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There has been an explosion in NYC. Thankfully, it appears no one has been killed.
http://edition.cnn.com/2016/09/17/us/new-york-explosion/
http://edition.cnn.com/2016/09/17/us/new-york-explosion/
How does a bombing have no indication as a terrorist act? Do you mean there was no initial indication of a foreign connection?Astronuc said:Initially, there was no clear indication of a 'terrorist' act, although the bombing was considered an intentional or deliberate act.
While somewhat rare, it does happen; Columbine comes to mind. Not every [attempted] mass murder is terrorism.mheslep said:How does a bombing have no indication as a terrorist act? Do you mean there was no initial indication of a foreign connection?
Yes - other than the conclusion that the act was deliberate, it was not initially clear that it was a terrorist act. It could have been an act of retaliation or an intentional act to maim or cause death for some unknown reason.mheslep said:How does a bombing have no indication as a terrorist act?
Correct. It was not clear that the perpetrator was domestic or that there was foreign influence.mheslep said:Do you mean there was no initial indication of a foreign connection?
kyphysics said:Does Hillary get a bump from showing a calm and cool head ...
mheslep said:Clinton's pitch IMO is the *appearance* of calm and cool via the spin that there's nothing really going on in the US; that these attacks are just so much harmless noise, nothing is going to hurt you, which I think is what many people want one hear. Actual calm and cool would be to confront problems leading to violent attacks and address them, regardless of what people would like to think. Giuliani's press conferences immediately following 911 are the archetype.
We're talking about perceptions here, not direct statements. Do you agree with kyphysics's statement that Hillary portrayed a "calm and cool head"? Do you agree that Trump overhypes problems? Do you agree that an incumbent party's representative would be shooting him/erself in the foot by overhyping problems that she/they should have already dealt with?StatGuy2000 said:mheslep, I'm afraid you're expressing your right-wing bias here regarding Clinton. Since when has Clinton ever specifically said that there is nothing really going on in the US, that these attacks are harmless noise? The fact that (at least from the news reports I've been hearing) Clinton is not immediately jumping to conclusions should be viewed as a positive.
(I do agree with you about Giuliani's press conferences immediately following 911, as well as his overall conduct as mayor during the immediate aftermath of the attack.)
russ_watters said:We're talking about perceptions here, not direct statements. Do you agree with kyphysics's statement that Hillary portrayed a "calm and cool head"? Do you agree that Trump overhypes problems? Do you agree that an incumbent party's representative would be shooting him/erself in the foot by overhyping problems that she/they should have already dealt with?
Add those realities together and the calmness disparity works against her, not for her. I mean, this is the whole point of how Trump got here, right?!
Hillary is doing a better job recently of addressing terrorism in her speeches than Obama in my opinion, but she is still trapped by her ties to him and her own past sins (Benghazi).
StatGuy2000 said:...
4. Clinton's problem, as far as I see it, has nothing to do with her calm and cool demeanor (which is actually a plus) but a perception that she is dishonest and untrustworthy, a perception which is somewhat unfair (as many of the accusations against Clinton are without factual basis, with Benghazi being the best example), but not entirely unwarranted (the controversies regarding the e-mail server and the Clinton Foundation feed into that perception).
There's always anger born of dissatisfaction swirling around elections. IMO, Trump's success stems from persuading people that he can actually break up the establishment, an ability enabled by being an outsider, a non-politician, and a clear refusal to speak in the bland manner of establishment politicians.5. Trump's ability to win the Republican presidential nomination is due, in large part, to his ability to (a) tap into a sense of anger among a significant percentage of the electorate who feel that the American political system and the mainstream political parties (both Republican and Democrat) have failed to represent them, ...
mheslep said:It is not the FBI "controversy" that creates the perception, it is the Clinton lie about absolution from the FBI.
Politifac's
"All False statements involving Hillary Clinton"
http://www.politifact.com/personalities/hillary-clinton/statements/byruling/false/
The bull about dodging sniper fire in Bosnia is not included on their list, but it's on mine.
There's always anger born of dissatisfaction swirling around elections. IMO, Trump's success stems from persuading people that he can actually break up the establishment, an ability enabled by being an outsider, a non-politician, and a clear refusal to speak in the bland manner of establishment politicians.
You just agreed with every step of the logic and then when you got to the conclusion, jumped to a completely different topic instead of finishing with the conclusion. Yes, Clinton's dishonesty perception is a problem, but it is a different problem from the one we were discussing. Back on topic: The logic we just went through demonstrates how/why "calmness" can be a problem for her. Right? If you still disagree, tell me where in the line of logic you need to change a "yest" to a "no"! (major caveat being that as @Vanadium50 said in another thread, the same message can have different effects on different audiences)StatGuy2000 said:4. Clinton's problem, as far as I see it, has nothing to do with her calm and cool demeanor (which is actually a plus) but a perception that she is dishonest and untrustworthy, a perception which is somewhat unfair (as many of the accusations against Clinton are without factual basis, with Benghazi being the best example), but not entirely unwarranted (the controversies regarding the e-mail server and the Clinton Foundation feed into that perception).
The demagogue tally goes to Clinton if I'm counting, populist to Trump. Take another look at the some of the False cases in the Politifac list. I don't mean the deception but the demagoguery present in claims like "vast right wing conspiracy", and to announce in a debate that "Republicans" were the enemy she was most proud to have. Not Bin Laden. Not even Assad who she said "must go". Republicans.StatGuy2000 said:...
And you are right -- he doesn't speak like an "establishment" politician. He speaks like a populist demagogue, and populist demagogues have generally proved to be disasters (Silvio Berlusconi in Italy, of whom Trump resembles, is a great recent example).
russ_watters said:You just agreed with every step of the logic and then when you got to the conclusion, jumped to a completely different topic instead of finishing with the conclusion. Yes, Clinton's dishonesty perception is a problem, but it is a different problem from the one we were discussing. Back on topic: The logic we just went through demonstrates how/why "calmness" can be a problem for her. Right? If you still disagree, tell me where in the line of logic you need to change a "yest" to a "no"! (major caveat being that as @Vanadium50 said in another thread, the same message can have different effects on different audiences)
Regarding Benghazi, it hasn't gotten a ton of press because it was swamped by email stuff, but Hillary's email scandal (which grew from the Benghazi investigation) did indeed demonstrate that the primary complaints of the Republicans were accurate, and both relate to the topic we were discussing:
1. Hillary's state department ignored repeated requests for additional security and even reduced security not long before the attack. The security situation was an obvious problem that her department exacerbated. There is no other way to take that than she/her department didn't take the threat seriously enough.
2. The Obama administration crafted and forwarded a narrative of a motive/events they knew to be false (again, downplaying the terrorism aspect). Hillary emails from while the attack was underway confirmed that she was clear that it was a self-contained terrorist attack and there never was any demonstration for the attack to grow from.
The only explanation that makes any sense for why he/she did these things is that it was 2 months before his re-election and Obama needed to downplay the terrorism risk to boost his poll numbers. That is following Clinton here.
http://nypost.com/2016/06/28/final-benghazi-report-blames-clinton-disregarding-witnesses/
I certainly agree with that. Here's a poll that says that her biggest character problem is the dishonesty thing:StatGuy2000 said:What I'm asserting is that, from the reading I'm getting, that it isn't the main problem with Clinton as a candidate.
So...I'm not sure why you think the accusation is extreme given what you say after it -- which I agree with. But if the "mid-ranking officials" part was key:Among the most extreme accusations levelled against Clinton allege that the death of diplomat Chris Stevens can be blamed on her as Secretary of State because (I have heard rhetoric stating that Clinton has "blood on her hands"). And it is troubling why mid-ranking officials at the State Department declined requests for more security, but it is always easy to look in retrospect on what should have been done, when at the time, these officials may well have assessed (wrongly, as it turns out) that the security situation in Libya was stable enough that security was sufficient.
I'm sure the CEO of Wells Fargo had hoped he could sell that too. But unfortunately for him and her, being in charge means being responsible.And there is no specific evidence that Clinton herself can be implicated in any way.
I don't really think that's true except in a narrow sense that Hillary has a broad body of work in this regard, so that's just one piece. But that is a fairly recent and significant piece of that body of work. And does it matter in the more direct sense? Yeah, I think it matters a lot that Hillary is willing to downplay security risks to the point where it gets people killed, if it serves her politically. And, of course, it may matter enough that she only ends up with 44% of the vote!Ultimately, does any of this ultimately matter? Probably not, since those who distrust Clinton will find reasons to do so irrespective of the reports of Benghazi.
Of course. The following is a list of qualifications required for being President:And her actions, IMHO there only indicate that she's fallible, not unqualified for higher office.
I hadn't seen this one before, from that article:At any rate, here is an article on the Economist discussing the House committee findings on Benghazi:
http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2016/06/bitter-end
Even the liberal "Economist" calls it "plausible" that Hillary's State Dept (presumably her, directly) worried more about the administration's image than fulfilling their duty to their soldiers/citizens. Lots of other bad stuff in the article, but that one's the worst because in the middle of an attack, politics should be put on hold. If she can't put politics on hold to do her job in the middle of an attack, can there be any scenario where doing her job would take precedence over protecting her image?Since the report’s publication some conservative pundits have seized on its stories of tragic squabbling and dithering, including an account of how a team of Marines from a Fleet Anti-terrorism Security Team (FAST) sat on a plane in an American airbase in southern Spain for three hours and changed in and out of their uniforms four times, while the Americans in Libya were under attack. This was the result of a disagreement between Pentagon and State Department officials about whether it would be provocative for the FAST team to arrive in Libya in American uniforms, with State preferring plain clothes.
The Republican report claims, plausibly, that the idea of Americans in uniform flying into Libya amounted to an image problem for a government that had assured the public that there would be no “boots on the ground” in that country.
russ_watters said:I'm sure the CEO of Wells Fargo had hoped he could sell that too. But unfortunately for him and her, being in charge means being responsible.
I don't really think that's true except in a narrow sense that Hillary has a broad body of work in this regard, so that's just one piece. But that is a fairly recent and significant piece of that body of work. And does it matter in the more direct sense? Yeah, I think it matters a lot that Hillary is willing to downplay security risks to the point where it gets people killed, if it serves her politically. And, of course, it may matter enough that she only ends up with 44% of the vote!
Even the liberal "Economist" calls it "plausible" that Hillary's State Dept (presumably her, directly) worried more about the administration's image than fulfilling their duty to their soldiers/citizens. Lots of other bad stuff in the article, but that one's the worst because in the middle of an attack, politics should be put on hold. If she can't put politics on hold to do her job in the middle of an attack, can there be any scenario where doing her job would take precedence over protecting her image?
The explosion in NYC was caused by a malfunctioning transformer at a Con Edison substation.
Fortunately, there were no reported casualties from the explosion in NYC.
Aside from the damaged transformer, there were no major damages reported from the explosion in NYC.
Yes, the explosion did cause some power outages in the surrounding area, but they were quickly resolved by Con Edison.
Yes, Con Edison and local authorities are currently investigating the cause of the explosion in NYC to prevent similar incidents from happening in the future.