btw,

If it’s true that Martin and Brazile are guilty of feeding that question to Clinton, they should suffer the consequences. And, ya know, they already have. Both were fired.

Now, if you were to follow the usual, wildly and radically disproportionate response favored by Trump the baby fascist authoritarian, then it’s the firing squad for them, right?

I mean, Trump and his brownshirts — who beat up a guy for just holding up a sign yesterday, btw — scream lockerup!! when it comes to Clinton, cuz, emails. No one in private life would be subjected to the legal system for doing what she did. At worst, they’d be fired for negligence and poor handling of IT stuff. But no one would be hauled in front of Congress and grilled for months and months on end for being stupid at IT.

Are there other things she may have done to warrant serious scrutiny? Yeah. Definitely. But the GOP won’t ever go after her for that, because it would implicate them as well. They won’t ever go after her for her role in expanding empire, the reckless support for capitalism, war, the surveillance state, etc. etc. because the GOP luvs all of that too.

Instead, they trump up nonsense about Benghazi and a private email server.

Just a thought, bnw. Why not actually try to work on behalf of the American people, instead of spending all their time trying to destroy their political opponents? Maybe if the GOP did that, they wouldn’t have a single-digit favorability rating for Congress.

zn wrote:

Billy_T wrote:

Now, I think he’s just kinda tweaking us for effect.

I wouldn’t go too far into the motives thing. Violates the spirit.

But it is fair to call someone on their sources.

It’s the old problem. The lefties here range far and wide with their sources and do not just simply repeat partisan blogs. Mainstream, academic, commentary, and so on…it’s all mixed in.

Far too often some reps of the right just repeat rightie blogs. In terms of knowledge of sources, it’s like bringing a pen knife to a laser fight.

In saying that I am just commenting on a visible debate tendency and how evidence is used in posts.

That’s fair. I shouldn’t engage in the motive thing. No one should.

Agree about the rest of what you say as well. There just isn’t any comparison between the two halves of the political spectrum when it comes to verifiable, fact-based, evidence-based discussion. The right is woefully lacking in legitimate credible sources, and tends to ignore the good stuff they do have access to.

And in the rare, stopped-clock moments they do stumble onto something, inevitably they blow it out of proportion to surreal degrees and then douse even that with hyperbole and paranoia.

The debate about such things, of course, never goes anywhere. But I’m beyond comfortable with my own range of reading, sourcing, etc. etc. and that of the leftists here.

NewMexicoRam wrote:

And to me, it could have all been avoided if the GOP had picked Rubio.

I think Rubio would win over Clinton. But there are several Dems and Indies who could have beaten Rubio.

Rubio, IMO, is every bit the conman Trump is. He’s just a lot better at presenting himself in a polite manner. Not overtly hate-filled. His policy ideas and his voting record are abysmal and terrible for Americans and the planet. But he presents a better picture than Trump.

Trump has horrifically ugly ideas — at least to the extent we can figure them out from his word salad. And, he all too often wears his hatred on his sleeve. He also can’t hide his authoritarian nature for long. It comes out pretty much whenever he goes off script.

To me, it’s kinda like this: Vote Dem, and you get a broken arm. Vote GOP, and you get your arms amputated. The duopoly has to go.

There is no history of voter fraud beyond a coupla dozen cases. Total. Comprehensive, bipartisan studies put the figure at 31 cases out of one billion votes cast, since 2000.

Republican-led efforts at suppressing the vote, however, are proven, and have resulted in destroying voting rights for hundreds of thousands, at least, and making it as difficult as possible for literally millions to vote. Killing early voting; slashing poll offices in likely Democratic precincts; making it illegal to organize the poor; okaying certain kinds of ID, like hunting licenses, while outlawing others, like student IDs . . . . etc. etc.

The GOP engages in classic projection with their Big Lie about “voter fraud.” Goebbels would be so proud. It’s blatantly in service of hiding their own corrupt practices.

wv wrote:

bnw wrote:

wv wrote:

If Hillary got herself elected
and then she got herself impeached,
would her VP then be president or would
there be an election, or what? I forget how that works.

w
v

The VP becomes president.

————

Well, I’d rather have Hillary’s VP than Hillary,

w
v

I would too. But he’s still too conservative to me. In his favor: He doesn’t have the Clinton’s baggage, at all.

The Dem bench is almost as weak as the GOP’s. Not a lot to choose from. But, if it has to be someone from the duopoly, I wouldn’t mind Zephyr Teachout. I like what I’ve heard from her:

From Wiki:

Teachout is a tenured Associate Professor of Law at Fordham Law School and was previously a Visiting Professor of Law at Duke University and a lecturer at the University of Vermont.[9]

Teachout served as the Director of Internet Organizing for the 2004 Howard Dean presidential campaign. In 2009, Teachout helped found the Antitrust League.[10] Teachout was also the first national director of the Sunlight Foundation, which promotes transparency and accountability in government.[11] She volunteered at Occupy Wall Street, where she encouraged the movement to focus on the importance of decentralized power, citing the ideas of James Madison.[12][13]

wv wrote:

Billy_T wrote:

I can see that, WV. That makes a lot of sense. At the same time, the one-sidedness of their critique gives me pause, and makes me less likely to believe them wholesale. In part, yeah. I’m guessing they’re expressing at least part of the truth, and telling us things that are important to know. Like you, I suspect (but don’t know) — just how much of it is true, though.

————

Sometimes i think its getting harder and harder to evaluate information, in this here
modern world. There are so many corporations funding ‘science’ and so many secret interests
funding ‘news’ sites etc, etc, etc.

We all do the best we can sorting and sifting and piecing things together as best we can
but it seems to me its getting harder and harder to figure out whats ‘true’ and whats not.

w
v

Yep. Perhaps we’ve developed society, media, technology, etc. etc. too much, and it’s produced diminishing returns. Pitting us against one another in needless, everlasting competition.

The proverbial genie is out of the bottle, but I often think we’d be far better off if we could go back to ancient societies, but update them in certain ways. Pick and choose which advances in various technologies to keep, which to throw out.

Ideal for me would be small, organic farms and forests, spread out across the countryside, with small university towns in the center. Huge amounts of culture packed into those small university towns — all the arts, etc. But forests and farms, lakes and streams, mountains and pristine valleys covering the vast majority of our landmass.

Perhaps like a highly literate, musical, artistic, scientific version of the Shire. But we’d be much taller.

;>)

Didn’t catch this edit in time. Should be formatted as:

He’s probably right-libertarian or “propertarian.”

zn wrote:

Billy_T wrote:

zn: From what I gather he’s basically a libertarian. Which is probably why we never get anything from him (that I know of) about corporate wrongdoings.

I’ve noticed the lack of corporations (and capitalism more generally) too. His leaks have only been directed at — as far as I know — the public sector. And, as already mentioned, with few exceptions when it comes to America, just the Dems.

My editorial: personally? I don’t suspend that criteria. Wikileaks is libertarian and serves a libertarian agenda. There’s no scrutiny of business interests. I don’t suspend my criteria for him–he either recognizes the private sector needs major exposure, or he serves their interests. I don’t care beyond that. I have that criteria for everyone I discuss politically. There is just absolutely no way I make him an exception.

…

Just minor, pedantic quibbling here: He’s probably <e>right-libertarian or “propertarian.” As you know, the American version, which is right-wing, is pretty recent. “Libertarian” means something quite different in most of the rest of the world. It’s more like “libertarian socialism” elsewhere.

Good article on the right-wing version’s origins, here.

But, yeah. I agree with you. Purposely leaving out capitalism and corporate interests is a deal-breaker for me as well.

Another issue: The FB(facebook)ization of media, news, information. Heard a discussion on BBC radio this morning, caught just waking up. So I didn’t get all of it. But it hit me as one of those “duh” things, and provoked more thought beyond what they were saying.

Algorithms. Riffing off the Netflix idea of personal likes and dislikes generating suggestions for other films and TV, etc. We’re heading toward a day when the only sources we consume will be on our likes list, or those the algorithms suggest. Which obviously means folks will build their own little bubbles, and won’t venture beyond them.

Rather than “the democratization of media,” we’re regressing into little feudal fiefdoms of our own making. Example: I’ve been struck by comments from several Trump supporters who say it will be a landslide in favor of their candidate, because all the people they know — on facebook and in their neighborhood — are huge Trump supporters. Of course, it’s likely they’ve blocked or “unfriended” people who don’t agree with them about Trump . . . and this is likely happening a lot on the Dem side too.

Customized ignorance, basically, with a major assist from software programmers.

Speaking of the Enviroment:

Trump just proposed ending all federal clean energy development He’d end all research on solar, wind, efficiency, batteries, clean cars, and climate science, too.

Excerpt:

In the last week, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has repeatedly vowed to zero out all federal spending on clean energy research and development. And the plan he released would also zero out all other spending on anything to do with climate change, including the government’s entire climate science effort.

You may have missed this bombshell because team Trump did not spell out these cuts overtly. In a campaign where the media has “utterly failed to convey the policy stakes in the election,” as Vox’s Matt Yglesias explained recently, it appears only Bloomberg BNA bothered to follow up with the campaign to get at the truth of Trump’s radical proposal.

Polling guru Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com fame gives Trump a one in three chance of becoming president. So I agree with Yglesias that we ought to seriously look at the implications of Trump’s proposals — especially since if Trump wins, he’s all but certain to have a GOP-controlled Congress to back him.

Related to the above:

Kessler, the centrist fact-checker for the WaPo, brings us his “highlights” for the election so far:

The biggest Pinocchios of Election 2016

Excerpt:

This presidential election race has been one for the record books — including for Pinocchios.

In many ways, it was an unbalanced race. Donald Trump has amassed such a collection of Four-Pinocchio ratings — 59 in all — that by himself he’s earned as many in this campaign as all other Republicans (or Democrats) combined in the past three years. His average Pinocchio rating was 3.4. (By contrast, the worst Pinocchio rating in 2012 was earned by Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota — an average of 3.08 Pinocchios.)

Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, ended up with an average Pinocchio rating of 2.2. That put her in about the same range as President Obama and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney in 2012. (She had a total of seven Four-Pinocchio ratings.) If not for her statements about the email controversy, which earned her lots of Pinocchios, her average rating would have been much lower.

Here are some of the lowlights of the 2016 campaign.

Most absurd facts

Trump repeatedly made claims that boggled the imagination. He said the unemployment rate was 42 percent when it was actually 5 percent. He claimed there were 92 million “jobless Americans,” which included everyone who did not want to work, such as retirees and students. He even claimed that he could save $300 billion a year from a Medicare prescription drug program that only costs $78 billion.
Return to sender award

Hillary Clinton earned 24 Pinocchios over the course of the campaign for a series of misleading statements about her private email server arrangement when she was secretary of state. Among other claims, she falsely said the arrangement was permitted, that she had not sent or received classified information, and that the FBI director had said her answers were truthful.

Most imaginary history (GOP version)

Trump repeatedly claimed things that did not happen. He said he saw thousands of Muslims in New Jersey celebrate the collapse of the World Trade Center after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. He falsely claimed that Hillary Clinton started the “birther” movement that questioned whether Obama was born in the United States. He said Russian President Vladimir Putin called him a “genius” when in fact Putin called him “colorful.” And he suggested that the father of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) had a hand in John F. Kennedy’s assassination.

Most imaginary history (Democratic version)

Hillary Clinton claimed that the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act was enacted to thwart an anti-gay constitutional amendment; hacked emails later showed that her staff immediately knew the statement was false. She also claimed that she tried to join the Marines on the eve of her marriage in 1975 but was turned down — a story that did not add up for a number of reasons. And she asserted that Trump opposed the auto bailout in 2009 — when in fact he supported government action.

Not an original observation here, of course, but if one candidate tells lies 75% of the time, and the other, 25% of the time, the media shouldn’t cover that equally. It shouldn’t try to be “fair and balanced,” because that actually skews perceptions.

“We need to pick five Trump lies and five Clinton lies, so it’s fair!”

Trump has presented the media with a unique dilemma. From the moment he launched his campaign, he’s said more despicable and false things than any other candidate for the presidency (in my lifetime, anyway) outside of, perhaps, George Wallace. Clinton just can’t compete with him on that, though she obviously has her own major, big time negatives.

Is it “bias” to spend more time on one candidate’s negatives when he has more? No. It’s actual “bias” in favor of that candidate if they don’t.

wv wrote:

NewMexicoRam wrote:

Billy_T wrote:

I guess another way to try to trim this down:

I see the media as rooting for a horse race. It’s great for ratings. It’s terrible for ratings to have a blow out. I’m guessing media bosses try their best to gin up conflict, drama, anger, even hatred, and they don’t want anyone to run away with this — especially not months before election day. So they’re likely going to want to knock down anyone riding high, and maybe give a leg up to the person riding low.

Generalizing like crazy here, but I think that’s essentially the case. Throw in the natural “conservative” tilt of the media, due to the people who own it, and I really don’t see any consistent pro-Clinton bias. At times, yes. Then Trump gets his time too. Back and forth.

Regardless, this circus disgusts me . . . and I despise the absolute lack of viable (positive) choices for Americans — this time and pretty much always and forever in our history.

__________________________________________________

90% of those who work in “the media” vote Democratic.
No, they’re not biased.

I’ve been comparing the headlines for Fox, CBS, ABC, NBC, and CNN websites for awhile.
When Fox comes out with big headlines that should produce real investigative reporting, the other networks label it as Clinton overcomes obstacles.
I remember when the media bit hard after Nixon, with very little to go on. Their persistence paid off. Now we have HUGE amounts of evidence that Clinton was involved in felonies, and the MSM barely are touching it. If they acted like Bernstein and Woodward did in 1972 and 1973, Hillary would be done for sure.
Complicating it is the most corrupt presidential administration we’ve seen in years. Most transparent administration ever, yep. I can see right through them.

—————
Well, i read a Woodward/Bernstein book about deep throat and watergate, and they certainly did not think the ‘media went hard after Nixon’. They had a HELL of a time getting the Washington Post to print stuff, and no other newspapers were doing ‘anything’. And that situation last for quite a while. After a while though, the feeding-frenzy started. But it took a while. I have a feeling the same will happen with Hillary.

This has been the strangest, weirdest, ugliest most dispiriting election
of my life. Cept for the Bernie surge, which was fun, but we knew how it would turn out.

w
v

It does take a ton to get these things revved up, and to overcome the fact that the politicians in question general hang in the same circles as the owners of the media. Their children go to the same schools. They all go to the same parties, etc.

There is a built-in circuit breaker on deeper looks.

The frustrating thing for me is this: Both wings of the duopoly have this power to skate and avoid scrutiny. But one of them, the GOP, has been peddling nonsense about “bias” for fifty years, when it’s got just as much say so over media content, if not more, than the Dems.

They both avoid far, far too much sunshine. I’ve never bought the line that the Dems have more power over the narrative than the GOP. I don’t think there’s any evidence to support that.

I haven’t had enough coffee right now, so I can’t remember, but doesn’t Chomsky talk about them as basically one big and corrupt power center, not two?