Tuesday, September 27, 2016

Sadly This Seems True

Criminologists have tried for decades to prove that the overrepresentation of blacks in prison is due to criminal-justice racism. They have always come up short. They have been forced to the same conclusion as Michael Tonry in his book, Malign Neglect: “Racial differences in patterns of offending, not racial bias by police and other officials, are the principal reason that such greater proportions of blacks than whites are arrested, prosecuted, convicted and imprisoned,” Tonry wrote. In 1997, criminologists Robert Sampson and Janet Lauritsen reviewed the massive literature on charging and sentencing. They found overwhelming evidence establishing that “large racial differences in criminal offending,” not racism, explained why more blacks were in prison proportionately than whites and for longer terms.
http://www.city-journal.org/html/hillarys-debate-lies-14759.html

"Turn out the lights, the party's over ..."

Will the last one out of ObamaCare please turn off the lights?

That's a question that health insurers and individual Americans both may want to start pondering. Recent events such as the departure of the insurance company Aetna from the vast majority of state exchanges show that ObamaCare is entering the death spiral that experts have long predicted. Insurers are now heading for the exit, fast — and consumers won't be far behind them.

In the wake of massive losses, insurance companies are instinctively engaging their fight-or-flight instincts. The two big insurers remaining on state exchanges — Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield, and Cigna — are still evaluating the risks of a collapsing system, trying to determine if they should abandon the ObamaCare exchanges altogether or cope with the realities of increasingly high-cost care and coverage.
http://www.investors.com/politics/commentary/obamacares-death-spiral-has-begun/

Why Did She Need It?

Why did Cheryl Mills require criminal immunity?

This is the irksome question hanging over the FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton’s home-brew server in the wake of news that Ms. Mills was granted immunity for her laptop’s contents.

Ms. Mills was a top Clinton aide at the State Department who became Mrs. Clinton’s lawyer when she left. She was also a witness, as well as a potential target, in the same FBI investigation into her boss’s emails. The laptop the bureau wanted was one Ms. Mills used in 2014 to sort Clinton emails before deciding which would be turned over to State.

Here’s the problem. There are two ways a witness can get immunity: Either she invokes the Fifth Amendment on the grounds she might incriminate herself, or, worried something on the laptop might expose her to criminal liability, her lawyers reveal what this might be before prosecutors agree to an immunity deal.

As with so much else in this investigation, the way the laptop was handled was out of the ordinary. Normally, immunity is granted for testimony and interviews. The laptop was evidence. Standard practice would have been for the FBI to get a grand-jury subpoena to compel Ms. Mills to produce it.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-secrets-of-cheryl-mills-1474932673

I feel covered in slime reading about these things.

Monday, September 26, 2016

Who's the Greediest of All

Someone might want to tell Hillary Clinton that greed and envy are two of the seven deadly sins. She's guilty of both.

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Her revised tax plan‎ would raise the estate tax to as high as 65% -- up from 40% today. She would also apply the hated death tax to as many as twice the number of estates.

It's one of her dumbest ideas yet — which is saying a lot. It won't raise any revenue to speak of. It's a bow-tied gift to estate tax lawyers and accountants. Many studies have found that the cost to the economy of taxing a lifetime of savings more than ‎outweighs any benefits. It actually could end up costing the Treasury money by reducing investment in family businesses that are a major engine of growth for our economy.

But Hillary wants to take us back to the 1970s. According to a Wall Street Journal analysis, the plan would "impose a 50% rate that would apply to estates over $10 million a person, a 55% rate that starts at $50 million a person, and the top rate of 65%, which would affect only those with assets exceeding $500 million for a single person and $1 billion for married couple.

What Hillary doesn't get is this: Anyone who's smart enough to make half a billion dollars is smart enough to find a way to dodge this confiscatory tax. That's the whole history of the death tax — the very rich never pay it."
http://www.investors.com/politics/columnists/bernie-clintons-massive-tax-hike-is-based-on-greed-and-envy/

Who knows more - markets or true believers?

So while scientists are aggressively promoting their theories about a horrid future thanks to no serious global response to what has them alarmed, the smartest investors in the world are plainly ignoring them as though their theories are bogus.  Just once it would be nice if the scientific community might address why the very people who have the most to lose from so-called “global warming” work, invest and live as though its impact will prove a non-factor.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/johntamny/2016/09/25/are-the-promoters-of-global-warming-catastrophe-the-actual-ones-in-denial/2/#6525886c5e71

Wouldn't It Suck If We Made Our President Into A King ... And Then The Other Guys Regained Power?

In one way, it’s not surprising that Democrats are beside themselves at the possibility of a Trump presidency. They’ve spent the last 100 years expanding the scope of executive authority, granting the federal administrative agencies the power of judge, jury, and executioner over their ever-widening dominion. If liberals and progressives didn’t want that awesome, intrusive power to fall into the wrong hands, perhaps they should have heeded the warnings of small-government conservatives, who railed for a century against the bloat, rot, and corruption they saw metastasizing within the District of Columbia. Perhaps they shouldn’t have declared the U.S. Constitution—with its bill of rights and enumerated powers—to be an antiquated relic.
http://city-journal.org/html/normalize-14753.html

I don't think the progressives get the irony, yet.

Not that there's any reason to think Trump would be a worse king than another Clinton.

In Theory

As it happens, Clinton’s agenda, as my colleague Adam Davidson also wrote the other day, does have a unifying theme. It’s the same one that Democrats have been running on for twenty-five years, a period in which they have won the popular vote in five out of six Presidential elections, and it involves using the power of the government to tilt the economy in favor of working people. Trump, although he talks like a populist, has largely adopted the regressive economic policies of the Republican establishment. 
http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/the-presidential-debate-is-clintons-chance-to-outfox-trump?intcid=mod-latest

They have been running on for 25 years?  More like 100 years.  More federal government power, more pretense that the federal government pulling strings will give us the predicted results without the negative unintended consequences.  Giving more power to an already over-reaching federal government is just giving more booze and faster cars to teens.  I would say only idiots could think this will work, but I know too many smart people who are still caught in this fantasy.

"Dead Fish" Stink


House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) said he learned only Friday that the Justice Department gave immunity deals to Clinton’s former chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, and two other aides. That brings to five the number of Clintonistas who got a pass in exchange for testimony and/or information.

But what makes it especially significant in Mills’ case is that she was allowed to sit in on Clinton’s FBI interview, asserting attorney-client privilege on Hillary’s behalf. This, even though Mills was herself a witness, even a potential subject of, the investigation.

Indeed, she was a key player in the process that deleted tens of thousands of Clinton e-mails — many later found to be classified — before the FBI could subpoena them.

Mills’ lawyers say her immunity deal was limited to the contents of her laptop, and was given because of ongoing debate over after-the-fact classification.

Prosecutors normally strike such deals only when they can’t get the information any other way. But if Mills refused to turn over the computer without any immunity, why couldn’t the FBI just subpoena the laptop?

After all, as Chaffetz notes, “immunity deals should not be a requirement for cooperation with the FBI.” Yet in the Clinton case, he noted, “the FBI was handing out immunity deals like candy. No wonder they couldn’t prosecute anyone.”
http://nypost.com/2016/09/23/fresh-proof-the-fbis-hillary-email-probe-was-a-joke/

Thursday, September 22, 2016

What's Going to Happen Next Chicken Little?

This is comedic genius!  Every punch line sounds like the subtext to Chicken Little.

The new numbers are startling. Only four years ago, I wrote an essay called “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math.” In the piece, I drew on research from a London-based think tank, the Carbon Tracker Initiative. The research showed that the untapped reserves of coal, oil, and gas identified by the world’s fossil fuel industry contained five times more carbon than we can burn if we want to keep from raising the planet’s temperature by more than two degrees Celsius. That is, if energy companies eventually dug up and burned everything they’d laid claim to, the planet would cook five times over. That math kicked off a widespread campaign of divestment from fossil fuel stocks by universities, churches, and foundations. And it’s since become the conventional wisdom: Many central bankers and world leaders now agree that we need to keep the bulk of fossil fuel reserves underground.

But the new new math is even more explosive. It draws on a report by Oil Change International, a Washington-based think tank, using data from the Norwegian energy consultants Rystad. For a fee—$54,000 in this case—Rystad will sell anyone its numbers on the world’s existing fossil fuel sources. Most of the customers are oil companies, investment banks, and government agencies. But OCI wanted the numbers for a different reason: to figure out how close to the edge of catastrophe we’ve already come.
https://newrepublic.com/article/136987/recalculating-climate-math

Why so funny? Because it is all based on at best scientific conjecture.  No one has anyone come close to proving that these numbers mean anything at all.  Every attempt to prove the numbers just ends in another failed climate model - and no one's arguing that the models are failing.  There's been a lot of conjecting, investigating, hypothesizing and fear mongering but nothing even close to proof.  The temperatures are not rising significantly - less than the margin of error in the measuring system.

It's just a bad comedy.  I hope I live long enough to laugh with a friend about when they finally pivot as they have with things like saturated fat and cholesterol and start to claim they knew it was wrong all along.  The idea that these goof balls want to wreck the engine of human well being to prevent this faux catastrophe is lovely testimony to the enigma of the human experience, in which we find Forest Gump, based on what he does, is smarter than the climate alarmists. Sadly FG is perhaps not smarter than the industries that profit from climate change do-gooder naivete or the political class which is always excited to legislate away your liberty and mine.

Another retort to these AGW goofs:
So the authors of this Report, operating without government or industry funding, compiled the best available atmospheric temperature time series from 13 independent sources (satellites, balloons, buoys, and surface records), and then backed out only ENSO (i.e., El Nino/La Nina) effects.  And with that data and that sole adjustment they found: no evidence of the so-called Tropical Hot Spot that is the key to EPA's claimed "basic physical understanding" of the claimed atmospheric greenhouse warming model, plus no statistically significant atmospheric warming at all to be explained.

For those interested in all the gory technical details, here is a link to the full Executive Summary, and here is a link to the full 68 page Report, complete with zillions of charts and access to all the archived underlying data.  Note that, in great distinction to the tradition of climate "science," where hiding data from adversaries is the norm, here the authors have made all data and methods fully available.  Try to prove them wrong!

Well, back to you EPA!  Do you mean that you're trying to impose hundreds of billions of dollars of costs on the American economy and citizens and the so-called "scientific" basis for your project never existed? You'd better come up with something pretty good and quick!

Meanwhile, Hillary is saying that she supports Obama's climate agenda because she "believes in science."  Does she even know that science is a process of testing hypotheses against data, and not a set of enforced orthodox beliefs?  Don't count on it.
http://manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2016/9/19/what-exactly-is-the-science-underlying-climate-alarmism

Wednesday, September 21, 2016

What A Tangled Web

Among the many eye-openers from the Vincent-Klein review of internal Platte communications:

The server suffered at least one hacking attempt from a Russia-based computer in 2013, and three from China-based PCs in 2014.
 When news broke of Clinton’s mass deletions of old emails, Platte execs worried about being implicated in what they believed was her “covering up some shaddy [shady] s - - t.” One even called it “Hillary’s coverup operation.”
 The IT folks later sought to “cover our asses.” On Aug. 19, 2015, Platte IT consultant Bill Thornton wrote colleagues: “Any chance you found an old email with their directives to cut the backups back in Oct‐-Feb? . . . If we had that email, we are golden.”
 Thornton’s other damage-control idea: “Wondering how we can sneak an email in now after the fact asking them when they told us to cut the backups and have them confirm it for our records.”

Do You Believe in Bigfoot?

She lied repeatedly about her emails. She lied when she said she had “turned over everything I was obligated to turn over” (FBI Director James Comey said the FBI “discovered several thousand work-related e-mails that were not among the group of 30,000 e-mails returned by Secretary Clinton to state in 2014”). She lied when she said there was “no classified material” in her private emails . . . that there was nothing “classified at the time” . . . and that there was nothing “marked classified” in her private emails — all of which the FBI director said were untrue. And, to top it all off, she lied about her lies — declaring on national television that “Director Comey said my answers were truthful, and what I’ve said is consistent with what I have told the American people” — a claim The Post’s Fact Checker gave “Four Pinocchios.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/hillary-clinton-who-tells-dreadful-lies/2016/09/19/cd38412e-7e6a-11e6-9070-5c4905bf40dc_story.html?utm_term=.6bd398c74129

Today, the American people agree. A recent NBC News poll found that just 11 percent of Americans say Clinton is honest and trustworthy. To put that in perspective, 14 percent of American voters believe in Bigfoot. In other words, more Americans believe that a large, hairy, hominoid creature inhabits the forest of North America than believe that Hillary Clinton tells the truth.

Tuesday, September 13, 2016

Well Put

Trump accused Clinton of “hatred and derision for the people who make this country run,” the citizens who “thanklessly follow the rules, pay their taxes, and scratch out a living for their families.” Hillary, Trump says, “displayed the same sense of arrogance and entitlement that led her to violate federal law as secretary of state, hide and delete her e-mails, put classified information in the reach of our enemies, lie to Congress, and sell government favors and access through her foundation.” Candidates usually are smart enough to slam other candidates. Instead, Hillary Clinton slimes actual voters, by the millions. 

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/439969/hillary-clinton-basket-of-deplorables-donald-trump-supporter-comments-malign-americans

I Don't Want To Be Around For the End

What's going to happen to these people when this regime inevitably falls?  It's already a human tragedy on a massive scale, will it be worse before it gets better?

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/editorials/ct-north-korea-nuclear-kim-jong-un-edit-20160912-story.html

Monday, September 12, 2016

When Will the Dam Break 20160912

Would you support the drug war, prohibition of drugs, if you believed the despair described in the linked article was the symptom of all of the costs of that prohibition?  We have believed that we can protect ourselves from drugs by law for a long time, despite all the evidence to the contrary (evidence like we can't even keep drugs out of prisons).  I view the drug war as just another cultural delusion regarding what the government's monopoly on coercive force can create or accomplish.

Without the drug war, there would be no drug black market, there would be no funding to pay for the guns and ammo, there would be no drug turf over which to fight, the current practice of arresting poor young men dealing would end, so there would be a chance for young poor men to father their own children.  There would be young, poor men around for young poor women to marry.  The chance for family would be restored.

If then experiment - if the drug war, then mass imprisonment is the only way to reduce violence.  Else - no drug war, less violence, less money to be spent by criminals on guns, more incentives to enter the work force (even if it is only the legal sale of drugs).  It wouldn't be utopia, nor will we find utopia under any circumstance.  But a drug war free US would be better than the current bloodbath and the way it pits the populace in these circumstances against the police officers who would try to protect them from crime.  If no drug war, then many fewer reasons for police to confront minorities while each fears and perhaps hates the other.

But of course, this "conservative" author cannot even pin point the drug war as the problem - it would be akin to expressing doubt in the christian god in her circles to suggest that using violence to stop drug use is stupid, dehumanizing and ultimately more lethal to US citizens than al qaida.

‘The streets are gone,” Dean Angelo, president of the Chicago police union, told me last month. The night before, Aug. 14, a Chicago police officer’s son had been killed in a shooting while sitting on his family’s porch, one of 92 people killed in Chicago during the worst month for homicides in the Windy City since July 1993. The August victims who survived included 10-year-old Tavon Tanner, shot while playing in front of his house (the bullet ripped through Tavon’s pancreas, intestines, kidney and spleen); an 8-year-old girl shot in the arm while crossing the street; and two 6-year-old girls.

On Sept. 6, a 71-year-old man was accosted by a teen on a bike while watering his lawn. The robber demanded the man’s wallet and when he refused shot him in the abdomen, then grabbed his wallet before pedaling away.

By Sept. 8, nearly 3,000 people had been shot in Chicago in 2016, an average of one shooting victim every two hours. Five hundred and sixteen people had been murdered. Gun homicides and non-fatal shootings were up 47% over the same period of 2015, which had seen a significant rise in crime over 2014.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-black-body-count-rises-as-chicago-police-step-back-1473631079

Washington's Only Sin

Washington's only sin, saying what you really think.

It took the Hillary Clinton campaign a day to figure out their candidate had made a big mistake when she took at shot at supporters of Donald Trump. And, as is often the case, with unforced errors, it was a little too little, too late. Clinton’s statement at an LGBT fundraiser—“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the ‘basket of deplorables.’ Right?”—had all the hallmarks of a classic gaffe and immediately raised comparisons to Mitt Romney’s infamous “47 percent” remark in 2012. Her partisans insisted from the moment they learned of that the whole thing was either no big deal or a spasm of wondrous truth-telling, but just like their dogged insistence that her emails don’t matter to voters, the spin fell flat.
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/politics-ideas/campaigns-elections/clintons-deplorables-gift-to-trump/

Bold Move or Ugly Desperation?

Also telling is that her staff avoided alerting the press that travels with her — and were left to catch up after noticing her missing. Clinton’s brief walkabout some 90 minutes later, after she’d rested in daughter Chelsea’s apartment, settles nothing. Nor does word late Sunday that she has pneumonia.
We hadn’t made much of Clinton’s long coughing fit last week, but that now seems more disturbing, too. Maybe her repeated memory failures when the FBI interviewed her over her e-mail abuses were actually real, rather than dodges of questions she didn’t dare answer truthfully.
Even her refusal to hold a single real press conference for more than nine months suddenly looks different: Is she dodging the press to avoid questions about all her endless scandals, or does she fear something else?
http://nypost.com/2016/09/11/hillary-clintons-health-is-now-a-real-issue/
Bold or desperate if one were to run for president in poor health? It's a killer job.

Friday, September 9, 2016

What A Relief

Oh geez what a relief.  For a minute, I thought that Ms. Clinton directed the folks who ran her secret, illegal server to feloniously delete emails owned by the people of this nation, which she generated as a public servant.  Thankfully, as her statements and those of her legal team make clear, she did nothing criminal such as directing a company she employed to do anything - like perhaps wipe the server with a rag - that may have protected her from the Congressional subpoena.  

Then again, even if she did do additional felonious things over and above using the private server, it's clear none of her supporters would care.  Even a demon from hell is better than the devil.

According to the F.B.I. documents, Mr. Combetta told the bureau in February that he did not recall deleting the emails. But in May, he told a different story.

In the days after Mrs. Clinton’s staffers called Platte River Networks in March 2015, Mr. Combetta said realized that he had not followed a December 2014 order from Mrs. Clinton’s lawyers to have the emails deleted. Mr. Combetta then used a program called BleachBit to delete the messages, the bureau said.

In Mr. Combetta’s first interview with the F.B.I. in February, he said he did not recall seeing the preservation order from the Benghazi committee, which Mrs. Clinton’s lawyer, Cheryl D. Mills, had sent to Platte River. But in his May interview, he said that at the time he made the deletions “he was aware of the existence of the preservation request and the fact that it meant he should not disturb Clinton’s email data” on the Platte River server.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/09/us/politics/hillary-clinton-emails-investigation.html?_r=2


When Will the Dam Break?

A day later, Chicago police Superintendent Eddie Johnson, who's been a cop in this city for 27 years — long enough to qualify for advanced degrees in sociology, psychology and economics — provided a pertinent footnote to the Labor Day weekend violence. "Impoverished neighborhoods, people without hope do these kinds of things," he said. "You show me a man that doesn't have hope, I'll show you one that's willing to pick up a gun and do anything with it."
Maybe that's more than a footnote. It might be a chapter, or the thesis. There can't be a simple explanation for why people shoot at each other, destroying themselves and their neighborhoods, can there? No, but gangs — these days, often with weak or no leadership — are at the heart of the violence.
Gang structure has atomized, creating block-by-block turf battles. Gangbangers shoot at each other over drug sales or factional rivalries, over petty insults on social media or over a pair of shoes. They fight and shoot perhaps because they don't care, or perhaps because fighting and shooting gives them something to care about. The shootings beget retaliatory shootings. Illegal guns are easy to find. So are targets.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/editorials/ct-shootings-chicago-police-murder-laquan-johnson-edit-0908-jm-20160907-story.html
You see, it's not the drug war that created all this violence, it is guns.  
If you want to do an insightful, heart felt, moving and depressing article about violence and oppressed minorities and people without hope, you can't mention inconvenient facts like:
-the government oppression of those who want to get high
-fiscal empowerment of those who sell drugs in violation of the law
These all too pertinent facts cannot be mentioned because for an inexplicable reason, we still cling to the idea that government control of drugs is protecting us.  It's not protecting us any more than alcohol prohibition protected us.  Prohibition doesn't make drugs less available, nor did it make alcohol less available.  For those caught up in these turf wars over who gets to sell to whom - from inner cities to small towns in Maine to the nation of Mexico - the drug war is dehumanizing them and killing them.

Thankfully, the evidence is clear and it's only a matter of time until people can speak in public and be frank about the stupidity, the criminality and the barbarity of drug prohibition.

Thursday, September 8, 2016

That's So Strange, What Could Have Been Going On?

The very curious timeline of Clinton’s document deletions: subpoena issued → her lawyers talk to Clinton’s IT team → e-mails destroyed 

Imagine a mafia don who wants to have some evidence destroyed, maybe even have a witness “disappear.” Does he have a sit-down with his trusted capos, who will then give the job to a reliable button-man? Not if he’s taken the Clinton Family course in advanced criminology — known around the campus as “(C).” If the don is a graduate, he knows the new way to get away with murder is to have all your orders communicated by your lawyers.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/439804/clintons-e-mail-scandal-stinkier-stinkier-documents-destroyed-after-subpoena
The closer we look at the FBI’s investigative file on Hillary Clinton’s emails, the more we wonder if Director James Comey always intended to let her off the hook. The calculated release before the long Labor Day weekend suggests political favoritism, and the report shows the FBI didn’t pursue evidence of potential false statements, obstruction of justice and destruction of evidence.

Mr. Comey’s concessions start with his decision not to interview Mrs. Clinton until the end of his investigation, a mere three days before he announced his conclusions. Regular FBI practice is to get a subject on the record early then see if his story meshes with what agents find. In this case they accepted Mrs. Clinton’s I-don’t-recall defenses after the fact.

The notes also show the G-men never did grill Mrs. Clinton on her “intent” in setting up her server. Instead they bought her explanation that it was for personal convenience. This helped Mr. Comey avoid concluding that her purpose was to evade statutes like the Federal Records Act. Mr. Comey also told Congress that indicting her without criminal intent would pose a constitutional problem. But Congress has written many laws that don’t require criminal intent, and negligent homicide (for example) has never been unconstitutional.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-fbis-blind-clinton-trust-1473289804

Comey Knew This

Of course, Comey knew this. He is the one who did not want these obvious questions and many others asked. He is the one who allowed Clinton to testify without being under oath. He is the one who de facto allowed her to assert she did not "recall" the most well known and common things like the circle "c"  insignia for classified email without being questioned, further allowing her to do this a staggering 37 times. Clinton didn't even have to take the Fifth.  (And this woman is running for president of the United States.)

What a coward Comey is. When Julian Assange starts to release his next round of emails, the director may have to commit hara-kiri. It will be the only honorable way to go, failing his resignation.
https://pjmedia.com/diaryofamadvoter/2016/09/07/james-comey-should-resign-now-for-the-good-of-the-country/2/

Wednesday, September 7, 2016

Deleted All the Emails Right After They Were Subpoena'ed? Crazy Coincidence

The chairman of the House Oversight Committee has sent a letter to the company that handled the technical side of Hillary Clinton's private email server. Rep. Jason Chaffetz wants to know why an employee of Platte River Networks (PRN), which was under contract with Clinton to handle the server, deleted large amounts of email after the Clinton team received a congressional subpoena for the material, and why a PRN technical employee, apparently the one who performed the actual deletions, asserted a legal privilege and refused to tell the FBI what was said on a conference call he took part in with Clinton's attorneys on March 25, 2015, around the time the deletions were performed.

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/probe-targets-clinton-contractor-who-deleted-email/article/2601078

Gee, I hope someone can solve this puzzle.  Why in the world would the emails have been deleted then?

HC's Whoppers for Today

Hillary also claimed a lot of memory problems, leaving blogger Tamara Keel to write:  “I have an Ivy League lawyer, wife of a former governor and president, who lived in the White House for eight damned years, then went on to be a senator and Secretary of State telling me she didn't know about classified email and that work-related documents needed to be saved as part of the public record? Look, I don't mind you bullshitting me a little bit, Hillary, but don't you ever lie to me like I'm Montel Williams."

http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2016/09/06/emails-fbi-hillary-crooked-blackberry-lost-phones-laptop-server-classified-glenn-reynolds/89881664/

Forget the new dump of Hillary Clinton emails. Forget the phony claims that the missing communications were all about wedding plans and yoga routines. Forget, too, the many requests from Doug Band in which the Clinton Foundation honcho hoped his quos (hefty donations to the Clinton Foundation) would translate into quids (e.g., special access to the secretary).

Forget them all. The most disturbing aspect about the FBI dump may not be fresh evidence of another Clinton lie. The most disturbing thing about Mrs. Clinton’s continuing email drama may be where she’s telling the truth.

Or at least a half-truth. Mrs. Clinton told the FBI it was “common knowledge” at State that she used private email. Agents further quote her as saying she “could not recall anyone raising concerns with her regarding the sensitivity of the information she received at her email address.”
http://www.wsj.com/articles/even-worse-than-clintons-emails-1473116518

Some Pigs Are More Equal Than Others, Part 25

...a good amount of today’s release has been redacted. The original documents were classified at the Secret/Not Releasable to Foreign Nationals level, and to make it Unclassified about a third of the text has been cut out.


But what’s there is awful enough for Team Clinton. Although the FBI’s press release is terse, the documents themselves indelibly portray the Democratic presidential nominee as dishonest, entitled, and thoroughly incompetent.

Considering that Hillary has been accused of mishandling classified information on an almost industrial scale, what shines through is that Clinton is utterly clueless about classification matters, betraying an ignorance that is shocking when encountered in a former top official of our government—and one who wants to be our next commander-in-chief.

Our Federal classification system isn’t particularly complicated, the basics can be explained in a quarter-hour, and there are courses of instruction that exist precisely to explain how to identify classified information and properly handle it. In fact, they’re mandatory. Since Hillary blew off those courses, even though they are required for government workers at all levels, it’s not surprising that she has no idea what she’s talking about.
http://observer.com/2016/09/fbi-data-dump-shows-clinton-is-criminal-and-clueless/

Friday, September 2, 2016

Ugliness at the University (Another Institution Tarnished)

Then Potts-Kant's troubles got worse. Duke officials took a closer look at her work and didn't like what they saw. Fifteen of her papers, mostly dealing with pulmonary biology, have now been retracted, with many notices citing "unreliable" data. Several others have been modified with either partial retractions, expressions of concern, or corrections. And last month, a U.S. district court unsealed a whistleblower lawsuit filed by a former colleague of Potts-Kant. It accuses the researcher, her former supervisor, and the university of including fraudulent data in applications and reports involving more than 60 grants worth some $200 million. If successful, the suit—brought under the federal False Claims Act (FCA)—could force Duke to return to the government up to three times the amount of any ill-gotten funds, and produce a multimillion-dollar payout to the whistleblower.
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/09/whistleblower-sues-duke-claims-doctored-data-helped-win-200-million-grants

If it weren't real you'd think it was a novel

For nearly two years, she maintained the servers through which her unauthorized, non-secure homebrew communication system had operated. As we now know, about 62,000 emails were stored on those servers, over 2,000 of which contained classified information, including some of the most sensitive national defense secrets — and the highly classified sources and methods for acquiring those secrets — maintained by our government.

The latest classified email disclosure is a joke. The document is so chockablock with classified information — meaning it is so thoroughly redacted — that the State Department might just as well have issued a blank page. This reminds us of how cynically the Democrats’ presidential nominee looked the American people in the eye and assured us, for over a year, that she never sent or received classified information.

http://nypost.com/2016/08/31/latest-email-disclosure-is-just-more-proof-that-clinton-lied/

We are also reminded that Clinton repeatedly vowed she’d surrendered every single government business-related email upon the State Department’s request.

This was an extraordinary lie: She hoarded and attempted to destroy thousands of emails which, like the one The Post describes, involved government business — some of it highly sensitive and significant (such as the 30 emails related to the Benghazi massacre that the FBI recovered but the State Department has yet to disclose). Converting government records to one’s own use and destroying them are serious crimes, even if no classified information is involved.