Put It To Bed

Same ol', same ol'. We get days of banner headlines, but when it turns out they got it all wrong, there's a "retraction" on page 7, buried in the middle of the ads for bras and panties.

From a series of tweets by Kurt Einchenwald:

I began to read the New York Times's editorial today, "...But Her Emails" and was excited it was catching up to what I wrote in 2015 based on regs and documents, and acknowledging the Clinton email "scandal" was about nothing. They my heart sank. They got it wrong again.

I don't understand it. It's all right there. I figured it out in a day and a half, just by poring through the regulations that were supposedly violated. And. They. Weren't. 

So, one more time, let's go through this incredibly important error so many STILL make.

This is the key paragraph in the Times editorial, the "on the other hand" element that lays out why what Clinton did was supposedly wrong. The argument being made is, essentially, while the email imbroglio was not that important, there was still a violation of the regs.

This is true - NOW - as of 2013 - AFTER Clinton left office. This is like driving 50 MPH in a 50 mile zone, and then getting a ticket because the speed limit was changed a year later.

So, let's go to the regulation at issue here, the one that seeming no one has ever read.

This is 36 CFR Chapter XII, Subchapter B. Yes, its complicated. Yes, its hard to find the relevant section. But if reporters are going to write articles & broadcast stories that they know can affect the outcomes of an election, they have do to it.

So, to make this easier for all reporters handling this story in the future, you go to 36 CFR Chapter XII, Subchapter B, Subpart C, § 1236.22. Now, read it carefully:

In that reg, there are 19 words - 19 - that tell you the primary argument under the email "scandal" could be wrong. "Agencies that allow employees to send and receive official electronic mail messages using a system not operated by the agency.." 

Two questions are left ... sorry, 4 questions:

A. Was State an agency that allowed "employees to send and receive official electronic mail messages using a system not operated by the agency."

Yes. It was. 

B. Did regs allow for those documents to be printed out for preservation?

Yes. They did.

C. Are there records showing that Clinton's government staff in charge of document preservation used that method of printing out to follow the preservation rules?

Yes. There are. And yes. They did.

Finally, and most important - and the key to this entire ridiculous affair:

D. Are there two systems of emails for everyone with classified access, one for general business and one for classified?

Yes. There are.

Let's go through the last one so people understand how awful this reporting has been.

Regular emails, like those sent & received on HRC's personal email system, are general business. Those on the State system used that instead. It is not a classified system. The retroactively designated confidential emails would have gone through a nonclassified system.

In other words, no matter what was done, whether it was the State non-classified system or the HRC non-classified system allowed under the regs, those few retroactively marked emails in question would have gone through a permitted non-classified system no matter what anyone used.

Now, which was more secure? Not that it matters, since the regs allowed for HRC to do exactly as she did, but the answer is: HRC's. The State dot gov email was hacked by the Chinese and petabytes of information was taken by them. But not Hillary's. Her system was more...secure. 

OK, so if that is not where the classified emails were, where were they? Here is the system. Hold onto your hat, it's complicated: Those emails came through a highly secured system only accessible through a sensitive compartmented information facility, or what is known in intelligence circles as a SCIF. 

Most senior officials who deal with classified information have a SCIF in their offices and their homes. Hillary did. These arent just extra offices with a special lock. Each SCIF is constructed following complex rules imposed by the intelligence and defense communities. Restrictions imposed on the builders are designed to ensure that no unauthorized personnel can get into the room, and the SCIF cannot be accessed by hacking or electronic eavesdropping.

A group called the technical surveillance countermeasures team (TSCM) investigates the area or activity to check that all communications are protected from outside surveillance and cannot be intercepted. Most permanent SCIFs have physical and technical security, called TEMPEST.

The facility is guarded and in operation 24 hours a day, seven days a week; any official on the SCIF staff must have the highest security clearance. There is supposed to be sufficient personnel continuously present to observe the primary, secondary and emergency exit doors of the SCIF. Each SCIF must apply fundamental red-black separation to prevent the inadvertent transmission of classified data over telephone lines, power lines or signal lines.

I could keep going but this was what was in Hillary's house for the classified emails.

The reason you get these imbecilic chants of "lock her up" is journalists almost never point out there are two systems, and that HRC was not just sitting around sending classified emails on her private system. 

Just like Colin Powell, who used a personal AOL account for his emails. 

Or the staff of Condoleezza Rice used personal accounts for their business emails. 

Reporters were just listening to Republican members of Congress, writing their outrage, and making it seem like there was something here. There was nothing there. There never was. And it was easy to figure out.

So it sure would be nice if, when journalists now apologize for overblowing the email "scandal," they stop repeating the very same errors that made them think it was a scandal to begin with.

Hillary's OpEd Piece

I'm pasting the whole thing because I think it's important to hear from her on this, and I don't think the pay wall should get in anybody's way.

Sorry, Mr Bezos - but I do expect you to understand and gimme a pass on this one.

Anyway, remember - she ran against Bernie (even in the general election, he was always there), she ran against Trump, and the Koch brothers, and the Mercers, and Facebook and Twitter, and the NRA, and DumFux News, and the other Corporate Media outlets that constantly flak the Both-Sides bullshit, and Wall Street (yes, they paid her well for some speaking engagements, but their donations favored the GOP, as always), and she ran against the full force of Putin's Russia - 

and she beat them by 3 million votes.

WaPo:
By Hillary Clinton

April 24 at 4:44 PM

Our election was corrupted, our democracy assaulted, our sovereignty and security violated. This is the definitive conclusion of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s report. It documents a serious crime against the American people.

The debate about how to respond to Russia’s “sweeping and systematic” attack — and how to hold President Trump accountable for obstructing the investigation and possibly breaking the law — has been reduced to a false choice: immediate impeachment or nothing. History suggests there’s a better way to think about the choices ahead.

Obviously, this is personal for me, and some may say I’m not the right messenger. But my perspective is not just that of a former candidate and target of the Russian plot. I am also a former senator and secretary of state who served during much of Vladi­mir Putin’s ascent, sat across the table from him and knows firsthand that he seeks to weaken our country.

I am also someone who, by a strange twist of fate, was a young staff attorney on the House Judiciary Committee’s Watergate impeachment inquiry in 1974, as well as first lady during the impeachment process that began in 1998. And I was a senator for New York after 9/11, when Congress had to respond to an attack on our country. Each of these experiences offers important lessons for how we should proceed today.

First, like in any time our nation is threatened, we have to remember that this is bigger than politics. What our country needs now is clear-eyed patriotism, not reflexive partisanship. Whether they like it or not, Republicans in Congress share the constitutional responsibility to protect the country. Mueller’s report leaves many unanswered questions — in part because of Attorney General William P. Barr’s redactions and obfuscations. But it is a road map. It’s up to members of both parties to see where that road map leads — to the eventual filing of articles of impeachment, or not. Either way, the nation’s interests will be best served by putting party and political considerations aside and being deliberate, fair and fearless.

Second, Congress should hold substantive hearings that build on the Mueller report and fill in its gaps, not jump straight to an up-or-down vote on impeachment. In 1998, the Republican-led House rushed to judgment. That was a mistake then and would be a mistake now.

Watergate offers a better precedent. Then, as now, there was an investigation that found evidence of corruption and a coverup. It was complemented by public hearings conducted by a Senate select committee, which insisted that executive privilege could not be used to shield criminal conduct and compelled White House aides to testify. The televised hearings added to the factual record and, crucially, helped the public understand the facts in a way that no dense legal report could. Similar hearings with Mueller, former White House counsel Donald McGahn and other key witnesses could do the same today.

During Watergate, the House Judiciary Committee also began a formal impeachment inquiry that was led by John Doar, a widely respected former Justice Department official and hero of the civil rights struggle. He was determined to run a process that the public and history would judge as fair and thorough, no matter the outcome. If today’s House proceeds to an impeachment inquiry, I hope it will find someone as distinguished and principled as Doar to lead it.

Third, Congress can’t forget that the issue today is not just the president’s possible obstruction of justice — it’s also our national security. After 9/11, Congress established an independent, bipartisan commission to recommend steps that would help guard against future attacks. We need a similar commission today to help protect our elections. This is necessary because the president of the United States has proved himself unwilling to defend our nation from a clear and present danger. It was just reported that Trump’s recently departed secretary of homeland security tried to prioritize election security because of concerns about continued interference in 2020 and was told by the acting White House chief of staff not to bring it up in front of the president. This is the latest example of an administration that refuses to take even the most minimal, common-sense steps to prevent future attacks and counter ongoing threats to our nation.

Fourth, while House Democrats pursue these efforts, they also should stay focused on the sensible agenda that voters demanded in the midterms, from protecting health care to investing in infrastructure. During Watergate, Congress passed major legislation such as the War Powers Act, the Endangered Species Act and the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1973. For today’s Democrats, it’s not only possible to move forward on multiple fronts at the same time, it’s essential. The House has already passed sweeping reforms that would strengthen voting rights and crack down on corruption, and now is the time for Democrats to keep their foot on the gas and put pressure on the do-nothing Senate. It’s critical to remind the American people that Democrats are in the solutions business and can walk and chew gum at the same time.

We have to get this right. The Mueller report isn’t just a reckoning about our recent history; it’s also a warning about the future. Unless checked, the Russians will interfere again in 2020, and possibly other adversaries, such as China or North Korea, will as well. This is an urgent threat. Nobody but Americans should be able to decide America’s future. And, unless he’s held accountable, the president may show even more disregard for the laws of the land and the obligations of his office. He will likely redouble his efforts to advance Putin’s agenda, including rolling back sanctions, weakening NATO and undermining the European Union.

Of all the lessons from our history, the one that’s most important may be that each of us has a vital role to play as citizens. A crime was committed against all Americans, and all Americans should demand action and accountability. Our founders envisioned the danger we face today and designed a system to meet it. Now it’s up to us to prove the wisdom of our Constitution, the resilience of our democracy and the strength of our nation.

And one more thing:

45*'s "presidency"

is not legitimate

Hillary

...on what's next, given what we know about Cult45*'s fuckery, and what we know about the constraints of the Mueller investigation.

...on the undercurrents of bias - in general, but specifically against women in politics.

...on "the end of the beginning."

...on the process of (and the need to follow) the rule of law when you're trying to fulfill your duties to maintain the rule of law.

Overheard

Michael Cohen will plead the 5th because he's afraid the ordeal of his questioning will break him down and he'll look bad and Trump will tweet unkind things about him and that means Daddy doesn't love me anymore and and and.

Hillary testified under oath for 11 hours. Then she raised $4M for the DNC and broke up a chain fight at a biker bar while opening a coupla stuck pickle jars with her vagina.

Yeah, But The Emails

Mary Louise Kelly, WaPo:

Around 3 p.m. that day, massive news broke. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security released a terse statement, declaring that Russia had “directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations.” In other words, the leaders of the intelligence community were for the first time publicly fingering Russia for the Democratic National Committee hack, and not only that: “Only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.”

I had attempted to take Oct. 7 off, and I have a vivid memory of standing on the sideline of my son’s soccer practice, scanning the statement on my phone and realizing that my weekend was shot. But before I finished filing for the NPR newscast, another shoe dropped. At 4:02 p.m., David Fahrenthold of The Washington Post tweeted, “stand by for some news about @realDonaldTrump.” One minute later, his story on the “Access Hollywood,” “Grab ’em by the p----” video went live, instantly imperiling Trump’s candidacy.

And still the news gods were not done. Just when you thought the afternoon could not possibly get nuttier, 4:32 p.m. brought a tweet from WikiLeaks. “RELEASE: The Podesta Emails,” it read. Some 2,000 messages from Clinton campaign manager John Podesta’s personal Gmail account were posted immediately; WikiLeaks claimed to have tens of thousands more. Soon reporters would be mining a document dump that included both serious campaign communications and Podesta’s risotto recipe.
That last bit - the part about how reporters were combing through the emails like a bunch of grade school little brothers who've found their big sister's diary, and making no perceptible effort to make sure we were well-informed about the link between those emails and the fact that the whole goddamned Spook Network was telling us the Russians were fucking with our election.

Now, of course, they blame Obama for not trying harder - for not continually hitting us over the head with it.

Do your own fuckin' work, Press Poodles.

Today's Today

Happy Presidents Day

I'm not trying to pretend everything would be just peachy if we had the actual winner of the election in the White House now.

But I think it's safe to say we wouldn't have quite the criminal enterprise in power either.

May you live in interesting times - my ass.

Hillary In Retrospect

Some interesting points made here.

"She was a horrible candidate". Maybe some of the perception regarding Hillary is due to our perception of how thoroughly horrible Trump is, and we're judging her relative to that. ie: "she was up against the worst person in the world and she lost, so she has to be the worst of everything ever..."

Plenty of "bad candidates" have been in office for some very long stretches of time.

New York Magazine:

Affection for her campaign staff is one reason Clinton claims she will not point fingers at her own team in assessing her loss. “I will never say anything other than positive things about my campaign,” she tells me in Chappaqua. “Because I love the people that led it, worked in it.”

Besides, she argues, “what I was doing was working. I would have won had I not been subjected to the unprecedented attacks by Comey and the Russians, aided and abetted by the suppression of the vote, particularly in Wisconsin.” She agrees that there are lessons to be learned from her campaign, just not the same ones her critics would cite. “Whoever comes next, this is not going to end. Republicans learned that if you suppress votes you win … So take me out of the equation as a candidate. You know, I’m not running for anything. Put me into the equation as somebody who has lived the lessons that people who care about this country should probably pay attention to.”
--and--

She was still in the ritualistic-process mode when she attended Trump’s inauguration. People close to her told me that she’d had doubts about being able to make it through without visibly losing control. “Oh,” says Clinton, “it was hard. It was really … difficult.” But “at the time, we hoped that there would be a different agenda for governing than there had been for running.”

Of course, it quickly became clear from Trump’s speech that there would be no change in strategy. A look of disgust crosses Clinton’s face as she recalls it. “It was a really painful cry to his hard-core supporters that he wasn’t changing,” she says. “The ‘carnage’ in our country? It was a very disturbing moment. I caught Michelle Obama’s eye, like, What is going on here? I was sitting next to George and Laura Bush, and we have our political differences, but this was beyond any experience any of us had ever had.”

I ask her about the report that Bush had said of the speech, “That was some weird shit,” and her eyes light up. “Put it in your article,” she says. “They tried to walk back from it, but …” Did she hear it herself? I ask. She raises her eyebrows and grins.

--and--

The unusually prolonged pummeling is partly because Clinton’s Election Day loss was not just hers but the nation’s; her defeat this time left us not with an Obama presidency but with an out-of-control administration led by a man so inept — and so reviled — that even (some) Republicans are voicing concerns. The nation is grasping for a way to understand how we got here, and blaming Clinton wholly and neatly takes the heat off everyone else who contributed: from the critics who derided her supporters as empty-headed shills to those supporters who were cowed into secret Facebook groups; from the journalists who treated Trump as a ratings-pumping sideshow and Clinton as the suspiciously presumptive president to all of us who permitted cheerful stories about America’s progress on gender and race to blot out the real and lingering inequities in this country.

Even Louis CK

Hillary Clinton can take the abuse - this has been 25 years of hazing, and it's given us someone who's tough; someone who can focus, and get shit done.

If you vote for Hillary, you're a grownup.

If you vote for Trump, you're a sucker.

If you don't vote for anybody, you're just an asshole.

Word, bubba.

Today's Keith

Watch this video on The Scene.

What I've suspected for a while.  I can count on Keith to track it down and articulate for me.

Repubs could've glommed onto the main point of the Benghazi thing and gotten after Clinton, but they knew Benghazi was no worse a fuckup than all the other fuckups that get our State Department people hurt and killed on a regular basis. So they didn't pursue it to get at Clinton as the Secretary, and they sure as fuck didn't do it to be noble protectors of our valiant diplomacy warriors. They coulda done that by simply not cutting the State Dept's Security Budgets. 

Those hearings were pure theater - as always.  But none of that was really the point. The point was to damage Hillary Clinton politically for 2016 (Kevin McCarthy admitted as much on the record), and to maintain the "issue" so they could make money off the issue; money that gets them re-elected.

But that's not the onliest thing.  One other thing is how odd it seems that every email portrays Hillary or Podesta or Blumenthal in the worst possible light - and like Keith has said, never a word about GOP or Trump.  But here's the kicker: up until a coupla months ago, a lot of these "leaked emails" were slagging Debbie Wasserman-Schultz for doing shady things to fuck over Bernie. Now, suddenly (ie: magically?), Donna Brazile is the one who spent all that time and energy conspiring and conniving, while Wasserman-Schultz has disappeared completely.

Gee, it's almost like "Chairman Brezhnev has a touch of the flu and is currently under a doctor's care in a secure and undisclosed location."

This has smelled like bear shit for a long time now.

Thank the magic sky-goblin for Keith Olbermann.

It's A Wonderment

Given recent blowups regarding revelations of Mr Trump's ever-increasing Ick Factor, I got curious as to the Endorsement Scorecard, so off to Wikipedia we go.

And, ooh look - here's a snapshot of Newspaper Endorsements for 2016

In a 5-way contest, Trump finishes behind "No Endorsement" and "Not Donald Trump" and Gary (what's "a leppo"?) Johnson. Dead.Fucking.Last.

Zero. Zip. Zilch. Nada. Not one. Not so much as the Bergen County Shoppers Guide. Nothin'.

But wait, Mike - everybody knows the Librul Media can't we trusted. What about all the others; the "real people" ?

So, I went to the Endorsements page for each candidate, and browsed around a bit, and then I employed the time-honored metric of counting the number of times I had to hit Page Down to get thru the lists - and here's my very silly little quickie recap:

Hillary Clinton = 54 pages

Donald Trump = 17 pages

There ya have it - Hillary stomps his ass by better than 3-1.

Oh yeah - maybe this is the kicker and maybe it's not, but anyway, here's the score on how many endorsements have been retracted for each of 'em:

Hillary Clinton = 0

Donald Trump = 42

Knowing how low and crass and mercenary any given politician (or pundit) can be, we know how bad the situation has to get before one of these public ho-bags admits to making a mistake and reverses course.

Forty-fucking-two

Today's Tweet

HILLARY: i told you he'd fuck the chair
TRUMP: *while fucking the chair* I never fucked the chair pic.twitter.com/QACRSry4SG

— michael koh (@ughHugs) October 10, 2016

But Don't Get Happy

We have Clinton's lead up to 5 points now. https://t.co/WLXtJodIzD pic.twitter.com/rcbE00H4iY

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) October 6, 2016

...Get to work. 
Make the calls. 
Hand out the fliers. 
Put up the yard signs.
Elect the people who'll keep the pressure on. 

A Quote

"Senator Clinton is the prune juice of this election. She might not seem that appetizing, but if you don't take her now, you're gonna be clogged with crap for a very long time."

--SNL sketch

Today's Chart

And for anybody still insisting on being hung up on the "Yeah, but she's still lying so it's OK for me to sit here doing nothing but pining over Bernie", spare me the purity crap.

Governments lie. Politicians lie. Insurance Salemen lie. Cops lie. Your wife and kids lie.

You lie.

The point is that we can sift thru it; we can make a fairly accurate determination as to what the lie seems to be about vs what the lie is really about; we can test the statements in various ways to assign values to the lies and the liars - we can, to an extent, quantify the rhetoric. We can then put all this on a spectrum, and we come up with an assessment - which gives us reasonable rationale for flipping a coin or just going with your gut feeling.

Yeah, hey, I'm funny.  But, there are facts here. 

Fact 1: 

Hillary lies a little less than 30% of the time, while Trump lies more than 65% of the time. 

Fact 2: 

Hillary makes true statements more than 50% of the time, while Trump makes true statements less than 20% of the time.

Fact 3: 

Hillary tells the truth more than twice as often as Trump, while Trump lies more than twice as often as Hillary.

Fact 4: 

More is more, and less is less.

Look, I don't really know, but I hafta say this again - Hillary's been raked over the coals for 25 years, and she's standing tall.  Trump spent 90 minutes on stage with her last nite, and he's a mass of welts and bloody blisters today.

Where To, Bub?

Hillary went out of her way to assure us that she's not dead.  Of course, we all know what a liar she is so I guess that means we'll have to stay home and let that orange Nazi guy win it.

 

HRC's Episode

Some tweets:

hillary has pneumonia and is still campaigning 24/7 meanwhile my back kinda hurts so i ordered delivery 3 times today

— jomny sun (@jonnysun) September 11, 2016

Wait, so Hillary has PNEUMONIA and she's still campaigning as hard as she is? You realize how badass that is, right?

— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) September 11, 2016

It shows her doing her best to grit her teeth and work hard even with pneumonia. And it's humanizing, relatable.

— Josh Barro (@jbarro) September 11, 2016

I'd rather they just come out and tell us what's going on. I think I understand that they don't wanna make her the center of attention in order to countervail the fact that Trump superimposes himself on everything in sight; and they believe they always have to protect her from the shit that everybody throws at her every minute of every day and blah blah blah - but she's gonna catch that shit either way, so I think she's better off if they stop trying so hard to be cute with it and just let her own it.

"Yeah - I tho't it was just the usual allergies that bother me this time of the year.  Turns out I have pneumonia.  And then I did a coupla campaign stump speeches and a fund-raiser or two, and a buncha other work-type stuff, and then I sucked it up on a Sunday and went to a 9/11 memorial and I started feeling really bad and I had to take a little break - because pneumonia, bitches.  Do ya think Presidents get to call in sick every time they feel a little funky?  I'm gonna do this job, and I'm gonna keep on doing this job, and they're gonna have to carry me out in a fucking box before I stop doing this job.  Hear what I'm sayin'?  Good - what else ya got?"

Today's Hillary

Just in the last several years:

Hillary's emails:
Looks bad, and while there's a few bits and pieces, nothing to get your panties in a bunch over.

DNC emails:
Democrats "conspiring" to nominate a Democrat. Color me unsurprised. Moving on.

Benghazi!!!!!:
Get fucking serious.

"Scandal" after "scandal" for 25 years; and 25 years of "oooh, this time for sure; those indictments are coming any minute now" - and there's just never ever anything that amounts to more than a little nose-wrinkle?

Now, we can add The Clinton Foundation thing to the pile.

Tuesday afternoon, Stephen Braun and Eileen Sullivan of the Associated Press released the results of a review of State Department appointment data that they used to make some striking claims about Hillary Clinton’s schedule as secretary of state.

According to their reporting, Clinton spent a remarkably large share of her time as America’s chief diplomat talking to people who had donated money to the Clinton Foundation. She went out of her way to help these Clinton Foundation donors, and her decision to do so raises important concerns about the ethics of her conduct as secretary and potentially as president. It’s a striking piece of reporting that made immediate waves in my social media feed, as political journalists of all stripes retweeted the story’s headline conclusions.

Except it turns out not to be true. The nut fact that the AP uses to lead its coverage is wrong, and Braun and Sullivan’s reporting reveals absolutely no unethical conduct. In fact, they found so little unethical conduct that an enormous amount of space is taken up by a detailed recounting of the time Clinton tried to help a former Nobel Peace Prize winner who’s also the recipient of a Congressional Gold Medal and a Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Here’s the bottom line: Serving as secretary of state while your husband raises millions of dollars for a charitable foundation that is also a vehicle for your family’s political ambitions really does create a lot of space for potential conflicts of interest. Journalists have, rightly, scrutinized the situation closely. And however many times they take a run at it, they don’t come up with anything more scandalous than the revelation that maybe billionaire philanthropists have an easier time getting the State Department to look into their visa problems than an ordinary person would.

If there's really anything there, and she always just gets away with it, then the fact that 25 years of hard snooping, GOP Congressional Investigations and many many millions of dollars spent - to find practically nothing - all of that would have to mean Hillary Clinton is the most amazing of all evil genius super-criminal masterminds ever - and she's not.

I'm not a fan.  I try to trust politicians no farther that I could spit one of 'em.  But at a certain point, since this particular politician is the one we've got, maybe we could figure out how to take 'yes' for an answer, admit that we agree with her on some things, help her do the things she says she agrees with us on, and always keep the pressure on her to do those other things.  You know - kinda do that thing we like to call, uhmm, what is again? Oh yeah - Politics.

And all the rest of that shit?  You're not getting any of that - wish for something else.

  

Yeah, About That

My main contention about Politics In Public is that nothing is ever about what the pols are willing to tell us it's about.

So I'm wondering - the Repubs might be trying really really hard to make Benghazi about Hillary because they desperately need us not to be thinking of the obvious connection between The Bush Doctrine and what an even bigger total cluster fuck "The Arab World" has become since we started swinging the big USAmerica Inc dick around knockin' shit over late in 2001 - which, btw, every "liberal" tried to warn us was likely to happen, while every "conservative" kept telling us it couldn't possibly happen because after all, inside every stoopid mooslim is a clean-cut Methodist-wanna-be with a burning desire to open up a shoe store in Topeka and join the local JCs.

How often do we hafta make the same fucking mistake before we get with the fucking program here?

Another great tweet:

How @TheDemocrats have felt about the GOP for the last 30 years in one picture. #p2 pic.twitter.com/6YrfUmwpVn

— Jason Hitchcock (@JasonHitchcock) October 22, 2015

And one more thing - I've been watching the Benghazi Circus today, and I've been hearing HRC trying mightily not to end every sentence with "Silly Goose" or "Sonny" or "you scabrous fucking twat-waffle".

Not A Hillary Fan

...but right now, she beats the fuck outa everybody else for me.  So while she's gonna get lotsa push-back from me for things like the Standard 3rd-Way Bullshit she apparently thinks she hasta peddle in Iowa, I'll more than likely be right there working the phones and handing out fliers and standing at my local polling place all day on the 1st Tuesday in November 2016.

Charlie Pierce explains why:

If she is elected, she unequivocally will accept the science of anthropogenic climate change and treat it as a crisis. This cannot be said of any of the Republican candidates, real or potential.

If she is elected, she unequivocally will support marriage equality, and oppose discrimination against our fellow citizens based on sexual orientation or gender identity. This cannot be said of any of the Republican candidates, real or potential.

If she is elected, she will not destroy the Affordable Care Act, an article of faith among all the Republican candidates, real or potential.

If she is elected, and despite her closeness to certain Wall Street interests, she will not destroy the Dodd-Frank reforms, another article of faith among all the Republican candidates, real or potential.

If she is elected, the DREAMers will get to stay in the country.

If she is elected, she will not sign a bill to eliminate the estate tax. (More on this one later)

If she is elected, Janice Rogers Brown will stay right where she is in the judicial food chain.

To get elected, she does not have to wink at state's rights, up to and including incidents of armed resistance.

To get elected, she does not have to equivocate on the science behind the theory of evolution as does any Republican candidate who seeks the votes of Republicans in Iowa.

To get elected, she does not have to peddle the snake oil of supply-side economics, nor does she have to peddle scare stories about the oncoming caliphate, nor does she have to create bogeymen about jackboots coming to steal your guns.

More, I suspect, to follow.

Jesus, this is going to be a long 19 months.

Amen to that, Brother Charles.

Please, Not Hillary

I'll have a really hard time supporting Hillary Clinton if when she runs in 2016.  I just have this thing against 'legacies'.  I don't think you should get special consideration for admission to any school just because you're the child of an alum.  You shouldn't have the professional skids greased for you in any way just because your parents were 'important' - or because your husband preceded you in office (even tho' having a famous/popular husband may be the only way you get the respect you've earned by your own worthy accomplishments).

There's no earthly reason Paris Hilton should command anything close to national attention for anything she does.  There's equally no reason to believe Meghan McCain would be some kind of leading light in the GOP Youth Brigade if it wasn't for her daddy's name and her mommy's money.  Luke Russert should be running the cash register at the Dollar Store while he works part time as an assistant to the deputy senior intern at some local AM station in Pokacuzzin West Virginia, where he gets to read the farm report whenever the regular guy is too hungover.

Here's my thing:  no more Kennedys and no more Rockefellers and no more Pauls and no more Bushes and no more Clintons.  No lagacies.

"Unfortunately", Hillary's credentials are nothing short of amazing.  Plus, I can't see anybody on the Repub side who could get thru the primaries and still have anything in his platform worth voting for.  So I may have to make an exception.

But then along comes Elizabeth Warren:

We’re three years from the next presidential election, and Hillary Clinton is, once again, the inevitable Democratic nominee. Congressional Republicans have spent months investigating her like she already resides in the White House. The New York Times has its own dedicated Clinton correspondent, whose job it is to chronicle everything from Hillary’s summer accommodations (“CLINTONS FIND A NEW PLACE TO VACATION IN THE HAMPTONS”) to her distinct style of buckraking (“IN CLINTON FUNDRAISING, EXPECT A FULL EMBRACE”). There is a feature-length Hillary biopic in the works, and a well-funded super PAC—“Ready for Hillary”—bent on easing her way into the race. And then there is Clinton herself, who sounds increasingly candidential. Since leaving the State Department, Clinton has already delivered meaty, headline-grabbing orations on voting rights and Syria.

Yet for all the astrophysical force of these developments, anyone who lived through 2008 knows that inevitable candidates have a way of becoming distinctly evitable. With the Clintons’ penchant for melodrama and their checkered cast of hangers-on—one shudders to consider the embarrassments that will attend the Terry McAuliffe administration in Virginia—Clinton-era nostalgia is always a news cycle away from curdling into Clinton fatigue. Sometimes, all it takes is a single issue and a fresh face to bring the bad memories flooding back.

I hope Warren stays right where she is tho'.  I want her to be a thorn in their sides for a very long time.

And I think it sucks that the political firmament has become so dull that practically any bright spot at all looks like a fucking supernova to us.