14 Thursday Jun 2018
Posted in Hillary Clinton, social media
A few minutes ago:
Hillary Clinton @HillaryClinton
But my emails.Kyle Cheney @kyledcheney
IG found that on numerous occasions, COMEY used a personal GMail account to conduct official FBI business, according to source briefed on the report.
Heh.
25 Monday Sep 2017
Posted in Uncategorized
Tags
Ann Wagner, Billy Long, Emails, Jared Kushner, Mike Pence, missouri, Reince Priebus, Roy Blunt, Steve Bannon
I’m willing to bet that you remember all about Hillary Clinton and her email. And most of you remember that despite several “investigations” by Congress and the FBI nobody could substantiate claims that she did anything untoward – although James Comey, then the Director of the FBI, did give her a schoolmarmish lecture about seemly behavior or something along that line, and later made a feint in the direction of “reopening” the investigation upon the “discovery” of some additional emails that were also very quickly found to be inoffensive, but which many believe created a false impression of wrong-doing that cost Clinton the election.
I’m also willing to bet that you also remember all the Republicans who couldn’t constrain their concern about what they pretended to think was an earth-shaking matter, or, at least, what they wanted us to believe was a big bad no-no that deserved a serious hand-slapping. And, of course, Missouri’s GOP delegation were more than happy to join the feeding frenzy. A few examples:
Rep. Billly Long (R-7) got mightily exercised when the FBI investigation failed to find evidence of criminal wrongdoing:
The American people deserve better than a justice system that looks the other way rather than demanding honesty at federal agencies,” said Rep. Long.“Director Comey said point-blank that former Secretary Clinton recklessly stored and transmitted classified information, and it’s unthinkable that such brazen carelessness with our secret national security data could avoid justice.
GOP Senator Roy Bunt made some gleefully stern comments about Comey’s email Hail Mary :
From day one, it has been clear that Secretary Clinton did not take her national security clearance seriously,” […]. “The law establishes a standard that national security material cannot be handled carelessly. I have serious questions about the way the FBI has handled this case up to now. The immunity given, the potential evidence that was allowed to be destroyed, and political support for the spouse of a senior FBI official are all very concerning. The FBI needs to set a better standard as they reopen this case.”
Blunt’s over-the-top I-told-you-so was echoed by Rep. Ann Wagner (R-2), who was fairly salivating at the prospect of seeing a hard-working public servant punished for … something:
Secretary Clinton’s reckless mishandling of classified information proves that she cannot be trusted with the support of Missouri families. I am hopeful that this most recent probe by the FBI will be conducted fairly, swiftly and more thoroughly than the previous investigation.
Well guess what? We now have an opportunity to see just how seriously these self-righteous hacks really take a similar case where private email accounts have been used by the President’s capos to avoid public scrutiny. We’ll find out just who, if anyone in Missouri’s GOP delegation, has enough integrity to hold the apple(s) of Trump’s eye to the same standard with which they beat Hillary Clinton over the head.
It seems that son-in-law-in-chief and presidential advisor, Jared Kushner, set up a private email account during the transition upon which he has since conducted official business in preference to his official White House account. We are assured that while he used the account to exchange “emails with senior White House officials, outside advisers and others about media coverage, event planning and other subjects,” he did nothing wrong. Of course, we’ll just have to take the White House’s word about that since the folks there aren’t inclined to hand the emails over. And we’re also supposed to trust their assurances that these emails will be preserved as required by law.
Gee, if Clinton had only known that all she had to do was to say that she’d done nothing wrong she could have saved herself a world of hurt. Or maybe not. Clinton is a Democrat. And a woman. And smarter and kinder than the sleaze bag Republicans put into the White House. All hanging offenses to the members of the old, white, male cadre the GOP mostly represents.
Actually, use of private emails seems to be ubiquitous in Trump’s White House. Next time he tries to revive the “lock her up” business, remember that in addition to Kushner, White House officials Reince Priebus and Steve Bannon also used private email accounts to conduct their business.
Of course, we’ve known for some time that VP Mike Pence not only used private email to conduct state business in Indiana, but was actually hacked. Pence, interestingly enough, said nary a word about his transgressions during the campaign when he and Cheeto-in-Chief went off on Clinton’s emails.
But no matter. Because nowadays, given the way the cookie crumbles, the ball bounces, the mop flops, and the tail wags, we’ll wait a long time before we hear a peep from our otherwise truculent Republicans about private emails being used to evade the attention of a public that said GOPers and the Ritchie Rich-pants in the white House are determined to well and truly fleece.
We need to remind them that Karma’s a bitch, the wheel of fortune turns, and the handwriting is on the wall.
07 Monday Nov 2016
Posted in Uncategorized
We received confirmation yesterday of what most sane individuals had already figured out for themselves. There was nothing to the latest effort to revive the GOP Clinton email scam. Most individuals, that is, but Grand Old Partiers who are suffering from permanent anti-Clinton hangovers.
Clinton remains, as she always was, a technically unsophisticated woman who followed the precedent set by her predecessors and used her personal email to transact State Department business. She broke no rules; out of thousands of emails, three marked classified, one in the header and two within the text, were found- all, incidentally, dealing with old news already in the public domain. A little over a thousand more emails were deemed to merit classification after the fact. Her server was never hacked. That’s it. No scandal
In spite of the recent effort to revive the topic, that’s still it. No scandal. The so-called “new” emails were all either personal in nature or duplicates. The whole thing falls into the category of those events that leave future readers of history shaking their heads, wondering just how backwards and gullible their parents and grandparents really were.
Of course, the unhinged Trump doesn’t care. He just went back to talking about rigged elections and yelling “crooked Hillary” into the wind.
Other Republicans, reluctant to stop trying to club Clinton with the email wet-noodle, have also kept up the hue and cry. Missouri’s GOP Senator Roy Blunt, for example, is showing himself reluctant to disavow Trump’s hilarious denial of the obvious:
Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the FBI had engaged in “rushed work, which the FBI clearly has botched.”
Blunt faces Secretary of State Jason Kander, a Democrat, in one of the nation’s closest Senate races on Tuesday. Blunt previously criticized the FBI for granting too many immunity agreements with Clinton aides and for allowing for the destruction of some computers and electronic devices.
“The investigation was a failure,” he said in a statement issued Sunday night.
Rushed work? Echoes of the Trump campaign’s claim that there’s no way folks could go through 65,000 emails in eight days – which makes anyone who remembers that we’re talking about emails, digital content that can be analysed and deduped via computer – howl with laughter. There’s software readily available that would make short work of the project.
In fact, my husband, who worked in computing research for years, observed that it shouldn’t have taken the FBI more than a day and a half at the most to have vindicated Clinton. The entire review could have been done before Comey sent his first letter to the Congress a couple of weeks ago. Because of this failure to act as expeditiously and efficiently as possible, Blunt is almost right when he dubs the investigation a failure, although not for the reasons he alleges. It was certainly handled in an unnecessarily clumsy fashion from the get-go, by, one suspects, would-be GOP partisans in the FBI.
Blunt, of course, doesn’t dare anger truculent Trump supporters. We learned in last Saturday’s (Nov. 5) edition of the St. Louis Post-dispatch that when GOP Rep. Ann Wagner disavowed Trump in the wake of his sex assault scandal, she was besieged by constituents vowing to vote for her Democratic opponent, Bill Otto, for no other reason than to punish her for disrespecting their Fearless Orange Leader. That’s how important the cult of angry personality is for the raging Republican hordes Trump has inspired.
Blunt also has other reasons to hang on to the dishonest GOP Clinton narrative. She is, after all, his only viable weapon against his election opponent, Jason Kander. In recent weeks the corruption tainted Blunt’s only real defense against Kander has been a plethora of adds and mailers trying to tie the conservative Democrat to the GOP fantasy of a corrupt and radical Hillary Clinton. Guilt by association can be effective in politics, but in this case there are many of us on the real left that wish it were just a bit truer. We’re all too aware that Blunt, in the best Trumpy style, regularly misrepresents and outright lies about Kander’s moderate positions.
Steve Benen has said about Paul Ryan’s late embrace of Trump that it is clear that he is “a man of ‘principle’ – weak, malleable principles, which he’ll forgo whenever partisan considerations get in the way, hoping no one remembers what he said before.” The same goes for Roy Blunt. And that, in a nutshell, is the story of how the GOP ended up with incompetent, racist, presidential nominee Trump.
05 Saturday Nov 2016
Posted in Uncategorized
It’s likely that most people have made up their mind about who they are voting for by now. But you may have noticed that the reasons some folks give for their decisions don’t inspire confidence in their level of information or even their seriousness – references, for example, to Clinton’s emails, or Trump as a change agent are rampant but rarely convincing. Many of the people who speak this way aren’t able to accurately describe the problem with the Clinton emails. Nor can many tell you why they believe Trump’s claims that he can fix a problem he can’t define accurately. Well, there’s some last minute help if you want to gather your facts.
Clinton’s Emails
Vox has got the goods on all the silly allegations surrounding the putative email scandals. An article by Matthew Iglesias, descriptively titled “The real Clinton Email Scandal is that a Bullshit Story has Dominated the Campaign,” covers every angle of the current email derangement syndrome. Yglesias deals with Clinton’s reasons for using a private email account and personal server; the transparency issues that have been raised in the media, including the famous 33,000 deleted emails; general government email practices and regulations along with what he terms the classification “red-herring.” He concludes:
… Clinton wasn’t even breaking with an informal precedent. The very worst you can say is that, faced with an annoying government IT policy, she used her stature to find a personal workaround rather than a systemic fix that would work for everyone. To spend so much time on such a trivial matter would be absurd in a city council race, much less a presidential election. To do so in circumstances when it advances the electoral prospects of a rival who has shattered all precedents in terms of lacking transparency or basic honesty is infinitely more scandalous than anything related to the server itself.
Trump as President
The Daily Beast‘s Michael Tomasky writes convincingly about “What a President Donald Trump Actually Would Do in Office.”
First, Tomasky tells us just why Trump would not be able to follow through on some of his more extravagant promises like reviving manufacturing; keeping businesses from locating outside the US; bringing coal back; and repealing and replacing Obamacare. According to Tomasky, what Trump would do, however, is start a financially disastrous trade war with China, and, assuming he follows through with his deportation plan, cost the U.S. treasury something in the neighborhood of 500 billion dollars, not to mention associated labor market costs.
To add to these potential disasters, Tomasky reminds us that Trump has not only shown himself to be morally unfit to hold office – “he would be serving while involved in a fraud trial over his bogus university, and quite possibly a child-rape trial as well” – but that he has also demonstrated consistently that he is intellectually and temperamentally incapable of handling potential international or financial crises that may be in the offing. He concludes:
I suppose the people on this transition team [i.e. the Trump transition team] are fooling themselves by preparing briefing papers and whatnot. But really, they might as well be playing Free Cell all day. And through some miracle in these last few days it might be nice for cable news to stop obsessing about the latest supposed crisis in Hillaryland and remind people that they are voting for a president, and one of the two candidates has been deemed unqualified by nearly every newspaper in the country, by most retired generals, by a huge phalanx of foreign-policy people of both parties, by nearly every serious economist, and basically by everyone except a few people who are either blinded by their hatred of Clinton or too scared of their more rabid constituents to say a cross word about this madman. To quote someone close to the situation, believe me, it’s a disaster, folks.
In a nutshell, the gist of both articles is that one candidate is trustworthy and qualified to be president and the other isn’t. We don’t need to know anything else. Thus armed, go forth and vote.
29 Saturday Oct 2016
Posted in Uncategorized
I read today that Philippine’s President Rodrigo Duterte has had a message from God:
Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has promised to stop swearing, saying God spoke to him on a flight from Japan on Thursday, warning him the plane would crash if he kept using bad language.
This is the same Duterte who is directly or indirectly responsible for the murder of more than 2,400 people in a less than three month period. Most of these people were suspected drug dealers or users which, according to the quasi-facist Duterte and his supporters, makes it okay for police and death squads to condemn and execute them at will.
And then Duterte has the chutzpah to tell us that God is disturbed by his bad language.
It’s enough to put one off God.
But religion isn’t the real issue. Nor does the matter at hand have anything to do with conditions that are unique to the Philppines or any other “foreign” or “under-developed” country. It’s a question of perspective and its relation to our moral values, a question we in the United States have been confronted with every day during the current election.
Today, for instance, the paper version of my local paper, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, ran a headline in one-inch caps reading “FBI Reviews New Emails.” The text ran down the left side of the front page and, on the other half, a half-lit profile of Hillary Clinton emerged from the dark background. Pretty sensational news, right?
Well no — although almost anyone seeing that headline layout will go away thinking that these emails constitute a momentous, game-changing discovery.
But as most of those who’ve paid attention know, once again this is much ado about nothing. The “new” emails were as Political Animal’s Nancy Letourneau notes, not from Hillary Clinton, not from her private server, not withheld from the FBI by Clinton, and are likely duplicates of emails already examined by the FBI — which is not, as many in the (perhaps intentionally) credulous media have asserted, “reopening” their investigation of Clinton.
Nevertheless, this latest irrelevant diversion will hold center stage for the next few days and possibly influence the direction of the election. The big orange pseudo-Mussolini is already crowing about how this news vindicates his absurd “Hillary Clinton for prison” war cry. Although it is unlikely to cost Clinton the presidency (knock on wood), it could depress her margin of victory, which would clear the path for a resurgent Trump or an über–nationalist Trump clone in 2018. Nor would it help with down-ballot races. At the very least, it may provide more ammunition for the GOP dead-enders who will inevitably seek to delegitimize a Clinton victory.
Meanwhile, the complex of forces unleashed in the Middle East by Bush’s invasion of Iraq are laying waste to the region, immigrants are flooding into the Western World — an influx that will only grow as the ravages of climate change increase. The warming of our world, if not mitigated in a timely fashion, will create environmental and economic wastelands. Economic and social inequality threaten the stability of the West while we are held in thrall by the ascendancy of ‘free market” advocates and oligarchs who seek to weaken the power of government to effect necessary long-term changes.
There are hard days ahead no matter who wins the election and none of it has anything to do with emails. And yet the media wants to persuade us that the election of our leaders should hinge on a just such unfounded suggestions of scandal.
It’s all a matter of moral perspective. Something that both Duterte’s God and our trivial entertainment and celebrity-sodden media culture seem to lack.
*Cross posted to Daily Kos.