Gonna have to side with octopus here. About the ‘enemy’ thing.
I ain’t saying it’s kosher. I ain’t saying it’s legal, (although I do not know what specific laws were broken.) Just saying it ain’t technically treason.
I dunno. Maybe one of legal scholars will come by and put me right on this.
Oh no, I voted for Hillary quite enthusiastically, precisely because the alternative was so much worse.
I’m continually having to explain this to people who don’t understand how important optics and marketing are to politics. The “baggage” of Hillary was mostly invented by the GOP, but it was still baggage.
She won a plurality. Don’t try to gussy it up any more than that – accept the fact that a majority of voters did not select her.
But Jill Stein only got about 1% of the vote, which was half the margin. If every single Green vote had gone to Clinton, she still would not have had an outright majority or a win. It would be more fair to say that Gary Johnson at over 3% stole enough votes to hold Trump securely below Clinton in the popular vote.
Your overall point may be correct, but I have colored a falsehood red. Give Stein’s votes to Hillary and Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin all flip … along with the election.
Oh, you mean in the awful and illegitimate Electoral College? Pffft, I say! Pfft!
Nope, sorry, not Pennsylvania:
DJT: 2,912,941
HRC: 2,844,705
GJ: 142,653
JS: 48,912
other: 20,896
Add JS+HRC and you get 2,893,617, which still leaves Ms. Clinton 19K short. “Other” is Darrell Castle of the Constitution Party (get US outta the UN), so those votes are not going to her.
And of course, we have to give all the Johnson votes to Trump, so he steals at least Nevada, Minnesota, Maine(?!) and maybe a couple others.
I got numbers from Wikipedia:
DJT 2,970,733
HRC 2,926,441
GJ 146,715
JS 49,941
Which are correct? I dunno … though the fact that Wiki’s numbers are all larger may be a clue.
The page I linked to is dated 12/13/2017, which means the result had been certified by that point. Your numbers may be complete, but the totals would be rather after the fact.
Then the Senate Committee has the perfect opportunity to clarify that. Look, this is a negotiation, and anyone who has ever been involved in negotiating should recognize what’s going on:
*Party 1 to Party 2: We want you to give us A, B, C and D.
Party 2 to Party 1: We’ll give you A and B, part of C but none of D.
Ball is now in Party 1’s court.*
And let’s be quite clear that we’re not talking about some exalted, objective judicial body here. We’re talking about a Republican controlled committee of the Senate. It’s kind of funny how some folks in this thread are so eager to question Stein’s motivation, but don’t give one second of thought to the motivation of the that Committee. Deflect the discussion from Trump, anyone? What ever happened to the idea that the Republicans can’t be trusted on anything?
Frankly, I’m even suspicious of the motivations of the Democrats on this committee after reading the postings here of Clinton supporters (let’s stick it to Stein for allegedly being a spoiler).
Some perspective is in order here.
I’m pretty sure most of us here can walk and chew gum at the same time. Who do you think is distracted from the Criminal-in-Chief’s daily scandals?
Your [eschereal’s] numbers are identical to NPR’s election night result marked “99.8% of precincts reporting (9,136 of 9,158)”. My numbers are those posted as “Official returns” at the Pennsylvania government website. I’ll bet on mine. 
Which, of course, is not to say Jill Stein cost Hillary the election. There’s so much blame to go around, that Ms. Stein wouldn’t even be a contender for the Top Hundred Culprits List.
And yet, the electoral victory went to a candidate who didn’t win even a plurality.
This is relevant only by assuming that the Libertarians would have all voted for Trump instead. This might seem like a no-brainer, since libertarians tend to be generally conservative in a lot of ways, but in 2016 they refused to vote for Trump. Absent Gary Johnson, who’s to say they would have all voted for Trump? Many of them might have stayed home.
Yes, some perspective is in order here.
How do you know they didn’t? It’s pretty clear that the Senate committee is doing a fairly reasonable investigation that is outwardly progressing in a bipartisan manner – at least it isn’t the House partisan trainwreck. And so far, the Senate’s M.O. seems to be not to rush to the press with every single thing they are investigating. Why would they run to the press to explain that they have followed up with this phone call or that letter or some email or whatever?
Looking at the Intercept story, it appears that the only source is the Stein campaign. They have a vested interest in making the Senate investigation look bad.
And you seem to be presuming that Stein and her campaign is, for the first time, acting in a responsible manner. That is not a reasonable assumption to make.
Yeah well, the Dems getting all the Green votes is obviously not automatic either. I didn’t assume it, I was noting it’s certainly POSSIBLE Trump could have won a run off.
“Because the one of the two parties with even the slightest chance at winning that more closely aligns with my politics expects me to vote for them, I refuse to give them that support, tacitly enabling the other party, who does not align with my politics.”
Sounds kinda… off when I put it like that, doesn’t it?
Look, you can refuse to hold your nose and vote dem, and instead vote for the green party all you want. But the fact is that, as a matter of pure self-interest, it’s just incredibly dumb. It’s essentially saying, “I’ll take not voting at all over voting for a candidate who supports some but not all of my values”. Because, no matter how much you hate to admit it, people who vote green may as well not vote at all.
The Green party, in presidential elections, is a sick joke. It’s not just that they can’t win. It’s not just that they can’t even win a single state. It’s that there isn’t a single state where they beat the other party that can’t win and can’t win a single state, and that they couldn’t even break 1% nationally. They’ve managed that once, hitting 2.7% in the 2000 election, and handing Florida, and the election as a whole, to Bush - thanks for that, by the way. At their absolute best, all they manage to do is throw the election to the major party that is least politically aligned with them. In order to support the Green party, you have to completely ignore your own-self interest or want the republicans to win. In order to be a high-ranking member of the green party, you have to be really stupid or want the republicans to win. Which do you think it is with Jill Stein? I mean, we know it’s at least a little of column A - see her comments on vaccines and GMOs - but it may very well be at least a little of column B as well (the point of this thread). Which should give you pause if you’re a green voter who doesn’t like the republican party.
And how shall we court the tiny percentage of purist voters who are unwilling to vote for a party that can win that is aligned with them in a two-party system, and instead decide not to vote? What concessions would you, personally, like from the democratic party?
If that’s all you got from Clinton’s campaign you very clearly were not paying attention.
Yeah, it was to protect slavery. Silly us, arguing that that system should go away.
Okay, flippancy aside, another reason given by the founders was to ensure that unqualified demagogues wouldn’t have a quick and easy path to the presidency, and that terrible candidates who clearly have no business being president could be stopped by the electors.
…I don’t feel the need to add anything to that statement. I think it pretty much speaks for itself.
Okay, but most of that baggage was either small potatoes or completely fucking imaginary. Seriously, the big talking points of the election: Benghazi (a made-up right-wing conspiracy theory), the email server (a tiny problem blown waaaay out of proportion), and… Pizzagate?
By comparison, Trump was literally under investigation by the FBI at the time of the election for his connections to Russia, was settling a lawsuit for his blatantly fraudulent “university”, had a long history of defrauding his clients, had a past political record most notably defined by his endorsement of the insane “birther” conspiracy theory, may have actually committed bribery in Florida, had close ties to people like Alex Jones, had a baker’s dozen women accuse him of sexual assault, was caught on tape bragging about committing sexual assault, and still won.
Calling out the democrats for running a “shitty, baggage-laden candidate” while ignoring that the opposition was far, far worse in that regards is just bizarre to me.
Ohhh, okay, so the baggage wasn’t real, but it doesn’t matter anyways because of “bad optics”.
Quick question - can you find me a candidate in the democratic stable with any kind of noteworthy name recognition who doesn’t have baggage? And wouldn’t have baggage after well over a year of the GOP, Fox News, the right-wing blogosphere, and more doing everything in their power to spin any piece of news to make them look bad, blow every tiny scandal way out of proportion, and often straight-up make up insane bullshit in order to make them look bad?
If you don’t realize that one of our side’s major failings in the last election was nominating someone who was under criminal investigation by the FBI (I’m not talking bullshit partisan congressional investigation, I’m talking “you need a lawyer because there’s a chance you could go to jail” investigation), then I wonder if the Democratic Party may make the same mistake again someday.
The fact that Trump’s investigations were of much broader scope and reflective of his whole shitty career is not a good reason to excuse the FBI investigation into Clinton. To the contrary, it makes it even more aggravating that when voters compared the speck in her eye to the timber in his, so many of them focused on her. But we should have nominated someone more clear-eyed to begin with.
No, I’m not assuming that at all. I’m assuming that this is the earliest stages of a political negotiation. I object to her being characterized as “scum” because she doesn’t cave on the first level of the negotiation. Do you think that is a fair characterization of her?