The Case For Biden

@ossobuco,

I think he can explain this. Ms. Clinton is too taken with herself to explain here stand on the same issue.

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@hawkeye10,

I agree about the likely general disatisfaction with political elites of all stripes, who, whether they know or not, simply don't do the jobs for which they were elected. Even without all the political controversy surrounding Obamacare or Dodd Frank, the crass ineptitude involved in creating and writing these exceedingly complex and yet vaguely written laws, and the many administrative corrections that have followed .as well as the even larger number of unforseen but still uncorrected side effects that still linger have likely contributed to this deserved lack of trust and confidence.

My company does a good deal of business in environmantal cleanups with several departments of government and we have seen the changes in the bureaucracy as well. The levels of competence and professionaism previously evident in these activities appear to have vanished, and a new crowd interested only in ever more onerous contract restrictions on suppliers has replaced them. Very little gets done or decided while they all pontificate about new improved contracting methods amidst universal gridlock and paralysis.Very strange.

I hope "we the people" have a plan, but I believe the electorate is a lot more polarized and divided than you suggest. It is instead many disparate groups, each with more conflicting hopes and illusions than real plans and all shouting at one another.

1 Reply

@georgeob1,

"Public confidence" (and support of) any initially leading candidate is almost a given to erode, George. I do not disagree with that part of your post at all.

What Revelette and others are doing, however, is to show support for Hillary...and if that annoys the opposition...I think it is working just fine. People who allow themselves to become annoyed are usually easier to defeat.

I agree with you that people are dissatisfied...but that is the norm for humans...especially humans who regularly show up in Internet forums to argue politics.

I may be wrong on this (very wrong)...but my guess would be that this silly season will eventually resolve itself the way most previous silly seasons have resolved...with the establishment calling the shots for who becomes the candidates. Trump and Sanders will almost certainly be footnotes to the history of the campaign of 2016. And if either manages to pull a "Goldwater" or a "Mc Govern"...that person will suffer the same fate as President Goldwater or President Mc Govern.

But as I said, cooler, more logical heads will almost certainly prevail on both sides...and the campaign will be between less radical contenders.

(For the record, I think if a mistake is made by one of the parties, I suspect it will more likely be the Republicans with Trump than the Democrats with Sanders.)

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@georgeob1,

Quote:

It is instead many disparate groups, each with more conflicting hopes and illusions than real plans and all shouting at one another.

I think most if not all of the shouting is a demand for competent government, which as you point out is getting less competent fast, and has not been good for a long time. Bad political leadership at the top was the original problem. Then funding problems were added. Now we have fair to poor morale all up and down the chain (government shut downs, many years of not inflation adjusting pay, and extreme headcount controls added to the management incompetence to cause this...thanks a ton Congress and POTUS!) . Why would good people sign up for a career in government now? Why does Obama and everyone else at the top seem to not even understand that this problem in the end makes it 100% impossible for them to do anything? The captain can make all the plans and speeches he wants, if the crew cant keep the vessel ship shape nothing can come of it. And just WTF did Gore do with all that time that he was supposed to be working on this problem?

We could not fight the war on terror at all competently, we could not deal with Katrina (both in having city protections done right and bailing out the city when the protections failed), we cant get budgets done, we cant get a coherent immigration policy, we cant figure out how to pay for highway repair much less build and operate modern transit systems, we cant fix our schools, the "justice" system is highly abusive, our health system is bankrupting us and we get a crap product for all that we spend (and the federal government owns it now after Obamacare), our financial system almost put the world in a depression and yet we made ZERO effort to fix it ...what can these motherfuckers do even close to right? I am at a loss. And as things stand now nothing is going to get fixed in the foreseeable future.

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Someone got a nail or several?

That patch of sky looks like it is about to fall!

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@Frank Apisa,

Frank Apisa wrote:

Someone got a nail or several?

That patch of sky looks like it is about to fall!

You all have been saying that since I showed up here. Only the most diligent reality deniers now think that this Federal Government works.

And what are our would be presidents saying that they want to do about our broken government? Pretty much nothing.

1 Reply

@hawkeye10,

Run for office...and do better.

Then lecture!

Anyone can go to an Internet forum and complain.

1 Reply

@Frank Apisa,

Frank Apisa wrote:

Run for office...and do better.

Then lecture!

Anyone can go to an Internet forum and complain.

You run your life and I'll run mine tyvm.

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@hawkeye10,

No. You are not allowed to say politics as usual is being challenged by a great and growing number of Americans. Frank can't tolerate the truth. He likes the stupid, ineffective, corrupt morass just as it is.

Mention the change that is sweeping the country and he'll criticize you and give you the exact same boring concern troll bullshit the rest of us have been reading ad nauseum.

Just block him to avoid re-reading that warmed-over **** until after the elections.

1 Reply

@Lash,

Of course the problem for you is that Sanders too has little to say on why our government does not work. "I will be a better captain" is pretty useless when the ship is broken, except in maybe working on the ships problems, and other than the broken justice system I dont hear him talking about that.

1 Reply

@hawkeye10,

I think I've been listening to him more than you have because I've heard many of his platform policies. I mean, what do you think attracted me to his campaign?

1 Reply

@Lash,

I like how he at least talks about justice, but his 12 point plan is mostly traditional candy promising. For instance he knows that we need a ton of money for roads but not only does he not advocate the obvious solution of raising the gas tax but in 08 he actually was pushing a 6 month gas tax holiday.

I have never understood why he gets credit for " saying it like it is" when most of the time what he is doing is promising to pass out more candy (AKA is trying to buy votes) .

1 Reply

@georgeob1,

I really don't think it is head of the State Department's job to classify data and information and how it is handled, or she or he would spend all their time doing that. I imagine they have separate departments for that. Moreover, what the intelligence considers classified after the fact might be different than what the State Department considers classified. One of the emails now considered "classified" was merely an article discussing drones over Pakistan. I mean it was in the news for goodness sake.

Quote:

The officials who spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity work in intelligence and other agencies. They wouldn't detail the full contents of the emails because of ongoing questions about classification level.

Clinton didn't transmit the sensitive information herself, they said, and nothing in the emails she received makes direct reference to communications intercepts, confidential intelligence methods or any other form of sensitive sourcing.

The drone exchange, the officials said, begins with a copy of a news article about the CIA drone program that targets terrorists in Pakistan and elsewhere. While that program is technically top secret, it is well-known and often reported on. Former CIA director Leon Panetta and Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, have openly discussed it.

source

Also according to a lawyer who deals with this sort of thing, it wouldn't matter if classified information was passed on Clinton server or the State Department, both are not allowed.

The Hillary Clinton e-mail ‘scandal’ that isn’t

Quote:

experts say, there’s no legal difference whether Clinton and her aides passed sensitive information using her private server or the official “state.gov” account that many now argue should have been used. Neither system is authorized for transmitting classified information. Second, prosecution of such violations is extremely rare. Lax security procedures are taken seriously, but they’re generally seen as administrative matters.

Face it, this email thing is blown way out of proportion to the max

1 Reply

@revelette2,

revelette2 wrote:

I really don't think it is head of the State Department's job to classify data and information and how it is handled, or she or he would spend all their time doing that. I imagine they have separate departments for that. Moreover, what the intelligence considers classified after the fact might be different than what the State Department considers classified. One of the emails now considered "classified" was merely an article discussing drones over Pakistan. I mean it was in the news for goodness sake.

I agree that isn't her job. However as the head of the agency she was responsible for the level of performance delivered by the whole organization just as is the captain of a ship responsible for all that goes on there or the CEO oof a corporation for the activities of his/her company. Clinton and her apologists have been botable for ignoring this basic principle. Now the number of e-mails reviewed found to contain classified information is in the hundreds, and that represents only a small sample of a larger body of messages not yet reviewed or even released. The simple fact is that to suit her own convenience and desire to avoid accountability she placed a large fraction of her direct communications in an easily hacked personal e mail system, in defiance of directives she herself had issued to all her subordinates in the Department for which she was responsible.

That is as a minimum hypocrisy and dereliction of duty.

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@georgeob1,

When the emails were sent or received they were not marked classified or top secret at that time. The State Department spokesman said the decision to classify the information did not represent a determination that it should have been marked that way back then.

Quote:

However, State Department spokesman Mark Toner stressed that the information was not marked classified at the time it was sent several years ago. He also said the decision to classify the information did not represent a determination that it should have been marked or handled that way back then.

"That certainly does not speak to whether it was classified at the time it was sent, or forwarded, or received," Toner said during the daily State Department briefing Monday afternoon, before the release. "We stand by our contention that the information we’ve upgraded was not marked classified at the time it was sent."

At the briefing, Toner had said he expected the number of classified messages in the lastest set to be "somewhere around 150." Asked about the final tally for this batch being about 25 fewer, State officials said Toner's number was simply a rough estimate. They also said some of the information classified in Monday's release was identical to information withheld in earlier batches.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2015/08/clintonemail-batch4-213164#ixzz3kV3CWDPW

Clinton is right, regardless of whether she used private email server or government one, the issue is the same since they can't send classified information on either one. From what I have seen so far none of the information is such a big deal as you and republicans are making out. In one of them she was talking about a possible Petraeus run for presidency and in another she was talking about someone going somewhere to try to undo the damage from the WikiLeaks thing. She is right, it is a arcane classification system. It was legal for her to the her private server and she was not the only SOS to use one. Powell did as well. Who knows what is on his as well once people start going through them.

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@hawkeye10,

hawkeye10 wrote:

Frank Apisa wrote:

Run for office...and do better.

Then lecture!

Anyone can go to an Internet forum and complain.

You run your life and I'll run mine tyvm.

Okay...then just complain and call people who do more than you...incompetent and dishonest.

You provide laughs...I'll give you that.

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Where have we come as a country when partisanship is so thick that Hillary Clinton's obvious lies and malfeasance can be so easily dismissed by her supporters?

I'm not saying this is strictly a Democrat problem, although they do tend towards the notion of moral relativism, Republican partisans are capable of it as well.

Now I fully expect to get the "Where's your evidence?" defense to which I can only answer that if Clinton supporters are honest with themselves, they know that if the tables were turned and Clinton was a Republican, they would be raising Holy Hell.

And if you don't think so, just look at what happened with Chris Christie and "Bridgegate."

1 Reply

@Finn dAbuzz,

Finn dAbuzz wrote:

Where have we come as a country when partisanship is so thick that Hillary Clinton's obvious lies and malfeasance can be so easily dismissed by her supporters?

I'm not saying this is strictly a Democrat problem, although they do tend towards the notion of moral relativism, Republican partisans are capable of it as well.

Now I fully expect to get the "Where's your evidence?" defense to which I can only answer that if Clinton supporters are honest with themselves, they know that if the tables were turned and Clinton was a Republican, they would be raising Holy Hell.

And if you don't think so, just look at what happened with Chris Christie and "Bridgegate."

And if Clinton WERE a Republican...guys like you would be excoriating the people who are blasting her from every angle with nonsense and more nonsense.

Your line about "Republican partisans are capable of it as well" is a treasure. I have put it in a file I use on days where I need a fast laugh.

1 Reply

@Frank Apisa,

So do you have a problem with what I wrote or only the fact that I wrote it?

1 Reply

@Finn dAbuzz,

Finn dAbuzz wrote:

So do you have a problem with what I wrote or only the fact that I wrote it?

I don't have any problems, Finn.

Just commenting on what you said...and adding to it.

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