By Lambert Strether of Corrente.
2016
Clinton email
White House throws Clinton under the bus: “[Clinton] appears to have operated in violation of what the White House said Tuesday was ‘very specific guidance’ that members of the Obama administration use government e-mail accounts to carry out official business” [WaPo]. Oooooh, I bet Obama’s been waiting for this moment a long, long time.
Clinton email server ran in her house (!): “The computer server that transmitted and received Hillary Rodham Clinton’s emails — on a private account she used exclusively for official business when she was secretary of state — traced back to an Internet service registered to her family’s home in Chappaqua, New York, according to Internet records reviewed by The Associated Press” [AP].
This is exactly what the Bush administration did with when it conducted official business on the RNC’s gwb43.com account run on servers in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Big scandal then. But what could the problem be?
In theory but not in practice, Clinton’s official emails would be accessible to anyone who requested copies under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act. Under the law, citizens and foreigners can compel the government to turn over copies of federal records for zero or little cost. Since Clinton effectively retained control over emails in her private account even after she resigned in 2013, the government would have to negotiate with Clinton to turn over messages it can’t already retrieve from the inboxes of federal employees she emailed.
If you’re a Democratic tribalist, IOKIYAD. If you want your government to have even a modicum of accountability, this matters. In the gwb43.com scandal, the Republicans destroyed millions of messages. Clinton could do just the same. This just isn’t a hard call. Since when do “Mrs. Clinton’s advisers” get to “review her account and decide which emails to turn over to the State Department” now that she’s a private citizen? This is just wrong. And it’s not a hard call.
Shorter Digby: This “scandal” is the Clinton-hating Village recycling narratives. Anyhow, Michael Tomasky says it could be legal [Digby’s Blog]. Neither of which makes the narrative wrong, or the actions right.
Shorter Media Matters: It’s not illegal. Anyhow, it’s old news [Media Matters].
Shorter anonymous Clintonistas: Everybody who got mail from Clinton knew she wasn’t using her official address [Business Insider].
“[H]ow this situation is handled will go a long way in determining how our government handles its records, and whether our accountability laws apply evenly to everyone” [Sunlight Foundation].
Emily’s List president Stephanie Schriock: Clinton has “shown us how to shake off the setbacks, ignore the haters and keep focused…” [Bloomberg]. This is true; one of the reasons I’m not a Clinton hater is that I admire her resiliency and persistence. But still.
Clown Car
Ben Carson: Homosexuality is a choice because many people “go into prison straight — and when they come out, they’re gay” [CNN].
The Hill
If Petraeus had been a whistleblower, Obama would jail him. Since he only give classified information to his mistress, he gets a wrist slap [New York Times]. Priorities! Petraeus is a “hero.” His country “needs his advice.” Besides, he has “a lucrative second career.”
Stats Watch
ADP Employment Report, February 2015: Continued slowing, “private payrolls rose 212,000 which is 8,000 below consensus” [Bloomberg].
Gallup U.S. Job Creation Index, February 2015: 41% of employees say their employer is hiring workers, 12% saying their employer is letting workers go. Forty-two percent say no change [Bloomberg].
PMI Services Index, February 2015: “Service sector growth picked up noticeably” [Bloomberg].
MBA purchase applications, week of February 27, 2015: “A dip in mortgage rates failed to give much lift to the purchase index which slipped” [Bloomberg].
Herd on the Street
Driverless cars included as “risk factors” in corporate filings by three insurance suppliers [Wall Street Journal].
“The Fall of the Hipster Brand: Inside the Decline of American Apparel and Urban Outfitters” [Racked]. Here is a context in which “millenial” actually makes sense: Consumerism.
“Why Target lost its aim” [The Economist]. Multiple debacles.
Payment expert: “[I]t’s not ‘an anomaly’ to see fraud accounting for about 6% of Apple Pay transactions, compared to about 0.1% of transactions using a plastic card to swipe [Wall Street Journal]. Here is the very geeky blog (!) post behind the WSJ story.
Emmanueldämmerung
“[City] records reveal just days before Emanuel awarded a lucrative red-light camera contract to Xerox State and Municipal Solutions, his former top congressional aide, John Borovicka, became a lobbyist for a government relations firm representing Xerox” [International Business Times]. Shocked, shocked.
“[A]dvisory measures calling for the school board to be elected instead of appointed by the mayor won overwhelming support from Chicagoans on ballots last week” [New York Times]. That’s “the neighborhoods” voting against Rahm’s key policy.
Chuy on the appointed school board: “[You get problems like] Mayor Emanuel appointing people ….with conflicts of interest. People like Dave Vitale who come from the banking industry engaging in exotic financing deals that can jeopardize the assets of the Chicago Public Schools” [Salon].
Gitmo at Homan Square: “The Chicago police department, in its only official statement on the swirling allegations, denied the Guardian’s reporting [here] on Tuesday, without giving specifics. … [T]he Chicago Tribune characterized local attorneys’ perception of the statement as ‘laughable'” [Guardian].
Gitmo at Homan Square: 10 questions the press should be asking Chicago police [Crains Business Review]. Very good. Oddly, the majors haven’t picked this up.
Gitmo at Homan Square: “Emanuel felt he could dodge the story only because major news organizations have been disappointingly slow to report on the topic” [Harvard Crimson].
Death of Blogging Greatly Exaggerated
History of the food blog, Eater, and how it scaled up [Lucky Peach].
“Lumber Liquidators Holdings Inc.’s stock plunge over the past week, fueled by allegations of excessive formaldehyde in its flooring, can be traced back to a blog post from an obscure 25-year-old short seller” [Bloomberg].
“Saudi blogger Raif Badawi, sentenced to 1,000 lashes over accusations he insulted Islam, could now be facing the death penalty” [Channel 4].
Medium’s new product (called, internally, “Bloggy Medium” during development) bets that there’s some juice left in the old [author’s-]voice-driven web [Atlantic]. But is it Tumblr for rich people?
“[O]ur core discomfort with Medium—with most of online publishing—is we can’t quite see how the money works no matter how hard we squint” [A Working Library].
Class Warfare
Larry Summers: “The core problem is that there aren’t enough jobs” [Dean Baker, Al Jazeera]. Seven years after the crash, they admit education as not the solution (and at the Hamilton Project no less). But who knows what they’ll do to solve the problem. Can they “right size” the population quickly enough, for example? Kidding!
“If you have eaten buffalo mozzarella in this country, there is a very good chance you have eaten the product of inmate labor” [Pacific Standard].
News of the Wired
- “The Web’s Grain” [Frank Chimero]. This is the best article I have ever read on web design. A must read if you’re in that field, or have ever been frustrated by a design-heavy site that works you, instead of you working it.
- In the 90s, NSA made sure that the early “SSL protocol itself was deliberately designed to be broken.” 15 years later, implementations of that protocol are still running on servers, which can be cracked in just a few hours [ZD Net]. “Among the millions of sites that were, or still are, vulnerable … are American Express, Whitehouse.gov, FBI.gov, and — oh the irony! — the NSA Website.”
- “Photos for OS X obfuscates the file system even more than iPhoto or Aperture do — once you import photos from your camera, it seems to be impossible to locate the original file in the Finder, even if you have Photos set to store the original, full-size images on your computer” [The Verge]. It’s fun to see Apple crapify OS X.
- “This Chair Folds Down To The Size Of A Beer Can” [Fast Company]. Like a 21st Century shooting stick!
- “Everything that God made is good, even marijuana,” says Texas lawmaker, as he introduces bill to legalize marijunana [Houston Chonicle].
- “Shooting While Shopping” [Pinterest (!)]. Well, a few accidental deaths in shopping malls and parking lots are a small price to pay for liberty.
- “Indian cuisine tended to mix ingredients whose flavors don’t overlap at all” [WaPo].
- “Six UC Santa Cruz students … chained themselves to bins filled with concrete and blocked three lanes of traffic for the better part of Tuesday…. to protest UC tuition hikes, police brutality and racism, according to student organizers” [Santa Cruz Sentinel]. Watch this. Actions of this scope and using such techniques don’t just happen. (Not sure about highway blockage as a tactic, though; we’ll have to see how it plays out. It didn’t damage #BlackLivesMatter AFAIK.)
Readers, feel free to contact me with (a) links, and even better (b) sources I should curate regularly, and (c) to find out how to send me images of plants. Vegetables are fine! Fungi are deemed to be honorary plants! See the previous Water Cooler (with plant) here. And here’s today’s plant, the third of Plants in Snow Week (Morak):
Can’t wait…
Readers! How about sending me some plants under snow and/or ice? Seems appropriate? And if that doesn’t sound like a good idea, how about some humorous vegetables?
If you enjoy Water Cooler, please consider tipping and click the hat. It’s the heating season!
Yes, I’ve got to fix the hat! Thank you all for your generous help in the mini-fundraiser!
Talk amongst yourselves!
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There’s an interesting new financial institution that is getting ready to open its doors in Croatia this year. It’s set up much like a credit union but with an essential difference:
They are also planning on integrating such things as crowdfunding, p2p lending, alt. currencies and barter networks into their institution. It will be interesting to see how it plays out, for sure.
An Ethical Bank for Croatia: A New Model of Banking for the Solidarity Economy ~Grassroots Economic Organizing
Hillary’s decision in setting up her emails to run through her own personal equipment (well, at least someone associated with her who is tech savvy set it up) makes perfect sense if you look at it in the light of the Snowden revelations.
We know that all the major “cloud” email providers like Google and Microsoft are in bed with the NSA.
Given the sensitive nature of her communications while working at State, would you have wanted her exposing herself to the NSA’s snooping and intercepting?
If anything this makes me grudgingly respect her. This is coming from a libertarian who is no fan of the Clintons.
Why aren’t we ALL doing that?
You can, but there’s a bit of a time/equipment investment involved, as seen here:
Run Your Own E-Mail Server, Part 1
Run Your Own E-Mail Server, Part 2
Run Your Own E-Mail Server, Part 3
Run Your Own E-Mail Server, Part 4
Yes, that is four separate, yet equally important, parts.
Email servers are one of the first things hackers probe for when attempting to enter a computer system. And they are notoriously tough to configure securely and to keep patched for security holes. Something tells me Hellery’s tech savvy uncle was prolly not up to the task. Nice treasure trove for the hacker community if they wormed into it. Oh heck, the worst that could happen is hackers might get alerted to troop movements — so what’s the biggie. ;-)
His real name is Hothem:
A wise move on Mr. Hothem’s part. Loose lips sink ships.
Hahaha. So this Eric Hothem registered the clintonemail.com domain name under a fake name. The plot thickens.
Recall that Bill Clinton pardoned his half-brother Roger Clinton. A congressional investigation into Clinton’s clemency decisions found that as Roger Clinton refused to testify to the committee in March 2001, he received a $15,000 wire transfer from a Citibank account in the care of Hothem.
Like a mafia family tree.
Opps forgot to cite a link to that info.
http://twitchy.com/2015/03/04/is-eric-hoteham-really-former-hillary-clinton-aide-eric-hothem/
Ugh, twitchy.
A wise move on Mr. Hothem’s part. Loose lips sink ships.
Anything worth saying is worth waiting for a subpoena and having your attorney(ies) present,
In other words, it is because a short course in postal logistics, inspection and metal stamping still takes a lot more time and effort than posting a mailbox on the street or porch. Fair enough. Having done this work no few times, most of the difficulty in configuring an email service arises not due to outside factors, but due to the lack of a simple, standard interface for transport agents to ask delivery agents whether they will accept email to thus-and-such address for delivery. We instead have a proliferation of MTAs and MDAs that need to know way too much about one another’s secrets in order to perform their mission, and are thus complex so as to accommodate.
Consider instead the “Mail in a Box” (github), a semi-finalist in the Knight Foundation’s 2014 News Challenge, which seems to me to hit the sweet spot: low-frills webmail and workgroup services, a one-size-fits-most configuration, low-touch setup, chooses its battles. The same shipped as an SD card or Docker image for Pi computers would solve much of the problem from the technical end — it’s just a matter of getting the default state of inbound port 25 on residential-class Internet pipes to unblocked and letting the world know how to find you.
A rogue NSA needs to brought within the law. But an out-of-control NSA is no excuse for public property (official correspondence) to be held offsite in a private server. The mission is to confront the problem head on, not resort to personal, unauthorized workarounds.
Meanwhile, as I suggested yesterday:
Sounds good, until you read the fine print. The subpoena covers only emails related to Benghazi. No committee has issued a subpoena for the entire contents of the server, so that someone other than Hillary can decide what is official correspondence and what isn’t.
Despite the WWF-style partisan rhetoric, this limited subpoena represents ‘professional courtesy.’ There is only one Depublicrat party.
A somewhat related question.
If each of us has a file at the NSA, why can we all have individual holy accounts at the omnipotent Fed, so we too can borrow directly from the creator (of money), at ‘the preferred believer-rate of nearly, ghostly zero?’
If I can get that rate, I will convert and become a believer…sorry, no unconditional love (for the deity)…must have, uh, rewards, spiritual – heavenly maidens – or material – money.
As we speak Ecuador is rolling out a mobile phone payment scheme where every user has an account directly with the central bank. Acceptance will be mandatory, required by law.
First things first. We will need to implant a geo-location tracking device in your PrimeBeef gluteus maximus. :-)
That’s the price you pay when they merge the Fed with the NSA.
We are all Ecuadorians now, in a ‘safer’ way, of course, thanks to the monitoring implant.
I’m trying to imagine a spy novel where an official from the Sicherheitsdienst or the NKVD is saying something like:
“Oh, it’s been going on forever. Months and months. Some fool in the suburbs is sending morse code at midnight. Nothing to worry about. We listened to some — it was total gibberish! Didn’t mean a thing!”
Well respect her if you respect hypocritical sociopaths I guess, respected like a fox, as meanwhile Shillary was collecting credit card numbers and biometric data from foreign heads of states (the Manning leaks).
I seriously doubt that Hillary’s personal email account is on her own private equipment. More likely is that she has a personal website (with email capability) that is maintained by someone (internet company) else. It can be done by anyone paying for website hosting. The email (trail across the internet) routing may indicate that her account is “registered” to her Chappaqua address, but my guess is that the server is elsewhere. (I have this arrangement for my business website.)
You’re right; that’s what “everybody is saying” and I could have over-stated; I’ll return to this later in the day. (I’m not familiar with the regulations on server registration/location. My impression — and it would be great if somebody who knows what they’re talking about can confirm or correct — is that the actual physical location where the “tube” from the server connects to the Intertubes must be given. E.g., if the server is at your lawyer’s, your lawyer’s address.)
The key point, though, is that public records are on a private server under private control.
re: Rahm
This piece was written by a former Rahm employee, Ben Labolt, who now is a co-partner w/ David Gibbs in the Third Way/Neolib lobbying outfit—the aptly named The Incite Group. The Incite Group specializes in demonizing Teachers Unions.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/03/04/the-progressive-case-for-rahm-s-re-elect.html
I remember when all the educational problems in the world were solved by putting an apple on the teacher’s desk.
Emily’s List et al isn’t concerned about the Clinton email scandal? That’s moderately sickening, but expected. At least who have very clear litmus test here to determine who on the Democrat side is a venal hypocrite though. Honestly I have just been assuming all Democrats were venal, mendacious hypocrites, but any who care to castigate Clinton will have redeemed themselves a bit.
Edward G. Rendell, a former Pennsylvania governor and chairman of the Democratic National Committee during the 2000 election, said Mrs. Clinton needed a more robust political organization to defend her. “I assume when there’s a campaign, there will be a better effort,” he said. “I assume this will get rectified.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/05/us/politics/hillary-clinton-emails-catches-democrats-off-guards.html
Translation: the beatings will continue until the polls improve. UFB.
Clown Car
Ben Carson: Homosexuality is a choice because many people “go into prison straight — and when they come out, they’re gay” [CNN].
=============================
I do appreciate how politicians are such a great source of really, really cheap humor – and you can’t get arrested for enjoying it like you can if you download a book or movie by torrent.
But this one is getting too close to that linguistic virus in Snow Crash that freezes up a computer programmer’s brain.
Snow Crash? craazyboy? Gay clown cars? Synthesis? (Comingle.io) (MNSFW)
shit. dilduino? I’ll pass. But I gotta neat idea. Turn it into an Internet Of Things device. Might work as a electronic counter measures device and jam NSA spying. Dunno what’ll happen to your Google profile, tho.
It sounds to me like Ben Carson has been watching too many of those movies of rather dubious origin and, erm, somewhat clichéd plotting “Buck is sent to solitary confinement for misbehaving in the shower and is given hard time by the warden…”
Or maybe do the prisons in the U.S. show too many Judy Garland films on movie night ? Talk about cruel and unusual punishment.
Lambert, yet Chimero’s article is working the same godawful “design-heavy”, “content-light” 20-words-per-column-inch “mobile-first” awfulness as everyone else, yet filling up 200% of my window height with a six-word bro-ism is not “working me” somehow.
There’s a plugin idea: reformat these crapified “mobile first” designs into pure, natural text. Hmmmmm.
Now that’s a killer app.
Let’s call it Demobilize.
Actually, Firefox on Android has that feature built in. I use it all the time. Don’t know what it’s called; there’s just a little icon in the search bar that looks like a book. Click on it and it renders the page as a readable, well-formatted text. Works great,e.g. on Salon, with their horrible layout.
Just tried it… nice! Sadly, it’s not landing on desktop for a few more versions, at least.
Given that this single Chimero page, requiring plenty of useless scrolling, heavy plugins and probably some atrocious CSS and Javascript, sent my laptop into a furious CPU-heating processing loop, I doubt it would ever work properly on a mobile browser.
Shoemakers’ children are the worst shod.
Yes, on the shoemaker’s children, but I did look at the source code. The color gradients are done, properly, with CSS; nothing fancy there at all. Not sure what you mean by “plug-ins”; plug-ins are for the browser, not a site. If you mean the videos, there’s no way to demonstrate pages changing without it, so it’s editorially necessary. Not sure what you mean by useless scrolling; most long-form articles require you to scroll as you read them.
Then we might have a different experience because of different browsers — which then is not a good point for the portability of Chimero’s design.
Anyway:
I have to scroll two full screens on my laptop to get through each of the intermediate titles (such as “HOW TO SEE A MOMENT”. Sorry, a title should take ONE line.
I suspect something troublesome might be hiding in those jquery libraries specified at the beginning of the page — as soon as Javascript is activated, my Firefox 31 goes crazy. And there is an unmatched tag left behind in the HTML markup.
Yes, like I said, the post is reproducing slides from a talk. I know those libraries; I used them. Sorry for your difficulties.
No issue at all, what Chimero does is not your fault.
Actually, this is something I like with NC: it works perfectly without Javascript (which I have kept disabled by default in various ways ever since the late 1990s). One only really needs Javascript for commenting.
Curiously, in the past couple of years, I have increasingly started disabling CSS as well — main text in difficult-to-read low-contrast grey? obnoxious headers or footers that just muck up scrolling with page-up/down? deficient formatting that prevents text from reflowing nicely when I increase the font size and requires me to scroll left and right?
Crapification galore — and that is without talking about those supremely irritating pop-ups (“you might also be interested by this article:…”) that obscure the main text, or those buggy bespoke selection lists (why, oh why can’t they just use the built-in HTML element?) that are squashed by disabling Javascript.
So, please keep NC plain and unadorned as it is now. It works well, do not break it.
“This site is an interpretation of my talk from Webstock, 2015” so I assume it brings over the slides from that source. Not sure where “bro-ism” is coming from, and if you think that’s heavy OR “mobile first,” have you seen Bloomberg? Anyhow, it’s a big Internet. Nobody said you had to read it all.
The “lever” that adjusts the unemployment rate is deficit spending, especially if it is through direct employment by the government. (Direct employment avoids the siphoning off caused by bidding, oversight, and profit-taking.)
If we cut taxes enough, increasing the deficit spending, we will eventually reach full employment in China.
They will not have full employment in China, unless we continue to import their laminated flooring.
Key to longevity? Exercise and low caloric intake. Translated to economics: Manufacturing and low consumption.
Key to beauty: Sleep when tired, along with eating right of course. Translation: When the economy slows down, let it slow down (but the economy is not the workers as we can see in that last few years – GDP growth and more inequality).
So, if there is a recession, there is a recession.
With People’s Monetary Policy, we can survive recession without quack medicine like QE or ZIRP.
But QE or ZIRP are the key elements to maintaining Obesity Expectations.
That’s a very astute observation.
‘Let them eat fat!’
Bingo. The main impediment to full employment, all else equal. The trade deficit removes ~$500B worth of spending from the domestic economy annually. That could employ a few of us.
Actually the only way to full employment that is actuallly full is a Jobs Guarantee. Or a massive informal sector that’s counted in the stats.
“Government doesn’t create jobs”
President Barack Obama
Straight from Jerry Mahoney’s mouth.
No one really creates jobs.
“I accept this award of one-job creation humbly. But really, I couldn’t have done it without my family, my friends and my team.”
I donno, the links this week seem to indicate that society is an increasingly rapid downward spiral to the pit of eternal stupidity. I fear what next week might reveal.
It might just be my cold medicaid tho.
Indeed, the spiral into who knows what the hell the future will bring just keeps whirlin round and round. Not sure as to whether I’d classify it as stupidity or insanity. Either way, a whole lot of ugly is sittin around the corner.
It feels to me like 2008 redux.
Maybe Clinton can pull Obama under the bus after her. Or at least drag one of his feet under the bus’s wheels. With all her ( and Slicky Bill’s) contacts in the world of Big Money, maybe she can convince some of them to give Obama just a little less money than they were going to give him otherwise. Maybe the Clintons can quietly tell Rahm just how much damage they can do to his future earnings and social circling if he doesn’t force the Obama library to re-locate. Perhaps the Clintons can at least get Obama blackballed from all the best parties and see to it that Sasha and Malia don’t get to marry a Wall Street bond shark the way Chelsea did.
Dhere are vays for the Clintons to get even, if they really want to.
Or maybe the Clintons could cause it to be made known to Rahm Emmanuel that unless the Obama library’s present location is cancelled, the Clintons will campaign hard and effectively for his opponent in the mayoral election. There are always things a Clinton can do . . .
Obamacare kaching!
The market has spoken. The decision is just an afterthought.
I was just thinking – if the hospitals kill all of us, can they still make money?
Is that why they have a plan B – keep bringing new babies to replace the outgoing geezers?
The H1-B visa solves all their problems.
Only non-believers in alternative medicine.
‘I only use acupuncture.’
‘You are not allowed to enter.’
‘I am a strict voodoo magic medicine man.’
‘You too, can go home.’
‘Only ayurvedic here. And yoga and navel gazing.’
‘We never want to see your face again.’
The “markets” must be expecting Roberts to save and preserve subsidies in ALL states.
“Everybody who got mail from Clinton knew she wasn’t using her official address” And shame on each and every one of them in the US Government who didn’t raise the issue.
The trouble with this is simple. The world in general, and the USA in particular already have a “rule of law” problem with elites who think they’re above the law and the rules don’t apply to them. Do we really need another one of them as our next President? How could we expect a lick of empathy or understanding from her for those of us not powerful enough to be entitled to those kinds of privileges?
Just because one is smart does not mean he/she is not wise.
She is very smart.
And she is also very wise, at least insofar as regards her personal interests. And I don’t think anyone would argue with the label “aristocrat”.
What she is not is a public-minded person.
don’t mistake persistence and low threshold for personal dignity as wise. I am not impressed when I hear her speak. Nothing very illuminating IMHO.
Ironically she apparently has no real personal interests, unless being a professional political dilettante constitutes one?
What ZD Net fails to realize is that it is not ironic for the NSA and the other .gov sites to have the Freak vulnerability; it is strategic. It doesn’t put those sites at any real risk since they are public data anyway and it encourages other sites to do the same.
I’m just glad the we have a security vulnerability with a cool name that comes with its own theme song. ‘Le Freak’ by Chic.
Freak out.
Blah blah ApplePay blah blah. Mobile money is just an app, not an overcomplicated dino-scheme that requires some specific merchant point of sale dino-hardware and some marketing company’s specific phone version. Alipay did $642 million in 24 hours over New Year’s, use any device (AAPL or GOOG or Xiaomei or whatever), just get the app, link to any bank. The U.S. is still in the dark ages.
Petraeus is clearly getting a huge pass. It would appear his “mistress”/biographer who apparently had use of information as source for publication and promotion of the book via the media, who, unlike Assange can be labled as traitor, is free to a not fugitive life. Or is there some secret grand jury in Northern Virginia pursuing this criminal event? Pointing out inconsistencies and hypocrisy would seem trite, if only those who (with social consciences) are victimized by the unfair prosecutions weren’t so seriously pursued and punished.
The takeaway is that the rule of law is a sham and the rule of men is fully online.
odd, she hasn’t been set up and framed yet.
My first thought on the Hillary email mess was “here we go again” – like a little trip back to the ’90s.
You think it’s still the vast right wing conspiracy pouring over her cattle futures?
The thing is, there really was a VRWC, funded mostly by Richard Mellon Scaife, the Koch Brothers of the day. But (Hillary) Clinton backed off it, instead of confronting it.
A story, told in links:
http://www.ibtimes.com/us-backed-syrian-rebel-group-dissolves-after-losing-hundreds-men-battle-1832900
https://twitter.com/SajadJiyad/status/572486797168648193
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/03/01/main-u-s-backed-syrian-rebel-group-disbanding-joining-islamists.html
http://jordantimes.com/training-of-syrian-rebels-in-turkey-in-4-6-weeks—-us
Gee, who could have POSSIBLY seen this coming?
Well I don’t care too
Much for money
Money can’t buy Jihad …
(well… maybe if you’re Saudi Arabia…)
http://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/english/news/20150304_34.html
US federal agents raid ‘birth tour’ facilities
World
Mar. 4, 2015 – Updated 10:09 UTC
US federal agents have raided dozens of sites in California where pregnant women mainly from China are staying to give birth on US soil so their babies will obtain US citizenship.
Immigration officials and police on Tuesday searched about 40 locations, including homes where women taking part in such maternity tours were staying
The officials say tour operators who arranged travel, lodging and obstetric care are suspected of falsely reporting why the women were visiting the US.
The officials say maternity tours are increasingly popular among wealthy Chinese. By US law, babies born in the United States are granted citizenship regardless of their parents’ nationalities.
Officials say the women are believed to have paid 15,000 to 50,000 dollars each for a short stay in California to give birth.
Local media say such a large-scale raid is the first of its kind. Immigration officials plan to investigate the legality of the tours.
Birth tours are being organized to the West Coast of the US, Saipan and elsewhere. Many operators are apparently involved, and the tours are coming under increasing criticism.
In some cases, a large number of Chinese women stay in ordinary homes, leading to trouble with neighbors. Critics also say the program is tantamount to buying citizenship even if no laws are infringed.
One operator under investigation said it has arranged tours to the US for 4,000 pregnant women from China since 1999.
CNN television said figures provided by Chinese state-run media show the number of women on such birth tours from China more than doubled from 4,200 in 2008 to 10,000 in 2012.
CNN said the parents apparently hope US citizenship will help their children receive a better education and improve their opportunities.
It also said parents may hope their children’s US citizenship will be their ticket out of China. When the children turn 21, they can get green cards for their parents.
Perhaps we should feel grateful and relieved. If they want their children to have an option to live here, perhaps they want to leave this country in better shape than they plan to leave Tibet.
The Chinese never plan on leaving Tibet. They were the regional hegemon once, and they want to be it again. These wealthy Chinese have read their history and are preparing for a possible return of the Years of Chaos.
By “leave Tibet” I mean “leave Tibet such an eco-shatttered bombed-out moonscape that the Tibetans will never rise again because they will have no ecological basis from which to rise from”.
I meant “leave Tibet” in ruins.
So Urban Outfitters is loosing speed and altitude, eh? People may start watching their outlets for Liquidation Sales.