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Trump LOST the election.

Within the long established electoral system of the United States of America, there is just one election that matters when it comes to selecting a president and a vice president: the votes cast by the electors of the United States Electoral College.

In 2016, Donald J. Trump received 304 of the electoral votes. His main opponent received only 227. Thus Trump won the election.

The popular vote is pretty much irrelevant.

Probably worth examining, what counts as a public record? And what can be "off the record"?

https://www.archives.gov/recor...

They'll simply say everything is "confidential", but that doesn't exempt it from the Federal records laws.

If I had to guess, I'd say that any automatic or programmatic deletion of government communications (federal or state) breaks the law.

Probably worth examining, what counts as a public record? And what can be "off the record"?

https://www.archives.gov/recor...

And then, there's Benghazi. Clear case of treason, and no Democrat is interested.

Clinton clearly dropped the ball with Benghazi. Her negligence had fatal consequences, and her apology did not sound sincere. However, I would not call what she did "treason:"

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.

Source: The Constitution of the United States: Article III, Section 3.

She was negligent and failed either to provide additional support for the consulate or authorize their withdrawal to a safer location. She did not levy war against the United States, nor did she adhere to or provide aid and comfort to an enemy of the United States. She was a spineless coward who clearly did not respect her subordinates or value their lives: but she did not commit the crime of treason. I think in general some people throw that word around a little too loosely without understanding what it means.

You are right that we have a long history of people crying wolf. As part of a course on the policy and ethical implications of AI, I am teaching the history of Luddite reactions from the printing press to the more recent robotic "revolution". Even recently with ATMs, there was a prediction of fewer branches and tellers which did not happen. So we're good right? Well...

Unfortunately, there is one thing that should stand out as being potentially different this time -- in previous instances of the Chicken Little scenarios, it was those who were worried about being displaced that were sounding the alarm, not those creating the technology. This time, it's the other way around. The vast majority of AI researchers, particularly in the private sector, are bullish on the elimination of most blue-collar and service jobs (even management and hedge fund investors are not safe) in the not too distant future. And if you have doubts, we have ample room to believe that the changes are not 50 years away:

• Manufacturing jobs are finally returning to North America...for robots
• Chinese factory replaces 90% of human workers with robots. Production rises by 250%, defects drop by 80%
• BBC News: Foxconn replaces '60,000 factory workers with robots'
• Attention all humans of Shanghai! Robo chefs will now whip you up a bowl of ramen in 90 seconds flat
• Japanese white-collar workers are already being replaced by artificial intelligence
• Mining 24 Hours a Day with Robots
• China Has Launched the Robocops You Have Been Waiting For
• Robots are already replacing fast-food workers Trump’s pick for labor chief, the CEO of Hardee's and Carl’s Jr., likes the idea.
• Inside Silicon Valley’s Robot Pizzeria
• Fmr. McDonald's USA CEO: $35K Robots Cheaper Than Hiring at $15 Per Hour
• Fast-food CEO says he's investing in machines because the government is making it difficult to afford employees

And other things to think about....

• Dallas Police Used Robot With Bomb to Kill Ambush Suspect
• Microsoft Foresees AR Tracking Your Keys, Milk, Entire Life
• White House: US Needs a Stronger Social Safety Net To Help Workers Displaced by Robots
• McKinsey's 2016 Analy

You can read the financial disclosure forms and see. Even arguing it quadrupled is specious though, it might be far less of an increase, depending.

Yea, those people I say: Fire. How many paper records have been lost to fires. Just look at what happened with the National Personnel Records Center in St Louis. Tens of millions of records lost.

Bad practices are bad practices, be it with physical copies or digital.

Found the archived OMB report.

Obama only really began using executive orders after 4 years of the most obstructionist congress in history. The guy REALLY tried to do things by working with congress, they refused to work with him.

While I understand that it's easy to believe that, and that it's a fairly logical train of thought, the truth is that he had more executive orders during every year of his first term than he did in any year of his second term. To imply he didn't use them significantly until later in his presidency is simply untrue.

My expectation is that Trump will issue a significant number of executive orders this year. Why? Because he's an incoming president of a different party than the outgoing president, and that is how things happened for Obama (more issued in 2009 than any other year), G. W. Bush (more issued in 2001 than any other year), and Clinton (more issued in 1993 than any other year). While it wasn't true for G. H. W. Bush (his highest was year 3, 1991), he was following Reagan so he didn't have other party policies to overthrow. It was true for Reagan though (more issued in 1981 than other years).

I thought Hillary lost the election

She didn't.

Welcome to the USA, where one could win the popular vote and LOSE the election. The election that counts is today — "the first Monday after the second Wednesday of December" — the electors from each state cast their votes.

Actually, we could pass a constitutional amendment banning the private printing of United States money if we wanted. That doesn't mean the private printing of US money isn't already illegal or bannable under Federal law.

Frequently, the role of a constitutional amendment is to establish the constitution of a country (surprising, that). For example: nothing in the U.S. Constitution establishes any sort of equal rights treatment for gay marriage--or any recognition of any marriage--and yet we had a short-lived effort to ban gay marriage with a constitutional amendment. At the time, it was understood that the Federal government could not be legally-compelled to accept gay marriages as legitimate; the goal of a Constitutional amendment was to make sure no future Federal government would, unless the states ratified an amendment repealing the one banning gay marriage.

The Federal government has unilateral right to repeal the prohibition of marijuana and other drugs (barring international treaty). This would result in a scrambling of other states to re-implement DEA controls, and to provide duplicated DEA resources to control any substances they believe should be controlled. It also heavily impacts interstate commerce because of Utah being right next to Colorado, thus being flooded with smuggled drugs across the UT-CO border as UT tries to keep MJ illegal. Thus Utah would be interested in a constitutional amendment prohibiting Marijuana, although they'll never get it: they have a great interest in making sure a coalition of states can uphold their ideal moral fiber and prevent other states from snapping it.

The prohibition of alcohol was the same: the states didn't realize what they were getting into when they all decided alcohol was detrimental to the moral fiber of the United States and that it should be constitutionally banned. They knew they wanted to prevent legislative pressure from constituents in multiple states from pushing back after the ban went into effect; they didn't realize the pressure would be so great as to distort the moral fiber of the United States, glorifying illegal drug smuggling operations as heroic efforts against tyranny and undermining their important puritan message. The social and economic impacts were so great that the states actually repealed that amendment; and they will never give up that much flexibility again without good reason.

When FDR did it, he instated a separate payroll tax to fund Social Security and unemployment, thus giving contributors a legal, moral, and political right to collect their pensions and unemployment benefits. This was to prevent future politicians from scrapping the social security system--the same way a constitutional amendment might make it a tiny bit difficult to repeal your new anti-Budweiser law. Defense against hostile successors is a common thread in lawmaking.

The intent of the Electoral College at least in part was to act as a final check against an unsuitable candidate becoming President. Now we can certainly debate Trump's suitability for high office, but as to complaining about the rules, well the EC is actually somewhat vague in that regard. The chief issue I see with Electors voting for someone other than who they are pledged for is that it could, in states where being a faithless electoral, end you up in hot water.

But only in these states.

Without California Hilliary wouldn't have won the popular vote. She won California by over 2 million votes, a total higher than she got for the US overall. California is so overwhelmingly liberal that I don't think Trump even bothered with it knowing that it was hopeless. This is what the electoral college was designed specifically for, to preserve the power of the smaller states so that they don't become marginalized. Worked exactly as designed.

Agreed it worked as expected, but other than these states electors may cast their vote for a candidate other than the one that won the popular vote in their state or the one that they pledged to. So this election has the potential of getting very interesting (probably not).

That being said, I generally disagree with the hysteria with replacing the EC with the popular vote. The argument that the smaller less populous states need some kind of advantage to preserve power at the executive level is idiotic. Their power resides in their sovereignty, in their representation in congress and via their party to elect a candidate to promote their ideals and run for president. The will of the people to elect the leader and figurehead of our country should be done by popular vote, i.e. we elect a candidate that has swayed the majority of voters that their views are in the best interest of our nation, the president therefore needs to either a) have a majority of his party in congress to push his/her agenda, or b) work with congress to pursue the presidents agenda, which is where the smaller states maintain power either individually or via coalition of like minded representatives at the congressional level (and see below).

Ultimately you feel that the smaller states views and ideals would not be represented if the popular vote was used, but that is not the case. If you look here you will see the last 100 years of presidential elections (other than a couple outlier's) the EC and populate vote generally have gone hand-in-hand. You will also see that both Republican and Democrats won the EC and popular, so this nonsense that somehow the smaller states would not have a voice in the general election is just pure ridiculous as history shows us otherwise.

Not to get all factual on you but...

the electoral college hasn't voted on the 2016 election yet. They don't meet until December to vote (just checked they meet on December 19th).

https://www.archives.gov/feder...

It may be possible to impeach a government official for violating the Oath of Office, which includes swearing to protect and defend the Constitution. Trump has made no secret of the violations he intends to commit, after taking office. For example, Constitution specifies that one of its purposes is to "promote the general Welfare" --which does not mean promoting only the welfare of the rich, and it is mostly the rich who desperately want all the data about Anthropogenic Global Warming to be ignored, so they can keep getting richer, while ocean levels rise and drown the home of millions of ordinary citizens.
Next, Trump claims to want to make America great again, but then he goes and starts appointing people who promote ignorance, not knowledge. Knowledge Is Power! --not ignorance. It is know-how that was one of the factors that made America great in the first place. To promote ignorance is to not-hardly be consistent with the Oath of Office, to defend the Constitution and consequently promote the general Welfare!
The last thing I'll mention is Trump's claim to oppose abortion --and that means enslaving pregnant women, when they don't want to stay pregnant, in violation of the 13th Amendment. Note that the Constitution requires a Census of ALL persons ("except Indians not taxed") every 10 years, and the Founding Fathers were right there in 1790 to specify the details of how the very first Census would be done. No unborn human has ever been counted in any Census! This means that the Founding Fathers did not consider the unborn to be persons, a Constitutional Precedent far predating the Roe v Wade decision. And modern scientific data about what we might call "generic personhood" indicates that dolphins are vastly more likely to qualify as persons, before any unborn human. Our unborn are mere-animal entities, nothing more than that, and to enslave women as life-support systems for mindless animals would be a heinous crime quite worthy of impeachment.

Yes, you did. When the voters in each state cast votes for the Presidential candidate of their choice they are voting to select their state's Electors.

https://www.archives.gov/feder...

because come Wednesday morning, we'll have a woman in the white house.

I'm not a constitutional scholar, but I believe we won't have a woman in the White House (serving as President) until January 20, 2017.

Furthermore the vote coming Tuesday is just the popular vote which is just symbolic more than anything else. The actual vote, of the Electoral College, takes place December 19th and the electorates are free to basically ignore the popular vote as proven in the 2000 election.

Your failure to read is not my mudslinging. www.wikileaks.com just in case you wanted to go read the emails for yourself. Congressional hearing transcripts can be found here, here, and since you appear to be inept with a Web Search you can get help here. If you refuse to find facts and choose to ignore facts, keep your comments to yourself.

https://www.fbi.gov/news/press...

Our investigation looked at whether there is evidence classified information was improperly stored or transmitted on that personal system, in violation of a federal statute making it a felony to mishandle classified information either intentionally or in a grossly negligent way, or a second statute making it a misdemeanor to knowingly remove classified information from appropriate systems or storage facilities.

From the group of 30,000 e-mails returned to the State Department, 110 e-mails in 52 e-mail chains have been determined by the owning agency to contain classified information at the time they were sent or received. Eight of those chains contained information that was Top Secret at the time they were sent; 36 chains contained Secret information at the time; and eight contained Confidential information, which is the lowest level of classification. Separate from those, about 2,000 additional e-mails were “up-classified” to make them Confidential; the information in those had not been classified at the time the e-mails were sent.

That is 110 counts of Felony mishandling of classified information.

With respect to the thousands of e-mails we found that were not among those produced to State, agencies have concluded that three of those were classified at the time they were sent or received, one at the Secret level and two at the Confidential level. There were no additional Top Secret e-mails found. Finally, none of those we found have since been “up-classified.”

There are three more counts.

Now, as to the government issued cell phone, she was offered a Blackberry like every other government employee, she chose instead to have her own Blackberry, so how did she exactly avoid the "poor excuse" for a cell phone?

http://www.politico.com/story/...

As well, the fact that she failed to turn over official records, that were improperly stored and destroyed breaks the records retention laws that were clarified after she left office, but were always assumed to cover email as well as paper.

https://www.archives.gov/about...

You can choose to believe that she did nothing wrong, but fact is, she committed many felonies, and concealed evidence of them by running her own server. We will never know what she did or didn't do for Benghazi, but we do know that she destroyed emails related to it. It is rather hard to run an investigation when the party is destroying evidence the whole time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

It is quite clear that there are many emails not delivered to the investigation. and in fact, there were several emails requesting additional security before the attack that were ignored, that would have been sent to Clinton, but none were in her email dump. In fact, other countries had already closed their embassies at that time, so it isn't like no one knew there were issues.

https://www.washingtonpost.com...
http://www.usatoday.com/story/...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...

But, I wasn't even speaking about Benghazi, you bring tha

Nice revisionist history. China had Most Favored Nation status well before Clinton was even president.
http://articles.latimes.com/19...

And Bush Jr. followed in Daddy's footsteps by making China's MFN status permanent:
https://georgewbush-whitehouse...

https://www.archives.gov/about...

Specifically:

https://www.archives.gov/about...
and
https://www.archives.gov/about...

https://www.archives.gov/about...

Specifically:

https://www.archives.gov/about...
and
https://www.archives.gov/about...

https://www.archives.gov/about...

Specifically:

https://www.archives.gov/about...
and
https://www.archives.gov/about...

Yeah, because committing federal felonies (incorrect destruction of official records) is totally cool!

https://www.archives.gov/about...

The fact is that she used a private server to facilitate the destruction of official records, because she didn't have enough control over the State email servers to implement the same there. This is a major felony, but I guess you don't really care, and would just rather not have politicians who are accountable.

Can you read English and do some basic fucking googling?!

You're either a shill or an absolute moron.

https://www.fbi.gov/news/press...

The link to the FBI director's statement so that you don't try to claim you didn't know about it.

Our investigation looked at whether there is evidence classified information was improperly stored or transmitted on that personal system, in violation of a federal statute making it a felony to mishandle classified information either intentionally or in a grossly negligent way, or a second statute making it a misdemeanor to knowingly remove classified information from appropriate systems or storage facilities.

From the group of 30,000 e-mails returned to the State Department, 110 e-mails in 52 e-mail chains have been determined by the owning agency to contain classified information at the time they were sent or received. Eight of those chains contained information that was Top Secret at the time they were sent; 36 chains contained Secret information at the time; and eight contained Confidential information, which is the lowest level of classification. Separate from those, about 2,000 additional e-mails were “up-classified” to make them Confidential; the information in those had not been classified at the time the e-mails were sent.

The FBI also discovered several thousand work-related e-mails that were not in the group of 30,000 that were returned by Secretary Clinton to State in 2014. We found those additional e-mails in a variety of ways. Some had been deleted over the years and we found traces of them on devices that supported or were connected to the private e-mail domain. Others we found by reviewing the archived government e-mail accounts of people who had been government employees at the same time as Secretary Clinton, including high-ranking officials at other agencies, people with whom a Secretary of State might naturally correspond.

(this breaks records retention laws https://www.archives.gov/about... )

Since he was NOT a government employee, he is not covered by the court decision mentioned in the article. Of course, Judicial Watch knows that.

Snowden was an CIA employee before going to work for Booz Allen, so he would have, like the former CIA employee Snepp in the court case, signed a standard agreement not to divulge classified information either during employment or after. In addition, he would also have to sign a similar document working for Booz Allen since it was doing contract work for the NSA and he couldn't gotten clearance otherwise.

So yeah, he was covered by the court decision.

What she did was "spill" classified data onto an unclassified, public system.

The proper fix for a spill is to confiscate every computer that the spilled data is on and wipe it. You can find the processes in Army Regulation 25-2 "Information Assurance". The reg was written as it is to comply with the extant laws covering classified data as well as the Privacy Act.

Spillage is a big deal.

She signed SF 312, in which the penalties for this kind of mishandling of classified information are covered.

Belief that she should have gotten away with it is bogus. Her crime was evident, Comey wimped out, as usual for him.

it worked perfectly and I have never in my LIFE heard a Democrat/Liberal complain about it.

NAZIism and Islam are both supremacist ideologies. Islam has nothing to do with skin color, though it's adherents have been playing a very two-faced game with that concept all along using western insecurities about racism as a weapon. If you talk about screening for Muslims at airports, they laugh that Islamic people are of all ethnicitiesand thus you are stupid to think you can screen for them. If you say that you want different rules for Muslims, they they scream that you are a racist. Islamic Sharia law would completely displace the US constitution and eliminate all rights for atheists and agnostics, who would be subject to the death penalty.

During WWII, Democrat President Franklin Roosevelt put more than one group of AMERICAN CITIZENS into internment camps:

JapaneseAmericans were gathered-up on purely ethnic grounds and put into camps with the worry that they might have allegiances to Japan and might engage in sabotage. Because they were an ethinc group, this has been hugely publicised and their internment classeed as racist and the have been apologized to and been paid a token compensation.

German Americans, were subjected to a SECOND round of internment (it was ALSO done to them during WWI). They were mostly put in camps for being of both German heritage AND suspected of having the same beleifs as the enemy. Given that they were caucasian, they have never been able to scream "racism", the popular media has NEVER portrayed them as "victims", and most people have never heard of it. The few Americans who are aware have been told that they were all goose-stepping NAZIs (which is a joke when you consider that it happened also in World War One). There were indeed some goose-stepping NAZI sympathisers, just like today there are many Muslims in the US who are ISIS sympathisers.

If you are gonna condemn Newt, who was a history professor and certainly must know this bit of history, then you must also condemn FDR and the Democrats for putting thousands of German Americans into camps, most with no evidence of actual wrongdoing.

Remember: Islam is a BELIEF system, and it involes a replacement for the US government that would implement a legal system in which non-Muslims would have no or reduced rights depending on the subject (death for gays and atheists, subjugation for Christians and women, etc). Christianity is also a belief system, but it's the one that the US Constitution was derived from when Christians created the country.

Nixon was driven from office, Carter just lost an election.

John Kerry earned the disdain of peers. America was lucky not to be stuck with such a mediocrity as president. Bush was a better student (by a nose) and likely better read as well.

Given the feckless foreign policy under Kerry's watch the US had a better Chief Executive and Commander in Chief in Bush.

If the Democrats hadn't blocked Bush administration reform efforts the financial melt-down could probably have been avoided. Where do you think ol' John Kerry was voting there? With his party perhaps?

Bush and Kerry are opposites - Bush pretended to be less than he was, and Kerry pretended to be more than he is.

boils down to: the Secretary of State bucked the rules of her own department.

No, the requirements for government employees to keep records of all their communications, so that people can FOIA them, are not State Department rules. They are laws governing all government employees; see here.

Oh look, there's news today. Judicial Watch has proof that Hillary Clinton deleted some work-related emails.

Before providing her correspondence, Clinton and her lawyers withheld and subsequently deleted tens of thousands of messages that she claimed were personal, such as emails about her daughter's wedding plans, family vacations, yoga routines and condolence notes.

With the new release Monday, more than 50 work-related emails sent or received by Clinton have since surfaced that were not among those she provided.

The previously never seen emails have Hillary Clinton worrying about who can see her documents and emails.

"I have just realized I have no idea how my papers are treated at State," Clinton wrote to Abedin and a second aide. "Who manages both my personal and official files? ... I think we need to get on this asap to be sure we know and design the system we want."

The audit also cited a then-unreleased copy of a November 2010 email Clinton sent Abedin in which the secretary discussed using a government email account, expressing concern that she didn't want "any risk of the personal being accessible."

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/775550d62ef8487a975a2a1c1c8b1100/more-clinton-emails-released-including-some-she-deleted

If you want us to buy your theory that she just set up her email server to provide better security, can you find any quotes from any of her released emails where she discusses the issue of email security?

The only place I am aware of where Hillary Clinton was worried about email security was the memo that went out with her signature on it, warning that State Department employees must not use private email. Note, she was using private email at that time.

18 U.S. Code  798 - Disclosure of classified information:
(a) Whoever knowingly and willfully communicates ...
prejudicial to the safety or interest of the United States or for the benefit of any foreign government to the detriment of the United States any classified informationâ"
(1) concerning the nature, preparation, or use of any code, cipher, or cryptographic system of the United States or any foreign government;

You would have to know that it is a government secret.

Note nothing it in the statute says that removing the classification label makes it okay. If you know it is secret and you willfully communicate it to an authorized person, that's a felony.

798 is concerned with intercepting and decoding encrypted communications -- i.e. deliberate acts of espionage. 793 is the chapter more broadly concerned with deliberately disclosing classified information to the detriment of national security interests. However, this mostly only applies to individuals that have obtained a clearance. When you are granted a clearance you essentially sign an NDA that has not just civil, but criminal penalties bound to it, and 793 provides most of the teeth. See SF-312 for a more exhaustive list.

In general, if you are a non-cleared average citizen, and are not deliberately gathering privileged information and conveying it to a foreign government, you are probably not breaking the law if you disclose any classified information that lands in your lap. This is why reporters don't usually go to jail for printing classified documents. This doesn't mean that the government might not try to make your life difficult, and you could still end up in contempt of court for refusing to cooperate with an investigation or prosecution subsequent to the leak. The courts are usually reluctant to go there in the case of reporters protecting their sources, but see the Valery Plame case.

If you independently discover something that is classified, you are almost certainly not in any trouble. There are certain circumstances where the government might have the power to gag you. For example, the DoD has the power to retroactively classify patents that duplicate military secrets. In those cases they may also issue a gag order to the applicant.

So, to the GP's point, were you to duplicate the FBIs exploit, unless you had privileged knowledge of what exactly it was, you are not under any obligation to keep their secrets for them.

IANAL, etc

Since you are too much of a political minded person to understand it, I don't foresee this changing your mind, however, here are the laws which she broke.

https://www.archives.gov/about...

She also broke laws having to do with notification of classified leakage, and encouraged her interns to commit felonies which are recorded in emails she handed over.

I do know that thirteen investigations by a hostile Congress turned up no wrongdoing, and I find that pretty convincing.

None of the investigations had access to her emails because she had them on a private server. How do you do an investigation when you have no information to use to investigate?

As far as the email server went, which specific law did it break?

https://www.archives.gov/about...

I know it would be illegal now.

It was just as illegal back then.

Clinton had some classification authority, and telling her staff to send a classified document by unclassified channels strikes me as a judgment call she probably had the authority to make.

As a classification authority, she can't tell people to just remove classification markings (that others put there) and send unclassified since they are having problems with the classified fax machine. This is breaking the law.
Also, BECAUSE she is a classification authority, she should have been able to tell that the TS emails were not supposed to be emailed on the public internet. By the accounts I have seen, she received HUMINT, which is ALWAYS TS/HCS, not ever Unclassified.

You're also speculating here: "If she...". If you killed someone because they had different opinions of Clinton than you do, then you'd be a murderer.

As I am not a part of the investigation, and they haven't said if she sent emails that were classified or not, I can only speculate on that point. It isn't required for her to have broken laws, but it helps to pin that SHE sent classified emails, not one of her underlings.

You're also speculating on her intentions and what subpoenas actually do. If I were running an enterprise, and my emails for 2014 were subpoenaed, I'd hand over the ones for 2014.

The problem is, she sent over half the emails from 2014, claiming that the rest were personal email.

Also, the problem is:

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/l...

Look at the size of the piles, there is no reason that there should have been that much of a difference in the number of emails she sent like that. The only reason for that difference is that Hillary didn't hand over emails that were related because they made her look bad.

You don't even have to believe me, believe the inspector general of the state department about the email server:

https://www.washingtonpost.com...
https://www.washingtonpost.com...

At this point, if you still see nothing wrong with what she did, as Trump put it, she could murder someone on main street, and you would still cheer her on. She HAS broken the law, there is no doubt about it, the doubt is whether she will be charged before November, and if she isn't, it has more to do with politics than guilt.

Actually, it's right there in the Constitution:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Every signed petition form and written letter is following the same legal channel as a lobbyist. A lobbyist just opens the discussion by saying "I represent this many people associated with this organization, and they have this concern". A Washington Post op-ed piece says it well:

How many remember that, in addition, the First Amendment protects a fifth freedom -- to lobby?

Of course it doesn't use the word lobby. It calls it the right "to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." Lobbyists are people hired to do that for you, so that you can actually stay home with the kids and remain gainfully employed rather than spend your life in the corridors of Washington.

Not really.

Some places already use proportional voting.
I want to say Delware? And I know there is a push in Maine for it.

IIRC FPTP is used simply because the other concepts hadn't really developed as yet. Voting was a simple concept back then and so no one had really given thought to potential short comings when done on a progressively grander scale, especially as the growth this country has seen wasn't really anticipated. Also, most of the founder's were generally opposed to the idea of political parties, even though they couldn't help themselves from coalescing into them themselves.

http://www.archives.gov/exhibi...

The method of Congressional elections is determined by each state for its delegation, though the Constitution does provide for the Congress changing the rules there.

But the Presidential election is laid out by the constitution as being determined by the result of the elector college, which is clearly laid by the constitution. It then states the electors in the electoral college can be chosen by each state in a method of their choosing. most simply hold an election, which we generally think of as voting for prez, but really we're selecting delegates to the elector college. and most states do require the delegates to the electoral college to vote as directed in the "general" election, though some (Nebraska) split their delegate votes proportionally (still voting as directed, just not "winner take all").

So for Congress, no constitutional fix needed.
For President, yes constitutional change would be needed.

For individual state level and city level elections, it depends on state constitutions and city charters.

To my mind, the easiest way of course would be a constitutional amendment eliminating FPTP, but I'm not sure extending it beyond the federal level would fly everywhere (I'd support that though).

Here's the National Archives transfer requirements, from 2002, for e-mail messages with attachments:

The practical issue is that an individual's emails must be archived in such a way that they can be organized and searched as a "body of records."

The example given for labeling a body of records is, "the e-mail records of the Deputy Secretary from the past fiscal year."

If someone want's to know what the Secretary of State said about a certain subject then they need to search the emails the secretary sent. The way Secretary Clinton performed cc/forwarding of emails then all emails of anyone to whom she sent an email would have to be searched.

It is the responsibility of the head of each Federal agency to make and preserve records including, "effective controls over the creation and over the maintenance and use of records in the conduct of current business." It's hard to see how failing to keep as a record the emails one sent and relying on the addressees to retain those records meets the standard the National Archives has set.

Secretary Clinton said she didn't want anyone to be able to search or examine her personal emails. The system she deployed made it so no one could search her official emails either.

Which is exactly why the Bush administration made an appearance before the Democrat-controlled congress and warned them of the consequences of congress's pushing Fannie Mae to continue to underwrite (and to essentially REQUIRE underwritten banks to provide) things like no-income-proof, no-down-payment mortgages to people who couldn't possibly afford them once their rates ballooned. That Clinton-era policy, of putting more people into home ownership no matter what, started that bubble growing, and the congress under Pelosi and Reid kept pouring gas on that smoldering fire. The Bush administration spent six years trying to push through Fannie/Freddie control measures, and repeatedly warned congress about the problems and the dire consequences.

The same Bush administration that was championing the ownership economy to justify his tax cuts? The same Bush administration with a Zero downpayment initiative?

Where's the Bush-era policy of correcting the housing bubble? Where's the Bush-era policy of warning about an unsound economy? He had enough States of the Union to do it. It took him until 2008? And even then, he doesn't mention anything about holding Banks responsible for their misdeeds.

No, no, with you, it's always Democrats, always Democrats, who are to blame when it comes to anything wrong. That's your consistent approach. You even try to excuse George W. Bush, because Democrats controlled Congress?

Well, in that case, who controls Congress now? Why haven't they fixed anything? Why haven't they done the job you want done? Where's their plans?

People selling derivatives around that mountain of unsecured, bloated housing debt didn't cause people to lose houses and banks to put the brakes on dishing out more credit. People lost houses because their income couldn't keep up with foolishly chosen mortgages, and because they had speculated on the prospect of a get-rich-quick turn around on the house in the near future, they owed more on those houses than they were really worth. It's not exactly mysterious.

People selling derivatives that were bogus were trying to get themselves rich, not serve anybody other than themselves. People who bought a mortgage, sold to them by the lender at the bank, weren't exactly given fair and upfront information about it. People who bought a house, and wanted to make payments, were suddenly asked to compensate for the bank's risk-taking, not their own. It's not exactly mysterious.

Eventually somebody had to place the wrong bets, and when it did, the whole house of cards started to tumble down.

The banks got stuck with enormous piles of worthless debt, and houses it cost more to foreclose on than were often worth the trouble.

Nope, the banks made sure the rest of us got suck with piles of their manufactured worthless debt, and deliberately engaged in foreclosure processes that were reckless, at best, haphazard at worst.

Exactly why you can't hold them responsible, I don't know.

AFAICT: You're quoting Reagan out of context. He was speaking about farming and government subsidies. This is what Reagan actually said:

"When I first started traveling abroad as President, especially to our annual economic summits, I suggested that the best foreign aid or development program the United States could give the world was a crash study in free enterprise. And this idea was, to say the least, greeted with skepticism. But when America's economic miracle took over and as we created during the past 67 months 17 million new jobs, I noticed that the idea of fostering growth through encouraging the entrepreneur began to take hold -- even to the point where the emphasis on agricultural subsidies, once so sacrosanct in other nations, is giving way at these summits to ideas on how to develop more free enterprise. There seems to be an increasing awareness of something we Americans have known for some time: that the 10 most dangerous words in the English language are, ``Hi, I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help.'' [Laughter]

Well, of course, sometimes government can help and should help -- natural disasters like the drought, for example -- but we need to look to a future where there's less, not more, government in our daily lives. It's that philosophy that brought us the prosperity and growth that we see today. That's why we've proposed nothing less than a total phaseout by the year 2000 of all policies that distort trade in agriculture, and I'm speaking of worldwide. This proposal reflects one of my abiding beliefs -- I think it's a belief that you share: The solution to the world agricultural problem is to get government out of the way and let farmers compete."
https://reaganlibrary.archives...

For example, Valerie Plame was an operative whose name was leaked by Scooty Libby, for which he was thrown in jail. (Not exactly, he got thrown in jail for lying about it later, but then Bush bailed him out.)

Wrong, Scooter had his prison sentence commuted, but the conviction stands... He was not pardoned by Bush'43, he paid a quarter-million dollars in fines and penalties, and had two years of supervised release.

Well, there is a slight difference: the Prophet (whatever religious belief you're relying on to accept being a mortal thinking animal) is either non existant or dead. Humans being insulted because of their skin are well alive, and might suffer from it for real.

What a fucking pathetic definition of "suffering".

"Ooooh! You INSULTED me!"

What a candy ass.

Hmmm, looking here I see not one word about "freedom from being insulted".

But a see a LOT of the regarding FREEDOM OF SPEECH.

GFY.

That would infringe on the right to keep and bear by placing a precondition on it.

It's a post-condition. The state grants the right so that it may have a well-regulated militia.

First of all, you have misquoted the amendment.

"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

I'm stating a post-condition. Buy a gun, you're in the militia, you show up for indoc (or drill) 0600 Saturday morning. If it turns out you're unfit for duty due to the voices, you're barred from the militia, and ipso facto, no firearm for you. Obviously the state can prevent certain people from owning firearms already.

Rights and responsibilities are two sides of the coin. If one is going to exercise the right to own a firearm, they should observe the responsibility to serve in the militia and protect the security of the state.

The 2nd Amendment clearly states that in order to have a militia to protect the security of the state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

The Constitution says nothing about hunting, self defense, rape prevention or anything else. The reason for the uninfringed right to bear arms is for the purposes of having a state militia to protect the freedom of the state.

So: Make everyone with a firearm serve in the state militia. Make it a National Guard-esque obligation. The most important benefit of this would be to be able to thoroughly screen all the militia members, both mentally and physically, so it can be ascertained they are fit to serve and by extension bear arms in defense of the state.

The constitution does have such a provision, but only for the president. If the president refuses to sign a bill into law, it becomes law automatically after 10 days.

If any Bill shall not be returned by the President within ten Days (Sundays excepted) after it shall have been presented to him, the Same shall be a Law, in like Manner as if he had signed it, unless the Congress by their Adjournment prevent its Return, in which Case it shall not be a Law.

While that is true, it is worth noting that the spending on defense is in fact the primary purpose of our federal government, it is right in the Constitution.

Maybe time to read it again....

http://www.archives.gov/exhibi...

Article 1, section 8 lays out congress' jobs and it actually lists 8 things including the post office and "patents" before talking about the military. The primary purpose of the federal government is to enable a functioning state of which a military is surely a part but there is much more to it than that, thank goodness. If you look around the world, bad things happen when the military always comes first.

The people that have been saying "war for oil" arent saying something understandable

So the Republicans that beat the war drum against Iraq claiming that occupation will take a short while and could be paid for with Iraqi oil money were speaking gibberish? Tell us something we didn't know back then!

And Iraq, unlike Afghanistan, is a rather wealthy country. Iraq has tremendous resources that belong to the Iraqi people. And so there are a variety of means that Iraq has to be able to shoulder much of the burden for their own reconstruction.

- Ari Fleischer, White House Press Secretary, 2/18/2013

If you want, here's some other relevant quotes from Donald Rumsfield, Paul Wolfowitz, and others: http://watchingthewatchers.org...

BUT, information that is declassified will have the original classification marking, but crossed out. In this case it is marked as unclassified, and there is no other classification marking.

http://www.archives.gov/resear...

Items are absolutely declassified after a certain amount of time, the national archives has a whole division dedicated to this activity.

Here is an example of a declassified document, you can see the classification of Top Secret is crossed out.

https://nsarchive.files.wordpr...

Anyone else notice that the vast majority of those pages are marked as unclassified and/or non-secret yet severely redacted?

This is not at all unusual. Sometimes documents are declassified because the content is no longer considered sensitive. Sometimes documents are declassified by redacting the sensitive content. More information here.

There's no evidence that any documents were improperly deleted.

That seems like quite the statement. How do we determine this when she FUCKING DELETED EVERYTHING?

The investigation shows that none of the documents which were sent to/from the server were classified at the time of transmission.

That is a lie. The classification markings were removed from the documents, but as an original classification authority, there is strong evidence that she should have known that the items had been previously marked classified.

There is no evidence presented to date which indicates any security breaches of the server, so there's no indication that unauthorized people might have gained access to those documents.

So? The server was incredibly unsecure, it is a miracle if it wasn't breached, but as she had it wiped (after the subpoena for the information!), we may never know.

It was legal at the time for someone in her position to use a private server for official communications

No, it absolutely was against the law, and has been for a long time.
http://www.archives.gov/about/...

(something *both* of her predecessors also did)

Incorrect. Both of her predecessors did not run their own servers. Rice didn't use email, and Powell used state email systems for official communication, and still turned over his private email (from a provider, not his own server) after he was done.

The laws barring it were written and passed *after* she had stepped down.

The law was clarified, it was edited to make it more clear that email was considered a record, but nothing about the law was changed, official records have always been required to be kept.

> electoral college who don't have any obligation to side with the popular vote.

That isn't entirely true. There are states that require electoral colleges to vote for their candidate. It is also rare for an elector to vote outside of party lines. "Throughout our history as a nation, more than 99 percent of Electors have voted as pledged." Less than 1% have betrayed their party, so it would have to be an extremely tight race to matter.

I've kind of been on the fence with electoral colleges, personally. They give some say to states with sparse populations because they least you can have is 3 right now (I seem to recall 2, but looked it up and everyone has at least 3). It also gives states with the most population the most say, so doesn't remove population as a factor. If you just went by popular vote, people in sparsely populated areas would feel they aren't properly represented.