We’re live. I thought it started at 9.
ETA: Guardian liveblog here.
This post is in: Election 2016
We’re live. I thought it started at 9.
ETA: Guardian liveblog here.
This post is in: Election 2016, Open Threads, Proud to Be A Democrat
I'm old enough to remember when Clinton supporters were so angry that they'd never support Obama in 2008. People get over shit.
— Ian Millhiser (@imillhiser) December 19, 2015
Coming to you tonight, from St. Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire, courtesy ABC, which will be livestreaming beginning at 8pm ET. Debate proper starts at 8:30pm. (I’m assuming the Guardian will live-blog as well, but my weak search skills can’t find a link yet.)
The always perceptive Ed Kilgore, now at NYMag, has “5 Things to Think About Before Watching Tomorrow Night’s Democratic Candidate Debate”. I suspect yesterday’s kerfuffle has given more weight to his second point:
… Nobody knows what ABC has planned for the debaters.
All ABC has vouchsafed to the rest of us about the debate is the names of the two moderators (David Muir and Martha Raddatz). We also know who is not going to be moderating: ABC’s own controversial George Stephanopoulos. The original co-sponsor, local TV station WMUR, is also excluded because it’s not behaving well in a labor dispute with its workers. But the format is a bit of a mystery, and so is the attitude of the moderators. Anyone who has watched the GOP debates knows this factor can be crucial. “Speaking of national security, Secretary Clinton, let’s talk about your responsibility for the deaths of Americans at Benghazi … ”One wild card is whether the moderators — or, for that matter, any of the candidates — will get into the strange dustup that broke out [Friday] when the DNC “suspended” the Sanders campaign’s access to party voter files (an indispensable tool) to punish it for an earlier breach of HRC’s confidential voter-info database, which Team Bernie admits but calls an unimportant accident (the staffer responsible was promptly fired). Sanders… could make a rude gesture in the direction of DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz if she shows up in Manchester tomorrow night, but it’s hard to see exactly how it figures in a debate…
Speaking of which, several commentors linked to David Atkins’ excellent explanation in the Washington Monthly of “What Bernie Sanders Staffers Actually Did and Why It Matters”:
… The brouhaha over this little fiasco has been intense, and made worse by the fact that only a few thousand people in the United States understand anything about the voter tools involved. Few journalists—to say nothing of armchair activists—have enough campaign and field management experience to truly understand what happened. That ignorance has led to wild accusations and silly reporting from all sides, whether from conspiratorially-minded Sanders supporters or schadenfreude-filled Republicans…
…[I]t made sense for Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the DNC to suspend the Sanders campaign’s access to the data until it could determine the extent of the damage, and the degree to which the Clinton campaign’s private data had been compromised. As it turns out the ethical breach by Sanders operatives was massive, but the actual data discovery was limited. So it made sense and was fairly obvious that the DNC would quickly end up giving the campaign back its NGPVAN access—particularly since failing to do so would be a death sentence for the campaign and a gigantic black eye to the party.
This doesn’t mean that Wasserman-Schultz hasn’t, in David Axelrod’s words, been putting her thumb on the scale on behalf of the Clinton campaign. She clearly has been, judging from the intentionally obfuscated debate schedule and from her demeanor and reaction to this recent controversy. The Democratic Party would have been wiser to bring the campaigns together privately and resolve the matter internally. Instead, Wasserman-Schultz chose to take it public to attempt to embarrass the Sanders campaign, and merely managed to embarrass herself and the Party’s data security vulnerabilities in the process.
Still, the Sanders camp’s reactions have been laughable. It was their team that unethically breached Clinton’s data. It was their comms people who spoke falsely about what happened. The Sanders campaign wasn’t honeypotted into doing it—their people did it of their own accord. NGPVAN isn’t set up to benefit Clinton at Sanders’ expense—and if the violation by the campaigns had been reversed, Sanders supporters would have been claiming a conspiracy from sunrise to sundown. What’s very clear is that the Clinton camp did nothing wrong in any of this. Sanders campaign operatives did, and then Wasserman-Schultz compounded it by overreacting. And in the end, the right thing ended up happening: the lead staffer in question was fired, and the campaign got its data access back.
It’s also another reminder that armchair activists speculating about news stories would do well to actually get involved in campaign field activities. If you want to be involved in politics, there’s no substitute for actually doing the work to gain a real understanding of how and why campaigns and politicians behave as they do. There would be a lot fewer overwrought conspiracy theories, at the very least.
I hope even the most committed partisans among us will agree with that last paragraph, at least.
by Betty Cracker| 102 Comments
This post is in: Election 2016, Open Threads, Politics
Gotta admit, this is a pretty effective approach, considering the intended audience:
His appalling politics aside, the biggest knock on Cruz is that he’s such an unlikable sumbitch, even to fellow wingnuts. Sounds like someone on his communications staff gets that and has a strategy to counter it.
Leaving the vile subject of the clown car aside, what do y’all think will happen at tonight’s Democratic debate? I’m annoyed by the timing of it since I have plans and will only be able to watch sporadically if at all.
Will Sanders complain about DNC favoritism? Will Clinton attack the Sanders campaign for data peeking? Or will they shake and move on? I honestly don’t know, but I’m hoping for the latter.
This post is in: Election 2016, Hail to the Hairpiece, Open Threads, Republican Stupidity, Assholes, Fools! Overton Window!
I know she's trolling, but this is still shocking to see. https://t.co/1u5yJTNSgX
— Andrew Lebovich (@tweetsintheME) December 19, 2015
.@KatrinaPierson: "What good does it do to have a good nuclear triad if you're afraid to use it?" #OReillyFactor pic.twitter.com/KWe9fNTu0R
— Fox News (@FoxNews) December 19, 2015
Hand-picked-by-Fox-News correspondent Hugh Hewitt cunningly asked The Donald about the “nuclear triad” during the last GOP debate, and it was clear that Trump wasn’t sure whether the phrase referred to foreign affairs or American’s Next Great Bake-Off. Now, of course, all the Repubs are strutting for the cameras, explaining how they will triad anybody so much as side-eyes Heartland America(tm), no lie. Which is not at all what the busy little minds in Ailes’ shop had in mind, oh my however could one cast such aspersions on their asparagus?…
Scientists Baffled As Doomsday Clock Simply Flashes "lol i quit" Repeatedly
— Hayes Brown (@HayesBrown) December 19, 2015
(… also, notice they sent the “chick” out to take the heat, she said…)
Open Thread: Trust Fox News to Ask, and the Trump Campaign to Answer…Post + Comments (76)
by Betty Cracker| 238 Comments
This post is in: Election 2016, Politics, General Stupidity
Uh-oh — a firewall on a shared Democratic database that was supposed to separate data from the Democratic campaigns was down for a time on Wednesday, and everyone rushed to poach Martin O’Malley’s voters — all three of them. Not really. Here’s what happened, via Buzzfeed:
The Democratic National Committee has suspended Bernie Sanders’ access to the party’s 50-state voter file in response to a software glitch that allowed the Sanders campaign to access Hillary Clinton’s internal voter data.
The DNC move effectively freezes Sanders’ field organizing program six weeks from the first caucuses and primaries.
The breach occurred on Wednesday, a DNC official confirmed, through the NGP VAN, the leading technology company that allows campaigns to identify voters, as well as monitor their preferences and leanings, in what’s called the 50-state voter file. For a “brief window” — about 30 minutes, an official said — a bug in the software exposed the campaigns’ internal “voter ID” data.
During that period, the Sanders campaign discovered the breach, accessed the Clinton campaign’s data, then called the vendor to point out the flaw, according to the official. The DNC has since cut off Sanders’s access to the voter file — until his campaign officials can “prove” they’ve deleted the Clinton data.
If I were Clinton, I’d call on the DNC to immediately restore the Sanders campaign’s access. There is no point in picking an intramural fight — and no need to if you’re in the catbird seat, which Clinton’s campaign is.
Sanders supporters are blowing up social media with conspiracy theories. I’ll take them seriously when they present some solid evidence.
That said, it’s clear (to me, anyway) that the DNC under chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz has functioned as Clinton’s coronation committee since the beginning, so they are partially responsible for stoking the paranoia. They are therefore obligated to demonstrate even-handedness now to restore faith in the process.
ETA: The Sanders staffer who accessed the data was subsequently fired by the Sanders campaign; he is Josh Uretsky, national data director. So this wasn’t some low-level nobody. However, CNN has more on this angle:
Uretsky…told CNN Friday morning that he was not trying to access Clinton voter data.
He said instead that he was just trying to “understand how badly the Sanders campaign’s data was exposed” by the software error.
“We knew there was a security breach in the data, and we were just trying to understand it and what was happening,” Uretsky said.
He added that to the best of his knowledge, “nobody took anything that would have given the (Sanders) campaign any benefit.”
This post is in: Election 2016, Excellent Links, Republican Venality, Women's Rights Are Human Rights, All we want is life beyond the thunderdome
I think I'd feel better if half the GOP field wasn't jonesing for the same end times battle of civilizations as ISIS.
— Bob Schooley (@Rschooley) December 16, 2015
Rebecca Traister, at NYMag:
… It has been a violent, sad year marked by mass shootings and police violence and acts of terror and a seemingly endless supply of vitriol and anxiety. But while that series of events may have felt like a random, scary blur as we lived through it, it’s coming into stark and horrifying relief at year’s end thanks to the blaring optics of our presidential-election cycle…
This moment, this election, these years represent the death throes of exclusive white male power in the United States. That the snarling fury and violence are contemporary does not make them less real than the terrors of previous periods; it makes them more real, at least to those of us living through them. And the presidential-primary contest, while absurdist and theatrical, is reflecting very real fury and violence in the non-electoral world: the burning of crosses and black churches, the execution of black men by police, the resistance of male soldiers to women in elite combat positions, a white man with a history of rape and violence against women [calling] himself a “warrior for the babies” after killing people at an abortion clinic, and a younger white man killing nine black churchgoers with the explanation “You rape our women, and you’re taking over our country.”…
Whatever their flaws, their political shortcomings, their progressive dings and dents, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton mean a lot. They represent an altered power structure and changed calculations about who in this country may lead. It is not coincidence that after seven years of a black president people are calling for lynchings at Republican rallies. It’s not some random quirk that eight years after a woman almost became the Democratic nominee, Republican candidates are crowing about their commitment to making pregnancy compulsory and accepting the endorsements of those who support violence against abortion providers.
This is our country in an excruciating period of change. This is the story of the slow expansion of possibility for figures who have long existed on the margins, and it is also the story of the dangerous rage those figures provoke. Listen closely, and you’ll hear the acknowledgment coming directly from the Republican candidates. Here was Marco Rubio in Tuesday’s debate: “What’s at stake in this election is not simply what party’s going to be in charge but our very identity as a people and as a nation.” This is not a dog whistle. This is a statement of fact…
… Clinton, like Obama before her, isn’t carrying just her own baggage, but will stand in as the symbolic target for those whose fury at increased female autonomy has been building. In a nation where women who were not permitted to cast votes still live and breathe, her campaign, as Ms. Clinton has herself declared in other contexts, is living history. If she wins, she — and we — will be forced to do battle with this rising, chilling, ever more open threat from those who feel enraged that their country is no longer their own. I fear that there’s a lot more terror ahead of us.
Late Night Scary Read: “The Election and the Death Throes of White Male Power”Post + Comments (138)
This post is in: Election 2016, Open Threads, Proud to Be A Democrat, Ever Get The Feeling You've Been Cheated?
This chart is from a NYTimes piece by Angie Drobnic Holan, of Politicfact, published under the cheerful title “All Politicians Lie. Some Lie More Than Others.” Which is… well, difficult to rebut. I would argue that the whole premise behind the chart is Pants on Fire, because it seems like Politifact makes no effort to distinguish between “Hello, voters, it’s so great to be here with you in Pig Lick, Iowa, on a dreary February morning” and “The Kenyan Usurper plans to declare martial law during his next State of the Union speech”. But — truthiness!:
… Even though we’re in the midst of a presidential campaign full of falsehoods and misstatements, I see cause for optimism. Some politicians have responded to fact-checking journalism by vetting their prepared comments more carefully and giving their campaign ads extra scrutiny.
More important, I see accurate information becoming more available and easier for voters to find. By that measure, things are pretty good.
Mr. Trump’s inaccurate statements, for example, have garnered masses of coverage. His claim that he saw “thousands of people” in New Jersey cheering the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, grabbed headlines but the stories were about the rebuttals…
In fact, journalists regularly tell me their media organizations have started highlighting fact-checking in their reporting because so many people click on fact-checking stories after a debate or high-profile news event. Many readers now want fact-checking as part of traditional news stories as well; they will vocally complain to ombudsmen and readers’ representatives when they see news stories repeating discredited factual claims.
That’s not to say that fact-checking is a cure-all. Partisan audiences will savage fact-checks that contradict their views, and that’s true of both the right and the left. But “truthiness” can’t survive indefinitely in a fact-free vacuum…
**********
Apart from taking what solace we can in the conviction that the deck chairs on our political Titanic will be cunningly arranged and flawlessly well-kept, what’s on the agenda for the day?
Thursday Morning Open Thread: <em>Both Sides!</em>… Is A Big LiePost + Comments (88)