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Julian Assange Shaping Up To Be Next Conservative Hero

Mother Jones

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There’s always a certain level of hypocrisy in politics. When you’re in the majority, the filibuster is an obstructive, anti-democratic abomination. When you’re in the minority, it’s an important bulwark against mob rule.

But have we ever seen anything like the recent lovefest among conservatives for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange? “Julian, I apologize,” cooed Sarah Palin. Sean Hannity poses the question of the day: “Who do you believe? Julian Assange or President Obama and Hillary Clinton.” Donald Trump approvingly passed along Assange’s contention that “a 14 year old could have hacked Podesta”1 and then asked, “why was DNC so careless? Also said Russians did not give him the info!”

So far, this sudden outpouring of affection for Assange hasn’t gone beyond the inner circle of Trump sycophants. But it might not be long before it does. If a third of Republicans can decide they think Vladimir Putin is a great guy as long as he’s anti-Clinton, why not Julian Assange too?

1Just for the record: yes, a 14-year-old could have hacked Podesta. But in fact, a 14-year-old didn’t hack Podesta. Here’s the story.

Ben Stevens/i-Images via ZUMA

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Julian Assange Shaping Up To Be Next Conservative Hero

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How Should the Press Handle the Hack of John Podesta’s Email?

Mother Jones

Let’s give some thought to a journalistic quandary: How should news organization handle the leak of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s hacked emails?

Under normal circumstances there would be nothing much to think about. Once they’re out, they’re out. You trawl through them and print anything that seems newsworthy. Neat and simple.

But consider the circumstances here. There’s evidence that the hack was directed by a foreign power trying to influence the US election. The leak itself came from an organization that detests one of the candidates. And they’re playing a transparently too-clever-by-half game of trying to keep this in the news for weeks by parceling out the emails a few thousand at a time.

Leaks often have a partisan motive, but this one is self-evidently hyper-partisan. So should news organizations allow themselves to be used as pawns in this obvious effort to affect the presidential election? If they do, they can hardly pretend to be neutral channels of information. But if they don’t, they risk failing to report genuinely important news.

What to do? I think there’s a fairly straightforward way to handle this: just dial up the threshold for “newsworthiness” a notch or two. You’d still ignore the obvious trifles, and you’d still report anything truly newsworthy or scandalous. But for stuff in the gray middle, you’d lean against publication.

Since this is not an abstract question, but an actual, concrete issue that affects an actual, concrete candidate named Hillary Clinton, it’s all but impossible to discuss this on its merits. But it’s worth trying. After all, does anyone think that this kind of hack is going to get less common as time goes on?1

1Actually, it might. People in high places might (a) start taking more care to never say anything embarrassing in email, and (b) start encrypting their email and other data more routinely. This might start to make hacking less productive, and eventually kill it off.

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How Should the Press Handle the Hack of John Podesta’s Email?

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Hillary Clinton Is Serious About UFOs

Mother Jones

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Once again, Hillary Clinton has pledged that she will discover as much as possible about government involvement in UFO research and share the information with the American people. Clinton was on Jimmy Kimmel’s talk show Thursday night, and Kimmel brought up the fact that he’d asked former President Bill Clinton about his efforts on UFO disclosure during his administration. (Kimmel has also asked President Barack Obama about UFOs.)

“He said that he did do that and he didn’t find anything,” Kimmel said. Hillary Clinton replied, “Well, I’m going to do it again.”

This is the second time during the last few months that Clinton has said she wants to tackle this issue. In late December, Clinton told a New Hampshire reporter that she thought “we may have been visited already,” and that she would “get to the bottom” of the issue if elected president. Three weeks ago, Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, an X-Files fan and longtime Clinton aide, told a Las Vegas television station that he’s pressed Clinton on the issue.

“I’ve talked to Hillary about that, this is a little bit of a cause of mine which is that people really want to know what the government knows, and there are still classified files that could be declassified,” Podesta said at the time.

And while many dismiss UFOs with eye-rolling skepticism, Clinton showed Kimmel that she’s familiar with the more scientific side of the issue, correcting his use of the term “UFO.”

“There’s a new name—it’s ‘unexplained aerial phenomenon,'” she said. “UAP, that’s the latest nomenclature.”

UAP is the term used by the scientific and evidence-based wing of the UFO research community, and is an attempt by those interested in the issue to get away from the derision and mockery that the term “UFO” typically provokes. When Podesta was interviewed in Las Vegas, he said, “I think I’ve convinced her that we need an effort to kind of go look at that and declassify as much as we can so that people have their legitimate questions answered and more attention and more discussion about unexplained aerial phenomena can happen without people who are in public life who are serious about this being ridiculed.”

As Mother Jones has reported, the Clintons’ interest in UFOs and information about US government involvement goes back at least until the mid-1990s. During that time, the late Laurance Rockefeller, who was a UFO enthusiast, approached the White House and pushed for the information to be released. Documents released about Rockefeller’s meetings under a Freedom of Information Act request show that Hillary Clinton was involved in those talks. She met with Rockefeller in August 1995 at his Wyoming ranch and probably discussed the issue, according to the FOIA documents. The effort, known by some as the “Rockefeller Initiative,” has been the subject of several big stories lately, including a recent Mother Jones profile of Stephen Bassett, the nation’s only registered extraterrestrial-issue lobbyist.

Hillary Clinton with Laurance Rockefeller at his Wyoming ranch in 1995 Grant Cameron/Stephen Bassett

Last night, Clinton told Kimmel that anything that can be released should be released. “I would like us to go into those files and hopefully make as much of that public as possible,” she said. “If there’s nothing there, let’s tell people there’s nothing there.”

“What if there is something there?” asked Kimmel.

“Well, if there is something there,” she replied, “unless it’s a threat to national security, I think we ought to share it with the public.”

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Hillary Clinton Is Serious About UFOs

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Here’s What a Hillary Clinton Presidency Would Mean for Global Warming

Clinton sees climate change as a major threat. But she still wants to boost fossil fuel supplies. Hillary Clinton at the 2014 National Clean Energy Summit in Las Vegas John Locher/AP It’s strange to remember how bitterly divisive the 2008 Democratic presidential primary battle was. Hillary Clinton’s and Barack Obama’s platforms and ideological positioning were awfully similar. And on the chief difference between them—Obama’s less hawkish foreign policy—the victor wiped away that distinction by appointing Clinton as secretary of state. Now Clinton has announced her candidacy and is poised to coast through the 2016 Democratic primaries as her party’s prohibitive favorite. Would a Clinton presidency be essentially a third Obama term? On climate change and energy, it seems the answer is yes. For better and for worse, Clinton’s record and stances are cut from the same cloth as Obama’s. Her close confidant and campaign chair, John Podesta, served as an Obama advisor with a focus on climate policy. Like Obama and Podesta, Clinton certainly seems to appreciate the seriousness of the threat of catastrophic climate change and to strongly support domestic policies and international agreements to reduce carbon emissions. But, like Obama and Podesta, she subscribes to an all-of-the-above energy policy. She promotes domestic drilling for oil and natural gas, including through potentially dangerous fracking. (The Clinton campaign did not respond to our request for comment.) Here are eight important points about Clinton’s climate and energy views: 1. She understands the science. In a December speech to the League of Conservation Voters, Clinton said, “The science of climate change is unforgiving, no matter what the deniers may say. Sea levels are rising; ice caps are melting; storms, droughts and wildfires are wreaking havoc…If we act decisively now we can still head off the most catastrophic consequences.” Read the rest at Grist. See the article here: Here’s What a Hillary Clinton Presidency Would Mean for Global Warming

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Here’s What a Hillary Clinton Presidency Would Mean for Global Warming

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