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[SalmonGod]

Mainiac, what's your opinion of the accusation that Hillary's early campaign funds were used to buy superdelegates?  If I'm understanding this article right.

Yeah, I know, it's DailyKos, and someone is going to say their echo-chambering with a bunch of other far-left media sources is not reliable information.  That's why I didn't do anything with the article when I first read it, and I'm not trusting it implicitly.  But it seems like some meatier content to chew on if we want to talk about superdelegates and the validity of our voting process than picking apart the details of popular votes vs delegate counts state by state.

Wanted to do more research on this myself.  See if I can find some corroborations.  But haven't had the time.

[Orange Wizard]

Wait, what's racism got to do with this?

[mainiac]

Mainiac, what's your opinion of the accusation that Hillary's early campaign funds were used to buy superdelegates?  If I'm understanding this article right.

That's it's prima facie absurd and that people are latching onto ridiculous ideas because they have some notion of corruption that they will invent evidence of when the truth is it's a hum drum campaign as usual.

Remember: "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence"

[Shadowlord]

Wait, what's racism got to do with this?

You can't word things like that, man. My memory is memetic, you can't just be firing off random songs from the 80s unintentionally! Or did you do that on purpose!?

E: Fixed url tag!

[itisnotlogical]

Wait, what's racism got to do with this?

You can't word things like that, man. My memory is memetic, you can't just be firing off random songs from the 80s unintentionally! Or did you do that on purpose!?

That's a funky URL tag you've got there.

[mainiac]

It is an improvement on the discussion.

[Baffler]

The 80's were truly an era of musical genius.

Anywho, some news. The feds are creating a consolidated, government run service to centralize student loan services and information. Payments can be made there, and they say there won't be anymore random changes of ownership on your debt, along with the changing benefits and rules that result. They handle consumer complaints as well. Thoughts? I know moving Obamacare online was kind of rough at first but it's in decent shape now, though some lingering saltiness remains. Hopefully this won't go so badly at launch and poison the well, it's a pretty useful service from the looks of it.

[origamiscienceguy]

It is an improvement on the discussion.

I'll improve it some more.

My opinion is that rent is too damn high.

[SalmonGod]

Aww, come on mainiac.  I value your contributions when you leverage information, and help me learn about a subject.

Reading into it just a little bit more right now... It doesn't look to me like there's much more evidence required than what's already out there.  The structure of the Hillary Victory Fund can't really be disputed, it looks like.  So what people are questioning is the motive.

In summary: 
The Democrat Party in 33 participating states set up a joint fundraising thing for the general election apparently the earliest that it ever has, and tied it directly to Hillary's campaign funding.  They set it up so early this time in order to take advantage of a bypass to individual campaign contribution limits introduced by a ruling in 2014, and it looks like it does this by splitting contributions to the Hillary Victory Fund between Hillary's campaign and the Democratic Party.  The entire fund is operated by Hillary's campaign staff, and the accusation is that Hillary's campaign is in direct control of 33 state's largest source of campaign funds before she's won the nomination.

Wikipedia's article on this is decent.  More information and less accusatory in tone.

The articles that are ripping into this are making the claim that this is easy leverage on the political careers of superdelegates, held directly in the hands of Clinton's campaign.

So please give me the perspective that all the lowest hanging information out there is not giving me on why this is not undemocratic in nature.  I bet you've already read into this, and can provide perspective based on your sports fan-like knowledge of campaign history and information not being reported on the surface.  Because for someone like me, who is less informed than you, but more than the average voter, this doesn't look like hum drum campaign as usual.  And even if it is, I need to understand why I should be ok with it... or if the information I'm coming across is flat out wrong.

[mainiac]

The feds are creating a consolidated, government run service to centralize student loan services and information.

It was only a matter of time.  First we subsidized the banks, then the government started funding the loans directly.  At that point the banks were just acting like middlemen and doing the front end.  Then we decided to stop paying them to be middle men and were paying them just to be the front end.  There's no sense in paying them to be the front end.  Now we will be able to decide to what extent we want to subsidize loans and do it directly rather then doing a circlejerk through corporations.  On the other hand, having a more efficient program to subsidize loans will make controlling college cost inflation look less urgent.

I bet you've already read into this

No I really haven't.  It's a complex world.  You can take a detail of that complexity, replace perspective with the assumption of guilt and have proof of wrongdoing.  There are a lot of details out there.

Hillary Clinton is a well connected politician, few people would deny that.  She has spent a lot of time making ties to people in the democratic party.  It's a tangled web.  You'd have to study this stuff full time to understand every esoteric group, like being a staffer in the whips office.  I'm certainly not going to do that.  But complexity does not equal corruption.

[Egan_BW]

The feds are creating a consolidated, government run service to centralize student loan services and information.

But complexity does not equal corruption.

Citation needed?

I mean, in a lot of ways they seem the same.

[TheBiggerFish]

The feds are creating a consolidated, government run service to centralize student loan services and information.

But complexity does not equal corruption.

Citation needed?

I mean, in a lot of ways they seem the same.

Not necessarily citation needed material, but yeah, I'd take that with a shakerful of salt.  Complexity is obfuscation is quite possibly corruption.

[Orange Wizard]

Complexity makes it easier for people to get away with corruption. Hence the entire US electoral system. But corruption is legal there anyway, so maybe that's not the best comparison.

[SalmonGod]

To somebody who is predisposed to look at the issue negatively, complexity will look like it's constructed purposely to obfuscate corruption.

And realistically, I'm sure sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't.  This is why I was hoping mainiac would be able to provide balance to the stuff I've read.  Because the only counter-points readily available are "Hillary and Democrat Party officials insist there's nothing fishy going on."

No I really haven't.  It's a complex world.  You can take a detail of that complexity, replace perspective with the assumption of guilt and have proof of wrongdoing.  There are a lot of details out there.

Hillary Clinton is a well connected politician, few people would deny that.  She has spent a lot of time making ties to people in the democratic party.  It's a tangled web.  You'd have to study this stuff full time to understand every esoteric group, like being a staffer in the whips office.  I'm certainly not going to do that.  But complexity does not equal corruption.

But this, I admit, is unfortunately understandable.  I argue something similar as to why it's so uncommon for people to get involved in more local elections.  It's hard to pick apart the tangled web in a national election, where mass media is broadcasting every possible scrutiny for your easy consumption.  I've always heard that local politics are even more corrupt, there's less information, and I firmly believe that you shouldn't vote for a candidate unless you've researched them, else you're just shooting in the dark.  At least so long as our parties are so fucking huge and umbrella such a broad range of political stances.  If I voted straight D without dedicating my life to research, I fully expect I'd grow angry with a lot of office-holders, only to realize that I helped put them there.

[Reelya]

The system is rigged against political outsiders. An occasional blip that goes the other way isn't evidence that there's no problem

That would be the case if I was pointing out some anecdote from a multitude and what he was indicating was the general.  But Wyoming is not indicative of a broader trend.  In fact it's the opposite:

To date, Sanders has captured 46 percent of Democrats’ pledged delegates but just 42 percent of raw votes.

Ironically, the behavior you accused me of is the exact behavior you yourself are displaying.  You assumed that a specific case of "discrimination" against your preferred group was generally descriptive.  And you leapt to accuse me of it.  Maybe next time dont leap to compare me to racists because it's so fucking clever to do that instead of y'know considering the other side.

That 46/42 argument is idiotic. It's due to slight variations in the total voter turnout between states, and it's like a couple of percentage points off, which of course is going to happen in the normal scheme of things. But the unelected delegates are 469 to 31. Which is a mountain, but your article is expecting us to "balance" that mountain against a molehile.

So rather than proving "just the opposite" you're doing exactly what I eluded to in the analogy to "reverse racism". You bring up a statistical blip that happened to favor Sanders slightly (and not by any design), to excuse a deliberate and intentional skew the other way which is much, much larger. He's won 40+% of caucus delegates and 6% of superdelegates.