Search the DNC email database

I don't really see a big difference between someone selling their personal address book to LinkedIn and someone supplying it automatically. In both instances, both parties benefit (the user with connections or money, and LinkedIn with new user leads), and the recipients end up with unsolicited email.

Using an address book to locate existing users and present them an option to connect is one thing. Using that address book to market to unknown people through their email addresses is clearly spam.

Are you talking about political agents being unethical (to which I say, "duh"), or are we talking about what you previously stated, "conspiring to commit a civil rights violation, or exploit one" ? Those are very different things.

People have a right to vote for a candidate as they see fit, based on all the information they have at their disposal. That's a core tenet of democracy. While I would prefer people not use religious views of candidates in most cases, there are cases where I would definitely like to know (for example, if the candidate believes the world will end within the year, I think that's probably the most relevant information in a presidential candidate you can know). While self serving, I can't see the action as purely negative, as it would be increasing true information to the public (as opposed to attack ads that insinuate unverified information).

1. I did not say that you said that those emails were about Bernie; I said that those emails could be about Bernie, because it's something that I do regard as a live possibility. I was just being honest about how little content there is there; it could be about Bernie or not. (Also the "I didn't mention Bernie so why did you think it was about Bernie?" card is extremely lame; we're talking about a WikiLeaks leak and WikiLeaks in parallel with this leak has announced e.g. via Twitter that they interpret this as being about Bernie. Of course it's neither my nor your innovation to read the emails that way; we both received it.)

Like, you say "the emails refer to two upcoming primaries." I am simply saying that this is too assertive for my tastes. It doesn't say anything about primaries; it says "KY" and "WVA" and those can be primaries, they also might not be. (I'm afraid I don't understand your "by the way" here -- you might be trying to point out the disambiguation link up-top, but of course acronyms may also refer to things that are not on Wikipedia. For example, Brad Marshall has a lot more emails from before this time mentioning the HVF; but have fun trying to find that on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HVF .)

So, I mean, there's a lot that we're reading into this thing to come to that conclusion. Getting fussy and treating it like it's not a conclusion is not a great idea. It might well be a correct conclusion. But it's a conclusion that we're presently coming to off of limited evidence, and you shouldn't be all like "you cannot possibly be serious!" when someone points out that the evidence is limited, when it is.

2. You have a messed up definition for "clearly" then. That's OK, it seems like a lot of things seem a little muddled in your worldview. For example, you're right that "that is clearly saying that knowledge that Sanders is an atheist would hurt him in KY and WVA," as long as we weaken the word "knowledge" to "belief" (because it would be easy to misread what you said as drive-by-asserting that Bernie is an atheist, whereas Bernie has disclaimed this a few times, even though he has repeatedly asserted that he's not very religious in any organized way).

But it's not "clearly suggesting to use the question against Sanders." That's another conclusion. It might be right, but it's not like the email says "My Southern Baptist peeps would not vote for him if they knew the truth." In fact the whole case for this hinges on the word "skate" (you used, in quotes, "skate by", but that is not even what the email said).

That word by itself is not clear. It is implicitly suggestive via a negative connotation.

3. I am not doubting that the bigotry exists and I am not stating that the DNC for sure acted ethically. However, we would need to know a lot more than this email to know if that were true.

For example, you're treating this as a serious suggestion rather than some banter among friends. The email thread ends on an "AMEN!" which suggests that nobody in this thread considered it a starting block for some sort of conspiracy to actually ask Bernie the quetion to get him to be unelectable. In fact, that earlier thread about the "HVF" I mentioned, there was an official DNC denouncement of claims that the Bernie campaign was making; it came on the backs of a lot of back-and-forth in order to write a formal press release which is not present here... But one of the more interesting (and very hard to interpret) emails comes from Hillary's general counsel, Marc Elias, who was CCed on the question apparently independent of his work on her campaign. https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/emailid/5740 . It seems they might, having known him personally, sent him some examples of what Bernie is saying and solicited his legal advice on whether they could meaningfully speak against Bernie, even though they're supposed to be formally unbiased.

So it seems that on serious matters they approach it with sincerity and gravity, whereas the one you're calling a "conspiracy" might also just be a private sharing of personal bigotry, rather than an attempt to exploit it publicly.

Again, I'm not saying that this is surely what happened. Maybe it was a serious suggestion, too. We're on HN, we're both more mature than that; we both know what uncertainties are, and I'd hope we both have a practical knowledge of Bayes' theorem. I am merely saying that you're very convicted based on a conclusion drawn from very little evidence. We may get more evidence, and better evidence, which vindicates you. But the evidence as we have it right now is relatively brittle, as such things go. You multiply the odds ratio by the probability that he would have sent that email if he was trying to conspire against Bernie (relatively high, but he'd probably have been more explicit about it and his listeners probably wouldn't have treated it with such a lack of seriousness) divided by the probability that he would have sent that email if he wasn't trying to conspire against Bernie (which is probably not a tiny negligible probability the way you're making it out to be).

Citation needed.

> with no political experience

That's not necessarily a bad thing.

If a sufficient electoral base exists to elect Trump, a sufficient electoral base exists to get him sufficient legislative support (sooner than new people are elected, perhaps, simply by raising the prospect of electoral danger to present incumbents) to implement his policies.

Put another way, they are allowed to act unchecked by Congress much of the time.

Why is this?

I think the president and congress play a coordination game through which corrupt legislation is passed.

Take Obamacare. Its passage was a massive success to rent-seeking firms and interest groups. All the interest groups and most of the members of congress who were instrumental in getting it passed were happy to have it called "Obamacare" and not "PhizerCare" or "AbbotCare" or "HalliburtonCare".

Correspondingly, both parties benefit from the notion that Obamacare is somehow leftist or constitutes a big defeat for "greedy firms" and "selfish doctors".

In reality, the program simply modernizes many of the existing flows of rents from the public to firms, and reflects some of the changes in magnitude of influence of some industry subgroups.

This is one reason why the GOP didn't come up with a serious market-based counter-proposal: The spoils of Obamacare were just too appealing to pass up, at least for enough of the GOP's constituents to get the bill passed. The loud crowing about wanting to repeal it is no more meaningful than anything else politicians say to seem principled or to seem consistent.

From the beginning, Obama was far more pragmatic than HRC about pleasing healthcare industry incumbents, which is one reason for his surprising performance in the 2008 Democratic primary.

I strongly agree that executive orders and extralegal actions (which Bush honed and Obama perfected) are quite worrisome... But the core issue is that congress largely agrees with the actions that are undertaken. As a case in point, there was a lot of outrage from Democrats about GWB's extralegal shenanigans during the Iraq war, but then once Obama took office we got the chance to observe that in fact he (and his party) strongly support drone warfare, happily exploit the idea of enemy combatants not having rights, enjoy every clause of the Patriot Act, and utilize every extrajudicial rendition option just as GWB did.

We have one party, and it goes through a little ceremony every few years to see which corporatist warmonger gets the chance to be our figurehead.