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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."
'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."
Oddly, the caller left her name as "an avid supporter of freedom from email prosecution"
"This is a survey call. Mr. or Ms. DNC, which candidate are you more likely to vote for if the election was held today?"
This is all Russia's fault! I should know, I can see Russia from my back yard!
Pay no attention to the corruption, instead we all need to worry that Trump is going to sell the White House to Canada so they can burn it down... again.
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.
So you thought you could trust the Democrats to leave the power to the people? Right up until they bend you over and fuck you in the ass for corporate interests. That's what Hillary really is, she's the arm of the Democratic Party that will continue to serve the needs of her corporate friends.
Hillary to the left of me, Trump to the right, here I am, stuck in the middle getting screwed.
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
I mean, phoning in to complain that Bernie actually was given access? What reporter would do that? They need to get in line after the Billionaires and Millionaires the DNC sold out to, after all!
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
At least they are consistent with their emails...
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.
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.
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
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.
This election is rife with hilarious situations, if you know where to look.
Technically, Sanders raised more money than Clinton did in the first 3 months of this year. As an example, at the end of January Sanders raised $67 million compared to Clinton's $27 million.
The maximum one can donate to Clinton (or any one candidate) is $5400, but you can donate to other Democratic campaigns in various amounts. So the "Hillary Victory Fund" held a number of campaign contribution events supposedly for local democratic campaigns. The fund transferred the money to local committees, but then moved the money from there directly to the Clinton campaign.
From the Rolling Stone report:
As an example, take couples who paid or raised $353,400 to sit at a table with George Clooney, a sum that Clooney himself called an "obscene amount of money." The figure represented the maximum allowable donation given the structure of the Hillary Victory Fund, a joint venture between the Clinton campaign, the DNC and 32 state committees.
Donors can give a maximum of $5,400 per election cycle to Hillary's campaign, $33,400 per year to the DNC, and $10,000 per year to each of the 32 state committees in the fund.
If you assumed that the Clooney guests had already given their maximum $5,400 to the Clinton campaign, that left just over $353,000 for the DNC and the committees.
But Vogel and Arnsdorf found that less than 1 percent of the $61 million raised by the Hillary Victory Fund went to the state committees.
[...] The money sometimes came and went before state officials even knew it was there. Politico noted that the Victory Fund treasurer, Beth Jones, is also the COO of the Clinton campaign.
[...] Vogel-Arnsdorf also noted that of the $23.3 million spent directly by the fund, most "had gone toward expenses that appear to have directly benefited Clinton's campaign, including $2.8 million for 'salary and overhead' and $8.6 million for web advertising that mostly looks indistinguishable from Clinton campaign ads."
So the Democratic party took all the Bernie Sanders money and matched it with an equal amount of money drained from local democratic elections, and like matter and anti-matter both sums annihilated in a flash of political advertizing!
All that effort and money and work you Bernie Sanders advocates put in came to naught, because the Democrats simply didn't want Sanders to win.
(I don't care *who* you are, that's funny right thar :-)
And nothing will be done about it.
The Democrats probably violated FEC law, possibly violated money laundering law, and absolutely betrayed your trust in a fair and honest runoff between candidates...
All this was noticed in May , and there's been no call for investigation, no call for prosecution, nothing.
Bernie got roughly 43 percent of the popular vote.
Do you think that those extra campaign funds might have tipped the balance in favor of Hillary?
It gets better.
The polls at the time showed that Bernie had a better chance of beating Trump than Hillary.
And by siphoning money away from local elections, the Democrats have probably thrown many local elections to the Republican side!
That's hilarious! :)
Sanders and the rest of the party are calling for *everyone* to support Hillary. They're effectively asking all the Bernie voters to "forget that we just betrayed you in the worst possible way, we have to stick together or Trump will win!". Keep party unity! Don't let the Republicans win!
And they're absolutely right! If Bernie runs as a 3rd party, Trump will win. If Bernie supporters swi
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!
"However [political parties] may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion." - George Washington, first President of the US
If people would spend more time reading what our founders said and wrote, and just a tiny bit less time on pop culture, we might be a little bit less messed-up. They designed the American system and left us both the operating manual (the Constitution) and their design notes (extensive writings, both for and against the choices they made see: "Federalist Papers" and "Anti-Federalist Papers" and all thier other books and writings).
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.
What I'd really like to see happen is for the rest of the Sanders supporters to keep at it - not just at the presidential level, but in the Congressional races, and state/local too. Support progressive candidates, and fscking turn out in off years, too. That's how you get taken seriously - make them scared of being primaried, not just for President, but every single one. Politicians aren't born honest, you have to keep them honest, and primaries do exactly that. Look how the Republicans have kept their congresspeople/Senators in check and tied to their agenda. They're all scared sh*tless of being primaried from the Right.
If you want to see Democrats sniping at each others' candidates or complaining about what the party's up to, just go on any Democratic blog.
It's not a scandal. It's not a secret. It's not even a problem -- not even when people get hot under the collar and start acting like assholes. George Washington was elected unanimously by the Electoral College, but in every election since then politics has been turning Americans into assholes.
And that is a good thing. You can't make politics 100% civil without pushing out unpopular opinions.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
What we got from Obama and Pelosi has only caused costs to go up and increased the burden on employers, individuals and tax payers.
Annnnnd, back in reality world, costs have *NOT* gone up and the percentage of people insured is at an all-time high.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
Not that I want to interrupt the flow of your psychotic and irrational ranting...but...
What you are saying in the main part of your post is not actually stupid, but you make a bad impression, starting out calling people psychotic, both because opponents are not psychotic simply because they don't agree with you, and of course, your usage demonstrates that you have no idea what "psychotic" actually means, it seems; you just hope it sounds sufficiently strong to be impressive.
It is easy to get a high score, if that is all you care about - in the present times you just need to howl abuse against Ms Clinton. But that is like keeping warm by pissing in your pants; the good feeling doesn't last long. It is much more satisfying - and worthy - to achieve a high score by arguing calmly, making sense and being respectful of your opponents.