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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
Is anyone else starting to think Comey's October Surprise blunder was stupidity rather than malice? I don't think he completely believed in the Justice department's decision to drop the Clinton investigation but his insistence on a need to publicly correct the record if evidence comes out contradicting a previous statement also appears to have been applied to his refusal to announce that Donald was not being personally investigated. "Correct the record" seems to be shorthand for "covering our asses". In short, he acted hastily to cover his/the department's ass when it came out more emails had been found and it backfired..
In other news, while we're distracted by this three ring circus, the Senate is making progress on the health care bill
. From Twitter chatter calling for all hands on deck it sounds like they're trying to push out something by the end of the month.
edited 9th Jun '17 10:52:37 AM by Elle
Ultimately, I think he prioritized the appearance of neutrality over actual neutrality. If I had to guess, he didn't expect Trump to win and was trying to avoid accusations of partisanship in the form of concealing information about the Clinton investigation. What he should have done is kept his damn mouth shut and let the accusations fly, secure in the knowledge they were baseless. Instead, he tried to prevent the accusations from coming in the first place, and his actions in doing so were what gave the accusations weight.
Really from Jupiter, but not an alien."Exclusive: Trump targets illegal immigrants who were given reprieves from deportation by Obama" - http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-immigration-deportations-exclusiv-idUSKBN1902I4
There's also reporting that Comey was influenced by a vocal minority in the FBI who wholeheartedly bought into the InfoWars/Breitbart propaganda about Clinton and were pushing for more aggressive prosecution. He believed that if he did not release information himself, they were going to leak it.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"No. Robert Mercer backs the site and would presumably continue to do so even if it had zero advertising revenue. But it's definitely feeling the pinch, according to the WaPo article.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"I do think that Comey is more Republican than Democrat and this might influenced his decisions. I also think that he is a man whose first priority is to protect his own career. Let's be realistic about it, if he hadn't gotten fired and Trump hadn't attacked him, he might have kept everything which happened secret. But I also think that he is a man of integrity in the sense that he would never do anything outright illegal.
A poll has Ossoff up 6 points, outside the margin of error.
http://www.cnn.com/2017/06/09/politics/georgia-house-poll-jon-ossoff-karen-handel/index.html
What, you don't think Combat by Champion is something to consider in terms of electoral reform?
So, while writing about the British election, I had a thought about some recent elections:
Is it possible that we tend to overestimate how much policy governs voters' decisions?
Idea inspired by the fact that a number of UKIP voters in England (think a cross between Trumpism and the Tea Party) now voted for Labour (which is currently led by Jeremy Corbyn, think Bernie Sanders one quarter as controversial), as well as by some comments on Steve Bullock (Democratic governor of Montana) about why he gets elected in a red state. Basically, I think that some left wing parties have trouble picking up voters because they focus too much on policies and too little on all the other expectations some people have of politicians, such as listening to voters and relatability.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard FeynmanI mean... duh? I didn't realize that was even a question. Of course policy is irrelevant to most voters. Most voters are utterly politically illiterate. Outside of maybe one or two issues they're personally invested in, they don't know what a candidate's policies are, don't know any of the intricacies of policy-making, and can't be arsed to go looking. They understand politics strictly in terms of which team they root for, which is usually whoever their parents rooted for.
This is, theoretically, one of the upsides of a two-party system. Having only two competitive parties allows the ill-informed to make at least a somewhat informed decision by being able to identify "this is the party that generally says more stuff I agree with than the other one," which while far from ideal, is at least better than "this is the candidate that says the nicest things about me/the meanest things about the people I don't like."
In the discussion earlier about how a certain percentage of voters can pretty much always be counted on to vote either D or R, with a smaller leftover percentage of undecideds making up the middle, the solid D and R voters are largely the first group, while the undecideds largely fall into the latter category. Without the two big parties, that latter category would then be flooded with people from the former category who wouldn't have the convenient D/R labels to use as a quick reference, and demagogues would become much more common.

They wouldn't survive long enough to be impeached.