After reading through a lot of the comments on my post about the various pointers to the obvious; namely, that Russia’s hacks were done with a mind to tilt the election toward Trump with Mitch McConnell’s blessing, I see some are misconstruing the emergency here. This is not about war with Russia. It’s about treasonous acts… Continue reading “War with Russia isn’t the issue. Treason is.”
The FBI was reportedly trying to build an investigation into the Clinton Foundation around claims made in a right-wing book riddled with errors written by a Republican activist with a history of bogus reporting. The author’s organization is headed by Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s campaign chief executive and is funded by one of Trump’s top… Continue reading “FBI based potential Clinton Foundation case on debunked right-wing book”
A Politico story notes the possibility that a Republican Senate might continue to maintain a Supreme Court blockade if Hillary Clinton is elected president — with no registered objections so far from Majority Leader Mitch McConnell: A spokesman for McConnell pointed to comments made a month ago, when the GOP leader declined to speculate on how… Continue reading “In the Supreme Court battle, will GOP senators argue that Clinton wasn’t really elected?”
The double standard established by your actions is clear.
In my communications with you and other top officials in the national security community, it has become clear that you possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisors, and the Russian government – a foreign interest openly hostile to the United States, which Trump praises at every opportunity. The public has a right to know this information. I wrote to you months ago calling for this information to be released to the public. There is no danger to American interests from releasing it. And yet, you continue to resist calls to inform the public of this critical information.
By contrast, as soon as you came into possession of the slightest innuendo related to Secretary Clinton, you rushed to publicize it in the most negative light possible.
There you go.
It’s been really hot here, the past several days. When I went out the other day to retrieve my trash cans (we’re talking less than a minute, maybe 15 feet from my front door), it was so hot and humid, I actually felt faint. That’s the first time that ever happened to me.
Now, imagine standing outside in that heat and humidity for an hour — wearing a suit. I look at Clinton wearing those outfits (and probably a bullet-proof vest), and all I can think about is how hot she must be, and how much she must be sweating.
So when she left the 9/11 memorial yesterday because she felt overheated, I wasn’t surprised.
Then I saw this from a few weeks ago that popped up in my Twitter feed:
Now, he makes some assumptions here. I’m sure if Clinton notices any cognitive symptoms, she goes to her doctor. I’m pretty sure she has access to the best medical care.
But what he says here is just careless, and feeds the conspiracy machine. Football players almost always lose cognitive function from repeated brain trauma. The effects of concussion are cumulative. While it does happen that one concussion causes long-term loss of function, that probably has more to do with undertreatment. Unless you live in an urban center, you probably don’t have access to brain injury specialists. Clinton did.
The Trump people, of course, want us to think otherwise — which is why they’ve been spreading rumors about her health for weeks.
Which maybe distracts from all the questions about the sociopath who’s running on the Republican ticket.
Good morning, Hillary! Your next president, Hillary Clinton, apparently has been hearing the weeping and gnashing of teeth coming from the national media about how BOO HOO she never talks to them and BOO HOO the national press corps needs to be babied at all times, so she decided to do a press conference Thursday morning… Continue reading “Hillary Clinton Did A Press Conference, Which Is Impossible Because She Doesn’t Do Those”
There’s a lot in flux, many of them differ for a variety of reasons, and they’ve been hammering Clinton over the fake foundation scandal.
Always run as if we’re ten points behind. But that said, I’ll tell you when it’s time to worry.
P.S. Of course they smashed her Blackberries with a hammer! That’s a recommended security practice. But since it’s her, it must be a coverup, right?
(Photo: Flikr)
Look, boys and girls, a tale of two journalists and the way they cover Hillary Clinton and a glowing example of how the media fails us time and time again.
Last Friday, the FBI released pages of their investigation and notes from their interviews on the issue of Hillary Clinton’s emails/server.
Kevin Drum of Mother Jones and Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post both proudly boast that they did the work for us lowly regular Americans of reading the release. I actually thought that was the JOB of journalists, but if they need praise for doing so, here it is: Bully for them!
Now here’s where it gets interesting: Drum looked at the release and picked out basically the same points that Cillizza did. They’re the same innuendo-laden talking points we can get from any Trump proxy or conservative pundit on any news channel. They’re the same talking points that the far left are eagerly embracing in their rush to demonize Hillary Clinton over “optics.” If you’ve spent any amount of time watching the news, you know what they are.
But Drum did the startling work of actual journalism and put them in context, unlike Cillizza. To wit:
4. A note sent to all State Department employees on Clinton’s behalf warned them against the risks of using personal email addresses for official business.
Clinton told the FBI she did not remember sending that memorandum.
Pretty damning. The State Department (via Hillary Clinton herself, mind you) warned against using personal emails and Hillary ignored it. In fact, she didn’t even remember sending the email! Which implies that Hillary Clinton thinks she’s above the rules, or she’s suffering from dementia, obvs.
But look how Drum covers the same section:
Page 11: While State policy during Clinton’s tenure required that “day-to-day operations [at State] be conducted on [an authorized information system],” according to the REDACTED the Bureau of Information Security Management, REDACTED there was no restriction on the use of personal e-mail accounts for official business. […] In 2011, a notice to all State employees was sent on Clinton’s behalf, which recommended employees avoid conducting State business from personal e-mail accounts due to information security concerns.
This makes it clear that although State “recommended” that employees not use personal accounts, there was no rule prohibiting it. And apparently personal accounts were very widely used.
See the difference?
Note that Drum places the talking point within the context that this was not an uncommon practice at State (both during and before Clinton’s tenure) and that Clinton was mindful of the potential security risks and warned her staffers to be careful. In fact, Drum does the same with all of the talking points, showing how none of it is particularly shady or worthy of the scandal-mongering all over the media.
But Chris Cillizza isn’t going to let little things like journalistic practices, integrity or…let’s face it, facts get in the way of continuing to foster the notion that Clinton is inherently corrupt or untrustworthy. And then he’ll be able to reinforce yet again that OF COURSE Hillary is untrustworthy, because all Americans think so. Hell, he might even get booked on a television news program to make that case, not that he’s looking for camera time, you non-serious liberal.
Make no mistake, that doesn’t mean that Drum gave Hillary Clinton a pass. His conclusion:
If you read the entire report, you’ll find bits and pieces that might show poor judgment on Hillary’s part. The initial decision to use one email device is the obvious one, something that Hillary has acknowledged repeatedly. Another—maybe—is her staff’s view of what was safe to send over unclassified email. But this is very fuzzy. It could be that her staff knew exactly what it was doing, and it’s the subsequent classification authorities who are wrong. This is something that it’s impossible to judge since none of us will ever see the emails in question.
Acknowledged errors in judgment. That’s really all this entire “vast right wing conspiracy”-led investigation that has cost us millions and millions of taxpayer dollars can come up with. But here’s where Drum distinguishes himself from Cillizza:
That said, this report is pretty much an almost complete exoneration of Hillary Clinton. She wasn’t prohibited from using a personal device or a personal email account, and others at [S]tate did it routinely. She’s told the truth all along about why she did it. Colin Powell did indeed advise her about using personal email shortly after she took office, but she chose to follow the rules rather than skirt them, as Powell did. She didn’t take her BlackBerry into her office. She communicated with only a very select group of 13 people. She took no part in deciding which emails were personal before handing them over to State. She had nothing to do with erasing information on the PRN server. That was a screw-up on PRN’s end. She and her staff all believed at the time that they were careful not to conduct sensitive conversations over unclassified email systems. And there’s no evidence that her server was ever hacked.
There’s remarkably little here.
Cillizza doesn’t bother to make any summation that acknowledges that ultimately, there’s no there there. Funny, that.
It’s almost as if he wants to keep doing the work of these right wing groups like Judicial Watch.
The media’s inability to cover Hillary Clinton with anything approaching intellectual honesty (as exemplified by Chris Cillizza, but really, I could have substituted any number of other mainstream journalists in there, including almost everyone on the “liberal” MSNBC) is actively hurting this country.
To be clear, I don’t want or need them to coddle Hillary Clinton, nor do I think she expects that either. If she screws up, report on it. But have enough integrity to not be a mouthpiece for yet another costly and fruitless suggestion by some shadowy right wing entity that has no basis in fact. The mainstream media needs to make an effort not to fall back into the lazy and pointless Clinton Rules of Reporting, as Jonathan Allen outlined.
It was EXACTLY this kind of failure of the press that led us to the disastrous invading and occupying of Iraq and allowed the “debate” on climate change and a whole host of other issues that we shouldn’t debate any longer, but act on. The mainstream media are failing us on a basic level, as Jeff Jarvis, who teaches journalism, spells out here:
Because of this election, we now know that the media has done a terrible job of reflecting the concerns and goals of underemployed, angry white men in the heartland. If media had done a better job of reporting — and then informing — their worldviews, would there have been an opening for them to be recruited by Trump and the forces of the so-called alt right?
Far more important than either of those examples, of course, is the experience of minorities in this country: African-Americans, Latinos, Muslims, too often women, and too many others who are unseen in media. A few weeks ago, I spoke with a journalist planning to write about how the internet is destroying the truth. The unsaid assumption in his thesis is that we used to have the truth, when the truth came from media. But whose truth was that? The truth presented by mass media was but one view of the world and did not reflect so many diverse worldviews because the people making it were — and still are — not diverse. That is one reason why so many do not trust journalists. (Note that people trust presidents more.)
In this election, I am not a mass. I am not a poll number. I am not a color on a map. Neither am I a journalist. I am a member of a community I cannot see and hear in media. I am frustrated.
Although Politico would certainly like you to think so:
Taxpayer cash was used to buy IT equipment — including servers — housed at the Clinton Foundation, and also to supplement the pay and benefits of several aides now at the center of the email and cash-for-access scandals dogging Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
This investigation, which is based on records obtained from the General Services Administration through the Freedom of Information Act, does not reveal anything illegal. But it does offer fresh evidence of how the Clintons blurred the line between their nonprofit foundation, Hillary Clinton’s State Department, and the business dealings of Bill Clinton and the couple’s aides.
According to several people familiar with the former president’s operation, the rationale behind the interwoven payrolls is that they allow for a small team to assist Clinton in a variety of settings without having to do logistically complicated hockey-like line changes. In a given day, Clinton might deliver a paid private speech (during which time his employees’ salaries could be paid by the executive services corporation) and a public speech in his capacity as a former president (during which his staff could be paid by the GSA funds). And he could attend events for the foundation (where staff time would be paid by the foundation) as well as his wife’s presidential campaign (staff time would be paid by the campaign).
….A GSA spokesperson declined to comment on specific employees, but said ex-presidents have broad discretion over how they choose to divvy up the $96,600 they are provided each year for staffing. They can give the entire sum to a single employee or divide it among multiple employees.
So Clinton gets the princely sum of $96,600 each year for staff, and tracks the work these staffers do in his capacity as ex-president. He bills the GSA for that work, and bills other organizations when the staff does work for them. This is bog standard stuff. Staff time is tracked, and then charged out. This is not just “not illegal,” it’s the way pretty much any similar kind of operation works. Even me. Mother Jones pays me an annual salary, but if I write an op-ed or something, I bill that time to whoever I wrote the op-ed for.
Go ahead and read the whole thing. There’s really nothing even remotely blurry or scandalous or shady or anything else. It’s just the standard way anyone operates who has multiple interests, multiple funding sources, and staffers who do work for multiple organizations. There’s no hint that any of the charges were incorrect, or that any of the purchases were misallocated. As near as I can tell, it was all entirely above board, and the GSA was actively involved in scrutinizing everything.
Still waiting, of course, for reporting on the foundations started by George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Colin Powell.
This is why I pay so little attention to Clinton “scandals.” There’s rarely any “there” there.
