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from the another-election-season-trainwreck dept.
Florida Representative Debbie Wasserman-Schultz has announced she will resign as chair of the Democratic National Committee. The resignation is to become effective after the party's convention. The organisation's e-mail system was hacked; leaked e-mails appear to confirm accusations that Wasserman-Schultz had taken action favouring Hillary Clinton in her contest against Bernie Sanders to become the Democratic Party's presidential nominee. Sanders had previously called for Wasserman-Schultz to resign, a request he reiterated in light of the leak.
Wasserman-Schultz said in a statement:
I know that electing Hillary Clinton as our next president is critical for America's future. I look forward to serving as a surrogate for her campaign in Florida and across the country to ensure her victory.
coverage:
(Score: 5, Informative) by hash14 on Monday July 25 2016, @08:27AM
Ralph Nader wrote a great piece on all the disgusting tactics that the democrats use to block third-party candidates:
While any Democrat or Republican who wins their party’s nomination is guaranteed a place on general-election ballots nationwide, smaller parties must, in many states, petition election officials to be listed. And that is a delicate process, easy for the major parties to disrupt. Their operatives have a number of tools at their disposal to knock third-party candidates off the ballot, render their campaigns broke, and harass and ostracize them.
In 2004, Democratic operatives were especially zealous in their efforts against my campaign. They hired private investigators to harass my campaign’s petition circulators in their homes in Ohio and Oregon and falsely threatened them with criminal prosecution for fake names that saboteurs had signed on their petitions, according to sworn affidavits from the workers and letters containing threats that were presented in court. Our petitions were also disqualified on arbitrary grounds: In Ohio, complaints submitted in court and to the office of the Secretary of State by groups of Democratic voters led officials there to invalidate our petitions. They disqualified hundreds of signatures on one list, for instance, because of a discrepancy involving the petition circulator’s signature. In Oregon, Democratic Secretary of State Bill Bradbury retroactively applied certain rules in a way that suddenly rendered our previously compliant petitions invalid.
Democrats and their allies (some later reimbursed by the DNC, according to both campaign finance reports and a party official in Maine who testified under oath) enlisted more than 90 lawyers from more than 50 law firms to file 29 complaints against my campaign in 18 states and with the Federal Election Commission for the express purpose of using the cost and delay of litigation to drain our resources. “We wanted to neutralize his campaign by forcing him to spend money and resources defending these things,” operative Toby Moffett told The Washington Post in 2004.
Democrats falsely accused my campaign of fraud in state after state. In Pennsylvania, they forced us off the ballot after challenging more than 30,000 signatures on spurious technical grounds. My running mate, Peter Camejo, and I were ordered to pay more than $81,000 in litigation costs the plaintiffs, a group of Democratic voters, said they incurred. In an effort to collect, their law firm, Reed Smith ,which the DNC also hired in that cycle, froze my personal accounts at several banks for eight years. A criminal prosecution by the state attorney general later revealed that Pennsylvania House Democrats had, illegally at taxpayer expense, prepared the complaints against our campaign, and several people were convicted of related felonies. A federal court in Pennsylvania ultimately struck down the state law used against me that had led to the order that I pay the litigation costs. But Reed Smith was still allowed to keep $34,000 it withdrew from my accounts, because state courts wouldn’t let me present evidence that could have permitted me to recover the money.
With the exception of this handful of felony convictions, most of the partisans who fought to keep me from running got away with it.
Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/03/25/ralph-nader-why-bernie-sanders-was-right-to-run-as-a-democrat/ [washingtonpost.com]
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Monday July 25 2016, @01:50PM
Well, I'd never heard any of that before. How interesting that the media buries this, until now. So, the Washington Post was sitting on dirt on the Democratic Party-- pardon me, about both the Democratic and Republican Parties (have to be Fair and Balanced!)-- until an election year, hmm? Bezos, what gives?
For that matter, something I've been wondering for some time now is why so many of the elites in the US evidently don't really believe in democracy, and routinely take actions, blatantly illegal actions such as bribery at that, to subvert democracy. And why so many others help them corrupt our democracy by burying stories, and finding legal technicalities to get them off on those rare occasions when they are caught and exposed. Can they not understand how unwise this is? It seems not. No doubt they really believe they're people a cut above the masses, smarter than the average bear, and are blind to their own stupidities, of which they commit more than the general public. The Neo-Cons used propaganda and lies to hustle us into attacking Iraq. Of all the dumb things the elites have done, that War of Choice was the most stupid and damaging move of all, far exceeding anything bad a majority of the general public has actually wanted for the past, oh, century or so. What happened to the elites since the 1960s, when they actually acted, albeit with considerable helpful pressure from MLK and friends, to end the unfair race based voter disenfranchisement in the face of considerable public hostility? Is it that elite status runs in families, and the children of elites growing up as they do surrounded by plenty, tend to be more spoiled, callous, and overall degenerate? One of the major points of having a democracy is that it is a better way of choosing leaders than the medieval style monarchy in which too often the crown prince was a spoiled, sheltered, idiot brat totally unfit to be king, like Bobby Pellitt from Horrible Bosses.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 25 2016, @03:53PM
Look at how much of the country is begging, begging for fascism. Would you really leave the fate of the country up to these easily-manipulated morons if you had the power not to? These dangerous morons need to be protected from destroying themselves and the country.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Zz9zZ on Monday July 25 2016, @08:53PM
They are the minority. You're basically falling for the same line of reasoning that the "elites" fall for, thinking that most people are the same as the small vocal shitty minority.
~Tilting at windmills~
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 26 2016, @02:43AM
A minority? A grand majority of voters vote for either Republicans or Democrats, and a grand majority of people seem to support authoritarian policies of various kinds. Is it really a minority?
(Score: 3, Informative) by butthurt on Monday July 25 2016, @06:53PM
Why do you say the Washington Post "was sitting on dirt"? Did you notice that they covered the actions against Nader in the 2004 story [washingtonpost.com] linked from his article?
Nader's book "Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State" was published in 2014, and the Washington Post carried a review of it in that year. [washingtonpost.com] The review doesn't mention the tactics used against Nader's presidential campaigns, but I am not aware that the book mentions those, either: the book seems to mainly/entirely be about proposals that broad swathes of the populace agree on, transcending the usual political divisions, but which are not being implemented.