Thousands of Wild Buffalo Appear Out of Nowhere at Standing Rock (VIDEO) USUncut. Be sure to watch the video.
Scientists call for breaching dams to save Puget Sound orcas Associated Press (furzy)
If You Want to Help Protect Bees From Deadly Pesticides, Here Are the Grocery Stores to Avoid Alternet
Let researchers try new paths Nature (Dan K)
Rapidly Warming Mediterranean Headed for Desertification, Study Warns InsideClimate News (Lulu)
International Monsanto Tribunal in the Hague – October 2016 Defend Democracy
China?
No one knows what these hexagonal structures the Chinese keep building in the South China Sea are for Business Insider
Refugee Crisis
Migrants forced to leave the Calais refugee camp are now pitching tents on the streets of Paris Business Insider
Calais: France says Britain must take in more than 1,000 refugee children Guardian (furzy)
Three months ago, it was a tiny Ugandan village. Now it’s the world’s fourth-largest refugee camp. Washington Post (furzy). Another refugee crisis…
Ukraine/Russia
NATO Warmongering at the Highest Pitch: Andres Fogh Rasmussen’s Recent Book & the 21st Century Colonialism Newsbud. Catherine writes, “Interesting perspective” and I must point out I cannot verify accuracy.
Syraqistan
Syria’s “Voice of Conscience” Has a Message for the West Intercept (Wat)
Big Brother is Watching You Watch
Facebook Lets Advertisers Exclude Users By Race ProPublica (Dr. Kevin)
Your home’s online gadgets could be hacked by ultrasound New Scientist
Clinton E-mail Tar Baby
Tomorrow's cover of the New York Post. pic.twitter.com/E54cGh6bpH
— Natasha Fatah (@NatashaFatah) October 28, 2016
New Clinton emails found during Anthony Weiner sexting probe New York Post
Computer seized in Weiner probe prompts FBI to take new steps in Clinton email inquiry Washington Post
Read the letter Comey sent to FBI employees explaining his controversial decision on the Clinton email investigation Washington Post. Consistent with my pet theory that Comey was force to get out in front of this development due to the odds of staff insurrection in the form of leaks. From Lambert via e-mail:
By Comey’s own words under oath in July, there must have been “new and substantial information.” So unless Comey is committing perjury, which the Clinton campaign has not, so far, claimed, this is not a nothingburger, by definition.
So that must have been quite some “briefing.”
Also: “Yesterday, the investigative team briefed me on their recommendation with respect to seeking access to emails that have recently been found in an unrelated case. Because those emails appear to be pertinent to our investigation, I agreed that we should take appropriate steps to obtain and review them.”
So there’s a process, it doubtless takes more than a week, and therefore the Clinton campaign’s talking point of “We don’t know what’s there, so release it all for the sake of the American people” is bullshit, even if you leave out that the emails can’t be released without vetting them for classified information.
Also, if it’s really nasty, do the people the Democrats encouraged to vote early get a Mulligan?
Weiner revelation proves Comey dropped the ball on Hillary probe New York Post. Some detail on what Huma’s e-mails from State contain.
Callan: Time for FBI director Comey to go CNN (Dan K). Important.
Clinton urges FBI to explain renewed email inquiry ‘without delay’ Washington Post. As if the FBI has to explain itself to her?
Democrats turn on Comey after he reopens Clinton email wound Politico. How fickle of them. He was their statesman just a few weeks ago…My guess is that Comey told Congress because so many agents in the FBI were unhappy about how the earlier probe had been handled and the the news of the latest batch of e-mails was already all over the FIB (a Freudian typo). Thus Comey felt he had to go public, since it would otherwise be leaked and he judged that to be worse (imagine the wrath of the Republican Congresscritters)
2016
Clinton can no longer coast to the win Politico
‘Slaughter Donald for Putin bromance’: #Podesta15 emails reveal ISIS strategy diversion for Clinton RT
They Don’t Care About Us Jacobin (Phil U)
What a Hillary Clinton Presidency Means for Your Financial Future Nation (furzy)
Grifters-in-Chief Wall Street Journal
Chelsea Clinton’s Frustrations and Devotion Shown in Hacked Emails New York Times. She is exceptional too, they are all wonderful people. Para los ninos.
Hillary Clinton Prayer Candle Celebrity Prayer Candles (resilc)
‘The woman is a disaster!’: Camille Paglia on Hillary Clinton Spectator (resilc). Paglia is very uneven, but this is one of her good moments. I couldn’t agree with her more on how disempowering it is to acculturate women to behave like fragile Victorian flowers.
Tremor over Clinton emails gives glimpse of market view of Trump Financial Times
Liberal group sends puppies to the polls to get out millennials The Hill (Phil U)
Do shark attacks swing elections? Washington Post (furzy)
Everything you need to know about election observers — and why the U.S. needs them Washington Post (furzy)
Obama: Most will be ‘pleasantly surprised’ by health plan costs The Hill. Phil U: “Wow, he is an idiot.”
The Best Way to Save Obamacare Jacob S. Hacker, New York Times (Kevin C). Spare me this “saving”. We need single payer.
Higher health-insurance premiums don’t mean the Affordable Care Act is a disaster Washington Post. Redefines “damning with faint praise”.
Supreme Court to Review Transgender Bathroom Access at Public Schools Wall Street Journal
Clarence Thomas Groping Allegations Land in Oversight Vacuum National Law Journal
Police from 5 States Escalate Violence, Shoot Horses to Clear 1851 Treaty Camp Sacred Stone Camp (Phil U). OK, if you want to get New Age-y about this, wish that all the perps have their misdeeds come back on them 10X. They need their bad karma to boomerang on them fast and hard.
Tension Between Police and Standing Rock Protesters Reaches Boiling Point New York Times (furzy)
First Amendment Rights Must Be Protected for Those Peacefully Opposing the Dakota Access Pipeline EcoWatch
Oregon standoff prosecutors failed to prove ‘intent’ to impede federal workers OregonLive (furzy)
Harvard called ‘lazy, fat, stupid’ in endowment report Boston Globe (TF)
Rhode Island Gets Back to the Basics Top1000Funds (j3). Another public pension fund cuts its hedge fund allocation.
Does Behavioral Economics Matter? Adam Levitin, Credit Slips
Class Warfare
‘This is slavery’: U.S. inmates strike in what activists call one of the biggest prison protests in modern history Los Angeles Times (Lulu)
Uber loses right to classify UK drivers as self-employed Guardian (furzy)
How Inequality Found a Political Voice Project Syndicate (David L)
Antidote du jour (Lulu). So handsome, particularly the unusual eye color:
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
498 comments
Comments are closed.
Early voting started here [a very Dem suburb of DC] two days ago. My husband went to vote yesterday afternoon and had to wait in line nearly an hour. I have no idea what this might signal, since both House & Senate seats are solidly Dem — so solid that neither Dem candidate bothered to advertise. The polling place was well-staffed, and there were plenty of voting machines, so that’s not a factor.
Is it ‘reflecting the will of the people,’ if people voting early can’t change their votes before the election?
Hillary wants people to vote early, meaning Right Now!
Does tomorrow’s news scare her?
no
Have a happy, safe and politically correct Halloween!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2ySty3ONkY&feature=youtu.be
hahahahaha. Well, maybe it’s not so funny when you consider how we got to this point.
Wouldn’t want to get arrested and sent off to Halloween offender camp.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_fBYROA7Hk
You might be interested in this. Jordan B Peterson and her student discuss the origins and traits of left wing authoritarianism. The term ‘left’ being kind of iffy though, since in they tend to elect brutally neoliberal politicians.
The orcas are Fukushima related. The North Pacific is a dead ocean walking.
What orcas? Are you referring to an article?
I’d guess this one (second link above).
Oh, sorry. Yes, also the sockeye salmon population around Seattle has gone down. The Fukushima story has not been completely told by the MSM, IMHO.
even now 5 years after Fukushima i’m still getting nosebleeds and sinus problems when a big front moves in off the pacific and settles over the great basin… and the real surprise is florida which has had the highest radiation readings in the US, strange… my point is the atmosphere is still being filled with particles and they never mention it
Hi Susan,
I live up in the NW corner of WA State and after Fukushima I disconnected my rain water catchment system for a while until I received a geiger counter. There were all kinds of scary rumors. But…I have measured the count regularly since then and have seen no real increase above the background.
Also, being a resident of the “Salish Sea” and a frequent observer of the continuous harassment of our local Orca population by “well-wishers” in incredibly high powered tour boats that surround any visible whale…I’d take Ken Balcomb w/a grain of salt. You can argue that removing the dams on the Snake might help fish populations but it is a long way from there to “saving” the Orca.
+1
I fail to see a close link between fish runs of the Columbia River (Snake River flows into the Columbia) and Orcas in Puget Sound, many miles north. Maybe that’s why I am not a scientist.
It’s not established cause and effect, but for some unknown reason the sockeye salmon which used to be plentiful in that big lake in Seattle are not there any more.
herschel
http://articles.latimes.com/1985-12-05/news/mn-721_1_herschel
just one dam thing after another, or in this case a lock…
David Suzuki had mentioned that the salmon runs in Canada were well above normal in recent years. I had heard from family living in the northwest that the water temp had changed in the Sound so that could mean the fish were hitting land further north in Canada.
http://digitalcollections.lib.washington.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/fishimages/id/45314/rec/2
oddly or not I did a fair amount of work restoring the house this kid lived in at the time of the photo…the story goes that the cannery accountants (clare washburn) wife ran a boarding house and this photographer dragged the kids down to the dock to pose with the fish…. This is a 100 lb salmon from less than 100 years ago, a giant these days is 30 lbs, orcas live primarily on chinook…Granny, the j pod matriarch, was probably alive at the time of the photo. You make a good point re columbia river not being in puget sound, I’ll guess the connection is that they spend time offshore as well as in the sound. The elwa has been un dammed so may start producing fish, haven’t heard much. On a related note, still no starfish here in the southern san juans…
I also disagree with the view that removal of four dams on the Lower Snake River would materially improve the population of Chinook salmon in Southern Puget Sound of Washington state and restore a major food source for resident orca whales. I don’t believe Snake River Chinook salmon migrate into Puget Sound in significant numbers in their Pacific Ocean migratory circuit. Most Chinook salmon in Puget Sound spawn in rivers that flow into Puget Sound that have been heavily impacted by siltation and pollution related to real estate development, population growth in the region, logging, increasing riverine water temperatures, surface runoff, dams on area rivers and other factors.
While removal of the four dams mentioned would likely improve migratory fish runs in the Columbia River system, there are also many other dams on the Columbia and Snake River systems, together with other factors that impact fish migration, spawning success and overall fish populations. it should be further noted that removal of those four dams would likely have detrimental economic effects on the economy of the inland Pacific Northwest, including loss of hydroelectric power and barge traffic that presently enables area farmers to ship agricultural crops to Portland, Oregon and on to East Asian markets.
While I don’t like being pessimistic, I don’t believe there is a quick fix to help Puget Sound’s orcas, to whom I have long felt a deep attachment. However, I do believe public recognition of the scope of the impediments and the political will to undertake meaningful remediation is improving.
Thank you for posting this piece.
To y’all who are confused about the connection between the Snake River dams and Orcas of the Salish Sea: you know that salmon spend most of their adult lives in the salt water, right? The endangered Southern Residents are dependent on Chinook salmon for food: up to 80% of their diet consists of Chinook. There are many other stressors on the lives of these whales, including shipping traffic, military exercises, tour boats, pollution, etc. but none of these is as significant as the loss of the whales’ primary food source. The largest spawning river for Chinook is the Columbia/Snake river system. So yeah, there’s a pretty direct connection between the dams and the whales.
Whales With a Dam Problem
Thanks for the link, Adrienne. I am not confused about the salmon life cycle and their migratory patterns, or the massive losses in the size of salmon runs in the Columbia River system due in large part to the effects of the many dams. However, I was unaware that the South Puget Sound orca pods migrate seasonally to the mouth of Columbia River in pursuit of Chinook salmon.
Dickileaks….That might be the single best New York Post cover ever. I can’t stop laughing….
Apparently the renewed investigation was based on a tip.
Ahh, “tipped off” to new messages I see.
For comic-book aficionados:
I: “This is like ‘Top Ten’ or ‘Promethea’ crazy politicians.”
She: “It’s like Top Ten bizarro world. I liked Promethea.”
She: “Anthony Weiner, the gift that keeps on giving. It’s the bonus round in Jeopardy.”
She’s on a roll:
“Rarely has someone fit their name so well.”
Just saw the WaPo headline: “Weiner probe”!
Have you ever noticed that tears from laughing seem to fall from the outside of the eyes?
These headlines almost write themselves, don’t they?
In all seriousness though, if the FBI keeps tugging on the Weiner thread, the whole thing might come to a climax.
You win sir. ++
I’m pretty sure the New York Post already locked up that win, but I just can’t help myself. The whole idea that Hillary’s march to the coronation has been upended by the tawdry, hilarious, gross, stupid, inexplicably bone-headed (sorry) dic pics of the man married to Hillary’s RIGHT-HAND woman and partner in crime Huma is just too cosmically, karma-ically perfect. I can’t contain my giddiness. Hillary’s glorious quest for the Presidency in on the verge of becoming a punch line.
Show me the blue
dresspantsuit!Terrific comment Tom, and I totally agree. Yet my giddiness is quickly tempered by the thought of a Trump presidency. Still not sure what scenario will allow “we the people” to win. At least, this may be a positive sign their plan is unraveling.
Cosmic karma for the win please!
Indeed, this Cocktober surprise serves her right for playing the ‘pussy’ card at every turn. The gods have a funnybone!
“god is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh” – voltaire
Tom. Yes. And who but our friend Karl Marx would have foreseen this?
Karl Marx, and here I lift a translation from Wikipedia: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Caussidière for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre, the Montagne of 1848 to 1851 for the Montagne of 1793 to 1795, the nephew for the uncle. And the same caricature occurs in the circumstances of the second edition of the Eighteenth Brumaire.[8]”
But in the U S of A, we must add: First as tragedy, then as farce, then as a sit-com with sexual leering.
Maybe now people will pay attention.
Isn’t this already a bit of Karma? Wasn’t Wiener always a friend of $hill & Dollar Bill? But didn’t they essentially abandon him and throw him under the bus during the first texting scandal, when no one accused him of doing anything other than sending pics and having no physical contact with any of the women? (Not saying this is good BTW!)
How many Republicans have been caught having affairs, with women, male and female pages, prostitutes, whatever, and are STILL IN OFFICE, while Wiener lost his seat for a couple of not-so-attractive pics? (I believe there’s an entire documentary on this which focuses on politicians & sex scandals — especially closeted gay Repubs, but I forget the title.)
It really felt to me at the time that Wiener was thrown under the bus for having the temerity to push for single payer against 0boma and was really the biggest voice that I remember in the media at that time…and conveniently the sexting crisis hits and the single payer debate faded away.
Yes …anyone remember the ‘DiaperBoy’ from La.
We should. He’s still a sitting Senator.
I think he resigned on his own…. if I remember correctly. I bet if he stayed in he would have gotten reelected.
What a party pooper.
It was David Vitter and he’s still in office.
yep he IS indeed ….
“you gonna believe my diaper.. or your lyin eye bleach ??”
Not for long. He ran for LA governor and lost (largely due to that scandal). After that loss (2015) he said he wouldn’t seek another term.
The other sex scandals that are relevant to this….
Mark Sanford (R) was SC’s Gov when he went hiking on the appalachian trail… which lead to an Argentinian mistress. He didn’t resign and then got elected to the house, where he is now.
Elliot Spitzer (D) NY Attn Gen. Prostitutes, resigned. Ran for something else later and lost. Too bad, he was a good one.
Larry Craig (R) Idaho Sen. Toe tapping in the MSP airport restroom. Didn’t resign, didn’t run for reelection.
Dems do seam to get hurt the most, but I think it has more to do with them resigning. The GOP critters always seem to try and weather the storm.
I wonder if voters think that stuff is irrelevant to holding office, but if you resign you are admitting that it made you less effective.
20 year old son said ‘Anthony Weiner’ was like proof of a glitch in the Matrix….
Hillary will be on a rampage if she is done in by a dirty Wiener photo, Ha! Leak those emails disgruntled FBI agents. All that Bill has done and a naughty sext to a teenager topples her highness.
Lawrence R sent this as an HRC pussy picture on Weiner’s computer. I should be better behaved:
All is forgiven, today is National Cat Day, by Act of Congress: http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_5813c176e4b0990edc3153f2
…just don’t use the other word…
A happy Kitty Day to all!
YES! i’d not have made it this far without them!!
“I meant,” said Ipslore bitterly, “what is there in this world that truly makes living worthwhile?”
Death thought about it.
CATS, he said eventually. CATS ARE NICE.”
~Pratchet
Same here!
“If man could be crossed with the cat it would improve the man, but it would deteriorate the cat.”
― Mark Twain
..Because CONgress has absolutely nothing else important to do ….. !
Pussy Law ……
We’re doomed
I laughed so hard when I saw this on my phone I startled my husband in the next room.
I love relaxing kitties. I miss mine.
Waiting for Newt Gingrich to complain about the media’s preoccupation with sex. BTW – have we heard from Megan on this yet?
Huma Abedin is being set up for the fall. Consider this tweet from Clinton Campaign spokesman Kurt Eichenwald, which points out that the new emails bear “on the procedures of an aide” and not on HRC herself.
https://twitter.com/kurteichenwald
Wonder if that was why she kept all the emails to begin with. If she goes down so does everyone else.
Our young melanoderm president has cancelled his joint appearances next week with Hilary Antoinette.
I believe he is the piece that makes the whole HMUSVOCAL (Hil-Mail Universe-Sized Vortex of Corruption and Lies) come together in a neat package.
I find this whole saga so repulsive I don’t even want to read or hear about it. I don’t want to see pictures of newspaper covers or see any of the abject humiliations piled on in bloodlust.
most of these people need mental help, as does much of our culture — which evidently would put these people in charge — and I don’t mean just the folks now in the spotlight. I mean most of them, in the shadows too. It’s a cyclone of dystopiacal darkness, a whirlpool spinning us all down and down.
In an more enlightened society, they’d either be getting spiritual counselling from a healer or they’d be somehow restrained in their most compulsive instincts and put to some sort of useful work — like baking things or laying bricks or driving a bus or raising crops on a farm.
It’s not too late for Dwight Eisenhower to announce he’s in the race. The Pleadies is actually a star system that you can see if you look up in the night sky. Nobody’s making it up or fabricating aspects of it for self-advantage — anybody can see it either with their eyes or a telescope. And if they send us messages across interstellar space, and those messages are from General Eisenhower, then let’s not be too skeptical. It takes a little creativity to find new horizons.
I, for one, welcome our new Overlord, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, from Outer Space; and want it to be on record that I fully support whoever is going to next take over our planet. For I am not a troublemaker, Dear Overlords.
Would that we could have Republican Dwight’s foreign policy, his tax policy, and his social policy
Have you read “Dancing In the Shadows of the Moon” or “The Mount Shasta Mission” by any chance?
You need to read “The Three Body Problem” trilogy by Cixin Liu.
Clinton demands FBI explain itself… Here, for once, I agree.
Can’t keep the FBI guys from leaking stuff, if there isn’t an “ongoing investigation”.
Seems that some in the FBI have decided that Hillzilla is the “worst of two evils”
Premature electionation?
You are correct. Comey ought to know better than to go against Obama and the Clinton family. He’s been good and played ball so far–but now this.
Only thing I can figure is that he knows there’s some godawful bad stuff out there in emails and he wants to get out ahead of it before wikileaks, Russia, his own agents–lets it out. Of course we already have wikileaked emails of Hillary sending special access information to Podesta’s (obviously) insecure gmail account, and saying within the text of the message “by the way this info comes from US intelligence sources”. Comey sure has some balls to have not recommended an indictment despite that one already being out in the open. He must think that this next leak coming up is far worse.
‘Only thing I can figure is that he knows there’s some godawful bad stuff out there in emails and he wants to get out ahead of it.’ Agreed. Reopening the investigation for a few emails found on Abedin’s home device? Makes little sense.
We’ve known for nearly a year that this group of cult followers has been treating reams of ‘sensitive’ material like the sports section. And knowing them, probably for just about forever.
Forgot link!
http://observer.com/2016/01/hillarys-emailgate-goes-nuclear/
Add to the get in front of the leaks idea that as vindictive as Clinton is there is a lot of evidence that Trump doesn’t forget slings either. Comey may be reading those tea leaves as well since there is still a good chance there is going to be a President Trump.
Poor Huma… she narrowly escaped getting thrown under the bus. I imagine the Clintons are now in the market for a whole fleet of ’em to run over her carcass.
Amidst my tears for the abjection that this election has demonstrated, it’s nice to chuckle at the delicious irony that it may all come crashing down because of that complete goofus, Anthony Wiener.
Man, don’t we miss ol’ Joey Buttafuoco and Amy Fisher, his underage Long Island Lolita.
Wonder whether Weiner’s 15-year-old girlfriend is packing heat?
If she don’t hurry, Huma’s gonna be in federal custody … out of reach.
I missed this link for Links at launch (added this later).
http://nypost.com/2016/10/28/weiner-revelation-proves-comey-dropped-the-ball-on-hillary-probe/
Wow. So Comey dropped the ball and forgot to issue a directive restraining his agents from seizing computers in the Weiner case? Just kidding.
This is a crazy year.
Seems extremely careless of him, doesn’t it?
From the same NY Post story:
Lying to the FBI will be a piece of cake to prove. It’s a potential plea-down if they elect not to proceed with an espionage trial.
And, immunity deal for Abedin in 3…2…1…
She and Dear Leader did not get immunity deals, right?
And Mills’ deal was limited to the one computer which was then destroyed, right?
Does this potentially render all of those limited immunity deals (ahem) impotent?
Deal is void if she lied.
It IS possible to have multiple email accounts with different identifiers on the same server. I can setup a server on my own computer and create a bunch of email accounts for myself, each with a different name/domain, etc. That said, Huma cannot make this a defense since it appears SHE is the one who suggested an “off-the-books” email server in the first place.
Also, forwarding classified documents and emails to a yahoo or google or msn or whatever account IS a violation of the law with regards to classified handling. If I had done that with classified emails in the military, I’d have been hung out to dry (which is why I am LIVID that it’s OK for Hillary and even Obama, just not for the Little People). If I would eat career ending shitcake for something like that, and since many others HAVE eaten career ending shitcake for this very thing in the past AND CURRENTLY, I demand that Hillary, Huma, AND OBAMA eat that same shitcake! No more two rules: one for the “special assholes in charge” and another punitive set for “the little people”.
Did huma herself “forget” that she had done this? How is it that this particular laptop escaped the hammer?
that’s exactly why i think huma had a bone to pick…or at least a bit passive-aggressive, maybe??
Tom (nails it down)
October 29, 2016 at 10:33 am
Interesting. The article answers the incredibly complex and demanding question of how the FBI agents investigating Weiner’s home devices were able to do what the Hillary investigators were not:
How did agents examine the devices? By seizing them.
“Huma had a bone to pick” Hmmm? One might say she picked the wrong one,
Well … it’s obvious she grabbed the wrong flute ….. ‘:]
Huma Abedin is facing an espionage indictment. She is in grave trouble.
Espionage doesn’t require intent, or having a foreign state as a client.
But the possibility of Huma serving as a mole for a foreign interest should be considered.
Both Abedins — Huma and her child molester hubby — are going to be taken down.
The Abedin Weiner Undertow may be strong enough to pull in folks at the White House, so there are some unusual national credibility issues at stake.
Ha! The Weiner undertow.
Other possible variations:
The Weiner effect? The Weiner fallout (or should that be the Weiner fall out)?
….. a ‘stiff” wave of destruction …..
The Weiner triangle? the Abedin triad?
But seriously the Russians are off the hook and Hellary must be ballistic at such a tragic turn of events. She really wanted to kneecap a Ruskie to mount over the fireplace.
There goes Huma’s insurance hoard it kinda makes a new take on ‘bonfire of the vanities’. The entire campaign has consumed so many in its relentless flame. Burn baby, BURN.
From ‘Akzed’ on the internet:
Did Huma simply give her Muslim Brotherhood contacts in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia (where she grew up) her Yahoo Mail password?
Huma might be the Islamic version of Jonathan Pollard and the Rosenbergs. The quantity and quality of classified info she mishandled is staggering.
The Military Intelligence complex is baying for her pelt.
“Huma works for the Great Satan and has a Jewish beard. That’s two capital crimes right there, Sharia-wise.”
Moslems force their women to shave their private parts?
Man, that’s an interesting religion.
It’s hot under those burkas!
Hillary bleaches; Huma waxes.
naked cats
Hillary’s husband: commits perjury and sexual harassment
Hillary’s chief aid: married to serial liar and pervert Weiner; possible perjurer herself
Hillary’s foundation donors: Goldman, Citibank, Saudis, Qatar
This is the woman who should be running the US? Honestly, she has the worst judgment and sense of entitlement in the world.
Compadre you let her off the hook much too easily.
Do the math: Year 2000 she insists she is “flat broke”. $30M in speeches since then (let’s be generous). Current net worth: several hundreds of millions of $…all without ever having any product or service for sale.
Buy ah yes she did have a product for sale: the US Government, which she sold to the highest bidder, whether that was a government that loves beheading gay people and women accused of adultery (her #1 campaign contributor the Saudis), a hedge funder wanting to mark up the price of a lifesaving drug 1000%, or a convicted mining grifter wanting a mining concession to pocket a cool billion directly from the poorest people on Earth, while propping up a bloodthirsty one-party tyrant (Rwanda).
In get why people really want her to be OK. She’s not. Not by a huge margin.
that won’t fly…she’s too close to Clinton. how would it look with Clinton keeping Huma that close without knowing her background?…even more negligence on Hilary’s part.
You think Hillary and Huma are kindred spirits?
something like that…
She officially took over as Clinton’s aide and personal advisor during Clinton’s successful 2000 U.S. Senate campaign in New York[4] and later worked as traveling chief of staff and “body woman” during Clinton’s unsuccessful campaign for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination.
My original reply disappeared in the ether, so I’ll just say this.
>The Abedins helped create the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, a publication accused of having ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and of promoting a hardline Islamic ideology.
Accused by whom? On what evidence? And with what relevance to a much-needed consideration of Clinton? This kind of random smear has McCarthyite overtones and does not appear to contribute to a larger understanding of anything.
WaPo identifies the accusers:
WaPo dismisses the allegations as “guilt by association.” But they took them seriously enough to publish a debunking article.
the clinton campaign makes nasty accusations against trump, and people around him. looks like standard political smearing to me. I’ll stick to the obvious corruption. i don’t think trump is controlled by putin, nor abedin by the muslim brotherhood. i kind of doubt adedin would meet with much approval by strict muslims.
This…her Muslim connections make no difference. She lied under oath. Hilary lied and lied and lied, though never under oath because of that little tarmac deal between her husband (who lied under oath) with the top law enforcement official in the land. Who yesterday decided not to lie under oath and took the Fifth when asked about the multi-billion $ Iran bribery lies. Really? The Attorney-General of this great nation took the Fifth? How does that work? But back to the Huma deal. When did Obama know about Hilary’s server crimes? He insisted before millions Americans on TV that he learned about it from news reports. I wonder if he would put his hand on a Bible in front of some men in black robes and repeat that one? And now we have the spectacle of the FBI, forced to admit they got the little Hilary deal-io wrong, they interviewed her for 3 1/2 hours but apparently didn’t write anything down, gee they interviewed Angelina Jolie last week for 4 hours and took copious notes.
A giant stinking cesspit of corruption and lies. No need to drag a pro-Muslim newspaper into it.
Ah. Roger Stone.
Seems just as likely that these organizations controlled/coopted by the Abedins were western intelligence ops in he first place. If you read the new Gaius Publius piece on Syria, it is clear that the US has intended to use Jihad as a weapon against the russkies for decades.
Thanks, Katherine. I’m thinking exactly the same.
Abedin has immunity. If the reporting that these are e-mails the FBI already had, the immunity still applies. They already determined there was no ill intent in the handling. If they used ill intent to ignore actions that have sent others to prison for lengthy terms, I don’t see them doing it now.
Exactly. All the gleeful speculation here is rather silly.
You want to put money on that?
One thing I really like about the NC comment section is the “reality facing” bias of the contributors. Unlike at many other sites there is a refreshing absence of comments by people who seem to have great difficulty separating their opinions, speculations and fantasies from facts and truths. You know what I mean?
There is not a lot of stuff like this: “OK, this is what happened. Obviously the US Army is flying ISIS members (who are, of course, MOSSAD operatives trained by Saudi intelligence and MI6) from Mosul to the CIA HQ outside al-Raqqa in top secret stealth C-130 transport aircraft. The satellite images of Mosul under bombardment show large parts of the city obscured by smoke. These are false and a cover for the stealth ISIS airlift. The live footage shot by ABC at the same time shows the wind coming from the NE but in the “satellite photos” the smoke is drifting in the opposite direction. Magnify the areas covered by “smoke” and you can see the shadows of two US Army C-130 aircraft. Do they think we’re stupid? Stealth still leaves a shadow! Duh. Bob from Fantasists R US has a SPECOPS guy on the ground there who saw blablahblahblablah etc.”
That was made up and slightly OTT but similar comments passing off speculations and fantasies as hard facts are very common indeed. They are also annoying and just a bit ridiculous. I am glad there are a few spots on the interwebz where these practices haven’t taken hold. Let’s keep it that way.
(I want to ask the people making these comments if they actually, truly, really believe what they are writing…but I am afraid the answer will be “yes” and that is not a comforting thought. At all.)
Except that others are calling Jim’s statements malarkey.
Some are desperate to see Clinton lose they get giddy over anything. Others think WL is still going to get them the outcome they want. Heck, some see the e-mails back in the media and screech for Clinton to step down and bring back Bernie.
Only a few more days and Jim can go back to complaining about Venezuela. :)
What you seem to conveniently forget is that the output of the MSM today is heavily composed of fabrications. Remember Saddams WMDs? In such situations, ‘rational speculation’ is downright scientific. Adding in the deplorable fact that what were ‘officially’ dismissed as conspiracy theories, and, by definition, unacceptable as subjects of conversation, are turning out to have been true all along.
If all one were to accept as ‘proper’ subjects of discourse were those items vetted and passed by ‘serious people’ and ‘thought leaders,’ then, we’ll have just another “Organ of the (Deep) State.” NC has commenters who are astute enough to realize that “reality,” or something that approximates such, is a very wide reaching net indeed.
Now put the special sunglasses on, and take the red pill.
In the case of Obama or the Clintons, it DOES require intent. The normal, REGULAR rules do not apply to them. The entire reason the original email probe was shut down by Comey (after the cozy chat between the AG and Bill-Molester-Clinton) was because they found an Obama secondary email in the Hillary server mix. This whole thing proved Obama LIED about not knowing about the server (he had the awareness to use a secondary email to contact Hillary/staffers via the Hillary email server…thus HE DID KNOW). The forwarding of clearly classified data by Huma to herself on yahoo and other accounts is also the clear evidence that the server DID compromise secret messaging. Huma is on the hook specifically, but Hillary and company are on the hook generally.
But that doesn’t matter. This is the Clintons we’re talking about. The rules just do not apply.
This seems like a good time for the FBI to check out the email leads provided in this link (from NC).
http://nypost.com/2016/10/25/hillarys-33000-emails-might-not-be-missing-after-all/
What special snowflake Miss Hillary doesn’t get is that when the FBI’s on your tail, they subpoena you; you don’t subpoena them … until the discovery phase of your trial, when the prosecution is obliged to submit its evidence to the defense.
Best guess is that the FBI found emails between Hillary and Huma — withheld as “personal” and not turned over to the State Dept — which detailed their conspiracy to destroy evidence and obstruct justice.
For instance, Hillary’s explicit instruction to Huma to have Paul Combetta Bleachbit the server — just after receiving the Benghazi committee’s subpoena — may be part of their correspondence.
This is the sort of smoking gun evidence needed to sustain an obstruction indictment, when the evidence shifts from “deletions were ordered” to “Hillary ordered deletions.”
It’s a beautiful thing that the heavily conflicted Huma and her pervy husband were the center of the Clintons’ spider web of racketeering and extortion.
What is time frame of sexting young girl & what was hill up to.
For trash must dig around in garbage
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3790824/Anthony-Weiner-carried-months-long-online-sexual-relationship-troubled-15-year-old-girl-telling-hard-asking-dress-school-girl-outfits-pressing-engage-rape-fantasies.html
Apparently Weiner’s sexting with a 15-year-old occurred this year, in 2016. But after seizing his phone and PC as evidence, now the FBI has emails covering a critical period in early 2015.
In effect, the Weiner sexting probe not only frees the FBI from those side agreements with other actors, but also gives the FBI crucial direct communications between HRC and Huma in March 2015, when Platte River Networks was ordered to wipe the server.
One of those emails in March 2015 will show that Hillary personally ordered the destruction of evidence, I believe.
Although ultimately it could not be proven that Richard Milhous Nixon ordered the wiping of a crucial 18-1/2 minutes of a tape recorded conversation, it may yet be conclusively proven in writing that Hillary Milhous Clinton ordered the wiping of a server, “like with a cloth or something.”
I think Huma is the fall gal. Clinton will be criticized and issued a correction but Huma will be found to have violated laws for which people get put away for decades. As likely having Saudi intelligence contacts, I predict Huma negotiates a special plea bargain that will raise more questions than it answers. But the point is that everybody be able to cover their own ass, and that is what they care about.
Everything points to Huma. Huma will be indicted so that Hillary can have her coronation.
The FBI could wait until after the election for that. “Nothing to see here, Huma wasn’t running, etc.”
I submit, ladies and gentletrolls, that there must not only be something truly damning in those emails, but something that the FBI cannot hide until after the election.
Otherwise Comey has every incentive to bury it quietly. This must be something that he can’t keep buried, not even for another eleven days.
I tend to think you are on to something. Comey knew his announcement would send shockwaves of historic proportions through the 2016 presidential elections. So the question is why do it? Not to get too tin foily, but remember this Newsweek story:
I’m not sure what happened to that particular accusation, but what if evidence exists of a compromised covert operation that can be linked to Clinton’s “extremely careless” use of her own private email server?
If not that, we are still talking of some extinction-level event.
didn’t seem to matter when bush or cheney outed valerie plame. i remember fitzmas, when i all got was a stocking full of coal.
Maybe you are right–I hope you are–but I don’t believe that such a scenario is necessary to make sense of Comey’s action.
If I am an unprincipled breeze-breather like Comey, I want to situate myself as well as I can for each of two possible electoral outcomes. If Trump is elected, then I am gone–maybe indicted even–unless, having done my duty by the current administration, I cover myself with an action that is prima facie helpful to Trump. If Clinton is elected, then I have my original and unprecedented recommendation that the DOJ not prosecute her crimes (“mistakes,” “errors”) to fall back on, and I hope that the big favor I did her earlier outweighs the latter inconvenience. This would work on the assumption that everybody knows and appreciates how big of a favor that first one was.
Or, it is possible that Comey believes that something is coming down the pipe which will BOTH not only ensure that he would lose his job and possibly face indictment if he did not act first, AND is SO major that he thinks it a near certainty that it will ruin Clinton’s electoral chances, one way or the other.
Could it be the latter? Yes. But I very much doubt it. But who knows?
Comey is a political animal, sure. But this has basically pissed off the brass of both legacy parties, not to mention everyone else.
Not to mention his timing.
There’s something else driving this.
that rationale depends on trump now being a favorite, i think . i have no clue what trump’s chances are, but comey’s action is sure to piss off the nominal favorite, clinton. comey already incurred a sunk cost so to speak, having made his bed with the clinton campaign, seems like something significant would have been needed for him to unmake the bed and do something that will favor trump.
I don’t think that Team R will exactly welcome Comey, not after Clinton Coverup I.
But I may be wrong.
yeah he’s managed to piss off both parties with this. i think it must be internal pressure from within the fbi; his dance with criticising her behavior while constructing a half baked rationale for not prosecuting her reflected that. it wasn’t enough to appease the people that wanted to prosecute her-these emails could have given them more ammo.
There’s always the chance that something really epic is in those emails, epic enough for Obama to throw the Clintons under the bus.
He is the only one in the world who is in position to do that.
They are throwing Band under the bus for the Foundation pay to play.
“Grifters in Chief”
We spent eight years in the 1990s watching the Clintons sleazy back door deals, and keep pushing the edge of the “illegal” envelope.
Zero accountability. So why would anyone expect anything other than more of the same?
Anyone ever thought that the reason Russia and China always seem to be a “step ahead of us” diplomaticslly and strategically is because they ARE, thanks to reading unsecured e mails?
Zero accountability is certainly key here. While these links are damning I’m sad to say I think they will only affect the choices of those still undecided and informed voters. They certainly don’t seem to have any effect on tribalists.
Just take a look at the comments on the NYT article below, or wade your way through huffpo comment sections on the leak.
The tribalist base (of both parties) will be voting for their tribe no matter what. Honestly, hillary could murder the entire (tiny) crowd at one of her “rallies” on live TV and I think it wouldn’t change the vote of a single tribalist. They would probably be more likely to say the rally goers deserved it because they were under appreciative of her awesomeness and gender.
Take a look at these comments and you will see what I mean. http://mobile.nytimes.com/comments/2016/10/29/us/politics/fbi-hillary-clinton-email.html
HBE, I did, and it was an unpleasant experience. I naively thought the NYT comment section might have some objectivity, but as you mentioned they will vote for their team no matter what and gleefully expressed this in the comments. Had to return to NC for sanity. Finally deleted my Guardian app because of the HRC water carrying.
the guardian’s coverage has been deplorable.
I have been a reader and fan of the Guardian for decades, and have their mobile app subscription for $5 or so per month. But after their shameless Bernie-bashing and blatant attempts to sabotage Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership campaign, I’m going to cancel it. It may be a result of Alan Rusbridger’s departure. In any case they are now just yet another neoliberal rag.
i think that’s why he left, but i’m just speculating.
At her speech in Cedar Rapids yesterday, Hillary announced the numerical total of Iowans who have voted early so far.
All the Dembots behind her cheered wildly, as if early voting were the best thing since free checking.
Now we know the reason for Hillary’s desperate appeals to vote early — she knew that Weiner’s seized laptop meant trouble, and was trying to beat the clock.
Hillaroids can’t even tell when they’re being cynically played.
I never understood the point of early voting so far out from an election.
Why is it a good idea?
In this case, couldn’t a majority of those votes be for her opponents? Why the cheerleading? Does she know something we don’t?
Early voting is a bad idea, for the same reason that bidding on an Ebay auction more than minute before it ends is a bad idea.
Early voters are giving up the option to react to new info (such as Comey’s Oct 28th bombshell) without compensation.
ebay: Snipe once in the last 5 seconds. That way you probably won’t get fooled into paying more than you consider fair.
bombshell: True believers will simply ignore the crater or revert to conspiracy theories about how the depression was created by the enemy.
It’s very convenient. “Get it over with.” I like early voting.
The New York Times online comments sections underwent a marked, probably coordinated change in tone about 7-8 months ago. They were swamped with glib, distinctively similar pro-Clinton posts at that time. They had been leaning Sanders up to that point.
The change in tone was striking and fairly abrupt.
I noticed that too… comments on Krugman’s posts and columns used to be fairly diverse and then a while back: boom! not much besides ones hewing to the current Washington consensus and HRC supporting line.
Everyone got their “Don’t Blame Me, I Voted For Kodos” t-shirts and bumper stickers ready to go?
So many lines from that episode resonate now.
It was a remarkable change in comments in the NYT.
The columnists had been advocating for Clinton and readers were writing wonderful rebuttals and voted as readers’ favourites.
Then almost overnight, and before Bernie conceded, the comments changed to completely support Clinton. And, to add insult to injury, the comments were boring drivel and receiving thousands of up votes. I stopped reading the NYT.
Noticed it too. I never see the star commenters anymore either. Probably Correct the Record bots. Sad!
Pick up those lead tire weights you find lying on the road when you walk your dog. Wrap them in tape to soften the edges. Wash your hands afterwards.Put them into the first class postage paid envelopes begging you to subscribe to the NYT, or donate to the Clinton campaign.
Write “Hand cancel” on them.
Advantages:
1 You are picking up toxic litter that can hurt animals and the environment.
2 You are helping the United States Post Office, started by Ben Franklin.
3 You are hurting the “The Beast.”
Reddit Politics is all proClinton antiTrump since Bernie conceded.
r/Wayofthebern, however, is delightful.
The Record was Corrected.
Early in the primary when Trump started to spew whatever came into his head (and got into the lead), there were many who said that he was only running to ensure Hillary’s win. Two individuals hired for his campaign early on said they were told he did not want to win but come in second. His comment that, “I could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and it wouldn’t affect my support,” comes to mind.
Did HRC know something damaging might come out, and that she needed an “insurance policy”?
This speculation seems to be less speculative now.
FWIW, HuffPo has become famous for the diligence with which it deletes comments that it doesn’t want seen, that do not fit their narrative. It has become a kind of sport of mine to write comments insulting the censors, likening them to Izvestia during the Soviet era.
I particularly like to point out to them that their selective censoring is obvious when there are so many answers to points no longer on the thread, or unanswered questions to those who usually cannot resist answering them.
They have become a real joke.
I dunno… I think that pretty much any person of at least average intelligence, some ability for logical thought and a reasonably firm connection to reality could stay a step ahead of the Washington brain trust diplomatically even without access to unsecured emails. Access it would probably just make the job a bit easier.
It would be incredible if those buffalo came from out of nowhere. That sounds like woo woo foo foo New Age Santa Fe channeler-style wacko metaphisics.
they probably walked over from the other side of a hill. That’s a scientific explanation. Why resort to magical thinking when science has rational answers?
science also explains the Harvard endowment fund’s willingness to pay hundreds of milliions of dollars to money managers. They also walked in from over a hill, or they drove in, and sat down in front of computers. That right there is incredible. Of all the places they could sit, they sat there. The odds of that are so low, when you think of the whole world, that it’s certainly extraordinary.
There is no way the average person could have sat there. In front of a computer and, in fact, facing it, not sitting sideways or looking out a window.
This is science at its best.. Directly observing reality and making mathematically tractable measurements that inform decision making. If anybody can argue with the decision to reward precision and incentivize future accurate sitting, let them try. They’ll just be wasting their time spewing foo foo woo woo all around their imagination and embarrassing themselves in the sober judgments of rational individuals learned in the scientific method of thinkingg
Bless you craazy for finding the hidden links between those links (in Links)
The link says they were herded in by tribesmen, who along with their horses were targeted by the Imperial Troopers. Still, a kind of magic…
Lest we forget that even the spirit warriors protecting the waters and sacred ground are part of the human legacy, read a little on how the Plains Indians drove herds of buffalo over cliffs:
The average mature bison weighed some 700-800 pounds and yielded 225-400 pounds of meat, and communal hunts resulting in the deaths of dozens or hundreds of animals (30, 60, 100, and even 600, 800, and 1000 were reported killed) produced fantastic quantities of meat: 50 cows, for example, yielded 11,000-20,000 pounds of usable meat. Many European observers were struck by gourmandizing as well as by what struck them as subsequent “profligacy” or “indolence.” At times, Indians used everything. But on occasions they did not, and the observers remarked upon “putrified carcasses,” animals left untouched, or Indians who took only “the best parts of the meat.” Sometimes Indians were said to kill “whole herds” only for the fat-filled tongues.
Why did Indians sometimes behave in ways antithetical to today’s conservation (which at heart means to prevent waste and to manage a resource to prevent depletion)? Among possible reasons are
-the likelihood that in any given year there were tens (or hundreds) of thousands of buffaloes within sight [the inexhaustible not-subject-to-peak resource of the day?]
-the need to ensure an adequate supply of an animal on which they were thoroughly dependent
-the difficulty of halting midway a drive over a jump
-the enormous quantities and weights that awaited butchering and processing after some hunts
-the preference for cows for their palatable meat and more easily worked hides
the preference for delicacies like the hump, tongue, marrow, and fetus.
Other reasons may have come from certain beliefs, which, to Indians who held them, were perfectly rational. Plains Indians animated buffaloes (and other animals) as other-than-human persons. In a former day, Plains Indians collectively believed, men and women conversed with, fought, killed, had sexual intercourse with, shared food with, and were kin to animals including buffaloes. Human-animal relationships ranged from beneficial to harmful, and were regulated by expectations and obligations similar to those that governed relations between human kin and allies. For Plains Indians, the buffalo was either the most sacred animal or one of the most important beings in which power was distributed. Thus religion permeated the hunt, from ritual intended to “call buffaloes” within range, to prayers offered to the animals before they were killed; and Indians, concerned above all to ensure a successful hunt, addressed buffaloes as sentient beings, animating them in ways that made perfect sense to them even if not to alien observers of European descent. http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/nattrans/ntecoindian/essays/buffalob.htm
“Plus ça change…”
My reading on the history is that the buffalo jump method was mostly a practice of pre-horse plains tribes. Once they had their “buffalo runners” to ride, there was no need to kill en masse. Also, I’ve read an account of a Blackfoot (iirc) medicine man who had a dream in which a representative of the Buffalo people came to him and told him that the jump method was unsustainable and that the people should cease doing it…and they did.
That makes me feel so much better… Wonder if any of our Elite have Spirit Dreams and stop with the unsustainability stuff… or the rest of us…
Why stuff yourself with the best fatty meat? Indians from the Plains have the genetic ability, and necessity, to pack on extra pounds to survive winter. In the era of fast food and constantly available calories, corn syrup crap and fast food, this leads to obesity, heart disease and diabetes. Same thing with Mexicans with Indian blood. A survival mechanism becomes a curse.
Yes, all these folks pushing “Paleo” diets as if their recommendations are sound because it’s purported to be more “natural”. They promote a high-protein, high fat diet.
These people clearly never ate game. Wild critters are very lean, save in the Arctic, where they are fat of necessity. Not sayin’ that eating lots of grain is healthy, but their interpretation of “Paleo” is ahistoric.
Yeah…USUncut isn’t the best at fact-checking. This is from the Sacred Stone Camp website:
And while I’m at it, I’ll comment on this, too
Wrong. Wish that all the perps are overwhelmed by love, compassion and understanding. You wish karmic retribution on someone else, you’re liable to get a heaping dose yourself…and who among you, etc. Also, even if all the perps have a string of awful things happen to them, what good would that do the protectors? It might just put the thugs in an even worse mood and lead to intensifying violence against those we would ally with. On the other hand, if the perps were to be flooded with compassion and empathy, they would have no choice but to immediately stop their violence.
That’s the real new-agey way to think about this stuff…imho.
++++++++++++
teehe: Oh Lestat, you deserved everything that’s ever happened to you. You better not die. You might actually go to hell. Rice, The Vampire Lestat
seriously, keeping it simple: When you see a good person, think of becoming like her/him. When you see someone not so good, reflect on your own weak points. Confucius
I want to agree with both of you, I really do, but unfortunately that doesn’t work for the sociopaths who permeate societies as big as ours.
Sociopaths look at new-agey, lovey-dovey, let’s all get together and make the world a better place feelings as something to use and exploit in others, not something to grow to love and get behind in themselves.
sweetie they been around since caves…and we’re still here. Why? Because Truth & Compassion are stronger and obviously strengthen thru time.
I agree that love, truth, honesty, compassion, etc. is strong and collectivism is what makes us stronger…if it was only us and not the conscience-less. Psychologists have argued about the genetic need for our species to have sociopaths on a cultural/societal level. They were the remorseless warriors and killers which allowed early humans to survive and even prosper versus other competing humans, or neanderthals, or denisovans or whomever.
But culturally, like sour milk, they are probably past their “Use By” date and instead of helping humans to survive, they are poisoning us and helping to kill us from the inside out. (This isn’t to say there aren’t a lot of minions out there too who should ostensibly have consciences too.)
But we might not still be HERE soon. Therein lies the problem and the rub. And the world, despite having lots of good people in it isn’t very good right now and lots of people and plants and animals and the entire planet are suffering and dying.
Evil gets what it gets due to a lack of conscience. Evil can take and take and kill and torture and often people think that they Karmically suffer in some way because of the evil they do. I’ve seen very little proof of that, with at best poor interpersonal relationships and psychological issues, but then again they already aren’t like the rest of the population “burdened” (in their minds) with a conscience.
I have seen too many good people in my life that believe love conquers all get chewed up, spat out and destroyed by sociopaths and I’m sick and tired of it. Books like “The Sociopath Next Door” should be required reading for every high school student, but there are many other great books on the topic as well.
i’ve quoted the sociopath next door many times on this site and Lambert has linked a few papers. it does seem like the sociopaths are in abundance these days, but the cyclical theory of history admits many periods when an abundance of these dark creatures appear in droves…it gets ugly! and both ‘sides’ are eat’n an chewed up…we continue. where i think we won’t continue is when nature burps us off this planet…sorry for the pun but its so horrible to image that i must joke.
the ‘good’ people you refer to are not sociopaths, right? so i know plenty of those good people, and too many of them are unaware and many more choose to be unaware of the their part in the process of the capitalist destruction of everything…getting dicey, my friend.
You’re exactly right. Sociopaths have no way of knowing they are “bad” in the way that people burdened by consciences can and should know.
They are only acting in ways that their brains allow them to act based upon the worldview and framework that lack of a conscience forms inside them.
It is only the good people, not knowing or not doing something about it (either willingly or unwillingly) that allows for evil to get this powerful.
This is one of the saddest thoughts for me about humanity and that is because no matter how good the majority is, or how wonderful a society we could create, it will always be under assault by those without conscience. Eternal vigilance isn’t an option, it’s a requirement. But in a world with people fascinated by Kim K., Faceborg, Twitter and all the nonsense, I fear that maybe humanity as we have evolved are not capable. Hopefully some future human or human-like species, if the planet survives, will be better equipped to tackle this issue.
“I, Psychopath” is another documentary on socio/psychopathathology for those interested.
also, the collective you speak of is stretched under capitalist destruction. we’re stretched under Draconian laws of convenience throughout the globe. to no avail, Lone Wolfs push against the machine and the collective, in droves after days of protest, must return to the lives they endure. add to this economist stating the depth and breadth of this economy has no comparison. maybe the collective isn’t so collective…and maybe this is what makes the sociopath so luminous today.
+1
Those that rely on karma, a myth, to deliver “justice” because retribution is so…uncultured, are avoiding the necessary.
You know, it was the agreeable and concentious people who run concentration camps and torture people to death. You know, the two traits most people would use to describe ‘good people’. Because those traits measure desire to go along to get along, and if getting along means torturing people to death, so be it.
Evil is not something you can externalize on other people, and if ou can’t see the parts in yourself that would murder on command you are exactly the sort of person who would.
Here’s what came to me in my meditation this morning, as I contemplated anger.
Anger arises when reality (including other people’s behavior) does not abide by our expectations or desires. There are a few of possible ways to respond when anger arises: 1) attempt to change reality to match our desires; 2) attempt to change our desires to match reality; 3) attempt to do away with desire entirely; or 4) wallow in anger.
If we decide to respond to reality’s failure to correspond to our desires by attempting to change reality, the question then becomes what is the most effective way to do that. Often, the way we attempt to do that is by displaying our anger to those whose behavior we disapprove of. This amounts to the use of intimidation and fear. While this tactic may be effective in the short term, in the long-run it will prove ineffective, as the behavior will likely resume as soon as the intimidation is removed. Displays of anger, therefore, are seldom effective means to change behavior.
Anger, then, is like a metal detector. It is a useful tool for sussing out problems that we need to address, like a metal detector is a useful tool for locating hidden objects beneath the ground. However, just as a metal detector is an inappropriate tool to use to dig up what has been located, anger is an inappropriate tool to use in attempting to change realities that we don’t like. Anger is, in this way of thinking, a part of our sensing apparatus. But once it’s shown us where the anomalies are, it is imperative that we set it aside in favor of more appropriate tools. What those are depend on circumstance and creativity, but anger, at least in my experience, makes a poor tool for convincing others to change their behavior (as one Indian guy put it, “you can’t call people bad and then expect them to be good.”)
So I don’t reject anger as totally useless, as many spiritual types seem to do. But we shouldn’t let that anger get in the way of clear thinking about what we can actually do to change the situation. Of course, the people engaged in violence against the protectors are hoping to draw out an angry, violent response. We owe it to ourselves not to fall for that. That’s my take.
… A must read comment.
I hope it helps me decide who to vote for (context, I am #NeverHillary but undecided) … And as a former lifelong Democrat, I am burdened with a deep rage.
I am coming to believe that it would be a very bad thing for Hillary to win (But the Chorus chants: “Trump, Trump, Trump”)
On one hand, my vote in Kansas hardly matters. So I could safely vote for Stein. But I know for sure that I’d vote for Trump if I lived in a swing state. Grrr.
… Yes, a must read comment.
I would add that instead of wishing for enlightenment for the ignorance of police, oil execs, sociopaths, I prefer #1: attempt to change reality to provide more justice for ourselves and others. After we have done all we can do in our little space, then we need #2: attempt to accept that we have done all we could in that situation, BUT keep thinking of ways to improve the situation.
Never, never give up thinking creatively. Two years from now . . .three years from now . . . we may find another way to add justice to the situation.
When we chose #3, to do away with our desire, we become passive. When we chose #4, we lash out viciously at our opponents and lose our power.
That does not mean we cannot show anger and some people are very good at the right comment at the right moment, but most of us, think of the best words after the moment has passed.
bravo Dip, obviously Anger begs attention and won’t stop till it makes a mess. during my counting breaths moments, when i have to take Anger for walks, i notice Fear & Frustration have to join us. these two are a problem…Anger is cool but Fear & Frustration are a bit passive and will walkout into on coming traffic if i let them. i usually negotiate…i’ll listen a bit harder to what angers me but my buddy Anger is hangin near…so is Silence.
a ways back,in front of a few people, i went off about the global economy and someone asked me if i had anyone to talk to…if i had anyone that had my back. seriously? i told them yes i do ANGER, FRUSTRATION & FEAR…a smile and a wink calmed everything down and we all separated with something to consider…
diptherio: As a bad Buddhist and a bad Catholic, I don’t believe in karma. Karma is too neat, a kind of ill-tempered holy man’s concept, sort of like Socrates and his immortal soul business. It is a moral dead end. But metta, as you point out, no one can get around metta.
Also, I recently read Louise Erdrich’s Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country (2003). What a journey. What an peek into the spiritual lives of the people who enliven the Great Lakes. But having read that, I’m not so sure about “herding” the buffalo: I suspect that the Buffalo Nation did indeed cooperate.
You don’t believe in cause and effect? That’s all karma is. The western overlay of karma as some sort of punitive retribution…punishment ….is just that…western interpretation. Old Testament rules. And the best cure for ignorance of police, oil execs, even sociopaths is to wish for their enlightenment. May all sentientents realize happiness and be enlightened!
I’m sure the Buffalo nation willingly participated. Anyone think they’ve forgotten what the white folks did to their ancestors? I don’t. Ungulate memories are long.
As for karma, there are many ways of understanding what is meant by that word, far too many to go into here. I’ll just say that the “eye for an eye” view of karma is a very low-level understanding, and not one I’m particularly fond of…although it works for some people. My understanding is closer to, “we all have to lie in the bed that we’ve all made,” and understanding that trying to fill society with love and compassion is likely to lead to all of us having a nicer place to recline. But like I said, even that is just one way of understanding.
Dante’s view of karma:
You are given the reality of what you truly love, eternally. So you best be loving what is truly good.
Agree. Does it really matter where the buffalo came from, or that they came under Sioux escort?
“plus ça change” indeed… Wounded Knee. I hope the co-owners of DAPL will dial this back.
And that’s why New Age, like most consumer metaphysics, is an opiate, not a curative.
Operative mages well know that there are rebound effects to placing curses on others. Community members know well that there are rebound effects to casting someone out of their community, or punishing the otherwise incorrigible who labor under their quaint misapprehensions that doing what oligarchs tell them to do is the service their sky god expects from them.
Craazyman, you didn’t write House of Leaves, did you? I just read your post and it encapsulated the existential essense of the whole story. I could sense the same horror and insanity of a mathematically inconsistent house…even the love story and the subtle mocking of academia is lurking in there. Just beautiful. And it only took 5 paragraphs…not 6 or 7, not even the 700 plus pages of House of Leaves. But on the off chance you didn’t write “House of Leaves”, you might want to put it on your Halloween reading list…after checking out the amazon reviews.
It would be incredible, but unfortunately it was not. They were herded in, and so the cops shot the bisonboy’s horses out from under them.
http://sacredstonecamp.org/blog/2016/10/28/police-from-5-states-escalate-violence-shoot-horses-to-clear-1851-treaty-camp
A buffalo and a money manager hoof into a low bar …..
The ‘thouasnds of wild buffalo’ looked to me from the video to be fewer than 50.
Obama: “pleasantly surprised by health care costs….”. Wow. I have a silver plan, not thru the exchange. Went from $1430 to $1800 per month. News articles of people complaining about their increases are in the $300 – $500 per month range. I don’t get it. Who the hell is supposed to be
able to afford this? On top of that, rent a house for the last 8 years that happens to be 2 blocks
from the new Apple campus. Lord, what a blessing. Couple of 20% yearly rent increases. I feel
blessed. Fark. I want to vote for Trump and just hope he blows up the Fed.
Obama: “pleasantly surprised by health care costs…”
In the same way a person would be “pleasantly surprised” to be able to walk away from a head-on collision under their own power.
Pleasantly surprised to find only a pound of flesh was required to secure that lone.
Well he did assure us (30+ times) that “If you like your plan, you can KEEP your plan!”
And wasn’t it “all negotiated live on C-SPAN” as promised — no smoke-filled rooms?
(I recall how his spokesman once tried to pretend he had never promised that, until shown the video evidence.)
When he said ‘plan’ ….. I think what he really actually meant was ‘pain’ !!
Ouch. The truth hurts.
Look, from Obama’s perspective, a years health care for a family of 5 is less than a round of golf…or a Lear Jet.
seems like he may have been misquoted, “peasantry surprised by health care costs…” makes much more sense.
inflation is contained, dont ya know…
Price, That’s all that changed? No increase in deductible, co-pay, no reduction in network, fewer procedures covered, or medicines? If so, then count yourself unluckily lucky… or is it luckily unlucky.
Now that wasn’t pleasant at all.
Pleasantly surprised to discover that, after the hospital visit, they still had enough left over for a bag of dry beans!
And from Aldi no less, so they manage to protect the bees as well! Silver linings!
Equally disturbing is the 0bama admin’s party line that those receiving subsidies won’t feel the full impact of big premium hikes.
Bigger subsidies mean bigger gov’t payouts to the health insurers who wrote this train wreck of a law.
We’re not supposed to care? Health insurers looting the Treasury is every bit as obnoxious as banksters looting it.
The theft is more subtle than that. Actually it’s not doing the Insurance companies that much good directly, where it’s helping is their holding companies have invested in hospitals and other service providers and are jerking up the rates, now that there a paymaster who has almost no ability to set price controls or enforce competition.
Because it isn’t as if we couldn’t all list a multitude of things better to spend our money on than insurance company profits . It is all disturbing, but in line with the totally disconnected from reality mind set of most of our political class.
Keeping Your Affordable Care Act Plan Affordable [NYT]
Which for some reason reminds me of Sophie’s Choice.
I wonder how often Ms. Cox has changed doctors after changing plans. Just curious, but I’m of the opinion that until advisors have to do it a couple of times and have to go through the hassle of FINDING a doctor from those truncated networks that are taking new patients they should have to place that cheerful assessment of doing that in an appropriately dark and smelly place.
Finding a new doctor is not only a “hassle,” it can be dangerous.
What’s “high” blood pressure for one patient may be perfectly “normal” for another, and an “anomaly” on an x-ray may not necessarily be pathology if it’s existed unchanged for years.
These extremely important nuances of “healthcare” are inconvenient to the stove-piped, metric-driven, impersonal “practice” of medicine, that trivializes doctor switching as a necessary “feature” of consumer-driven, for-profit “healthcare.”
Continuity of care–having a long-standing relationship with a patient as an individual instead of just a list of test results or prescriptions on a computer screen–not only results in “healthier” humans, it can massively reduce ill-advised, unnecessary and redundant “treatment” that not only increases costs but can be harmful or even fatal.
What a load of crap. Subsidies are calculated based on the cost of the second lowest priced silver plan in the given area. What that meant for Cook County, IL last year, was a reduction in subsidies despite massive increases of premiums, because a new player moved in, offered an incredibly crappy silver plan with only one hospital system in the network, and priced it very very low. Yeah, that left me “pleasantly” surprised when I went shopping for my mother’s policy, to the extent any government-sanctioned mugging can be called “pleasant”. I am yet to check what is on offer this year, news of 45% premium hikes gave me enough “pleasure” to make me want to put off the main event for as long as possible.
+ + + Yep. What went on last year in Cook County was so bad that even my health-insurance agent (and I didn’t go through any exchange) was pissed. Further, even she wa having trouble determining which hospitals BC BS had left in the network for individual plans. It turned out to be something like Saint Boris Karloff of Niles Medical Center and Party Store. And what went on in Cook County was just a test-drive for what is going on nationally this year
Yep, BCBS really “improved” their network. From their website:
So much for “you can keep your physician”. Not to mention that the network excludes Northwest, UChicago, Illinois, and Rush, among others. I particularly enjoy the Orwellian “BlueChoice” moniker, given the lack of choice. It takes real chutzpah to take an HMO network and call it a “PPO.” BCBS only offers the real PPO plans off the exchange, and they are unaffordable for my mother without the subsidy. She lives in Hyde Park also, so now the nearest in-network hospital is in Lakeview. I hate to think what will happen in case of real emergency. Thanks 0bama!
Dunno about now, but I got an HMO thru 0care in 2014 that allowed me to stay with my Hyde Park doc (on 47th) and go to Illinois Masonic (not top tier but not bad). I think Advocate was the group plan.
Before (prior to my employer dropping coverage when 0care came online) and after (when I got a new job tyvm) I saw this same doc through my employer-sponsored insurance.
Now that I have relocated and am looking for a job I may have to go back to 0care. And NC is one of the states that has no choice in its “market”.
Still putting off the main event but doubt I’ll have a job before Jan and couldn’t COBRA when I moved cuz I had an HMO.
It’s probably been 30 years since I didn’t have health insurance; it should be scary cuz I do have several chronic conditions but mostly I just don’t think about it.
Necessity brought me here and oh well. Plenty of folks have it worse than me.
I love the way Obama always glosses over the poor self-employed SOBs (like me) who don’t get any subsidies. I make just over the cut-off to qualify, so not only do I get to help pay for everyone’s premiums who are subsidized; I also get to pay full freight for my own premiums.
Don’t get me wrong, when I hear how the 80% of people who are subsidized pay an average monthly premium of $75 bucks, I’m happy for them. But when I’m writing out my own monthly premium check of $425 for a crappy Bronze plan with a high deductible, I kinda wonder where I went wrong.
Where you went wrong? By being a member of the (diminishing) middle class, which pays for the endless Warfare and inefficient Welfare state foisted on the population by a greedy and corrupt oligarchy. It keeps the poor people uneducated, poorly fed, poorly housed, and (crucially) distracted (cf Kartrashian style TV) — just enough so they don’t start riots in the streets.
Of course the 1% do pay taxes, but it’s just chump change for them and they have their offshore accounts and LLCs to hide their true wealth.
I feel you, man. Our non-ACA grandfathered plan is going up 30% next year. It’s more or less useless unless we have a catastrophic medical event.
The ACA was not written to protect consumers from healthcare costs, but to protect the medical system from the uncollectable bills. We are insuring they will get paid. Now they DID have a huge problem w/people who can’t afford to pay and probably still do. Few people have the 10k out of pocket. But the big events are covered. And now that the costs are socialized let the profits flow.
Big event are only covered in network. Given small and shrinking networks, how many people are still faced with medical bankruptcies. One of the worts things about 0bamacare is that it gives the impression that there is a maximum out of pocket costs. There is no such thing as maximum out of pocket if one ends up out of network. Which is highly likely given the small networks. If you are unconscious, how do you tell the EMTs to take you to an in network hospital? Is everybody a “sophisticated consumer” that knows all the pitfalls of their policies?
I guess you should have a field in the Medical ID on your phone to inform medical personnel what hospitals to drive to.
“Pleasantly surprised” that the intended Markets beneficiaries of the PPACA are doing so well, meaning his take of spoils after Jan. 20 is still on the up side of the curve…
can you image Central Planners at this juncture: ‘Would all of you just stop your corruption for just one day…we’re running out of tools to keep corrupt markets afloat’
I have a ‘nickle’ plan ….
I get nicked for every year I don’t sign up !
Neera Tanden’s Greatest Hits [LifeZette]
In which progressives’ favorite voodoo doll has at least 3 stopped clock moments:
Making Tanden almost sound like those “crazy leftists down there [at ThinkProgress].”
Which pairs nicely with
Hacked Emails Actually Prove Clinton Adviser Neera Tanden Is a Truth-Telling Hero [NY Mag]
It will be sad when the election is over and parody accounts like @JonathanChait, @joshtpm and @mattyglesias go away.
I really wonder if “David Brock” is being referred to in these terms. I wonder if ultra-clumsy language is obscuring the meaning that Donald Trump is being referrenced in these terms. Just a thought.
Callan: Time for FBI director Comey to go CNN (Dan K). Important.
I would say it was time for Comey to go a while back.
If nothing else, this proves that a totally incompetent investigation was conducted. Indeed, it strikes me that there was a purposeful desire NOT to find relevant emails.
The irony of Hillary getting the shaft from illicit Weiner sexts is too (Marc) rich to contemplate…
Indeed, the Stroking Gun Dickileaks front page will go down in history.
Comey should never have been appointed head of FBI in the first place, having never been an investigator. Political appointee.
Interesting question is what turned Comey, this late in the game.
FBI agents going through Hillary-Huma “private” correspondence on Weiner’s computer likely found clear-cut evidence of obstruction of justice, in emails intentionally withheld from submittal.
They likely told Comey, you have a professional obligation to turn this evidence over to a grand jury. And if you don’t … we will publicly leak it, and nail YOU for your cover-up.
In other words, the new evidence is too toxic to be covered up any longer.
Probably know more by Monday or Tuesday or Wednesday or Thursday…..
Meanwhile, Huma is a flight risk.
This is the best or at least most interesting speculation I’ve seen so far.
(JH’s obstruction of justice/orders to destroy evidence suggestion.)
Jim Haygood
October 29, 2016 at 9:26 am
What’s the cliche?
Its always the cover up.
Nixon was too ?stupid? ?vain? to erase the tapes
Hillary was smart enough to erase, but not smart enough apparently to know that with unlimited copying, one email is the same as a million….
NOW, if you have the FBI actually REALLY looking for computers and emails, who knows what they’ll find….
If l’affaire Weiner is under grand jury inquiry (as seems likely), then the FBI now has the subpoena power which it notably failed to obtain in its previous investigation.
Weiner’s letching after teenage girls was the accidental, fortuitous back door that end-ran the Clintons’ carefully crafted conspiracy (tarmac meeting and all) to abort the investigation.
Just as Paula Jones derailed Bill’s second term, Anthony Weiner has derailed Hillary’s first term. Anthony and Paula might make a nice couple, come to think of it … after Anthony gets out of prison.
If Huma had given Weiner the boot after the first sexting scandal this all would have been avoided. But no, the “appearances” and political embarassment would have been too much so she stuck with him… also the second time (when he was running for NYC mayor FFS). Hubris.
Huma’s mentor Hillary stuck with her man “Bill” for strategic reasons, after it had been clear for 20 years that “Bill” would be a playah till his last day (and they might even have difficulty closing his coffin lid owing to a protrusion in the groin area).
Lid can be made to order from China.
Boltcutters
Everybody is conflicted. Remember there’s a kid.
But the latest episode is most delicious…
Halloween is fun…
Hope undecided swingers are paying attention…
Where is the kid? I guess Huma isn’t caring for him? Who is?
Surely not Carlos Danger.
back when HRC’s email scandal broke and it was said she would be indicted, she attacked her “enemies” by saying she had a file on all their dirt and if she got indicted she would release the file. Nobody followed up on that amazing comment, it wasn’t reprinted/posted anywhere and it quickly died. J Edgar Hoover used just those tactics to run DC for 50 years – but now it looks like Hillary might have lost her grip; her big threat isn’t saving her. maybe. maybe we are so drenched in scandal that nobody is intimidated any more.
people don’t like to be threatened and they don’t forget. i imagine the threatened will lob her to the 7th ring where she belongs…but if she’s seated in the WH, she’ll be a global target…this never sits well with a sociopath. have mercy on US.
She said that?
Is there a link?
Is there a courtroom quality verified true link which can be proven and then viralized?
The other image that will go down in history is that one of Huma and HRC on the campaign jet. Can you imagine the conversation?
What are they conversing now inside Hillary Bunker?
Do the Russians have them surrounded?
Will a book ever be written detailing such things as “conversations in Hillary bunker”? Yes, I think so. The rats will commence jumping off the sinking ship shortly.
Joseph Kennedy: “Don’t get mad, get even”. Comey was ordered to make the problem go away and now he is getting even. Does anyone think he did not know that he was ruined when he originally closed the case? Nobody is that stupid. (With the possible exception of the Clinton wackos)
Comey can and probably will right a book about these escapades and make enough to just kick back and play golf, shoot pool, shoot heroin, or whatever for the rest of his life. Many “tell-all” books will be written soon, but I’m looking forward to the Oliver Stone movie—“Huma”.
I retract my previous statement that nobody can be that stupid. Loretta Lynch is how criticizing Comey for violating DOJ policy and the MSM is uncritically reporting it. Are you f**king kidding me? That idiot minion has no business talking about policy since she violated any modicum of credibility on the subject. (Remind me again what the policy is on meeting with Bill Clinton while his wife is being investigated) “When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” We truly are living in a Lewis Carroll novel where down is up and up is down. All we need now is for Hillary to start hysterically screaming “Off with their heads” BTW – I stand by my contention that Comey finally just said F Y to the machine.
Before the latest development, Trump had already said (at the debate) that if elected he will try to jail Hillary C. What about Loretta L? Yes, the tarmac meeting in front of God and everybody was not exactly legal, was it?
Hmmm I imagine the team investigating Wiener, discovered the emails and had a very private chat with totally pissed agents who investigated Hellary. They had to squeeze the Director so he could not close it down. They likely threatened leaks or maybe even had it all before a grand jury for the Wiener case. Then they told the Director. Either way Comey was toast and it was all about to be released. That was his horse head moment as alluded to on water cooler. Knowing how Hellary goes after women connected to Bill that threaten her ambition, I could imagine the emails are Huma’s insurance and then perhaps I imagine that it is a total f*k up and they were overlooked.
Loretta Lynch has been suckered and it is a nice look. NOW she insists on protocol!
Time will tell but it will be a fascinating week ahead. This election campaign deserves truly ghastly finale something akin to Gaddafi’s demise or that of the Ceausescu’s (figuratively speaking of course).
Clinton emails/ FBI – check this out!!
“The RELIABLE sources from behind the curtain (1) say the Wikileaks has made the FBI look like fools, besides I reported previously that those working on the case unanimously believed she should be indicted. (2) the latest “new” emails go all the way to Obama and it appears that Hillary didn’t like reading long emails on her Blackberry. She was first sending them to Huma would then print them out for Hillary. Huma did not delete them so now they have the whole batch. This is the latest running around behind the curtain for they surfaced from another department when they were looking into allegation of Huma’s husband texting underage girls.”
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/international-news/north_america/2016-u-s-presidential-election/the-fbi-reopens-hillarys-emails-too-hot-to-handle/
must wonder if they went after the icky anthony as a way to get hillary – they knew it was a tight connection and busting anthony left her defenses impaired… doesn’t explain why those emails went to his computer unless they went there before he flamed out… who is running this country? can’t we just outsource government?
How about shutting it down and disbursing the power proceeds to the people? The only government needed is a building full of clerks who fear us.
Actual government is boring. It’s endless talk about how much money to budget for the sewer system. Most people don’t seem to want to be bothered with it. Nobody even shows up for my once a month 1 hour home owners association meetings. Makes me wonder how much time they’d make for anything more abstract than that.
Re: Clinton emails
I’m not so sure that there’s going to be any sort of stroking, um smoking gun in that latest batch. In my opinion, that leaked Douglas Band memo should be devastating to her campaign. It’s practically a road map for Bill Clinton’s post-Presidential corruption. All it takes is a half-decent investigative journalist to start tugging on those threads, and it will come unraveled.
Of course, the “serious” journalists out there won’t look into that, at least not prior to the election. After all, as long as Hillary Clinton is not Donald Trump, they will prop her candidacy up at all costs. After all, they must not let the deplorables out of their basket.
+1
That it would only take an ‘investigative journalist to start tugging on those threads, and it will come unraveled’ means assuming there’s a point at which the State Department, Teneo & the Foundation end and the next racket begins.
voteforno6
October 29, 2016 at 8:04 am
To me the Band memo exposes that the system as a whole runs on money – – not law. Just as equal justice under law is a farce, and that the legal system is DESIGNED to assure that one with enough money can signal that by hiring expensive MADE men of the legal system variety, so that the law does not apply to them, the very same is true of the state as a whole. The lawyers don’t find holes, lapses, or exceptions in the law, they simply signal that they are of a class that requires the most carefully composed justifications of their client’s actions by our esteemed lackeys…i.e., jurists.
Congress passes law, a great simulacrum of a nation of laws is ceaselessly propagandized, and than when your of the 1% you pay the Clintoon foundation a finders fee and you get what you want.
The medieval church used to have dispensations so that all those pesky religious rules could be ignored without consequence. We seem to be going back more and more to the old ways…
Told to me in a private conversation last week–when Bennie Smith (“Fraction Magic” hero–see Short Version video on YouTube) investigated the actual election data records from the voting machines from prior election years (thanks to Bev Harris / Black Box Voting) what he discovered that the races in Memphis that were tampered with were exclusively those for judges and prosecutor.
Isn’t that interesting?!
Related matter is judicial conflicts of interest, which have dogged public interest court cases of all kinds. (e.g., Ohio 2004 elections, the judge that got to determine the case was also legally the judge representing the State of Ohio staff; or the recent case in Pocomoke MD investigated by The Real News Network, where key legal rulings are made by a judge that also has a statutory obligation to serve the interests of state staff.
Then when you compound this by even considering that maybe some of them got into office through a “short cut”–and knowing that subsequently they could be controlled–is it any wonder our judicial system produces interesting results at times?
Nothing new in all this. One bit of the corruption i got to observe from fairly close range involved an actual investigation into parts of the massive corruption that is the court system in Illinois, particularly Chicago but pretty universal, “Operation Greylord.” Where some actual judges actually got indicted and convicted for selling their authority. The FBI’s own archived brag sheet on the “successful” (you can’t get permanently rid of rats or roaches) is here, https://archives.fbi.gov/archives/news/stories/2004/march/greylord_031504
It was called OPERATION GREYLORD, named after the curly wigs worn by British judges. And in the end—through undercover operations that used honest and very courageous judges and lawyers posing as crooked ones… and with the strong assistance of the Cook County court and local police—92 officials had been indicted, including 17 judges, 48 lawyers, eight policemen, 10 deputy sheriffs, eight court officials, and one state legislator. Nearly all were convicted, most of them pleading guilty (just a few are shown in our photo). It was an important first step to cleaning up the administration of justice in Cook County.
That’s really the whole point. Abuse of the public trust cannot and must not be tolerated. Corrupt practices in government strike at the heart of social order and justice. And that’s why the FBI has the ticket on investigations of public corruption as a top priority.
How’d that happen? Historically, of course, these cases were considered local matters. A county court clerk taking bribes? Let the county handle it.
But in the 1970s, state and local officials asked for help. They didn’t have the resources to handle such intense cases, and they valued the authority and credibility that outside investigators brought to the table. By 1976, the Department of Justice had created a Public Integrity Section, and the FBI was tasked with the investigations, focusing on major, systemic corruption in the body politic.
Who’s investigated? Public servants: members of Congress and state legislatures; members of the Administration and governors’ offices; judges and court staffs; all of law enforcement; all government agencies. Plus everyone who works with government and is willing to pay for “special favors”: lobbyists, contractors, consultants, lawyers, U.S. businesses in foreign countries, you name it.
What kind of crimes? Bribery, kickbacks, and fraud. Vote buying, voter intimidation, impersonation. Political coercion. Racketeering and obstruction of justice. Trafficking of illegal drugs.
How serious of a problem is it? Last year [2003] the FBI investigated 850 cases; brought in 655 indictments/informations; and got 525 who were either convicted or chose to plead.
Last words: Straight from Teddy Roosevelt: “Unless a man [woman?] is honest we have no right to keep him in public life, it matters not how brilliant his capacity, it hardly matters how great his power of doing good service on certain lines may be…No man who is corrupt, no man who condones corruption in others, can possibly do his duty by the community.”
I wonder how many G-Men still hew to that notion of the indispensability of honesty (or at least a tolerable minimum of “slack”) in the ruling of our great nation…
And one becomes a judge in Cook County by having a “Chinaman” recommend you to the Democrat Machine…
Like you say, it’s nothing new. Yet still when details come out it is still shocking, as cynical as I am already.
For example, FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds spoke at length in a Boiling Frogs interview ( I think it’s this one http://www.boilingfrogspost.com/2013/06/19/podcast-show-112-nsa-whistleblower-goes-on-record-reveals-new-information-names-culprits/ ) about how, when her Supreme Court challenge to her FBI gagging was coming up (this was before she former her whistleblower organization), she was approached by others in the FBI & CIA, each telling her that in their early years of employment in their respective agency they were asked to do extensive background checks of people being considered for important offices–whether as politicians, judges or high-level government officials. They were told to dig up all the dirt–sexual indiscretions, financial problems, marital problems, business corruption–anything that might look bad.
They diligently provided their bosses with lists. To their shock, when they subsequently saw the lists of names their superiors recommended, the lists were headed by those with the worst records–the blackest of the black. The ones who were clean were never recommended.
Actually, the specific nature of the Fraction Magic video revelations are new. And neither Bennie Smith nor Bev Harris expected the judge/prosecutor races to be the exclusive target of Memphis electronic election rigging over several years. I gotta admit it’s a clever strategy. It cuts off exposure at the pass by ensuring there will be no legal recourse if something leaks out.
Re: Standing Rock.
The police and their outriggers have been at full-panic for some months. There is apparently nothing they won’t do to protect that Sacred Pipeline from desecration by those crazed, wild Indians. So far they’ve only shot the horses with live rounds — oh, and the drones sent up by the Indians to record the incidents — but you know that’s a warning to the Water Protectors that any one of them, or the whole lot of them, could be next.
The overkill is startling. Yet it appears to be a matter of “lessons learned” from the suppression of Occupy, BLM, and other incidents of civil disobedience.
Note, however, no such overkill-suppressive tactics have been used against armed insurrectionists such as the Bundys. It’s not simply a matter of double standards when dealing with white-rightists vs designated Others perceived to be leftists, nor is it simply that one group is armed and the other quite openly is not — and thus the unarmed group is subjected to militarized suppression — though those factors enter into it.
No, these are cases where the intent of the government is to ensure, at all costs, that no perceived-leftist interest/organization arises and succeeds in accomplishing its ends, no matter what they may be, no matter where they are.
For these outfits, whether it be the Standing Rock Sioux and their allies, or the Occupy Movement, or BLM or even the Bernie campaign represent potential or actual existential threats to The Powers That Be. They expose the fraud of our neoLibCon rulers. In the case of the Water Protectors, they force the hand of the wildly over armed and over protective police, whose only interest is the ultimate victory of the pipeline over people, their water and land.
Make no mistake, they will do it to you, too, if you get out of line in the wrong direction, and that is true whether Hillary or Trump eventually sits in the Big Chair.
Don’t fool yourselves that one or the other will protect you — because by golly, they won’t. Not even if you march to their band…
i’m not one to put Animals before Humans (altho i prefer animals to most humans)…but the COPS SHOT THE HORSES?!?! pisssssssssssssses me off
I bless the hoss from hoof to head –
From head to hoof, and tale to mane! –
I bless the hoss, as I have said,
From head to hoof, and back again!
James Whitcomb Riley
They did indeed. From the Standing Rock news item:
http://sacredstonecamp.org/blog/2016/10/28/police-from-5-states-escalate-violence-shoot-horses-to-clear-1851-treaty-camp
The Officers of Repression are terrified of the horses. They’ve called them “weapons.”
The appearance of the buffalo freaked them out.
Democrats turn on Comey after he reopens Clinton email wound Politico. How fickle of them. He was their statesman just a few weeks ago…My guess is that Comey told Congress because so many agents in the FBI were unhappy about how the earlier probe had been handled and the the news of the latest batch of e-mails was already all over the FIB (a Freudian typo). Thus Comey felt he had to go public, since it would otherwise be leaked and he judged that to be worse (imagine the wrath of the Republican Congresscritters)
=============================================
Its hard for me not to think that Richard “I am not a crook” Nixon would have served out his second term if he had had the more astute, personable, and CONNECTED press agents, press flacks, and reporters (but I repeat myself).
The crime itself, a third rate burglary, was obviously too minor to overturn an election. So it was the “cover up” What would judge Sirica have thought of the toughness of the FBI Hillary investigation???
So what was once known as a cover up is now “spin” and/or public relations??? Kinda of like bribery is now “synergy” and win/win and facilitating public private partnerships? Would ANY of those convicted in ABSCAM be convicted today with Hillary’s PR team – – or at all? If being convicted of bribery even POSSIBLE nowadays???
How many flat out lies has the email scandal exposed – yet we live in a world of EXTREME danger from Russian hacking, but fortunately our state department communications are un-valuable….
That’s what Nixon himself thought and his social inferiority complex was a big part of his makeup. His predecessor Lyndon was also jealous of those aristocratic Kennedys. But the reality was that the left’s grievance against Nixon (back when reporters were a lot more liberal) had more to do with his early redbaiting and his conduct of Vietnam.
Nixon also had a voice-activated taping system which proved to be his undoing:
Instead of tapes, the FBI now has emails between Hillary and Huma, likely containing Hillary’s explicit instructions to BleachBit hard drives, shift email retention to 30 days, withhold “private” emails which in fact were official business, and so forth.
One player who’s sweating is Hillary’s personal attorney David Kendall. I’m betting he was in on the conspiracy to destroy evidence and obstruct justice by withholding pertinent material. He could be facing disbarment or even indictment.
Hang out with the Clintons, you get STDs (Socially Transmitted Diseases).
how far can we trust the fbi not to “lose” some crucial emails?
this far: l_l
Why would Hillary ever need to email Huma with instructions, when they are connected at the hip during all of Hillary’s waking hours.
More likely that the entire criminal conspiracy took place verbally with no microphones present. Huma is going to painted as a ‘bad apple’ and that ‘nobody knew she was being so careless’. I have already seen the shills referring to Huma as a ‘former aide’…
DJPS
October 29, 2016 at 11:17 am
The documentary “Weiner” was fascinating, as there was a real marriage, and yet you had a woman who supposedly is so intelligent who couldn’t see what is now obviously a very troubled man. (or maybe she isn’t so smart – just an exceptional gopher??? Indeed, maybe that is the modus operandi – pick the ones stupid enough to believe that you are a FoB)
When Huma gets cut loose, how long will she toe the line before she (Huma) sees that her best course of action, just like with cutting Anthony loose, is to cut all ties and turn state’s evidence??? Huma has small children…
This will be the crux of the matter – is the Clinton conspiracy so large and powerful that discipline will hold, or will, like Napoleon’as imperial guard at Waterloo, will the battlefield pawns realize the best course is to run for the hills?
Podesta: I was truly in fear for my life…
If so, I predict a lot of tell all stories of what it was like to be a journalistic shill for the Clintons in the salad days….
Isn’t this usually where someone gets into a tragic traffic accident or shoots themselves in the back of the head a couple of times?
They’ll be offered some weekend R&R, or I&I, at the Mena Spa.
somebody prolly did off Breitbart for exposing (:-0) Weiner – i don’t think it was the burger
cough … ‘MISUSED NAILGUN’ … cough
Or a small plane crash with suspicious “investigation” like Michael O’Connell: Man In the Middle or, more recently, the mysterious murder of the DNC’s IT person Seth Rich.
I’m not sure these “instructions” will have been found… I suspect HRC is too wily to write them down in emails and elsewhere. I think it is just her laziness — we know she never really learned how to use a PC (!) and preferred simply using her Blackberry or smartphone. I suspect she was receiving lots of attachments (some classified) and she asked Huma to print them out. How the mighty are fallen!
“Checked on you but you were sleeping,” Abedin wrote to Clinton at 7:44 p.m. on Sunday, November 1.
“I’m up now so come when you are able,” Clinton replied later that night at 12:21 a.m. “Just knock on the door to the bedroom if it’s closed.”
http://www.theamericanmirror.com/hillary-huma-just-knock-door-bedroom-closed/
That’s actually kinda tender.
Maybe Hilary wants to re-introduce herself to us again…for real this time around. Yoko says she slept with her, if she just came out with it she would probably see a net gain
This thread has some serious over excited commentary. Remain calm everyone, Huma has many jobs to do in the inner and outer confines of the Clinton tabernacle. Then there is always the PARDON mechanism if the going gets bumpy.
I think we should wait and see exactly what the FBI has to say this time (and maybe next time too). We know what the Justice Department will say and we know that the State Department will take six months to clear the release of any emails. I don’t see the ancient mariner getting this albatross loose from around her presidential neck anytime soon.
Meanwhile wikileaks will be drip feeding the gears of the meat grinder every day or so too. This is just too good. Can it not end soon please, can it just rot on the brazier for a month or so?
We came, we saw, she failed! hohohohoho
Hillary is dumb but not enough to write incriminating things like that in email. In the wikileaks there’s very few emails, especially of substance, composed by her.
But Huma is dumb enough to write “Combetta will Bleachbit the archives pronto per ur instructions.”
If you’re being instructed to do something that might come back to bite you, it’s smart, not dumb.
The Clinton’s much like Richard Nixon are setting themselves up for a Shakespearean tragedy. Clinton’s lies and graft which seem to grow weekly have in reality been out there for some time. It will take time before they fall but they will fall and be disgraced. They have to much entitlement and disregard for consequence to go unpunished. It doesn’t matter how corrupt America has become. The Clinton’s will stand on top of the heap of corruption in this country and because of it will fall down.
i hope you are right.
“…Shakespearean tragedy…” — I saw a picture of Nixon recently that seemed to evoke this notion:
Richard Nixon at his wife’s funeral, June 26, 1993
I find it remarkable that the “dog ate my homework” excuse “the Russians did it” gains other than laughter.
Podesta had a gmail account, so everyone sending him stuff should have known it was not secure, if someone had determined his password.
Besides, “the Russians are trying to influence the election” mantra should have been laughed at, given the USA and HRC have been actively trying to influence elections around the world for many years.
As far as the evolution of government non-investigations and non-public servants, one can contrast the Nixon administration people who resigned (AG Richardson and Deputy AG William Ruckelhaus) when Nixon pushed them to dismiss the special prosecutor Archibald Cox.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturday_Night_Massacre
NIxon must be spinning in his grave to witness what the Clintons and crew have gotten away with, 100’s of millions in donations to their foundation, even while in office, extremely well paid speeches, apparent evidence destruction and gross mishandling of government security information.
Nixon probably believed he would have survived if he had had someone “wipe” (“erase” in those days) the tapes, a lesson not lost on HRC.
.
It has taken a corrupt Washington D.C village + national media to maintain HRC as viable candidate.
But she may pull it off, and then recycle a (steroid assisted ball player) Mark McGuire statement and assert, she was not elected “to talk about the past.”
John Wright
October 29, 2016 at 9:47 am
Very good point with your noting the evolution of non-investigations.
To me, as the parties have become less substantively different, the brand/grift drivers have become ever more critical. What is the aphorism about college faculty fights being so vicious because they are about so little?
Fundamentally, Nixon lost the repubs, and when he did, he lost the presidency.
Will Hillary lose the dems? CAN Hillary lose the dems???
If Trump were elected, could it be possible to remove him? We may have evolved to the point where our tribes are more important than our principals…
Now I don’t think that is just a dem problem – today I believe if Nixon and watergate were occurring now, Nixon’s chance of surviving would be quite good, what with FOX, Drudge, Limbaugh, Hannity, etcetera.
Lord of the Political Flies ……
“Who wants to join My Tribe ?? “
“We may have evolved to the point where our tribes are more important than our principals…”
Is that a Freudian Slip? Seems like having tribes more important than princi(pals) would be preferable based on the two principals involved.
Whine Country
October 29, 2016 at 4:40 pm
Well, my lack of spelling ability gives it an interesting slant….but I did mean principles.
I guess I could say our tribes are all principals and 0 principles…..
The response “the Russians hacked these emails!” is equivalent to responding to the Pentagon Papers with “the copy machine they used was made in China!”
Nice one!
I just knew I would find something wonderful in the links today! I supposed(and hoped) it might possibly be a leaked “d#ck pic” Hillary sent Weiner in bygone days, but the link to Celebrity Prayer Candles just made my weekend.
There, I found a candle “honoring” the man who encouraged a confused eighth grade boy to:
“Drop out of school before your mind rots from exposure to our mediocre educational system. Forget about the Senior Prom and go to the library and educate yourself if you’ve got any guts.”
Frank Zappa.
Nearly 50 years have passed since I first read those words. I see this blog as my “library” these days.
Thanks for that. And thank Frank for moving me into the realm of “subscriber”
IHateBanks
October 29, 2016 at 8:16 am
Lyrics to “Kodachrome” song by PAUL SIMON: When I think back On all the crap I learned in high school It’s a wonder I can think at all…
RIP Frank – he’d be having a blast right now writing songs about this election.
Think I’ll put on “Broadway the Hardway” and listen to him skewer the 80’s politicos.
And glad I get my news from a reliable source now rather than the tube –
.
I am gross and perverted
I’m obsessed ‘n deranged
I have existed for years
But very little has changed
I am the tool of the Government
And industry too
For I am destined to rule
And regulate you
I may be vile and pernicious
But you can’t look away
I make you think I’m delicious
With the stuff that I say
I am the best you can get
Have you guessed me yet?
I am the slime oozin’ out
From your TV set
Frank Zappa – I’m The Slime
And that’s when there were only three channels – indeed very little has changed.
remarkable how this site just gets better & better…Thanks! and agree he’s laff’n his ass off…
Mediocre educational system?
Nearly 50 years ago?
Was it as bad as today’s Teach for America?
Zappa had it right all along “shut up an play yer guitar”.
What we must not forget is that this election was stolen from Bernie Sanders. If Hillary was indicted like she should have been, Sanders would have gotten the nomination. Maybe Hillary should step down now and hand the nomination to Sanders. Ha! Good one, huh?
Instead, Hillary will limp over the finish line, barely beating a a man that any other candidate could have defeated by double digits.
What’s next after that? A pardon from Obama? My tin foil hat says no. After the election is when Hillary will step down and then Kaine will be installed as CIA Cyborg-Pres., which was probably the plan all along.
It’s too early to say Hellary is going to win. The nomination was not stolen from Sanders, it was stolen from the people who voted for Sanders, those who worked for his election.
What is with this American need for royalty, to hang all of it, the whole process on one person.
America’s system was founded on the myth of the “Philosopher King.”
As long as one such can be manifested to the ‘masses,’ personal responsibility for the nation’s politics can be avoided. Admittedly, this idea is not exclusive to America. However, the ‘Founding Fathers’ were as close to a group of ‘Philosopher Kings’ as we will ever see. Can anyone here seriously conceive of today’s politicians writing the Federalist and Anti Federalist papers? Compare the political discourse of the eighteenth century to today’s turgid prose coming out of the manquees posing as Think Tanks.
+1
How’d you get such political wisdom in one paragraph? Brilliant.
These days Hamilton and Jefferson would be arguing on CNN until cut off for a commercial.
But while those early intellectuals understood the problem (keeping power in check) their solutions not holding up so well.
As the post-Patriot Act period has demonstrated, the executive branch seized power with secret laws, secret spying, secret renditioning, secret courts (FISA) etc — and the legislative and judicial branches are totally on board with it.
The “weak” pre-1789 Articles of Confederation gov’t could not possibly have been worse. And likely — lacking the financing to launch foreign wars — would have been far better.
We now know that the Bill of Rights wasn’t a guarantee — it was a list of targets. All taken out now.
>As long as one such can be manifested to the ‘masses,’ personal responsibility for the nation’s politics can be avoided.
Excellent!
Do you also believe that The New Republic is a popular magazine that every citizen reads? I hope you’re not about to praise the holiness of a stratified, sadistic society where the people get whatever the oligarchs can’t be bothered to lay waste to.
But some people need to be led as a permanent condition. That’s what ethos’ll do to ya.
I can criticize without condemning. The “politics” I’m seeing just now start with condemnations and go downhill from there.
What the ‘Founding Fathers’ seemed to be doing was trying to work out a replacement for Monarchy and Aristocracy. The Aristocrats were manifestly failing. Today, the Capitalists are in the process of failing. Who is even mentioning, much less arguing methodology about replacing today’s version of Globalist Capitalism?
Besides, we already have the “Holy and Stratified Society.” One has only to peruse any issue of People magazine to see that.
ambrit, thank heavens for that! My point was that it might be incorrect to represent the Anti-/Federalist Papers as the customary level of discourse of the general public, particularly as some former standard due for revanche from aristocratic decadence. Also, that it might be incorrect to represent the broad general public as having greatly influenced that discourse. In the myth, the lumpen citizens along for the ride aren’t so much erased, as painted expectantly in the solid matte colors of their “betters”, as if they were parties to an equity that never was.
In other words, except for megachurch preacher Belknap’s enforced helplessness, I don’t believe the mucker or night-soil collector had a hand in the mode of government the ownership class eventually chose, or that mode would have been much more explicitly favorable to commoners’ interests, much more level, and much less exclusive. For the result to have come out as it was despite their interests would have needed either hefty pre-compromise on their interests (not that we aren’t doing much the same today) or a rather different, less woke culture.
If indeed that’s what they endeavored to do, they didn’t put much work into that area that we can see today — looks more like circling the wagons for their property claims.
oh Hunker my Hunker…i rest my case.
The only thing I’m skeptical about in that scenario is if Kaine’s butt is big enough to fit all the puppeteers’ arms in. But with enough additional marionette strings, the entire Deep State, Wall Street, the SP500, billionaires, hedgies, Pay for Players, Israel, Soros and Saudis should be able to animate him just right.
I saw speculation today that the rise of Kaine was a plot by the Catholics to install the only Catholic president since JFK. Invoked was an image of a decrepit Benedict pulling strings from the privacy of his disgrace, trying to bring the Catholic Church into a new millennium of political manipulation. Francis continues on as he did before, kissing babies and engendering goodwill, oblivious to the coup about to happen.
Honestly, given that this is 2016, it wouldn’t surprise me.
cocomaan: Anti-Catholicism is the anti-Semitism of the left. That’s a saying that has been around a while. Francis has his tiara in hock so that he can forward Kaine’s career? Sheesh. Francis can hardly get the finances of the Roman Catholic Church under control.
I think it was said in jest, I certainly am not taking it seriously. It was in the same conversation where Donald supposely predicted everything about the Weiner scandal.
Kaine is interesting to me, though. If HRC only has one term, I can’t really see him running for POTUS. Plus all the anti-catholic chatter in the podesta emails. He’s one of the younger Democrats and wholly unpleasant as seen in his performance in the veep debates.
Young democrats, the “democrats of tomorrow” so to say, seem in short supply after the party went all in for HRC.
cocomaan: Kaine is mainly a way for the Clintons to inoculate themselves. And he’s perfect, like Bing Crosby in Bells of Saint Mary’s. Except for the right-to-work problem (which, incidentally, goes against a church encyclical about labor) and the Hyde Amendment (which is outrageously sexist).
If Hillary cannot continue as Dem prez nominee, she –and the Elites– will NEVER help Bernie get the line.
It will go most likely to Kaine, as he’s a good little Corporatist Dem.
What is the line of succession if Clinton is never sworn in? Does anyone know?
You have to be more specific. I think if she has to withdraw before election day, Bernie takes her place, because he never surrendered his delegates. That’s not required. I think technically the DNC picks somebody. But it wouldn’t automatically go to Kaine, either, and with fruit of the poison tree issues (metaphorically) and Bernie being the most popular politician in American who’s been playing The Good Soldier (kinda), it would be hard not to put him in. And then the voting would start over from scratch, if I understand it correctly.
If she withdraws or dies after the election but before the Electoral College votes, I think they get to pick among whoever is left, but I can’t remember if that includes the VPs, or whether someone else would need to win a state to be be considered. I think there’s a weird loophole where some states’ electors can vote for whoever they want (including people who didn’t win states), but I am not sure I’m correct about that. Unless VPs can be chosen, that would seem to guarantee Trump the win, because presumably Trump electors would stick with Trump, and at least some Clinton electors would go to Trump rather than do something more daring because the Iron Law of Institutions would hold. They’re all invested in the system; you aren’t going to get more than half of them to do something daring that’s against the existing power structure.
I believe once she is certified by the electoral college, then if she dies before the inauguration, Kaine is sworn in. I am not 100% confident I’m correct about that. But there are different potential outcomes based on which stage of the process is in play.
Each day, we get closer to President Kaine, which is clearly the end game for the blob.
Ash Carter, or David Petraeus? Al Haig?
Just, like, wow dude.
The glaring subtext of the Post Weiner cover is how corrupt and despicable Americas political class is; out in the open, plain to see, in your face vile. This is the American political ‘Marie Antoinette’ moment. What’s best about this is that the Post cover makes American politicians look pathetic and deserving of contempt.
I do have to give Comey credit for recognizing that the Clinton E-mail Hairball has reached angry, pitchfork carrying mob dimensions. He would be irresponsible not to try to get out in front and pretend that he was leading the “parade.” The management of perceptions is a part of any ‘leaders’ job. At this point, Comey may be thinking primarily about the reputation, such that there is left, of the FBI. If the ‘new’ e-mail evidence is damning enough, rational people will expect Comey to “fall on his sword.”
Would that ‘they’ were all put up against a wall…
Hillary will not be ‘not under investigation’ between now and Nov 8.
Instead, she will be under investigation.
I don’t see, absence a miracle from our Omnipotent Media, a path out of this desert to her Promised Land.
Remember how the Israelites took (and are again taking) what they called the Promised Land — by trickery and slaughter. Just like how our oligarchs are doing it, the Clintonians sticking to the playbook…
Israel invades Lebanon tomorrow at sunrise? Someone shoots down a Russian / American fighter jet or domestic airliner? Missile hits aged Russian aircraft carrier? Trump accused of grabbing pussy?
We have ways to distract.
There are many Americans who are repulsed by the political class and their Acela cheerleaders. Over the course of many NC reader adult lives, Watergate and Hillary represent what may be bookends, with some redemption or turnaround to try to live up to the vision and decency of the nation’s founding.
My wife and I voted for Jill Stein.
And yet we are being told AGAIN they are “nothing burger” by the great liberal blogosphere again. Sadly, I am of the opinion that for some, including nice people I have met, will believe this is and everything else is a Republican plot. Unless and until all the smoke and mirrors is stripped away and both Clintons are facing at best house arrest with each other for the rest of their lives up to multi decade terms in federal prison with mountains of evidence anyway. Tribalism, denial, and frankly the fact that there were a few plots have built a huge wall around the Clintons behind which they break and twist and flaunt laws and regulations.
Since I thought at the time that the latest Weiner eruption was too conveniently timed, I might have to laugh if this is the beginning of the end of that smoke and mirrors. It would be appropriate if Weiner’s sexual problems were used by the Clinton machine and that hubris broke it and ultimately provided the greatest gift to the left ever by Weiner.
If this follows through with damaging results, we will have been spared misery twice from Clintons because of sex acts.
“Weiner eruption”… I sincerely hope that was intentional.
Roger Smith
October 29, 2016 at 10:06 am
When the history of the constitution is written, it will come to pass that the republic was saved by a couple of dicks…
I know plenty of team D members that would vote for Hillary even if she were convicted. They neither believe that HRC, or any other serious member of the team, could so something wrong nor do they accept that a member of the tribe can be judged by any but the faithful. And of course… Trump.
If this recent flare up effects anyone it will be those that are on the edge and there doesn’t seem to be many of those due to centralized MSM PR controls. Where this might make a difference is after the election. Then the Rs, with their ambivalent support for Trump, will bring out the long knives to prove they really are on the team.
You want to keep your dysfunctional government providers? You can keep your dysfunctional government providers – on steroids. Without a 50% a year markup included this time.
“….a member of the tribe…”
I think it’s more like a cult than a tribe.
Infallibility.
Selling of indulgences.
Moral superiority.
The faithful.
Holier than thou.
Creation of the Internet World in 7 days or by One Being (no, not by A.I., that is, not through artificial intelligence).
Immaculate Conception of a Love Story.
alas, you left out money, worship of, attempt to gather all available, at any cost of life and property, in the face of hurricanes and earthquakes. Sorry, one could get carried away.
Of course the tribe ain’t what it used to be. According to a Gallup January 2016 poll of USians,
And I have to wonder what a poll taken today would find. I had been a life-long registered Dem up until the primaries this year. I was so disgusted by the party’s political shenanigans that I re-registered as an independent following the primary (I couldn’t have voted in the primary as an independent). I find it difficult to believe that there aren’t a significant number of others who feel the same.
(meant as a reply to temporal)
sigh, a poster i used to regard as one of the most perceptive on the guardian (dating back to greenwald days) made a comment on a truncated guardian comment thread to the effect that it was all a republican plot.
Remind them that the digital signatures verify on the Clinton email and the Atlantic Council’s are Rathergateable forgeries. #FeelTheMath.
Oh nooooooooo…
Call the election off and declare Trump the winner! It’s the only choice now…
FBI Director James Comey writes in a letter sent Friday to congress that the bureau is investigating more emails related to Hillary Clinton’s use of a personal email server.
In previous congressional testimony, I referred to the fact that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had completed its investigation of former Secretary Clinton’s personal email server. Due to recent developments, I am writing to supplement my previous testimony
In connection with an unrelated case, the FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation. I am writing to inform you that the investigative team briefed me on this yesterday, and I agreed that the FBI should take appropriate investigative steps designed to allow investigators to review these emails to determine whether they contain classified information, as well as to assess their importance to our investigation.
Although the FBI cannot yet assess whether or not this material may be significant, and I cannot predict how long it will take us to complete this additional work, I believe it is important to update your Committees about our efforts in light of my previous testimony.
The letter’s vague. Everyone is losing their shit over it, either thinking it’s saying more than it is (there’s no suggestion that it’s her email), or finding its lack of detail suggestive of a partisan effort to spread fear and doubt days before an election.
Mush from the lying liars of the NYT:
“investigators to review these emails … to assess their importance to our investigation,” says Comey.
It couldn’t be plainer that this is an active investigation, with or without the hairsplitting verb “reopening.”
Speaking of NYT liars: one of the NYT articles I read this morning (sorry, no link) mentioned “Weiner’s illicit text messages to a woman…”
Elsewhere in the NYT they had it correct: his text messages were, knowingly, to a 15 year old girl.
The same MSM that swamped the dialogue with Trump’s (admittedly disgraceful) comments about women and alleged history of groping — where is the equivalent outrage over Weiner’s rape fantasies with an underage girl?
I did not read the details of the most recent Weiner sexting because gross.
But engaging in consensual sexual communications with an underage person, which is what I am under the impression is what he is accused of, is not a “rape fantasy.” It is illegal (depending on the state, I guess) because she is deemed as being too young to give consent. In essence, he is exploiting their power differential, as Bill Clinton did with Monica Lewinsky, even though she was a legal adult at the time. That may be criminal, it may be immoral, but it is not rape. Any kind of virtual power exchange role playing they might have done would only be criminal due to her age, unless there was some degree of more definitive coercion. That is also not rape. Whatever Weiner imagined about her in his mind is legal.
As to whether engaging in consensual sexting with a teen is worse than groping an adult woman against her will, I’d prefer to not have that debate. I’m a woman. We put up with a lot of crap. It’s all bad. And of course the MSM is being corrupt and dishonest, because they are not covering Bill Clinton’s sexual crimes — some of which have related convictions — as they insist Trump is the Worstest Sex Offender Eva on much less and weaker evidence. (To be clear, I believe Ivana Trump’s initial report of marital rape, so I’m not claiming Trump’s entirely innocent. Only that it is hilarious, in a very dark way, for the Clintons to be trying to claim the moral high road.)
Illegal but I guess it’s fairly common. There is a good documentary about a British guy that nabs these men by impersonating an underage girl and getting the guy to come over to a certain address, getting it all on video. In Britain the laws are such that the cops have a hard time nabbing these guys, but this civilian can hand over all his evidence and it’s admissible in court.
This whole election “cycle” is “hilarious in a very dark way”. I want to read the good books summing up all the nonsense. Will they be able to find a publisher?
I still say if HRC wins, she’s gonna run into nothin but trouble. Because there will be a few big newspapers who remain “loyal”, but then the whole internet laughing at her. Plus her health problems.
[…] Everything depends on the ground rules of the observer: if someone refuses to look at obvious patterns because they consider a pattern should not be there, then they will see nothing but the reflection of their own prejudices. C.Knight
Pattern…But it’s hard not to be skeptical of the narrative that Clinton was ignorant of the rules when the assistant secretary for diplomatic security sent a memo directly to Clinton in March 2011 that urged employees to “minimize the use of personal web email for business,” citing cybersecurity concerns. Three months later, a similar email went out to all staff, sent under Clinton’s name. http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/may/31/hillary-clinton/fact-checking-hillary-clintons-claim-her-email-pra/
Oh, please, none of us is going to know who is going to win this election until election day and possibly even later. That was the case on Thursday and it is the case today. Deluded people like you will continue to support Clinton, a whole lot will roll the dice with Trump, others will vote none of the above by choosing a third party or not voting for President at all, and a whole lot will stay home. In fact I think there is every chance that more people will stay home than vote for the eventual winner. And once again none of that has changed since this came down.
What you need to realize is that most of Clinton’s problems ARE Clinton’s problems. There was no reason for her to use a private server, she chose to do that. And there is only one reasonable explanation as to why – avoidance of public over sight. There was no reason for her to set up a Foundation that does very little that other groups do not already do and better. If she was so charitable she could have lent her name, her time, and donated her money to them. No, she needed a vehicle for personal money raising. And if she really wanted to raise money for state level democratic organizations there was no reason to set up a situation where donations to them got sent to her.
Nope, this election is no shoo-in because of the bone deep corruption of the Democratic Candidate – Hillary Rodham Clinton. And the devastating effect her chosen policies have had on most of the population of this country. No other reason, continued revelations aside.
I am beginning to think that even California is a swinging state.
Nothing is for sure.
And no one can afford to waste his/her vote…if the supreme goal is to defeat Hillary.
You have gotten sooooo caught up in this Trump nonsense. Now youre accusing us Greens of ‘vote wastage’ just like the Democrats do.
If the supreme goal is to not defeat, but disable bourgeois liberalism, its intentional structural unaccountability, and all the lying manipulating sacks of parasitic sycophancy that defend its “good” name, then what? The only way to not risk wasting a vote is to keep it home so that you can be sure where it is.
The political uncertainties you mention then must be combined with the uncertainties of our proven insecure election systems and manifold other versions of election-tampering including vote suppression, voter database hacking (see Greg Palast on “caging”), having conflict-of-interest judges rule on election fraud cases, and other forms of dirty tracks.
It leaves me not knowing what is political “truth” about political analysis, as they are typically based on the assumption of prior results being a correct representation of votes cast–which is provably not the case. (E.g., in a recent conversation Bev Harris told me out of curiosity as to how far back in time election fraud went, and how widespread, she looked into election fraud relating to the mechanical lever machines. She quickly found there were convictions for election rigging and related corruption everywhere, going back as far as she looked, which was the 1880s! There was a typical pattern of “old-boys network” of local “fixers”, which is what she subsequently found in relation to electronic voting machines.
+ + + Thank you, Pat. I will add: As the photos of the starving Yemenis arrive one after another, I will point out that foreign policy matters, too, but that most people in the U S of A don’t care enough to follow the money overseas. Which is why I will vote Green. My vote may be a droplet on a stone, but eventually, the stone cracks.
Why now, and why at all, considering comey gave out immunity to all and declared nothing to see here?
He must not have been on top of the wiener investigation, and agents seized the laptop and ran with it… And maybe a grand jury has been formed, nobody cared about wiener, the buses were lined up…
Now the whole agency knows, and it was already steaming about the prior…
More cover up was a cover too far, mutineers ready to jump…
Can’t imagine shill and $bill are popular with any of the agencies rank and file…
Comey might think his statement will prevent more eruptions, hope not.
What do swing undecideds think? Great to rub their noses in the stinking Clinton corruption a little more. And sweet the podesta source identified as not Russian in his own emails… clintons and agencies must not have had any idea since they swore it was the evil Putin… Wait, they all had the emails, didn’t they? So confusing…
Preet Bharara got them when he did the most minimal of an investigation and subpoened the Weiner/Abedin devices in regards to Weiner texting an underage female. PB tossed it back to the FBI where all of the parties have immunity.
Comey has to dot the eyes and cross the teez and find the additional e-mails unactionable in only the Clinton case.
Can’t verify if it’s real, but there’s a screencap going around from what is supposedly a private Facebook group for FBI agents, in which someone said a couple of days ago agents examining the Weiner/Abedin laptops found emails between Hillary and Huma plotting out destruction of evidence and obstruction of justice. Bharara notified Comey, and Comey knew he’d have to announce they’re reopening, because he had no way to silence the New York people.
Again, while I saw the actual screenshot, I have no way of knowing whether it’s doctored or faked. It had exactly the kind of typos a real post would have, for whatever that’s worth.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2016/10/28/matt-damon-explains-why-he-made-this-surprising-new-film/?wpisrc=nl_answer&wpmm=1
I know the person who did this documentary on the charter school movement, so I am linking this article, which is about both the documentary and the problems with charter schools.
the “school reform” movement is probably THE most visible case of The Grift that is the informal name for our national government. It is probably the most pernicious because its tendrils reach into every community in the United States. It connects to the Clinton Catastrophe(TM) in that that family seems to have become particularly specialized in the grift at a scale that must only be dreamed of by other pols (who aspire to the same — as I am sure we will see with team Obama in the next years. I think this story intersects with the FBI story in how The Grift offends professionals who see the potential in government in both ensuring equitable access to important public goods and delivering those services competently and professionally — as I have seen with public school teachers my entire life of now nearly 50 years. I suspect more than a few agents at the FBI came to feel similarly about the way Clinton abused national security laws. All the more so since we now have an absolute crisis of computer security world wide — and complete idiots (when it comes to computers) occupying the top posts of business and government (including their idiotic aides).
…. and more computers for schools …but graduates can’t do change working a register ….
more common-core please …
not !
Re the Intercept interview with the Syrian dissident now living in Turkey.
The conversation got me so confused that I have no idea what the point of the interview is (Assad is worse than IS?). He actually says at one point that “Islam is the religion of Muslims”…OK right and he’s an atheist so I guess that’s sort of makes sense to put out there but really?
If there’s anyone else who got something prescriptive or analytic or even instructive out of that piece, please help me to understand.
Perhaps The Intercept is not always to be trusted? Specifically in relation to the Syrian refugees, this Newsbud.com round-table discussion featuring whistleblower Sibel Edmonds, James Corbett, Spiro Skouras and Prof. Filip Kovachevic raises issues that relate to your question about The Intercept article.
For example, an issue that comes up towards the end of the discussion is Soros being one of those who is positioned to profit from the refugee crisis–which is not a line one is likely to hear of on The Intercept.
Another interesting part of the discussion was that of refugees being used as a geopolitical weapon–and that research has shown it to be more effective than either economic sanctions or diplomacy, as a way for a weaker state to accomplish some of its objectives in relation to more powerful states.
I suspect watching this video might give some new perspectives to consider in relation to the Intercept and the specific article about ISIS.
“…refugees being used as a geopolitical weapon”
Refugees as a real-world distributed denial of service attack. Perpetrated by The Usual Suspects.
No perhaps. As a Greenwald supporter I’m quite disappointed in it. Omidyar is part of the regime change/ngo contingent so that may explain.
Yes, I got the impression quite early that he had done better with editors pushing him. It is harder to be your own editor, with no one else saying wait a minute, what about, how do you know, have you considered…?
they don’t seem to allow comments on the robert mackey shill articles anymore.
I was confused too. He claims that the Assads are not anti-imperialist however it was Syria who drove the US out of Lebanon by bombing the Marine barracks in the 80s.
Not sure what the guy was trying to get at at all.
It was a Shi’ite suicide bomber probably funded by Iran, IIRC. The official (US/Israeli) story was that Hezbollah did it but the group was in its infancy back then and organizing that event was likely beyond its capabilities. There is no evidence that Syria was directly involved.
As far as I am concerned the US and French Marine barracks that were blown up were legitimate military targets. The governments of those nations made a choice to get involved in the Lebanese war on the side of the invaders (Israel) and their allies and were attacked by their opponents. Outrageous!
The Intercept is not to be trusted on certain geopolitical issues. See the comments and discussion following my question from 10/23, as I was similarly bewildered by their reporting.
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/10/links-102316.html#comment-2691429
Thanks. Totally consistent with the piece today. I’ve run into people like this supposed opposition figure at various times of my life and they always turn out to have some kind of grift running. Confused explanations are a dead giveaway.
What I liked in the Intercept were the Barrett Brown reports from federal prison. The guy’s a great writer.
Yes, B Brown and G Greenwald make it worthwhile. Other stuff on the whole still much better than the Post, etc., but that’s not saying a whole lot.
My immediate response to this piece was, since when does criticism of the US involvement in Syria imply approval of the Syrian regime?
OK, Assad’s a thug, the regime is odious. So how is the United States’ maneuvering/scheming/meddling/bombing/arming (profiteering)/extremist-nurturing etc in the region helping this horrifying situation?
I don’t understand either…
My stance is that I want this war to end. Everything bad said about Assad may be true. But a stable Syria under his regime is still a better prospect than an Afghanistan-style scenario in which the region spends the next decade or more in a multi-way civil war between different bands of head-choppers. The guy claiming Assad is worse than ISIS is a worm, pure and simple.
On the subject of Syria, much more important news is that the the militants outside of Aleppo made another massive push to punch through SAA lines and reopen a supply line to Eastern Aleppo. After some initial success their offensive seems to have ground to a halt and is in the process of being reversed.
I agree completely on Assad.
As a comparative example, Gaddhafi was a bad guy, sure, sure. But does anyone actually think Libya is better off now than in 2010? It had the highest standard of living in north Africa but now its a cancerous sh*thole infecting the entire region with jihadis.
Clinton wants to do to Syria what she did to Libya, and Russia is all “NOPE!”
It’s complicated. A lot of what he says about Assad being a neoliberal dictator is true. The neoliberal reforms Assad carried out before the Arab Spring earned the praise of Hillary when she was Secretary of State*. It was also a contributing factor in the uprising as rural areas suffered from drought and increased poverty. That doesn’t mean I’m in favor of regime change or whatever nonsense because I suspect that if Assad were to fall the country would fall into chaos and warlordism that would make Somalia look like a vacation resort. The horrifying truth of the matter is that Assad might be the only person holding the country together.
I’m more than a little irked about his comments about the international left though. While it’s true most leftists don’t know crap about Syria the idea that leftists are siding with fascists is silly. The fact of the matter is that the secular opposition stopped being a major factor in 2013 after the strongest groups of secular rebels in Aleppo were crushed** by the Islamist coalition including al-Nusra and Islamic State. Even in 2012 the Islamist ideology dominated the opposition. The man is pretending it’s still 2011 and he’s either ignoring or dismissive of everything that’s happened since.
But I just can’t get over the fact that he fled to Turkey. A country which is cynically fueling the conflict and destroying his country for it’s own regional ambitions. Instead of Northern Syria where Syrians enjoy a sense of relative peace and broader rights in the Federation, It’s also where his political ambitions are at least a possibility. By no means is it perfect but it’s not cowering under the umbrella of the neo-Ottomans or begging the West to overthrow Assad and put him in power.
*In Hillary’s email release from Wikileaks it’s mentioned that one of the things that could be used to undermine Assad was to attack the success of his reforms. That’s ironic.
**These secular groups were actually supported by the CIA. After their defeat at the hands of the Islamists/Jihadist survivors from both the Hazzm Movement and Syria Revolutionaries Front who didn’t flee Syria or join the Islamists reformed into Jaysh al-Thuwar (Revolutionary Army) which allied with the Kurdish YPG in an operations group called Euphrates Volcano.
This was the nucleus of the Syrian Democratic Forces.
Was there ever a “secular opposition”?
https://gowans.wordpress.com/2016/10/22/the-revolutionary-distemper-in-syria-that-wasnt/
We’ve been fed propaganda on Syria out the wazoo.
I think so. The early protests in 2011 might’ve been directionless but they certainly weren’t agitating for Sharia law. They were more a general protest against corruption kinda like the Iraqi protests in Baghdad that happened earlier in the year. The armed opposition in 2012 did contain some secular/nationalist elements, and I already named the two major groups in the north in my previous notes, but like the DIA report said it was mostly Brotherhood / Al Qaeda that dominated the opposition. By 2016 only a few FSA franchises and the Syrian Democratic Forces can be considered secular-minded or nationalist.
I don’t agree with Draitser but that author isn’t much better. He cites pro-Assad journalists like Fisk and deliberately uses Cockburn’s statements in 2016 as somehow applicable to 2011/2012. His assertion there isn’t a drought or water issues with the Euphrates when Iraq has similar water-sharing issues with Turkey and is still suffering from shortages is ridiculous. The neoliberalization of the Syrian economy involving the cutting of subsidies to the poor was covered by Roland on today’s article by Gaius Publius so I don’t feel the need to reiterate any of that. It’s also common knowledge that the government staged counter-demonstrations by bringing in government workers and their families on buses.
It was a ‘unicorns do exist’ article
The NYT piece on Chelsea Clinton certainly provides a different perspective. On the one hand, it supports the detailed, authentic concerns CVC shared in her lengthy email report to her parents after her post-earthquake visit to Haiti. It is hard to square her Haiti report–whose date is unknown, interestingly–with what actually transpired in Haiti–a compounded disaster, “thanks” in large part to the elder Clintons’ “help”. Was it that CVC means well but doesn’t have the experience (or inclination?) to play hardball with the skill and enthusiasm and commitment of her parents’ and the Foundation’s senior aides and staff?
Or is this just NYT trying to whitewash at least one of the Clinton family? And sow doubt and confusion? Or an email written at a much later date to provide credible whitewash material? (I keep learning that facts are more nefarious than what I’d imagined.)
I have no idea what to think, since I don’t know CVC and probably some mixture of all of these are true. At least combining all the information may come closer to the “truth”, whatever that is.
It’s worth noting that one of the things Doug Band complains about in the Podesta emails is how Chelsea doesn’t really do anything, and yet the foundation seems tailor made to make it seem as if she is important and necessary to… whatever it is the Clinton Foundation is meant to do.
And I quote:
She’s clearly out of her depth. And when you consider how the Clintons have mistreated the Haitians over the years, there’s also a great deal of bad blood (and real blood) to get past.
You can read the email in full here.
Exactly. It’s hard for me to know whether Band is trying to blacken CVC because she is a threat to his own power, and whether her incompetence is real or imagined, exactly what kind of competence is meant. (If she was genuinely trying to clean up the foundation, she’d be a serious threat to Band’s power. But on the other hand, even if she was genuinely trying to do this–and I’ve no idea if she was–she probably didn’t have the level of “hardball” competencies Band would have, i.e. she’d be incompetent compared to him in the ability to play unethical power-games and manipulate people–or maybe she was genuinely incompetent in positive leadership skills. Maybe some of both.)
IOW, Band’s evaluation and lengthy memo has self-interested motives.
Will the real CVC please stand up? Maybe if she were to take public, principled stands where she was putting herself at risk we’d have a better means of assessing who she is. I’m not aware of her doing this.
Well, of course he’s self-interested; I take that as a given here. But I do think there is independent corroboration of what he’s saying.
One, think about her well-paid stint at NBC doing… what exactly? Then the fact she was in half a dozen unrelated graduate degree programs (serial student syndrome). Also, I recall a panel on women in tech that she moderated from last year, in which she basically contributed nothing beyond awkwardly repeating things the other panelists said in different words.
Her only real job has been CGI/Clinton Foundation, which was specifically created to make it look like she has a real job. I’m also wont to believe Band, because, as a money man, he has to obsess over what’s being bought, so his suspicion that nothing much at all is being garnered for the megabucks makes sense.
So Band’s annoyed Clinton junior wasn’t as good a money-raiser/manipulator/supporter-of-WJC Inc as he was.
It’s a pity she hasn’t found a way of playing a positive role. The email from Haiti–if it’s for real (???)–indicates she’s not without some fundamental humanity and intelligence. She seems to lack moral courage, and being in the foundation hotbed (and hedge-fund hubbie) probably hasn’t encouraged principled stances that put social/financial/political capital at risk.
I don’t give her a free pass–she’s responsible for her actions. But at the human level I understand how easy it is for any of us to sell out with far less inducement. There’s hope for any of us to change for the better/wiser. I also don’t count on it. Maybe she needs one of those life-transforming NDE experiences ala Anita Moorjani or Dr. Mary Helen Hensley.
It’s pretty clear she was bred to be, in effect, the next generation of the dynasty, and perhaps at some basic level she resists the mess that’s been imposed upon her as a result. But at the same time, having been brought up in a world of ridiculous privilege, it’s pretty clear as well that she can’t quite see a way past it, like a trust fund kid who suddenly develops a class conscious. She may have some sympathies with what’s happened to the victims of American imperialism, but she’s never going to do anything to actively undermine it either.
She has stood up. She stood up in public and said that Bernie’s plan for universal health care would strip people of their health insurance. She stood up in public and said that legalizing marijuana would be injurious to people’s health.
She has a graduate degree in public health.
I’m seeing unwarranted sympathy for Chelsea Clinton. Yes, she was probably shocked by the squalor in Haiti. So what? What did she do? She pretended her father’s henchman was the true villain, taking advantage of her dad. And then…nothing. Was the graft stopped? Is Doug Band under indictment? If she wanted to make the world a better place, all she had to to do was leak her mother’s medical condition via records or video to Ivanka’s husband.
She is not a good person.
She has a graduate degree in public health? That’s a shocker, given what she’s said and hasn’t said (and hasn’t done).
I guess she doesn’t have much practical experience with public health.
Analyzing or describing a situation is one thing–but doing something constructive to change it is a completely different skill set. I don’t see either Band or CVC doing that.
(Symnpathetic–I keep hoping for the best and want to give people the benefit of the doubt. But your examples show the leopard’s spots.)
Uahsenaa
October 29, 2016 at 11:07 am
CANNOT RESIST POSTING THIS FROM EMAIL:
I’m also starting to worry that if this story gets out, we are screwed. Dk
> and I built a business. 65 people work for us who have wives and husbands
> and kids, they all depend on us.
=====================================
ships, sinking, rats…
When it all collapses, the question will be “How could this have gone on so long without any one knowing???!?!!!”
And of course, anyone who could have done something knew, but didn’t do anything because not doing anything was more profitable than doing something.
Yes, the answer will be that the Clintoons were exceptionally cleaver master grifters…
Interesting. The article answers the incredibly complex and demanding question of how the FBI agents investigating Weiner’s home devices were able to do what the Hillary investigators were not:
And I think that little fact will begin to dig at people who haven’t drunk the kool-aid deeply. It is the little things that destroy the delusions most effectively.
Holding my package & voting for Hillary. Please don’t judge me.
Better to grab your own ‘package’ than hers.
That would be groping.
I surely won’t judge you as I think my hubby will vote the same way. Oddly enough, this year I understand anyone voting for any of the 4 candidates that most people know. If the socialist worker’s party had a slot here in CT, I’d vote for them. Right now I can’t say what i’ll do in 10 days, but it’s not likely I’ll vote for the mad bomber or the orange hair ball.
No need for us to judge you. Deep down you have done it yourself.
only you can judge you.
Holding several packages & voting for Jim Haygood. Yves, Lambert & all the rest of you immensely alluring souls: Won’t you join me? You won’t regret it.
Jimbo / Treas…Hunkerdown / Pres…Ambrit / VP…
Craaz / DOJ…Optimider / DOD…
i’ve been here toooooo long
I’m flattered, aby, but I can’t golf for spit. Can I trade for Sec of Interior or maybe Commerce?
Nope. Your calling is Your burden for being so Hunker…suck it up.
“Dennis the Peasant: Listen. Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
Arthur: Be quiet!
Dennis: You can’t expect to wield supreme power just ’cause some watery tart threw a sword at you!”
“I mean, if I went ’round saying I was an emperor, just because some moistened bint had lobbed a scimitar at me, they’d put me away!”
Graham Chapman
Dear aby;
I keep having these recurring nightmares where I am on a perpetual trip to golf dates in exotic locales and state funerals. Am I losing it? Erudition and perspicacity continually elude me, but a step ahead of me, and one step behind some hurrying rabbit.
Oh heavens. It’s the dead watches of the night and the owls are hooting in the trees down the road!
Yours,
Ensnared
Ha! You’re Perfect…Hunker will be busy disarming NSA computers! Leave the golf courses to the Elites…they can sleep on them with pup tents.
i have an mind’s eye for these things…
I judge you. For whatever that’s worth.
Every single person who votes for Hillary Clinton who has access to the necessary information to know that she has committed serious crimes against the state, war crimes, and serious corruption that undermines the rule of law domestically and global stability and health, that she is dragging us towards a nuclear confrontation with Russia and intends to destroy Social Security and the remains of the social safety net for American citizens, is a traitor to the nation, as far as I’m concerned. You have other options. Use one.
Hillary’s ‘Saturday Night Massacre’ (a la Nixon)
“Hillary Clinton Assails James Comey, Calling Email Decision ‘Deeply Troubling’ ”
“Hillary Clinton and her allies sprang onto a war footing on Saturday, opening a ferocious attack on the F.B.I.’s director, James B. Comey, a day after he disclosed that his agency was looking into a potential new batch of messages from her private email server.
“Treating Mr. Comey as a threat to her candidacy, Mrs. Clinton took aim at the law enforcement officer who had recommended no criminal charges less than four months earlier for her handling of classified information as secretary of state.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/30/us/politics/hillary-clinton-emails-fbi-anthony-weiner.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0
SNL resides in the shadows of Monty Python…
“Sir Beldevere: What makes you think she’s a witch?
Peasant 3: Well, she turned me into a newt!
Sir Beldevere: A newt?
Peasant 3: [meekly after a long pause] … I got better.
Crowd: [shouts] Burn her anyway! ”
see what i mean
‘Saturday Night Massacre’ was a term used by political correspondents to refer to the following event during the Watergate scandal. Nixon’s Atty Gen Elliot Richardson had appointed Archibald Cox as special prosecutor to investigate events surrounding the Watergate break in. When Cox subpoenaed Nixon directly for information Nixon balked and on a Saturday ordered Richardson to fire Cox. Richardson refused and resigned. Nixon then ordered Asst. Atty. Gen Ruckelshaus to fire Cox. Ruckelshaus refused and resigned. Nixon finally got Robert Bork to fire Cox. So 3 men gone from office on a Saturday: Richardson, Ruckelshaus, and Cox. (The firing was ruled later ruled illegal.)
Clinton’s furious attack on Director Comey under these circumstances seems reminiscent, imo. The reference has nothing to do with SNL or Monty Python.
Ah-Ha…appreciate the history lesson. my-bad !
That was why a “pundit” on I believe the Dick Cavett Show referred to Nixon as “That Cox sacker.” It was a simpler time then.
Chinese hexagonal structures.
Don’t know about hexagons, but if they were hexagrams, my guess would be for commemorating I-Ching divination casting results for the world to see.
There was a link (on NC I think) a few days ago about hexagonal “holes” in the clouds, tying them to gigantic destructive waves. No idea if there’s a connection but it’s curious.
There’s a massive hexagonal storm in the north polar region of the planet Saturn.
France is shaped like a hexagon. It all makes sense.
Fuel storage tanks for ships, store diesel fuel. Exterior are spill control berms. Go look at most any refinery or harbor fuel storage for similar structures, perhaps not always in hexagonal arrays.
Anyone intrigued by the Camille Paglia piece ( http://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/10/the-woman-is-a-disaster-camille-paglia-on-hillary-clinton/ )might be interested in this recent podcast about her, in context of her recent appearance in London as part of the 2016 “Battle of Ideas”.
“The woman.”
Finger pointing, “That woman.”
Many are regretting having (internal email) intercourse* with the woman.
*reminding myself the definition of intercourse is ‘communications or dealings between individuals or groups.’
I’ve never read any of her works, and wasn’t familiar with her. Clearly she’s someone who’s not afraid to fly against the prevailing thought patterns. I find it inherently useful to broaden the range of ideas I’m exposed to, whether I agree with them or not. It’s so easy to absorb existing memes and not realize it.
Agree completely with your “absorbing existing memes” observation. I’ve always been interested in watching movies about cults and it finally dawned on me that one reason is because the people inside lose the ability to see they are in a cult. Which led me to wonder, what is it about my culture that I can’t even see is cult-like? This place is a huge help.
Whole Foods has the best score by far. Now I’m going to feel guilty when I pay less by shopping at other stores.
Since this morning, the story has apparently been pulled from Alternet. But I found this link which is closer to the original source: http://www.goorganiccanada.com/shocking-number-of-top-retailers-sell-food-produced-with-pesticides-toxic-to-bees-ecowatch-2/
The bee in my bonnet, as it were …… it that a person can go to any retailer (Home Depot, Lowes, your neighborhood hardware store, etc…) and buy any number of insect-killing chemicals …… and apply them in the most unthinking manner …….. but hey ……. nobody in the vaunted (msm or alt.) press ever brings that up ….which leaves Joe & Jane Public off the hook and guilt free …….
It’s not just the boogeman corpros …
It couldn’t be that the notion of property is the problem, could it? The right to lay unlimited waste, for example, ought to be a capital crime.
“Obama: Most will be ‘pleasantly surprised’ by health plan costs ” I’m incredibly surprised!!! My health insurance just rose almost another $400.00 per month now standing at $2,850.00 per month for a three person family.
request asylum someplace, if you possess skills you can sell abroad?
I was surprised too when I found out that my premiums are set to rise 30% next year. But it felt like a kick in the tail with a frozen gum boot. And did anyone else notice this howler towards the end of the article:
“…Obama asked his vast network of grassroots activists to help protect his healthcare legacy days before the administration launches its final sign-up period.”
Wtf?
In other contexts, people sometimes post comments here that modest inflation is not bad, and might even be good. When people must endure severe insurance premium inflation such as this, it’s clear that any other price inflation, no matter how moderate, is going to be very harmful. Wage inflation rarely keeps up with price inflation. Cost of living wage adjustments always lag behind the price increases.
Wiener revelation proves Comey dropped the ball on Hillary probe I work at a bank and we were told never to send emails to our personal email, implying we’d be fired for doing so. And yet “She routinely forwarded emails from her state.gov account to either her clintonemail.com or her yahoo.com account,” the agents wrote. Why? “So she could print them” at home and not at her State Department office.
Presumably even the most stalwart Clinton defenders would have to admit that printing out State Dept documents at home, some of them possibly classified, is a serious problem? Especially when, erm, one’s husband is a serial liar and sexter (to 15-year-old girls, FFS, including “rape fantasies”… ugh) and presumably a top blackmail candidate?
I wandered over to Daily Kos late yesterday to see how they were taking the latest news. True to form it was all “this is a nothingburger” and “how DARE Comey release this letter” — whereas when he closed the investigation Comey was the greatest FBI director in history over there.
Also did a check at DK — totally having a “Leave Britney alone” breakdown.
It sounds like that’s what they found – she forwarded emails from the state dept server to her yahoo account, and then logged into her yahoo account from her husband’s laptop, which he then used to try and sex up a minor. I forget what she originally said in the investigation, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t that. I wonder if that invalidates her nonprosecution agreement.
Humm …. Yahoo Email ……. now, I seem to recall THAT internet giant posting a ‘security issue’ they brought to light recently …
This just in. The Russians control Anthony Weiner’s penis! Sorry no link.
Well the Ukraine girls really knock me out
They leave the West behind
And Moscow girls make me sing and shout
That Lolita’s always on my my my my my my my mind
— Beatles, Back in the USSR
Should include apology: they said Georgia, with (I presume) a hat tip to Hoagy Carmichael.
Hoagy loved Tbilisi in the springtime. ;-)
Worse yet, the FBI may discover that the Clintons, Huma and Ant, Mr & Mrs Trump, Putin and his underage blonde Ukrainian sex slave, all belong to the same wife swapping club and have just been screwing with our heads all these years.
It’s all in his ‘head’ ……
From standingrock.org.
Video of shotgun fired into the crowd:
Here’s the google drive link again:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BysUexxOGui6a3BXQ3NWdDJ5TTQ/view?usp=sharing
Tinfoil optimism, but hey…
“If Berniecrats won even one or two states by writing in “Bernie Sanders,” and Trump and Clinton both fell even one electoral vote below the majority, the House of Representatives would have to choose between Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, and Bernie Sanders.”
More likely scenario:
“If a candidate dies or becomes incapacitated between the general election and the meeting of electors, under federal law, the electors pledged to the deceased candidate may vote for the candidate of their choice at the meeting of electors. Individual states may pass laws on the subject, but no federal law proscribes how electors must vote when a candidate dies or becomes incapacitated. In 1872, when Horace Greeley passed away between election day and the meeting of electors, the electors who were slated to vote for Greeley voted for various candidates, including Greeley. The votes cast for Greeley were not counted due to a House resolution passed regarding the matter. See the full Electoral College vote counts for President and Vice President in the 1872 election.”
The Republican-controlled (and thrice-divided) House of Representatives or the Supreme Court. Take your pick.
One cannot agree to an appropriations bill in their own caucus. The other is evenly split 4-4 with most of one set of four having been in the majority for Bush v. Gore.
Electors are chosen to be faithful to the party and the candidate.
What happens when some judge decides that Trump is now fair game before the election?
It’s not Bernie that is the result; it is Constitutional chaos.
Greeley died; he wasn’t incapacitated. It takes some sort of political judgement based hopefully on evidence to decide whether a candidate is incapacitated or not.
That’s not tinfoil optimism, that’s wishing for a unicorn.
How Inequality Found a Political Voice — How a Nobel laureate can pontificate on this and not even mention Occupy Wall Street is a mystery to me. Or not. As James Joyce said: “Wipe your glosses with what you know”. And Heritage Foundation knows populism is bad.
Your homes devices could be hacked by ultrasound…
“High-frequency audio “beacons” are embedded into TV commercials or browser ads. These sounds, which are inaudible to the human ear, can be picked up by any nearby device that has a microphone and can then activate certain functions on that device.”
Aluminum tape, the kind used for heating and ventilation work, blocks sound on a P.C. microphone. and blocks the camera. The stuff is expensive, but a half postage stamp sized piece will do the job. It has its own backing that you peel off, so you can hand out small pieces of it to friends with no mess. put a piece of paper over the microphone and camera first to prevent the tape’s glue from clogging them. One roll could probably tape a thousand cameras and microphones. FBI director James Comey has said he tapes his microphone and camera.
For people who must have a smartphone and leave it on all the time, you are handing away your personal privacy voluntarily. If it’s powered on in your purse or pocket, and is continually sending out a “Here I am” signal to locate the nearest cell tower, a signal strong enough to penetrate a foot of concrete, you are also giving away the health of your internal organs. It’s a grave new world.
AL tape will block camera, but I doubt will do much to block sound reaching microphone. May even act as a supplementary diaphragm. Laws of physics prevail. Also, any “ultrasound” messages are incapable of being transmitted or reproduced by the limited bandwidth of the audio channel on almost all devices.
Not that it isn’t possible in some circumstance, but you cannot equate “proof of concept” research with real world applications.
If you want to block microphone, you would need something with more density. Try it yourself, put a bit of tape over the mic, turn up the gain, and use “sound recorder” or the like to record your voice. It will probably render high freq. a little less intelligible, but not block anything of consequence. I have some, and will try it tonight, just for grins.
Just about any fairly opaque tape or sticker will work for camera, even a translucent one would likely render images as a blur.
Depending on the model of your computer, plugging in a broken microphone can do the trick (can just be at appropriate male plug plus a pair of wires going nowhere).
In these devices there is a manual (not software controllable) switch that turns off in onboard microphone so as to not confuse with input from the attached bogus mic. Big advantage is that malware cannot route around the hardware.
Sound is transmitted by pressure waves, not by electromagnetic waves.
Imagine you are inside a sealed steel drum, if someone pounds on the outside metal surface, you will hear it as the sound pressure vibrations are transmitted inside the drum to your ears..
But if someone shines a bright light on the outside of the drum (electromagnetic waves) you won’t be able to see it from inside as the electromagnetic waves are reflected back or absorbed (or both).
To block sound (passively) you need some sort of pressure absorbing material (such as foam) that converts the sound into heat.
Effectively you want to cover your microphone with something that absorbs the frequencies of interest.
I don’t believe aluminum tape will do much to block sound as the sound pressure waves will travel through it, just as sound travels through a thin apartment wall.
Aluminum tape will block (reflect back) electromagnetic waves such as light or radio frequencies, not too useful in this case
One drunken evening I filled my phone’s mic port quite accidentally with delicious Lindor chocolate. I assure you it’s quite effective.
One other, less drunken evening, after a dodgy firmware upgrade for a low-cost generic Android tablet, the ambient noise level got low enough that I heard faint clicking noises. I shut the tablet down and they stopped; turned it back on and they started up again not much later. That firmware apparently had some special sauce in it that activated the camera. The camera was promptly disconnected and said tablet filed with the e-recycling.
So the phones the FBI took from Weiner and Abedin in August 2016 had emails on them unrelated to the Weiner sexting allegations that suddenly get invoked by the FBI on another unrelated investigation.
Is this not the danger of law enforcement overreach that many articles posted at NC have been hammering for some time.
If this sort of law enforcement can occur to an experienced politician in the middle of an election campaign, how much easier is it to happen to ordinary citizens?
Not to divert from the general mood of celebration of “Ding, dong, the witch is dead.”
Just pointing out that we have evidence and possibly blackmail by law enforcement for evidence or resolution of a case being celebrated when it happens to politicians that we would not accept (but probably would be forced to) if it occurred to us in our private life.
We have become that cynical. Not defending or electioneering, just commenting on how deep in shit we all have become with little prospect for change.
The problem with knowing some who is accused of breaking the law is that investigations into that person can drag in others who have done things wrong upon discovery. That is the nature of law enforcement. A failure to report and investigate apparent wrong doing in that circumstance makes the office of the investigator complicit in a coverup.
This is one of the reasons people don’t really want to be friends or even in communication with those they know have provable ethical lapses. Weiner has this in spades. Plenty of people have gone to jail for less than he is believed to have done. With respect to Abedin, lots of smart people have dropped their spouses like a hot rock for less.
The cynical thing would be to believe that when some people break the law they should be left alone because of their position in life. Not investigating because someone is running for, or holds, an office is not a valid form of justice.
I haven’t read a single story suggesting that the people investigating Weiner were blackmailing him.
Lambert pointed out to me that the FBI might need to get a subpoena to look at the Clinton-Huma e-mails. Which means Hillary’s harrumphing about “Show us what’s in them” at the press conference would seem to paint her in a corner. The Rs could go nuts if she were to fight a subpoena. And that would also insure this is in play through Election Day (as in the FBI won’t even be able to check if the e-mails are duplicates).
However, I’d flip this around: the FBI should not treat this case differently than they do other cases. If they routinely engage in what is arguably overreach, the elites might wake up and realize they can be hoist on their own petard and decide to pass more restrictive laws.
October 18th news article:
FBI should have their subpoena in hand now. In fact it may explain the timing of Comey’s statement yesterday.
The fbi should not treat this case differently…
Than what other cases?
How they treated the prior Clinton investigation? In that case they should give immunity to all and destroy the laptop.
What they used to do? Hand the results of their investigation to justice (giggle) for subsequent grand jury indictment?
The latter is no longer operative for elites. Funny, I remember a time when nobody was above the law, there were investigative reporters and newspapers that reported the news…
Showing my age.
A subpoena? I would hope so. That would address part of the issue I was raising.
Clinton might understand a subpoena is on the way and was trying a pre-emptive spin on it.
I would hope that if the FBI engages in overreach to deal with white-collar offenses by elites that they act similarly with all of their cases.
Thinking that the Clintons will serve as an example to the elites is a delusion. No matter how wealthy and powerful the Clintons become, for the elites they are still those interlopers from Arkansas. And for Arkansan elites, they are still “those damned integrationists”.
Overreach would have to apply to someone really shocking to be effective; one of the TBTF bankers or one of the Koch Brothers might get more attention.
The rest of my issue is the free pass the Bush administration was given on separating out emails. Not to mention committing war crimes. And the failure of elites to answer for the multiple layers of fraud that were involved in the meltdown that created the Great Recession.
The Clintons have not been Teflon; they have been Velcro.
There are plenty of war crimes to go around, and your attempt to separate the clintons from the elites is effing hillarious…also relating to your aca defense below that “all we have to do is elect new legislators”, I agree, I’ll never vote for another democrat again, too many lucy/football moments for me in my 30+ year voting tenure…
Strongly Disagree. the Clinton’s are put upons to old money…the Dudley’s nor the Winthrop’s would ever ‘entertain’ them. but they would donate where their skin is in the game. ‘interlopers’ are just about the kindest Clinton description i’ve read.
“The Beltway Hillbillies” is the best moniker for the Badger Game from Little Rock that I’ve heard.
thanks, I stand corrected….maybe it’ll make it easier for them to be thrown off the bus….?
It was Democratic leadership that declared we should look forward, not back, and refused to prosecute the Bushies. Obama protected them just as he is protecting Clinton. Your beef is with him, the Democratic Party, and the ruling class generally.
If Hillary had simply elected not to run for President again, her crimes committed during her Secretary of State time would have gone unpunished. And they will STILL probably go unpunished. The very worst thing likely to happen to her is that Trump squeaks out a win, Obama pardons her on his way out the door to please his own donors as they seek to use him to build a new money laundering/influence peddling/shadow government “foundation,” and she, Bill and their respective sexual partners and servants hightail it to the Bahamas to live out their days.
^^^ Exactly. It wasn’t just impeachment that was taken off the table. No one in DC gave two thoughts to The Bush email thing. A lot of people blame it on me (you never said anything when Bush did it. Which wasn’t true, but whatever) others blame it on the media….
But what about Congressional and Senate Dems? Couldn’t they have whipped up a frenzy? Especially if they included war crimes, etc.
(1) Trump might win by a much more healthy margin than merely “squeaking.”
(2) We’ve never had a prez like Trump, at least not lately. He’s not a member of “the club”. If HRC is pardoned, he will still try to prosecute anybody that’s not pardoned. He loves going to court.
At this point, if Trump wins, I will weep with joy. And I have no illusions of the next four years being a nirvana of progressive action if it happens. But now that Republican party leadership is openly undermining him, he would be truly independent. At least he would be legitimately elected. It’s something. But if it means no TPP and a whole bunch of show trials, it would be good for the nation. We have got to get this corruption under control and the bankers back in their cages. Even if Congress is completely paralyzed, it’s better than what would happen under Clinton.
Also, I would watch Rachel Maddow’s election night coverage on a loop before bedtime for weeks, possibly months. It probably won’t happen. But if all I can have are dreams, I’m going to make them good ones.
I too want Trump to win. Not deeply enough to vote for him, but his win would really take a weight of anxiety off my shoulders the next 4 years.
(I dont live in a swing state, but if I did, I STILL wouldnt vote for him…)
You lost me. If you want him to win, you vote for him. That’s the whole purpose of voting.
I think some of us are still on that journey.
I am closer everyday to a Trump vote but it makes my stomach hurt to think about. A Hillary presidency however, terrifies me.
Your comment and reading aab’s comment above clarified things quite a bit.
Part of my problem is that so much of my social network is divided between voting for her out of fear of Trump or voting Stein or Bernie out of hatred of Hillary. No one in my set is openly comitted to a Trump vote. Although I think a couple of my cousins might be starting to consider it.
Thinking ahead to my feelings if either wins (as aab did) is a good exercise. So I’m making progress. Still, I might be undecided until I get in the voting booth…..
One of the genius things about the Clinton demonization strategy is that it helps suppress people saying they’ll vote for Trump, so the immoral low information voters primly advocating for Clinton go unchallenged, helping to hold on to fringe voters who know in their gut that Hillary Clinton is a bad person and would be a terrible president but don’t feel confident enough to say so. Some of them will vote Trump privately, but since it isn’t showing up in the polling, their secret vote can be effectively wiped away. Others will limp to the polls for Clinton, because “everybody’s doing it.”
The only bad vote a person can cast in this election is a vote for Hillary Clinton. That is inexcusable at this point. Otherwise, there’s really no bad vote. You need to free yourself of the false fear being engendered by the propagandists. They are the servile creatures of billionaire oligarchs LITERALLY destroying the planet. The people protesting at that pipeline were put in dog kennels after being illegally arrested (that’s treaty land, apparently.) DOG KENNELS. Native Americas and other Americans trying to protect our land and water from monsters who intend to befoul our environment in order to ship the bones of dinosaurs overseas for their personal enrichment have been assaulted by illegal private security forces, dogs, and extremely advanced military hardware. Hillary Clinton is implicated in the assassination of an indigenous female leader in Honduras. Need I go on? You know all this. She is evil. The faction she represents is evil. They must be stopped.
Vote against her.
If you’re not in a swing state, you don’t matter. I would absolutely vote for Trump in California to stop Clinton if I thought it would matter. But it won’t. So why do it? Instead, I’m trying to figure out if one of my third party options is better than another.
Yes, voting is an individual choice and I hope everybody votes. I have already voted. “Vote early and vote often.” I think that saying originated in Chicago, but I could be wrong.
Let me put it this way. I feel that voting for someone means you support them and are responsible for what happens. I feel that voting for evil is still evil. If Trump wins, and I had voted for him, every awful thing he does will partially be on my shoulders. And the thought “But Hillary would have been SOOOO much worse!!!” will absolutely NOT make me feel better about it.
And for that matter, if Trump loses, whenever Hillary does something bad, thinking “Dont blame me, I voted for KODOS instead of Kang!!” wont make me feel much better, either.
I ‘want’ Trump to beat Hillary, but I dont ‘want’ him to be president. Have I made myself clear or am I still doing a poor job making my feelings comprehensible?
Im voting for the least evil choice, which is Stein. And you know, I would probably vote Stein even in a swing state.
Isikoff
Exclusive: FBI still does not have warrant to review new Abedin emails linked to Clinton probe
Does that mean that any valid reports of what is in those emails was based on a warrantless search of Abedin’s phone? Presumably a warrant had already been issued for both phones for the purpose of investigating the allegations against Weiner.
Again I ask how does that immediately slide over to an investigation of Abedin.
I see the ghost of J. Edgar Hoover is still roaming the halls of the FBI.
Looks like the FBI have done it.
From the WP no less:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/fbi-agents-knew-of-clinton-related-emails-weeks-before-director-was-briefed/2016/10/30/657ed266-9eb1-11e6-8d63-3e0a660f1f04_story.html
THE LIST
The Top 100 Most Damaging Wikileaks (so far)
The first order of business is not to punish the messengers, rather it is to prosecute government crimes that have been exposed.
http://www.mostdamagingwikileaks.com/
Dammit Rich – I’ve already spent too much time in front of this screen today; and then you had to post that link.
Oh well, a grudging thanks anyway;)
rich
October 29, 2016 at 1:26 pm
Great link! Thank!!!
Impressive in it’s totality – very much, thanks !
a rhetorical question:
if the nsa is archiving this post (hi, guys!), why on earth don’t they have all of ms. clinton’s emails?
••
if these clintonites are so smart, WHY ON EARTH DOES JOHN PODESTA USE A GMAIL ACCOUNT?!!?
sheesh.
They’re all demonstrably morons about personal computer security. I guess they figure if they control the entire system, it doesn’t matter? They know the Google boys are on their side, and I guess everybody below the C level is just perceived as a compliant shadow, not a human with agency.
But it’s nuts. Podesta uses gmail, Huma forwards classified emails over her Yahoo account, they all broadcast email themselves passwords when they know they’ve been hacked.
This is literally the opposite of merit. It is now proved beyond question that in 21st century America, gaining power and wealth is completely unrelated from intelligence and competence.
How 0bama helped re-elect McCain:
People are tired of McCain. But his D party opponent offers up timid partisan mush, while 0bamacare premiums take a breathtaking leap.
Thanks, 0bama!
If I remember the ACA legislation correctly, the premiums and plans are regulated at the state level no matter who handles the web front end. That means that the state regulators allowed those plan increases. The insurance companies are the drivers on this, not the legislation. What would the premiums be without the legislation if all of the restrictions on cherry-picking policy holders were still in place?
If folks in Arizona don’t like it they can pass single-payer legislation that meets the requirements of limiting cherry-picking and insurer overhead (medical cost ratio). And then ask HHS CMS for a waiver. That might require electing a different legislature.
If I remember correctly, the Democrat Party controlled Congress in 2010. It’s committee chairs refused to even consider single payer, passing what is in effect a slightly modified version of a law originally proposed by the Heritage Foundation. Nice attempt to pass the buck to the state regulators, but in the end all that they have to work with is the rules of the federal law. Other than forbidding denial for preexisting conditions and thus benefitting some people, most people are now worse off than before. ACA was designed to pass on most of the costs onto the “consumers” in the belief that this would “bend” the cost curve by making people “consume” less health care. So what we now have is exchanges with fewer options, skyrocketing premiums and out of pocket costs, and shrinking networks. 0bamacare is in effect a ghetto, a government mandated rip-off for those who are already too poor to afford a decent insurance.
Yes this is true: ACA was designed to pass on most of the costs onto the “consumers” in the belief that this would “bend” the cost curve by making people “consume” less health care.
It isn’t the premiums that are the cost killers; it is the deductibles and copays.
But state regulators do have the authority over premiums. Whether they can use them because the industry has consolidated to render them ineffective is another issue. If regulators acted and insurers fled the state, the state in principle could set up single payer and file for a waiver.
But the political will to see that done at the state level is not there. Even Vermont failed to do what it said it was going to do.
As for the Congress in 2009-2011, Democrats held 58 Senate seats plus 2 independents (Sanders and Lieberman) who caucused with them only between September 25, 2009, and February 4, 2010. Lieberman early on came out against the public option (and likely single payer as well). The Republicans from the beginning of Obama’s administration adopted an unprecedented scorched earth obstructionist strategy; no Republican voted for Obamacare. No Republican budged from the Republicans plan of nationalizing the insurance market and restricting medical malpractice suits.
Passing the Patient Protection restrictions on cherry-picking and the non-budgetary elements of the bill (which did not include mandatory enrollment in a plan) required a filibuster-proof majority of the Senate. That happened on December 23, 2009 with a 60-39 vote. So on this vote, it was Lieberman (CT-Lieberman for Lieberman) , not a Democrat who held the non-budget issues hostage.
To deal with the parts of the bill that were in the budget, the House created an amendment to the bill as part of the budget reconciliation process. The election of Scott Brown to fill Ted Kennedy’s seat in the Senate and continued obstruction by Republicans forced using reconciliation as the means to pass the budget portions. And the House was able to get some of its legislation into the bill through this process. This passed the House on a 219-212 vote with 34 Blue Dog Democrats voting against it. (Interestingly, a lot of them were those who were defeated in 2010 and 2014.)
Jim Haygood is correct about the authorship and the office in which it was put together. Max Baucus acted as the brake on health care reform just as Daniel Patrick Monyihan had on health care reform in 2013. Not getting a bill at all brought a double-bladed reaction in the 1994 election. It demoralized Democrats and emboldened Republicans; Baucus and Clinton and Pelosi were not going to repeat that mistake. Just make new ones. The lesson here for progressives is the power of the Chair of the Senate Finance Commitee to stop or alter legislation. Even when the President is from a different party, that can be an important power.
What is often missed is the power of the Senate Budget Committee Chair. In the process that put through the reconciliation part of this process, Senate Budget Committee Chair Kent Conrad extracted the concession of a commission to look at the deficit and debt and do a grand bargain with Republicans. Conrad was playing to his North Dakota voters with this, but it set loose the Simpson-Bowles Commission and the GOP threat to not expand the debt limit with all of the Supercommittee shenanigans that went with the struggle to find a compromise in 2010 and 2011. Bernie Sanders as Senate Budget Chair would have a different agenda than Conrad’s.
Given the origin of the legislation, it is a wonder that Wellpoint has not consolidated monopolies in all of the smaller states. I bet the legislation was tailored to its business model and then current IT architecture.
It is not “Democrats” in aggregate who created this, it is the Democrats from Lieberman’s Connecticut who rejected Ned Lamont, the Democrats from Indiana (home of Anthem’s headquarters), the Democrats from Max Baucus’s Montana and those in all the Blue Dog Districts of those 34 House members. It is the Democratic pharmaceutical wholesaler in the House who made sure that Medicare could not competitively price.
Those who watched the livestreaming of the House markup of the bill that did not move forward might remember Tennessee Republican Marsha Blackburn arguing for a formula that could allow more community clinics in Tennessee long before she joined the GOP total obstruction of the bill.
There are legislative and political remedies at the state level to push forward on costs and co-pays and deductibles. The total elimination of deductibles and co-pays from patient billing would simplify the billing process to a fight between the provider, the insurer, and the government (if the government is involved). That could reduce costs (an not a few jobs in billing in collections, another consideration of Congress in a recession). And if WellPoint succeeds in obtaining monopoly status in all 50 states, isn’t the next step obvious: nationalize WellPoint and direct the profits into the Social Security Trust Fund.
Incidentally, the Ranking Member of the Senate Finance Committee is Ron Wyden. If Democrats take the Senate, he likely becomes Chair of the Senate Finance Committee.
I don’t know all of what that means for policy (who has bought him) but take that information into account when considering a vote for any candidates for the US Senate.
It was Obama who didn’t want real healthcare reform at all who made sure it didn’t happen. We have rarely had a President with more power than Obama had on inauguration day in 2009.
But rather than going to The Capital and browbeating his supermajority into passing Expanded Medicare for everyone NOW. ….
He met with a bunch of Healthcare Insiders and promised to take care of them.
No one will ever convince me that he couldn’t get ANYTHING and everything he wanted in the spring of 2009.
A President delegitimized by the birther controversy and suspect by politicization of the military who consider him a Kenyan muslim socialist.
A President with 57 votes in the Senate but a Republican Party (1) unwilling to compromise on anything and (2) able to control its caucus in a way that neither Harry Reid nor Nancy Pelosi could.
A Senate Finance Chair with an in-house executive from Wellpoint already writing the text of the bill.
A renegade Senator, who you crossed a Democratic candidate in Connecticut to support, but who was feeling the power of being the 60th vote.
A White House staff intent on not doing liberal things.
A lobbying community funding up to fight anything that threatened their share of 1/6 of the economy.
Yep. Most powerful President in history. I can see how browbeating Ben Nelson, Kent Conrad, Bill Nelson would go down. LBJ used to know how to twist Ev Dirksen’s arm, but when the opposition party goes full court press and keeps discipline even with Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, I doubt LBJ could have gotten the votes to do ANYTHING and everything he wanted. Even in the spring of 2009.
I take issue with “Obama who didn’t want real healthcare reform at all who made sure it didn’t happen.” as if a President is an all-powerful dictator.
Downticket does matter. Even legislatures can keep running battles of nullification going as enforcement of the current Voting Rights Act shows in North Carolina.
Yes, yes. We know. Bush did it. Actually O had to fight like hell to get O Care thru. And it was a bailout to insurance, medical providers and pharma.
Yes, the birther thing was big among the nuttier wing of the Wingnuts. No one was laughing over that. Keep your head down Saint Obama!
You need to read some history. Whatever Team Blue sources you’re using are, um, inadequate.
The Democratic Party in 2009 had majorities in the House and Senate and a Democratic President who had just won the Nobel Peace Prize. They could have done ANYTHING. But they didn’t want to do those things that their voters wanted. They wanted to do the things their donors wanted. So they pretended they needed to abide by that 60 vote nonsense, and empowered Lieberman, Baucus and a couple of Republicans as a Kabuki show. They had 50 votes plus Biden. They did not need any of those people you named. In fact, they could have given up a couple of actual Democratic votes and STILL had a usable majority.
It’s really that simple. You were bamboozled. Wake up. Barack Obama chose to hire Rahm Emmanuel and Larry Summers. No meanie Republican made him do that. Are the Republicans forcing him to use every drop of influence he has left to pass the TPP? Did they force him to exclude ALL worker, citizen, and environmental rights groups from the TPP negotiations? No, they did not. He chose to do that, because he’s a wholly owned creature of banks and corporations.
He doesn’t care about us, and he never did. He’s a con artist, like the Clintons. Sleeker, but also weaker.
You do realize the Democratic Party goes to a great deal of trouble to block and and all progressive candidates from running and being elected, right?
If Senators were willing to do a real filibuster they wouldn’t need 60 votes. If they were to start using their control of time and effective media lots more could be done.
Art. 1, Sec. 5 allows Congress to make their own rules, which includes making them up as they go along and suspending them whenever they as a body feel like it. Why is it only 51 when the oligarchs want something?
I think his comment at that time was, “This is America”, with regard to any alternatives like single payer, or expanded Medicare.
They have a price list for Medicare too – our “normal” medical marketplace doesn’t like quoting prices to customers – which I find Weird. Additionally, these prices can vary a few hundred percent depending on where you go. Market inefficiency???
The ACA legislation MADE the insurance companies the drivers.
It was written by Liz Fowler, Vice President for Public Policy and External Affairs at WellPoint, the nation’s largest health insurance provider, while she was serving as an aide to Sen Max Baucus.
State regulators have no effective recourse against a setup that was dictated from Washington. If they demand that the sole provider in Phoenix halve its rates, that company will walk just as the others did.
So McCain wins again.
Thanks, 0bama!
HC lead in ABC/Washington Post evaporates ‘on no news’ as ZH would say…if these were market prices.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-10-29/abc-wapo-effectively-admit-they-tampered-their-polls-hillary-lead-shrinks-2-points
Elsewhere:
‘Independents favor Trump over Clinton by 13 points (41-28 percent)…The candidates garner almost equal backing among the party faithful: 83 percent of Democrats back Clinton, while 81 percent of Republicans support Trump.’
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/10/26/fox-news-poll-clinton-leads-trump-by-three-points.html
How Clinton is getting this badly whomped in terms of independents and is winning any polls is just beyond this observer. Is Fox an outlier for independents? The latest party affiliation by Gallup is 27R-40I-32D. If someone can get a 3% Clinton lead with these numbers and this distribution…please share.
I am voting for $hillary…gotta hand it to her and slick willy…to get power you have to have a krewe…but usually you cull them as you move forward…and try to eliminate those who might have too much knowledge or potential power against them…
in the latino/hispanic cadillo world…it is “a la patada” usually meaning once you have climbed up the ladder by going over people you have to make sure they can’t follow along up the ladder by kicking their hands off the rungs…what might also be called kicking someone to the curb…
$hillary does the best columbo in public I have seen in a long time…dumb enough to be bright…
now she is getting rid of p2, the institute and mabaheth/gip in one sweep…
bye bye podesta…
bye bye intel jv of sauds and moe saad…
gotta hand it to the folks from arkee sae…
comey comes out with no time left until election and takes the wind out of the remaining wikileaks revelations by stepping in front of them with his nothingburger…as $hillary feigns anger and concern…
a big hand to the not ready for crimetime players….
Onto to 2018….
the funny part is that there are still 10 more days for more absolutely ridiculous reality tv nonsense to swamp us in more absolute ridiculousness
*scans sky for incoming Giant Meteor*
Don’t giant meteors precede with a trailing orange coif upon entering the atmosphere …. ??
Ohhhh nice Trump joke, it took me a bit to get that.
This is a trump joke right?
….. ain’t sayin nothin ! ……
This goes back to a discussion a couple of days ago on how easy it is to get your systems cracked wide opened:
http://fortune.com/2016/10/29/clinton-email-phishing-attack/
Remember Judicial Watch’s FOIA lawsuit?
We seem to have a little perjury problem here.
Huma’s attorney Miguel Rodriguez of the Washington law firm Bryan Cave likely has cancelled his weekend plans, to attend his client’s rather pressing predicament.
Perjury in a civil action is a non-event as a practical matter. The issue will continue to be finding a government agency to allege a crime which seems to be more difficult than we understand. I maintain that Comey was assured by his bosses that there was nothing there and instructed to wrap his investigation up quickly so it would not influence the election (According to policy supposedly set up at DOJ). Comey went along to get along. Subsequently it became clear that he was lied to and, along with the honest people that work for him reacted by telling his bosses, “You lied and you’re not going to leave us all hung out to dry.” I refuse to believe that he did anything more than trust people that he now knows he should not have. Clinton’s people are definitely tribal but more importantly they are completely incompetent and incapable of holding any position in government (see Loretta Lynch for example)
‘Perjury in a civil action is a non-event as a practical matter.’
Seriously? Didn’t perjury in the civil case of Jones v. Clinton get “Bill” impeached?
i was just wondering that. of course, that was before the mainstream republicans backed a clinton.
Sounds like her attorneys failed there.
Authorities Shut Down Roads & Airspace Near Pipeline
A long-standing virtual-memory race condition (CVE-2016-5195) in the Linux kernel, since 2.6.22 or so, allows reliable local privilege escalation. On any device which allows user-crafted native code to be executed (unwittingly or, as with apps you download, wittingly) and which runs a vulnerable Linux kernel, read-only files can be written to and read-only memory can be modified, without leaving any trace of its own. That means desktop Linux, Android, many network appliances like Wi-Fi routers, printers and Internet Thingies, etc.
This is approximately the equivalent of a fail-open vault protected by perimeter security. Be careful who you let into your crypts, y’all.
(Interesting aside: active exploitation of this bug was discovered by a sysadmin who recorded ALL traffic to and from their server. I’ll have to ponder the ramifications of that a bit more.)
How common is that kernel? If I downloaded the latest kernel would it have that problem? I thought Linux was more secure.than Windows, used in most servers, etc.
“The bug has existed since around 2.6.22 (released in 2007) and was fixed on Oct 18, 2016. List of patched versions here”
As a design matter, the Linux and other open-source Unix-ish kernels offer stronger isolation between processes and users than does Windows, and in general won’t try anything shady because the open-development model combined with robust tooling allows for quick and reliable attribution.
Linus explains the situation in the commit message for the proper fix (available from original link):
A Twitter user recently quipped that Linux runs on more thermostats than desktops. Minsky might have said, anyone can download the latest kernel; the trouble is getting your thermostat to accept it.
20% of women die in yale clinical trial(ok…it’s only 18.5%)…
Jama(journal of ama) pushing out big noisy “result” trying to “prove” that women should not avoid antibiotics by drinking cranberry juice…except if one bothers to read Dr. Marisha Juthani-Mehta one finds she is working on very old women in nursing home type settings who seem to have a 30% constant rate of yeast infections…and they gave out capsules that had the “effect” of only 20 ounces of cranberry juice…no one I have ever dated only drank 20 ounces of cranberry juice in trying to lose the problem…
A rather sad $hilling for the pharma companies in trying to sell everyone in using more antibiotics instead of gaia…
185 women in a double blind clinical trial for one year…33 of them were dead at the end of the one year trial…they were 85+ years old…seems a rather small sampling from which to draw the dramatic conclusion been pushed by the infogods of mountain view 94043 that cranberry juice doesnt work…
uh, for those on a Warfarin regiment, Cranberry is a big no no…just saying
sadly this story is being pushed out there, by the NYT & Wapo…the headline does not actually mention the deaths, only that the idea the good doctor(who is purported to be anti anitbiotic…but it is always convenient to have a friendly person prove the other side wrong…) is leaning to the idea that cranberry is not the answer…except there is nothing in the articles pointing out she is only working with women who are over the age of 85…and already in a nursing home environment…not exactly the average woman…
and the article slips in that the “gold standard” for this is antibiotics, except in a 2013 study with the same good doctor, she points out she is working on her studies because…”in the absence of a gold standard definition of urinary tract infectioin that clinicians agree upon…” and she was concerned about the “overtreatment by antibiotics”…
http://www.straitstimes.com/lifestyle/the-cure-for-urinary-tract-infections-its-not-cranberries-study-shows
just find it odd one would do a study on a very small sub set of the population which are at end of life and somehow the result is being burped out into the public as if it covers teens and women in their 50’s and 60’s.
yes for some reason it seems women when they get past 65 it becomes a bigger issue…at 10% of the population having an issue on a regular basis…
and then all the way up to 30% of the over 85 female in nursing homes population…although…it was shocking to me that there was such a high rate in a nursing home scenario…
which my first thought might be the problem is the nursing homes…and not the women…
It’s a hormonal issue. Lack of estrogen after menopause changes the vaginal Ph, and creates a more yeast-friendly environment. The older you get the more susceptible you are.
The (extremely effective!) and simple remedy for both yeast and the urinary tract infections it can cause is a lozenge suppository that combines a very low dose of “friendly” estrogen with acidophilus. My very sharp gynecologist in Thailand prescribes it for me. It is made by a European pharmacy and not available in the US (of COURSE.)
What happens if Hillary is indicted between the election and the searing-in ceremony in February?
Any Constitutional experts here?
Obama stays in power forever? Though I’m afraid McKaine would get it, as the other part of the ticket people voted for.
just a lowly minion with an abundance of curiosity but located this: Being convicted of a felony is not a disqualification for the office of President, so even if convicted the President (or President-Elect) could continue to hold (or assume) office. However, pardon does not prevent impeachment (either under the common law, due to the Settlement Act of 1701, or under the power granted to the Executive in the Constitution), and our felonious executive officer could still be removed on that basis.
bummer, right?
“bummer, right?”…prolly should explain before i’m attacked by the sites ‘crispers’…the mayhem and delay this fiasco would entail allows the worlds largest Central Bank (ours) to create all kinds of havoc behind the scenes. we would wake from one nightmare into another…a stephen king wet dream.
I’m super curious (and hoping I’m not a crisper — I don’t know what that means). What do you envision the bankers doing? If she makes it past the electoral college, I don’t think anything big happens on the ruling front. She’ll be president. They can’t remove her from office without 66 votes in the Senate, which ain’t happening. She might be weakened, but they’d have to have proof of something pretty terrible for the Dems to move against her. I’m sure they’ll be fine with Kaine (he’ll be taking over in a year or two anyway, most likely.) But to actually admit it really always was a big deal and she’s criminal? The queen of the party? That seems unlikely, unless it’s something new and sexy, like the rumors floating up from the fever swamps.
Lambert, it’s not exactly a plant, but I stumbled across a beautiful photo from a Massachusetts poll worker that I believe you might enjoy.