Countdown to Extinction: The 2016 Presidential Election

[Parsifal]

I am a registered voter, so what?

I'll repeat the argument of one of our distinguished GMG members: if allegations of deleting emails, criminal neglect in Benghazi, enabling and covering up her husband's misbehavior, defrauding Haitians, going all the way back to the Whitewater scandal and probably even further, then WHY hasn't she been prosecuted?

To turn this argument around if any of the allegations are untrue, then where are the refutations and why aren't her accusers being prosecuted for slander?

Maybe because slander is not a crime in the United States and therefore you can't be prosecuted for it?

[mc ukrneal]

Maybe because slander is not a crime in the United States and therefore you can't be prosecuted for it?

I assume you mean it is a civil suit rather than a criminal one? One can sue another for slander/libel.

The reason she doesn't do it is that statements made about a public person (politician, actor, ,etc.) usually fall under a different standard. It is thus nearly impossible (if not impossible) to do. Malice has to be proved.

[zamyrabyrd]

Maybe because slander is not a crime in the United States and therefore you can't be prosecuted for it?

The origins of the United States' defamation laws pre-date the American Revolution; one influential case in 1734 involved John Peter Zenger and established precedent that "The Truth" is an absolute defense against charges of libel. (Previous English defamation law had not provided this guarantee.) Though the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution was designed to protect freedom of the press, for most of the history of the United States, the U.S. Supreme Court failed to use it to rule on libel cases. This left libel laws, based upon the traditional "Common Law" of defamation inherited from the English legal system, mixed across the states...

Defamation law in the United States is much less plaintiff-friendly than its counterparts in European and the Commonwealth countries due to the enforcement of the First Amendment. In the United States, a comprehensive discussion of what is and is not libel or slander is difficult, because the definition differs between different states, and under federal law. Some states codify what constitutes slander and libel together into the same set of laws.

Criminal libel is rarely prosecuted but exists on the books in many states, and is constitutionally permitted in circumstances essentially identical to those where civil libels liability is constitutional. Defenses to libel that can result in dismissal before trial include the statement being one of opinion rather than fact or being "fair comment and criticism", though neither of these are imperatives on the US constitution. Truth is an absolute defense against defamation in the United States,[1] meaning true statements cannot be defamatory.[2]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_defamation_law

[Karl Henning]

The ease with which Trump has erased Republican conservatism matches the speed with which Republican leaders have normalized him.

[Herman]

     I thought Hillary was almost charming. Granted, my standards are oblique-wise to the norm, and it feels a little funny to give up on her unlikeability, which I rather admired, but there it is. I feel she would be fun to hang out, talk over old times and delete incriminating emails with.

I watched together with my gf who's Canadian and had not seen Trump talk (let alone sniff) before.

I confess to some Hillary fatigue after 25 years or more, but I thought her performance was admirable. As an ambitious woman in the public eye she has such a thin behavioral margin. If she'd pounced once or twice on Trump's stupidities she would have come across as a bitch, so she just didn't.

Her radiant smile as Trump was meandering his way thru shards of blather moving towards his mouth-anus was just wonderful and so effective.

I have watched Trump's campaign with horror, but also with amusement at the way this boorish neanderthal is self-destructing in slowest possible slo-mo*, I have to confess, and her smile seemed to indicate she could feel that way too.

So much more effective than righteous indignation.

* The unintended consequence of his presidential bid is that so much semi-illegal shit has surfaced about this guy that chances are his beautiful beautiful business empire will be destroyed by a massive nr of legal cases and he's well aware of this. He'll spend the rest of his existence in court cases.

[Madiel]

I am a registered voter, so what?

I'll repeat the argument of one of our distinguished GMG members: if allegations of deleting emails, criminal neglect in Benghazi, enabling and covering up her husband's misbehavior, defrauding Haitians, going all the way back to the Whitewater scandal and probably even further, then WHY hasn't she been prosecuted?

To turn this argument around if any of the allegations are untrue, then where are the refutations and why aren't her accusers being prosecuted for slander? It is as night follows day, any claims of equalizing the wealth, someone is going to have to pay for it and probably through the nose, re: promises of free college education, health care, etc.

Your lack of knowledge of law is as breathtaking as many other things about you. No-one gets "prosecuted" for slander. It's a civil lawsuit, not a crime. And Clinton doesn't appear to be in the habit of threatening to sue anyone and everyone who disagrees with her. Unlike Trump, whose response to an amazing number of people seems to be either "I'll sue you" or "go ahead, sue me".

As for "where are the refutations"... they're all around you. They're in 11-hour hearings before Congress. They're in the results of investigations into emails and into Benghazi. You remind me very much of people who say "why don't Muslim leaders condemn terrorism" who are capable of ignoring all the countless times that Muslim leaders are recorded as having condemned terrorism because one's favourite media organisations didn't carry the story about the condemnation of terrorism.

Just because you personally are apparently not aware of "the refutations" doesn't mean they don't exist. It just means that you're the kind of person who can't be arsed to go looking for them and probably wouldn't acknowledge a refutation if it sat on your face and wiggled.

[Madiel]

"The Truth" is an absolute defense against charges of libel.

Which means, what? What relevance does this have to anything anyone has actually said?

If this is your way of saying "aha! Clinton isn't suing anyone because she knows that what they said is true", we can all think of a wide array of other reasons why Clinton isn't suing anyone.

Also, why the hell is "The Truth" in quote marks and capitalised?

[Herman]

Just because you personally are apparently not aware of "the refutations" doesn't mean they don't exist. It just means that you're the kind of person who can't be arsed to go looking for them and probably wouldn't acknowledge a refutation if it sat on your face and wiggled.

This phenom has been written about a lot. The advent of the internet was going to make us smarter and better informed. The opposite happened for a lot of people, who live in an echochamber of info that reinforces their fears and prejudices.

Trump as he was doing his Birther stuff discovered there was a huge market of misinformed angry people and capitalized on it with his presidential run  -  which of course at first wasn't intended to bring him this far.

[Karl Henning]

What did the Truth have to do, exactly, with El Tupé's Birther scam?  I marvel, absolutely marvel, at the Truth being held up as the agent of Clinton's disgrace, by those who make incessant, daily excuse for El Tupé's disregard for the Truth.

[zamyrabyrd]

The ease with which Trump has erased Republican conservatism matches the speed with which Republican leaders have normalized him.

Is the Washington Post supposed to be Holy Writ? Proposing judges in the mold of Scalia, reducing taxes, bringing back American businesses from abroad, etc., are these supposed to be counter-conservative? RINO's, Republicans in Name Only depict most of them, the Bushes being a prime example.

As for "birther", back in the 1990's Obama was touted as having been born in Kenya. Hillary dredged up that claim way before Trump. Even if he weren't born outside the US and/or was educated in Indonesia, his behavior has shown time and again that he has little core patriotism.

[Madiel]

As for "birther", back in the 1990's Obama was touted as having been born in Kenya.

Who the hell had heard of Obama in the 1990's in order to be discussing his place of birth? Source please, because I have never, ever heard this suggestion before. Not even Trump in his current "I didn't start it" mode has suggested that the claim dates back to the 1990s.

Hillary dredged up that claim way before Trump.

Where's your evidence? Given the number of media organisations that have negated this claim so many times in recent weeks, what do you know that they don't?

Even if he weren't born outside the US and/or was educated in Indonesia, his behavior has shown time and again that he has little core patriotism.

Even if you're completely wrong, you'd like to divert attention from that by bringing up some completely irrelevant assertion about the man's personality which has nothing do with the point of the "birther" controversy which was designed to question his legal qualification for the job.

EDIT: And you'd like to do it without pointing to any specific examples of a lack of patriotism because, you know, that would require some kind of evidence. And we know how much you hate having to back up your sentences with facts.

[zamyrabyrd]

Who the hell had heard of Obama in the 1990's in order to be discussing his place of birth? Source please, because I have never, ever heard this suggestion before. Not even Trump in his current "I didn't start it" mode has suggested that the claim dates back to the 1990s. Where's your evidence? Given the number of media organisations that have negated this claim so many times in recent weeks, what do you know that they don't? 

Being upsidedown on the other half of the world may account for not being in the loop:
None other than the Harvard law Review:
"Barack Obama, the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review, was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii. The son of an American anthropologist and a Kenyan finance minister, he attended Columbia University and worked as a financial journalist and editor for Business International Corporation. He served as project coordinator in Harlem for the New York Public Interest Research Group, and was Executive Director of the Developing Communities Project in Chicago's South Side. His commitment to social and racial issues will be evident in his first book, Journeys in Black and White."
http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/birthers/booklet.asp

Even if you're completely wrong, you'd like to divert attention from that by bringing up some completely irrelevant assertion about the man's personality which has nothing do with the point of the "birther" controversy which was designed to question his legal qualification for the job. EDIT: And you'd like to do it without pointing to any specific examples of a lack of patriotism because, you know, that would require some kind of evidence. And we know how much you hate having to back up your sentences with facts.

Obummer's treatment of the Vets is bad enough. He has deliberately put in place policies that weaken the military. But I'm really not talking to you. I just came for a visit when I saw my initials and answered to that. Bye!

[knight66]

ZB, I urge you to read up on how to construct a premise and logical conclusion properly instead of all your inductive fallacies.

To pick you up on only one issue you have used to suggest that Clinton is some kind of thief: inheritence taxes.....

I quote from US.News

'In reality, the effective rate will never reach the nominal top rate of 65 percent. Smart tax planners will continue to devise strategies to reduce the effective estate tax. Even with no planning at all, the 65 percent rate applies only to the portion of an estate's value that exceeds $1 billion for a married couple. Before a single dollar is taxed at 65 percent, a married couple would pass $460 million to their children.'

Do you even know anyone this will affect? Far from your sweeping statement that she is trying to hurt people who just want to leave their estate to their family: it is probably about one half of one percent of the US population who would be hit by this. It may sound like a high rate, but as pointed out, the effective rate will be much lower via estate planning. Also, the rate was higher than this proposal for decades under both complexions of government.

Mike

[knight66]

Being upsidedown on the other half of the world may account for not being in the loop:
None other than the Harvard law Review:
"Barack Obama, the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review, was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii. The son of an American anthropologist and a Kenyan finance minister, he attended Columbia University and worked as a financial journalist and editor for Business International Corporation. He served as project coordinator in Harlem for the New York Public Interest Research Group, and was Executive Director of the Developing Communities Project in Chicago's South Side. His commitment to social and racial issues will be evident in his first book, Journeys in Black and White."
http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/birthers/booklet.asp

Obummer's treatment of the Vets is bad enough. He has deliberately put in place policies that weaken the military. But I'm really not talking to you. I just came for a visit when I saw my initials and answered to that. Bye!

A highly selective reading of an issue that was debunked ages ago.....as it states within the article.

IE 'The editor of the biographical text about Barack Obama which was included in the booklet maintained that the mention of Kenya was an error on her part and was not based on any information provided to her by Obama himself.'

Long ago it was established that the writer of the blurb had made an error, but of course, that becomes part of your hard-hat conspiricy theory.

Mike

[zamyrabyrd]

ZB, I urge you to read up on how to construct a premise and logical conclusion properly instead of all your inductive fallacies. To pick you up on only one issue you have used to suggest that Clinton is some kind of thief: inheritence taxes...

I quote from US.News

'In reality, the effective rate will never reach the nominal top rate of 65 percent. Smart tax planners will continue to devise strategies to reduce the effective estate tax. Even with no planning at all, the 65 percent rate applies only to the portion of an estate's value that exceeds $1 billion for a married couple. Before a single dollar is taxed at 65 percent, a married couple would pass $460 million to their children.'

Do you even know anyone this will affect? Far from your sweeping statement that she is trying to hurt people who just want to leave their estate to their family: it is probably about one half of one percent of the US population who would be hit by this. It may sound like a high rate, but as pointed out, the effective rate will be much lower via estate planning. Also, the rate was higher than this proposal for decades under both complexions of government.
Mike

Yikes, I am trying to stay out this! 65% is an obscene rate even if only 1% pay it. The point I was making that for social benefits that she is now peddling to the public, someone will have to pay for them. It ends up by the people who were supposed to benefit by them and even in a worse predicament since so much money will be dissipated by bureaucracy as the so-called Affordable Health Care which is anything but. Socialized medicine may work in smaller countries but the US is too big for that to be a streamlined service. I can't stand the way benefits are freely promised by politicians but how they will be paid for is blanked out. During the debate she was trying to project herself as little ol' middle class me, when in effect she is rolling in money.

[North Star]

Socialized medicine may work in smaller countries but the US is too big for that to be a streamlined service.

There are these smaller entities called states in the US, though, and counties in those states. There's more than one big hospital in smaller countries too.

[knight66]

ZB, That is a completely different argument and exactly echos Trump when he suggests he does not pay tax because the government wastes it anyway.

If the set-up of the country is to enable one half of one percent of the residents to own as much as the bottom 90% of the population, surely it is right to wonder who is busy robbing who? That is the position in the US. Corporate and big money interests have steadily robbed various countries. It is way beyond mere entrepreneurial spirit.

What is done with any money recouped is certainly open to discussion. But that is yet another argument from where you started, which was, Clinton wants to rob families of their wealth.

Mike

[zamyrabyrd]

A highly selective reading of an issue that was debunked ages ago.....as it states within the article.
IE 'The editor of the biographical text about Barack Obama which was included in the booklet maintained that the mention of Kenya was an error on her part and was not based on any information provided to her by Obama himself.'
Long ago it was established that the writer of the blurb had made an error, but of course, that becomes part of your hard-hat conspiricy theory.
Mike

So why wasn't it disavowed back then? If how Obama or Barry Soetoro got into Columbia as a "foreign student", then it would all make sense.  Members of the Class of '83 who remember him are as scarce as hens' teeth. The point is, if you add it all up, all these unanswered questions doesn't really inspire confidence. Instead, they provide the manure for any conspiracy theory, true or false or anything in-between to grow like weeds.

[zamyrabyrd]

ZB, That is a completely different argument and exactly echos Trump when he suggests he does not pay tax because the government wastes it anyway. If the set-up of the country is to enable one half of one percent of the residents to own as much as the bottom 90% of the population, surely it is right to wonder who is busy robbing who? That is the position in the US. Corporate and big money interests have steadily robbed various countries. It is way beyond mere entrepreneurial spirit.What is done with any money recouped is certainly open to discussion. But that is yet another argument from where you started, which was, Clinton wants to rob families of their wealth.
Mike

That was only one instance in which Trump put his foot in his mouth. For sure he has paid plenty of tax over the years. As for Clinton robbing families of wealth, how about taking bread from the mouths of children? She and the Clinton Foundation did as much in Haiti. She can smile all she wants (smile and be a villain) but a person endorsed by Planned Parenthood has a big red X in my books.

[Madiel]

God, I always love conspiracy theories that rely on the absence of something.

"Why can't I find this? I ought to be able to find this. It should be handed to me on a platter. Why wasn't anyone recording this for my benefit? Why wasn't anyone anticipating my question decades before I asked it? Where's the proof that this didn't happen? There ought to be proof."

And on and on it goes. Always with a complete lack of analysis about how one would actually go about proving whatever it is that the conspiracy theorist wants proved, and a complete lack of analysis about whether the "crucial" piece of information would have actually been memorable at the time.

Personally, I've had errors about me made on national television. I didn't think a great deal about it at the time, although one of those errors did appear to contribute to a middle-aged couple trying to get me interested in their daughter. Now I'm worried, though, that if in my remaining decades I do something that gives me a higher profile, someone's going to dig up a recording of the relevant broadcast and then I'm going to think about how I prove that I didn't do one of the things the TV presenter said I did. I have no records to prove I didn't do it, there being no records of a non-activity. Keeping records of ALL the things I didn't do would be such a time consuming task I would never have time to actually do anything else.

I can think of dozens of things I didn't do today. Perhaps I'd better write them down in my non-diary.