I searched for a while looking for those observations, but came up with nothing. Once upon a time, I was pretty good with google and could tease results out, but I've got nothings but common words to work with here.
They were several posts about them on reddit on Friday and Saturday. I haven't seen anything since. I figured/pol/ would have stepped up with screenshots by now.
You have two options. #1, take that part of the story as unverified/untrue and put it out of your mind. #2, notice the rest of the circumstances and take them as your confirmation.
This was a coup attempt, plain and simple. The tape appears to have come from the Bush family archives (host Billy Bush), and the never-trump crowd was ready and waiting for it, complete with calls for him to step down so the GOP slime could install their own puppet in his place.
Half of the press is still reporting that wikileaks was forced to dump early to distract from the tape, which is the exact opposite of what really happened. I take this alone as confirmation of the pulled-stories reports. Almost certainly the tape, or a summary of it, was winding through the newsrooms, allowing staff writers to get their stories straight so they'd be ready to go right away. Wikileaks dropped their bomb, and the Clinton campaign had to use the only distraction they had ready: this tape.
The early release caused some chaos, but nothing these professionals couldn't handle. Stories that had been on the spike for the coordinated release date got published "now" instead. If you believe that I saw reports of stories published before the leak, and that the reports were true, they fit in to this era, and were published (for good this time) shortly after.
The coup failed. In an echo from 1774, patriots gathered outside Trump tower to show their support, and both Trump and his supporters were energized, rather than demoralized, by the weekend. So energized, in fact, that Trump called Clinton "the devil" and said that he'd need to appoint a special prosecutor to deal with her after he is inaugurated. Meanwhile, over the weekend and across the country, the plotters behind the failed coup were heckled and cursed. The crowds roared "We want Trump" and "Shame on you" as these soon to be ex-congressmen and governors slipped quietly off stage.
And Trump, learning from the many low blows against him, introduced a whole new generation to Bill's rape victims and Hillary's coverups and smears.
What are you, a child? This is serious stuff, not a place for logic or consistency. Global warming doesn't act the same everywhere. It causes fire where there are fires, and it causes ice where there is ice, and it causes floods where more water is unwanted, and droughts where more water is wanted. It corrupts hard drives here, but makes encryption unbreakable there.
You can never tell when it is ready to strike, or how. It may enlarge your prostate today, but undercook your neighbor's pasta tomorrow. The only safe thing to do is hand over your rights to your government and your money to your betters so they can get nicer private jets to enjoy while flying between their parties.
Same as always. Team Hockey Stick passes around an internal survey asking if global warming caused all of the fires, or just some. Since The Team is, by definition, the only scientists qualified to give opinions on such questions, the fires are Presto! "attributed" to the funding stream that is putting their kids through college and fuelling their yachts.
Anyone, like you, raising an objection will be investigated, and shortly you will be discredited because the grocery store you use gives a 2 cents-off-per-gallon coupon on the back of the receipt, which is obviously just a money laundering scheme to hide payoffs from big oil to troublemakers.
If you want your question answered for real, you need to raise your child in a bubble so that he is never tainted by dirty oil money, then get him to join The Team so that he can share in the the trillions of pure untainted government money. At age 90, he can burn all of his accumulated credibility to ask the question. No one will answer it, of course, since they'll all be too busy denouncing him as a racist/sexist/pedophilophobe, and discovering that he was senile this whole time!
Shortly, I expect to see a paper on the preprint archives about the motivation of kindling to accumulate. Deep psychoanalysis of one magic bristlecone pine will reveal that the kindling doesn't care about forestry, but is distraught over global warming. Only by tithing more to Team Hockey Stick will we be able to cure the kindling and return the continent to lush, fireproof, pre-white-devil, utopian greenness, as depicted in the first minute or so of that great nature documentary: Bambi.
Oh, global warming! Is there anything that you can't do?
Other than stopping rich jerks from flying around the world to lecture us masses about conserving resources apparently to leave them available for more Jerk Air flights?
Which Trump tax plan are you reading? The one on his website is mostly about cutting the rates on low and middle incomes (including small businesses). It does remove the 35% and 39.6% brackets, and the AMT, but it also caps deductions WAY lower than the current limits, which means that a lot of very rich people will suddenly be paying taxes pretty close to their actual tax rates.
The thing it does most to "favor the rich" is leave the capital gains rates unchanged from today. This should surprise no one that has watched his 1991 testimony to Congress where he made his feelings very clear on using the contrast of a lower capital gains rate to incentivize investment.
Also, the story of this election was indeed going to be two lizards. Hillary vs. JEB. That had been the plan since 2008, and you can find stories in the press pushing it since at least 2012. But we are sick of lizards, so the people picked two candidates that weren't more of the same, Trump vs. Sanders. The Democrat party managed to suppress the voters and ensure victory for their lizard. But the Republican voters were sick enough of their party to prevent them from replacing the people's choice with the party lizard.
Note that the Republicans are still trying to get their lizard in. The lockerroom tape was an attack coordinated from three sides. Stories about reactions to the tape from Republican officials, including Paul Ryan and others, were out on the internet before the stories about the tape itself, and they included calls for Trump to step down.
`How you doing, Dixie?'
`I'm dead, Case. Got enough time in on this Hosaka to figure that one.'
`How's it feel?'
`It doesn't.'
`Bother you?'
`What bothers me is, nothin' does.'
`How's that?'
`Had me this buddy in the Russian camp, Siberia, his thumb was frostbit. Medics came by and they cut it off. Month later he's tossin' all night. Elroy, I said, what's eatin' you? Goddam thumb's itchin', he says. So I told him, scratch it. McCoy, he says, it's the _other_
goddam thumb.' When the construct laughed, it came through as something else, not laughter, but a stab of cold down Case's spine. `Do me a favor, boy.'
`What's that, Dix?'
`This scam of yours, when it's over, you erase this goddam thing.'
He jacked in.
`Dixie?'
`Yeah.'
`You ever try to crack an AI?'
`Sure. I flatlined. First time. I was larkin', jacked up real high, out by Rio heavy commerce sector. Big biz, multina- tionals, Government of Brazil lit up like a Christmas tree. Just larkin' around, you know? And then I started picking up on this one cube, maybe three levels higher up. Jacked up there and made a pass.'
`What did it look like, the visual?'
`White cube.'
`How'd you know it was an AI?'
`How'd I know? Jesus. It was the densest ice I'd ever seen. So what else was it? The military down there don't have any- thing like that. Anyway, I jacked out and told my computer to look it up.'
`Yeah?'
`It was on the Turing Registry. AI. Frog company owned its Rio mainframe.'
Case chewed his lower lip and gazed out across the plateaus of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority, into the infinite neuroelectronic void of the matrix. `Tessier-Ashpool, Dixie?'
`Tessier, yeah.'
`And you went back?'
`Sure. I was crazy. Figured I'd try to cut it. Hit the first strata and that's all she wrote. My joeboy smelled the skin frying and pulled the trodes off me. Mean shit, that ice.'
`And your EEG was flat.'
`Well, that's the stuff of legend, ain't it?'
Case jacked out. `Shit,' he said, `how do you think Dixie got himself flatlined, huh? Trying to buzz an AI. Great...'
`Go on,' she said, `the two of you are supposed to be dynamite, right?'
`Dix,' Case said, `I wanna have a look at an AI in Berne. Can you think of any reason not to?'
`Not unless you got a morbid fear of death, no.'
Congress actually does have a jail of their own, that isn't run by the executive branch. They essentially don't use it except for very short term holding before handing detainees off to the executive for ordinary prosecution. But they could use it when the executive refuses to execute Congress's laws.
It would be trivial, of course, for the executive to break people out of it, if they are ready to escalate a constitutional crisis that will probably lead to a second civil war.
The drives were under Congressional subpoena, not from the FBI. The FBI had no jurisdiction to tell them deleting anything was acceptable.
This.
The Federal Government is three co-equal branches. If congress is unable to enforce a subpoena without the cooperation of the executive branch, we don't have three branches any more, we have one. Effectively, the executive branch would then be able to do whatever it wants, as long as the DOJ promises not to prosecute.
We've seen hints of this particular Constitutional crisis several times throughout our history. We've never been anywhere near so close though, mostly because no previous President has managed to collect quite so many corrupt ideologues under one roof before. Traditionally, the Attorney General resigns in disgust much sooner, or refuses to play along, which is the same thing.
Our congressmen should strongly consider growing some balls and locking these people up. Either for contempt until they produce the evidence they were ordered to preserve, or until they can hold trials on the floor of the house.
The trials will be short. "This is a signed agreement whereby you conspired with the FBI to destroy evidence. Is that your signature? The FBI says you handed over the evidence as planned, and they destroyed it. Do you dispute their testimony? Guilty."
No, I'm using it correctly in every sense. I'm using it to refer both to Marx's own ideas, and to the ideas of the people that call themselves Marxists because their philosophy is rooted in his ideas.
Come back after you've read Capital yourself, and the archives of the Frankfurt School. Then we can talk.
Yes, it would give a supermajority of the states the ability to prevent the supreme court from finding new "rights" in the Constitution, and yes, some of those new "rights" might be mine. I'm OK with that.
Actually, the President can do a lot today. Trimming the executive branch down should be very easy.
First, the regulation process doesn't require congressional input. Trump can issue new proposed regulations that simply discard most of the current CFR. Then he waits for public input for a while, ignores that input, and BAM! those regulations are gone using the same method that created them.
Second, people enforcing the now-removed regulations get laid off. The civil service union won't like it, but the employees aren't getting fired exactly, their positions have been obsoleted.
Third, he demolishes the office buildings and turns them into federal parks. Personally, I'd prefer nuclear waste storage sites, but we can't always get what we want.
It would take decades for leviathan to recover from that. A couple of Constitutional amendments and it might be centuries.
(While I disagree with Mark Levin on term limits, and on Trump, his Liberty Amendments book lays out a solid plan for bringing the federal government back under the control of the states. Most relevant here are: The amendment to require an affirmative vote for approval of new regulations, and the amendment to give the states veto power over Supreme Court decisions.)
Is it safe to assume that you've never actually done your own taxes? Nor read to the point of comprehension the return prepared for you by H&R Block?
There isn't a box on the form for "net worth", nor a place to list assets. The closest you get is depreciation schedules, and those don't cover a whole lot. It is pretty common for wealthy people to have no income, and also not to actually own anything.
Unless he wrote off a payment to a hit man as a business expense, it is hard to imagine anything that might be in his taxes that are worse for him, politically speaking, than not releasing them. He isn't releasing his tax returns because they don't exist in any meaningful sense, and they won't until the audit is concluded. When you are under audit, the IRS is saying that the documents you submitted are not your tax return, and they are going to use the audit process to create your return.
The fracture is decades old now. Since 1988, there has been a growing gulf between the GOP establishment and the GOP voting base.
This election season won't result in a third party. It will be a return to the two party system. Your choice lately has been between Globalism and Marxism fast, or Globalism and Marxism slowly. This year, the Republican voters are turning the Republican party into a pro-America and pro-American party, a clear choice for a change.
We tried warning the GOP elites. First, we started the Tea Party movement. That rapid rise should have been taken as a warning shot. It meant that millions of Americans were unhappy with the GOP leadership. The Tea Party brand got corrupted, so no one uses that name now, but we, the voters, are still here, and our apathy has given way to cold anger. We intend to win the war for the GOP in the next decade or less.
Read it again. It isn't necessary for anything to actually be stolen. All that is necessary is that by failing to exercise proper care, the documents under her charge became vulnerable to theft.
The physical analogy is leaving a paper file on your desk when you step away, rather than locking it back up the safe. People get charged with that. And not because anyone actually steals the files. but because their boss walks in while they are away and finds files that weren't properly secured.
The really shitty part for Martha is that she had lied about something that wasn't even a crime in the first place.
That law needs to die in a fire. Other than in the very narrow context of sworn testimony in front of Congress or a Jury, or at a sworn deposition, lying should not be a criminal act in itself, not even lying to cops. I have no objection to having a pile-on charge, or a sentence enhancement, for lying to cover up a different crime, but only after (or concurrently and dependent upon) a conviction for that other crime.
(Philosophically, sentence enhancement post-conviction and NOT as a different charge is better. Overcharging is a shitty practice and it intimidates jurors into thinking that "They are charging this guy with 5000 counts, surely one of them is right.")
And as much as I despise her, I don't think that Hillary should face criminal charges for lying either, except for the times (if any) when she did it under oath.
What evidence of intent could there possibly be? A signed confession? A stone tablet from God himself handed to Comey personally by an angel? In this case, intent must be inferred. All of her excuses so far have turned out to be lies. Remember how she didn't want to carry two devices? Blatant lie, she had several, and aides to carry them for her. Gowdy would say that false exculpatory statements prove intent. Actually, I think he made Comey say that.
And your second part is stupid. Do you want me to give you a second to think about it?
Don't read any more until you've thought it through.
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The Federal Government provides secure systems for handling (aka sending and receiving) classified information. Federal law dictates that they are to use those systems, and only those systems, for classified work. Having to work with classified documents is not cause to use a private, personal, insecure, unclassifed email system.
There is no problem with her using a private email server. I've got one in my basement, and I've had it for more than 8 years.
The problem is that she was using her private email server for federal business: first, to evade public scrutiny, which is illegal; second, for sending and receiving classified documents, which is also illegal.
The Colin Powell defense is, as I already said, bullshit. It is true that he had a non-government email address that he used to conduct government business when he was SOS, but there are three differences. First, he didn't use it for classified work - he carried two devices, as we say now. Second, the State Department didn't have a non-classified email server at the time. Third, he used a commercial email service, which means that in the event of a discovery request or subpoena a third party would be in charge of providing the records, not his own lawyers and cleaning crew.
Go read about his email leaks. He tried repeatedly to warn Hillary against using him as her defense. She eventually got the message but, like the Japanese submarine from Gilligan's Island, some of her sycophants are still fighting that lost war.
Public records from the Bush administration were a fucking mess because so many of the departments were on their own for providing email services. In response to this, a bunch of new domains and email servers were set up for official use, and the use of outside email for public business was banned. Once that was complete (2009?), Hillary even sent emails to her staff telling them not to use outside email services for state business.
P.S. Obama should indeed have noticed. StoneTear's reddit request was probably not about obscuring Hillary's email address, but Obama's.
P.P.S. Oh, and her staff knew that their boss was breaking the law, but were told to keep their mouths shut. If we'd learned about this from a whistleblower years ago, instead of from a lawsuit last year, maybe this would have blown over by now and not been a huge topic in her election campaign.
I don't remember their names. Over the last few months I've heard several radio interviews with lawyers involved in these cases, mostly while driving. I tried google using bits and pieces of the stories that (I think) I remember, but I didn't have much luck.
One guy that with a case still in the process (as in, he wasn't in prison yet at the time, and maybe still isn't) was a mechanic in the Navy who took a picture or a selfie of his (classified) work area so that he could tell his kids "this is where I worked when I was away". No criminal intent, prosecuted anyway. I remember clearly one of the lawyers talking about that case said that they were preparing appeals paperwork for their other clients to have ready depending on how his use of the "Clinton Defense" went.
I mean that no one knows, in the legal sense, if they had intent or not, because it wasn't examined at trial. Criminal trials are narrowly focused on the elements of the crime. Since the laws relating to classified documents were intentionally written by Congress to exclude intent as an element, it never gets examined at trial. Prosecutors don't raise the question because they didn't need to, and defense lawyers don't bring it up because it wouldn't help. At best, it might be in an opening or closing statement, but those are just fluff.
If the courts agree that some level of intent is necessary for a conviction now, all of those cases are appealable because their trial records no longer contain facts sufficient to sustain their conviction.
If you've ever pled guilty to something in court, the judge will ask you to affirm each element of the crime. They won't take your word at it that you are guilty of jaywalking, they want you to agree that "Don't Walk" was lit, that you knew it, and that you crossed anyway. The same thing happens in a real trial. The prosecutor lists the elements of the crime and argues that you did them, the defense disputes those claims (among other defenses). If the prosecutor is successful in establishing all of the elements beyond a reasonable doubt, you get convicted.
Espionage is very hard to prove. A person doesn't have to wrap up a bundle of secret documents in a bow and sign a card saying "Here's the spy work you wanted me to do!", they can do, and have done, things that can plausibly be mere carelessness. For example, you could accidentally leave a document out on your desk instead of locking it in the safe. Oops, careless! Unless the cleaning guy is also compromised and drops it in the trash to be fetched later. Now the secrets left the building, but in a way that both of the people involved can plausibly claim they didn't intend.
And motivation can be tricky too. Cash is obvious enough, but what about blackmail? Or loss of faith in the government? Or anger at a manager or director? Want to impress a girl? Want to experience the thrill of rule-breaking at middle-age?
Because it can be so complicated, Congress also made carelessness with classified information punishable, regardless of intent. That's basically our espionage law: If you give away our secrets, or, if you allow through carelessness the conditions for someone else to steal them, we are going to prosecute you and probably throw you in prison for a while.
Comey is claiming now that the second part should be "...or, if you intentionally allow through carelessness the conditions...", which is just asinine, and if we had honest media in this country, would be seen as such by everyone.
I can answer #4. Because she fucking hid everything until a lawsuit from Judicial Watch forced the State Department to release some of the public documents generated by her term as SOS. Once the people had access to her public records, they started to notice that her email wasn't entirely on the government servers, but on her own. Then her lawyers and IT people started to panic (the infamous reddit post) because they knew that Congress would get involved soon, and it did.
The answer to #2 is that every agency seems to be in on the coverup to some extent. They have all been dragging their feet producing records, and several have "lost" drives, tapes, records, etc. IRS Commissioner Koskinen is facing impeachment for this same crap, but for a different scandal (not for Hillary's emails). Obama is probably going to need to pardon every single member of his cabinet and most of the senior management, or President Trump is going to need to build a brand new prison to house the "Most Transparent Administration in history (TM)".
#1 is crap. See Powell's email leaks. #3 is no, or at least not that I've heard of.
Whoever, being an officer, employee, contractor, or consultant of the United States, and, by virtue of his office, employment, position, or contract, becomes possessed of documents or materials containing classified information of the United States, knowingly removes such documents or materials without authority and with the intent to retain such documents or materials at an unauthorized location shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for not more than one year, or both.
As to your conclusion, there are guys in prison today for violations of the exact same laws, and several are now attempting to appeal their sentences. At the time they were convicted, those laws were seen as strict liability, so their trial records do not include proof of intent. If those same laws, which haven't changed, require mens rea now, at the very least they need a retrial to establish intent.
This is an American news story. Here, Asian means Oriental, which is where ninjas, samurai and kung-fu monks come from. But we shouldn't say Oriental any more because it reinforces racist notions about which direction the Roman Empire thought the sun rose from in the morning. (Part of that is a joke, but, sadly, not enough.)
If it was a European news story, Asian would mean Muslim and nothing more, though you can usually make a good guess based on the country: English Asians are mostly Pakistani, German Asians are mostly Turkish, French Asians are mostly Tunisian, Algerian, Moroccan, etc, Italian Asians are mostly "Syrian, *wink* *wink*", and so on.
Thiel spoke at the Republican convention, so now he is getting the Tea Party treatment. And this is why Trump needs to fire 98% of the federal government.
Discrimination is a trap. There is no way to hire more than one person without exposing yourself to charges of discrimination. If he doesn't hire enough Orientals, he's discriminating against them. If he does hire them at the rate they "deserve", he is necessarily discriminating against whites (and no one cares), hispanics and blacks. Note that California colleges all discriminate against orientals, and the courts say it is fine when they do it. If they didn't, there would hardly be anyone else enrolled there.
This melodrama villain monologue sums it up:
Did you really think we want those laws observed? We want them to be broken. You'd better get it straight that it's not a bunch of boy scouts you're up against... We're after power and we mean it... There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced or objectively interpreted â" and you create a nation of law-breakers â" and then you cash in on guilt. Now that's the system, Mr. Reardon, that's the game, and once you understand it, you'll be much easier to deal with.
He made his opinions on the matter pretty clear in his letter, written while he was alive. Unless you've got a peer-reviewed seance showing otherwise, I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and take him at his own word.
By the way, good job on following the playbook. Discredit, disqualify, change the subject. I forget what's next. Are you going to discover that his ghost is racist? Or are you going to call him a paid shill because his widow earned $43 in cashback on her gas station credit card?
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I searched for a while looking for those observations, but came up with nothing. Once upon a time, I was pretty good with google and could tease results out, but I've got nothings but common words to work with here.
They were several posts about them on reddit on Friday and Saturday. I haven't seen anything since. I figured /pol/ would have stepped up with screenshots by now.
You have two options. #1, take that part of the story as unverified/untrue and put it out of your mind. #2, notice the rest of the circumstances and take them as your confirmation.
This was a coup attempt, plain and simple. The tape appears to have come from the Bush family archives (host Billy Bush), and the never-trump crowd was ready and waiting for it, complete with calls for him to step down so the GOP slime could install their own puppet in his place.
Half of the press is still reporting that wikileaks was forced to dump early to distract from the tape, which is the exact opposite of what really happened. I take this alone as confirmation of the pulled-stories reports. Almost certainly the tape, or a summary of it, was winding through the newsrooms, allowing staff writers to get their stories straight so they'd be ready to go right away. Wikileaks dropped their bomb, and the Clinton campaign had to use the only distraction they had ready: this tape.
The early release caused some chaos, but nothing these professionals couldn't handle. Stories that had been on the spike for the coordinated release date got published "now" instead. If you believe that I saw reports of stories published before the leak, and that the reports were true, they fit in to this era, and were published (for good this time) shortly after.
The coup failed. In an echo from 1774, patriots gathered outside Trump tower to show their support, and both Trump and his supporters were energized, rather than demoralized, by the weekend. So energized, in fact, that Trump called Clinton "the devil" and said that he'd need to appoint a special prosecutor to deal with her after he is inaugurated. Meanwhile, over the weekend and across the country, the plotters behind the failed coup were heckled and cursed. The crowds roared "We want Trump" and "Shame on you" as these soon to be ex-congressmen and governors slipped quietly off stage.
And Trump, learning from the many low blows against him, introduced a whole new generation to Bill's rape victims and Hillary's coverups and smears.
What are you, a child? This is serious stuff, not a place for logic or consistency. Global warming doesn't act the same everywhere. It causes fire where there are fires, and it causes ice where there is ice, and it causes floods where more water is unwanted, and droughts where more water is wanted. It corrupts hard drives here, but makes encryption unbreakable there.
You can never tell when it is ready to strike, or how. It may enlarge your prostate today, but undercook your neighbor's pasta tomorrow. The only safe thing to do is hand over your rights to your government and your money to your betters so they can get nicer private jets to enjoy while flying between their parties.
Same as always. Team Hockey Stick passes around an internal survey asking if global warming caused all of the fires, or just some. Since The Team is, by definition, the only scientists qualified to give opinions on such questions, the fires are Presto! "attributed" to the funding stream that is putting their kids through college and fuelling their yachts.
Anyone, like you, raising an objection will be investigated, and shortly you will be discredited because the grocery store you use gives a 2 cents-off-per-gallon coupon on the back of the receipt, which is obviously just a money laundering scheme to hide payoffs from big oil to troublemakers.
If you want your question answered for real, you need to raise your child in a bubble so that he is never tainted by dirty oil money, then get him to join The Team so that he can share in the the trillions of pure untainted government money. At age 90, he can burn all of his accumulated credibility to ask the question. No one will answer it, of course, since they'll all be too busy denouncing him as a racist/sexist/pedophilophobe, and discovering that he was senile this whole time!
Shortly, I expect to see a paper on the preprint archives about the motivation of kindling to accumulate. Deep psychoanalysis of one magic bristlecone pine will reveal that the kindling doesn't care about forestry, but is distraught over global warming. Only by tithing more to Team Hockey Stick will we be able to cure the kindling and return the continent to lush, fireproof, pre-white-devil, utopian greenness, as depicted in the first minute or so of that great nature documentary: Bambi.
Oh, global warming! Is there anything that you can't do?
Other than stopping rich jerks from flying around the world to lecture us masses about conserving resources apparently to leave them available for more Jerk Air flights?
Which Trump tax plan are you reading? The one on his website is mostly about cutting the rates on low and middle incomes (including small businesses). It does remove the 35% and 39.6% brackets, and the AMT, but it also caps deductions WAY lower than the current limits, which means that a lot of very rich people will suddenly be paying taxes pretty close to their actual tax rates.
The thing it does most to "favor the rich" is leave the capital gains rates unchanged from today. This should surprise no one that has watched his 1991 testimony to Congress where he made his feelings very clear on using the contrast of a lower capital gains rate to incentivize investment.
Also, the story of this election was indeed going to be two lizards. Hillary vs. JEB. That had been the plan since 2008, and you can find stories in the press pushing it since at least 2012. But we are sick of lizards, so the people picked two candidates that weren't more of the same, Trump vs. Sanders. The Democrat party managed to suppress the voters and ensure victory for their lizard. But the Republican voters were sick enough of their party to prevent them from replacing the people's choice with the party lizard.
Note that the Republicans are still trying to get their lizard in. The lockerroom tape was an attack coordinated from three sides. Stories about reactions to the tape from Republican officials, including Paul Ryan and others, were out on the internet before the stories about the tape itself, and they included calls for Trump to step down.
Congress actually does have a jail of their own, that isn't run by the executive branch. They essentially don't use it except for very short term holding before handing detainees off to the executive for ordinary prosecution. But they could use it when the executive refuses to execute Congress's laws.
It would be trivial, of course, for the executive to break people out of it, if they are ready to escalate a constitutional crisis that will probably lead to a second civil war.
This.
The Federal Government is three co-equal branches. If congress is unable to enforce a subpoena without the cooperation of the executive branch, we don't have three branches any more, we have one. Effectively, the executive branch would then be able to do whatever it wants, as long as the DOJ promises not to prosecute.
We've seen hints of this particular Constitutional crisis several times throughout our history. We've never been anywhere near so close though, mostly because no previous President has managed to collect quite so many corrupt ideologues under one roof before. Traditionally, the Attorney General resigns in disgust much sooner, or refuses to play along, which is the same thing.
Our congressmen should strongly consider growing some balls and locking these people up. Either for contempt until they produce the evidence they were ordered to preserve, or until they can hold trials on the floor of the house.
The trials will be short. "This is a signed agreement whereby you conspired with the FBI to destroy evidence. Is that your signature? The FBI says you handed over the evidence as planned, and they destroyed it. Do you dispute their testimony? Guilty."
No, I'm using it correctly in every sense. I'm using it to refer both to Marx's own ideas, and to the ideas of the people that call themselves Marxists because their philosophy is rooted in his ideas.
Come back after you've read Capital yourself, and the archives of the Frankfurt School. Then we can talk.
Yes, it would give a supermajority of the states the ability to prevent the supreme court from finding new "rights" in the Constitution, and yes, some of those new "rights" might be mine. I'm OK with that.
Actually, the President can do a lot today. Trimming the executive branch down should be very easy.
First, the regulation process doesn't require congressional input. Trump can issue new proposed regulations that simply discard most of the current CFR. Then he waits for public input for a while, ignores that input, and BAM! those regulations are gone using the same method that created them.
Second, people enforcing the now-removed regulations get laid off. The civil service union won't like it, but the employees aren't getting fired exactly, their positions have been obsoleted.
Third, he demolishes the office buildings and turns them into federal parks. Personally, I'd prefer nuclear waste storage sites, but we can't always get what we want.
It would take decades for leviathan to recover from that. A couple of Constitutional amendments and it might be centuries.
(While I disagree with Mark Levin on term limits, and on Trump, his Liberty Amendments book lays out a solid plan for bringing the federal government back under the control of the states. Most relevant here are: The amendment to require an affirmative vote for approval of new regulations, and the amendment to give the states veto power over Supreme Court decisions.)
Which word?
Is it safe to assume that you've never actually done your own taxes? Nor read to the point of comprehension the return prepared for you by H&R Block?
There isn't a box on the form for "net worth", nor a place to list assets. The closest you get is depreciation schedules, and those don't cover a whole lot. It is pretty common for wealthy people to have no income, and also not to actually own anything.
Unless he wrote off a payment to a hit man as a business expense, it is hard to imagine anything that might be in his taxes that are worse for him, politically speaking, than not releasing them. He isn't releasing his tax returns because they don't exist in any meaningful sense, and they won't until the audit is concluded. When you are under audit, the IRS is saying that the documents you submitted are not your tax return, and they are going to use the audit process to create your return.
The fracture is decades old now. Since 1988, there has been a growing gulf between the GOP establishment and the GOP voting base.
This election season won't result in a third party. It will be a return to the two party system. Your choice lately has been between Globalism and Marxism fast, or Globalism and Marxism slowly. This year, the Republican voters are turning the Republican party into a pro-America and pro-American party, a clear choice for a change.
We tried warning the GOP elites. First, we started the Tea Party movement. That rapid rise should have been taken as a warning shot. It meant that millions of Americans were unhappy with the GOP leadership. The Tea Party brand got corrupted, so no one uses that name now, but we, the voters, are still here, and our apathy has given way to cold anger. We intend to win the war for the GOP in the next decade or less.
The government is not the country (where we live). The government is not the nation (who we are).
Read it again. It isn't necessary for anything to actually be stolen. All that is necessary is that by failing to exercise proper care, the documents under her charge became vulnerable to theft.
The physical analogy is leaving a paper file on your desk when you step away, rather than locking it back up the safe. People get charged with that. And not because anyone actually steals the files. but because their boss walks in while they are away and finds files that weren't properly secured.
The really shitty part for Martha is that she had lied about something that wasn't even a crime in the first place.
That law needs to die in a fire. Other than in the very narrow context of sworn testimony in front of Congress or a Jury, or at a sworn deposition, lying should not be a criminal act in itself, not even lying to cops. I have no objection to having a pile-on charge, or a sentence enhancement, for lying to cover up a different crime, but only after (or concurrently and dependent upon) a conviction for that other crime.
(Philosophically, sentence enhancement post-conviction and NOT as a different charge is better. Overcharging is a shitty practice and it intimidates jurors into thinking that "They are charging this guy with 5000 counts, surely one of them is right.")
And as much as I despise her, I don't think that Hillary should face criminal charges for lying either, except for the times (if any) when she did it under oath.
What evidence of intent could there possibly be? A signed confession? A stone tablet from God himself handed to Comey personally by an angel? In this case, intent must be inferred. All of her excuses so far have turned out to be lies. Remember how she didn't want to carry two devices? Blatant lie, she had several, and aides to carry them for her. Gowdy would say that false exculpatory statements prove intent. Actually, I think he made Comey say that.
And your second part is stupid. Do you want me to give you a second to think about it?
Don't read any more until you've thought it through.
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The Federal Government provides secure systems for handling (aka sending and receiving) classified information. Federal law dictates that they are to use those systems, and only those systems, for classified work. Having to work with classified documents is not cause to use a private, personal, insecure, unclassifed email system.
There is no problem with her using a private email server. I've got one in my basement, and I've had it for more than 8 years.
The problem is that she was using her private email server for federal business: first, to evade public scrutiny, which is illegal; second, for sending and receiving classified documents, which is also illegal.
The Colin Powell defense is, as I already said, bullshit. It is true that he had a non-government email address that he used to conduct government business when he was SOS, but there are three differences. First, he didn't use it for classified work - he carried two devices, as we say now. Second, the State Department didn't have a non-classified email server at the time. Third, he used a commercial email service, which means that in the event of a discovery request or subpoena a third party would be in charge of providing the records, not his own lawyers and cleaning crew.
Go read about his email leaks. He tried repeatedly to warn Hillary against using him as her defense. She eventually got the message but, like the Japanese submarine from Gilligan's Island, some of her sycophants are still fighting that lost war.
Public records from the Bush administration were a fucking mess because so many of the departments were on their own for providing email services. In response to this, a bunch of new domains and email servers were set up for official use, and the use of outside email for public business was banned. Once that was complete (2009?), Hillary even sent emails to her staff telling them not to use outside email services for state business.
P.S. Obama should indeed have noticed. StoneTear's reddit request was probably not about obscuring Hillary's email address, but Obama's.
P.P.S. Oh, and her staff knew that their boss was breaking the law, but were told to keep their mouths shut. If we'd learned about this from a whistleblower years ago, instead of from a lawsuit last year, maybe this would have blown over by now and not been a huge topic in her election campaign.
I don't remember their names. Over the last few months I've heard several radio interviews with lawyers involved in these cases, mostly while driving. I tried google using bits and pieces of the stories that (I think) I remember, but I didn't have much luck.
One guy that with a case still in the process (as in, he wasn't in prison yet at the time, and maybe still isn't) was a mechanic in the Navy who took a picture or a selfie of his (classified) work area so that he could tell his kids "this is where I worked when I was away". No criminal intent, prosecuted anyway. I remember clearly one of the lawyers talking about that case said that they were preparing appeals paperwork for their other clients to have ready depending on how his use of the "Clinton Defense" went.
I mean that no one knows, in the legal sense, if they had intent or not, because it wasn't examined at trial. Criminal trials are narrowly focused on the elements of the crime. Since the laws relating to classified documents were intentionally written by Congress to exclude intent as an element, it never gets examined at trial. Prosecutors don't raise the question because they didn't need to, and defense lawyers don't bring it up because it wouldn't help. At best, it might be in an opening or closing statement, but those are just fluff.
If the courts agree that some level of intent is necessary for a conviction now, all of those cases are appealable because their trial records no longer contain facts sufficient to sustain their conviction.
If you've ever pled guilty to something in court, the judge will ask you to affirm each element of the crime. They won't take your word at it that you are guilty of jaywalking, they want you to agree that "Don't Walk" was lit, that you knew it, and that you crossed anyway. The same thing happens in a real trial. The prosecutor lists the elements of the crime and argues that you did them, the defense disputes those claims (among other defenses). If the prosecutor is successful in establishing all of the elements beyond a reasonable doubt, you get convicted.
Espionage is very hard to prove. A person doesn't have to wrap up a bundle of secret documents in a bow and sign a card saying "Here's the spy work you wanted me to do!", they can do, and have done, things that can plausibly be mere carelessness. For example, you could accidentally leave a document out on your desk instead of locking it in the safe. Oops, careless! Unless the cleaning guy is also compromised and drops it in the trash to be fetched later. Now the secrets left the building, but in a way that both of the people involved can plausibly claim they didn't intend.
And motivation can be tricky too. Cash is obvious enough, but what about blackmail? Or loss of faith in the government? Or anger at a manager or director? Want to impress a girl? Want to experience the thrill of rule-breaking at middle-age?
Because it can be so complicated, Congress also made carelessness with classified information punishable, regardless of intent. That's basically our espionage law: If you give away our secrets, or, if you allow through carelessness the conditions for someone else to steal them, we are going to prosecute you and probably throw you in prison for a while.
Comey is claiming now that the second part should be "...or, if you intentionally allow through carelessness the conditions...", which is just asinine, and if we had honest media in this country, would be seen as such by everyone.
No law overrules the constitution. Her felonies don't disqualify her in the literal sense.
I can answer #4. Because she fucking hid everything until a lawsuit from Judicial Watch forced the State Department to release some of the public documents generated by her term as SOS. Once the people had access to her public records, they started to notice that her email wasn't entirely on the government servers, but on her own. Then her lawyers and IT people started to panic (the infamous reddit post) because they knew that Congress would get involved soon, and it did.
The answer to #2 is that every agency seems to be in on the coverup to some extent. They have all been dragging their feet producing records, and several have "lost" drives, tapes, records, etc. IRS Commissioner Koskinen is facing impeachment for this same crap, but for a different scandal (not for Hillary's emails). Obama is probably going to need to pardon every single member of his cabinet and most of the senior management, or President Trump is going to need to build a brand new prison to house the "Most Transparent Administration in history (TM)".
#1 is crap. See Powell's email leaks. #3 is no, or at least not that I've heard of.
Here are at least three of the laws that she apparently broke:
18 US Code 793
18 US Code 798
18 US Code 1924
As to your conclusion, there are guys in prison today for violations of the exact same laws, and several are now attempting to appeal their sentences. At the time they were convicted, those laws were seen as strict liability, so their trial records do not include proof of intent. If those same laws, which haven't changed, require mens rea now, at the very least they need a retrial to establish intent.
This is an American news story. Here, Asian means Oriental, which is where ninjas, samurai and kung-fu monks come from. But we shouldn't say Oriental any more because it reinforces racist notions about which direction the Roman Empire thought the sun rose from in the morning. (Part of that is a joke, but, sadly, not enough.)
If it was a European news story, Asian would mean Muslim and nothing more, though you can usually make a good guess based on the country: English Asians are mostly Pakistani, German Asians are mostly Turkish, French Asians are mostly Tunisian, Algerian, Moroccan, etc, Italian Asians are mostly "Syrian, *wink* *wink*", and so on.
Thiel spoke at the Republican convention, so now he is getting the Tea Party treatment. And this is why Trump needs to fire 98% of the federal government.
Discrimination is a trap. There is no way to hire more than one person without exposing yourself to charges of discrimination. If he doesn't hire enough Orientals, he's discriminating against them. If he does hire them at the rate they "deserve", he is necessarily discriminating against whites (and no one cares), hispanics and blacks. Note that California colleges all discriminate against orientals, and the courts say it is fine when they do it. If they didn't, there would hardly be anyone else enrolled there.
This melodrama villain monologue sums it up:
He made his opinions on the matter pretty clear in his letter, written while he was alive. Unless you've got a peer-reviewed seance showing otherwise, I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and take him at his own word.
By the way, good job on following the playbook. Discredit, disqualify, change the subject. I forget what's next. Are you going to discover that his ghost is racist? Or are you going to call him a paid shill because his widow earned $43 in cashback on her gas station credit card?