Readers, you get an extra ration of links because I’m not doing an original post, this being a low-traffic day.
What animals can swim up your toilet? BBC. News you can use!
Why male fruit flies have such enormous sperm Los Angeles Times
Errant banks perfect the waiting game FT. Libor.
Prosecutors: 1MDB Money Laundering Probe Largest Ever in Singapore WSJ
Malaysia letters deepen mystery over fate of 1MDB cash FT
How four words rewrote Bayer-Monsanto deal script Reuters
Why Is a Hospital Machine Tied to Superbugs Still in Use? Bloomberg
Facebook Wants to Help Sell Every Ad on the Web WSJ. Even if you don’t use Facebook. (See also Facebook Settles FTC Charges That It Deceived Consumers By Failing To Keep Privacy Promises FTC, November 29, 2011.)
Organic Farmers Are Not Anti-Science but Genetic Engineers Often Are In These Times
Venezuela government, opposition meet with mediators in Dominican Republic Reuters
Syraqistan
Ankara slams US troops wearing YPG insignia, says loses confidence in ally Daily Sabah
‘Disaster in the Making’: The Many Failures of the EU-Turkey Refugee Deal Der Spiegel
Britain is at war in Libya and nobody thought to tell us Independent
U.S. Blocks Bomb Shipments to Saudi Arabia Daily Beast
More Messy Meddling In Libya Moon of Alabama
Tony Blair: Corbyn government would be a dangerous experiment Guardian
Margaret Thatcher’s legacy: Spilt milk, New Labour, and the Big Bang – she changed everything Independent
French government scrambles to stem fuel shortages as protests continue France24
In Hiroshima Obama Calls for World Without Nukes, Contradicting New $1 Trillion Weapon Upgrade Plan Democracy Now!
A former senior U.S. general again calls for abolishing the nuclear forces he once commanded Center for Public Integrity
The Anti-Imperial Emperor The Baffler
2016
For my friends who think it’s important (now) to elect HRC and take back the Senate – a short history lesson Op-Ed News (MR).
How Hillary loses Politico
A Dialogue With a 22-Year-Old Donald Trump Supporter The Atlantic
Donald Trump: “There is No Drought” and Other California Water Inanities HuffPo
How swing voters could swing – to Trump McClatchy (Re Silc).
Never mind Trump, GOP uniting under banner: ‘Never Hillary’ AP (Pat S).
Police Declared Protests Outside Donald Trump’s San Diego Rally An Unlawful Assembly, But What Does That Mean? Bustle. Couple of odd things about the Trump protests in San Diego and Albuquerque (and let me caveat that Google News is getting worse and worse, so I may be missing something). First, I’m not seeing any outraged condemnations of “the violence” by the Democrat Establishment. Second, I’m not seeing any reporting about who the protesters actually are, especially the water bottle-throwers. As we know from Occupy, there can be multiple and conflicting players who seek violence. Oh, and the numbers aren’t very large. A thousand or so.
Sanders mocks ‘tough guy’ Trump for changing mind on debate The Hill
The Nickname Campaign Eschaton. Nobody could have predicted the DNC’s “Dangerous Donald” would flop. Crime makes you stupid, I guess.
Bernie Sanders’s ‘Scorched Earth’ Strategy Seems to Be Working New York Magazine. Politics ain’t beanbag.
It’s time to look in the mirror, Bernie: Now, more than ever, Sanders needs to be criticized for his failed political theories Amanda Marcotte, Salon. I’ll just leave this here.
Red and Blue Agony Elizabeth Drew, NYRB. And this.
Bernie Sanders’ call for ouster of two convention co-chairs rejected USA Today
Sanders Supporters’ Emergency Injunction Before California Primary: 5 Fast Facts Heavy
Why Bernie Sanders keeps popping up in California’s out-of-the-way places Los Angeles Times
HIV/AIDS activists upset with Sanders after meeting Washington Blade
Be Like Bernie: Sanders Looks To Spread His Political Wealth NPR
Sanders Endorsement Nets Pearson $60K for State Senate Bid Seven Days
If you thought one Bernie Sanders was good, how about 100 of him? Anoa Changa, Guardian
Prosecutions rare under law cited in McAuliffe probe Charlottesvile Daily Progress
Clinton Email Hairball
Mika: It Feels Like Hillary Clinton Is Lying Straight Out | Morning Joe | MSNBC YouTube. Watch it all, especially Brzezinski’s sigh and “I know” at 2:22. These are chattering class members who aren’t Republican partisans and are outside the Clinton bubble. When you’ve lost Andrea Mitchell…
Time to care about damn emails: Hillary Clinton has a serious legal problem Salon. (Again, if you haven’t read this from Informed Vote, grab a cup of coffee and settle into an armchair.)
Clinton email headache is about to get worse The Hill (MR).
Feds fight to prevent Clinton deposition in email case The Hill (Li). Perhaps we have lawyerly readers who can comment on the DOJ strategery?
Big Brother Is Watching You Watch
Evaluating the privacy properties of telephone metadata PNAS
Class Warfare
Verizon workers declare end to 44-day strike, claim “big gains” Ars Technica
Mind the Gap: The Divide Between Gap’s Promises and Actual Labor Conditions The Fashion Law
Flint and America’s Corroded Trust Mother Jones (Re Silc). Ditto Ferguson.
America’s opioid addiction: ‘I ended up selling all my valuable stuff to buy pills’ Chris Arnade, Guardian
How America Lost Its Mojo The Atlantic. Housing costs.
Marxism, Intersectionality, and Therapy The Hampton Institute
You Say You Want a Revolution The American Prospect (Re Silc). Blah blah blah Obama Coalition blah blah blah.
Impoverished children with access to food stamps become healthier and wealthier adults Microecomic Insights
Here’s one really obvious way to boost the US economy Quartz
U.S. Cellphone Study Fans Cancer Worries WSJ. I guess all the kidz with their ears glued to their phones will be excellent fodder for a generation’s-worth of longitudinal studies…
Antidote du jour:
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
203 comments
Comments are closed.
The Salon article states that all of Hill’s defenses are shattered in her e mail debacle. So what kind of time frame are we looking at— can anybody venture a guess? Yes, I know they have to dot the i’s and cross the t’s, but come on. What happens next? First Hill has to answer some questions. Soon, right? Then the FBI sends its recommendation to DOJ. Then, what? Loretta Lynch just lets it sit there, being too busy to even look at it?
Once she’s a sitting President, I thought that the only way to get rid of her was to impeach her and try her in the Senate, a fully political process.
I may be wrong, but aren’t the age limit and the birthplace considerations the only legal constraints on running and serving as President? Who says that the DoJ can’t declare the White House a prison and let HC reign from there?
As for the delaying tactics, well, it helps if the DoJs’ ‘master’ is also a Democrat.
Yes, I think the prevailing legal theory is that a sitting president is immune to criminal process.
Imho, I also believe that impeachment is reserved for crimes committed while in the particular office, i.e., the email crimes occurred while Clinton was secretary of state. What’s the penalty for a conviction on an impeachment charge? Removal from office. She’s already removed as secretary of state.
Impeachment is reserved for “high crimes and misdemeanors” which means unpopular enough to be impeached or impeachment is a popular decision. I suppose Obama could have a stroke and refuse to step down. Impeachment and removal might fly in that case. Every July 4th, Americans celebrate the symbolic trial and execution of George III for largely failing to restrain Parliament under the guidelines of the colonial charters which made no mention of Parliament’s role in the colonies. They even tore down the statue of George III, the one outside Independence Hall, and melted it in a symbolic exercise. By the letter of the law, George III didn’t do anything the Declaration accuses him of, but he was unpopular enough to do it.
Parliament received its powers from the King, and all bills were issued under the royal writ, the sovereign suit. Parliament needed no mention.
You might want to review Parliament’s options or choices for the American Colonies because of the costs to the Crown of the French and Indian wars.
Parliament was passing colonial defence costs back to the people who benefited and followong William the Conqueror precident of the foundation of fee simple property ownership, and duties of land owners to the Crown.
In the view of parliament, the American Colonists were grifters trying to get free military support for their expansion westward over the Appalachian mountains.
I would note that is a part of America’s history, and appears to establish the foundation for a pattern.
Looks like the Administration is trying to rehabilitate her record. They will need something that they can point to:
http://www.thehill.com/regulations/court-battles/281523-aggressive-lynch-makes-mark-at-department-of-justce
In preparation for what, though?
Your link leads to a page not found message now.
It didn’t work for me either, but when I copied and pasted the article I found it came up as the same link above. but it seems to now work for me anyway. Weird.
Just to try:
http://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/281523-aggressive-lynch-makes-mark-at-department-of-justice
That piece reads like a press release. DoJ is a beat that needs a lot of sweetening.
Meh. I may be in the minority but I consider Lynch the anti Eric Holder. From where I am sitting Holder did as little as he possibly could while serving and he seemed more suited to defending rather than prosecuting. Lynch is more of a prosecutor and definitely seems more apt to fight(although I’m not happy she did a stint as board member of the Fed of NY.)
NC regular poster William Black, back when Lynch was confirmed:
What Paul Krugman would call incremental progressivism.
She didn’t fail to prosecute HSBC or for that matter Citigroup,
from wiki-Lynch investigated Citigroup over mortgage securities sold by the bank, resulting in a US$7 billion settlement; and was involved in the US$1.2 billion settlement with HSBC over violations of the Bank Secrecy Act.[2][15][16]
Now we can certainly argue that their punishment was not enough but I haven’t seen ANY prosecutor go after jailing the bastards for breaking the economy.
Apparently the Citibank and HSBC bank buildings committed those crimes.
I’m going to drive over to the 7-11 and rob it, if they catch me I will just say my car did it.
A settlement is not a prosecution. A settlement is a get-out-of-jail-free card attached to a cost-of-doing-bussiness fine which is set high enough to impress those of us who think in thousands, but low enough that the target can make it all back in a year or two.
So if Lynch “got” a “settlement”, doesn’t that mean she refused to prosecute but rather offered the target a chance to make a payment to make the case go away?
Give me the name of ANY lawyer that has prosecuted using your criteria?
according to black, hsbc failed to live up to the settlement agreement and committed “thousands of felonious transactions after the sweetheart deal…”. yet, no prosecutions for that.
Sorry about the link, I am having real problems with them on this new computer.
Seems to me that she is a continuation of the Holder Justice Department; she has yet to go after any of the usual suspects. This rehabilitation of her record looks like something to weight the scales when she finds a reason for not prosecuting Clinton, or rationalizing her pardon. The e-mail thing could blow up any day with links to her foundation; precisely the type of case she would pass on.
Reply to cwaltz @ May 30, 2016 at 12:49 am
(thread got too long and there was no reply link)
There have been plenty of criminal prosecutions for certain kinds of activities in the financial and mortgage areas, without any possibility of the accused being allowed to settle. It’s just that the accused have all been either low level munchkins or people who committed their crimes against banks, rather than for banks. Here’s a typical `mortgage fraud’ case:
Real Estate Broker and a Loan Officer Sentenced to Federal Prison on Mortgage Fraud Convictions [FBI]
Meanwhile, the criminals who committed foreclosure fraud and stole houses from millions of people, or rigged rates that affected trillions of dollars of transactions are allowed to settle and walk free. The record shows that they immediately return to their criminality.
All aided and abetted by the last two AGs.
Of course, the cossacks work for the czar.
Perhaps the Fed also looking into the Clinton Foundation.
“In a 9-page letter dated yesterday and posted to his blog, Ortel calls the Clintons’ charity the “largest unprosecuted charity fraud ever attempted,” adding for good measure that the Clinton Foundation is part of an “international charity fraud network whose entire cumulative scale (counting inflows and outflows) approaches and may even exceed $100 billion, measured from 1997 forward.” Ortel lists 40 potential areas of fraud or wrongdoing that he plans to expose over the coming days.”
More………….http://wallstreetonparade.com/2016/05/a-harvard-mba-guy-is-out-to-bring-down-the-clintons/
Bravo Charles Ortel!
If his campaign against the Clinton Foundation succeeds, we’ll coin a new adjective to describe whistle-blowers: ortellian. :-)
Except he is not an insider blowing the whistle. He is an outsider making an analysis.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/hillary-clinton-to-be-indicted-on-federal-racketeering_us_574af94be4b0009f3d848d20
Related.
The Huffpost article linked to has been scrubbed from the site, but not before it was first captured by a web archive service in Iceland:
https://archive.is/bERJ6
It’s a contributor authored piece but man, the media fix is really in on this one, it appears no news that actually harms Clinton will be tolerated. They no longer even pretend to be journalists rather than propagandists. They don’t seem to care if we know, almost seem proud of it.
Not all pro-Sanders/anti-Clinton stories are good.
heh. that post has its own logical inconsistencies
“heh. that post has its own logical inconsistencies”
definitely. i’m finding it harder this week to evaluate the “real” source and real intent of the pieces i’m seeing. i guess this problem will worsen as the election season proceeds. is everyone now jumping into the 11th dimensional chess realm of power gaming? it’s pretty destructive of the shreds of democracy that citizens can still lay claim to (if any–we’ll soon find out).
this kind of trickery mainly seems to be coming from the hrc camp. sanders supporters as a group seem quite committed to the ethic of reliable reporting, even by citizen journalists. they are utterly fed up with the mainstream media, and they grok well how the internet can be used to spread misinformation–possibly better than the hrc people. their admiration of sanders’s manner of truth-telling is playing a big part in his revolution. they seek to emulate him. however, not all of them are very sophisticated readers/writers.
I have my doubts that this email imbroglio will actually result in any indictments. I don’t think they would throw anyone in jail for non-compliance with the records keep act. As for mishandling of classified information – I think that there would be institutional resistance to that. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was fairly common for senior government officials to act in ways very similar to Clinton. Charging her with a crime would open up a can of worms that could bring down a lot of people. If there’s going to be any legal issues, I think that they will stem from the Clinton Foundation (which is why I find the McAuliffe news to be interesting).
That being said, there’s a way for the Republicans to use this email thing to their advantage. If someone much lower on the food chain had done this, the result would’ve been a loss of his/her job and security clearance (rules are for the little people). The ads would practically write themselves.
Her two counts of non-compliance with the Record Keeping Act are the smallest sharks in her pool. They are civil charges at this point anyway, only truly significant as the basis for proving she intentionally defrauded and violated her legally binding agreement that she understood and would follow precisely all protocols for recognizing and handling of government Secret, Top Secret, and SAP documents.
She and her entire staff were “grossly negligent” in handling sensitive communications and information, including freely sharing them with people on her staff and around the world who had no kind of security clearance whatsoever.
She and her entire staff were “grossly negligent” in setting up an unsecured home email server in the first place, “grossly negligent” in not even knowing how to secure it from even casual hacking, and “grossly negligent” in not handing over to State everything on that server the day she left office. She never intended that server to come to light, and spent months along with Cheryl Mills deleting half the emails on it a couple of years later, before handing over printed copies of half of its contents. That was destruction of government records right there, and obstruction of justice.
For four years, whenever she wanted to email somebody from her State Department office, she got up and went out into the hallway to use her off-the-shelf Blackberry, since no electronic device like that is allowed in State Department offices — heavily secured against hacking, and known as Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities. Every one of the many thousands of times she did this is proof that she knew she was violating her legally binding pledge to not do this, ever.
But her most serious legal problems will arise from the selling of her office in the form of consistently showing favorable decisions to businesses, individuals, and sovereign states shortly after they gave outsized, gigantic donations to the phony Clinton Foundation. Pay Bill Clinton a half million each for a few half hour speeches, and your request to buy arms for your country soon gets approved by State.
She’s a monumental crook with no intention of serving any citizen not closely connected to her and Bill and Chelsea. The Presidency itself will just be a larger realm for self-enrichment than she enjoyed at State. She’s no public servant.
But whether through criminal prosecution, or these facts leaking out to the press from anonymous DC sources, she will never be President. That’s already behind her.
Yeah, yeah she has hundreds of superdelegates bought and paid for. Doesn’t matter. Doesn’t even matter if she “officially” becomes the nominee. There are about 150 FBI agents who are actively voting to put her behind chain link fencing at a Federal country club prison, shut down her fraudulent charity, seize all her laundered money both here and offshore, and put most of her aides in prison as well. Those votes count, and the men and women behind them are determined to see that they do.
Now, if Hillary has the pull to get Lynch to not prosecute, the FBI agents working the case have let it be known that they have already made arrangements for the case notes to be leaked anonymously to the media. Further, it is likely that FBI Director Comey will resign in disgust, as will many top investigators. The FBI will have a very big explosion, too big to ignore.
Now, if Hillary has the pull to get a pardon from President Obama, it will have to come in advance of any prosecution, which will still blow up the top echelon of the FBI, and still see her entire case leaked to the media.
There is no way to unshit the bed for Hillary. From the very beginning, she never, ever in her wildest dreams thought any of this would come to light. She really didn’t, and now neither she nor her lawyers can prevent it from coming to light, either in a courtroom or in the press before the November election.
Is it possible the guys in power indict those in the FBI who decide to leak ‘classified documents’ to the media, before they leak them, and HIllary gets her pardon from the president?
It will all be done beyond the scene, so we are not privy to know it.
Does the top echelon of the FBI set a good example of properly handling documents?
Does the commander in chief make sure it doesn’t happen again during his few remaining months in office?
Her two counts of non-compliance with the Record Keeping Act are the smallest sharks in her pool. They are civil charges at this point anyway, only truly significant as the basis for proving she intentionally defrauded and violated her legally binding agreement that she understood and would follow precisely all protocols for recognizing and handling of government Secret, Top Secret, and SAP documents.
She either comes clean in a deposition and is damned or lies in a deposition and is prosecuted for perjury… Then The Clinton Money Laundering Foundation. An evil tree that will bear much fruit. Where are they on the misstated tax situation?
The Clinton Foundation responded to Charles Ortel’s initial alarm bells last year by refiling the last six years of tax returns.
Didn’t help. Charles went on to develop 40 separate PDF documents, each detailing a separate arena of violations of tax laws and malfeasance within the Clinton Foundation. Refiling more tax returns is moot now. It is most likely that the FBI and IRS will shut the charity down for its endless list of egregious violations. There will be fines and penalties, and seizure of fraudulently obtained assets.
Charles Ortel is the analyst who sniffed out everything fishy in AIG’s vault before the Crash of 2008. When he says the CF is not a charity, it’s a money-laundering operation, people listen.
The only post on AIG and Ortel that I can find is from the Sunday Times of London, and it’s paywalled. However, Automatic Earth has a hefty excerpt; search on “We are in a hotel in London, sitting on cracked red leather sofas” on the page at that link, which is from the Times story. (It’s an aggregation page; the story is under the headline “Joseph Cassano: the man with the trillion-dollar price on his head.”)
Adding, was that really causal? Are we sure the CR “responded”?
i.e., CF?
“There are about 150 FBI agents who are actively voting to put her behind chain link fencing at a Federal country club prison, shut down her fraudulent charity, seize all her laundered money both here and offshore, and put most of her aides in prison as well. Those votes count, and the men and women behind them are determined to see that they do”.
Is this a fact or a prediction?
So far only reports in dozens of media stories. Anonymous scuttlebutt shared by agents privy to the investigation. They report being so appalled and outraged at Clinton’s corruption that they will never accept her not being prosecuted.
I recently read a report — sorry, I can’t remember where — regarding the DOJ/FBI “interview” of Clinton consiglieri Cheryl Mills. Evidently, DOJ made a deal with Team Clinton that the questions would be narrow and many subjects were off-limits. When the FBI began questioning Mills, they dove right into the forbidden topics at which point Mills and her lawyers walked out of the room. They only returned after DOJ assured them the FBI would not persist in its questioning. I apologize for the lack of specifics but the critical point, IMO, is that this shows a schism between the FBI and the Justice Department. This is not how Federal investigators normally act. How it plays out remins to be seen but, from this and other tidbits, it seems the FBI is taking a jaundiced and hostile view of the Clinton Global Grift Initiative, while the Obama DOJ probably sees it as Savvy Businessmen acting sensibly within the New World Order, with the Clintons simply bringing the parties together and taking reasonable finder’s fees for their work.
ty
Rant of the Year!
*salutes Antifa*
+1
Antifa
May 29, 2016 at 11:14 am
thanks for that very informative summary
I can’t help but note that Hillary was on the Watergate committee, and the parallels with the FBI situation is rapidly approaching a “Twilight Zone” episode of poetic justice…
I suspect not much justice will derive but certainly some poetry.
It just occurred to me that Obama could pardon Hillary during Hillary’s Inauguration Speech. That would be a first for the exceptional nation!
Which “media”? The Clintonite Establishment media? If disgruntled FBI people were to leak it to the Clintonite Establishment media, the Clintonite Establishment media would keep it all buried. Now . . . if disgruntled FBI people were to leak it to WikiLeaks, then it might get exposed. Maybe.
It would be interesting if the FBI leaks came from deleted emails that forensics technicians were able to recover. Somehow, I doubt all those megabytes were consumed by scheduling yoga lessons and organizing Chelsea’s wedding. Think of that part of the server as the back office operation for Bill Clinton’s front-running (as Haygood calls it). It would be interesting to finally have a look at it.
The worker bees at the FBI and at State — if that vivid image of Clinton going out in the hallway to make a call was widely discussed — must be mighty pissed. (Funny how pissed everyone is this year, isn’t it?)
No one has yet to answer the question of who else might have had admin access to the server and the information it held beyond Bryan Pagliano and the Platte Company. Perhaps that’s a question only Pagliano knows the answer to.
Sandy Berger was charged for having just jotted down notes on classified information.
Berger was charged for actually removing documents.
Does Clinton’s redirection of the entirety of the Secretary of States email communication rise to the same level?
Which, alas, still does not answer the question of who else had access.
No. Buy her destruction of such communications by hitting the delete key did. Whether or not they’ve been later reconstructed by military intelligence ( the NSA, MI-6, PLA, etc) is irrelevant. Of course both Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan avoided prison under similar circumstances (although others acting on their behalf could not — except for Ollie North, who successfully used the “I was only following orders” defense in a US court for the first time since Nuremberg.
At this point, we might remember that Nixon never did destroy the tapes. Somewhere deep in that vile man lurked a conscience.
Quakers are funny that way.
couldn’t that just be the lust for immortality? if you are determined to go down in history for something–anything–you might hedge.
Clinton’s state concern was that the personal not become public. The question then becomes what was so personal that national security had to be sacrificed?
Perhaps the question could be rephrased as, “Should a someone who puts personal privacy and/or convenience over national security be president?”
“Clinton’s Coronation means Trump’s inauguration”
<a href="Mika: It Feels Like Hillary Clinton Is Lying Straight Out | Morning Joe | MSNBC “>
I haven’t seen the political press this depressed since Tim Russert died.
Well I don’t know why they are depressed, or why they should they should be surprised – most of the public figures they report on straight up lie ten times before Wednesday. Surely they understand this?
I don’t doubt the facts of the email case against Clinton, but I guess I have too little faith in the “system” as it were to think that she will actually be indicted. If she is in fact indicted before the election, do any protocol wizards out there know if Bernie can still take her place as the nominee or if we’re simply stuck with a nominee under federal indictment?
I also think Bernie was wise to sort of wash his hands of the situation just so that whatever he makes of himself he does on his own merits. Though it is odd to harp on her paid speeches and not on this (I wonder if he is privately bringing this up when appealing to super delegates?). Perhaps he knows that he doesn’t have to harp on it for it to become a serious matter on its own, while the paid speeches are more easily digestible and damning from a PR perspective. It seems that enriching oneself by taking money from financial services kingpins is more of a PR crime than actually violating laws.
The DNC would replace Clinton any way it wanted to if she was indicted. I don’t know the exact mechanism they’d use–highest bid?–but it wouldn’t be Sanders. They’d replace her with someone who they’d say more nearly represented the voters’ choice, i.e., Clinton.
Dems would then lose in a landslide as they should.
Yes. Those superdelegates accepted DNC favors, solemn promises of future rewards, or cash money in exchange for vowing to promote the neo-lib program of TTP, more wars, encircling and crushing China and Russia, tax cuts for the rich, and austerity for the godforsaken, mouth-breathing hoi polloi of these fifty states.
They’ll only vote for someone who’s down with that program. That ain’t Bernie.
heh highest bid. on second thought why am i laughing.
OMG what if Sanders offers the highest bid?
Elected politicians are not stupid. Well, OK, maybe they are, but still, not *that* stupid. If it looks like a route, and Bernie has coattails even if they won;t let him have the coat, then…
Right now, no super delegate who has pledged fealty to HRH HRC would dare breathe a word otherwise. If she is indicted and the Berners are fielding “a hundred Bernies”, you will see the definition of nanosecond — the time it takes a super delegate to get on the Bernie train, if there is one. But as long as the Hillary Serpent may still live and strike, no one will even look disloyal. And she ain’t dead yet.
If/when there are indictments, that will change. No one wants to be associated with deposed royalty. As Lord Pooh-Bah whined to the Mikado, after a graphic eyewitness account of Nanki-Poo’s execution, “I wasn’t there.”
Disclaimer-while I am an attorney I do not know if there are special rules involving former govt officials. With that caveat, it would appear to me that none of the objections in the article would prevent a deposition of Hillary from taking place. The scope of discovery is the broadest in the legal arena so to argue “overly broad” is ludicrous . Duplicative might work but it can only be duplicative if she is deposed in another case with the same issues. These would appear to me to be imposed for the purpose of delay- ie until after the nomination or election and for that reason, they might work but if JW wants her deposed and the case is not kicked, she will be deposed at some point.
She will not be deposed at any point if Obama and Loretta Lynch, among others, can get their way by hook or by crook. The Clinton people are verbally so gifted they call their patron’s tarball a nothingburger: wow, great inventive figurative crap, that burger. It’s going to be very instructive seeing how the Democratic power brokers put their machine into action to save the Clinton nomination. One way or the other, very few people can ever take her seriously now as president. She lies and cheats. So what else is new? The Democrats loved seeing the Republicans implode, who have in the meanwhile pulled themselves together behind Trump. Their turn to guffaw now about the stupid Democrats is next. The situation is disgusting and all can be laid at the feet of the Clinton/DNC machine: perverse hallucinations of arrogant entitlement.
I’m wondering about Obama – wasn’t it reported that he refused to give her full backing when asked about it in Hiroshima? Its no secret that he personally dislikes her. I’m sure he doesn’t want Sanders like the rest of the establishment, but he could easily declare that he has access to information which shows that Clinton cannot and should not be Potus, and try to get the delegates to opt for Biden instead?
I believe the DLC types and Obama, Sanders is largely arguing against the Obama legacy, don’t have a clue how to proceed. Beyond the irrational who are too attached to Hillary to see clearly, what is left? Biden is a clown and has Hillary’s record without her celebrity. The young Bernie supporters aren’t going to publicly share their troubles with student debt and then vote for Biden.
Name a Senator with a prominent profile who can jump in. Harry Truman was a household name when he was picked as FDR’s running mate for investigating war profiteers. Warren and Brown are known to people like us, but they are towering figures in American society. Schumer? His cousin has a highly rated cable show, so that’s something. Everyone else needs to run for office.
I think their strategy is hope at his point. Sherrod Brown has said young people only seem to care about Benghazi. Boxer has said young people like Bernie reminds them of their grandfathers, one died in ’69 and the other was a mean drunk who actually was from Vermont, not some interloper. These are two seemingly intelligent people (Boxer and Brown arent dummies, many in the Senate are but not them) who are simply denying the reality of how poor a candidate Hillary is. Instead they are latching onto bizarre claims about Sanders support in hopes it will come back to Team Blue because they have no other strategy.
Boxer endorsed Joe Lieberman against Ned Lamont. Just saying. All is not golden with Boxer.
Chuck Schumer (D — Israel & Wall Street) … ugh.
+100
Along with Feinstein, two of the worst “Democrats” in existence
Thanks RP.
And +100 to you re Feinstein … she really is execrable.
‘Schumer? His cousin has a highly rated cable show.’
ah ha ha ha … sorry, just flashed back to my childhood:
Saturday morning television was perfect for kids in Houston in the 1960s. During the commercial breaks, madman used-car dealer Art Grindell, cranked on black coffee, filter-less Camels and a fistful of Benzamine, would jump up and down on the roof of a ’52 Plymouth and scream “Look how solid this baby is! TAKE IT AWAY!” as the clunker shuddered off in a cloud of blue oil smoke.
Usually left out (why?) is the obviously best candidate, one of totally good repute (compromised only by an eight-year association with Clintons), with worldwide stature and respect, recipient of the highest award, deeply experienced in both public and private realms, foremost authority among political figures on the most pressing issue of our times, and who, to boot, would receive really enthusiastic support from Sanders and his supporters. A man who would win in a true landslide, especially with Elizabeth Warren as Vice-presidential candidate.
It’s the “former govt official” bit that makes DOJ’s motion opposing Hillary’s deposition look odd.
Certainly DOJ would resist deposing a current secretary of state if they believed the request to be “overbroad and duplicative,” as their motion states.
But Hillary Clinton is a private citizen now. That a deposition might take valuable time out of her campaign schedule is not a proper concern of the Justice Department, despite her former govt affiliation.
Why is the DOJ acting as Hillary’s personal defense attorney? [rhetorical question] Cuz cringing toadies like Loretta Lynch step ‘n fetch as they’re told. Bring me a toddy, miss, and make it snappy.
As I understand it, the suit is against the State Dept for release of records pursuant to the FOIA. Justice dept attorneys are the lawyers for the government in every case in US district court that I’m aware of. So, that in itself means little.
Of course, they could have sided with the plaintiffs and advised their client–the US–to settle. That they haven’t could be due to the “protect Hillary” attitude or, just as likely, to the general stonewalling the government does in most FOIA cases.
Probably some of both.
Who appointed Lynch to her first notable post in ’99?
Bill Clinton.
Every part of this election feels like the third act of a 35-year Long Con
Cell phones: I have observed that kids seldom talk on the their phones. They seem to mainly text or use them with earbuds to listen to music. However, they do carry the phones in their jeans pockets, where their relative proximity to various internal organs could pose cancer risks.
^That.
If anything, the risk may be to reproductive organs.
I was told that a cellphone in each pocket will cure herpes zoster. It just takes a while.
Perhaps you mean Herpes Simplex?
It could be an involved pun. Herpes zoster is shingles, caused by the re-emergence of the virus that originally causes chicken pox. This cellphone version would suggest that these are “nasty chickens,” and thus, susceptible to the other herpes variety mentioned as well.
See what hanging around on the wrong street corner with your cellphone in your pocket can lead to? Where’s Divine when you need her? This can only lead to Trouble in Mind.
Just watched the Morning Joe clip. The tone would have been more pleasant and the tension would have eased if they skipped the story and gave one another diagnoses of terminal cancer.
Viral all over twitter. As Lambert said, when Clinton’s lost Mrs Greenspan…
From the Heavy link above:
Sanders currently has 1,497 delegates to Clinton’s 2,309, so even if Sanders wins California, it won’t stop Clinton from reaching the delegate threshold to secure the nomination.
Precounting the superdelegates, everybody’s doing it…how to call this out effectively and generate an opposing narrative that will get any traction?
Who’s left, to call out the propaganda of most of news media, when much of network and cable news is controlled by top Clinton donors?
Whether as big as public policy compare and contrast, as small as who said what, or horse race reporting, most voters hear Bernie is fishy and Clinton only so to fanatics and haters. Because that is the job for those who are funding the reporting.
Who’s left to call out television news, Nyt, WaPo, or The Hill, on even the smallest story that the Clinton campaign wants reported favorably? They spent last week contradicting their own February reporting, that HRC agreed to a CA debate to get an additional, no-notice one from Bernie before NH. The new history is that HRC declined Bernie’s invitation to debate in CA (to imply Bernie’s request was pathetic and desperate), not that HRC demanded NH, agreed to CA, then reneged, chickening out on her commitment, just as much as Donald Trump.
Bernie’s campaign stump speech, organizing, and latest ad for California are doing a pretty, pretty, pretty good job, all things considered.
The number of allowable “positive” Bernie articles has gone way way down since NY primary. I think about one to two a week, or less, on HuffPo, as opposed to one to two a day prior to NYP.
Well, you could start by not doing it yourself…currently, Sanders has 1,499 pledged and Clinton has 1,769, a difference of 270.
Interesting that the numbers you referenced do NOT include Sanders’ superdelegates, but do include Clinton’s.
That was a quote from the article, the point of my post.
No need to counter. Just count down to the day Hillary withdraws from the race, and her delegate count becomes someone else’s to try to cling to.
She’s out, and she’s outer every day. Just hasn’t done the pivot to “going to spend more time with my family.”
Re: The Anti-Trump “Riot” in Albuquerque. Interesting situation, perhaps.
According to reports, approximately 30 individuals, youngish, mostly (they say) Hispanic and from the local area, took part in the festivities outside the Convention Center. Many hundreds of others looked on but did not engage in rock throwing or tossing the ever-popular protest “urine bombs.”
Police tended to stay back. (This according to crowd-control policies instituted after the consent decree — again, so they say…)
Some of the individuals who were identified by police as troublemakers have since been arrested, but it is my understanding that no one was arrested outside the hall on the night of the “riot.”
False reports of use of tear gas by police — they said they were smoke grenades, not tear gas — and one horse fell on pavement but was not seriously injured.
Those engaged outside the hall tended to be from different groups than those who protested and were dragged out/arrested inside. But there is little doubt the Albuquerque protest community was fully united in their opposition to the presumptive Republican candidate.
Small indie party supply shops in LA are selling Donald Trump piñatas right next to the princesses and super heroes. I do not think it is by way of a compliment…
Now that’s a data point….
You also can buy them in Mexico. South of the border, Trump pinatas are quite popular.
Do they call them . . . . Trumpiñatas?
Interesting article about Hiroshima. I did not know what Eisenhower said about it. I will need to read that Oppenheimer bio of Bird. Thanks! (And amusingly Obama again waxes eloquently one way while doing something else.)
The “scorched earth” article is a total hit job on Bernie. Aargh!
The Baffler piece is a useful corrective to the glib notion that the goal should be to turn the clock back: globalization has actually been very very good for the US, it’s just that the spoils haven’t been evenly shared within the country.
The author calls for REglobalization, not deglobalization.
Forget emails, paid speeches, the Clinton Foundation, even Vince Foster.
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/clintons-hawk-in-waiting/
If this is true, then Donald becomes a serious alternative. Not kidding.
Yes, it appears to be the case:
RT: ‘Extend American power’: Foreign policy establishment doubles down.
(From the ever-so-familiar-sounding Center For a New American Security’s “20-page pamphlet” Extending American Power)
Via Cafe Babylon: Next Gen Amerikans Must Embrace US Hegemony as Vital to Global Peace!
From the first comment:
Jennifer Rubin WaPo Op-Ed, May 18: Without Obama or Trump, we can have sensible, bipartisan foreign policy
Bill Clinton (“oddly” echoing CNAS sentiments…) says, however, that it’s all about kumbayah:
War is Peace!
If you say outrageous things, its outrageous!
If you say outrageous things, in the soft silky, oh SO SERIOUS cadence of the US indispensable nation timbre, your “qualified, serious, knowledgeable, experienced” – –
i.e.,
The Best and the Brightest.
‘Nuland started her rapid rise as an adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney. Subsequently, she was serially promoted by secretaries of state Hillary Clinton and John Kerry.’
Just goes to prove there is only one War Party, the Depublicrats.
————
‘President Obama is reportedly an admirer of Robert Kagan’s books, which argue that the U.S. must maintain its military power to accommodate its “global responsibilities.” ‘
Yep, Obama “believes in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being.” So what was up with his Oct. 2, 2002 speech in which he said:
Lies … all lies. Nuland’s husband Kagan is a mentor and co-conspirator of the “dark prince” Richard Perle and his shaggy dog-man sidekick, “Wolfie.” 0zero strolled into the White House and morphed into Dick Cheney’s adopted son, the Drone Messiah. “Special place in hell,” etc.
Agree 100%
American politics is just professional wrestling, with pretend kerfuffles to disguise the fact that we have no real choice but war, war, war, and more war*….
and anyone who doesn’t think that is NON-SERIOUS!!!
Jim,
Sidebar on tyour example of BHO’s don’t let fact interfere with the sty’lin of his rap
Neither PWolf or RPerle were “weekend warriors “. They were both Gradual Students
For my friends who think it’s important (now) to elect HRC and take back the Senate – a short history lesson Op-Ed News (MR).
With an economic crisis underway, a deep recession with an unemployment rate of 8% and growing (to 10% two years later) we got Clintonista retreads Lawrence Summers and Tim Geithner and the Democrats essentially continued the Bush bailouts of the big banks and Wall Street instead of undertaking serious bank restructuring, re-regulation, and implementing a massive infrastructure rebuilding program, all of which would have done more long term good and worked faster, actually restoring a healthier economy than existed before the ’08 crash.
Another big item was to follow through on a campaign promise regarding health care. On that one Obama and his party took single-payer (Medicare for all) off the table and gave us a program crafted in a right-wing think tank and piloted in Massachusetts (by a Republican governor named Romney).
In a nutshell, Obama and the Democratic party came in at an FDR moment and instead of changing direction, quickly demonstrated their loyalty to the big money. Then, in the White House Obama chose to be guided by the graceless contributions of Rahm Emanuel (now moved on to becoming the most hated mayor in the history of Chicago). For Secretary of Education we got the genius leadership of Arne (more testing) Duncan who put Bush’s No Child Left Behind on steroids. And Hillary Clinton was installed as head of the State Department where she ran it like it was a wing of the Pentagon.
Foreign policy under Obama and Hillary continued to look a lot like the Bush years. By more or less following Bush’s timetable for withdrawal, the Democrats could claim fewer “boots on the ground” in Iraq. But military involvement (and remote control killing) expanded all over the region and beyond, giving assorted jihadists in more places a continuing raison d’etre while draining U.S. resources, reducing credibility, and making life miserable for the vast majority of Muslims (and others) in the Middle East and much of Africa. People who, like Americans and people everywhere, aren’t that interested in politics or ideologies and want nothing more than to go about the difficult enough job of making a decent life for their families.
=================================================
Just examples to support my contention that the parties are the same – – maybe the dems worse because being smarter, they do corruption better…
The Democrats were just keeping that powder dry…
… Because the democrats have been keeping thier powder dry for decades the storehouse is about to blow up under the Capitol. Nothing does Guy Fawks like a blue dog democrat.
Nice synopsis. The democrats are more private about it (sneaky) while the republicans are public and loud about it – but their goals are still the same, serve their masters on Wall St. Public or private, that’s the only difference between the 2 parties I can see. But the sneakiness makes the dems worse, to me anyway. They’ll lie to your face.
Hillary is a KNOWN warmonger (Iraq, Libya) and so corrupt she literally has built a fackin “foundation” to turn bribery into charity (to herself as ortel shows).
If the Bernie doesn’t get the nomination, Trump will be my choice. I know 100% a hillary nomination = wars galore ( because of the potential nuland factor, possibly even a direct confrontation with Russia), Uber-neoliberalism, and a pay to play presidency (IE pay me enough and anything goes).
Trump has the distinct possibility of being just as bad, but I’ll take positive possibility over negative certainty any day.
There are so very many people in DC so very much smarter than Donald that it would be a true “nothingburger” to keep him busy on harmless projects that make him look like the great man he deeply fears he is not. Meanwhile, entire branches of the Executive Branch go off and do whatever they please, wherever they please.
Make the Oval Office a reality show, but without cameras. Although Donald will probably demand lots of cameras.
Ya know, there are all kinds of things the CIA doesn’t tell the President, not until there’s a need to know. I learned all this in a documentary film starring Peter Sellers, back in 1964.
All true. Plus, they’re corrupting our precious bodily fluids, Mandrake
“I learned all this in a documentary film starring Peter Sellers, back in 1964.”
This would also explain The Donald’s interest in coal mines!
In a repeat of the G W Bush regime, President Trump, if he is elected, will become somewhat like the President in some European countries, or like the Governor-general in Canada, a ceremonial attender at holiday parades and elementary school reading periods (couldn’t resist that). Meanwhile, the country will be run by a cabal of insiders, as it has been for generations. That would make three of the five most recent presidents, all Republicans in this case, “acting” Presidents.
If Hillary Clinton wins nomination and Electoral College, she, will become the third Democrat of the five most recent presidents, to instead choose to become a willing and vicious participant in the cabal.
Two different kinds of narcissism, but both destructive, possibly apocalyptic.
I haven’t really followed Trump much, but what I have seen tends to indicate that he is only as intelligent as the person standing behind him, and the person standing behind him is only as as secure as his ability to pander warrants. So, look for the obsequious Cheney types he surrounds himself with and you will know what kind Administration he would have. So far it sounds like Newt Gingrich has his ear, so it would prolly end up being a wash between Clinton and Trump in terms of what their objectives would be.
Which isn’t very comforting.
A couple weeks ago, I felt the same way. I thought if Trump could just dial down the game of nuclear chicken that the Obama regime has initiated against Russia, then a Trump presidency would be something I could vote for. And his pledge not to mess with social security was a positive. But the more Trump talks – let’s just say familiarity, in his case, breeds contempt. I see him being totally compromised by the Republican establishment. He has no attachment to the truth. Nor do I think he really understands why he is where he is today.
I recently heard an interview with Jill Stein of the Green Party. I agree with everything she said. I will vote for her if she is on the ballot in NY.
This. For all of Trump’s negatives, and the real likely costs of his taking office, he has said he would put a brake on the wars we have suffered through since 9 11. (not to mention the real suffering of the people who happen to live in the countries we target). Sanders would of course be better domestically for anyone on the left.
Also, (warning, new topic that I can’t practically cut and paste) related to her future military leadership, I’ve been fascinated by the recent deposition testimony and discussions of it online. The issue is not just re her possibly being very willing to start small wars. And the issues are not just legal and political re electability. One aspect of the Hillary email aka server aka Foundation mess that I’ve seen discussed online but not as much in the mainstream news seriously raises questions about judgement.
If the allegations are true re 1. zero competent security on the server- 2.refusal to use passwords on email – 3. server maintained by a political employee with no security clearance and 4. backed up by a private company with no history of government contracts, whose employees also lacked security clearance, then just how thoroughly must she have alienated the military and intelligence people that State works with? There was a huge fuss made over the outing of Valerie Plame. This is possibly worse.
I’m happy to be corrected, but the record seems to show that she combined her desire for personal secrecy from government oversight aka no public access to her communications (FOIA requests) with extreme technical recklessness over actually protecting that data from hackers around the world. The allegation is that she completely ignored advice re data security to protect conversations at the highest level. And she is running to be commander in chief.
If her position had been head of any domestic focused agency, I would agree that the corruption and record keeping issues re her communications while bad, possibly illegal, might or might not be politically disqualifying. But after 14 years of war we have many veterans in the voting public. The rest of us citizens also have an interest in her being able to competently use and apply technical expertise from subordinates to the political and geostrategic questions she would face as president.
The deposition testimony so far seems to show a profound disrespect for the need to protect high level military information from random hackers. The question that I see being asked online while rehashing those details, is what does that disrespect say to people considering electing her to run our national defense?
I don’t think the worker bees at State could have been happy about this. Probably they’re too straight arrow to have stashed any documents or video clips, but these days, you never know….
When I was deployed in Afghanistan, if I so much as connected a USB, I would’ve caught so much hell!
Then you hear about the sailor who took some pictures on a submarine, while Clinton gets away with Server Murder?
TPTB are mighty strong with the Clintons…
If the warmongress gets the Presidency, then the doomsday clock needs to be moved to a minute before midnight. The Saker (from the Vineyard of the Saker) gives his Russian and Orthodox slant to the weapons and attitude of people that lost 27 million in WW2. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-05-28/how-russia-preparing-wwiii
A long article with obvious bias but written “to try to raise the alarm about what I see is happening nowadays. Western leaders are drunk on their own imperial hubris, nations which in the past were considered as minor stains on a map now feel emboldened to constantly provoke a nuclear superpower, Americans are being lied to and promised that some magical high tech will protect them from war while the Russians are seriously gearing up for WWIII because they have come to the conclusion that the only way to prevent that war is to make absolutely and unequivocally clear to the AngloZionists that they will never survive a war with Russia, even if every single Russian is killed.”
Yahoo 10-9-15 “group of four Russian warships launched 26 Kalibr cruise missiles, known by the NATO codename Sizzler, from the Caspian Sea on Wednesday, the first time they had been fired in combat.The Russian Defense Ministry said the terrain-hugging missiles traveled some 1,500 km (900 miles) to strike their targets..”
The Saker: “Did you know that the Kalibr can be shot from a typical commercial container, like the ones you will find on trucks, trains or ships?”
I’ve always vote Green or other, but may be forced to vote for the lesser evil (Trump) if it looks like Clinton will win and the first step to the end of the world is taken.
Hi, I look at Links and Water Cooler regularly. Suggestion box item: a helpful service might be brief spoilers for clickbait headlines. I didn’t click any of these but here is a how a hypothetical spoiler service might look:
What animals can swim up your toilet? BBC (rats, cockroaches)
Why male fruit flies have such enormous sperm Los Angeles Times (breed more)
How four words rewrote Bayer-Monsanto deal script Reuters (icky theft creep monopoly)
Why Is a Hospital Machine Tied to Superbugs Still in Use? Bloomberg (cost)
etc
I don’t see anything wrong with the occasional modest guilty pleasure, of which clicking through a clickbait headline is one such.
I don’t think the last two links fall into the clickbait category, though. “Cost.” Really? Nothing more systemic?
Sorry, I’m being grouchy. I think they all require a click to get the meaning but it’s not your fault the MSM are doing this!
I’ve thought about the upcoming election and finally made a decision:
A Hillary presidency would be extremely disturbing, because she’ll be continually making the “wrong” decisions and supporting the “‘wrong” causes.
A Trump presidency would be even more disturbing, because you’ll never know from one day to the next what he’ll decide.
However:
A Trump presidency would also be extremely amusing, in a manner Hillary could not possibly match. And since politics in the US these days seems out of control anyhow, I am presently leaning toward the Donald. If it’s all a big show anyhow, then why not vote for the biggest showman of all?
A Hillary presidency would feature all the humor and spontaneity of a five-hour speech by Kim Jong Un at a military parade.
Don’t be the first person to stop clapping.
Trump on water: Trump reminds me of Tom Friedman (in approach not policy). I talked to a Taxi diver and they told me …. I talked to some farmers and apparently there is no drought in California …
umkay then …
Telling Fresno residents there is no drought is akin to telling Inuit to that polar bears are cuddly.
I’ve been away for a couple of days (mom sick) but in NY they had The Donald quoted at length saying he’s going to push coal and fracking “all the way to energy independence” and because it’s “good for the American worker.” When the Bread Basket looks like Alberta and the American worker is standing on lines for his government bread ration (if we’ve still got bread) it may all not look so good after all.
Any way you slice it the man is a menace.
It’s easy to get mixed up about the words “rain” and “drought”. El Wet Burrito brought some rain to Cal-e-forn-ia, even in the southern province of Los Angeles. [ I hope the Uber cab driver had newish tires, for the sake of Donald’s safety]
However, central Cal still has the ground caving in from the depleted water table. And as the article post by Antifa here says, they are drilling irrigation wells over 1000ft deep. We used to think 200 ft was a deep well. (CA had a thriving irrigation pump industry back in the 80s)
Trump: more fun than a barrel of monkeys.
Clinton: more trick than a bucket of Nixon.
Re: HRC and email.
One item that never seems to surface in the HRC email probe is: Why didn’t she or her underlings make multiple backup copies of the entire 60K emails prior to the deletion of the “personal” emails?
HRC could have used very strong encryption on the backup that would have pushed decryption of a backup copy out many years, assuming someone lacked the decrypt key and the backup fell into the “wrong” hands.
60K emails at 100K average size should require about 6GB of storage.
If times were tight at the Clinton Foundation and HRC/Bill were cash strapped waiting for the next paid speech opportunity, I would have given them a number of 8GB memory sticks so they could have made multiple encrypted backups.
They could have distributed the backups to trusted individuals and the State Department and given the decryption key to other trusted individuals.
In the event of questions about the HRC purging of personal emails process, investigators would have access to the original email source information, as needed, as HRC could provide the encrypted data file and the decryption key.
Beginning the deletion of HRC personal emails process WITHOUT saving an inexpensive archive copy of the original email (.pst?) file(s) sure could indicate to suspicious individuals that Clinton has something to hide.
Will HRC and her people plead that “technical ignorance” caused no encrypted backup to be kept?
Some of those deleted emails undoubtedly document collaboration with “Bill,” so that he could front-run HIllary’s official foreign visits and hoover up $250,000 speech fees, as well as rake in goodwill “donations” to the Clinton Foundation.
It’s universally understood in Asia, LatAm and Africa that the way you bribe public officials is through their family members. Never has this been practiced in the US on the epic scale of the Clintons, who between their speeches and their charity
fraudfoundation have cleared a cool two billion.Whether the FBI in fact recovered some or all of those deleted emails from the server they physically seized remains murky. Regardless, Hillary’s mass deletion is not only a felony obstruction of justice, it’s also a classic “badge of fraud.”
The Clintons’ monumental scam could’ve been stopped in its tracks 15 years ago by prosecuting “Bill,” Hillary and her oleaginous little brother Tony for bribery (selling pardons for cash). But Bush’s
landscaperattorney general Alberto Gonzales saw no evil — “all in the family.”The iron rule of American politics “don’t dwell on the past” and “look forward, not back” – a great philosophy for preventing investigation, and thereby getting away with everything kind of crime and incompetence…
The only emails on the HRC server that did not have an outside sender or recipient were emails sent by HRC to herself.
She could not have deleted all of these from sender/recipient mailboxes without cooperation.
If HRC sent out a “please delete” message, it might be ignored as recipients carefully calculate the pros/cons of actually doing the deletion.
So there is the risk that other people are saving up HRC personal emails for later monetization/ protection in a HRC administration.
Hillary must envy the control that Dick Nixon had to erase his tapes (Rose Mary Woods, 18 minute gap).
HRC’s situation is much worse, hoping she doesn’t get ratted out by someone in possession of a separate copy of a “deleted” email on their computer.
I suppose we could do a rough calculation of the diameter of the Clinton bubble by asking ourselves who might have email they could monetize (***cough*** Sid Blumenthal ***cough***). So the Clinton network, being corrupt, would be held together by blackmail as well as interest (and, of course, shared views on public policy).
Not that I’d be one to attempt making Hillary even more envious of Tricky Wanger’s quant old analog tape recording technology, but doesn’t the NSA or someone (maybe it’s Mossad and their US security clearance – so hard to keep track these days) have that huge data center in Utah where they are archiving anything and everything transmitted over the webz???
But these 6 GB backups of every single email she ever sent or received DO exist. There are multiple copies of them. Some in Romania, some in Moscow, some in PyongYang, some in Beijing, some in Tel Aviv, some even for sale on the dark web.
Why not? it was a totally public email server — truly a woman of easy virtue.
Why didn’t she or her underlings make multiple backup copies of the entire 60K emails prior to the deletion of the “personal” emails?
Why do you think a backup doesn’t exist?
As a minimum, once “send” is clicked, don’t ever assume an email doesn’t exist somewhere in perpetuity.
They’ve already said she “didn’t know how use desktop email”. My ass. A 4 year it could understand email.
but remember; she is highly qualified and the smartest person in the room.
Because she didn’t know how, wouldn’t ask, and her staff didn’t know either.
She had an IT guy, Bryan Pagliano, who supposedly set up the server. Seems like a no brainer that there would be some sort of auto backup to a second server in case the primary server goes down. In addition, someone had to have admin access so that new staff email addresses could be added or terminated as needed. And that’s without dealing with updates to whatever underlying os needs were required to keep the server functioning.
So someone had regular admin access to the server. Who?
Here’s one that might be up NC’s alley given the recent post on London’s empty towers. Whereas in London the super rich store their wealth in huge empty buildings that everyone must look at, they often hide their art away in vaults, sometimes for decades.
Perhaps a new squadron of “Monuments Men” will be needed to liberate art, not from secret Nazi salt mines, but from the vaults of Geneva.
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/05/29/arts/design/one-of-the-worlds-greatest-art-collections-hides-behind-this-fence.html
It is hilarious to read about how much Sanders has raised in 2 weeks time for his down ticket picks. What happened to all that MSM criticism? We’re is the retraction now that he had raised more (at least useable) money for people than Clinton?
Industry helps Chinese game their way into and through U.S. colleges
This industry is a much wider structural alignment of interest than the article indicates. It may start at the Boards of Regents and the Dean of Students Offices, but it receives it’s marching orders from a large base of oligarchy who find many of their own interests incidentally are best served by undermining the interests of the 99.99%.
It also winds it roots down to even the lowest levels, among some who fall well within the 99.99%. I’ve been approached by US engineering professors looking to land Chinese graduate students based on who their parents are inside the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), who expect these students will get them business, grants, and other opportunities, and who will help them through school as long as the student delivers on their end.
Similarly, the Donald Tsang and CY Leung Administration in Hong Kong have continued to increase the number of seats and scholarships available to mainland university students, to garner support from various factions in the CCP for their own agendas. CY Leung has reversed policy on small class room education in elementary to high school, closing public schools by increasing class sizes in the remaining balance, and the allowing the closed schools to be auctioned off to for profit school operators who focus nearly exclusively on recruiting mainland China students. It would not surprise me to learn that a similar neo-liberal behavior is going on in San Francisco, Seattle or Vancouver.
RE: ‘It’s time to look in the mirror Bernie’
What utter and complete dreck. According to the author who I’m guessing is not going to be invited to join MENSA any time soon, Bernie’s strategy of winning back independents to the Democrats with strong economic policies designed to actually help them has failed. Although polls show independents favoring Sanders close to 3:1 over Clinton, the author’s proof is a Nate Silver article. Silver has used all his big data wizardry to show that the independents voting for Sanders aren’t ‘real’ independents, ergo voters really prefer Clinton’s bait and switch identity politics and the neoliberalism that comes with it. No mention of why if that’s the case her positives are low and getter lower.
ugh
‘getter’ = ‘getting’
Before the campaign started last year, I found Marcotte to be an excellent writer on women’s issues, reproductive health, misogyny from the right, and related subjects.
However, as soon as the campaign started and she came out in support of Hillary, it was as if she had lobotomized her critical reasoning ability. As you note, she cherry picks her facts, sets up strawmen (I think she was a major propagator of the “Bernie Bro” myth), and generally shows a complete lack of understanding of Hillary and her history. Very sad. I can’t even read her columns about the election anymore.
I would have termed myself a fan in 2008.
Now I think her mouthpiece was crudely for sale even then.
Amanda Marcotte has been notable this election season for her utter lack of rationality. I understand that at one time she occasionally produced something worth reading, but one would never know it from the dreck that she has been putting under her byline the past year or so.
She used to show up occasionally at an Austin Drinking Liberally group I enjoyed participating in. This was during the depths of the GWB administration when we really needed each other’s support and good humor. I remember her being funny and wry on a variety of topics back in the day.
The humorless hack behind her Salon pieces is basically unrecognizable from those beer soaked evenings. Pitiful. I hope their checks are making life easier for her. Somehow.
Crime makes you stupid.
What’s worse than a criminal? And I’m not talking about criminals whose crimes aren’t real crimes — that don’t really hurt anyone. I’m talking about criminals who do real evil like the Clintons. So what’s worse than a criminal? An apologist for a criminal. At least a criminal has some guts, some initiative. The Huma Abedins of the world… now they’re a particular form of scuzzy anthropoid weasel.
Crime doesn’t make you stupid, providing cover and making excuses for criminals does. Though one could argue the original sin, as it were, is which criminals one picks to back. I’ve been amazed for many years now how the Clintons always seem to find a new batch of suckers to fall under the bus for them. I guess to some the Clintons appear larger than life… or something.
FAIR calls out Silver for his hackery on the issue of ‘real’ independents and their support for Sanders. Rather than dubious big data number crunching designed to fool the rubes, the author debunks the claims with some very simple arithmetic.- 538 Sacrifices Integrity to Go After Sanders on Independents.
The key bit –
….[Silver lieutenant Harry] Enten reported that while Sanders does better than Clinton among Democratic-leaning independents, the same is not true with the true neutrals:
“In the Gallup poll, Sanders had a 35 percent favorable rating among independents who don’t lean toward either party. Clinton’s favorable rating with that group was 34 percent.”
Well, that seems very similar, doesn’t it? Enten added a caveat:
“One could argue that Sanders has greater potential with these true independents than Clinton: Just 63 percent of them had formed an opinion of him, according to the Gallup poll, while 83 percent had done so for Clinton. But it’s also possible that these true independents will turn against him in greater numbers as they learn more about him.”
Wait a second—comparing the percentage of independents who expressed a favorable opinion about the candidates with the percentage who expressed any opinion, you can calculate what Enten doesn’t give you, which is the percentage of unfavorable opinion for Clinton and Sanders among non-leaning independents. For Sanders, it’s 28 percent; for Clinton, it’s 49 percent. This is what pollsters would refer to as a “sign that true independents disproportionately like Sanders.”
I put it to you that if your headline is “Sanders Isn’t Doing Well With True Independents,” then concealing the fact that he has a net favorable rating among those voters of +7 percentage points, compared to his opponent’s -15 percentage points, is an attempt to deceive your readers.
Marcotte’s anti-Sanders hit pieces in Salon have been progressively viler and less grounded with each passing week. My take is that she — and many of her fans — are people who fancied themselves to be truly progressive when they were young. They went whole hog for identity politics back when doing so had some grounding in decency — during the AIDS crisis in the 1980s.
Now, they are a bunch of rather hackneyed, well-connected persons who see the next generation as a threat. They aren’t rich enough not to fear the vigorous young who are snapping at their heels. They love the reliable middle-aged black women who form an identifiable (and very respectable) support block for their candidate. Those women not only give Clinton a patina of respectability, they are safe. They will never topple the bigger names of “Left” blogosphere from their tenuous social perches.
Sander’s and his supporters will. His focus on economic inequality highlights how useless these doyens of the “Left” have been over the past 15-20 years in regards to the mal-distribution of power in our society. His unexpected electoral success is an immense slap in their faces. They hate him for it.
Hillary will never submit to a deposition or FBI interview about her email caper. The proof–she refused to cooperate with the Inspector General’s office, even though everyone else did–Powell, Albright & Rice. I guess the “everyone else did it” defense only works when trying to justify wrongdoing.
Hillary’s attorneys have to advise her she is at risk of criminal prosecution for her email caper and thereby must take the 5th. While her private server techie could take the 5th without much fanfare, it would be the final nail in her political coffin.
Her supposed willingness to be interviewed is just a facade for public consumption. As with so much Hillary says, it is just not true.
Quite likely the case. These refusals to be deposed or interviewed will only advance the countdown clock on the end of her candidacy.
And the time is already five minutes to midnight.
Feeling the bern…since the klownz that be in that private business partnership commonly known as the democratic party will allow the morganatic coronation of the warmongering empress dowager, then uncle bernie needs to work on down ballot candidates that he chooses across the country in local, county, regional, state and a few congressional districts…why wait for the countercoup of 2018…
Oh…and the new tag for el donaldo…
#Oldteflondon
Thought of it all by my lonesome…
A nice thought on the surface yet the last 12 or so years have proved time and time again that placing a ‘prog’ in congress has failed.. whether because they lied or the machine turns them into neolib robots within weeks… it always happens. Don’t even get me started on the anti Democratic senate.
Just go back and look at the long list of Blue America candidates. That never changed a thing. Certainly not a restoration of rule of law, nor any progressive health care, taxation, any manner of reduction of MIC, Big Brother, quality labor or environmental policy. There has been no effort to improve infrastructure or establish first world internet service to all. Only efforts to erode and loot public education and social security. No anti-trust efforts among so many in need of a bloody sledge hammer. Banks, media, teh Googles, telecoms… Killing health insurance co’s as an entity at all. There is no such things as voting system with integrity here.
We are on the hook of all derivatives now. They take precedent. Congress-critters are all immune from insider trading. And global aggressive war is never even voted upon except to fund further. As the links section today demonstrates we are all Kagans now under the duopoly.
Saudi Arabia and Israel are our BFF’s. Who can we bomb for you today?
The apple is rotten to the core. The parties are private. They will sell you a t-shirt, pat you on the head, love you only when you agree with their sponsors to begin with, but you are never in the club. We need to quit looking for new and better worms to save said apple.
Buying into the Dem party is like buying into a mafia expecting to reform it. Ain’t gonna happen.
I understand your point, but I would also bet the same point would have been made in France in the 1770s. “They were great until they moved to Paris and were introduced at Court.” That worked until it didn’t. You don’t get a tipping point without piling up sand.
Private right of action under sherman act and clayton act…despite the slapping of heavy bernaze sauce on the commonweal by baby bambam scalia and the not ready for prime time powell pre-scotus brigade, the future has always been in our hands…
it just requires work…
waiting for big bluffer to protect the little people is a lewis carroll dream(or nightmare)…
Goo goo ga joob….
“I am the bagman,”
“They are the bagmen,”
“I am the Walstreet?”
Dan Malloy the Governor of CT is about as new dem as the Clintons. He tried to turn Stamford into a mini Wall Str, offering tax breaks to the banks to move. He destroyed many long time family business’ to get them in. Now they want more tax breaks or they will leave the state, like the rich on the gold coast. He gives them the breaks, while he taxes everyone else on everything and union busts to boot. What could be worse the crazy wrestler lady or Malloy, not sure.
RE: In Hiroshima Obama Calls for World Without Nukes, Contradicting New $1 Trillion Weapon Upgrade Plan
In his final days in office one must think: “Whom the gods would destroy, they first
make mad”. Captivated by his own speechmaking prowess, he utters gibberish just
to be noticed.
0zero is the reigning master of content-free faux solemnity, delivered in a fake, slightly southern Potomac-region accent that he copied from Serious Warriors at the Pentagon.
We’re all Virginians now, comrades.
Obama’s the American Tony Blair. Very sad. When he’s done in office look to see him heading phony peace organizations and phony peace think thanks. He does have a Nobel Peace Prize after all.
Bets on where he lands? A University teaching International Relations?
“How Hillary Loses” – Politico. Quote – “The key to a Clinton landslide is turning red voters blue.” I think this view among the political class is related to the way fruit flies evolved to have huge sperm.
Little Marco take heart?
Voters turn red with rage when reading or hearing about Hillary.
Their faces turn blue after they vow to hold their breath forever before they’ll vote Hillary.
I think it will be much closer than everyone here asserts. People like to be in their tribes. Many Republicans really don’t like or trust Trump, but they’ll pull the lever for him because he is “their” party’s candidate. The same will hold true for Clinton. And with support for both parties roughly even (hell, we’re talking about an electorate that put Obama in twice) most people will stick with their tribe and so the results will prove pretty close (my guess is it’ll be 53-47 or closer, and either candidate could win).
Except the Republican tribe is rallying behind its change candidate, while the Democrats are not. The tribal, authoritarian followers can be more successfully prodded to vote for the outsider than the rebellious, non-tribal voters can be dragged to the candidate they were explicitly rebelling against. About 50% of Democratic Party voters did not want Clinton and are continuing to refuse to vote for her — I think it’s actually higher than that, but it’s hard to determine accurately with the voter suppression tactics.
The Democratic Party still has a slight advantage in registrations — somewhere between 3-5%. But Trump already has 92% of registered Republicans saying they’ll support him. That number will go higher. And he’ll get some percentage of Independents. Clinton is not getting that high a percentage of the rebels returning. And Independents hate her — many of them specifically left the Democratic Party over Clintonism and neoliberalism. She is NOT going to get 92% of registered Democrats. Is there any reason to believe she’ll convert even half of Bernie voters? That seems high to me. She has to get them to the polls, too. I just don’t see her path.
I understand the generic electoral college advantage. But the “math wonks” in the MSM are madly “unskewing” their numbers to make things look better for her. I checked on the details on the most recent Cook Political Report Electorial forecast. He has an almost entirely blue map, and is forecasting 304 electoral votes for Clinton. But if you look at actual polling data out of the states, it doesn’t line up with his projections. He gives Colorado to Clinton. It’s currently going for Trump by a couple of points. Several states he marks as strong blue are like that, too. Like Silver, it looks like he’s just assuming — despite ALL the evidence that this is a wave/change election with a different, angrier electorate than traditional models represent — people will “come home” and “fall in line” to deliver his preferred result.
I’m not saying it might not be close. But I don’t think the preferred elite outcome is likely.
Harry Shearer’s excellent Le Show (available on his site or as a podcast from multiple places) today featured a great installment of his periodic segment “Clintonsomething” where Hil and Bill discuss her recent IG report headaches. Delicious!
He do the police in different voices…
I’m a fanatic listener of Le Show since I first started hearing it waaaaaay back (as Harry would say) in 1998 or so… “ClintonSomething” has been a constant source of laughs over the decades. At least if HRC wins the presidency we’ll have plenty more material for the next 4 years…
The Whistleblower By Full Measure Staff Sunday, May 29th 2016
Birkenfeld: My government, the Department of Justice, put me in jail, and my government, the Internal Revenue Service, paid me the largest reward in U.S. history.
As a manager at Switzerland’s largest bank, UBS, Bradley Birkenfeld found himself part of a massive, longstanding scheme to help wealthy Americans evade taxes.
Birkenfeld: There were 19,000 offshore, illegal accounts with $20 billion in assets.
Sharyl: Of Americans?
Birkenfeld: Only of Americans. This was the America desk, and it was based out of Lugano, Geneva and Zurich.
In 2007, he decided to blow the whistle: the first banker ever to break open the legendary Swiss bank secrecy.
Birkenfeld: They didn’t find me. I sought out the DOJ, the IRS, the SEC and the U.S. Senate back in 2007. And the problem here is that when I gave them this information, they were hostile towards me at the DOJ from day one.
Birkenfeld suspects hostility from DOJ, the Department of Justice, had something to do with UBS’s powerful connections. The bank was a top donor to then-President George W. Bush.
Birkenfeld: They had over a trillion dollars in assets. So, you can imagine they had offices worldwide. They had a lot of political influence and they hired politicians to help them, whether it was for marketing, or for presentation, or for lecturing or what have you.
And there were also politically influential UBS clients referred to as “PEPs”.
Birkenfeld: PEPs are ‘politically exposed people.’ We had a very secretive desk in Zurich, in which no one really knows who those account holders were. But we did have a dedicated desk because I knew the gentleman there, and he handled accounts directly out of Washington, D.C.
Birkenfeld: We still don’t know who the ‘PEPs’ were. They should be made public to the American public, so they can see who was breaking the law. Most of the other people in this country pay their taxes, but these people made millions, if not billions offshore. So why is it that those names aren’t made public?
While he, the whistleblower, was prosecuted, the government worked behind closed doors to cut a deal with UBS, which was one of President Obama’s top donors. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took the lead in negotiations with the Swiss Foreign Minister.
Sharyl: Do you think it was unusual that the Secretary of State, at the time, Hillary Clinton, intervened in this giant criminal case?
Birkenfeld: She has no right in getting involved in an international criminal investigation
Clinton and the State Department declined to comment for this report. Earlier, Clinton defended the deal by saying the Swiss helped the U.S. on many difficult diplomatic fronts including in Iran and Turkey.
And UBS donations to the Clinton Foundation skyrocketed, according to the Wall Street Journal.
http://fullmeasure.news/news/politics/the-whistleblower-05-23-2016
Betcha Bernie could “pep” up disclosure.
No matter how cynical I get about Obama and Madame Secretary Clinton it’s never enough. Thanks for the link though.
Dalio’s Bridgewater Gets Millions to Stay in Connecticut
Connecticut was downgraded by both S&P and Fitch this month
Firm to get $22 million to expand in Westport, Wilton, Norwalk
Bridgewater Associates LP, the world’s largest hedge fund, will receive $22 million in aid from Connecticut, which has been working to keep businesses from leaving the state.
The firm, led by billionaire Ray Dalio, was approved for a $5 million grant and a $17 million loan to expand in Westport, Wilton and Norwalk, according to minutes of the state bond commission’s meeting on Friday. The loan may be forgiven if Bridgewater, which manages about $150 billion, retains some 1,400 jobs and creates 750 new ones through 2021.
Other financial companies have received loans like the one approved for Bridgewater. In October 2014, Connecticut extended through 2021 an agreement with UBS AG that gave the bank a $20 million loan that doesn’t have to be repaid if it keeps at least 2,000 employees in-state.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-05-27/bridgewater-billionaire-led-hedge-fund-lands-connecticut-aid
my god the guy is made of $ but needs charity to stay put…sickening….soup for ray none for you….and remember all the GREAT CAPITALISTS reminding us Bernie’s a socialist..wafj
Meanwhile CT has budget crisis and even though it has expanded medicaid it will withhold payments to hospitals & MDs till budget crisis resolved.
Do you mean $$$ for Dalio but none for the doctors? Are our priorities confused?
Conservatives ‘so fractured over EU that fresh election needed’
http://tinyurl.com/ze69d52
A quote from a Tory MP
““If you have private wealth or if you work for Goldman Sachs you’ll be fine. But when public services are under pressure, it is those people who do not have the luxury of being able to afford the alternatives who are most vulnerable,” she wrote.
“It’s shameful that those leading the pro-EU campaign fail to care for those who do not have their advantages.”
We are indeed living in interesting times
Conservatives ‘so fractured over EU that fresh election needed’
http://tinyurl.com/ze69d52
A quote from a Tory MP
““If you have private wealth or if you work for Goldman Sachs you’ll be fine. But when public services are under pressure, it is those people who do not have the luxury of being able to afford the alternatives who are most vulnerable,” she wrote.
“It’s shameful that those leading the pro-EU campaign fail to care for those who do not have their advantages.”
We are indeed living in interesting times…..
When you’ve lost Conservative MPs…
In 2001, Dave Barry called for candidates to wear their sponsors’ logos on their clothing. Our girl Hillary answered the call, with a down-the-nose nod to “taste”, a bold expression of her two most reliable clienteles, and plenty of fried chicken for breast cancer.
You said you’d just leave the Amanda Marcotte piece, but I can’t. I’ll begin with her closing paragraph:
he might convince some gullible Democrats to keep wasting time and energy on trying to win over white voters with economic populism, rather than committing to the winning strategy of building up the Democratic coalition through old-fashioned liberalism. Which, ironically, would end up undermining the long term goal of building a progressive majority.
I guess the old-fashioned liberalism she favors is 19th century liberalism, because it sure isn’t New Deal Liberalism. When America’s increasingly becoming a nation of have and have-nots, how can you even have progressive politics without a healthy dose of economic populism?
As much as I hate political solipsism, Marcotte invited it by starting out with a healthy dose of gender politics. As a widow’s son (I don’t mean a mason) who grew up poor or borderline poor, got his first job at 15, and worked in stores or restaurants until the age of 40, I can honestly say that I haven’t seen Amanda Marcotte write about anything that would benefit most of the women I’ve known as much as the Fight for $15. In fairness, she doesn’t seem to care much about economic issues. That’s actually a point I’m curious about. She went to a private university and appears to come from an affluent background,so would it be fair to subject somebody who engages in gender-based identity politics to class-based identity politics?
Another point that I do think is important: she linked to a misleading Fivethirtyeight column to back the claim that Sanders isn’t winning over independents:
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/sanders-isnt-doing-well-with-true-independents/
Most voters who identify as independent consistently vote for one party or the other in presidential elections. In a Gallup poll taken in early April, for instance, 41 percent of independents (who made up 44 percent of all respondents) leaned Democratic, and 36 percent leaned Republican. Just 23 percent of independents had no partisan preference.
…
Sanders did slightly better with Democratic-leaning independents (71 percent favorable) than he did with plain-old Democrats (68 percent favorable), but that appeal does not seem to extend to true independents — those who are most likely to change party allegiances between elections and whose split between the Republican and Democratic candidates nearly matched the split in the nation overall in the last two elections, according to the ANES. In the Gallup poll, Sanders had a 35 percent favorable rating among independents who don’t lean toward either party. Clinton’s favorable rating with that group was 34 percent. Trump’s was a ridiculously low 16 percent.
The first sentence implies the Gallup Poll was a poll of either registered or likely voters, the link to Gallup didn’t clarify. My experience working and hanging out with the type of white people that liberals like Amanda (or Digby*) never meet has been that the more lefty tend not to vote. I always assumed it was that religion or something motivated the more conservative to vote while nothing motivated the more liberal to vote. I saw a recent New York Times article that said it was that the poorer tended not to vote. Whatever it is, a poll of registered voters wouldn’t do justice to efforts to bring the disaffected back into the system.
*Digby has written many posts that snicker at efforts to win over working class Trump voters. She’s right that liberals can’t get working class Trump voters, but there a lot of nonvoters, who could be turned into voters, in that demographic.
“My experience working and hanging out with the type of white people that liberals like Amanda (or Digby*) never meet has been that the more lefty tend not to vote.”
Yup. They keep their heads down and talk about other things. They are as human as the rest of us however, and if they were enthused many would register and vote. Acknowledging this fact would force Marcotte, Digby and other leaders of the modern left to recognize that their habits of thought are stale. That the past 3 decades of left “activism” have been fraught with navel gazing, self-admiring BS. That they don’t just lose because the Fairness Doctrine was revoked by evil Raygun, but because they’re boring snobs.
Digby has been shrewder than Marcotte in keeping her thoughts to herself on Sanders, but her blogging-blackout on him exceeds that of the worst MSM venues. He is just. not. there. as far as she is concerned. Her exclusive focus on bashing the clown show Republicans is frankly boring. Like shooting fish in a barrel. Singing to the choir.
I’ve relegated Digby to the garbage heap. Not a single word, positive or negative, about Bernie Sanders. Day and night Donald Trump and just, oh, how awful he and the Republicans are. No criticism of Democrats in general, let alone Barak Obama. As she tells us, ‘I would be thrilled to see a woman president in my life.’ That word ‘thrilled’ says it all: trembling titillation, vaguely adolescent. She was good on Bush and Iraq. Nowadays she is irrelevant, I’m sorry to say, because I was a big fan way back then. She conspicuously avoids the Democratic primary. Disappointing.
Digby heaped a lot of scorn at the Jim Webb campaign — an amazing amount considering how short-lived his campaign was; it even continued after he dropped out. While it’s unfair to criticize people for not writing the article or blog post that you would write, I thought a good 2015 blog post would have been something along the lines of “Why my candidate is better for both black and white working people than Jim Webb.” Of course, such an argument would have been easier for a Sanders, or even O’Malley, supporter to make than a Clinton supporter.
Not that weren’t legitimate criticisms to make of Jim Webb, his apparent belief that the poor are still coddles even after Bill Clinton’s welfare reform & support of “clean coal” come to mind. But, IIRC, Digby’s criticisms were more about his efforts to attract working class whites were at least somewhat racist and likely to prove quixotic. It wasn’t that I was a Webb fan, I liked Sanders much more, but I remember thinking that even the internet’s “smartest liberal blogger”* was more interested in choir preaching than in addressing real economic issues.
*As Rick Perlstein once described her.
UNTOLD STORY: How Donald, Bernie and the Hostile Media Miscalculated Hillary’s Greatest Strength
Apparently not snark, so I’ll have whatever he’s smoking.
Whoa, this guy needs an intervention.
And I hope he understands how few they are.
it’s not a mystery to me that Hillary is winning in the face of a brutal onslaught from Bernie, Donald and the national media.
oh dear. yeah the national media (not to mention bernie) has been so very brutal to her.
If she actually gets to the general campaign, he is going to get a huge shock when he finds out what ‘brutal’ really looks like. Maybe. If reality sets in. I mean this is someone who looks a person with falling polling, who has lost almost half the Democratic voters (probably more) to a 74 year old socialist and who is now thought of negatively by half the American population and thinks “winning!” so perhaps not.
I found the long blog post very enlightening (Do I Really Need to Worry about Hillary’s Emails? Yes. She Will Be Indicted). Some of the things that jumped out at me:
– there are TWO servers involved, the original one, stored by a private IT company without any security clearance, and the new one, which said company (illegally) migrated all of her server data onto
– it is very clear that she received, and sent, the most sensitive information possible using her private, illegal, un-secure server, including correspondence with Sidney Bluementhal (not a government employee at all, without security clearance, working at the Clinton Foundation) that names an intelligence source
– she engaged in both active gross negligence (by using the server and knowingly violating the contract she signed upon becoming SOS) and passive gross negligence (by not following the rules to inform State and by not turning over all work-related emails)
– she lied over and over again, in numerous ways and on numerous occasions, about every aspect of this
– and what surprised me most (having dismissed the Repub witch hunt over Benghazi) was that she DID lie about Benghazi and it DID (and does) matter. She lied to the families of the deceased right to their faces, as well as to the rest of the world, saying the attacks were over a video, when she knew – and stated to other officials – that they were carried out by an al Qaeda-affiliated group, financed by wealthy persons in Saudi Arabia (who may also be the people giving millions of $ to her Foundation).
Not even Trump could make me vote for Hillary.
Your last point, the one about the Saudi funding for the Benghazi raid, was the one that struck me when I read it. All the time Republicans spent on that boondoggle and they failed to get at the primary point. That she would have accepted money to keep it quiet, and that those investigating it would aid her in keeping the connection quiet, really shocked me. I didn’t think that anything they did could shock me anymore, but that really did. All of these wars, the opportunity costs and all of the dead, maimed, ruined or dispossessed and they are still protecting their funders.
They are all just monsters.
Perhaps the Republicans didn’t fail to get at the primary point. Perhaps they succeeded to prevent the primary point from being gotten at.
There does seem to be a concerted effort by members of both parties to keep America from realizing that the biggest supporter of terrorism is actually an ‘ally’.
There actually should be four servers (or at minimum partitions), which serve as backups. I really would like to see a detailed overview on the technology aspect. There are some big holes.
Who had admin access?
Underlying OS?
Updates?
Backups?
Redirects and forwards?
What else was on the server?
Any other domains?
Who else was using it for email?
How secure was it?
Was her Blackberry really secure?
Are there logs of any kind?
Etc
That Independent article sure wants me to view Thatcher in a positive light. Too bad; they’re gonna have to try a lot better than that. It’s a litany of sins. What an awful person she was, who left a trail of destruction and human misery in her wake. She indeed did bring massive change to the British political landscape, with New Labour solidifying her toxic changes as the new ‘centre’ baseline. It’s been a long time coming but the pendulum is finally swinging back to a more sane position.
They should probably installed a spittoon and urinal permanently beside her grave, to provide an outlet for the kinds of urges that inevitably overcome people who aren’t complete sociopaths upon viewing the tombstone.
+ another 1000 or so, Plenue! (Add to accumulated applause from here.)
But can’t the headstone itself can do the work of those other two public utilities?
Brixton (and by all reliable accounts also Glasgow), April 8, 2013 was a wonderful night.
Cf.: https://libcom.org/news/street-parties-greet-news-thatchers-death-09042013
Or anyone who missed it can look at a Guardian/Independent/BBC report and assume the exact opposite to be true. The presence of a lot of people “too young to remember Thatcher” wasn’t “shameful”, it was cross-generational sympathy between survivors of different stages of the unfinished onslaught.
Mika: It Feels Like Hillary Clinton Is Lying Straight Out | Morning Joe | MSNBC
I haven’t seen the political world this depressed since Tim Russert died.
What concerns me most about this year’s insistence upon politics-as-usual is that it indicates a grand determination to resume business-as-usual. The cold, hard truth is that we can’t afford to do that for even another year. We don’t have the luxury of forgetting anymore.
I’m reading an article just-published by Yereth Rosen of Alaska Dispatch News on how warm it is in the Arctic this year:
“Temperatures in eastern Siberia and parts of Alaska could reach above 80 degrees in coming days, according to the University of Maine’s Climate Reanalyzer. Temperatures are likely to be above normal in all of Alaska this June and all the way through October, according to the National Weather Service’s Climate Prediction Center. Most of Canada is also likely to have higher-than-normal temperatures, at least through fall, according to Environment Canada’s seasonal forecasts.”
How worried should we be?
Time magazine asked that question on its cover for March 26, 2006 (!)
Jeffrey Kluger then wrote as his lede:
“No one can say exactly what it looks like when a planet takes ill, but it probably looks a lot like Earth. Never mind what you’ve heard about global warming as a slow-motion emergency that would take decades to play out. Suddenly and unexpectedly, the crisis is upon us.”
I’ve been digging through books, news articles, journals and other media doing a search of our attitudes and understandings of Climate Change/Global Warming over time . Articles like Time’s hit me hard because we’ve always fallen back into complacency. Every single time.
Clearly a Trump presidency will not be helpful on climate issues. Clinton is definitely preferable to brand-Republican’s absolute ignorance and denial, although Sanders is far the better candidate just on “clarity of issue” alone. The bottom line and the main point, nature doesn’t care about our politics.
I’m pretty damned worried.
links:
Be Worried. Be Very Worried (Time, March 2006)
http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1176980,00.html
Persistent Arctic and sub-Arctic warmth expected to continue for months
http://www.adn.com/arctic/2016/05/29/persistent-arctic-and-subarctic-warmth-expected-to-continue-for-months/
——
“Nature doesn’t ask your permission; it doesn’t care about your wishes, or whether you like its laws or not. You’re obliged to accept it as it is, and consequently all its results as well.” – Dostoevsky
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pxz9tNFC_Bs
Hillary musical video mashup. I laughed.
On a shallow note, that Daily Mail article about Clinton’s outfit in Oakland is not entirely wrong. I don’t know if I would call it ‘gingham’, it seems a straight forward check to me. But it is oddly ‘shapeless’. And distracting and unflattering. And that seems to be the goals of her wardrobe in this campaign. And I just don’t get that. I may be disgusted by her stands and policies, mentor choices, her corruption and dishonesty, but at least I can understand why she might make most of those choices even if they are not the choices I would make. Wanting to accentuate ‘flaws’ or remind someone of a tablecloth, just does not make sense on any level.
it’s very dr evilish or kim jong unish, just with more colour
There’s a lot more in the Bernie Sanders interview with Bill Maher than just the headline the Hill chose about “mocking tough guy Trump” — although that part is excellent too. I wish Maher’s show wasn’t on subscription cable so more people could see it. Here’s the youtube link to the Bernie Sanders interview — watch the whole thing!
https://youtu.be/Q0kCHZdKdBY