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YouDig's JournalLearn to lose gracefully.
It's kinda sad watching the Bernie supporters lashing out as his campaign comes to a close.
So much of what Bernie campaigned on was worth talking about and preserving. But instead of that, all we hear about is gutter anti-Hillary smears, email conspiracy theories, threats to vote for Trump or third party, and so on. How about ending on a positive note, talking about Bernie's ideas, how to keep them going.
Here's a hint: the way to keep the Bernie revolution going is not by electing Trump.
Some reasons for optimism versus Trump.
Nobody knows what's going to happen, and Trump just proved all the pundits wrong by winning the GOP primary, so there's a certain feeling out there that Trump is like an invincible force that defies all logic that has come before him. And there's something to that, it is very unpredictable. And I'm just as scared as anyone else.
But I still think we can use logic here, and a lot of it points our way.
1) Trump was actually leading big in the polls the whole way through the primaries. The conventional wisdom and the pundits all assumed that that was going to change when GOP voters came to their senses. But in general election polls, he is behind by a lot, so this is a different situation. Trump has never needed to make up ground before.
2) Trump has a serious problem dealing with strong women. He just can't help himself when it comes to sexism. The one candidate in the primaries that got to him most in the primaries was Fiorina. And Fiorina is no Hillary Clinton.
3) Trump is going to try to act "presidential" for the general. Problem is, when he's tried it so far, it hasn't worked very well. "Sane Donald" is just a not too bright guy who changes his mind on policy from minute to minute. "Crazy Donald" is the reality star who won the primary, but crazy Donald can't win the general.
4) Minority and women voters. Nuff said.
5) There is going to be a lot of pressure on moderate Republicans to endorse Hillary. A lot of business leaders who would traditionally be GOP are going to be in favor of Hillary, because Trump is just too scary. For better or worse, Hillary is pretty much a continuation of the Obama status quo, whereas Trump just threatened to default on the national debt. Can you imagine bond markets if Trump gets elected?
So, yeah, Trump might win, maybe the unpredictable crazy guy defies all the rules. But the odds are in our favor.
How is it the Bernie gets credit for civil rights activism when he was 20.
But pointing out that he was writing about rape fantasies, weird theories of cancer and sex, cheerleading Castro, honeymooning in the USSR, and the rest of the crazy stuff he did or said in his 30s and 40s is "off limits." I get the whole people change thing, and I agree, but if that's the thing, then touting "pre-change Bernie's" civil rights activism doesn't seem to make sense.
Has Paul Ryan just launched his 2020 bid?
It's not out of the question. He might figure, Trump is going to lose, and even from Ryan's far-right perspective, a crazy person like Trump isn't that much better than Hillary. And on the other hand, if he really expects Trump to lose big, standing against Trump right now could make him look sane and principled come 2020.
A post in the primaries forum about the many flaws in the Guccifer hack claim.
It's dropping over there, apparently people are into conspiracies rather than facts. In case anyone is interested.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/12511904033
Some of the many dumb things about the Guccifer story.
The most obvious is that Guccifer's MO is to break into people's emails and then publish them, because he got a thrill out of it. So believing that he hacked Hillary's server and then published nothing and got no glory out of it is a bit like believing that Joseph Smith found golden plates with the word of god on them but then forgot where he put them. What is believable is that Guccifer, who is now going to be spending a long time in prison, would try to draw attention to himself by claiming to have hacked Hillary or claiming that he can prove the Rockefellers were part of some Illuminati conspiracy, or any of the other crazy things he has said.
The way Guccifer hacked people is by social engineering or guessing security questions, not by actually exploiting technical vulnerabilities. He was good at that, but there is no indication that he had the skills necessary to perform a technical hack, and there also isn't any indication that he socially engineered his way into Hillary's email account. The truth is, it's harder to socially engineer your way into a private server than a gmail or AOL account because there are no security questions to guess or tech support people that you can convince to reset your password.
He claims he described how he got into her server, by scanning for open ports, but scanning for open ports doesn't get you into a server. If he had actually gotten in, he would have described which port he used, and how he was able to use whatever service was running on it to obtain access. Finding open ports is easy, anyone can do it, but getting access to the computer through an open port is hard. An open port is not itself a vulnerability unless the service running on that port is vulnerable. Saying you hacked a server by scanning for open ports is a bit like saying that you were able to break into a bank vault by using google to figure out the bank's address and business hours.
One last thing. I see people thinking that because the server was "unsecured" for a few months that somehow means it would be easy for Guccifer to break into. But the thing that was unsecured was the email server running on the computer, not the computer itself. What that means is that communications to and from the server were not encrypted, and could be vulnerable to for example a man-in-the-middle attack. But that does not make it any easier to get in by scanning ports. For a man-in-the-middle attack, you actually have to be "in the middle", and Guccifer wasn't. If you connect to an unencrypted email server using hotel wi-fi, the hotel is in the middle, and they can read your correspondence, possibly spoof you or get your password. But there was no way for Guccifer to place himself "in the middle", nor is there any indication that he has ever done this kind of attack or would even know how.
Is it possible that someone broke into Hillary's server? Sure, after all, with Snowden and Manning and the rest, we know that no digital information is really secure. But Guccifer saying so doesn't make it any more likely.
Quick reality check. Bernie is down 286 pledged delegates with 933 to go.
That means he needs to win the delegate count by over a 30% margin going forward. And there are no more caucus states left, the only caucuses left are Guam and the Virgin Islands, with 7 delegates at stake in each.
Bernie has won only two primaries so far with a 30% margin. Vermont and Democrats Abroad. Together those netted him 21 delegates.
On top of that, 5 of the remaining primaries, for a total of 296 delegates, are closed. Bernie has won one closed primary so far: Democrats Abroad, where he got 9 out of the 13 delegates.
So he has no hope of winning more pledged delegates. His only hope is using superdelegates to overturn the will of the voters. But there are only 715 superdelegates, and 498 have already endorsed Hillary. In order to even get half the superdelegates, he would have to convince 141, or 28%, of those pro-Hillary superdelegates to change their vote in order to subvert the democratic process and nominate a self-described socialist who joined the party only to run for president.
That assumes that all uncommitted superdelegates also decide to go against the will of the voters. But even that wouldn't get him there, it would only get him to a tie in superdelegates, and the pledged delegates would put Hillary over. To actually subvert democracy he would need to convince about half of the superdelegates that have already committed to Hillary to go along with him.
In other words, goodbye Bernie Sanders.
The analogy to this primary isn't to a sport, it's to chess.
In major pro sports teams never quit until the last whistle. It's not part of the way the game is played. But in primary politics, as well as in chess, resigning when there's no path to victory is common. Top-level chess games almost never get played out to checkmate. When a player realizes it's truly hopeless, that player resigns the game.
And the other thing that happens in chess is, when you're ahead, you want to trade pieces, because the less pieces left, the more significant even a pawn advantage becomes.
So where are we now? Hillary is up by about three pawns, the queens are gone, the bishops are gone, and two of the rooks are off the table. She's got a solid pawn structure and she just exchanged the last pair of knights in Indiana. A few pawns will be traded in the next few weeks, and then on June 5 the rooks get exchanged. Bernie with a heroic effort might win one of his pawns back, but even then she'll still have an easy KPP vs K endgame.
Of course, there's no rule that the losing player has to resign. It's perfectly legal to play it out to the bitter end. The commentators are going to start talking about how it's hopeless and at some point even an insult to the game itself to force your opponent to go through the steps from a position that a 5 year old couldn't lose. But carrying on out of spite is legal. If you really want to be a sore loser, you can play the game down until it's mate in one, then just sit there and watch the clock run out so that you lose on time instead of giving your opponent the mate or resignation.
But if you do that, don't be surprised if you don't get invited back to many other tournaments.
This is going to be a "high-variance" election.
We start out ahead, both polls and betting odds show Hillary with a big lead right now. And she will probably win, but there could also be wild swings in either direction.
Trump is going to go scorched earth, so there is a chance that he'll be able to "Lyin' Ted" Hillary. On the other hand, he might hire some political consultants to remake his image totally, and pretend to be a reasonable human being. He is a TV performer after all. So, while the odds are in our favor, it's not a lock. And one problem is that the downside of a Trump presidency is enormous. This is not Mitt Romney or John McCain. This guy is insane.
But there is a lot of upside too. Trump could melt down spectacularly. There could be large numbers of GOP defections. If Trump's numbers stay the same or get even worse, we could make big gains in congress.
There's a big upside and a big downside. This is a big election.
The reality of Trump makes me even more glad it's going to Hillary for the Dems.
If Bernie had won the nomination, we'd be at serious risk. With his pacifism and trillions of dollars in tax raises, there's no way he pulls centrists and moderate Republicans from the GOP, but with Hillary, there are going to be a lot of Republicans that cross over because they are just as terrified of Trump as we are. I guarantee that her campaign is already making phone calls.
Also, the Trump campaign is going to be really ugly and nasty, and Hillary is used to this kind of thing, Bernie's never seen it before. He's a blank slate with a questionable and unexplored past (pro-Castro, USSR honeymoon, etc.) that Trump would be salivating about. And Trump wouldn't worry about whether he was being "fair" about the nuances of different kinds of socialism.
Bernie talks up his head-to-head numbers but those are meaningless because there have been zero negative ads run against him. He's done as well as he has in the primaries by playing to working class white resentment, but he can't beat Trump at that game.
The general election is a different game. The GOP candidates couldn't really hammer Trump for being racist because they needed the racist voters which make up a substantial portion of the GOP primary. And Hillary couldn't really go after Bernie on socialism because, even though it's anathema to the general electorate, she couldn't risk alienating the portion of the primary electorate that believes in it.
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