying. That's because journalism has it's own standards and ethics to consider. It was horrible for a journalist. But Clinton and her staff aren't journalists, they are politicians, and while it would be great if it wasn't true, we expect less from them. That's why journalism is so important and why it's protected under the first amendment, because it keeps politicians in check.
1: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/10/wikileaks-email-hack-c...
Of course that's not indicative of a problem--they're just exercising their free speech rights, right? They're not biased at all...
(And before you go all wikipedia on me with "sources, sources! hearsay!", just google "journalist campaign contributions" and do your own homework.)
This is absolutely ridiculous, trump has been a public figure for 30+(?) years. Even if you ignore the smearing that's been happening for the past year in the media, there's plenty of reasons to think this guy is the last person you'd want as president
Really? Even with binary opinions like supporting gay marriage?
Absolutely! I agree wholeheartedly.
> The amount of money and network it takes to become president in the US is ridiculous, and basically necessitates being dirty and indebted.
I thought we just agreed that politicians should not be puppets? And now they must be dirty and indebted? The situation is definitely ridiculous!
> Also, Clinton is most likely no worse than most previous presidents. There's just considerably more information about her.
That is certainly a rational outlook on the matter. We are definitely in a period where we have more information available.
But something else has changed (some 60 years and just 10 presidents past) - politicians are now evaluated largely according to TV performance, and costs have spiralled out of control. Perhaps when it was much less costly to become president, you didn't need to be dirty and indebted?
> But if you have the choice between that and Trump, I cannot imagine how you could choose the latter.
Only this convoluted bit of logic could possibly suffice: I think Clinton would make an acceptable President, and would continue the status quo. There would be little reform-instead, things would just get a little bit worse. Trump would be awful. However, I think that I (and my son, who will not be 18 in this presidency) could probably survive with only moderate loss of personal resources. As a result of that... experiment, I expect that in coming years the DNC and the country in general would institute various reforms that would be good for the long-term health of the country.
So you agree that she is trying to create an alternative reality for private purposes?
[1] https://www.charitywatch.org/ratings-and-metrics/bill-hillar...
Page 18 and 19. Out of a budget of $217 million, they spent $34 million on direct program expenditures. That's about 16%, not 88% as your link would lead us to believe.
Additionally, what is this money spent on?
Clinton Global Initiative, Clinton Presidential Center, Clinton Development Initiative, Clinton Health Matters Initiative, Clinton Giustra Sustaninable Growth Initiative
A little self-serving, don't you think? And what percentage of the money going to those initiatives do you think are spent on directly charitable causes?
No one should be under the illusion that the Clinton Foundation is a charity. It isn't. It's a slush fund for political purposes. Look at how mismanaged the billions of dollars for Haiti has been if you want to see how charitable the Clintons are (spoiler: nearly none of the money has actually been spent on Haiti, and virtually none of it on direct relief).
If the foundation were trying to fight AIDS by directly funding the distribution of treatments the numbers in the report would be pretty bad, but that's not the picture here.
[1] http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/9/22/12893444/cl...
HRC is the same woman that literally laughed and bragged on a television interview about killing Gaddafi. As shitty as he was, he was a real person. A living human, and she laughs about killing him. It's fine to have pride in protecting your country, but killing someone (much less a head of state) should never be a laughing matter.
I find it a bit troubling that in the article he makes passing mention of the drug company the CGI was working with but no mention of how they got into huge trouble for not actually passing many drugs, including the AIDS vaccine through QA.
You really have to wonder the about effects of pushing down the margins of a drug company who wasn't even following safety standards at the time.
It's easy to imagine situations where that money is not being spent 100% efficiently, but it also seems unlikely that it is being spent perfectly inefficiently.
Every time we get a new accusation from Trump (Clinton Foundation is a slush fund!!!) it turns out that Trump is actually the one doing it.
It's classic mis-direction. Accuse your opponent first to put them on the defensive, then when evidence if your own wrongdoing comes out you can muddy the waters and say no one has clean hands.
The Clintons used their personal connections and foundation money to lobby drug companies to give massive discounts on AIDs drugs to poor people. They've literally saved thousands of lives.
Trump's charity has done nothing charitable. He hasn't even donated to it in many years.
This is unproductive and dishonest hyperbole and I'm not going to waste my breath explaining the obvious.
>It's classic mis-direction
So is your post. "Just look at how bad Trump is!".
>to lobby drug companies to give massive discounts on AIDs drugs to poor people
What they've actually done is lobby drug companies into business dealings that make money for everyone. Do you think the drug companies are just giving shit out for free because Hillary and Bill asked nicely? Of course not. This would be like Trump saying he's saved lives by providing employment with health benefits.
>Trump's charity has done nothing charitable
It's funny that you try to say this in the same post as "Trump uses his charity to pay off his businesses legal settlements" because that pay-off was actually a donation to a charity for veterans (something the city of Palm Beach agreed to).
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/24/us/cash-flowed-to-clinton-...
http://www.breitbart.com/radio/2016/09/22/clinton-cash-autho...
"What that means specifically is that they are going to turn over all the Blumenthal emails to the Committee that they hav along with some other HRC emails that include a slightly broader set of search terms than the original batch. That of course includes the emails Sid turned over that HRC didn't, which will make clear to them that she didn't have them in the first place, deleted them, or didn't turn them over."
- Purposefully witholding all emails that were between HRC and POTUS [2]:
"Think we should hold emails to and from potus? That's the heart of his exec privilege. We could get them to ask for that. They may not care, but I seems like they will."
- Evidence that the DNC purchased craigslist ads in attempt to frame Trump [3]
"We’re proud to maintain a “fun” and “friendly work environment, where the boss is always available to meet with his employees. Like it or not, he may greet you with a kiss on the lips or grope you under the meeting table. Interested applicants should send resume, cover letter, and headshot to [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>"
- Clinton Foundation accepting $1 million from Qatar for Bill's birthday. [4]
1. https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/9272
2. https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/9545
How is your reading comprehension this bad?
1. Your understanding of the comment here is miserable given the point you are trying to make. If you should find anything suspicious, it is that the 2nd set of e-mails, with a broader search, included e-mails that should have been turned over previously but weren't. If you want to go down that angle, you think the Benghazi committee would sit on those e-mails and not say anything if there was anything particularly salient in them?
2. You have an issue that State is considering whether releasing POTUS e-mails are subject to executive privilege and should be cleared first?
3. Really? I'll parrot the guys that give out free comedy show tickets - "you don't like to laugh? you don't like humor?"
4. Please point me to the illegal or unethical behavior here.
Well to start, Qatar is funding ISIS according to other emails so maybe don't accept money from states that sponsor terrorism?
I mean we could go into how they stone gays for being themselves and women for having the gaul to think they can drive but we all know that's totally ethical.
No, wait, that was the Trump Foundation protecting the fraudulent Trump University.
For Trump, it's completely different. His strategy is built on two pillars - exposing the existence of the corrupt system and presenting himself as somebody who can fix it. The second part, unfortunately, is completely false and that's where alternative reality comes in - he needs to paint himself as somebody capable of doing a thing he has no idea how to do and no capability to do. That's why he always proposes over the top things - to capture one's imagination and paint himself as somebody who can do things. The proposal itself does not matter, neither the facts he claims to base it on - what matters is the image of somebody who knows how to do things, and has the guts to do them. Since the reality of his capabilities is rather modest, constant stream of fiction is required to keep this idea alive.
It's not irrational paranoia to believe your government operates as a separate entity, one that is not subject to the rule of law. From the Iraq war, to torture, to retroactively legal bulk collection, to immunity granted to telecoms for doing illegal surveillance, to no one going to jail in response to 2008, the list goes on and on.
We have a government all too happy to throw millions of us in jail for the most minor of offenses, yet the same rules don't appear to apply to the people constantly on our TV screens or ones that aren't with enough connections.
HRC is not the devil, but she represents something deeply unsavory to a lot of Americans on both sides of the political spectrum.
Trump is an obvious mad man. The fact that so many people are willing to give such a man the ability to unilaterally destroy humanity speaks volumes about where western civilization is at right now.
Implied in it is the idea that the Clinton campaign had an obligation to release their opposition research on Trump as soon as they had it. But of course, they have no such obligation: they're not journalists!
On the other hand, Wikileaks clearly is structuring their releases to draw out the impact on the Clinton campaign and (vainly) to blunt the impact of Trump's own behavior (mostly, Clinton has won the news cycles despite these attempts).
But Wikileaks is not supposed to be an organ of the Trump campaign. Unlike the HRC campaign, Wikileaks ostensibly does have an obligation to serve the public interest. It clearly does not honor that obligation; instead, it's transparently servicing the Trump campaign.
Better way of looking at it is: what would the effect be of the media letting a psychopath through until the late stages, letting the election get close, and then and only then actually educating the voting public on some of the most unsavory parts of his past?
The answer, if it isn't clear, is in the 50% bump in debate viewers over the 2008 election.
It's a two-person race. It's zero-sum. To materially oppose one candidate is to materially support the other. That is, i assume, why Trump's campaign keeps claiming they coordinate directly with Assange through an intermediary.
Can someone (calmly) explain why anyone should take seriously the idea that Assange can singlehandedly run virtually the entire opposition research campaign against Hillary Clinton and not be supporting Trump?
If I want to be internally consistent as a supporter of truth/justice/liberty/all those tasty things, I MUST NOT hesitate to release damaging information along those lines for the sake of a "lesser of two evils" justification. Your statement of zero-sum two person race is also a principle I believe one must sacrifice a "lesser of two evils" discussion to rally against, I believe that accepting we are in a two person race is part and parcel with the level of polarization/group-think we're seeing nowadays. The first steps to a better world in my eyes are to question EVERYTHING and become as vehemently anti-tribal as possible, and that means not withholding things that my moral code would demand I act on, even if it might harm the horse I'm rooting for. (quite to the opposite actually, if I saw that my main candidate had flaws and wasn't getting called out on them, I would see it as my obligation to do so even MORE so, since to whitewash in that direction to my eyes weakens what would otherwise be a valid stance. e.g., all things have negatives, even perhaps a positive choice, but to ignore them is duplicitous.)
tl;dr, my goals in this are not "this election" or "this candidate"; it's "getting people to question more"; "getting people to realize it doesn't NEED to be a zero-sum game". One may say this is idealistic/drop in the ocean etc; but I cannot reconcile with my personal philosophy giving up, because if I did, then there is no justification for ANYONE ELSE to push for these "impossible" goals, and thus the status quo/tragedy of the commons continues.
The problem is that what Wikileaks is doing is much worse than that.
No, not buying it.
https://www.rt.com/usa/361459-secretary-clinton-drone-assang...
She explicitly asked to have Assange assassinated -> people laughed -> until they realised she was serious because she offers arguments why it would be better to kill him.
My 2 cents: Assange is anti establishment and that's why he helps Trump.
It was on 23rd Nov 2010.
It's not nothing, but it's pretty damn close.
Perhaps the idea is that they might get off easier if Trump feels Wikileaks gave him an election present, but I find that to be a high risk gamble, especially at this point. That said, the argument could perhaps just as easily be made if they leaked a bunch of Trump stuff too.
I don't think anyone can really determine motives at this point with the current base of information.
He thinks Trump will severely harm America, and he really hates America.
We all wanted Bernie, but he sold out :-(
In a two horse race, throwing stones in front of one horse has an obvious and calculated effect.
There was a time when I believed in Wikileaks.
But collusion, orchestrated or not, with Putin and Trump crosses a clear line.
When you sell your services or align your actions with fascists, you are not longer serving the public interest, merely your own.
Let's not equivocate. Trump is an opportunistic fascist, apparently with aspirations to become America's analog to Putin the authoritarian fascist thug.
The cynic in me wonders what Putin has on Assange.
I can't read Hillary Clinton's mind. I can't realtalk with Julian Assange. I can't read Trump's emails. I'm not part of any intelligence community.
Was the announcement of the video timed to preempt the Wikileaks Podesta emails, or were the emails released as a direct reaction to the video? Is Wikileaks a puppet or the media? Nobody has the relevant meta-information to discern this. We're getting bombarded with scandalous new information against both candidates on a daily basis, so much so that it's nearly impossible to meaningfully judge their weight and discern who the bad actors really are.
What happens from this is we in our Trump or Hillary bubbles, or whatever bubble we may be in, with full-time jobs and a family to feed don't have the time to invest in these issues. This is really the logical conclusion of the problem with Internet/information bubbles.
The US is in a post-fact world where people get their opinions from the media rather than facts (though to some extent it's always been that way). When Wikileaks, a supposed bastion of free information appears to be biased or compromised, perhaps from possible grudges by Assange or international influence, we lose another source of that meta-information.
But these women are coming out on their own because of cooper's question? I don't understand.
In this case, we had Trump attempting to cast the video as entirely just talk, with no action involved. I think it's entirely within expectations that someone that had experienced this behavior may have had their hopes of justice which had risen during this incident dashed (given there wasn't an actual person to respond, just the video), and decided that was the straw that broke the camels back.
We saw this with Cosby as well, or do you think he's innocent? If you think he's not innocent, how do you explain all the people that only really spoke up loudly after the main report? We see this all the time. Coming forward is a risk, and until the perceived risk is lowered, you may not see many (or any people).
Now, it is possible that the people coming forward are making it all up, as it's always a possibility, but given the video and Trump's very affirmative statements on the video (of a 60 year old man, mind you. He should have learned long ago what is and is not okay with regard to sexual advances), I think it's far more likely that at least some of the women coming forward are telling the truth.
Wikileaks notified of an incoming set of documents dangerous to the DNC well before those Trump videos arose.
So they promised releases well in advance and then released them.
> And they also released social security numbers, names and addresses for hundreds/thousands of people, so they're obviously not that concerned with protecting people.
That wasn't Wikileaks, it was Michael Best. Did you read the update at the top of the article you linked?
From Michael Best himself:
> @WikiLeaks didn't upload the #AKP files with the private info on Turkish women - I did (and they've been removed)
https://twitter.com/natsecgeek/status/758059030527021056
Stop reading the Huffington Post; it's a rag.
Are you being intentionally obtuse? They promised releases to occur each week, until eventually weeks later an actual leak came out.
>That wasn't Wikileaks, it was Michael Best. Did you read the update at the top of the article you linked?
Yes, did you? It shows that he passed the data to Wikileaks, who didn't do the protection of information you say they do, and just released the information. And then never took responsibility. I mean, look at their own responses to that tweet. They're denying that anything they did was even bad.
I notice you also completely ignored the part about them releasing the private information of DNC donors.
>Stop reading the Huffington Post; it's a rag.
Stop complaining about sources when you are getting basic facts incorrect.
Wikileaks linked to the information; it was hosted on the Internet Archive, who took it down[0].
> And then never took responsibility.
It wasn't theirs to take down. The parties responsible took it down, responsibly.
> They're denying that anything they did was even bad.
They denied that members of the APK are an at-risk group.
> I notice you also completely ignored the part about them releasing the private information of DNC donors.
Because that's not the example you used. I wasn't aware you were refering to DNC donors with your accusation.
0: https://glomardisclosure.com/2016/07/26/the-who-and-how-of-t...
This is what I said
>And they also released social security numbers, names and addresses for hundreds/thousands of people, so they're obviously not that concerned with protecting people.
Sorry if that wasn't clear what I was referencing
http://www.theverge.com/2016/7/22/12259258/wikileaks-leaked-...
Yikes.
The persons who need to defend their actions are the DNC, who sent personal information over plaintext. Don't shoot the messenger.
Moreover, if you had a stack of printouts containing your customer's credit card information sitting on your counter while you left your front door wide open, and _that_ was stolen, I would consider that you had improperly cared for the private information of your customers.
Nothing is assured to remain safe.
>Moreover, if you had a stack of printouts containing your customer's credit card information sitting on your counter while you left your front door wide open, and _that_ was stolen, I would consider that you had improperly cared for the private information of your customers.
You have stopped trying to defend WikiLeaks and put all the blame on the DNC. Even if I grant you all of this, that still doesn't abdicate the responsibility of the people who took the data, or the people releasing the data. Taking someone else's private data, even if they made it easy for you to do, and broadcasting it to the world, putting people at risk and exposing their private information unrelated to any government transparency goal you may have, is irresponsible and dangerous.
The DNC put its donors at risk by engaging in ludicrously unsafe storage practices for their private information. Someone, who was not Wikileaks, made off with that information as a result.
Wikileaks provided the information when it received it; but in no way can the donors be certain that Wikileaks is the only party who received the stolen information.
Wikileaks did those donors a favour by declaring to the world that their private information was stored and transferred irresponsibly by the DNC.
Every one of those donors should now immediately contact the proper authorities to protect themselves from credit card and identity fraud. That agony is upon them as a direct result of the irresponsible practices of the DNC, and it is only because of the actions of Wikileaks that they are now aware that they are at risk.
And I have pointed out that they actively put people at risk. Of course, you deflect it onto the DNC, as evidence by:
>The DNC put its donors at risk by engaging in ludicrously unsafe storage practices for their private information. Someone, who was not Wikileaks, made off with that information as a result.
And WikiLeaks made that information publicly available, without any effort made to protect individuals. That is dangerous and irresponsible. If I leave my wallet on the sidewalk, whatever claims of negligence you want to level at me it's still morally wrong (and illegal) for you to take it and use it to steal my identity.
>Wikileaks did those donors a favour by declaring to the world that their private information was stored and transferred irresponsibly by the DNC.
We're on Hacker News, so I'm hoping you're at least somewhat familiar with the term Responsible Disclosure? If someone discovers a vulnerability in a banking website, you think the best way to help their customers is to make the vulnerability immediately available to the whole world? They "helped" these donors by making their private information public? That's just straight up delusional, to completely flip reality on it's head just to support a group you like.
>That agony is upon them as a direct result of the irresponsible practices of the DNC
And the irresponsible actions of WikiLeaks.
I don't agree with most concepts of responsible disclosure; most would have Wikileaks contact the DNC, who would then likely attempt to hide their mistake. I am in favour of informing those harmed by the negligent actions of those they trusted; and so the right thing to do is to expose the donor list, as well as what data was present.
Personally, I would have replaced credit card numbers with Xs, but as the CC values could no longer be considered secure I fail to see the egregious additional injury caused by revealing them. It's unkind, but not particularly beyond the harm that the DNC had already done by failing to properly secure them. Who knows who has had them, and for how long? Not the DNC, and not Wikileaks.
Not at all. They broadcast it to the world. They are an accessory.
>I don't agree with most concepts of responsible disclosure; most would have Wikileaks contact the DNC, who would then likely attempt to hide their mistake. I am in favour of informing those harmed by the negligent actions of those they trusted; and so the right thing to do is to expose the donor list, as well as what data was present.
That's... just ridiculous. You could get the same result by just redacting all the private info except names. Then everyone knows but no one is put at risk. But they didn't even bother to do that.
>Personally, I would have replaced credit card numbers with Xs, but as the CC values could no longer be considered secure I fail to see the egregious additional injury caused by revealing them
What you personally consider to be secure has no bearing. They took private sensitive data that was not public and made it public. Just because you think that maybe it probably was already at risk is irrelevant.
>but not particularly beyond the harm that the DNC had already done by failing to properly secure them
How can you even try to make this point? It makes no sense. If I know your credit card info, all I have to do is assume that other people already have it so it's fine if I publish it?
>Who knows who has had them, and for how long? Not the DNC, and not Wikileaks.
EXACTLY. Who knows? Not you, so it's irresponsible and damaging for them to release them when it's possible no one had them.
But be may be seeing another outcome: the greatest tax is on the organizations where its supporters care about what's right and wrong and true and false, while organizations that spew empty invective and bullshit have no tax. Perhaps what we ended up with is an 'intellectual honesty' tax.
The other thing is we have no idea if they are all authentic. It would be trivial to slip a few extra sentences in here or there. Everyone just seems to take it as given that they're legit but Assange didn't hack anyone to get them. We know nothing about who actually did, so we don't even have a flimsy "reputation" pretense to rely on.
This.
There has been no verification that these are completely real emails (the checksum matches so to speak).
Podesta himself admitted he got hacked and the password he emailed himself in plaintext worked for his other social media accounts.
For any one email, it's easy to check and dispute a discrepancy.
Checking thousands of emails takes time but you have to take that time to avoid the chance of validating a forgery. During that time, they're in the news a lot and someone may confirm a legitimate email in the dump, which will be taken by many as proof that the entire thing is valid. Many people will never change their memory of that. If you do find anything tampered with, it may be hard or impossible to prove to a level which will satisfy critics. It doesn't need to be provable to the level needed for a court case to be damaging politically – just look at how much mileage the GOP got from birtherism based on repetition and incredibly clumsy forgeries even with contradictory evidence available.
So if you compromise a political target's account, you could get the most damage from real dirt but you can get almost as much from a clever forgery among all of the normal office chatter as long as you don't do something like adding a Russian name to the Office metadata or claim something happened when it was unquestionably impossible (e.g. claiming a secret meeting when someone was giving a speech nowhere near the purported location).
Wikileaks has a 100% accuracy rating(meaning they have not once pushed a falsified leak).
You showing other falsifications by other corrupt organizations isn't enough for me to throw away evidence as 'false' when there is no reason to do so. Again, if there was an individual falsification why wouldn't DNC officials call it out? Can you provide me a rational explanation.
In the context of a leak dropped a day before the election with no chance to fact check, sure, I could entertain the possibility there might be forgeries to control the election results.
Weeks ahead? What is stopping any forgeries from being called out? Where is _your_ proof these are false emails?
You have none, because there is none.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/zeynep-tufekci/wikileaks-erdog...
Whatever you may believe about their actions in the past, they don't appear to be checking before publishing much now and that means it's on the reader to look for confirmation rather than credulously assuming nobody would lie about matters of political importance.
In this case, we've already seen that cycle with the Guccifer documents being heavily cross-promoted by Russian state media and Wikileaks but showing many signs of modification and misrepresentation (e.g. the alleged Clinton Foundation documents which didn't hold up to non-casual examination).
That doesn't mean that Wikileaks might not have real data but it definitely shows that anyone who isn't just looking for propaganda should take time to investigate rather than assuming they're legitimate or correctly summarized.
Most of them are biased against Trump, of course, and follow a fairly obvious strategy: "Hillary is extremely unpopular, we cannot make her more popular, so let's make Trump even less popular."
It works very well. Just to make this clear, I'm a European left-wing liberal democratic socialist, not a Trump or Hillary supporter of any kind. But I've seen many US elections and it was never like that before. It's as if all US media and news organizations have sold out to the highest bidder at once. (To be fair, I don't follow that many of them, just a few newspaper sites like L.A. times, NY times, TV channels like CNN, Fox, nbc and a few social media sites.)
There is no conspiracy.
Conspiracies, when they happen, seem to rather often fail; those requiring secrecy are in particular prone to failure. But people act according to their own interests all the time, and when their interests are even slightly aligned the outcome can certainly resemble or even be indistinguishable from an actively-managed conspiracy.
That being said, don't underestimate the amount of ordinary collusion and the work of spin doctors during election times. My point is that this is massive this time, definitely more than in past elections.
Finally, although I generally agree, a little warning about your last comment: Since we only see failed conspiracies, we lack the data to adequately assess the question of how much real conspiracy there is. ("conspiracy theories" on the other hand, are easy to debunk, but that's another issue.)
At a certain point there is evidence to show people in the media coordinating in private to try and reach a common outcome. If a bunch of people in the media working together to distort the truth isn't a conspiracy then I'm not sure what is.
What really bothers me is not being able to watch any national news coverage without a constant stream of Democratic narrative. I'm genuinely curious about what other issues or political offices are going to be on the ballot, but I'm going to have to take it upon myself to research any of it. Maybe that's a good side-effect though.
I want to know the dirt on our candidates because they will LIE LIE LIE as Trump put it.
My totally off the cuff hypothesis:
We are approaching a tipping point where new energy technologies (solar+batteries, etc.) will get cheap enough to "go exponential" vs. fossil fuels. This has huge geopolitical implications.
A more or less permanent crash in fossil fuel prices could completely realign the world. The biggest winners would probably be the USA, EU, and China since these are net energy importers and have economies based on high tech, manufacturing, finance, and services. The biggest losers would be Russia and the Middle Eastern petro-states, but certain regions within the USA and Canada would also lose substantially vs. others. More importantly you'd have a major crash in the value of certain corporations vs. others. Apple being briefly worth more than Exxon Mobil is perhaps a preview.
I've heard the view before that WWI and WWII were really about dominance of the emerging petroleum age. If that age is now ending, what happens next? WWIII?
Edit: Second hypothesis:
The world economy is about to crash again hard, and when that happens there will be a great window to enact all kinds of changes. Various parties are struggling to make sure they are in power for that window.
6m50s > "The thing that we have to watch is making sure there is a double blind between the campaign and the actual DNC and what we're doing. There's a double blind there. So they can plausibly deny that they knew anything about it."
9m35s > Aaron Black, DNC Rapid Response Coordinator, boasts about coordinating a Chicago protest at a Trump event. Two Chicago police reporters were injured and this event got a lot of news coverage.
Personally, I don't understand the brouhaha about all the Trump tapes. If you had even a remote inkling of fact about the man NONE OF THIS IS A SURPRISE.
While I'm definitely in the opposing camp, I have zero respect for those who are now abandoning Trump. You stuck with him on superficial grounds and now you are leaving on superficial grounds. Nothing about the man has changed.
I think it points towards people fooling themselves as to his character so they could continue to support him in good conscience. Once presented with hard evidence, that's harder to do. If something definitive came out tomorrow about Clinton accepting cash for favors (not donations to a charitable foundation for meetings, which is what is poorly alleged now), then I think a lot of Clinton supporters would have a similar crisis of conscience.
Huh? I remember the leaks coming out first then the video? I remember because I had fox news live on in the background, they started talking about the email dump and when they came back from break it was pussygate.
It does suck that they're timing their release with political motives, and Assange appears to be a gaping asshole (though not a rapist), but none of this is even remotely novel for Wikileaks.
correct. you saw the exact same defamation routine a few years ago with the iraq leaks, and again (not as strongly) with the diplomatic cable leaks. the only twist this time is the attempt to conflate russia-us geopolitical tensions with wikileaks involvement.
does the source of the information matter, if the information is legitimate? no. the dems live in fear of wikileaks and the endless dirt on hillary.
it's clear that russia does view assange as an asset, however-- the whole RT show a few years ago spelled that out for me. what is also clear is that unhappy facts are more effective propaganda than mere rhetoric. assange seems content to be a participant in russia's propaganda schemes, so long as he is actually releasing documents whose beef was agnostic to the context of geopolitical rivalry.
in other words: i want the dirt, too. i don't care if russia helps assange, we need all the help we can get against our own government at this point.
100% agree.
I'm constantly amazed at how some ordinary citizens can be mad at Snowden or Assange for releasing information. Wouldn't you want to know? Even just for interest sake I like to know what government and politicians around the world are up to.
HN readership doesn't really represent the average citizen. So while you may want the info that likely doesn't hold for a lot of folks who really only care about a very minor set of immediate concerns (food, shelter, children).
Children call eachother snitches. That's the level of discourse we're dealing with in these matters?
I mean, I guess it's a little bit underhanded, but only just barely. If there were something significant in the emails then it still would have been reported on, but as far as I can tell, there wasn't.
Ever since the DNC leaks and the subsequent accusations against Russia, it became clear to me that, at some point, the attempts to tarnish Wikileaks's name was to prime the listening audience in a way such that when information so irreparably damaging would get released, the voters would have to choose between continuing a corrupt government and choosing an apparently mad authoritarian, and to soften the landing on the former. Since the RNC, Trump's campaign has been entirely pushing "Don't believe their lies", and the gaslighting from both sides seems to be hitting a nadir at this moment. It's becoming far more difficult to find reality in the fog.
These are indeed interesting times.