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WikiLeaks Calls for Pardons From President Obama -- Or President Trump (wikileaks.org)
"President Obama has a political moment to pardon Manning & Snowden," WikiLeaks tweeted on Friday, adding "If not, he hands a Trump presidency the freedom to take his prize." And a new online petition is also calling for a pardon of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, saying Assange is "a hero and must be honoured as such," attracting over 10,000 supporters in just a few days. An anonymous reader writes:
Monday WikiLeaks also announced, "irrespective of the outcome of the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, the real victor is the U.S. public which is better informed as a result of our work." Addressing complaints that they specifically targeted Hillary Clinton's campaign, the group said "To date, we have not received information on Donald Trump's campaign, or Jill Stein's campaign, or Gary Johnson's campaign or any of the other candidates that fulfills our stated editorial criteria." But they also objected to the way their supporters were portrayed during the U.S. election, arguing that Trump and others "were painted with a broad, red brush. The Clinton campaign, when they were not spreading obvious untruths, pointed to unnamed sources or to speculative and vague statements from the intelligence community to suggest a nefarious allegiance with Russia. The campaign was unable to invoke evidence about our publications -- because none exists."
Thursday a WikiLeaks representative expressed surprise that, despite the end of the U.S. election, Julian Assange's internet connection in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London has not yet been restored.
Thursday a WikiLeaks representative expressed surprise that, despite the end of the U.S. election, Julian Assange's internet connection in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London has not yet been restored.
Clinton lost by a whisker. Clinton is Obama's friend. Wikileaks spread dirt on Clinton. Now you want Obama to give you a warm handshake and a kiss on the cheek?
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
I don't believe Manning qualifies as a whistle blower. (S)he just exposed a boatload of confidential documents with no clear purpose behind the action.
Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.
Clinton lost by a whisker. Clinton is Obama's friend. Wikileaks spread dirt on Clinton. Now you want Obama to give you a warm handshake and a kiss on the cheek?
Trump won over Clinton 290 to 228, which is most definitely *not* a whisker.
If you want to complain that Clinton would have won by different rules, you also have to allow that Trump would have campaigned differently under the different rules.
For example, with full popular voting Trump would have campaigned more vigorously in California and New York, to garner more of the proportional popular vote in those states.
He would have had a different campaign, and won under the different rules as well.
The badly written summary makes it clear that the pardon is requested for Manning and Snowden, and for some reason tries to include an unrelated mention of Assange, probably so they can have more links to click.
How is the US supposed to pardon him, when he is wanted by the Swedes for questioning?
I know a lot of people don't RTFA, but... It's a tweet, it's only 111 characters! And even if that's too hard for you, you didn't even make it to the end of the first sentence of the summary.
By the way I like dolphins. I just thought I'd share this since it is entirely as relevant to the discussion as your post was, but someone seems to be giving away free mod points, and dolphins are much cooler and more intelligent than Assange.
I've been thinking about this in the context of global warming. While the Obama Administration did see increased use of renewables, in the end he actually did very little to curb fossil fuels. Yes, the coal-fired power plants are being idled, but that has a lot more to do with market forces (cheaper shale oil, for instance) than with any grand policy to keep goal in the ground. Trump is not going to make coal somehow viable again. As to the Paris Accord, well, I have my doubts that any major government will put that much effort into it. Canada is going to institute a carbon tax, but it starts at such a small amount that it isn't likely to significantly impact fossil fuel production and use. In the end, I doubt there will be any great impact on fossil fuel use, and the march of renewables will go on, if too slow to prevent some of the nastier aspects. I suspect that the graph of emissions after four years will look the same as if Clinton were in charge.
Trump basically promised a lot of people a lot of things he can't really deliver, or he doesn't dare deliver. Look at Obamacare, over the last two or three days it has become clear that while there will likely be changes, and heck they may even repeal it on paper, the ACA will survive in one form or another, because as angry as people are at cost increases, no one save the hardest core Libertarian types actually wants to go back.
Yes, pushing the Supreme Court further towards the Right is troubling, but it's not like Scalia and Roberts could prevent some of the very rulings that have the social conservatives all riled up. And unless Trump and the GOP brass are complete idiots, they know damned well that Trump didn't win because a bunch of social conservatives, Evangelicals, and the like put him there. They would have voted for him no matter what. So anything that pushes too far towards the social conservative spectrum and lights up the culture wars again would almost certainly damage the Republicans.
No, underneath all the bluster and bravado, I'm really beginning to feel that Trump is no revolutionary at all, and that his shtick is just that, some fancy colors on a price sticker, but the sticker still reads the same price.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.