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Fighteer Lost in Space from The Time Vortex (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: TV Tropes ruined my love life
Lost in Space
#112551: Feb 19th 2016 at 1:13:24 PM

The "Wall Street speeches" thing is absurd, and Sanders knows it. He's playing to an audience. I hope he's not really working under the belief that the simple fact of accepting speaking fees means that you are politically beholden to the group that hired you. If so, I worry for him.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Luminosity Since: Jun, 2012 Relationship Status: Lovey-Dovey
#112552: Feb 19th 2016 at 1:18:33 PM

Then she should have no problem releasing those speeches already and putting this foolishness behind her.

edited 19th Feb '16 1:18:57 PM by Luminosity

FFShinra Since: Jan, 2001
#112553: Feb 19th 2016 at 1:22:59 PM

The more I hear, the more sympathetic I become to Hil. And I did not think that was possible.

SolipsistOwl Since: Jan, 2016
#112554: Feb 19th 2016 at 1:25:10 PM

Clinton could have easily de-escalated the situation and avoided turning it into a campaign issue simply through releasing the transcripts when first asked.

Instead, she deflects through invoking Sanders and questioning his own integrity. She challenged him first.

edited 19th Feb '16 1:29:00 PM by SolipsistOwl

Silasw A procrastination in of itself from A handcart to hell (4 Score & 7 Years Ago) Relationship Status: And they all lived happily ever after <3
A procrastination in of itself
#112555: Feb 19th 2016 at 1:27:58 PM

Or maybe she doesn't want to release them because as they were a paid speaking event she said what the audience wanted to here, not what she believes, and she'd like to avoid the two getting mixed together.

Or it might even be the basic privacy implication that people who hire someone to speak at a private function don't want such speeches in the public domain (otherwise they have the press there covering it), and they're entitled to that right of privacy.

Hell a basic selfish reason, if she starts releasing speeches given when she's paid to speak at private events, she might stop getting paid to speak at private events, something she'd like to be able to do if she loses or simply after finishing politics.

Edit: Did she deflect to him directly? I thought the deflection was aimed at everyone, including the Republican candidates.

edited 19th Feb '16 1:28:34 PM by Silasw

“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran
Eschaton Since: Jul, 2010
#112556: Feb 19th 2016 at 1:28:06 PM

I certainly doubt Sanders expects to find evidence of Clinton diabolically laughing behind scenes while swimming through a pool of cash, but as tiny a controversy as it is, it gives an advantage to him on the issue of being tough on "money."

What I would rather see focus on is Clinton's statements about how she talked to the financial institutions before the recession and told them to cut it out. Evidently, they did not listen to her. Has anyone simply asked her how she's going to make them listen to her now, or is it just assumed that they would?

SolipsistOwl Since: Jan, 2016
#112557: Feb 19th 2016 at 1:30:09 PM

[up][up]Clinton has named Sanders specifically, yes—although she has inferred the Republican candidates as well, which is an unfair metric.

ironballs16 Since: Jul, 2009 Relationship Status: Owner of a lonely heart
#112558: Feb 19th 2016 at 1:32:20 PM

I'm thinking Sanders should drop it before it becomes his version of "Where's the Birth Certificate?"

"Why would I inflict myself on somebody else?"
SolipsistOwl Since: Jan, 2016
#112559: Feb 19th 2016 at 1:34:03 PM

That'd be sort of ironic, considering it was Clinton who first pushed the "birther" conspiracy and other dog-whistle tactics against Obama in '08.

Eschaton Since: Jul, 2010
#112560: Feb 19th 2016 at 1:36:37 PM

Do you have a source on that? My knowledge of the birther conspiracy starts with a certain other presidential candidate...

Luminosity Since: Jun, 2012 Relationship Status: Lovey-Dovey
#112561: Feb 19th 2016 at 1:36:39 PM

@Silasw That'd be ok if she flatout said she won't release the speeches. She'd still get flak for it, but I'd respect it. But she said she will when other candidates, specifically Sanders, release theirs. Words need to be backed up.

SciFiSlasher from Absolutely none of your business. Since: Dec, 2011 Relationship Status: YOU'RE TEARING ME APART LISA
#112562: Feb 19th 2016 at 1:54:05 PM

[up] Like I've said, Clinton is a female, Democrat Trump. And apparently, every moron defending her doesn't realize that we hate her for this because it completely undermines her claims to fight for wage equality.

"Somehow the hated have to walk a tightrope, while those who hate do not."
Luminosity Since: Jun, 2012 Relationship Status: Lovey-Dovey
#112563: Feb 19th 2016 at 1:55:01 PM

[up] I ask you to please be careful there with the language. We don't need our own Nihlus.

SolipsistOwl Since: Jan, 2016
#112564: Feb 19th 2016 at 1:55:58 PM

[up][up][up][up]There's been speculation on the Clinton campaign originating the 'birther' conspiracy since at least 2011:

False rumours about Mr Obama’s background first surfaced in 2004, in Illinois, where he was a state senator. Andy Martin, a perennial local candidate and litigant, claimed Mr Obama was secretly Muslim.

Related theories — including that he was radicalised in a “madrassa” in Indonesia — developed after Mr Obama entered the national stage with a speech to the Democratic National Convention later that year.

In 2005, Mr Obama went to Washington as the junior US senator for Illinois. The rumours about him persisted, but seemingly failed to take hold among political insiders and voters alike.

It was not until April 2008, at the height of the intensely bitter Democratic presidential primary process, that the touch paper was properly lit.

An anonymous email circulated by supporters of Mrs Clinton, Mr Obama’s main rival for the party’s nomination, thrust a new allegation into the national spotlight — that he had not been born in Hawaii.

“Barack Obama’s mother was living in Kenya with his Arab-African father late in her pregnancy,” it said. “She was not allowed to travel by plane then, so Barack Obama was born there and his mother then took him to Hawaii to register his birth.”

Birther row began with Hillary Clinton

And the Clinton campaign certainly benefited from strengthening such beliefs. Clinton's Chief Strategist Mark Penn in 2007, on questioning Obama's patriotism:

In a March 2007 memo to Clinton, Penn wrote: "All of these articles about his boyhood in Indonesia and his life in Hawaii are geared toward showing his background is diverse, multicultural and putting it in a new light," he wrote. "Save it for 2050. It also exposes a very strong weakness for him—his roots to basic American values and culture are at best limited. I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and his values."

Penn also suggested how the campaign might take advantage of this. "Every speech should contain the line that you were born in the middle of America to the middle class in the middle of the last century," he advised Clinton. "And talk about the basic bargain as about [six] the deeply American values you grew up with, learned as a child, and that drive you today. He went on: "Let's explicitly own 'American' in our programs, the speeches and the values. He doesn't... Let's add flag symbols to the backgrounds [of campaign events]."

https://twitter.com/ZaidJilani/status/646516589857079296

I was at CAP 1 time and all this birther shit was going down and jen palmieri says to judd legum are you proud? (he worked for HRC in 2008)

https://twitter.com/ZaidJilani/status/646513310527959042

edited 19th Feb '16 2:10:34 PM by SolipsistOwl

ILoveDogs Since: May, 2010
#112565: Feb 19th 2016 at 1:59:36 PM

[up][up][up] Hardly. She has political experience, for one thing.

PotatoesRock Since: Oct, 2012
#112566: Feb 19th 2016 at 2:17:44 PM

The Speeches thing I think encapsulates Hillary's chief problem: She comes off as two faced/flip-floppy/weather vane-y. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It's an attack on the fact she might preach to the masses she's anti Wall Street, but then makes expensive speeches to Wall Street. (And has what, fundraisers from well known vulture capitalist firm Bain Capital?). Perfect shouldn't be the enemy of good, yes, but she has to realize that in this election, standing for 'something' matters to people. Especially when the population's finally been given some means of raging against the system and the banks.

She's insisting on cake and eat it too syndrome, when people want the heads of big bankers to roll, while she rubs shoulders with them, making mega money speeches off of "There's No I In Team" and "Many hands make light work" or whatever she's blathering at them. (I expect the speeches are essentially bullshit).

But it's all about image. And she's increasingly being portrayed as a weathervane who you can throw money at and you'll get whatever you want out of her.

Ogodei Fuck you, Fascist sympathizers from The front lines Since: Jan, 2011
Fuck you, Fascist sympathizers
#112567: Feb 19th 2016 at 3:03:41 PM

Supposedly the speeches she made were trite leadership nothings and not of particular substance.

She didn't start Birtherism, btw. The tools at HillaryIs44 did.

nightwyrm_zero Since: Apr, 2010
#112568: Feb 19th 2016 at 3:11:11 PM

Backing away from election news for a little bit, have you guys seen Cliven Bundy's pretrial detention memorandum.

An excerpt from the document:

While Bundy claims he is a cattle rancher, his ranching operation – to the extent it can be called that – is unconventional if not bizarre. Rather than manage and control his cattle, he lets them run wild on the public lands with little, if any, human interaction until such time when he traps them and hauls them off to be sold or slaughtered for his own consumption. He does not vaccinate or treat his cattle for disease; does not employ cowboys to control and herd them; does not manage or control breeding; has no knowledge of where all the cattle are located at any given time; rarely brands them before he captures them; and has to bait them into traps in order to gather them.

Nor does he bring his cattle off the public lands in the off-season to feed them when the already sparse food supply in the desert is even scarcer. Raised in the wild, Bundy’s cattle are left to fend for themselves year-round, fighting off predators and scrounging for the meager amounts of food and water available in the difficult and arid terrain that comprises the public lands in that area of the country. Bereft of human interaction, his cattle that manage to survive are wild, mean and ornery. At the time of the events giving rise to the charges, Bundy’s cattle numbered over 1,000 head, straying as far as 50 miles from his ranch and into the Lake Mead National Recreation Area (“LMNRA”), getting stuck in mud, wandering onto golf courses, straying onto the freeway (causing accidents on occasion) – foraging aimlessly and wildly, roaming in small groups over hundreds of thousands of acres of federal lands that exist for the use of the general public for many other types of commercial and recreational uses such as camping, hunting, and hiking.

Well, no wonder he objects to paying public land grazing fees, since he's obviously not ranching but instead doing some sort of illegal hunting of wild cattle on public lands.....

Tvtropes need an angry smiley.

edited 19th Feb '16 3:16:35 PM by nightwyrm_zero

Aszur A nice butterfly from Pagliacci's Since: Apr, 2014 Relationship Status: Don't hug me; I'm scared
A nice butterfly
#112569: Feb 19th 2016 at 3:35:21 PM

Shove animal abuses charges on him.

It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes
FieldMarshalFry Field Marshal of Cracked from World Internet War 1 Since: Oct, 2015 Relationship Status: THIS CONCEPT OF 'WUV' CONFUSES AND INFURIATES US!
Field Marshal of Cracked
#112570: Feb 19th 2016 at 4:11:03 PM

best. website. EVER! http://trumpdonald.org/

advancing the front into TV Tropes
Zendervai Since: Oct, 2009
#112571: Feb 19th 2016 at 4:50:00 PM

That sounds like a really, really terrible approach. So the whole reason he was so against the government owning the land near him and charging for it...was because he was too crazy to bother putting any sort of fences up? How would that even produce good beef? Hell, there's probably at least one beef provider in the area who just stole Bundy's cattle because, how the hell would Bundy even be able to tell that's what happened?

Granted, we've known he's crazy for a while, but this goes right to the point of actively making more work for himself for sub-par product.

NativeJovian Jupiterian Local from Orlando, FL Since: Mar, 2014 Relationship Status: Maxing my social links
Jupiterian Local
#112572: Feb 19th 2016 at 5:26:53 PM

Then she should have no problem releasing those speeches already and putting this foolishness behind her.
Clinton could have easily de-escalated the situation and avoided turning it into a campaign issue simply through releasing the transcripts when first asked.
This is classic concern trolling. I'm not saying it's deliberate on your part, but "all they need to do is X, why won't they X?" in response to whatever trumped-up objection has been raised recently — effectively forcing the person to do nothing but play defense by constantly answering whatever their critics can come up with, rather than getting their own message out on their own terms — is exactly the goal of concern trolling. And whenever one issue has finally been dealt with to the troll's satisfaction (or, more likely, their audience is getting tired of them harping on the same thing over and over), a new issue can be raised and the process started anew.

Before speech transcripts was private email servers. Before email was Benghazi. This trail of spurious but sensational accusations leads all the way back to Whitewater, investigations into supposed wrongdoings of the Clintons involving a real estate deal back in the 70s.

edited 19th Feb '16 5:27:23 PM by NativeJovian

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.
ILoveDogs Since: May, 2010
#112573: Feb 19th 2016 at 5:34:50 PM

Anyone remember that one conspiracy theory that was going around where the Clintons had absolutely everyone killed, and it led to the question as to why an intern's mom's chiropractor was killed and Kenneth Starr was apparently not important enough?

This whole stuff reminds me of that.

Cronosonic (4 Score & 7 Years Ago)
#112574: Feb 19th 2016 at 6:26:56 PM

I'm gonna echo PotatoesRock and say that this sort of thing is, again, why I just can't trust Clinton to follow through on her election commitments. People do not like it when the person they elected proceed to brazenly break their promises, which could cause people to vote for the other party.

edited 19th Feb '16 6:27:21 PM by Cronosonic

LSBK Since: Sep, 2014
#112575: Feb 19th 2016 at 6:30:35 PM

Don't people say stuff like this all the time? No one ever actually expects to follow throw because they never expect anyone else to do it because why should they? Why exactly is this so important that she should even bother?


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