Is it?

Someone told Clinton's campaign manager that there would be a question by a woman experiencing heath problems related to Flint's water supply. [1]

The debate was being held in Flint.

Do you think maybe everyone kind of knew that one was coming?

[1] https://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/303556-emails-brazi...

Imagine if Obama reformed the criminal justice system, wasn't a war monger in Syria/Libya and presided over a record economic boom? He'd be made a saint or something.

Go figure.

I am going to ignore the rest of your post and use this specific aspect to highlight something. Joe Biden has had a stutter his entire life. Stutters take an extensive and persistent amount of work to overcome. They are likely to return during times of increased stress, decreased sleep, or when one ages. There is zero evidence that Biden has experienced any kind of mental decline. All the evidence that people point to of him stumbling over his words, calling someone by the wrong title, or whatever other examples you have are almost certainly just symptoms and coping mechanisms used by someone with a stutter.

Do you think Trump is throwing pardons around just for shits and giggles? This is the first time ever that a US president has been using pardons as get-out-of-jail-free cards for his friends and allies. And he's throwing them around because he has a habit of associating himself with criminals who commit crimes (on his behalf) and therefore need pardons.

Trump wants to pardon his family, Giuliani, and potentially even himself. Which would not make the slightest bit of sense unless they had committed serious crimes. And if you argue that he wants to use the pardons to prevent those pesky democrats from setting him up, I want you to imagine a scenario where Biden was doing the exact same thing.

Biden and Harris will be scrutinized in much the same way presidents and their VPs have been traditionally. Trump is an anomaly.

The whole point of kompromat is that you keep it a secret. Once it's in the open it can no longer be used for leverage.

> he has a habit of associating himself with criminals who commit crimes

Whether or not what you're saying is true, I'd suggest reading up on the "other side" of the story for people like Flynn.

Let's make distrusting the intelligence agencies cool again.

Roger Clinton, Susan McDougal and Mark Rich say hi.

Oh, and Obama pardoned, commuted, or rescinded the conviction of 1,927 people. Trump so far? 45. [0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_pardoned_or_gra...

Similarly, McDougal had finished serving her sentences after conviction by the time she was pardoned.

Rich did get pardoned before standing trial, but that was because he fled the country in 1983 when he learned there would be charges. So this is a case of a pardon preventing trial and punishment.

Well he gave Flynn a pardon because Flynn was railroaded by Sullivan. I doubt you understand this case, because Flynn's original attorney had a conflict of interest with the prosecutor. Powell, via discovery, found text messages of FBI agents trying to find something, anything, to entrap Flynn with. They went after his family, his kids!

When all this came to light, the prosecutors said they would dismiss. Sullivan said they couldn't. In an unprecedented move, Sullivan assigned an americus (friend of the court) to see if they could prosecute Flynn for perjury because he plead guilty when he was really innocent.

Let that sink in. Sullivan wanted Flynn prosecuted for perjury BECAUSE HE PLEAD GUILTY WHEN HE WAS ACTUALLY INNOCENT. It's in the brief, which I don't think you've read. This is the definition of a Kafka trap.

>Our plea bargain system is so lopsided that 97% of criminal charges end with a guilty plea without a trial. Even if she is 90% sure of winning at trial, unless she has a million dollars lying around and a deathwish, it STILL isn't worth it to fight the system. - https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=btilly

I have heard a large number of people express the same opinion and statistics but have noticed the they are quiet when it comes to Flynn.

I think if people have committed crimes, then they need to be prosecuted but also that it is better for 10 guilty to go free than 1 innocent to be sentenced.

I think what has happened to Carter Page and the sentencing guidelines for Kevin Clinesmith are a joke. As the sibling comment said

>Let's make distrusting the intelligence agencies cool again.

I agree entirely. The CIA literally leaked at story to Yahoo News and used that fora FISA warrant. That is pure corruption.

For anyone not familiar with the Carter Page situation, this is the best 3,000 foot overview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qODProeRQ4c

This literally didn't happen. His whole "cleansing" statement was cringy, yes. But he never told them to drink, inject or enema bleach. There was one person who did, for whatever reasons ... and really we should have let that problem solve itself.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-suggests...

Not all leaders do things the same way, and there might be more cause to criticize one over the others. It should be _possible_ to publish criticism for all; that doesn't mean there should be equal amounts of criticism.

Otherwise, you could have one administration that mishandles a lot of thing complain that they were treated unfairly, just because they're rightfully criticized for their shortcomings. (Which it looks like has been happening recently.)

The question is, though, what happens if one side keeps knowingly publishing baseless allegations to stir up fear and mistrust.

Your comparison is off.

Examine which side of the political spectrum is overwhelmingly running media businesses through YouTube.

It is not Democrats.

It might be helpful if you cited sources yourself.

Note that the reasons for this are complicated, but the U.S. doesn't historically have to deal with monarchy, titles of nobility, vestigial aspects of governance left over from feudalism, a relatively recent postwar recovery period, or government implicated into churches. For instance, there's no American conservative impulse to support the monarchy because there's no American monarchy. The lack of that issue means other things are discussed instead.

Monarchism, a formal class system and state establishment of religion tend to be rejected by large swathes of both the American Left and Right.

We just had a summer in which armed gangs of self-identified Leftists roamed the streets of our major cities, set fire to buildings, harassed random passers-by and assaulted (and in a few cases, murdered) anyone they unilaterally labeled a "fascist" (i.e. anyone to the right of Mao). These Democrats you speak of were for three months ignoring the violence; when they occasionally admitted that violence had taken place, they claimed it was all perpetrated by right-wing agitators; when that didn't work (because who actually believes that right-wingers are spray-painting anarchy symbols, "BLM," "ACAB," and other slogans?), their propaganda mouthpieces calling it "mostly peaceful protest."

Do I think Biden is some hard leftist? No. But certainly his party feels extremely constrained in criticizing the hard left, and also feel that they must kowtow down to them.

> This also gives insight into the Republican style of pushing out falsities just for the sake of being in power.

This is a complete non-sequitur. The fact that US definitions of left and right (as mentioned in a sibling comment) differ from international ones "gives insight" into one particular political party lying? What?

Isn't the objective of every political party to obtain power, or at least influence? Don't all political parties "push[] out falsities" in order to obtain or retain power?

The one wrinkle here is that the Republicans (nor anyone on the Right - US definition) absolutely lack real political power, since they have no control over the bureaucracy, the media or the academe. Trump himself figured this out much too late, and wasted years appointing people who had no interest in carrying out his agenda. But in some ways, this is the exception that proves the rule.

I'd be fine with videos marked with something like "YouTube believes this video is untrue and spreads dangerous disinformation" put before or even over a video. But taking videos down is quite another matter.

News sources are always biased, even when they try to stay neutral. The trick is to learn to extract useful nuggets of information from a number of biased streams. Having these streams biased differently helps.

This is much like raw data in science: all data have noise and imperfections, but statistics help extract a signal if there is one.

I think anywhere that libel and slander are enforced. Any random person with any random agenda can write on facebook or make youtube videos advancing that agenda.

> News sources are always biased, even when they try to stay neutral. The trick is to learn to extract useful nuggets of information from a number of biased streams. Having these streams biased differently helps.

I'm not talking about bias, I'm talking about obvious made-up QAnon garbage.

> This is much like raw data in science: all data have noise and imperfections, but statistics help extract a signal if there is one.

I would argue that baseless data is not data at all.

Just because content on social media is negative towards Trump, doesn't mean the platform itself is.

In fact, Twitter has been incredibly lenient with Trump. Much of what he tweets (threats for example) contravene the TOS.

I don't think this is accurate, unless you mean that most employees of big tech vote/contribute Democrat. However, it doesn't necessarily follow that bias exists on the platform.

The one thing different about trump is that he purposely provoked the media and responded to petty nonsense that previous presidents would have just ignored. Trump and the media have a symbiotic relationship because they both need the attention.

Let the process play out. He'll have his day in court and will either win or lose, just like Bush and Gore.

Trying to rush things would have the opposite effect of building faith in the system.

And we know she is good because all the news media say she is good.

And we know the news media is good because she tells us it is good.

Welcome to Hotel California, you can check out at any time, but you can never leave.

And Brutus is an honourable man.

That said, I think google are making a bad mistake here. They've crossed a line that they've been toeing.

Social media isn't just a mass media. Media is always edited. Editing isn't censorship. But social media is also a communication channel. Haphazard interference in a communication channel sits wrong. We have no frame of reference for it.

Meanwhile, there are credible claims that social media fallacies have caused horrible things (including possibly genocide in Myanmar) in other countries/languages. FB (in that case) has no knowledge of the language or interest in getting involved in that. How can you justify one without the other?

I mean it's one of those doublespeak terms that they themselves don't fully understand (apparently), but still.