So yes, there have been many mistakes in modeling, but such mistakes are bound to happen, in any industry, and they will have bad consequences (they're mistakes!)
Hrmmm, where have we heard this before?
PETER: Corporate accounting is sure as hell going to notice 305, 3 (grabs the receipt) 26.13!! Michael!! ...
MICHAEL: Ok! Ok! I must have, I must have put a decimal point in the wrong place or something. Shit. I always do that. I always mess up some mundane
detail.
That's just the point. They didn't do the sociology of the people taking the NINA variable rate mortgages. A lot of them were speculators who were buying properties with no money down and then flipping them. This had two effects: driving the price up because they could; and, making it looks like NINA variable rate mortgages were getting paid off with only slightly higher risk than normal loans. Once the house-flippers got out and interest rates went up, the people with no assets and no income left holding the variable rate mortgages couldn't pay and the house of cards collapsed. The model was based on speculators flipping houses, not on real owners.
If the quant people had done the sociology instead of just running the numbers, they would know who was buying and why the data appeared the way it did.
Let me be clear, however. I don't think that quantitative methods are snake oil or numerology. They can produce some very powerful insights, even counter-intuitive explanations that really increase understanding of phenomena. Quantitative is not inherently illegitimate.
The problem with quants is that they often rely on rationalist assumptions rather than solid political science or sociology. In order to make quantitative methods produce the best results, you need to do the concept-building, research design, and empirical legwork beforehand. Then you can set up a formal model (one that does less violence to reality), and run statistical regressions on that.
There would be nothing wrong with quant if it were based on solid political science or sociology rather than assumptions and uninvestigated data points.
It's not really even "math" that's at fault here. It's "formal modeling" which is what all the quant and rationalist people use to set up their statistical regressions. When all else can be held equal, formal modeling can give you very powerful insights into causal mechanism and prediction.
The problem is, that in reality very little can be held equal. Formal modeling abstracts away too much of reality in order to come up with its parsimonious causal and predictive insights. In an economic equilibrium state formal modeling will do just fine. But if internal contradictions arising out of strategic behavior (endogenizing the formal models of your competitors into your own formal models in order to out-compete them) begin to mount, or if fundamental changes in economic structure change institutions that were previously used as assumptions (changes in the regulatory law, for instance), or if there's an exogenous shock to the markets then the formal models will be ill-equipped to explain much less predict.
Add to that the fundamental assumptions of rationalist formal modeling are highly suspect (i.e.: individuals and firms are rational maximizers of their economic interests; methodological individualism rather than herd behavior; rationality instead of bounded rationality in the more simplistic models; etc.), and you get a recipe for potential gross misinterpretation of socio-economic reality.
It's not the math that's the problem. 'Science' isn't really involved. It's the rationalist approach to formal modeling that is the center of the "machines on wall street" problem. It's the qualitative research that's not being done--the sociology and behavior of the actual people and organizations that their formal models are abstracting out with assumptions of rationality and individualism.
You're right, there is no section of the Constitution that explicitly names Madison as the authority on its meaning. He only wrote the Constitution--how could he possibly be the authority on what he meant when he wrote it?
Also, I'm not defending the constitutionality of the military-industrial complex.
First, because social programs aren't handouts, they're about the middle class, stupid.
Ah, an ad hominem attack. Good way to bolster your argument. The Constitution was not written to protect the interests of any one class--upper, middle, or lower. It was written to define and limit the powers of the new federal government. It explicitly wasn't given powers for social policy or for the improvement of a specific class of people.
Whether socialized medicine gives better care for less money or not is irrelevant to whether socialized medicine is Constitutional. It manifestly is not a power granted to the federal government, unless you read the Constitution as granting all powers to the federal government (i.e. reading "general welfare" as allowing the government to do anything it wants).
Efficiency in operations or service provision was not the point of writing this Constitution. As Supreme Court Justice Brandeis stated,
"The doctrine of the separation of powers was adopted by the convention of 1787 not to promote efficiency but to preclude the arbitrary exercise of power."
James Bryce, a constitutional scholar, wrote in The American Commonwealth,
"The aim of the constitution seems not to so much attain great common ends by securing a good government as to avert the evils which will flow not merely from a bad government but from any government strong enough to threaten the pre-existing communities and individual citizens."
If socialized medicine is manifestly a good thing, is not a threat to our liberty, and is best performed by the federal government rather than state governments or private corporations, then by all means lets pass an amendment to the Constitution granting the federal government this power. If socialized medicine is as good as you say it is, the amendment should have no trouble passing.
Insisting that the Constitutional limits on federal power are meaningless is a doctrine that may lead to socialized medicine, but has already led to a military-industrial complex, warrantless wiretapping, violation of habeas corpus, extra-judicial detention at Guantanamo Bay, and countless other violations of the written and explicit limits our Constitution and its amendments place on federal power.
James Madison, the Father of the Constitution, elaborated upon this limitation in a letter to James Robertson:
With respect to the two words "general welfare," I have always regarded them as qualified by the detail of powers connected with them. To take them in a literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character which there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its creators. If the words obtained so readily a place in the "Articles of Confederation," and received so little notice in their admission into the present Constitution, and retained for so long a time a silent place in both, the fairest explanation is, that the words, in the alternative of meaning nothing or meaning everything, had the former meaning taken for granted.
James Madison, "Letter to Edmund Pendleton," in James Madison, January 21, 1792, in The Papers of James Madison, vol. 14, Robert A Rutland et. al., ed (Charlottesvile: University Press of Virginia,1984).
"If Congress can do whatever in their discretion can be done by money, and will promote the general welfare, the government is no longer a limited one possessing enumerated powers, but an indefinite one subject to particular exceptions."
Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Albert Gallatin, 1817:
"Congress has not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but only those specifically enumerated."
All of the intelligence/military agencies you list are certainly suspect under a strict interpretation of the Constitution. But just because the Constitution has been broken for a military-industrial complex doesn't mean it should be broken for a cradle-to-grave nanny state either.
I agree. Grandparent's statement is just the usual Bush-obsession-neurosis This crisis has long roots, and having a respected president does not mean that the president has magical abilities to calm the market. FDR was a larger-than-life figure, but couldn't step in with his unassailable charisma to end perceptions of a depression. It took WWII to get production and demand back up.
I was born as a Mac IIe, upgraded to a Mac IIcx pretty quickly, went through that awkward Performa stage as a teenager until I figured things out toward the end of high school and became a Power Mac. I really took off in college though, as a dual G4 tower. But I changed during my year abroad in Europe to a svelte TiBook. After a disorienting state in my early twenties as a Mac Mini, I'm happy to say I'm back as a MacBook Pro, feeling as groovy as ever. What a long strange trip it's been!
Looks like you got the Democrat's talking points memo too. I've seen those exact line-ups posted elsewhere several times.
You can basically erase everything before Senator & Governor on both of those lists. We do not elect Columbia undergrads straight to the presidency. We do not elect the president of the Harvard Law Review on the basis on that qualification. We don't select Con Law professors as our presidents, nor best-selling book authors.
Likewise, we don't elect journalists, Miss Alaska's, sports reporters, and politicians involved in local governance.
We elect vice presidents, senators, governors, cabinet officials, and generals to the presidency, because having reached those levels of political experience is seen as qualifying someone to run for president.
In my original post, I granted that in terms of policy vision, Obama and Palin are not comparable. But in terms of raw experience at a position traditionally seen as qualifying for the presidency, neither has much experience at all. Making experience, rather than the issues, the center of the attacks on Palin was a strategic mistake, because it reflected poorly on Obama who A) has about the same amount of experience and B) had previously downplayed experience when Hillary made similar attacks on him.
I agree with you that saying Palin has more experience than Obama is incorrect. She may have more executive experience than Obama (and, for that matter, both Biden and McCain), but that's a transparently silly position. The bottom line is that neither Obama or Palin have much experience at all, and in making experience one of the two principal lines of attack against Palin initially (the other being her family), the Democrats made a strategic mistake that was reflected in a drubbings in the national polls.
I'm not saying it was brilliant. I'm saying it was a trap, and the Democrats walked into it. If they hadn't, McCain wouldn't have gained such a substantial bump from the pick. Nevertheless, if you look at the distribution of the massive number of polls released, it still shows McCain ahead in electoral votes. Now, the big polls usually have about a week lag behind events, give or take. Some folks are suggesting that the more recent polls show Obama with a lead because of the financial meltdown from the last few days. But in that case, it wouldn't be Palin but the economy that's the problem for McCain's numbers.
The Democrats were the ones leading the charge against her. DailyKos was the first to allege that Sarah Palin is NOT the Mother (although they have since removed this story, since it's both libelous and embarrassing to the DailyKos). The media followed suit, and lest you forget what the partisan breakdown of the media is, here's a reminder: bias. Obama rightly condemned it, but elections are lost not by your enemies but by your friends, and Obama's friends did a bang up job in the last couple of weeks.
I agree with you, however, that experience was the wrong thing to focus on, because it put Obama on defensive ground, since he is similarly inexperienced in raw numbers. You're right that the issues, policy vision, and judgment should have been the center of the attacks. They weren't, to the measurable detriment of the Democrats, as reflected in the polls.
I don't disagree that the hypocrisy is on both sides. Choosing Palin was a purely political choice, it was calculated to win the election and not to put the "COUNTRYFIRST!!1one!" But, in the short term, it was a calculated political choice that paid off for McCain, because it achieved exactly what he wanted it to achieve.
While, in principle, I think families should be off limits, in practice that's not the case, as you rightly point out with Republican attacks on Clinton. But let's recall that political attacks on politician's families are, in both the case of Palin and of Clinton, politically disastrous. Palin's popularity propelled McCain into the lead for the first time since the very beginning of the campaign. Clinton's popularity during the Lewinski scandal was the highest of his presidency (oddly, Clinton's popularity rose over time, unlike almost all other presidents who see it fall over time). Attacking families, even if not forsworn by principle, seems like it shouldn't be done simply because it's more politically damaging to one's own side than to one's opponent. It's a strategic mistake.
This is true. Having spent a longer time in politics does not necessarily make you a better leader. In fact, it may make you worse, because you're more cynical and beholden to party machines and special interests and the status quo. Rumsfeld and Cheney, who've both been around since the Ford administration, very much attest to that fact.
Nevertheless, a certain bare minimum of experience is certainly a good thing to possess. And like I pointed out with my examination of our three youngest past presidents, despite their age, they had racked up significant experience already. I think once a presidential candidate crosses a bare minimum threshold of experience, then the experience issue largely doesn't matter, and issues of policy vision and judgment should move to the center of the debate. This was the argument Obama used against Hillary's emphasis on experience.
And I think it's clear that Obama has a much better developed policy position than Palin, because A) he's been on the campaign trail for two years now, and B) she wasn't running during that time, she was tapped for VP in the midst of running Alaska, and C) it's silly to directly compare a presidential candidate with the vice presidential candidate. Once you've gotten into a debate over whether the presidential candidate is more experienced than the rival's vice presidential candidate, you're already on losing ground. And the truth is that neither has as much experience (even put together) as any our three youngest presidents.
I agree to a certain extent. There are many substantive attacks to be made on Palin's policy positions (creationism, "I can see russia from my house," etc). However, attacking her experience would be a fine strategy in any other election, because usually candidates have 10+ years of experience in a collection of qualifying jobs (VP, Senator, Governor, Cabinet, General). It doesn't work in this election, because Obama is similarly inexperienced, and made a point of denying that it was a key issue when Hillary attacked him on it during the primaries. Democrats should have realized this, and not made "inexperience" the universal talking point, and instead given her enough time to make the silly policy statements that she inevitably would, then jumped all over those. One should note that Obama didn't directly attack Palin, it was the people and organizations around Obama that did, lending credence to the old maxim that, "elections aren't lost by your adversaries, they're lost by your friends."
FiveThirtyEight: look at the "Supertracker" by scrolling down, it's on the right side.
Electoral-vote.com: interpret the polling lines with a one week lag after major events. You can see the Obama bump post-DNC, and then the collapse post-RNC.
I agree 100%. Senators are historically worse as presidents than Governors. The only governor on the ticket has less than 2 years experience.
In an election year when we had the first open field (no incumbent) in fifty years, this is the best that our parties could come up with? There was no debate on the fundamental beliefs of either party (save for the futile, and unfortunately clownish, appearances of Gravel, Kucinish, and Paul). Each party took its established position, hardened it, and slapped a "Change" or "Maverick" stick over it, and called it new.
When it comes to Governor Palin, I'm not convinced. Being a relative outsider she hasn't really had so much time in the limelight as the other candidates, so her past and personal quirks haven't been looked at in as much detail.
Would you condone the same type of tactics in digging up Obama's past? After all, he's spent about the same amount of time in politics, and only slightly longer in the national 'limelight.' There are significant portions of his past that are still unclear and that his campaign refuses to speak about. His records and writings while at Columbia U. are all locked up, there is zero information on his activities as a constitutional law professor (his syllabi, anything that he wrote on the topic, etc). Should Obama's privacy be breached in order to get at this hidden information, in lieu of a longer public record?
As far as I know, it's not clear that the account demonstrated that she was sending any emails that could be seen as a "smoking gun."
You've already judged her guilty of a crime, without evidence, but apparently 100% sure that such evidence exists. Therefore, violating her rights is acceptable, because you know that a crime has been committed.
With that kind of logic, you might as join the Bush administration Justice Department.
Innocent before proven guilty is still a good policy.
Password wasn't her zip code. It was one of several questions in the Yahoo password recovery questionnaire. Password was eventually reset by getting all the password recovery questions correct.
Slashdot Mirror
Hrmmm, where have we heard this before?
His powerful formal model predicted it after feeding in all the data. It's legit, trust him.
It's worse than that:
That's just the point. They didn't do the sociology of the people taking the NINA variable rate mortgages. A lot of them were speculators who were buying properties with no money down and then flipping them. This had two effects: driving the price up because they could; and, making it looks like NINA variable rate mortgages were getting paid off with only slightly higher risk than normal loans. Once the house-flippers got out and interest rates went up, the people with no assets and no income left holding the variable rate mortgages couldn't pay and the house of cards collapsed. The model was based on speculators flipping houses, not on real owners.
If the quant people had done the sociology instead of just running the numbers, they would know who was buying and why the data appeared the way it did.
Let me be clear, however. I don't think that quantitative methods are snake oil or numerology. They can produce some very powerful insights, even counter-intuitive explanations that really increase understanding of phenomena. Quantitative is not inherently illegitimate.
The problem with quants is that they often rely on rationalist assumptions rather than solid political science or sociology. In order to make quantitative methods produce the best results, you need to do the concept-building, research design, and empirical legwork beforehand. Then you can set up a formal model (one that does less violence to reality), and run statistical regressions on that.
There would be nothing wrong with quant if it were based on solid political science or sociology rather than assumptions and uninvestigated data points.
It's not really even "math" that's at fault here. It's "formal modeling" which is what all the quant and rationalist people use to set up their statistical regressions. When all else can be held equal, formal modeling can give you very powerful insights into causal mechanism and prediction.
The problem is, that in reality very little can be held equal. Formal modeling abstracts away too much of reality in order to come up with its parsimonious causal and predictive insights. In an economic equilibrium state formal modeling will do just fine. But if internal contradictions arising out of strategic behavior (endogenizing the formal models of your competitors into your own formal models in order to out-compete them) begin to mount, or if fundamental changes in economic structure change institutions that were previously used as assumptions (changes in the regulatory law, for instance), or if there's an exogenous shock to the markets then the formal models will be ill-equipped to explain much less predict.
Add to that the fundamental assumptions of rationalist formal modeling are highly suspect (i.e.: individuals and firms are rational maximizers of their economic interests; methodological individualism rather than herd behavior; rationality instead of bounded rationality in the more simplistic models; etc.), and you get a recipe for potential gross misinterpretation of socio-economic reality.
It's not the math that's the problem. 'Science' isn't really involved. It's the rationalist approach to formal modeling that is the center of the "machines on wall street" problem. It's the qualitative research that's not being done--the sociology and behavior of the actual people and organizations that their formal models are abstracting out with assumptions of rationality and individualism.
You're right, there is no section of the Constitution that explicitly names Madison as the authority on its meaning. He only wrote the Constitution--how could he possibly be the authority on what he meant when he wrote it?
Also, I'm not defending the constitutionality of the military-industrial complex.
Ah, an ad hominem attack. Good way to bolster your argument. The Constitution was not written to protect the interests of any one class--upper, middle, or lower. It was written to define and limit the powers of the new federal government. It explicitly wasn't given powers for social policy or for the improvement of a specific class of people.
Whether socialized medicine gives better care for less money or not is irrelevant to whether socialized medicine is Constitutional. It manifestly is not a power granted to the federal government, unless you read the Constitution as granting all powers to the federal government (i.e. reading "general welfare" as allowing the government to do anything it wants).
Efficiency in operations or service provision was not the point of writing this Constitution. As Supreme Court Justice Brandeis stated,
James Bryce, a constitutional scholar, wrote in The American Commonwealth,
If socialized medicine is manifestly a good thing, is not a threat to our liberty, and is best performed by the federal government rather than state governments or private corporations, then by all means lets pass an amendment to the Constitution granting the federal government this power. If socialized medicine is as good as you say it is, the amendment should have no trouble passing.
Insisting that the Constitutional limits on federal power are meaningless is a doctrine that may lead to socialized medicine, but has already led to a military-industrial complex, warrantless wiretapping, violation of habeas corpus, extra-judicial detention at Guantanamo Bay, and countless other violations of the written and explicit limits our Constitution and its amendments place on federal power.
If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.
James Madison, the Father of the Constitution, elaborated upon this limitation in a letter to James Robertson:
James Madison, "Letter to Edmund Pendleton," in James Madison, January 21, 1792, in The Papers of James Madison, vol. 14, Robert A Rutland et. al., ed (Charlottesvile: University Press of Virginia,1984).
Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Albert Gallatin, 1817:
All of the intelligence/military agencies you list are certainly suspect under a strict interpretation of the Constitution. But just because the Constitution has been broken for a military-industrial complex doesn't mean it should be broken for a cradle-to-grave nanny state either.
I agree. Grandparent's statement is just the usual Bush-obsession-neurosis This crisis has long roots, and having a respected president does not mean that the president has magical abilities to calm the market. FDR was a larger-than-life figure, but couldn't step in with his unassailable charisma to end perceptions of a depression. It took WWII to get production and demand back up.
Joseph Stalin, now an Anonymous Coward on Slashdot.
I was born as a Mac IIe, upgraded to a Mac IIcx pretty quickly, went through that awkward Performa stage as a teenager until I figured things out toward the end of high school and became a Power Mac. I really took off in college though, as a dual G4 tower. But I changed during my year abroad in Europe to a svelte TiBook. After a disorienting state in my early twenties as a Mac Mini, I'm happy to say I'm back as a MacBook Pro, feeling as groovy as ever. What a long strange trip it's been!
Admit it, you would hate the Microsoft commercial no matter what its content was.
I'm a Mac and I found it to be pretty decent, for a commercial about an operating system.
Looks like you got the Democrat's talking points memo too. I've seen those exact line-ups posted elsewhere several times.
You can basically erase everything before Senator & Governor on both of those lists. We do not elect Columbia undergrads straight to the presidency. We do not elect the president of the Harvard Law Review on the basis on that qualification. We don't select Con Law professors as our presidents, nor best-selling book authors.
Likewise, we don't elect journalists, Miss Alaska's, sports reporters, and politicians involved in local governance.
We elect vice presidents, senators, governors, cabinet officials, and generals to the presidency, because having reached those levels of political experience is seen as qualifying someone to run for president.
In my original post, I granted that in terms of policy vision, Obama and Palin are not comparable. But in terms of raw experience at a position traditionally seen as qualifying for the presidency, neither has much experience at all. Making experience, rather than the issues, the center of the attacks on Palin was a strategic mistake, because it reflected poorly on Obama who A) has about the same amount of experience and B) had previously downplayed experience when Hillary made similar attacks on him.
I agree with you that saying Palin has more experience than Obama is incorrect. She may have more executive experience than Obama (and, for that matter, both Biden and McCain), but that's a transparently silly position. The bottom line is that neither Obama or Palin have much experience at all, and in making experience one of the two principal lines of attack against Palin initially (the other being her family), the Democrats made a strategic mistake that was reflected in a drubbings in the national polls.
I'm not saying it was brilliant. I'm saying it was a trap, and the Democrats walked into it. If they hadn't, McCain wouldn't have gained such a substantial bump from the pick. Nevertheless, if you look at the distribution of the massive number of polls released, it still shows McCain ahead in electoral votes. Now, the big polls usually have about a week lag behind events, give or take. Some folks are suggesting that the more recent polls show Obama with a lead because of the financial meltdown from the last few days. But in that case, it wouldn't be Palin but the economy that's the problem for McCain's numbers.
The Democrats were the ones leading the charge against her. DailyKos was the first to allege that Sarah Palin is NOT the Mother (although they have since removed this story, since it's both libelous and embarrassing to the DailyKos). The media followed suit, and lest you forget what the partisan breakdown of the media is, here's a reminder: bias. Obama rightly condemned it, but elections are lost not by your enemies but by your friends, and Obama's friends did a bang up job in the last couple of weeks.
I agree with you, however, that experience was the wrong thing to focus on, because it put Obama on defensive ground, since he is similarly inexperienced in raw numbers. You're right that the issues, policy vision, and judgment should have been the center of the attacks. They weren't, to the measurable detriment of the Democrats, as reflected in the polls.
I don't disagree that the hypocrisy is on both sides. Choosing Palin was a purely political choice, it was calculated to win the election and not to put the "COUNTRYFIRST!!1one!" But, in the short term, it was a calculated political choice that paid off for McCain, because it achieved exactly what he wanted it to achieve.
While, in principle, I think families should be off limits, in practice that's not the case, as you rightly point out with Republican attacks on Clinton. But let's recall that political attacks on politician's families are, in both the case of Palin and of Clinton, politically disastrous. Palin's popularity propelled McCain into the lead for the first time since the very beginning of the campaign. Clinton's popularity during the Lewinski scandal was the highest of his presidency (oddly, Clinton's popularity rose over time, unlike almost all other presidents who see it fall over time). Attacking families, even if not forsworn by principle, seems like it shouldn't be done simply because it's more politically damaging to one's own side than to one's opponent. It's a strategic mistake.
This is true. Having spent a longer time in politics does not necessarily make you a better leader. In fact, it may make you worse, because you're more cynical and beholden to party machines and special interests and the status quo. Rumsfeld and Cheney, who've both been around since the Ford administration, very much attest to that fact.
Nevertheless, a certain bare minimum of experience is certainly a good thing to possess. And like I pointed out with my examination of our three youngest past presidents, despite their age, they had racked up significant experience already. I think once a presidential candidate crosses a bare minimum threshold of experience, then the experience issue largely doesn't matter, and issues of policy vision and judgment should move to the center of the debate. This was the argument Obama used against Hillary's emphasis on experience.
And I think it's clear that Obama has a much better developed policy position than Palin, because A) he's been on the campaign trail for two years now, and B) she wasn't running during that time, she was tapped for VP in the midst of running Alaska, and C) it's silly to directly compare a presidential candidate with the vice presidential candidate. Once you've gotten into a debate over whether the presidential candidate is more experienced than the rival's vice presidential candidate, you're already on losing ground. And the truth is that neither has as much experience (even put together) as any our three youngest presidents.
I agree to a certain extent. There are many substantive attacks to be made on Palin's policy positions (creationism, "I can see russia from my house," etc). However, attacking her experience would be a fine strategy in any other election, because usually candidates have 10+ years of experience in a collection of qualifying jobs (VP, Senator, Governor, Cabinet, General). It doesn't work in this election, because Obama is similarly inexperienced, and made a point of denying that it was a key issue when Hillary attacked him on it during the primaries. Democrats should have realized this, and not made "inexperience" the universal talking point, and instead given her enough time to make the silly policy statements that she inevitably would, then jumped all over those. One should note that Obama didn't directly attack Palin, it was the people and organizations around Obama that did, lending credence to the old maxim that, "elections aren't lost by your adversaries, they're lost by your friends."
FiveThirtyEight: look at the "Supertracker" by scrolling down, it's on the right side.
Electoral-vote.com: interpret the polling lines with a one week lag after major events. You can see the Obama bump post-DNC, and then the collapse post-RNC.
I agree 100%. Senators are historically worse as presidents than Governors. The only governor on the ticket has less than 2 years experience.
In an election year when we had the first open field (no incumbent) in fifty years, this is the best that our parties could come up with? There was no debate on the fundamental beliefs of either party (save for the futile, and unfortunately clownish, appearances of Gravel, Kucinish, and Paul). Each party took its established position, hardened it, and slapped a "Change" or "Maverick" stick over it, and called it new.
I don't disagree with you. The only reason I give it credence is that the entire content of the article is quoting another source directly.
This is called a stalking horse.
Would you condone the same type of tactics in digging up Obama's past? After all, he's spent about the same amount of time in politics, and only slightly longer in the national 'limelight.' There are significant portions of his past that are still unclear and that his campaign refuses to speak about. His records and writings while at Columbia U. are all locked up, there is zero information on his activities as a constitutional law professor (his syllabi, anything that he wrote on the topic, etc). Should Obama's privacy be breached in order to get at this hidden information, in lieu of a longer public record?
As far as I know, it's not clear that the account demonstrated that she was sending any emails that could be seen as a "smoking gun."
You've already judged her guilty of a crime, without evidence, but apparently 100% sure that such evidence exists. Therefore, violating her rights is acceptable, because you know that a crime has been committed.
With that kind of logic, you might as join the Bush administration Justice Department.
Innocent before proven guilty is still a good policy.
Password wasn't her zip code. It was one of several questions in the Yahoo password recovery questionnaire. Password was eventually reset by getting all the password recovery questions correct.