House panel looking into Reddit post about Clinton's email server
thehill.com
thehill.com
From the way it reads it looks like he is asking how to bulk remove an email address from the archived messages so when they are turned over they don't contain the redacted email address.
I assume it would be embarrassing and/or problematic to share the email addresses of various ambassadors and other government officials in public records. You could also read something nefarious into it if you want.
This whole fishing expedition is hilarious and transparently political. The Bush administration ran private email servers to avoid FOIA requests, then nuked millions of saved emails when his term was up to avoid handing them over. I didn't see any huge circus or massive outcry about that.
The idea that we should be able to immediately read all the correspondence written by any public official also seems silly... it just encourages public officials not to use email. People are allowed to have private conversations. A reasonable compromise might be a time limit... say emails are held sealed for X years after leaving office, then made public?
http://graphics.wsj.com/hillary-clinton-email-documents/pdfs...
But I could see this as a result of incompetency, that is, the IT person didn't realize that it's not up to him to redact addresses, the State Dept. could do it. I know that sounds naive but we're talking about an IT person who posted this question on Reddit using an account easily connected to him, so, incompetency is inherent in the scenario.
edit: Apparently, there is a Slashdot user named "StoneTear" who has been posting since 2002 and has made reference about working in government and knows about their data retention policies. So that mostly rules out the possibility of IT-guy-is-just-the-Senator's-nephew-in-law-who-got-asked-because-to-do-IT-because-no-one-else-was-around:
https://news.slashdot.org/story/16/09/19/2239234/computer-sp...
Only for her work email account.
This is her personal email account that they requested to release, but it isn't under their control.
Employers aren't supposed to be able to control one's private email account.
With no work email account ever setup.
It's a matter of law that any and all work related emails on a personal email address are to be handed over for future FOIA requests, etc. upon leaving office.
If I used my personal email address for all communication with my companies clients for work, they'd demand all of those emails when I left the company.
But they wouldn't be able to get them, no matter how hard they demanded.
Personal email addresses exist. Companies have to deal with that fact.
The easiest route would simply be to refuse me referrals. If I had a golden parachute deal, it would be invalidated by such an action. Any vested stocks I had would be in jeopardy. They can try to blackball me. They can cut off insurance benefits unexpectedly.
And all that before lawyers get involved...
If you do work on a personal email, your employer may later demand access to those emails. So don't do it.
I work in securities. My work emails must be archived. If I send work email from my personal email (a) that is potentially illegal and (b) I must promptly turn them over to my archives. If I refuse b, I face civil and potentially criminal censure.
Blows me away how finance has stricter controls than the people conducting bombing raids.
If your employer tried to force Gmail to turn over to them all your emails with your spouse and friends, no matter the subject or content, you and Google would fight it. And rightly so.
The House GOP members of the Benghazi committee are trying their hardest to get their hands on Clinton's personal emails, to dig for embarrassing messages to release. They already have her official business emails; they have had them for years. And they have openly admitted that the entire purpose of the committee is to undercut her presidential campaign.
No, they have the emails she claims are official. Big difference.
And she has zero credibility here. Negative credibility even, if she claims they have all the official emails you can be 100% sure they do not.
That would help the Republicans gain back some credibility if they did. Right now everyone considers this a colossal waste of time, exemplary of Republican waste.
Republicans are quickly finding that there are limits to their political powers.
The public needs to be forceful in telling the House to stop wasting government money on Hillary emails.
How would that help? She deleted them.
> The public needs to be forceful in telling the House to stop wasting government money on Hillary emails.
No, they need to tell the House that Hillary should be indited, that she is not above the rules.
Sucks for them, then. Perhaps the House Republicans should have been quicker on their feet, instead of clowning around?
The public is in support of Clinton, and want House Republican members impeached and jailed.
Your standard is that any time someone claims something, we can all act like the opposite of that claim is true, even if there is no actual evidence. By that standard, everyone is guilty until proven innocent. Again, thankfully, the law does not work that way.
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/buster/sidney-blumenthal/hacker...
In an unrelated tangent, when the Secretary of State's original search found few emails involving Clinton's ostensible state.gov address, a Tumblr meme (which was in support of Clinton) caught someone's eye who then inquired how Clinton was sending messages if they weren't showing up on her state.gov account: http://www.politico.com/blogs/under-the-radar/2016/06/hillar...
No, it didn't.
It's still her private email account. They can request nicely to see them, but they can't forcibly see them without a warrant.
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/0801b24d47274f0fac60beedc5f2e...
^ Former Secretary Hillary Clinton failed to turn over a copy of a key message involving problems caused by her use of a private homebrew email server, the State Department confirmed Thursday...The email was not among the tens of thousands of emails Clinton turned over to the agency in response to public records lawsuits seeking copies of her official correspondence. Abedin, who also used a private account on Clinton's server, provided a copy from her own inbox after the State Department asked her to return any work-related emails.
The State Department did not get a warrant before asking Clinton and her staff to turn over emails that went through Clinton's server.
Only emails related to official business. The distinction is crucial to these questions of law, but is consistently forgotten or elided, even by this Hill article.
It's not forgotten. No one believes her. (Except maybe you.)
She deleted the personal emails. Who does that? At most you don't turn them over, and then store them somewhere. Hard disks are cheap.
But no, she deleted them, making 100% sure no one could ever dispute her.
And I seem to remember an official email she did not disclose being discovered when the other person in the email disclosed it. So she is known to have withheld official emails.
No one really cares about this issue except the House Republicans. They really are trying their hardest to figure out something here, but are obviously coming up empty. It just makes them look foolish.
You're essentially arguing that a person who desires privacy is therefore suspicious. I would hope that folks here on HN recognize that's a bullshit argument.
His argument is that she had the option to achieve privacy (by complying with the request and simply keeping her private emails). Instead they decided to not let anyone ever have the possibility to verify if she complied.
She chose to achieve privacy by making any future investigation impossible.
Is it legal? I guess, assuming she told the truth (and made no mistakes) about which emails were relevant. But personally I would like to hold people in office to a higher transparency and ethics standard than "strictly legal".
If a piece of information is stored so that it can be given to someone else later, that's not really very private. Privacy means the right to keep things away from others, and it includes the right to delete things.
Now maybe you want to argue that certain public officials should not permitted to have privacy while they are in office. That's fine, make that argument, but it's not the state of things now, legally or culturally.
And consider that there might be unintended consequences. It might deter some great people from considering public service. And it might put a hole in the legal concept of privacy that others will try to widen later.
I would argue that if we're going to be serious about legally protecting privacy, we need to be consistent. "Protect privacy, except for politicians I don't like" is not a particularly strong legal framework.
I do NOT demand she hand over personal email! No. Only that she make it possible for a 3rd party to sort her emails into private/public.
She has the right to delete personal email - but only if it's actually personal, and I don't trust her to be the one to decide that.
She brought this on herself by mixing them in the first place. Want to maintain your privacy when you know you job requires publicity? Keep your public and private lives separate. She chose not to.
I don't even need to argue that certain public officials should not be permitted to have privacy while in office. She has a right to privacy. I am not arguing she doesn't.
I am arguing she made a series of poor choices that led to a situation where the only way she can live up to the standards we should expect from a public official (a verifiable paper trail for business pertaining to office) is by keeping a record of her private communications as well.
This is why you don't use your private email address for official business. If you want privacy while in office you don't use your private email server for official business. You aren't supposed to anyway. It's very simple and very reasonable.
He could delete all her private emails here if he wished.
Similarly, yes, he could delete the emails after being told they were part of an investigation, but that would lead to unwanted consequences. Could he have deleted them before any investigation started? Sure, then it would just be a cloud of suspicion, but no legal ramifications.
My original point was that as soon as Clinton agreed to turn over the emails, it was in the State Department's ballpark to determine which were eligible for disclosure, as the emails were written during her time at State and ostensibly dealt with State business. Not sure why you felt you had to argue that she had the capability of just destroying her servers. If she had done that, we wouldn't be having this discussion because she likely wouldn't be in the race.
My understanding: Combetta's post comes 1 day after Hillary had reached an agreement about turning them over.
So was she dealing in bad faith with the govt? To be determined I guess?
"Bad faith" is trying to expose personal email addresses to spammers.
The House Republicans would love it if they could publicize her private personal email address. It would render it useless.
The IT guy's job here is to make sure that doesn't happen.
I honestly can't tell if you're being serious or not.
Its is the job of the FBI to redact information they choose to (or are required to) release in accordance with any legal, operational, etc., concerns applicable to the FBI.
OTOH, its quite possible that the Clinton camp anticipated that they might have reason to directly release some or all of the emails to entities other than the FBI.
But not personal emails.
Read the Hill article very carefully and see if it identifies whether we're talking about official business or personal. It doesn't.
The House GOP is careful to avoid making that distinction, because their goal is to feed a sense of impropriety--a goal which seems to be well-met here on HN, judging by the comments.
But the distinction matters, it does exist in law, and it is based on content and parties, not servers. Sending official State business email from a server does not automatically expose the full content of that server to federal record-keeping laws.
That's true.
>The House GOP is careful to avoid making that distinction, because their goal is to feed a sense of impropriety--a goal which seems to be well-met here on HN, judging by the comments.
No, the sense of impropriety was fed by Hillary Clinton herself when she turned over a tiny fraction of emails relating to official business and then destroyed the rest so nobody could ever retrieve them.
Honestly, that people can't see, by now, after the cattle futures, after the Rose Law documents, after the Clinton Foundation, after the destroyed emails, that this woman is crooked... I can't help but be amazed.
It is nonsensical to say that following the law implies impropriety.
On top of this, the FBI recovered and reviewed many of the emails that she deleted, and did not find anything damning. They declined to recommend a prosecution.
Setting aside the politics of "it's Hillary Clinton and she's running for president," there is no evidence that she tried to break the law, or succeeded in doing so.
The evidence shows that she wanted some privacy, and even Hillary Clinton is entitled to that under the law.
Again, to make this perfectly clear: she was required to turn over official business emails and she omitted thousands of them. She deleted the ones she didn't turn over and had the server purged.
It takes a lot of chutzpah to set up a server such that your personal email is intermingled with official government communications and then claim you're the only person who can go through that server looking for official email that shouldn't have been there.
>The evidence shows that she wanted some privacy, and even Hillary Clinton is entitled to that under the law.
People try to use privacy rights to cover criminal activity on a regular basis. That's why we have subpoenas and laws against destruction of evidence.
2 years ago it wasn't even clear that HRC would run, let alone that her emails would become such a large and specifically scrutinized aspect of the campaign. Yes, it would've been better if Combetta had the foresight to avoid this sticky situation, but I don't think it's reasonable to claim he's incompetent because of this quite unusual confluence of events.
His two mistakes were using a known username and calling attention to how "VIP" his VIP was. Some people will say the only purpose for the latter is to brag, but I disagree. People on online forums are frequently both hostile and caustic. A likely response to his question would be "Tell them you can't do that". Combetta's emphasis on the VIP's stature was a pre-emptive attempt to get the help he needed without bickering about whether or not he had authority to shut down the request. Since that was obviously not on the table for a sysadmin trying to earn a living, he needed to make it clear that he was dealing with orders originating from well above his pay grade.
People will also say Combetta should've known this was illegal, which I think is silly too. HRC is a laywer. Everyone in politics is a lawyer. There is no intrinsic moral compass around email retention policies, and even if you say "Hmm, that doesn't sound fair", well, we all know that the law isn't perfect -- unfair doesn't make it illegal per se, and none of us would be employed if we had the full moral latitude we'd like to decline employer requests (for example, there's a good argument that modern marketing as an industry has deep moral flaws, but how many companies can afford not to market themselves? There's a lowest-common-denominator factor that drags everyone down. The option becomes indigence or compromise, accepting that everything is not necessarily as we'd like it to be).
If your client is a bunch of lawyers, and you're an IT guy (not a lawyer), and you work for a contracting firm that treats this like a legit request, you're going to assume that what they're asking is legal. Unless something is fundamentally and blatantly immoral (and I don't believe specific sniggles over email retention laws are), I don't think he should be blamed for complying with the directives issued by his clients and allowed by his firm.
This is an embarrassing time for Combetta, to be sure. Let's not unjustifiably heap it on. As far as I'm concerned, he should be fully covered by respondeat superior.
I say all this as someone who is probably going to vote for Trump and thinks that HRC should be prosecuted.
I can't help but fret, however, over how lame Congress has become in the last few decades. Congress is a separate but equal part of the government. In fact, if push came to shove, they're the ones who are supposed to have all the power. Congress can pick and fire a president under extreme circumstances. The president can't do the same with Congress.
But whether it's this fishing expedition or oversight of the intelligence community, Congress is missing in action and/or impotent. They serve subpoenas. Sometimes the people show up, sometimes they don't. They request evidence. Sometimes they get it, sometimes not. Sometime it takes years and they only get a little bit. Nothing happens.
If the Congress is conducting an investigation, even the idiotic political investigations they seem so good at, this is the government that is asking questions. People should be going to jail and/or disbarred for the types of shenanigans that regularly go on. But nope. It seems all too easy to say, well, it's just Congress, you know? Nobody takes any of that stuff seriously, right?
In the 1970s the Church Committee took apart the national intelligence apparatus and tried to fix a lot of problems. I don't see this Congress or any future ones being able to investigate and improve their own parking garage, much less anything of any national significance.
If your Congressperson is doing silly political stuff? Fire them and elect somebody else. But don't make the institution itself a politically powerless charade of a legislative body. That destroys a much-needed error-correcting mechanism.
You don't redact email addresses when you are subpoenaed by the f'ing FBI.
edit: My bad, it was the House Select Committee on Benghazi (July 2014). The FBI didn't take custody of the server until August 2015.
Edit: small mistake. The initial request did come from Congress and went through the State Department. It was not a subpoena though, that came later.
Edit 2: Since it was clear to some, the reddit post was dated July 24th, 2014. That's 7 months, prior to the first subpoena.
“I’ve done quite a bit already in the last few months related to this. Her team had me do a bunch of exports and email filters and cleanup to provide a PST [personal storage file] of all of HRC’s emails to/from any .gov addresses,” Combetta wrote. [0]
Exporting email and filtering it, but only for .gov addresses(?).. I would imagine that whoever subpoenaed those mails was requesting not just .gov communication, and I can't help but think that these sort of actions are suggestive of some deeper cleanup activity.
[0] http://dailycaller.com/2016/09/19/computer-tech-who-asked-ho...
> The Bush administration ran private email servers to avoid FOIA requests, then nuked millions of saved emails when his term was up to avoid handing them over.
Citation needed if you're going to "correct the record."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_White_House_email_controv...
Overall this sort of redaction smells like legal advice.
You define the record as the body of the message and archive messages without the headers, or at least without the sender and recipient headers in them. This might even be a valid interpretation of the US records act.
When asked why you can say this was the archiving policy and you stored the messages as a document and the headers were irrelevant since they did not hold any information.
When asked about who sent or received a specific email that has been redacted you can 'honestly' claim "I do not recall".
Overall this is pretty much exactly the borderline illegal narrative that a good legal counselor would provide in this case.
Of Course that advice was granted based on the premise that there would not be a trail that would make this look premeditated and suspicious.
Who cares? "But the other guys are corrupt too!" is not a great argument for your candidate.
> I didn't see any huge circus or massive outcry about that.
We can all agree this is a problem.
Funny how nobody seemed to think so until now.
Dude, do you think this is a football game? That scoring a point against your opponent negates points scored against you?
I suspect a big chunk of the people complaining about this would have complained even harder when Bush did it (if what you say is true), if they had been old enough to be aware what was going on, and had social media like we do now.
So, what is your point? How does Bush doing it matter literally at all to whether Clinton should get in trouble?
The point I'm making is that I don't think you, or anybody else actually cares about the emails—they care it's something they can criticize Clinton for. Before her, nobody gave a shit. After her, nobody will give a shit. They don't matter, except that they can be used to criticize Clinton. So of course nobody complained about it with Bush, because nobody cares about them.
> I suspect a big chunk of the people complaining about this would have complained even harder when Bush did it (if what you say is true), if they had been old enough to be aware what was going on
They wouldn't have. The rest of us had much bigger complaints to make, that complaining about deleting emails would have been a laughable waste of time.
No, we complained constantly. But we had more important things to complain about then where his email server was.
Based on what evidence?
> they care it's something they can criticize Clinton for.
I'm no fan of Trump either. I wish Clinton were a good candidate so she would wipe the floor with him.
> So of course nobody complained about it with Bush, because nobody cares about them.
I was 12 years old when Bush was elected. That's why I didn't care about whatever he may or may not have done.
You know absolutely nothing about me or anyone else and you are presuming people's motives without any evidence or justification.
Sure, if it was just one or two that's one thing, but A email is public in the first place and B when your the fifth person in a row to do something you generally assume that's just how it's done.
Politifact tells the truth of it: http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2015/mar/15/...
Mcphage is trolling. Let's not feed him anymore.
Hillary Clinton is a grown ass woman. She knows what she'd doing. She held a position of high responsibility, that deals with highly sensitive intel that impacts many facets of national security, and had an obligation to keep her correspondence secure as well as open to FOIA requests.
That she didn't, and has repeatedly lied about it, should concern everyone. That she was willing to leave her server open to possible hacking simply for personal convenience and gain, should concern everyone. It does me.
How is it just deleting emails? She's literally hiding her tracks and doesn't want people to see what she's talking about. And when caught, she lies and deletes the evidence. I honestly do not understand how someone like you, who ostensibly is lecturing us about simply being rah rah for "our team" can NOT care about this. Honestly how can't you? You are literally telling us not to look at it through the lens of our favored political party. So then don't. How is this defensible?
I'm a little less familiar about previous instances, but if you're referring to Colin Powell's actions.. from what I've read they are no where near the extent to which she used private server for gov't communication.. BUT! I absolutely do not support him doing it either! If he broke a law, he should be prosecuted. I'd be ok with it happening even now.
Do laws and regulations have any meaning anymore if they don't apply to those at the top? We all have our favorites, and surely there is hypocrisy when we like to look the other way when it's "our guy/gal"... next time something like this happens I'll definitely care then too. A big part of it is about what kind of precedent it sets for future politicians. How much more will they hide from the public with no threat of consequences?
None of them broke any law, as laid out by Comey, who is famous for bashing heads with politicians. The law was executed by Comey faithfully and there was no crime to prosecute.
Yea that's terrible. If there was evidence of a (possibly) compromised, unsecured personal server, with high level officials talking about national security on it (including Bush) then I would think it would be even worse. But it is bad as is.
Also, I think Bush was a pretty terrible president in many respects and overall I'm not a fan of his.
If he used, or personally signed off on the use of, then he should have been held responsible. As well as others that did so themselves.
And Powell's recommendation that Clinton use a personal server is a perfect example of an arrogant, entitled, self-interested "leader" who only cares about political expediency and convenience for themselves at the expense of destroying government transparency and risking security leaks and hacks.
As a General who above all should know this better than anyone, he's a disgrace for recommending this, in my opinion.
If watching the pundit shows has taught me anything, it's that there are few classes of public figures more venal, hawkish, shameless, or blatantly self-serving than the military brass. It's a miracle they can convince anyone to follow their orders.
It's actually exactly what it is.
If Trump[1] is even worse, then sure, vote for Hillary. But that doesn't mean that she's good or that people have to like her.
As an aside: if that were the argument Hillary fans had been making the whole time: "Yeah, we know Hillary is bad and corrupt, but at least she's way better than Trump, so you should vote for her", then I would respect them a lot more.
Instead, it's mostly been a chorus of "OMG, why are you dragging up conspiracy theories about her e-mails! You right-wing simpleton! Go back to Breitbart and argue about lizard people!"
Nothing is more annoying than people being smug when they're actually wrong.
[1]: Trump is Hillary's competition, in case anyone didn't know. Not sure why anyone is still talking about Bush.
This is true, and baffling. I try to vote as if the process matters, although I'll be the first to admit it's largely a waste of my time. Meanwhile, the morons who loudly declaim the fundamental importance of voting, care only about being "right". SMH.
Therefore, no there are NOT just two teams. Voting for the lesser evil is so much of what is wrong with the direction of this country today.
Given all the contention over the HRC email thing and specifically over this reddit revelation, I'm not so sure that the situation we have is clearly defined within the laws (otherwise why wouldn't everything be clear cut and decided already?).
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudenc...
What is clear however, is that judging Clinton's mishandling of emails as a crime, when only one person in a hundred years in completely different circumstances has been prosecuted for the same crime, would be unprecedented.
http://www.politico.com/blogs/under-the-radar/2016/07/heres-...
Snowden wrote in wired, though the article doesn't cover the latest news https://www.wired.com/2015/09/snowden-people-get-fired-prose...
There are several distinctions between the Clinton case and the Petraeus case.
* The Clinton case revolved around an unclassified context while the Petraeus case revolved around information taken from a classified context.
* The Clinton case involved data not marked classified (keep in mind emailing New York Times links to someone about about Snowden would be highly classified information), while the Petraeus case involved books that were clearly classified.
* The Clinton case showed no intent while the Petraeus case involved clear intent.
* The Clinton case involved an internal server while the Petraeus case involved open books given to his mistress.
* Clinton cooperated with the FBI while Petraeus intentionally misled the FBI.
Also, reminder that Snowden is a wanted criminal asking for a pardon for leaking 200,000 classified documents to the press, while taking refuge in the state of a geopolitical enemy. He will make scripted media appearances on behalf of Putin [1]. He is not a reliable source.
Unfortunately, every single person that I know, that has a security clearance, can easily punch holes in almost all your points.
My views are based on what I have read and what I have been told by people with, collectively, 100+ years of security clearance holding.
* The Clinton private email server was not cleared for handling classified info. Yet classified information went through it as we now know.
* Some things were marked classified and some were not. This has no bearing on anything however. The onus is on the person who has the clearance to treat and handle all classified information properly regardless of whether it is marked properly or not.
* Clinton's intent: "If they can't, turn into nonpaper w no identifying heading and send nonsecure."
i.e. take classified info, put into email form and strip the classified markings from it, then send to me.
Source: https://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/emailid/12605
I'll stop there. Basically your points are garbage.
What you cannot reasonably do, is take the legal opinion of the Director of the FBI, that the Clinton case is different from the Petraeus case, and disagree based on the fact that you have 100+ years of security clearance holding.
I have explained to you key points in James Comey's legal opinion that the Petraeus situation is not applicable to Clinton. I'm sure you're more knowledgeable than I in some area or another, however that doesn't change the fact that the legal position of the FBI has already decided. You can disagree if you want, in the same way people from the internet disagree that climate change exists. I am not interested your vague insinuations.
Petraeus vs Clinton is a red herring, I didn't mention Petraeus. I was referring to the case of Brian Nishimura.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-07-05/peak-fbi-corruption...
Seriously? "Oh, man, we sure left a loophole you can drive a truck through! Better update the training materials to make sure clearance holders know this is kosher..."
Sorry, but my prior on this claim is just way too low to casually accept that the analysis, as given in the first link, is plugging the relevant laws into the facts. Classified-material law just doesn't make sense if something like that is legal.
In a fast paced environment, procedures and expectations can be expected to evolve accordingly.
I did. This was just one of many mini-scandals under Bush that never really seemed to boil over.
I thought it was a problem then, still think it's a problem now, but now know why nobody held him to the fire: they were doing that shit too.
That's what I'm trying to understand here. Was it the case that they were just going to hand over the whole DB regardless, and are trying to keep personal info private (but still, e.g., leave the name so it's clear who's in the conversation)? That's, I suppose, kind of reasonable.
On the other hand, I'm vaguely aware that at least in some cases there's a legal discovery process, where you don't just hand over everything, but do certain searches for "relevant" info and hand over that [0]. Is that true or at all relevant here? That would be quite a bit more nefarious if they were trying to avoid the discovery mining process by changing the email addresses (without flat out deleting the emails). But it seems like instead of doing that why not just delete them?
[0] http://enterpriseit.co/microsoft-exchange/search-all-users-m...
> Instead, as Clinton revealed Tuesday, her attorneys searched the trove of emails for certain email addresses and subjects. Baron argued that raises the possibility that they missed some emails that should have been saved for the public record.
> First, the lawyers searched all emails with a “.gov” email address in any address field, which yielded 27,500 emails—more than 90% of the total correspondence ultimately provided to State.
Those matching emails were turned over on Dec. 5, 2015 and Combetta posted on July 24, 2015. The optics of trying to change the email addresses ahead of a search by her lawyers for certain email addresses to decide what to turn over are certainly not great.
According to Wikipedia, they turned over 30,000 pieces of paper.
I'm amazed that it isn't a requirement that documents be turned over in an electronically searchable format in most legal scenarios.
I agree it should be a matter of contempt of court when clearly used as a delaying tactic.
I think noting Bush's similar actions does not make Hillary's actions right. The old 'Two wrongs don't make a right' bit here.
There was plenty of anti-Bush press during his term too, so I can't answer to the lack of public outcry specifically on his email doings; perhaps, there was just too much other low-hanging fruit. Although, suspicions were raised blaming the Bush administration for the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that devastated parts of Indonesia and Thailand, and other earthquakes [1,2]. Sure a lot of them are flat-earther types, but you'd be surprised how some of the links I googled on this were just political forums.
[1] http://www.apfn.net/messageboard/03-17-05/discussion.cgi.81....
There were just so many things wrong with the Bush administration. I have mad respect for George W, he's a nice guy, and talks a little funny (to a northerner), but some of the things he did just... I don't even know.
Open government is silly? It has been a core aspect of democracy for a long time, and dates back at least to the time of the Enlightenment. People are allowed to have private conversations, but government are held accountable for decisions and the decision process. Transparency allows citizens of a democracy to control their government, reducing government corruption, bribery and other malfeasance. Is that what we are calling silly?
What it should do is encourage public officials to act lawfully and within the trust than citizens has given them. The idea of sealing emails "X years after leaving office" goes directly against the idea of classified documents, since that seal should only be added to information which will harm society and the public that elected the government. Embarrassing or corrupting showing information is not that.
Just from a PR perspective, this could not have come at a worse time.
The collapse at the 9/11 memorial, the "basket of deplorables", and the mention of the Pepe meme on her official website. Right after a couple of muslim terror attacks, some evidence surfaces purporting that she tried to cover up email indiscretions?
Most people do believe that where there's smoke, there's fire. And this cluster of events can't be good.
as her campaign camp looks like it's being run by a bunch of criminals who delete incriminating evidence.
FTFY
I have no problems accepting the fact that politicians might hire crooks to do some things that are extra legal. The fact that they're incompetent criminals who get caught and who don't understand the internet, that worries me.
Look up the origin of the term "banana republic" if you don't believe me. Or just look through how many things we did in South/Central America due to the doctrine of manifest destiny.
So if we have to do something bad to ensure a steady supply of oil at a reasonable price, sure. I can accept that.
But we should be discerning enough to figure out who to hire, and how to GET AWAY WITH IT to avoid repercussions. If you're the president, there's a lot more at stake here than your campaign - we're talking about full blown war.
I think that skill in shadiness is transferrable across motives. If you can't plan a robbery of a convenience store for your own wallet, why should I let you plan the robbery of a bank to give it all away to charity?
The ends (sorta) matter in a moralistic sort of way. But the means matter much more. You're playing for higher stakes here, not just criminal prosecution, but a low level brush war in the middle east if you mess things up.
aka robbing from the poor and giving to the rich
Illegal.
I have more problems with politicians hiring crooks to do illegal things for them, than with criminals being incompetent.
Which is why continuously pushing smoke, even when you know there's no fire, is such an effective strategy. How many Benghazi hearings were there, that all came to the same conclusion? But people hear "oh, there's another Benghazi hearing, it must mean something that there's so many!" even though everyone involved knows that it means nothing.
(2) The leak to the NYT about the server that broke this story appeared has been originated by the Obama administration. They were seeking to clip her wings as whispers about her policy differences with the Obama administration were circulating on Iran. Once HRC became such a sure thing she was inevitable as POTUS it would rended BSO an early lame duck, and on policy in the middle east where the two differ, would create issues for obama establishing a legacy. Obama now has the ability to pardon her (or in the actual turn of events, the Justice granted 'stonetear' limited immunity and killed a looming FBI indictment).
So both of these narratives play into a deeper and more complex game existing in DC than any sound bite or talking point proffered from a PR agency will attest.
Cites obama admin source
byline By MICHAEL S. SCHMIDTMARCH 2, 2015
24 hours before
Netanyahu’s Full Speech Before Congress, Mar. 3, 2015
http://www.nytimes.com/video/world/middleeast/10000000354782...
I happen to believe that facts are important in a Presidential race.
Essentially your response is repeating talking points of the Trump campaign... which is OK, 1st amendment and all that but to pretend like you're making a constructive addition to the discussion / debate is folly.
Right now America has a choice between Trump, a racist, mysoginist demagogue who has never held a public office and Hillary Clinton. Hillary may have issues but she is also possibly the most experienced presidential candidate of the last couple of decades.
George H. W. Bush was a two term vice president, director of the CIA, etc.
I've been following this election pretty closely for more than a year, and I seriously couldn't tell you what Clinton's positive message is besides "I'm experienced". Nobody cares. Americans don't elect technocratic planks of wood. This is the worst, most inept presidental campaign I've ever seen. She's very nearly losing to a joke candidate.
- "I'm experienced"
- "I'm a woman, and it's high time a woman became President"
It's interesting that her campaign has finally stopped beating us over the head with the latter, at least; it was insultingly sexist.
"Hillary may have issues but she is also possibly the most experienced presidential candidate of the last couple of decades."
s/Trump/Clinton/ and your statement: "Essentially your response is repeating talking points of the Trump campaign."
serves as a valid critique of your own response.
-
Qualified for not, Clinton's corruption has been confirmed beyond any reasonable doubt over the course of many leaks and scandals. Democrats who continue to support her are just as blindly partisan as Republicans.
The whole system is broken. I won't be voting for anyone.
Trump aside, electing someone that's openly corrupt (DNC Wikileaks show they went against Bernie, against rules) seems to be far more dangerous to the future of the US and worldwide democracy. Up until now, corruption was sort of assumed, but if a publicly corrupt candidate wins, it just shows "crime pays".
If you enforce the law, they should be deported. Now they probably have very good reasons for immigrating, but the fact remains that they broke the law and our borders, and the job of the executive branch is to enforce the laws.
She was linked to Whitewater, was that because she was a woman?
She constantly defended Bill Clinton's sexual indiscretions. http://www.nationalreview.com/article/435941/hillary-clinton....
She moved to New York just so she could run for senator.
She and Bill also spent 3 million dollars on her daughter's wedding. Where did she come up with that money, considering that a President's salary is in the mid six figures?
Oh that's right, she (and Bill) get quarter million dollar speaking fees at Goldman Sachs.
What part of all that would not be reprehensible if she were a man, and if she were a man, wouldn't this all be dug up and thrown into his/her face if you were running for president?
How is pointing out moral turpitude a "political smokescreen that plagues every woman in public office"?
If a man did all these things, and were running for POTUS, they'd get raked over the coals, just like Clinton is. What's your point?
Also, Clinton has made it a point to argue for "the right to be believed" for sexual assault victims. And she went to bat for her husband before that statement to cast doubt on his accusers? http://nypost.com/2016/08/15/hillarys-site-edits-sexual-assa...
What a two-faced person who should not be president.
Is this an incorrect reading of the sentiment here? And more importantly, should I assume that anyone against the H1B program feels so because of racial animus?
I doubt Trump has those same feelings however, as he hires H1B works at his own club in Palm Beach instead of Americans. If he was morally opposed to the program, I doubt he would do that.
I brought it up because he talks about it in a way to scapegoat foreigners, appealing to the darker angels of people who have racist tendencies and are looking for someone to blame. I find such a tactic reprehensible, and I personally do not draw a distinction between someone who acts on racist feelings and someone who makes racist appeals to those who act on racist feelings.
Being labelled a racist is a pretty serious charge for most people who don't have wealth or power and actually have to live and work with a diverse group of people. I would hate to be called a racist due to being against the current way the H1B program is administered just because Trump is against it as well.
Again, I'm sure that's not actually what you meant, but it points to the importance of using very clear language when leveling these kind of accusations.
It's pretty racist to attack a whole contingent of people and make broad negative generalizations about them and qualify with a half-hearted caveat that 'some' are good people. He's quite clearly drawing a line between "you" (the white audience he was speaking to) and the Other (i.e. the Mexicans) personified as rapists and drug dealers.
It's pretty straightforward xenophobic, hyper jingoist nationalist rhetoric. You = us good Americans. They = the Other. He uses the car industry for Japan, a conservative talking point since the 80s. For Mexico he harps on immigration and calls them rapists. It's aggregate and subjectivity-denying. It's racist and dumb.
At any rate, it's still besides the point. He's accurate in saying that people coming in illegally aren't "the best". If you're a top professional you're not going to risk illegal immigration anywhere, generally speaking. This lines up with my and others' personal experience (I lived in Central America for nearly 2 decades).
He's talking to a roomful of Americans mentioning how America (referred to as us, you) is being beaten by other countries (they). It's pretty obvious. Just because it doesn't make any sense doesn't negate what Trump was implying - it's not like he's known for sound logical reasoning or even being able to approximate a grain of truth. If you seriously think he was referring to "legal Mexicans" in that speech (again, to a roomful of his white cronies in Midtown NYC) then I got a brooklyn bridge to sell you.
>At any rate, it's still besides the point. He's accurate in saying that people coming in illegally aren't "the best".
Is he accurate in saying that Mexicans only care about "beating" us at the border and that they are mostly rapists with only some, he "assumes", are good people? Come on.
Illegal immigration is easy to attack without being racist. Mixed marriage not so much.
Lynchings were instigated by an accusation of a crime - the perpetrators could claim they weren't racist, they were just keeping their communities safe! [1]
Japanese internment too had a non-racist pretext: people of Japanese descent were claimed to be disloyal citizens with greater allegiance to Japan (even after being born in the USA or becoming naturalized) than the USA. [2]
We know that the debate about undocumented immigrants isn't about to Europeans who overstay their tourist visas or Canadians sneaking across the border: it is about a single ethnic group (hispanic) who have come across the Mexican border. This means that 'undocumented' can easily be a euphemism for 'hispanic', allowing people to shift racist statements into ostensibly non-racist ones. While not all discussions of undocumented immigrants are racist, some certainly are a form of dog whistle [3]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching_in_the_United_States#...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_America...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog-whistle_politics#United_St...
First, the two examples of racism you point out are decades old. Try to pay attention to current events.
We share a long, fairly badly secured land border with a country with significantly worse living and earning conditions than we enjoy. The fact that all those people trying to come to a better life share an ethnicity is not relevant at all.
If you want to see racism, see how British people treat Polish immigrants, even though the Poles have every right in the world to be there.
I don't mean this as a defence of Trump, but people seem to read into statements to determine his racism/bigotry/whatever. AFAIK he has not technically made a racist statement in any of his campaigning, for instance.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/8-of-the-sleaziest...
Also Trump was the President of the Trump organization when the DOJ fined the company for illegal housing discrimination, doing things like marking the lease applications of African Americans with a 'C' for 'Colored' so that they would know not to rent to them.
[0] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/d-c-rutledge/fbi-clinton-was-e...
Yes, it was because Nixon had moral fiber. Not because he negotiated a deal with Ford to pardon him immediately and preemptively, thus saving him the humiliation of impeachment and legal repercussions.
>but to pretend like you're making a constructive addition to the discussion / debate is folly.
That's silly. I'm just saying that all these things happened. Facts, if you will. These things definitely happened and were reported ad nauseum. The terror attacks, Clinton passing out, her basket of deplorables comment, those actually happened. And now this email thing.
These were Trump talking points long before the events happened.
Now, I think that her campaign staff could somehow spin this so that she comes out relatively unscathed, IF all these things didn't happen within about a week of each other. If this was spaced out over a month or so, we'd forget.
The way the timing is, no spin doctor in the world can buff this out.
I'm not advocating for either candidate, like you are, but I'm pointing out the fact that Clinton has pretty much made herself unelectable.
mentioning a meme on her website is disqualifying?
It's horrifying https://www.hillaryclinton.com/post/donald-trump-pepe-the-fr...
Edit: In response to your edit, she's attacking a cartoon frog. In seriousness.
Not only that, but she's trying to attribute characteristics to that frog that simply aren't any core part of why people post Pepe memes.
All of that questions the sensibilities of her campaign. Basically her campaign is going all out trying to paint Trump as racist, because that's really all they have left at this point, and even that isn't working too well.
There's only a single button (I Agree), and clicking the X in the corner to close the modal causes the button to be pushed at the same time.
For someone as "experienced" as Clinton, her campaign is astoundingly incompetent.
Only giving me one option offends my sensibilities, even if I belong to that person's camp. I can't think of a person on earth who enjoys having their autonomy removed.
So at best you've pissed off the people who support you, and at worst you've reinforced the other camp's argument that you're an authoritarian control-freak.
"Guy B is bad, elect me." is not as strong an argument as "I can and will do X to improve Y, guy B can't." And you still get to attack in B!
How can I in good conscience vote either party? I would be infinitely amused if everyone without talking about it voted for a third party out of spite and it was a total shock the day after. "Green party, bafflingly, wins election", or whatever.
[0]: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/201... [1]: http://www.breitbart.com/california/2016/08/11/nevertrump-yo... [2]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lesser_of_two_evils_principl...
The more we keep believing that we do, the more this same crap will keep happening every four to eight years.
What the hell, I'll give it a shot.
Huh? No it doesn't. It just closes the modal. Pressing the button does a different thing.
Try it out in a fresh Incognito window, or equivalent.
It's sad that it's so common, and scary effective. I just wish that it wasn't this way and that things like attack ads would at least include some info on how the candidate is different/better than the one they are attacking.
The sad truth is that I believe many of the same things as one of the major candidates, and when looking at the issues I do agree with some from the other, but the way they almost entirely ignore the issues and spend most of their time attacking others doesn't fill me with confidence that either one wont just bring that toxicity into an already toxic and gridlocked political system.
Yelling half-truths and over exaggerating the "enemy" isn't going to help the country at all. And IMO that stuff has no place on the offical website of a candidate.
So yeah, you and I look at that modal popup and think, "ew gross, why are you trying THIS hard to shove this negative image of your opponent down my throat, before I can even see a single fact about you and your campaign?", but I can totally see why they would do such a thing. People are very susceptible to being persuaded by these strong emotional accusations—it seems to me that the dialog is saying, "hey, you're not one of those filthy TRUMP supporters, ARE YOU? If not, prove it by clicking this button below." I believe that such a persuasive device is far more effective than either of us can imagine.
It's really not, the reason why they keep hammering it home is because his vocal support among the fringes is unprecedented in the modern era.
They've got plenty of things to attack him on - which they do.
Polls show he currently has historically high support among black voters - and not just for himself, but out of any Republican candidate over the last few decades [1], and it's high enough that it could tip the election.
0: http://graphics.latimes.com/usc-presidential-poll-dashboard/ (scroll to 'by race/ethnicity').
1: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/06/11/ho...
As it turns out, delegitimizing and spreading conspiracy theories about a wildly popular president in a community does not make people in a community fans of you.
Most analysts don't think the outreach was targeted at black voters at all, but rather white moderates, who are more persuadable and numerous in number.
0: http://www.vox.com/2016/8/24/12587672/donald-trump-s-black-o...
Who is this? How can I tell who of my neighbors is in this group? Having made that determination, how should I treat those neighbors?
> Who is this? How can I tell who of my neighbors is in this group?
People who espouse beliefs far away from the median belief in the society. You can tell by taking to them about their beliefs, or often in my experience by having them talk at you about them or by looking at bumper stickers and flags they display, and then comparing the beliefs they espouse to your intuition of what the median belief is. Of course everyone's intuition of that is based on the people they themselves know, so "the fringe" ends up defined differently for different people. This can be controlled a bit by reading or being exposed to summaries of reports of society-wide studies, like polls and surveys. This is what the news should help with, but unfortunately people tend to choose news from inside the same bubble as all the people they know, so that doesn't work that well either.
> Having made that determination, how should I treat those neighbors?
With the same kindness you treat everyone else, but without having to agree (or pretend to agree) with our have any respect for their views. You "hate the sin, not the sinner".
Second, the proposed method of making this identification is entirely subjective. I'm planning to vote either Green or Libertarian this election, because I oppose war, prohibition, and other travesties of the status quo. On the topics of most concern to me, I literally can't tell the difference between Clinton supporters and Trump supporters. How can I determine whose "sins" I should "hate"? Perhaps I should hate my own sins, even though they couldn't possibly be of support to Trump? This is quite disturbing to me, and the principle of charity had previously ruled out this reading of OP.
With the same kindness you treat everyone else, but without having to agree (or pretend to agree) with our have any respect for their views. You "hate the sin, not the sinner".
Incidentally, if any particular campaign takes this particular idiotic rhetorical stance, and then loses, and then wonders why? They'll be able to blame this particular idiotic rhetorical stance. In order to convince people of anything, one must speak with fluency in the people's terms. Your use of "sin" here would not be considered idiomatic by any Trump supporter I know.
Like I pointed out in my comment, "fringe" is definitely subjective, but there are also some objective measures, but they are also fraught for various reasons (which I went into a bit in my comment).
The claim (which, I'm not making, but others are) is that the Trump campaign has attracted more of "the fringe", not that all his supporters are of "the fringe". It's very possible to have both "mainstream" and "fringe" support.
But you are ignoring that people who are proudly racist are openly admitting to using pepe specifically to broaden and popularize explicitly racist ideas. That deserves to have light shown on it.
What do you get out of proving that self-proclaimed racists [do x], as a small subset of people who [do x]?
You mean like the prominent white supremacists quoted in the article linked to by that expose?
Who later turned out to be a couple of trolls making up stuff for shits and giggles to see what sort of ridiculous things they could make journalists write? (http://dailycaller.com/2016/09/14/heres-how-two-twitter-pran...)
Giving credibility to that just makes you look foolish.
> using pepe specifically to broaden and popularize explicitly racist ideas
I await Hillary Clinton's expose on Mickey Mouse
"We live in a society of a great deal of degeneracy, we live in a society in which the fundamental norms are liberal, and we are attempting to fight our way out of that. And sometimes that's going to involve using the means that are at hand. That's going to involve being a part of this fragmented group. That's going to involve dank memes. It's going to involve pepe. It's going to involve unleashing a little chaos". - Richard Spencer at the recent conference of the Alt Right
Willfully ignoring that these people are attempting to get organized, and co-opting whatever gets them traction, is unhelpful at best and dangerous.
You've got it backwards. Allowing their words to control your actions gives them power over you.
Are 'dank memes' now racist also just like Pepe?
Imagine instead of 'It's going to involve pepe' he said 'It's going to involve breathing air and drinking water', or some other common and popular thing.
Do you give such idiots the power to control your actions over some common and totally innocuous thing that you might otherwise enjoy or find amusing?
That is called being played for a fool and that is what gets them traction.
If you want to blow that up into a giant hyperbole that's on you. Making people aware of what is going on doesn't limit anyone's speech or actions.
The same would be true if they posted Mickey Mouse memes or anything else. To claim Pepe memes by default have any sort of racist undertones (as the Clinton campaign is doing) is false.
> Making people aware of what is going on doesn't limit anyone's speech or actions
Except with that article on Hillary's site, it's not being done to 'make people aware' it's done to brand Pepe as being racist so that when you see regular Trump supporters posting completely innocent Pepe memes (which they do with regularity) it creates the illusion that a large number of Trump supporters are racist (some are I'm sure but the same goes for any group that contains tens of millions of people).
Taking a white-supremacist at his word that Pepe is part of their movement also give them power and notoriety that they wouldn't otherwise have. By 'making people aware' you are giving voice to people who otherwise wouldn't be heard.
Don't believe me? Look at Google Trends for something like 'David Duke'
https://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=david%20duke
Who do you think is responsible for creating that upsurge in interest?
Who are the people quoting Duke in articles and writing pages and pages of content about him?
Hint it isn't Trump, it's the people trying to tar Trump with a racist brush.
I have no political agenda. I’m not from the US, I’m not in the US, I can’t vote in this election. I have no horse in this race. I’m an outsider looking in on the stupidity (on both sides).
I am addressing your points - or at least thought I was. Your point as it appears to me (feel free to correct me if I've misinterpreted you) was ‘we need to make people aware of how these white supremacists are promoting their ideals’.
My point is ‘this has the opposite intent of what you expect and like the Streisand effect, it inadvertently helps promote such ideals and gives these people cultural ground that they otherwise wouldn’t be able to occupy. Giving any sort of import to their ravings, makes them more important than they deserve to be, and gives them a degree of control over your actions.'
They are promoting it themselves, loudly, and trying to inject their ideas into mainstream political discourse. I see no problem in calling for people to reject it, and helping them identify them. You can look into american history and see that we have been through cycles like this before (example the 'Know Nothings' against the catholics).
I have myself clearly seen more speech in favor of segregation ("we just weren't meant to mix together") on many sites (reddit, facebook comments on congressman pages, etc). I can give you links to explicitly racist sites where they talk about organizing on popular websites to change discourse. You argue I'm giving them the Streisand effect, but we are already too late. They are here, people need to be aware today. These people intentionally prey on those who are susceptible and angry.
I have two (former) friends who have tried talking to me about how "cultural marxism is destroying western values" and that every muslim has evil in their hearts. They weren't always like this.
They don't deserve to be important, instead of ignoring them people need to be willing to say that this is unacceptable and their ideas are not welcome.
Which is a better way to show someone that they are not important:
* Ignoring them
* Giving their views countless press in order to discredit them
> They are promoting it themselves, loudly, and trying to inject their ideas into mainstream political discourse
Something they have been trying to do since basically forever. However they can only successfully inject themselves when other people allow it.
Have a look at this basic timeline:
Internet: Pepe the frog is fun
Racists: Pepe the frog now belongs to us
Internet: Nah, Pepe's not racist.
Clinton: Pepe the frog belongs to racists
Internet: Nah, Pepe's not racist.
Question: In this scenario, who gave racists control of Pepe the frog and who allowed racists to inject themselves in to this part of mainstream culture? (Hint: it was not the racists and it was not the Internet).
> I can give you links to explicitly racist sites
This is exactly what I was talking about. In your fervor to show how horrible these people are, you are willing to promote these sites yourself...
I don't care for those sites any more than I care for sites promoting flat-earth science and/or UFOs. I know they exist, but I ignore them completely, which is exactly the attention they deserve.
Did I give you any links? I indicated that they are there and it is explicit and obvious.
If you cannot handle that a meme is ALSO (which means NOT ENTIRELY ie they dont own it) by people with a racist agenda then I frankly don't know what to say. The above people asked for proof, I gave it to them. Deal with the facts.
I'm not going to stop pointing out the tactics of white supremacists to inject themselves in mainstream culture.
Ok, sure
> But you are ignoring that people who are proudly racist are openly admitting to using pepe specifically to broaden and popularize explicitly racist ideas
Yes. I am ignoring such people, because such tactics don't merit anything more. I would also ignore them if they claimed to be using Mickey Mouse or any other broadly popular icon to promote their ideas.
Because it deserves nothing more than a rolling of my eyes.
What I will call out is people (like the Clinton campaign) accepting or validating the idea that Pepe is somehow a racist, nazi frog.
> If you cannot handle that a meme is ALSO (which means NOT ENTIRELY ie they dont own it) by people with a racist agenda then I frankly don't know what to say
I can handle it fine. It's the Clinton campaign (and surrogates) that are trying to actively associate Pepe as a symbol of racism and that's what I object to.
I think this conversation has reached the point where it is only going to go round in circles, so I'm bowing out now. Please enjoy the rest of your day.
I'm writing this on my computer and I have an entire folder on my desktop filled with rare Pepes that I've collected over the years. I'm not a white nationalist and up until last week I had a Pepe sticker on my backpack that I carry with me everywhere. When I saw this article gaining mainstream attention I immediately took the sticker off. I have enough things to deal with in life to not want to worry about being called a racist because of my Pepe sticker. Now, I understand there are much greater injustices in the country to deal with than this, but this is yet another example of politicians using these kind of binary arguments that end up making serious discourse impossible.
2. > I can handle it fine. It's the Clinton campaign (and surrogates) that are trying to actively associate Pepe as a symbol of racism and that's what I object to.
People promoting racism are doing this, you want to stay willfully ignorant about it.
Granted, the primaries remedy this to an extent, except when you have the unabashed stacking that was employed to counter recent 2012 and 2016 primary campaigns.
Democracy is at its most interactive in the early stages of the election, but the vast majority of people will never leverage that opportunity. People don't act until a media apparatus cues them to cast a vote for its packaged candidate de jour.
Trump really knows how to seize advantage of a weakness.
And remember, he's already primed the pump.
He's labeled Clinton as "crooked" and "lacking stamina" far before all this happened. He must have seen something, cause everything she's done since then has confirmed it.
He has been successful in business and is now at the helm of one of the most powerful political parties in the known universe. No one has that kind of "luck". There is something more there.
("Indict" means to charge with a crime. "Indite" is an archaic synonym for "invite". The joke I make about this confusion of terms originates with Shakespeare, so I think "indite" must be pretty archaic indeed!)
In this period of great economic uncertainty, a billionaire real estate tycoon and media mogul with no political experience, inflammatory rhetoric, and awful, authoritarian policy proposals is a serious contender for the most powerful office in the world, I'd say we have bigger problems to worry about tHan anything Hillary may have done. Our economy, livelihood, and potentially our freedom is at stake under this threat. Trump is a true menace to society and we are treating any little flaw shown by Hillary as villainy in the highest order. It's baffling, and terrifying.
In short, I'd take Crooked Hillary over Tyrant Trump any day.
One of several archived copies of the r/exchangeserver thread, "Remove or replace to/from address on archived emails?" (the user stonetear deleted his account during the r/conspiracy thread): http://archive.is/FXcao
you have to admit, (fears of things going one way or another set aside) it's been pretty entertaining.
/r/conspiracy and /r/the_donald have been pretty prophetic.
Since then it's been spammed in a variety of low traffic subreddits in an effort to make it relevant news.
Personally, I find it had to trust anything that comes out of reddit's political forums, as they are incredibly unreliable sources of information. (this included)
The /r/exchangeserver communities top post of all time as of yesterday had 50 upvotes. The top post from 2 years ago had 25 and 13 comments. But somehow I'm supposed to believe that the best technical resource this guy could think of when faced with this investigation was reddit? Umm... No. I don't believe it for a second.
If you are going to run an e-mail server in difficult circumstances then hire a System Administrator who does not need to post obviously problematic questions to Reddit.
And then 2 years later your post on an internet forums about your missing dog helps tie you the destruction of evidence.
The point is that even if you are posting innocuous things, it builds up a profile that can identify you in ways you do not expect. This example was for something serious.
Who knows what the next example will be like.
About a month ago I received this pdf [1] (1700+ pages of email records) of Chicago's office of the mayor after about three months of resistance. Prior to that, it took a year and a half and a law suit to receive one week's worth of Chicago's mayor's logs [2] through Chicago's IT department. To my knowledge, prior to this work, records in volume have been impossible to get due to asinine rejections. The amount or resistance (and holy shit was there a lot) led me to run several chains of FOIA requests to gather bulk communication records.
Of note in the call records are many private investigator calls. I haven't had much chance to go through the email records and could use some help if anybody's interested.
[1] https://spaces.hightail.com/receive/oFwvr/fi-29853345-5f15-4... [2] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1hgG79eIr8MbkjYrCvcTR... (four, mostly unstructured sheets)
And really, it's not 100 million people. That's just the number of people on the site. In actual fact, it's probably a handful of people at most.
You can believe that, against all odds, Bill really did just talk to Loretta Lynch about grandkids. Even so, the point was still made.
Some of the "people faffing about" are probably also professionals and some of them are probably better than the people employed by the FBI. I mean, yeah, there are plenty of dumbasses on Reddit, but there are people who really Know Their Shit as well.
another person who asked questions on stackoverflow was Ross Ulbricht; it didn't quite help him.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/10/02/silk_road...
Then reading through the complaint, it seems like Ulbricht was undone by registering on Stack Overflow using his GMail account, which the FBI had tracked his Comcast IP to (didn't hurt that the gmail address was his real name), and then asked StackOverflow for the records relating to that GMail address: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/801103-172770276-ulb...
sidenote: The Slate article links to the complaint on Scribd, and now it's deleted from Scribd for some reason.
There's nothing in the thread to suggest he's trying to conceal anything meaningful in terms of the content of the correspondence. Presumably the "how does I delete sexy snapchats to the Saudis" thread was done more discretely.
The reason Exchange does not have the functionality to redact email address is that people who need to redact information usually prefer to do it by hand, so it would be a waste of Microsoft's time to build a utility to do it.
But to think that an Exchange DB can't be altered... I mean, if you have root on a machine you can do anything you want to the information on it. And yes, the legal world knows that.
As a business person, nobody would [buy/use] exchange if it was not reasonably secure from an audit trail perspective. The intergrity of the communications is required for many business's who have record retention policy and what not.
Think about an analogy for a bank's accounting system that allowed audit trails to be compromised. Its a huge problem for the purchasing people and the managerial layer that has to sign off on sarbox etc.
Technological audit trails are trustworthy only to the extent that the admins running them are trusted.
Even if you are using journalling, an administrator can open the journal mailbox and edit messages. If you want/need a reasonably secure audit trail, you need a 3rd party product in addition to Exchange.
[1] https://www.msoutlook.info/question/edit-message-and-subject
I have not seen this reported on by any major US news media. (FOX, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, PBS) Other than The Hill, US News, various right-wing sources, and VICE I don't see anyone writing about this. It reminds me of the first hour or two after Hillary's episode at the 9/11 event where the only major news source reporting was Fox News.
Is this something people are interested in? Is there an obligation to report on this nationally?
I didn't necessarily disagree that there are moments where we got it wrong, for sure. I tried arguing that using those events as a point of reference for insulating journalism a bit better was probably a good idea; you know "first step to overcoming a problem is admitting you have one" and he was having none of it. Maybe this story will do the trick.
Really curious to see where this goes taking some points from that debate.
Well, because some sentiments were wrong (in his opinion because people like Kim Kardashian are allowed to tweet), the whole notion needed to be thrown out.
So I agree, it's an important distinction-though that distinction is inherently part of the "riddle" so-to-speak.
The claim may not just be that bad data is mixed in with the good. It might rather be that we can't verify sources and facts on social media effectively. In other words, I question the assumption that traditional journalistic methods are effective when examining social media.
To be clear: I haven't formed an opinion on this. Thanks for the thought-provoking question, in any case.
Believe me when I say we went down that rabbit hole as well. I even asked if perhaps there was something to the notion as to the unreliability of sources on social media and if that was the case, how do we create incentives for or otherwise insulate journalism beyond the baked-in expectation that journalists will perform with more earnest intent to disseminate to verify and seek out sources. We expect a journalist to dig for qualitative sources; we expect integrity; what do we do when that doesn't happen? What's next?
He directly said "We ignore it. We ignore the problem and it will stop being one". I couldn't find a way to agree with that, I tried providing a subsequent argument that if there were a problem with social media mucking a story-where was the inherent problem in pointing to a fixed point in time where it happened (using examples he offered to the debate) as a means of understanding what went wrong in the process, and working to do better. That didn't get far. Trust me, I was there.
At the end of the day, I had to rest the argument because he just didn't think social media had any bearing for journalists, and I had to try even harder to avoid saying things that were just plain rude after my position was continuously mischaracterized and parroted back as ideological soundbytes.
Still, I think it's a critical conversation the journalism world ought to be having, and I don't think "Well just tell journalists to ignore social media" will solve that.
Redacting the characters of an email address is almost certainly not illegal; in fact both State and the FBI regularly do this themselves when releasing emails.
So, I don't think this is much of a win in the social media saves the world column.
I don't want Clinton or Trump to be the next POTUS. I think they're both inadequate for the position.
I wonder if corporate media will bring up this story.
Actually it's the Fifth Amendment protection against self incrimination.
Does anyone know if there is any form of signing the outlook data exports / live datastore that would prevent easy external programmatic replacement?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12533757 250 points (more than this post at the moment)
I think what's going on here (and what I just told the other moderators) is that this is one of those times when our standard practices around things like dupes and downweights—e.g. for political controversies—don't apply. This doesn't happen very often, perhaps once every couple weeks. In such cases the community will is unmistakeable, the story will keep coming up until it gets an airing, and our job is to let that happen.
I like it much better when we call these right from the beginning, but what are the odds that an r/conspiracy Hillary investigation would turn into a solid HN thread? Too small for the human eye, and no set of moderation rules can operate at that fine a grain.
After the flag-killed story today was reset, it still never showed up on the main page, despite hundreds of votes, although it did show up on /classic.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I assume this one's different because of the Reddit connection.
Moderation consistency is impossible, because we can't come close to reading everything here. We do our best.
But the phenomenon that was reported was true, it was easy to verify by yourself. I don't see why these kind of posts should be flagged and removed. Maybe you don't agree with their content, but then why not have a discussion about them? In this case I would have been interested in hearing an explanation for those autocomplete suggestions.
Screenshots http://sli.mg/a/wMhiQp
The 254/312 isn't what I'm seeing and ought to be impossible given how the software works. Can you reproduce it?
The user is likely misunderstanding how the plugin works.
But I saw the sudden drop from top 4 to below the fold within minutes. Way too fast.
> Citation needed if you're
> going to "correct the record."
>Correct The Record is a strategic research and rapid response team designed to defend Hillary Clinton from baseless attacks.
By saying that the GP was trying to "correct the record", he's implying that the GGP is a paid shill for Hillary.
https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/4xcwjb/what_i...
Edit: At the time of this edit, three replies have asked for a citation on "false", so I may as well put it here.
Barrier Breakers 2016, the subject of the original The Daily Beast article that spread the rumor [1], is a real project that spreads messaging (call if propaganda if you want) supporting Clinton. But that messaging is not anonymous or covert. Here are some of their social media accounts:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/nobarriers2016
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BarrierBreakers2016/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMLy17PDQw_WSNoytoDX-HA
Other CTR Twitter accounts (not 'Barrier Breakers'):
https://twitter.com/CorrectRecord
They post a lot of stuff - the @nobarriers2016 Twitter account has three posts in the last hour. But the accounts are clearly marked as a project of Correct the Record, and the glossy images they share are not even remotely pretending to be grassroots.
According to their spokesperson, they do not have an additional covert operation:
> “Barrier Breakers accounts are always identified as Correct the Record,” spokesperson Elizabeth Shappell said.
- http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/05/correct-...
That article is a good read in general and explains what they mean by "pushing back":
> In an exchange on May 24, a Twitter user with a bio that reads “Conservative Republican. Trump SUPPORTER. Fox news viewer,” wrote: “Whenever CROOKED HILLARY gets a tough question she either bursts into that blood curdling laughing cackle or starts barking like a dog. #LIAR.” Correct the Record responded with #ImWithHer and a graphic of Clinton with text reading: “She’s the most vetted person on earth. And standing STRONGER than ever.”
(You can find the tweet in question by searching - the response was from the @CTR_DZ account.)
Personally, I consider this approach fairly lame, in line with the brand social media accounts that sometimes show up in my Twitter replies when I complain about the brand. If I got a message from them, I doubt I would feel especially encouraged or interested in resharing their images. But that's a far cry from being immoral, which I think employing anonymous commenters to skew the public debate would be.
Of course, I can't present absolute proof that they are telling the truth about not having an additional covert operation. But there is no evidence whatsoever that they do have one, only baseless speculation about "paid shills", of the sort that's been around forever (I remember when I used to read Slashdot, closer to its prime, and it was Microsoft that supposedly employed an army of them there), combined with a distorted understanding of a real project.
[1] http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/04/21/hillary-pac...
Why have you decided it's false?
Any citation for that?
And she didn't say that Correct the Record doesn't have covert accounts, she said the Barrier Breakers accounts are always marked.
I keep (wishful thinking) envisioning a scenario where he gets just enough votes that all of a sudden everyone on the fence realizes that maybe he could win and joins in, and then he launches ahead
Wishful thinking and politics aside: there's a term for that phenomenon on the tip of my tongue, but I can't quite place it. Can anyone think of one? Where there's a slow growth until you get just enough of something and then it takes off?
Yeah, I know what you mean. It's just that this time around, BOTH "major party" choices are SO bad, that you look at it and think "who cares whether Gigantic Douche or Turd Sandwich wins?" Ya know?
Thus, it becomes a choice of 1) making a symbolic vote for a third party to "show them", 2) helping Clinton win, and 3) helping Trump win.
Given the potential outcomes of Trump vs Clinton, a lot of people believe (rightly, IMO) that this electoral cycle is not a good time to make symbolic gestures or long-term strategic voting games. Too much is at stake. Status quo sucks, but is still infinitely better than the alternative.
- Obama vs Romney
- Obama vs McCain
- Bush Jr vs Kerry
- Bush Jr vs Gore
- Clinton vs Dole
- Clinton vs Bush Sr
Unfortunately, because this argument was abused so many times before, it's hard to convince people that this time is different.
And a lot of us believe (rightly, IMO) that both Clinton and Trump are so equally bad, that there's no effective difference.
Me personally, if Gary wasn't in the race, I wouldn't cast a vote for President at all. shrug
Whereas 4 years of a sociopath with megalomania, a definitive authoritarian streak, and a massive populist backing, I'm not so sure about.
Let me put it this way. As a third party supporter, your strategy, presumably, is to slowly accrue vote until your candidate of choice (or really, anyone who's willing to reform the electoral system to make third parties viable) breaks past the barrier. This presupposes that there is such a thing as elections, though. Say what you want about Clinton, but there's no viable threat from her in that regard. She might be prone to skirting the rules, but she doesn't rewrite them. Trump, on the other hand, seems to be a fan of the "strong hand". Last time my country of birth went for that, we ended up with a dictator in all but name. And the parallels between what I heard people say there then, and what I see people in US say now, are making me very nervous.
Corruption is the #1 thing that destroys countries. Nothing else comes close.
A "sociopath with megalomania" on the other hand can't really do much to hurt the country (no one would let him). And I don't see how "a definitive authoritarian streak, and a massive populist backing" are a problem.
i.e. secret damage to a country is much worse than open damage.
I can see how someone might have said that before the 20th century happened.
Really? Militaristic jingoism has historically been a pretty popular choice to commit national suicide, for example.
The thing about corruption is that it's not violently destructive. It slowly erodes the system, but it takes a lot of time, and the process is reversible at practically any point.
> A "sociopath with megalomania" on the other hand can't really do much to hurt the country (no one would let him).
That seems to be a common retort that I've encountered among reluctant Trump supporters - that checks and balances would prevent anything really damaging.
I don't feel like it's particularly well supported by experience. Just to give a simple example, not only Japanese-American internment during WW2 was found to be legal and constitutional, but the corresponding SCOTUS decision (Korematsu) still stands. Which means that the president can sign a similar EO, and it'll be in force per existing precedent until SCOTUS gets a chance to overturn - and even then there are no guarantees.
And then there's a slew of accumulated post-9/11 precedent, which, in the hands of someone who thinks that torture is a good idea, among other reasons, "because they deserve it", could blow up big time.
> And I don't see how "a definitive authoritarian streak, and a massive populist backing" are a problem.
I'm not sure how to respond to that.
If you mean that you don't see it as desirable, but also don't think that it's dangerous, I would like to remind you that this is something that has repeated many times in history in the past 100 years alone, and pretty much every time resulted in authoritarian societies, with all that entails - political dictatorships, massive human rights violations, and often, wars with neighbors.
If you mean that you actually see it as desirable, I don't think that we have sufficient common ground to meaningfully discuss this subject.
There's really never a chance for third parties to rise in the US because we use a crappy voting system (first past the post). We should change our voting system to Range Voting [1].
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/09/gary-johnson-libertarian-...
Prisons:
>Johnson accepted at least $9,000 in campaign donations from a prison company that ultimately won a state contract. By the time he left office, New Mexico led the country in for-profit prisons, housing 44 percent of its inmates in private facilities. Only Alaska, with 31 percent, came close.
>In 2000, after four inmates and a guard were killed in private facilities, Johnson vetoed an oversight bill and startled reporters by insisting that New Mexico had the best prisons in the nation.
Poverty:
>Within just a few months, the state had knocked more than 16,000 people off its welfare rolls, and its poverty rate had risen to first in the nation, according to a report from the state’s legislature.
Schools:
>For Democratic legislators, the trouble wasn’t just that Johnson wanted to divert money from the public system to private institutions. It was that his plan would privilege rich families in the long run, said Charles Bowyer, who served as government-relations director of the teachers’ union during Johnson’s tenure. Tuition at the most prestigious private schools often cost around $8,000 or $9,000 — meaning low-income families could never afford them, even with vouchers. And private schools would still be able to reject special-needs students.
Keep in mind, Johnson is running for President, not Chief Cartographer.
You can call our foreign policy a joke, but it's inexcusable for someone running for the most powerful office in the world to not have even a cursory knowledge of it.
I was going to vote for Hillary, but after Sander's success, she started making promises that just mimicked his. She is not going to bring jobs back to the United States.
I might not vote for a president this year. I feel kinda dizzy just writing that last sentance.
There's a small part of me that thinks if the right third party candidate/person, back by a ton of money, jumped into the race this week, he/she might win.
At this point, if Bill Maher jumped in; I would vote for him. Hell--if Jimmy Kimmel jumped in, I would vote for him.
I don't even know these two guys, but I trust they would try to do the right thing, or at least delegate to the right people.
I rember feeling a sence of doom when Regan was running, but the world was so different, and I was in high school.
As someone said before, this election is beyond weird.
And why is that important? The government can always lower the minimum wage to adjust the number of jobs if it decreases.
Keep in mind, "Duverger's Law" isn't a law in the same sense that gravity is. That is, it's more of an observation of how things usually are... it's not an inviolable fundamental principle of the universe.
If you vote for one of those two people, you get to influence that outcome.
You're not influencing the outcome when the outcome is the same in both cases.
If you haven't heard of Johnson Weld, please hear them out and at least watch their 60 Minutes interview from last night: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/60-minutes-libertarian-candidate...
Effectively, there is no 3rd party this year :(
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/24/opinion/sunday/is-donald-t...
Edit: Some of the tweets he's re-tweeted are pretty questionable, i'll give you that much. I only saw a couple before, one about Jeb Bush which one article had as it's prime example so I was pretty confused.
He spent 5 years pushing the birther conspiracy even after Obama produced his birth certificate. He also implied that Obama was a Muslim despite his claims to the contrary.
He's implied several times that Obama sides with terrorists because of his upbringing.
He said a judge was unqualified to preside over a Trump University lawsuit because he was Mexican (turns out he was born in the US 60 years ago.) Paul Ryan called it a "textbook definition of racism".
He started his campaign with this quote: "When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people." Despite the fact that studies show first generation immigrants don't commit more crimes than native born citizens.
He uses language like "My African American", "The Muslims", and "The Hispanics" when talking about minority groups.
He refused to disavow David Duke on air until he "researched him more." He said he didn't know who he was, but it turns out there are numerous example of him mentioning David Duke in the past. He had primaries in southern states coming up, so publicly disavowing David Duke would have likely hurt him. Especially since David Duke has been campaigning for him. He did eventually disavow him after the media made a huge deal about it.
He repeatedly refers to Elizabeth Warren as "Pocahontas".
He said "They don’t look like Indians to me" about a Native American tribe that ran a competing casino.
He said "Maybe [the protester] should have been roughed up,” he mused. “It was absolutely disgusting what he was doing." about a Black Lives matter protester at his rally.
He said "I will say that people who are following me are very passionate,” Trump said. “They love this country and they want this country to be great again. They are passionate." when asked about supporters who beat a homeless Latino man because "they all need to be deported."
> In 1989 he reportedly said "Black guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day."
Last I checked, "Jewish" was not an ethnicity, but a belief system.
> He spent 5 years pushing the birther conspiracy even after Obama produced his birth certificate. He also implied that Obama was a Muslim despite his claims to the contrary.
Muslim is not a race. How is asking if the president was born in the US racist?
> He's implied several times that Obama sides with terrorists because of his upbringing.
Upbringing is a race?
> He started his campaign with this quote: "When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best.
Mexico is a country, not a race.
> He said a judge was unqualified to preside over a Trump University lawsuit because he was Mexican
Mexican is not a race. Louis CK is mexican.
> He uses language like "My African American", "The Muslims", and "The Hispanics".
African american is not a race. Charlize Theron is African American. Islam is not a race, it's a belief system. Hispanics - so he's racist against Spaniards or just mestizos?
> He refused to disavow David Duke on air until he "researched him more." He said he didn't know who he was, but it turns out there are numerous example of him mentioning David Duke in the past. He had primaries in southern states coming up, so publicly disavowing David Duke would have likely hurt him. Especially since David Duke has been campaigning for him. He did eventually disavow him after the media made a huge deal about it.
He did eventually disavow him, after agreeing with none of his views. Your point is?
> He repeatedly refers to Elizabeth Warren as "Pocahontas".
She has provided no documentation for her purportedly Native American heritage, even when pressed by the Cherokee.
> He said "They don’t look like Indians to me" about a Native American tribe that ran a competing casino.
How is that racist? I often say to my friends "I thought you were Japanese. You don't look chinese."
> He said "Maybe [the protester] should have been roughed up,” he mused. “It was absolutely disgusting what he was doing." about a Black Lives matter protester at his rally.
Way to dog whistle. He said his actions are deplorable, and he mentioned the (racist) name of the movement he was associated with.
> He said "I will say that people who are following me are very passionate,” Trump said. “They love this country and they want this country to be great again. They are passionate." when asked about supporters who beat a homeless Latino man because "they all need to be deported."
Was the homeless Latino man an illegal immigrant or a citizen? If he was an illegal immigrant, he should be deported.
Does anyone know what happens in the unlikely event that Clinton is placed under indictment before the election? Does Kaine move up the ticket? Does the DNC pick someone else entirely? What options do the electors have?
Different issues. One disqualifies handling of sensitive info and public records, the other, trust in being ethical.
[1] http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/
Where did you hear that? I'm not doubting you I'm just interested because I've never heard this before. My understanding was that he was so accurate last time around because the election followed normal patterns and his math was just better than everyone else's gut.
Could you elaborate? Is "private polling" the same as "internal polling," which is done by the campaigns? If so, my understanding was that the Romney camp's internal polls in 2012 turned out to be extremely inaccurate.
Nate Silver has been wrong at every single juncture, as have the rest of the polls. We're off the beaten path and down the rabbit hole, and now we're staring at a trap door in a dark sub-basement that even the rabbit didn't know was there.
Every politician ultimately wants to gain a position of power, and remain in it. Aligning themselves with a party lets them tap into that party's electorate, but said electorate also expects them to hold to certain opinions, and perform certain token rituals to demonstrate that - so they do that. It doesn't even matter that the long-term end result would be detrimental to the party in this case - what matters is that a GOP politician who'd publicly reject the block would lose a lot of votes in their next election.
And because US only has single-member districts, not party lists, this mode of thinking dominates, and can destroy the party from the inside.
Historically, though, that's exactly what they are. Party discipline usually prevails over everything else with those guys.
How does that not make sense? They've been blocking everything they can since they got the majority.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/20...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Byrd
“It is almost impossible to imagine the United States Senate without Robert Byrd. He was not just its longest serving member, he was its heart and soul. From my first day in the Senate, I sought out his guidance, and he was always generous with his time and his wisdom.” -- Hillary Clinton
Trump is being embraced by current, active KKK members.
It is obtuse to pretend there's no difference between the two.
From your own Wikipedia link: "In his last autobiography, Byrd explained that he was a KKK member because he "was sorely afflicted with tunnel vision — a jejune and immature outlook — seeing only what I wanted to see because I thought the Klan could provide an outlet for my talents and ambitions."[23] Byrd also said, in 2005, "I know now I was wrong. Intolerance had no place in America. I apologized a thousand times ... and I don't mind apologizing over and over again. I can't erase what happened."[13]"
Being embraced by and embracing are very different things. There are statistically going to be child rapists that support both candidates, does that make them both child rapists?
He was a repentant former racist who spent the later years of his life apologizing for his past.
edit for dang: Thank you for Correcting The Record. If you're going mark accusations of racism as off-topic, you should have done so a little further up-thread.
I'll give you props for not leaving an article like this flagged and dead for once. Too big to sweep under the rug?
>In case it's a concern: we don't care what your specific ideology is.
"We just cannot allow Donald Trump to become president. It would destroy this country." -- Paul Graham.
"I am contributing to both vote.org and voteplz.org, and probably two other get-out-the-vote non-profits. There are different approaches to this problem and I'm not sure which will work best, but unlike many for-profit startups it's non zero-sum–we have a long, long way to go to 100% voter turnout, and all the organizations working on this share the same fundamental goal. This feels like the most important US presidential election I've ever witnessed, and I want to do whatever I can to make sure we're all involved. -- Sam Altman
I know this is a particularly politicized thread, but your many comments still stand out as particularly ideologically driven.
(In case it's a concern: we don't care what your specific ideology is. We just care about not pushing HN off a cliff.)
> Meanwhile there is a picture of Hillary embracing a KKK member
actually
> Meanwhile there is a picture of Hillary embracing a FORMER KKK member who said that joining the KKK was "the greatest mistake I ever made."
"Senator Byrd came to consistently support the NAACP civil rights agenda, doing well on the NAACP Annual Civil Rights Report Card. He stood with us on many issues of crucial importance to our members from the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act, the historic health care legislation of 2010 and his support for the Hate Crimes Prevention legislation," stated Hilary O. Shelton, Director of the NAACP Washington Bureau
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12536216 and marked it off-topic.