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WikiLeaks Releases Hacked Voicemails From DNC Officials (thenextweb.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Late Wednesday afternoon as the Democratic National Convention was in full swing, Julian Assange and WikiLeaks decided to follow through with an earlier statement by publishing hacked voicemails of top democratic officials. There are 29 leaked recordings, which are identified by phone number and total about 14 minutes combined. Many of the voicemails are messages of callers leaving their numbers in hopes of being called back. Others are from voters upset that the DNC was giving too much support to Sanders. The Hill reports that "One caller with an Arizona area code called to blast the DNC for putting Sanders surrogate Cornel West on the platform drafting committee. 'I'm furious for what you are doing for Bernie Sanders,' another caller says in a message. 'He's getting way too much influence. What I see is the Democratic Party bending over backwards for Bernie,' adds the caller, who threatens to leave the party if the DNC doesn't stop 'coddling' the Vermont senator."
One caller with an Arizona area code called to blast the DNC for putting Sanders surrogate Cornel West on the platform drafting committee.
The man won about half the votes in the primaries. In a fair system, his surrogates would be about half of the platform drafting committee, not a token member or two.
Oh look, slashdot poster who complains about fallacious attacks engages in fallacious attacks. More at 11.
Not that I want to interrupt the flow of your psychotic and irrational ranting...but...
Were one to be strategically releasing things one would want to release something a little juicy at the beginning to wet the appetite and begin the story you are trying to tell. (i.e. leading to the sacking of corrupt DNC head)
Then fill the middle with the less interesting stuff so it will be reported, continue momentum as possible and create an ongoing story. In marketing it is important to at least double tap the consumer - one impression is too easily forgettable. Remember the media and general public are like a child with ADHD - keeping their attention is difficult and they are easily distracted by shiny, disingenuous, prepackaged speeches.
Once all that is out of the way one might end with a bang in a final awesome explosion of fireworks as the Demo convention closes. Maybe more than one if one had them.
Now I have no evidence that they have any evidence that might lead to this. But likewise you have no evidence that they do not.
So I guess what I am saying is that you are going off half cocked while acting like a cock crowing far too early and likely to end up under the farmer's axe when your irrational ranting is shown to be just that...
I wonder if the specific timing is WikiLeak's idea or the source's idea.
If you're trying to damage Clinton and the DNC this is great timing, it aggravates Sander's supporters and pits them against the party when everyone is at the DNC, it also distracts the public from good press that the DNC is generating.
But if you're trying to publicize WikiLeaks and the leaks themselves it's terrible timing, almost no one outside of political junkies is going to hear about it because the news is swamped with the DNC itself.
I suspect the source has specific conditions about how this info gets published.
I stole this Sig
Seems like a leak for the sake of leaking something. Are they just trying to embarrass the DNC by showing they got voice mail access? There is nothing of value here. This does nothing more than violate the privacy of people. Can't claim any moral high ground about whistle blowing with this.
If you think Hillary and Trump are the same, you're a lazy moron looking for an excuse not to think, and at anyone pointing out otherwise you'll yell some variant of "Nuh uh, they're DUH SAME" because we're threatening your safe little bubble where you're oh so smart and have everything all figured out, unlike everyone else.
I was once 17 too... you'll probably grow out of it.
Actually, it is more like Hillary to the right of you and Trump to the right of her.
Calling the democrats left because they are left of the republicans is like calling Tennessee west coast because they are to the west of North Carolina.
There is still a lot of the right to go before the democrats hit the center, let alone cross the center and make it to the left.
I bet anyone, that in the last 40 years that the leaders of each political party in the US have pushed for their favorites to be nominated and elected. The whole point of super delegates in the Democratic Party was to ensure that some extreme candidate didn't get the party nomination (cough, cough, Trump via the Republicans..) and create chaos.
The system is far from perfect and Bernie Sanders did a great job of getting people thinking, but until the presidential election is tax payer funded (and Citizen United overturned ) and open (2-8 parties based on some equation) we will be stuck choosing between the lesser of two instead of the greatest of two or more.
Up until the point that he got on the Hillary train, I had a LOT of respect for Sanders. You're right that most of his positions are close to "normal" for Democrats, but unlike most politicians, he was not trying to walk both sides of a line, and he was that rare (almost unique) straight shooter. He didn't hide behind weasel words, he didn't equivocate, he stated, simply, what his ideals were, and appeared to live by them.
When's the last time you heard ANYONE at his level of politics say something like "I have to get my tax returns from my wife, she does them" and then further find out that he's actually living on his Senate salary and not "speaking fees" or other similar near bribes?
I'm actually pretty upset over the whole thing--I would NEVER have voted for Sanders, because his politics are too far off from mine, but he was a politician I could admire... until he became just another party hack at convention time.
Politics is the art of compromise. The only ones who refuse to compromise are dictators or useless blowhards.
Sanders' could have insisted on all of his principles, refused to endorse Hillary, and possibly handed the election to Trump, undercutting virtually every policy objective he had.
Or he could endorse Hillary, hope she'd win, and watch her do 95% of the same things he would have done.
You can insist on a perfect candidate and pout if you don't get one. Or you can be smart like Sanders, find the least worst option you can, and do your best to improve it.
I stole this Sig
I'm curious as to what you think he was setting out to do.
Politics isn't an absolute win or lose game, and at least from an idealistic perspective, the goal isn't about gaining power, or even necessarily about having a perfectly virtuous leader, so much as it is about getting the right policies put in place. At the end of the day, it's the policies and governance that matter. Sure, a virtuous leader is more likely to enact good policies than an immoral or unethical one, but don't lose sight of the ultimate goal. In the US alone, we've had virtuous leaders take us down a ruinous path, and questionable ones who nonetheless left the country in a better state than they found it.
Did you somehow think Bernie Sanders entered the race with the express intent and goal of taking out Hillary Clinton? If so, you weren't listening to what he said. He's had very specific goals and ideas that he, and many others, did not feel at the start of the primary that Clinton would enough to push, at least not without being pushed. Seeing no other similar candidate (such as Elizabeth Warren) running, he entered the race. He didn't win, but he did manage to get Clinton to adopt many of his ideas. That's not a complete victory, but at this point, he's being entirely rational by concluding that Clinton will move things in the direction he wants them to move, even if not as far as he'd like. This is progress, even if slow. In 4 or 8 years, Sanders, or whomever succeeds him as the standard bearer of the Progressive wing, will be in a better position to achieve those goals.
In other words, he's done exactly what a politician who puts his ideals, beliefs, and goals, ahead of his own personal self-aggrandizement/status/power, rationally would do in his position.
The Superdelegates were for Hillary, but we probably would have had a situation where Bernie got the popular majority but Hillary got the nomination, if the DNC had played neutral.
Don't lose track of the big issue.
You make some good points, there's lots of insightful analysis that can be done, but the big issue is...
Despite any analysis, he *might* have won the nomination. That $61 million extra given to Hillary by the Democrats is a lot of money, and represents good-faith donations of hard-earned cash gone to waste.
Ultimately, Bernie never got his chance!
That is some fantastic fantasy trolling there, with some great riffing on the sort of irrational stuff that comes right out of those people we see sobbing tears of cultish joy in the audience at the DNC. Well done! A fantastic simulation of everything that's wrong on the low-information, non-critical-thinking left. Bravo!
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
No, we're talking about the popular vote. 55% Hillary vs 43% Bernie. That's a 12 point gap, nothing the DNC did could possibly have shifted that many votes. It's time for Bernie supporters to get over their butt-hurt and act like grown ups.
The scheduling of the debates was designed to limit exposure to the public of all the Democratic candidates, thus denying them free publicity early on, leaving HRC with the then superior name recognition she already had.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.