Ivanka Trump Used Personal Account For Emails About Government Business (washingtonpost.com) 498
The Washington Post is reporting that Ivanka Trump used a personal email account to send hundreds of emails last year to White House aids, Cabinet officials and her assistants. Many of the emails were "in violation of federal records rules," the report says. Ivanka's practices are reminiscent of the personal email account Hillary Clinton used as secretary of state. From the report: White House ethics officials learned of Trump's repeated use of personal email when reviewing emails gathered last fall by five Cabinet agencies to respond to a public records lawsuit. That review revealed that throughout much of 2017, she often discussed or relayed official White House business using a private email account with a domain that she shares with her husband, Jared Kushner. Some aides were startled by the volume of Ivanka Trump's personal emails -- and taken aback by her response when questioned about the practice. Trump said she was not familiar with some details of the rules, according to people with knowledge of her reaction. A spokesperson for Ivanka Trump's attorney and ethics counsel, Abbe Lowell, "acknowledged that the president's daughter occasionally used her private email before she was briefed on the rules, but he said none of her messages contained classified information," reports Washington Post.
"While transitioning into government, after she was given an official account but until the White House provided her the same guidance they had given others who started before she did, Ms. Trump sometimes used her personal account, almost always for logistics and scheduling concerning her family," he said in a statement. He went on to say that her email use was different than that of Clinton. "Ms. Trump did not create a private server in her house or office, no classified information was ever included, the account was never transferred at Trump Organization, and no emails were ever deleted," Mirijanian said.
"While transitioning into government, after she was given an official account but until the White House provided her the same guidance they had given others who started before she did, Ms. Trump sometimes used her personal account, almost always for logistics and scheduling concerning her family," he said in a statement. He went on to say that her email use was different than that of Clinton. "Ms. Trump did not create a private server in her house or office, no classified information was ever included, the account was never transferred at Trump Organization, and no emails were ever deleted," Mirijanian said.
Lock her up? (Score:3, Insightful)
Seems reasonable
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Ivanka is also named in this lawsuit [nytimes.com] filed by New York over massive abuse by the Trump foundation, and criminal referrals were also made to the IRS. It certainly doesn't stop here.
Re:Lock her up? (Score:5, Interesting)
"Lock her Up" For what?
Lost in all this is the fact that Ms Trump's use of personal eMail is entirely legal. As was Ms Clinton's mostly. There is, and was in Ms Clinton's day, a requirement that the emails be archived and accessible to the public. Nowadays, there is a requirement that the archiving be done within a time limit (20 days?). In Ms Clinton's day there was no such time limit. GWB's first term Secretary of State Colin Powell still hasn't gotten around to archiving HIS 2001-2005 emails.
And yes, commingling of official and personal eMails is OK. Only the official stuff has to be archived.
The issue of classified material on Ms Clinton's server is a separate issue -- complicated by the fact that as Secretary of State, Ms Clinton has considerable power to reclassify stuff. For all I or anyone else around here knows, a formal hearing would determine that Ms Clinton actually declassified the material in question, but didn't properly mark it. That's a parking ticket level misdemeanor offense at best. Not something people are locked up for even in America.
The outrageous conduct of Donald Trump and his crazed supporters seriously clouds the issue of course. And Democrats can smile and laugh for a few days about this. But really, there's apparently no fire and damn little smoke here.
Re:Lock her up? (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree mostly. Legally this is a nothingburger, and even less of a nothing burger than Hillary's email were.
Where i disagree with you is with the significance of the optics.
Trump and the republican party at large wandered around for months making a mountain out of Hillary's email -- Fox news still seems to make it a landing page headline every few days.
Given that environment, anyone with an ounce of common sense associated with Trump or the republican party would have made damned sure not to be using a personal email for government work of any sort.
If you make it a central plank of your campaign that Hillary Clinton's misuse of email not only disqualifies her for public service, but demands a prosecution, demands incarceration. Then you don't get caught using a personal email server yourself, no matter how trivial it REALLY is.
Legally there's no fire here, but the apparent level of hypocrisy, arrogance, and stupidity on display is staggering. Or it would be if it wasn't just another day in this dumpster fire of an administration.
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Correct. At the very least, Trump and Fox ought to admit that - oh, by the way, we were just kidding when we were running around with our hair on fire over Hillary's emails.
But hey, Trump still won't admit he was lying about Obama's birth certificate...
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Hey, if you want to try and convict Clinton, I'm all for it. There's a shit ton of politicians who have ignored the law either in adhering to security clearance or engaging in government business on personal accounts to avoid public scrutiny and documentation. If we want to go after Snowden, we should be going after Clinton.
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Um. I know you're very busy getting all indignant and stuff, but if you have a minute, I'd like to point out that the Secretary of State is not an elected official. So your sentence makes no sense.
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much less an elected government official. L
She's certainly not an elected official.
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Prior to becoming a federal employee, she used a personal email for government work.[87]
Emphasis added. Not an issue. She wasn't a Federal employee when she used it - she literally had no way of using Federal e-mail account.
Re: BeauHD should commit suicide (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: BeauHD should commit suicide (Score:5, Informative)
And about her use of e-mail [wikipedia.org]?
Prior to becoming a federal employee, she used a personal email for government work.[87]
Emphasis added. Not an issue. She wasn't a Federal employee when she used it - she literally had no way of using Federal e-mail account.
If she's not a federal employee why is she doing government work?
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Good point. It usually works the other way around (government employees not doing any work). If we only had more government workers like her, our budget problems would be solved!
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And that folks is why we know there are no secret aliens. If Trump had access to that information he's spill it in a heartbeat
Re: Lock her up? (Score:2)
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Yes, right after they lock up Hillary.
Here's an idea, put them both in a fight to death. Winner walks free.
Classified? (Score:5, Insightful)
Using personal email for work and vice-versa is something everybody does, even though it's often against some policy.
What matters is whether Classified information is being sent over unsecured links.
I don't really care about the classification (Score:5, Insightful)
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No, what matters is whether a law has been broken. Hillary broke the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which required that everything she did go through government servers so it was available under the FOIA.
If Ivanka did the same thing (caveat: I don't know whether the FOIA required her to restrict her emails to government servers for preservation, as Hillary's were (Note that Hillary was a Cabinet Officer - Ivanka isn't, b
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It does. That part doesn't seem to be in dispute.
Re:Classified? (Score:5, Informative)
In a statement to Newsweek, a White House spokesperson pointed out that Trump was not a federal employee at the time she sent the February 28 email. When she became a federal employee in March, “she made clear that one of her reasons for doing so was to ensure that she would have access to government-issued communications devices and receive an official email account to protect government records,” the spokesperson said. The spokesperson added that prior to her obtaining an official account, Trump’s emailing other official accounts “ensured the records were preserved and available under the Federal Records Act.” Trump did not have an official email account as a first daughter at the time, according to the spokesperson.
What few e-mails were sent, were sent BEFORE she was a Government employee and required to use Government e-mail servers. She requested to become a Federal employee so she could use Federal e-mail systems. There is NO claim she used her personal e-mail AFTER she became a Government employee. This is a nothingburger created by Hillary's supporters to try to justify her brazen breaking of the LAW regarding e-mail and security.
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Using personal email for work and vice-versa is something everybody does, even though it's often against some policy.
Sure, though if Ivanka was paying attention in 2016 you'd think she'd be a bit more careful.
What matters is whether Classified information is being sent over unsecured links.
Which is a completely separate manner from using personal email for work.
Neither Clinton's official state dept email address nor Ivanka's official white house email were cleared for sending classified information either. Classified information was supposed to be sent over a completely separate system.
It's just a perception issue. A few pieces of classified info going through your work email is a relatable mistake, bu
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What matters is whether Classified information is being sent over unsecured links.
Which POTUS does regularly.
What really matters is if it can send a focus group into fits of involuntary rage.
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Using personal email for work and vice-versa is something everybody does, even though it's often against some policy.
Is that really true, though, given web email and the capability of having multiple email apps on your phone? I have a personal email that I access at work, but I don't send work emails through it, just like I don't send personal emails through my work address. Maybe for old people or luddites who only have their work email, but I'd think anyone posting on Slashdot has at least two or three email addresses they use regularly.
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She’s not a whitehouse employee.
If you mean she's not drawing a salary, that's irrelevant. She is in fact doing work in the whitehouse, so she must abide by the the relevant rules.
She has the legal right to use perusal this email for whatever she wants.
Unless it violates federal record rules, which TFA says is the issue. Maybe not worth more than a finger-wag, but it still needs to be addressed and fixed.
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She’s not a whitehouse employee
She's a White House employee. Her job is called "Senior Advisor to the President". Even comes with a paycheck.
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She's a White House employee. Her job is called "Senior Advisor to the President". Even comes with a paycheck.
A paycheck that she does not receive. [nbcnews.com]
Not that that changes anything of course. She is indeed an employee.
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Technically, she has to receive it and then sign it over to the Treasury. It's illegal to volunteer for a Federal government job, so they have to jump through the hoop of issuing a paycheck that she gives back.
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As a Trump, she will say her paychecks are signed over then quietly bank them. Trumps only play wealthy people on TV.
How is this different from ... (Score:5, Insightful)
"Ms. Trump did not create a private server in her house or office, ..."
How is using the Trump Organization's server any better than using one in her own home or office? In fact, it is likely worse, because there will be more people with administrative access, simply because it is a bigger organization.
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Oh for some mod points. Exactly this.
Clinton's server was, assuming it was configured competently, secure. Ivanka is using a cloud service backed server (Microsoft).
It's worse (Score:5, Insightful)
IIRC, during the campaign it came out that the Trump Org. server was a Win 2000 box. (Democrats argued that's how it was obvious they were the ones targeted, cause Trump's would have been trivial to hack.) Further, there is pretty ample evidence that both China and Russia have been pinging machines in Trump Tower at least since he announced.
So, it's probably far less secure, and probably already compromised.
There's also the factor that the record laws about email were at least new when Hiliary was SOS; Ivanka had a year and half lesson on it from her dad and every newspaper.
Conveniently not mentioned (Score:5, Funny)
Ivanka’s personal email is being hosted on a server running in Hillary Clinton’s basement.
Server? (Score:5, Insightful)
As long as she used the one in her home, I guess it would be ok?
I mean, at least half of you MUST think that's ok (or you're hypocrites).
The other half must condemn her for this (or you're hypocrites too).
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The whole article is that kind of disgusting what-aboutism. The fact is that the email retention rules only really started applying at the beginning of the Obama administration*, so it's possible that Hillary made a mistake. There is no possibility Ivanka didn't know this was against the rules. To say nothing about how I expect more computer literacy from a 36 year old than a 70 year old.
But, yeah, fuck both of their private email systems.
* Both Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice used private email as Sec
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Timing is everything [newsweek.com]. The e-mails in question occurred before she was a Federal employee. She literally could not use Federal e-mail until she became a Federal employee. NO ONE is saying she used her personal e-mail AFTER she became a Federal employee.
I guess you need to turn yourself in if you've ever e-mailed a Federal employee or Congressperson, because who knows - one day you may end up working for the Federal Government and then you will have used your personal e-mail for official business!
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So, you're just going to ignore the fact that she wasn't a federal employee at the time. Just like you'll ignore the fact that she wasn't dealing in the highest levels of classified information as part of her day job, and set up a private server in her own home to do it.
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As long as she used the one in her home, I guess it would be ok?
I mean, at least half of you MUST think that's ok (or you're hypocrites).
The other half must condemn her for this (or you're hypocrites too).
Actually a lot of us thought Clinton's server was bad but not that big a deal.
As for this... It's not bad on it's own, but it exposes the absurd hypocrisy of the right. This email thing was the biggest issue in the country! A major scandal disqualifying for office! Someone should go to jail!!! As long as it involves Clinton or some Democrat, otherwise it isn't even worth the thought to make sure you're not being a ridiculous hypocrite.
Want more hypocrisy? Remember that terrible scary invasion of Central Ame
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OF COURSE it was illegal. Anyone else would be serving decades in prison for mishandling classified evidence (using her unsecured server extensively & exclusively, without authorization) and obstruction of justice (destroying evidence while under FBI investigation). Even if there wasn't prison time for violating record keeping and FOIA laws which predate Obama's order on emails, despite what Democratic chicken-fuckers [youtube.com] would have you believe.
The people around them didn't help? (Score:2)
Hillary Clinton had a "private email server"? Is it sensible to think that a 71-year-old woman, in her late 60s back then, had ANY understanding of email servers?
She knew (Score:3)
Hilary is very, very intelligent. Not saying she uses that intelligence in the most upstanding manor. But make no mistake, her failing was arrogance, not stupidity.
Hired someone??? She has NO knowledge of tech. (Score:2)
I've been doing technology support for decades. Recently I have wanted to find someone to do some computer hardware maintenance. I contacted an association of computer consultants. I did not find a sufficiently competent person.
Does anyone think Hillary Clinton has ANY ability to understand ANYTHING about technology?
It seems to me that the problems could have been caused by less-than-competent government workers
If any Trump family member does/has done (Score:2, Interesting)
That is guaranteed by the current state of affairs at the federal government level. The concepts of Political Ideology, Justice and Politics have merged and are now one with the accepted Group Think.
Honesty, Justice and Truth have no place in our current completely warped reality in Washington
Willfull Democratic Dumbfuckery (Score:4, Insightful)
Ivanka didn't:
Set up a private email server in her own house the way Hillary did.
Send thousands of classified emails from said account.
Destroy thousands of pieces of evidence while under FBI investigation.
This is taking butthurt partisan false equivalencies to 11.
More Willfull Democratic Dumbfuckery (Score:3)
One of the more pernicious lies from Democrats on this issue is that the emails weren't marked as classified so Hillary's server was A-Okay. Which is total Nazi bullshit, as much of those conversations would have been inherently classified. If Hillary received an email from the ambassador to India on the state of Pakistan's nuclear weapons program, that email didn't have to be stamped as "classified" for
Until she was briefed?! (Score:2)
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Laws are for the little people.
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Yes. But with the whole Brexit brouhaha in the UK and increasingly authoritarian governments coming to fruition in several nations around the world we're hardly alone, unfortunately.
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It must be so embarrassing to be American right now
It's really not.
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The data suggests otherwise.
https://www.newsweek.com/donal... [newsweek.com]
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The president is never a good representation of America. At any given time, half the country thinks he's trying to become Hitler (or an anti-christ), and a good third of the rest of the population thinks he's a nice guy but a bit misguided.
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Yes, it is. It really is.
Re:LOL (Score:5, Insightful)
Just like I don't expect most Russians to be like Putin, most people in the world are accepting of Americans. America is not the only good country, maybe it's not even the best country (that depends how you measure, of course), but it's a good one. Sorry you feel embarrassed about your nationality, maybe you should see a psychologist about that, because you have issues (by definition).
Re:LOL (Score:5, Funny)
heading out on a passport that is trusted and accepted in most of the world. What is there to be embarrassed about?
Under Trump, U.S. Passport Value for Global Travel Is Plummeting [newsweek.com]
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We're kinda used to it, Obama started the trend.
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Lok er UP!
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False equivalence. The president's daughter sending emails with a personal account when she doesn't have any official position is not the same.
The Secretary of State systematically using her own server she had created for the purpose, willfully deleting 30,000 pieces of evidence, the FBI still finding 110 counts of felony mishandling, and getting away with it because "no reasonable prosecutor would risk their career by harming the Clintons" is not at all the same.
This is a tech news site. Everyone here shou
Re:let the apologists start jumping through hoops (Score:5, Informative)
False equivalence. The president's daughter sending emails with a personal account when she doesn't have any official position is not the same.
Senior Adviser to the President is an official position.
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I think that says just about all you need to know about the President.
False equivalence: 2018 is not 2009 (Score:5, Interesting)
I have to add to this: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/emails-show-nsa-rejected-hillary-clinton-request-for-secure-smartphone/ [cbsnews.com]
"...According to a summary of the meeting, the request was driven by Clinton's reliance on her BlackBerry for email and keeping track of her calendar. Clinton chose not to use a laptop or desktop computer that could have provided her access to email in her office..."
"...Mills also asked about waivers provided during the Bush administration to then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for her staff to use BlackBerrys in their secure offices. But the NSA had phased out such waivers due to security concerns..."
Re:let the apologists start jumping through hoops (Score:5, Informative)
Why does the "Daughter of the President" have an office in the White House.
Does anyone else remember Chelsea having an office in the White House? How about Sasha or Malia Ann?
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Trump is draining the swamp and re-filling it with his own friends and family. Kinda like how you need to get a cesspit emptied now and then.
Re:let the apologists start jumping through hoops (Score:5, Insightful)
Where is your outrage over that?
Stop lying. You are pretending to be "Fair and Balanced", but what you are truly doing is spewing right wing disinformation.
If being a hypocrite was a toxin you would be dead and the region around your body would be treated like a radioactive disaster zone.
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Oh stop it, no one believes anything Trump says. It's impossible for him to endanger national security. Even the CIA published their report on the journalist killed by the Crown Dunce of Saudi Arabia rather than tell Trump first. That should tell you how much they trust him.
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False equivalence. The president's daughter sending emails with a personal account when she doesn't have any official position is not the same.
Yes the president getting his kids to do his work without even setting them up is pretty shitty.
Re: let the apologists start jumping through hoops (Score:5, Insightful)
That's where the lesser of two evils doctrine in US elections got reiterated to the American public.
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That's where the lesser of two evils doctrine in US elections got reiterated to the American public.
One solution is ranked choice voting [wikipedia.org], which was used in Maine on Nov 6th. A few voters were confused, and counting the ballots was slow, but it is clearly an improvement over plurality voting. Hopefully it will catch on nationally.
Another improvement is the nonpartisan primaries used in California state (but not federal) elections. Only the top two proceed to the general election, regardless of party. So in some liberal districts the general election is blue-on-blue. This system tends to encourage mode
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One solution is ranked choice voting [wikipedia.org], which was used in Maine on Nov 6th. A few voters were confused, and counting the ballots was slow, but it is clearly an improvement over plurality voting. Hopefully it will catch on nationally.
This. ShanghaiBill, I rarely agree with what you say. But you're right on this one. Arrow's Impossibility Theorm (linked in the Wikipedia article you provided) states that no election system is perfect. But runoffs (or its simpler alternative, ranked voting) are the best of all the imperfect solutions.
Another improvement is the nonpartisan primaries used in California state (but not federal) elections. Only the top two proceed to the general election, regardless of party. So in some liberal districts the general election is blue-on-blue. This system tends to encourage moderates over wing-nuts, and California is slowly becoming less dysfunctional.
Hm. Yes, better ... but not as good as runoff/ranked voting IMHO. It encourages multi-party participation.
Re: let the apologists start jumping through hoops (Score:5, Insightful)
I may have this completely wrong (and happy to be corrected, but this is secondary to my point)... but I think that the origins of what we currently think of as representative democratic government originates in the UK in the Middle Ages. In return for money for wars, the King was forced to give up some power and through that deal, the UK gradually transitioned to representative government. The House of Commons in the UK was founded in 1341 - the fourteenth century!
Here's the key part... The technology of the day was "horse and rider". It took between 4 days and one week to travel from London to York. The fastest means of communication was a courier on a fast horse... This meant that the only way the areas in the north of the country could participate in the decisions of government was to pick a volunteer who would travel to London (the seat of power) and represent the town or village. What has happened, then is that we have adopted a model of government that was effectively forced by the limitations of transport of the age.
In other words, we have based today's model of government upon a set of conditions that are very nearly 700 years old and are completely out-dated.
With modern communications technologies it is entirely practical for our government to allow us, as citizens, to participate at a much greater level than we do today. Indeed, any major decision could easily be supported by an all-digital referendum. For example, we might decide that we would only go to war with another country if a democratic majority of citizens agreed that it was necessary to do so.
When I make this observation in discussions with friends, I sometimes get challenges along the lines of, "It would be too easy to rig those sorts of votes..." but to which my response is always to point out that every single day we process billions of dollars worth of transactions electronically. Many people conduct their banking by mobile phone. Many more use the internet. So there are ways and means by which we could make this secure.
You might wonder why is it that we don't have this form of more democratic voting already? Why do we continue to rely upon representative government if a better alternative is available? The answer is simple: corruption is much easier to achieve when you only have a small number of people you need to bribe/blackmail/coerce. No? Just look at the amount of money in politics. Just look at the amount spent in campaign contributions? Just look at the number of lobbyists running around in the halls of power. A move toward distributed democratization would truly give power back to the people. It would also reduce the vast and expensive machine of government to an administrative office that served the will of the people.
That has to be a good thing.
Re: let the apologists start jumping through hoops (Score:5, Insightful)
The reason we don't have more direct democracy is that to work properly it requires the population to be well informed, and for the most part populations aren't. People prefer to delegate to elected representatives so that they don't have to become an expert on everything government gets involved in and so that theoretically informed decisions are made.
Another issue is that direct democracy is rather powerful, and democracy relies on individuals and individual institutions not having too much power. Checks and balances.
Democracy is a process too, so the nature of individual votes on often binary questions isn't really suited to it.
As an example of what can go wrong, look at Brexit. The population was not informed, in fact most of the information that was available was false or misleading. The question was both binary and unclear: leave or remain, but neither position was defined. And after a slim majority voted in favour of leaving that single event has been used to wield an enormous amount of power, so much so that new balances had to be introduced and it's not clear yet if they are strong enough.
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> every single day we process billions of dollars worth of transactions electronically.
Your analogy is wrong because:
1. In the case of financial transactions: The correct execution of the operation (money transfer) is in the best interest of those who (banks) execute it.
2. In the case of elections: The correct execution of the operation (counting votes) is NOT in the best interest of those who (politicians currently in power) execute it. They just want to win again. Why would they bother to count and do
Re: let the apologists start jumping through hoops (Score:5, Interesting)
" I think that the origins of what we currently think of as representative democratic government originates in the UK in the Middle Ages"
"With modern communications technologies it is entirely practical for our government to allow us, as citizens, to participate at a much greater level than we do today"
There is a reason our (United States) government was *NOT* set up like the UK. Our founders found the build of parliamentary forms of government wildly unstable -- and a new "government" could and demonstrably DID enact law based on the passions of the moment. Such laws ended up contributing to the Revolution and much of the tyranny we excoriated. Read the bill of rights -- much it was because of war crimes committed by the Crown against the colonies.
The Senate was *NOT* supposed to be elected by the people -- they were supposed to be appointed by respective states to represent the states interests. The 17th amendment changed that -- and while I understand the reason why, it had unintended consequences on our republic. And we *ARE* more a republic than a democracy -- or at least were were originally designed to be so. Senators were to be allowed to serve without the need to round support (campaign) and no be influenced by the passions of the population to any great degree.
The House of representatives was to directly represent the people and were democratically elected. While the Senate was designed to have more POWER than the house -- the house was granted the purse strings on funding to balance that. With some effort, the House can reign in the Senate.
The President was never meant to be directly elected by the people, but by the states. Each state has a democratic election for the President. Well, not REALLY, they are voting for whom their state will support -- and that support is weighted to match the number of representatives they have in Congress (a fairly close match to population, but not perfect). That's why it doesn't MATTER if you get 1 more vote or 2 million more votes for president in a given state -- you get the ENTIRE states weight in electors. Again, this was by design. The fear was that we would have an executive who would represent the interests of the larger/richer states at the time (Virginia, in 1787, was a prime example) and ignore the smaller, less populous states. This would force some type of compromise in getting an executive in office and force them to not ignore parts of the nation.
There's a great story (probably apocryphal -- but pretty demonstrative of the thought at the time) where Jefferson, when returning from France after the Constitution was adopted sat with Washington having tea. Jefferson asked "Why two houses, why a Senate? Why not just one, representing all the people?" And Washington asked "Why do you pour your tea in your saucer?" Jefferson responded: "To let it cool so I do not get burned". Washington answered: "And that's why we have the Senate -- to let new law cool and be tempered by time and thought".
The fact is, our country was founded based on trying to "FIX" those shortfalls in the various governments of the world at the time. They were more afraid of democracy than of monarchy. It was their genius when they put power in the hands of the people to FIX problems that may occur if any one part of our government became too powerful -- by voting in people to cut the purse strings and starve it off the vine of our nation.
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He may have won, but he dropped out of the race for a while.
In hindsight I wouldn't have expected much (Score:3)
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Yeah, as evidenced by Bill's re-election.
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I hate both parties. Both parties suffer from personality worship disorder.
The important thing, however, is that you have managed to paint yourself as superior to all others without shouldering any burden of of producing, much less implementing via popular vote, any solutions. Well done.
Re: let the apologists start jumping through hoops (Score:3)
Or just abolish all parties. Have a primary election and keep the top 3 or 4 to move onto the election. Thats how quite a few mayoral races work. Getting sick of the whole polarization. This would likely make it so no one group gets more than 30-35% of the votes. Thst would force them to have to work together.
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It would also risk exacerbating the cult of personality, though, because individual name recognition would count for even more
You can't avoid parties. They arise naturally (Score:2)
Parties provide advantages for politicians. So even if you don't make parties part of your political system, the people voted in will arrange themselves into something that acts like political parties, those parties will form alliances and coalitions, and those coalitions will merge into two distinct groups, who will divide the population down the center.
As it is better that such things be regulated in some way, most countries make them part of the constitution, so their power is, to some extent, controlled
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Ranked-choice would be better, but we need to address the rampant gerrymandering.
https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]
How you choose matters little if your vote doesn't carry the same weight as others.
On top of the gerrymandering, we have the problem that the Constitution confers an larger influence on the Presidency and the House (and originally, also the Senate) to voters in small states.
Then, there is voter suppression going on in multiple states.
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This is more than relevant because of how Trump trolls manufactured the original issue. Not to mention violently ironic. "To cover up her corrupt dealings." As a further embarrassment of the Trump crime family, this ranks right up there with Yeti Pubes. [urbandictionary.com]
Re:Bogus headline (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Bogus headline (Score:5, Insightful)
Ivanka is Trump's daughter who has an official government position. She should be subject to the same rules as other employees. The first lady is Melania Trump. That is another person entirely.
Once upon a time Hyprocrisy mattered, didn't it? I mean even when a republican does it?
Off the top of my head:
Trump and his iphone.
Trump with Russians in the Oval Office.
Omarosa recording a conversation in what was almost undoubtably a closed and secure area.
Ivaka using private email.
Hell Comey had some private email.
Trump not keeping up on his briefings, which is arguably worse than the Iphone thing. If there is one thing worse than an intelligence leak, is intelligence that should have lead to action that didn't.
Trump lying about everything, after nicknaming people "Lying Ted" and similar. Hell he even said, with a straight face "I will never lie to you." Think about this. Obama said, "If you like your plan you can keep it," instead of "If you like your plan and it meets the new minimum coverage standards you can keep it," and they all but nailed him to a cross for years. Trump says, "I'm going to give you the best healthcare," and then he tries to destroy it, partly succeeds, and does nothing to replace it at all.
Trump saying he is great for the press, health care, African Americans, Mexicans, etc, and doing things that show the opposite.
Once upon a time hyprocrisy and lies mattered, but it doesn't seem to now. Very few have changed teams as a result. The Tribes are set. Sure a little movement happens, but mostly you just motivate both bases, with increasing hate and increasing devotion and/or fear. Hell Trump just talked smack about the guy in charge of getting Osama Bin Laden. The fox news article is, "RNC backs Trump attack on retired Navy Admiral William McRaven" In short, the republican national convention didn't repudiate him, they backed him up.
Trump's words there were, "He was a hillary/obama backer" That's it. For Trump backing the opposing party, even if its not true, is the same as what? Being evil? Being wrong? I don't get it.
It's clear that Trump has no decency, but shouldn't some other republicans stand up? It seems they are quite happy to walk down the nature trail to hell (road to authoritarian rule).
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It's clear that Trump has no decency, but shouldn't some other republicans stand up?
They have. Some rather vocally, too. Paul Ryan is retiring, for example, rather than deal with the shit storm. McCain was dying to get away from Trump. The problem is a lot of Republicans who opposed Trump felt it in the election: Ted Cruz literally hugged Trump to enable him to squeak by in a red state.
Re:Bogus headline (Score:5, Interesting)
It's clear that Trump has no decency, but shouldn't some other republicans stand up? It seems they are quite happy to walk down the nature trail to hell (road to authoritarian rule).
And this is where the republican party has lost me for the rest of my life. Until the current crop is dead and gone, there's nothing that is going to bring me back.
The lack of spine and decency is appalling. If you can't put country over party, that's unforgivable in my book. And other than one or two republicans, the entire party is doing that.
What's mindblowing to me is that it's only for very, very short-term gain. Long-term, the republican party is dead demographically. Check out the op-ed from the former vice chair of the CA republican party: Why One Prominent California Republican Has Declared The GOP Dead In Her State [npr.org]. That's the first domino, and it won't take too many more to make the republican party nothing more than a disruptive minority.
The US already slipped below 50% of the babies being born white. There's no path forward for the republican party relying as they have on on toxic racism (and sexism) to secure their base. "There are very fine people on both sides" doesn't play well in the non-white demographics that are soon going to be a majority in the US. If the republicans can't purge and pivot in time for the next generation to see value in their platform, they are done. At the moment, they're making a lot more lifelong democrats than they are making lifelong republicans.
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Wow. So much hate, so little knowledge.
Hint: Ivanka is not and never has been married to Donald Trump.
Doesn't stop him from fucking her.
Re:I guess everyone forgot - (Score:5, Informative)
She is a CIVILIAN. And her participation in the presidency is "Voluntary"
The Secretary of State is a civilian. And also a voluntary position.
Ivanka Trump is a Senior Adviser to the President, which is an official government position. Complete with all of us sending her a paycheck.
Re:I guess everyone forgot - (Score:5, Informative)
Which happened after her emails from a private server, at least according to Newsweek.
Still a complete horseshit equivalency - even if she's been using private email since joining the White House staff. She's not an Original Classification Authority, the way Hillary was, trading in the highest levels of classified information as a part of her job. Nor has Ivanka set up her own private email server in Jared's house, nor has she used it exclusively.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Which happened after her emails from a private server, at least according to Newsweek.
Still a complete horseshit equivalency - even if she's been using private email since joining the White House staff. She's not an Original Classification Authority, the way Hillary was, trading in the highest levels of classified information as a part of her job. Nor has Ivanka set up her own private email server in Jared's house, nor has she used it exclusively.
Hillary was found to have sent 65 emails on topics deemed "Secret" and 22 deemed "Top Secret" but that all of them contained material that was particularly sensitive because the content of the emails discussed things that were at the time of writing available in the public domain, i.e. newspapers and it's kind of dumb to fault somebody for discussing secret things in non-secure emails that are already being discussed in newspapers. Some emails were also classified retroactively. Additionally several FBI inv
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Last I checked you cannot resign being the presidents dauther.
Re: I guess everyone forgot - (Score:4, Informative)
You can resign from your position of "Senior Advisor to the President", which is an actual job in the White House.
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Except she has that job. She's currently receiving a paycheck for it, which she signs over to the Treasury.
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After advising her father in an unofficial capacity for the first two months of his administration, she was appointed Advisor to the President, a government employee, on March 29, 2017. She takes no salary.[3] Prior to becoming a federal employee, she used a personal email for government work.
She did this BEFORE being a Government employee. In other words - it isn't an issue. Or can we toss you in prison because you may have e-mailed a Government official sometime? Even if you weren't a Government employee?
Re: I guess everyone forgot - (Score:5, Informative)
After advising her father in an unofficial capacity for the first two months of his administration, she was appointed Advisor to the President, a government employee, on March 29, 2017. She takes no salary.[3] Prior to becoming a federal employee, she used a personal email for government work.
In other words, her e-mails were not an issue because she was not yet a Federal employee. But let's go ahead and consider that equivalent to the Secretary of State running a private server in her bathroom, and passing thousands of classified and Top Secret e-mails through it. By all means, show your hypocrisy!
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About her use of e-mail: [wikipedia.org]
After advising her father in an unofficial capacity for the first two months of his administration, she was appointed Advisor to the President, a government employee, on March 29, 2017. She takes no salary.[3] Prior to becoming a federal employee, she used a personal email for government work.
In other words, her e-mails were not an issue because she was not yet a Federal employee. But let's go ahead and consider that equivalent to the Secretary of State running a private server in her bathroom, and passing thousands of classified and Top Secret e-mails through it. By all means, show your hypocrisy!
She had an office in the white house during that time. She was a government official whether the administration considered her to be one or not.
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Last I checked, every senior government position is "voluntary". Any of then can resign at any time. Ivanka has still been acting in official capacities, even if she doesn't have an official title or office.
Remember when she plunked her widening ass down in daddy's chair [vanityfair.com] at the G20 summit?
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Nepotism, plain and simple.
"I'm the first daughter" - ivanka in a nutshell (Score:5, Informative)
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