It looks like the media has decided to resume its regularly scheduled Hillary bashing. Got to have a horse race to cover!
In a way, maybe it’s just as well, given that the alternative is two months of Paul Ryan white knight fan fiction:
That basically allows the RNC to come up with any reason to declare the spot vacant. For example, they could, following President Obama, deem him unfit for office – as in, mentally unfit. Or they could hold a vote of no confidence. No doubt, if Trump is fighting them, that would be a bumpy road, possibly involving litigation. It might be easier for leaders to endorse Gary Johnson and move on. But because of that word “otherwise,” it’s likely within the RNC’s power to dump Trump even without his consent. Then they would be able to fill the “vacancy” by majority vote.
Interestingly, that person could be anyone. Mike Pence does not automatically move up the ticket. On the contrary, unless Pence drops out (or is similarly found to be unfit, which seems impossible), he remains the nominee for Vice President, which, after all, is a separate office and a separate nomination. Most likely, the GOP’s knight in shining armor, House Speaker Paul Ryan, would be a leading candidate for a last-minute substitution.
Mnemosyne
It’s almost like stupid questions lead to terrible answers. Huh.
Trentrunner
You can feel the MSM’s palpable relief at being able to return to this monumental non-story.
Al Giordano had a pretty good tweetstorm about this nothingburger and about staying focused on what matters: organizing and staying on actual issues.
I’m going to fucking drown in schadenfreude when Hillary wins, kicking both Trump’s and the media’s cottage-cheese asses.
ETA: Hillary just tweeted this out:
“Four Years Ago today:
An ‘extremely credible source’ has called my office and told me that @BarackObama’s birth certificate is a fraud. – Donald Trump”
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I usually like Barro, but what does HRC “leveling” with the public even mean? This is like a murder investigation with no corpse.
Ruckus
Isn’t this a case of paid shills have to be shills to be paid?
IOW isn’t money somehow involved for people who have to be paid well no matter the quality of the product/service they are providing? Notice I didn’t say the product/service that the customers want to purchase, but the product/service that they are providing. And on a personal note I find that not purchasing, at whatever the price, the product/service does at least provide me with positive benefits. Of course the crappy product/service is still out there, infecting the people who do come in contact with it.
amorphous
Hillary clearly needs to pivot to snail mail ahead of the general if she wants to win the highly desirable exurban marching band moms and white Java Developer dads.
Frankensteinbeck
The village wants Paul Ryan as president so BAD. He makes them tingle when he says we can fuck over the poor, destroy every trace of that uppity black guy’s legacy, enshrine the rich as Galtian gods, and balance the budget in the process. All that, and without the wake-me-when-it’s-over details and numbers and nuance Democrats keep going on about!
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
This shit makes me fucking bananas. We’ve been over this e-mail shit 8000 times now. Who the fuck even gives a shit any longer, aside from the dickbags who are already voting for Trump and the assholes in the press? The fucking Republicans couldn’t find anything. I don’t know, though. Maybe it’s less irritating than hashing over Benghazi again.
gogol's wife
My basic feeling is: attention is focused on the Olympics right now. Nobody understands or cares what she did with her e-mail. They can’t explain what she did that is so terrible. People who hate her already think she should be imprisoned for it (whatever “it” is). Nobody else cares. They’ll vote based on other things.
I’m going to be really Pollyanna-ish and say that I think Trump did himself irreparable damage last week, no matter what the MSM does now. Please don’t tell me I’m wrong.
And our job is to get out there and work for our candidate, including talking about the good things she will do.
jayjaybear
This is kind of like when a coyote has its paw caught in a trap, except the coyote has the sense to just chew the paw off and escape with its life…
Ruckus
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
No corpse, no crime scene and an inept detective. Of course they do have a plot and a script, even if the script is just one page, with repeat in parentheses at the bottom and the plot is three words, Hate the Clintons.
JMG
If Clinton wins and then announces from the podium Election Night’s she not doing any press conferences as President and is turning the White House press room into a rumpus room for her grandchildren, that’d be great.
Mike in NC
Ryan is the Koch-approved candidate but this is not his year.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I have yet to hear one Villager express the slightest curiosity about what was in Colin Powell’s emails from the run up to the fucking Iraq War.
Mnemosyne
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
It’s more like a murder investigation where witnesses keep telling the cops that they just saw the “victim” at the grocery store and he only had a black eye, but the cops keep insisting it was murder because shut up, that’s why.
MattF
Oh, btw, State Department says none of the documents on Hilz’s server were marked classified.
Ruckus
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.):
Of course they are incompetent. So there is always hope that someone, somewhere will find that one acorn of something that will do…………
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
@Frankensteinbeck: What is it about people like Ryan that makes these losers in the press cream themselves so? He isn’t even interesting. He’s a dull, smarmy asshole who lies about shit. And yet, they all seem to have some kind of creepy infatuation with him, the same as they did with Bush. But why? They fall in love with these Republicans, and they’re all creepy assholes. So many of the Democrats seem like nice, interesting people, people who would be fun to talk to, fun to get to know. You know? Republicans are so dour and humorless. Obama, Biden, Elizabeth Warren, these people, and scores of others like them are full of life, and they make jokes and shit. I know the whole “Which one would you rather have a beer with?” is such a dumb way to rate politicians, but even on their own terms, the press gets this all wrong. The people it would be fun to have a beer with are all fucking Democrats. Republicans? They’re the people you can’t get away from fast enough if you end up standing next to them at the bar.
gogol's wife
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.):
Right. There were about ten cute Irish guys at the DNC who I’d love to have a beer with, seriously.
amorphous
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.): Who gives a shit? Easy: The storyline gives a shit. Those pages ain’t gonna click themselves.
I mean, I know you know this. And it’s frustrating. But this is like all the people screaming about how NBC ruined the Opening Ceremony with commercials. The US media is not a service – it is a business that exists to make money. Shame we set it up that way, but add it to the list of shit to fix and try to figure out the priority I guess.
amorphous
@Ruckus: DID SOMEONE SAY ACORN??????? RED ALERT. RED ALERT. WE HAVE A NEW STORYLINE!!!!
JMG
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.): The bosses of all these reporters are almost all Republicans. It’s a learned behavior of ass kissing to get ahead.
catclub
@Frankensteinbeck:
“You get an asterisk! And You get an asterisk! And you get an asterisk!”
Ruckus
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.):
Maybe many of them float their boats on the same side of the pond? Ask yourself how many of those press people (or their bosses) you’d like to spend an hour at a bar with. Or even one minute.
Davis X. Machina
State Dept confirms FBI got it wrong, none of Hillary Clinton’s emails were classified at the time
Ruckus
@amorphous:
Nice catch and fast too.
catclub
@MattF: Ask if State Department servers – to which Hillary undoubtedly sent those emails, were ever shut down to deal with spillage of classified material onto them by Hillary’s emails.
No, they were not. That is a huge deal, if it had happened, but it never happened.
FlipYrWhig
I still want one major-media reporter to explain what the problem is OTHER THAN “impressions” and “optics” and whatnot, which basically boils down to dinging her for justifying the stories they already want to tell about her.
Mary G
The insanely right-wing Orange County Register haz a sad that the once-reddest county in the country has diminished to only+6 Republican, due to a surge in Democratic registrations.
In the June primary, more Dems voted than Republicans for the first time in 48 years. Dems are putting a lot of time and money into young people and Latinos. Republicans are getting no outside help. HA!
Here’s the best bit:
My man! BWAH HA HA HA HA. Dreamer activists are now chasing Darrell wherever he goes, and if supporting Trump takes him down, well, karma’s a bitch. I have even gotten my right-wing neighbors admitting to being at least Applegate-curious. It’s mostly because they think Issa let them down in his Benghazi hearings, but whatever. They hate Trump, too.
Elmo
@Mary G: Huh. Vista isn’t in Orange County tho.
Eric
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: this is a like a murder investigation with no corpse and the missing supposedly murdered guy is standing there saying “um really I’m fine, I just went out of town for the weekend and didn’t tell my neighbors”
Splitting Image
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.):
Simple. Ryan has appeared on television, playing the role of a Very Serious Person. Like a lot of other actors, he has been typecast into the role people first saw him play.
The Ancient Randonnuer
Cilizza is still trying to break out of the shadow of the Dick Whisperer. In case anyone has forgotten where little Chris got his start.
Mary G
@Elmo: We in the very southernmost bit of Orange County have been insanely gerrymandered for years. For a long time, we were in Ken Calvert’s district, which was in the Inland Empire and 98% Riverside/Redlands, but a long skinny leg about a mile wide was extended out to the coast and expanded. He needed more Republicans because that area has turned Latino.
The independent commission that CA put in place redrew it. Issa reps northern San Diego county, which starts about two miles from me, so we are at least geographically congruent.
gene108
@gogol’s wife:
The general response is she is hiding something, which is why she had her own server and deleted 30k e-mails before handing them over.
When I point out her most of her e-mails are public record available for all to see at the State Department website and FBI recovered the 30k deleted emails and found nothing with them, people are still convinced there is something nefarious going on.
There’s a “where there is smoke, there must be fire” mindset with regards to her because an honest person would not constantly be under investigation.
Elmo
@Mary G: Right! I grew up in Santee, so I know the area well. Issa fits right in.
tobie
@FlipYrWhig: So true. The press can only talk about optics since there isn’t any serious misdeed in this case. To shout that from the rafters, though, would be to be shrill, defensive, less than forthcoming, suspicious, obfuscatory etc etc etc.
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
@gene108:
This is the only thing the Republicans have gotten right. If you smear somebody for 25 years, people will slowly begin to come around to believing that there’s something bad about her. That’s all this shit is, just a feeling people have that she must be untrustworthy, she must have done something bad, sometime, since there are all these “questions” always swirling around her. And, yeah, every last one of these “questions” is a made up hunk of shit; but when people hear this shit long enough, some of them begin to fall for it. Think about that. In the last 25 years, the only thing Republicans have done effectively is smear people. That’s it. They’ve fucked everything else they ever touched up, but they did do a bang up job of smearing some people.
Schlemazel
I work with a really nice kid, child of a Hmong CIA fighter & refugee. He is a fundamentalist & a gun nut. but somehow still a good person if you can avoid those topics (and he himself avoids religion to his credit). Last fall he said he was going to support Ben Carson, we had no other conversations about politics since. Yesterday he asked me why Black Hat (a convention for security minded hackers) was having their first political event in 19 years of existence. There was a story in NPR & the founder of Black Hat said himself it was because having an insane incompetent as a major party nominee was a first. I said, “Its simply because there has never been a candidate of a major party that is insane and totally unqualified to be President”. He walked out of my office without saying anything, I wonder what he is thinking.
hellslittlestangel
@gogol’s wife: Right on all counts.
The Ancient Randonnuer
Speaking of Paul Ryan white knight fan fiction here is a headline from WaPo:
No mention of his muscular torso or rugged good looks but we still have 90+ days before the election.
D58826
@MattF: Haven’t you learned by now FACTS do not matter when it is a Clinton. (snark)
On twitter Norm Ornstein has a simple 3 step explaination:
1. reporter asks Hillary the same e-mail question for the 100th time.
2. Hillary gives the same answer for the 100th tiume
3. reporter now has his lead story forthe day
The only answer that the VSP’s will find acceptable is when she ‘confesses (as in a Stalin show trial confession)’ that:
1. yes the server had top secret data
2. she gave Putin the nuclear codes in exchange for a cushy Black Sea dacha for when she and Bill take their ill-gotten gains and leave the country
3. and she also sold the names of all our CIA agents to Trump so he could add them to his Trump ponzi scheme mailing list.
shomi
Sometimes I wonder who obesses over Hillary’s emails more. DougJ or the people he posts about…spreading THEIR word just like a good little minion.
Baud
This time she said “but” instead of “however.” Why can’t she keep her story straight?
MattF
@D58826: Cillizza isn’t going to be satisfied until Hilz is perp walked into the FBI building. It’s his own special ‘boy’s fantasy’ that he won’t discuss in public.
hovercraft
@Frankensteinbeck:
The last couple of days as they were speculating that Trump would drop out or be pushed out, they kept salivating about Ryan. Apparently he’s the only one who could step in and save the party, by uniting them. I guess they haven’t been observing the House over the last year, the base regardless of what the media thinks, hates Ryan as much as they did Boehner. They really, really want Ryan to be the face of the GOP, unfortunately the base doesn’t.
Mary G
Chris C. from the Wapo says Hillary’s case is different from Colin Powell’s because, although he used a commercial email account extensively, he didn’t use his own server. So his emails were on whatever servers his ISP had everybody’s email on. Isn’t that even less secure than Hillary’s?
D58826
@shomi: Well according to some of the polls ,the voting public does. The e-mails act as a fresh reminder that Hillary is ‘dishonest’. Never mind that, other than a blowjob and a perjury trap the Clinton’s have been convicted of NOTHING.
lamh36
I know this has absolutely nothing to do with the actual website optic, but gosh, I love me some White Nights. What’s not to like Mikel, Isabella, and Gregory Hines!!! Love, love, love!!!!
and Say You Say Me is like one of my favorite Lionel Ritchie songs.
MattF
@hovercraft: Yeah, that’s the problem– That gap between the fantasy Republican party and the actual Republican party.
Major Major Major Major
Hillary is selling “I BELIEVE IN SCIENCE” magnets for $10, should I donate? Will that go downticket?
catclub
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.): The only thing the guys introduced on page 1 of “The Hunting of the President” about the war against the Clintons, got right, was that Bill and Hillary Clinton were the most promising Democrats of their generation and would be dangerous to the GOP. They first only aimed at Bill.
MattF
@Mary G: Well, one would have to ask who actually set up and managed Hilz’s email server– I don’t know the answers to that, but it was probably not anyone who specialized in email security. And, in fact, in the scheme of things, commercial email servers are pretty secure.
hovercraft
@gene108:
I think they just want her to be penitent and humble and start every response with “I’m so sorry I’m a terrible person, I lie about everything, America is right not to trust me, please please forgive me, I’ll be a good girl from now on.” Republicans are allowed to be mean and blow off the press, democrats are supposed to be humble and do as the press says they should do. Dick Chaney can tell a democratic senator to fuck himself, but the president is being divisive when he calls a demagog a demagog.
Chris
@JMG:
Yep. I suspect a lot of this is institutional bias: people whose product is in line with the narrative are hired and promoted, those who don’t fit are either not hired or left in the lower ranks. In other words, I’m not even sure how many people are consciously kissing ass in order to rise, vs just being themselves, rising to the top, and simply assuming that’s a reflection of their skill and not their ideological disposition.
Ceci n'est pas mon nym
@catclub:
Thank you. And I wish somebody would inject the word “spillage” into some reporters’ heads and make them aware that:
– it happens, and there are procedures (incredibly painful ones, but they exist) to deal with it,
– those procedures don’t include criminal charges
rikyrah
@Trentrunner:
This.All of this. Team Hillary is on the ground organizing. That is what counts.
CalD
Meanwhile, Trump got his phone back again. Someone else has been tweeting on his twitter account the last day or so but as of about 10:30 this morning, he of the short-fingers was back with a vengeance.
Compare and contrast:
“Let us all see what happens”?
rikyrah
@Frankensteinbeck:
He talks in Frank Luntz approved dogwhistles. So, they can pretend that he doesn’t want to shred the American Social Safety Net. And posture to Democrats, as to why they aren’t COMPROMISING with him.?
rikyrah
@JMG:
I would LMAO if she did that.
Iowa Old Lady
@lamh36: Holy random comment. I love that movie. Have you ever seen this movie dance montage that includes the one from White Nights?
rikyrah
@lamh36:
It’s ok. I love the song, the video for the song, but am EH on the movie.
I do miss Gregory Hines.??
gogol's wife
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.):
“It frustrated him that after this exhaustive investigation his opponents still rehashed the stale charges of misconduct. He had learned a lesson about propaganda in politics and mused wearily that ‘no character, however upright, is a match for constantly reiterated attacks, however false.’ If a charge was made often enough, people assumed in the end ‘that a person so often accused cannot be entirely innocent.'” Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton, p. 457.
Frankensteinbeck
@hovercraft:
They want her to fight them and lose. They want to be able to pat each other on the back that they put that bitch Hillary in her place, the Obama years are over and will be wiped away, and their Republican dreamboat (currently Ryan) will save the country by gutting the safety net, giving the rich everything they dream of, and making it illegal to say the word ‘racism.’ And they want it to happen because they, the true intellectual sages and leaders of discourse, told America what to think.
germy
@Chris: Jon Karl was a college republican. He’s more than happy on ABC News to criticize the crap out of (or at least cast doubts over) Clinton or any other Democrat.
raven
RIP Pete Fountain!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61WTC4vTot0
divF
@rikyrah: Me too (ETA: missing Gregory Hines, I mean).
One of the funniest scenes in his film career was at the end of The Preacher’s Wife, in which his character starts awkwardly clapping in time with the gospel choir. Gregory Hines faking a lack of a sense of time or rhythm was a consummate bit of acting.
Gelfling 545
@MattF:
I’d be interested to know why you would assume that.
hovercraft
@CalD:
He’s waiting to see if democrats call for her to be replaced as the nominee, repubs have been calling for him to be replaced all week, so it’s only fair that democrats do the same. If they don’t that means that the system is rigged.
one_particular_harbour, fka Botsplainer
Fuuu-u-u-u-u-ck.
Jill Stein, Vlad Putin, Mike Flynn…
gogol's wife
All this talk of e-mails has inspired me to send Hillary a donation.
Mary G
@raven: RIP, loved that fat clarinet.
cmorenc
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.):
The explanation is there staring you in the face: because such a huge portion of the press who maneuver their careers into prominent positions at CNN, NYT, etc….are themselves smarmy assholes who lie or distort shit to serve their own interests. And really deep critical thinking is just too much damn work when a few alleged “facts” can so easily be cooked up into a dramatic narrative they can chew on for an extended number of news cycles, or even indefinitely.
Aimai
@Iowa Old Lady: i , too, live white nights!
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@one_particular_harbour, fka Botsplainer: the other day I caught some NPR call in show about Russia and a woman called in who had just come back from a Russian visit with some kind of group promoting world peace, which seemed like a fine thing. Then she said we had blown our only chance to elect a true peace candidate (guess who!). which was unsurprising. She then went on to say that Vlad is only responding reasonably to American aggression, and a few other kooky, BiP type stuff. I didn’t know there was a faction of Putin worship among a certain kind of American leftie
one_particular_harbour, fka Botsplainer
@MattF:
I’d like to talk about the whimpering by folks like Snowjob, Assange, Wikileaks about the NSA programs for message capture.
Could such a thing be used to ferret out a coordinated campaign by foreign intelligence services to manipulate American public opinion via multiple sources? Could that be the real reason by all the whines and the manipulation of grubby, chubby dudebro neckbeards (with “Han Shot First” tshirts) into worrying about the NSA looking into their anime and porn stashes?
Villago Delenda Est
The email is the only thing the vermin of the Village have. Hillary DESTROYED Benghazi and Draco Malfoy last year, so all they have is the email.
Meanwhile, Drumpf could quite literally open up with a Kalashnikov on one of his rallies and the Village would ignore it.
Peale
Ah. Olympic cutaway to the news. Apparently Hillary Clinton is the one keeping the email controversy in the news! Thanks milky odonnell
Frankensteinbeck
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
I didn’t either, but I certainly am familiar with a brand of ‘everything bad in the world is the result of a nefarious American plot’ philosophy common in our Progressive Betters. The followers of that thought are very enthusiastic about righteous backlash against our oil-grubbing ways. I guess it’s natural many would see Putin as a hero for standing up to us?
Earl
@MattF: There’s different types of security. Of course some random tech is not going to have the same type of intrusion detection, 0-day countermeasures, or even aggressive maintenance, patching, and ip blocks that, eg, gmail has, but otoh, google has probably hundreds of admins who could gin up a reason to look at someone’s email. All of the above are less secure that using state department mail servers, however, because the majority of the mail will never leave the server. Hillary was wildly irresponsible to do what she did, and the NSA was wildly irresponsible to not give the secretary of state the same fake blackberry secured to a local traveling wireless network that Obama got.
I believe Hillary literally had no idea how email works or anything else tech related. She was asked about her server being wiped and replied something with a cloth? But still, it’s her fault. And the chance that both the nsa and russian intelligence didn’t get every email going through that system is 0.0%. If they can’t hack the server itself, they’ll hack the admin and use his/her credentials.
That said, many of the commenters here are delusional. First, listen to Hillary’s response. What’s the old maxim — if you’re explaining, you’re losing? Not having good answers to this stuff is as stupid as Jeb not having a good answer to the Iraq war question down pat.
And as for why people don’t trust the Clintons, it’s because they’re not trustworthy. Whether it’s Hillary’s unalloyed enthusiasm for war, their willingness to take money from wall street and donations from companies with business in front of the secretary of state, 100x return on cattle futures, Bill flying the rape plane with underage hookers on board, or her giving word salad answers about her email not far off of “it depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is”, in an election where character has become a major issue, there’s no reason Hillary shouldn’t be pushed on hers. From gay marriage to super predators to trade to progressive values (Hillary version primary 2016 claims she is a progressive; that’s certainly a novel position for her (viz welfare reform)), there’s a long history of flip-flops. And both of them like to walk right up to the ethical, if not legal, line and give it a nudge. Contrast with Obama. Despite Republican’s best efforts, no scandals have stuck because he’s a more ethical person and he stays away from ethical lines.
The Ancient Randonnuer
@one_particular_harbour, fka Botsplainer: Another data point that reinforces one simple truth: Being highly educated doesn’t mean you have good judgement.
different-church-lady
Chris Cillizza. His stupid ass. Fuck him in it.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@cmorenc: Paul Ryan is a simple, wonky (just ask Paul Krugman), straight-talking man, who likes a simple glass of wine with dinner with friends and is in great shape having run a sub-three-hour marathon.
What’s not to like? He’s the kind of sensible, straight-forward, level-headed, wonky,
white, male, Republicanheartland leadership the country needs.:-/
Cheers,
Scott.
Tilda Swinton's Bald Cap
@Earl: Reggie is that you?
different-church-lady
@Earl: Hey now, just when I thought all the trolls were just gonna phone it in for the rest of the summer, we get this real honest effort. I mean, I know the laundry list is pretty much entirely off-the-shelf, but you really put your back into it. Good job.
The Ancient Randonnuer
@Earl:
Assumes facts not in evidence. However we do have accusations in a federal civil suit that Trump was on a plane with underage girls.
CalD
@hovercraft:
LOL. Seriously though, I suspect the wife may have been doing his tweeting while he was on the road. “Let us all see what happens,” sounds like something a non-native English speaker would say. Also, whoever was posting to his account all day yesterday always said “Hillary Clinton,” never “Crooked Hillary.”
Arclite
@amorphous: There are no white Java developer dads. They’ve all been supplanted by Indians on H1-Bs.
Earl
@Gelfling 545: why would you assume otherwise? People who understand anti-government security countermeasures are extremely rare, and work for either the government or google, apple, etc, and are also extremely expensive. The Clintons have no competency to select such a person, even if they were available. You’ll also not have access, unless you’re willing to spend giant amounts of cash, to the same hardware countermeasures; intrusion detection simply isn’t shared publicly. When you see random it workers panicking and shutting down servers because they think they were hacked (dec 2010; jan 2011), it means those workers are not competent to be running servers where the threats include governments. That same it worker was randomly disabling security features to make email transit work. That email server had malware actually show up in the mailboxes instead of being blocked. It was an incompetent shitshow all around.
oh yeah, this was her it person:
That’s a strong security background right there :rolleyes: He was probably presenting at blackhat between handling help-desk calls from nonprofit employees about how to change their screen savers.
lamh36
@Iowa Old Lady: YES!!!! love it
Major Major Major Major
@Earl:
Let’s count the ways:
“she disagrees with me so I don’t trust her”
“she disagrees with me so I don’t trust her”
when it’s the clintons, tertiary connections are prima facie evidence of corruption and untrustworthiness!
never mind, into the pie filter you go
different-church-lady
@Major Major Major Major: President of the Tautology Club.
Earl
@Major Major Major Major: I like how the new liberal standard for ethics is “doesn’t have a signed contract or video recording of the deal.” Obama / judicial standards of staying away from appearance of impropriety is apparently no longer necessary.
raven
GOAALLLLLLLL USA!!!
nutella
@Earl:
What is a good answer, in your opinion? Whatever she says, the press and people like you with a bad case of Clinton Derangement Syndrome* will shriek with fury and indignation. Well, unless she bursts into tears and announces that she’s dropping out of the election. She’s not going to do that.
(*) Or should I say Clintons Derangement Syndrome since you’re blaming the candidate for her husband’s alleged sins.
Major Major Major Major
@efgoldman: By the time it gets to Trump doing that, he’d have already kicked out all the villager media.
Or maybe invited all of them, who knows.
@Earl: Your comment could just have easily talked about shady real estate dealings, Tony Rezko, and cocaine. Don’t pretend you have an ‘Obama standard’ of purity.
raven
@efgoldman: You got someone else in mind.
PhoenixRising
@Mary G:
That is precisely the point. She had her staff hire someone to find a better quality of IS, they installed a server that was actually secure, compared to AOL’s servers. Or whatever, I forget who his provider was, but email security requires end-to-end encryption, and Powell/Rice both used email services that…well, let’s hope they just never used email for anything at all.
raven
@efgoldman: Women’s soccer v France. Men’s hoop next then a bunch of swimming finals. A couple of friends are swim and dive coaches and Allison Schmidtt is a Dawg too!
Keith G
The behaviors described in the FBI final report are a legitimate campaign issue. If that was characterizing the behavior of a Republican office holder, the Democratic Party would be overjoyed to use quotes from it as ammunition.
Since that report exists in the real world, I trust that Hillary and her folks are ready for the questions that will come during the debates. That’ll be the event when the most eyesballs will be watching Hillary all at one time. It is her chance to craft an answer that goes over the heads of the media middle persons and is able to be communicated directly to the electorate.
Earl
@nutella: For starters, under 100 words.
Here’s a go:
Look, this was a mistake. I understand that and wish I hadn’t done it. And while it was an error, it simply wasn’t a crime. Next question.
Take a page from eg Trump who simply answers the question he wants to answer.
Watch the press conference; she talked about the fox interview and her statements in public vs congressional testimony vs fbi testimony. Maybe throw in something about stuff wasn’t really classified, but then you get into a shitshow about classified later, the fbi and state department disagreement about what was classified, partial document markings, the fact that drone killings are supposedly classified but commonly covered in the media, etc. She (and we!) don’t want her to have that debate, because it’s complex and people have the attention span of a hummingbird.
It may be worthwhile to mention she’s a grandparent who didn’t grow up with the internet and didn’t (doesn’t?) really have a grasp on how this stuff works. I’m not sure if that helps or not.
Earl
@efgoldman: Any other findings you want to report from inside your ass?
Major Major Major Major
@Earl: She gives answers like that, it’s true. That’s a flaw. She has them!
John D.
@Earl:
Dazzle me with your brilliance. Tell me how you prevent a 0-day exploit from making it to the end user.
gene108
@Earl:
I can tell you do not pay attention. The folks, who believe the murder of Vince Foster was a warm act for Hillary’s multiple homicide of Amassador Sean Smith, et. al. are convinced Obama issued a stand down order to let Hillary commit murder, supplied guns to drug cartels, so they could mirder CPB agents (I guess to get more illegals in here to vote for him), and that he would never have won in 2008 without ACORN and the New Blank Panther Party working in tandem, respectively, to get illegals to the polls and intimidate whites from voting,
In short the only people paying attention will bite on any smear campaign aimed at Democrats.
PhoenixRising
@Earl:
Every part of this is wrong except the conclusion. You are correct that the NSA’s dick-swinging, which was targeted on her as an individual and as a Democratic politician, is the real scandal here. If anyone believes that POTUS is the boss of the NSA/DIA, I have a bridge to sell you, and this is the only evidence you need.
Using an ESP like Google/Verizon/Comcast could never be appropriate for this application, or any other application where it’s important to keep your business out of the reach of the NSA/Russians/Chinese. Because there are too many people who can look at the server, and because they cannot truly secure their servers. Period.
The servers at State were penetrated by foreign governments during the time she was SOS, and are screened by the NSA as well.
Putting emails inside end-to-end encryption, and storing them on a server you have physical control over, is the best available solution–and wasn’t even a violation of a policy or guideline when she did it, let alone illegal.
If I were her I would simply stop answering questions about the emails. Nothing happened except the spooks got to take their scalp…and if they end up with President Trump for their troubles, that will be one definition of irony.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@Keith G: Guess what? It did describe the behavior of several previous Republican office holders.
*crickets*
randy khan
@Mary G:
Yes, it’s less secure (or at least was at the relevant time) because hundreds or thousands of people who didn’t work for the State Department had access to Powell’s email. People forget that Google, Yahoo!, etc., are big companies and that lots of people have business reasons to have access to customers’ email.
Also, the odds of social engineering access to the account on the private server were zero, while it’s not hard to imagine someone saying to a Google customer service rep “No, not *that* Hillary Clinton. Yeah, I get that all the time,” etc.
MomSense
@efgoldman:
Ha!! My marching band student can beat up your honor roll student would be a great bumper sticker.
As I think about it more, the marching band kids tend to be the honor roll kids.
gene108
@efgoldman:
I think they’d be willing to take bullets for Trump, as long as he was just randomly firing into the media pit and not singling out specific reporters.
The way I see it, they would view it as reducing the competition with access to Trump. And since Trump was not singling out anyone in particular, by the Divine Grace of The Donald, the survivors are entitled to the divine right of better access.
Tilda Swinton's Bald Cap
@randy khan: Exactly, the very first rule of computer security, is physical security. Hillary had physical control of the server.
Keith G
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism: Of course there are crickets. As you typed ….”previous office holders”. Election politics is war by other means. Those other persons are no longer on a battlefield. Hillary Clinton is. When considering the task of running for the office of President, I can think of no other endeavor where a human being is so thoroughly examined for flaws, both real and imagined. She has chosen this path. Fair or not, the hurdles ahead of her are well-known and have been known for quite a while.
As I mentioned above she’s going to have an excellent chance to answer these issues in front of live TV and computer audience. If she heeds the correct advice, I’m quite sure she will handle this very well.
Earl
@John D.: @John D.: You can forcibly convert rich email to plain text, avoiding bugs in your html rendering engine. You can filter email, and especially attachments, from strange or unknown sources. You can simply refuse the type of attachments commonly used for exploits (msword/doc, zip, exe, dmg). You can use someone sending any of the last three as proof you should hole the entire email. You can, if paranoid enough, load attachments inside a vm and monitor for malware symptoms before even delivering them (an entirely reasonable countermeasure for people running executive/state/nsa/military). You can block attachments from outside a chosen list of domains and/or emails. You can subscribe to the 0-day alert lists that are close to invite-only. You can develop parser-validators that will help find common 0-day attack vectors and quarantine the emails. This is obviously not an exhaustive list.
You should start by hiring someone competent to run internet-facing services with state-supported hacking attempts.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@Keith G:
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
*pause to catch my breath*
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Pull the other one.
Are you seriously suggesting that the Deserting Coward was vetted to within an inch of his life? McCain? Romney? Bush Sr? Reagan?
Imma go find my inhaler now.
Major Major Major Major
@Earl: Hey, look, it knows words. What’s your point?
James E Powell
They are on the e-mails because they’ve got nothing else. And I guarantee that with the week Trump’s been having, every available Republican flack is on the phone bitching to whoever they can get hold of at CNN, MSNBC, NYT, etc., that their coverage is not ‘balanced’ and that they are letting Hillary off the hook. If keep talking e-mails, that tells us they’ve got nothing else and if they’ve got nothing else, they’ve got nothing!
Tilda Swinton's Bald Cap
If any Republican did EXACTLY what Hillary did with her emails, no one would have even heard about it.
bemused senior
@randy khan: This. Been in the security group of one of the 4 big email providers. 1. How many people do you think had root access to all the server? Hint – it was quite a large number. 2 Didn’t the security group raise hell about this? Hint – the security group could scream but the operations group reported elsewhere. 3. Did users have end to end encryption? Hint – Google was first to allow this to be configured and that happened in July of 2008. It became the default years later. Other services didn’t provide this at all until much later.
a thousand flouncing lurkers (was fidelio)
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.): They seem themselves in him: privileged but not “really ” (AKA Warren Buffet) rich, adequately good looking (i.e., white but does not look like John Merrick), moral (not caught), ethical (not rattled on), educated (went to college), and somehow, improbably (but deservedly!), in a position of power.
Major Major Major Major
@Tilda Swinton’s Bald Cap: If?
Brachiator
@Tilda Swinton’s Bald Cap:
Who had physical control of the DNC’s servers?
I mostly don’t care about the email issue, but don’t agree that it is a total nothing burger.
PhoenixRising
@Major Major Major Major: It’s a non-exhaustive list of good ideas for email security at the server. None of it is wrong, it’s just that there is no evidence that isn’t exactly what the person Clinton hired to make the choices did.
There is no credible suggestion that her emails were hacked, and that is because they were sent using end-to-end encryption and stored on a server she or her staff had physical custody of. Given that email was never designed to be secure, it was designed to be ubiquitous, those are the best practices…and no email sent to a server with a lower level of security is secure.
Specifics of how to secure the server aren’t wrong, they’re just not super relevant to the questions she’s being asked. Which take the form ‘Why do people not like you?’
A lot of the answer is, Because you need a horserace narrative between me and my opponent, who is clearly a lunatic unfit for office as the mayor of East Bumfuck, and will repeat anything that sounds scandalous to get one.
If anyone wants to understand what happened technically, there’s a good ArsTechnica.com roundup from July–link in my phone, sorry.
Tilda Swinton's Bald Cap
@PhoenixRising:
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Brachiator: it’s not nothing, but what is there left to say? I agree with Axelrod that she needs to find a better answer and stick with it, and she and her people have been in politics long enough that you would think they’d have figured that out by now, but this constant harping of, essentially, “prove you’re not hiding anything” is ridiculous.
(side note, Axelrod seems to be harboring some hard feelings from ’08)
D58826
@Tilda Swinton’s Bald Cap: The Bush Wh ran something like 5 million official business e-mails thru RNC servers. Only came to light during the investigation of the attorney firings. Seems the e-mails were deleted; so sorry. No harm meant. Just one of those things. Nothing to see keep moving. . Story soon followed the missing e-mails into the great bit bucket in the sky.
Tilda Swinton's Bald Cap
@D58826: I know, the whole thing is total bullshit.
gogol's wife
@James E Powell:
That is exactly right.
Major Major Major Major
@PhoenixRising: Exactly, it’s completely irrelevant to the conversation that Earl is trying to have, or thinks he is trying to have at least.
Brachiator
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
I guess I agree with Axelrod.
This may be a no-win situation. No matter what she did, some would look for an opening to hate. But unlike Benghazi, she and her people don’t have seemed to have found a way to entirely shut this down. And Bill’s brief meeting with the AG, no matter how insubstantial, fanned the flames. I know people not consumed with Clinton rage who see the email thing as flouting the rules and creating a potential security risk for the sake of convenience or extra personal control.
Feebog
There is an obvious pissing match going on between the FBI and the State Department over the three “classified emails” As I understand it, none of the questionable emails were marked with header that indicated they were classified. One had a (c) in front of several paragraphs, which Comey insisted meant “confidential”. But even that email did not have a header. This was all covered during Comey’s testimony before Chafetz’ House committee, wherein he admitted that none of these emails were marked, but that any person with Clinton’s level of experience should have known the information in the email was classified. The way for Clinton to handle this is to simply say, “I would refer you to Director Comey’s responses when questioned by Representative X during his testimony to congress.” Let the reporters chase down the actual answer.
Miss Bianca
@Schlemazel: Wait, did the Black Hats endorse Clinton? Now *that* would be freakin’ hilarious. Nah. must have been Johnson, right?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Feebog: but that any person with Clinton’s level of experience should have known the information in the email was classified.
As I recall, the classified information was a discussion of a state visit by the president of Malawi, which was only classified because he’s the head of a government, nothing particularly sensitive, and some discussion of drone policy that is officially classified but more or less already public information.
J R in WV
@gene108:
This is only true if the investigators are honest people, and when they are Republicans, or beholden to Republicans, there is no honesty to be found, anywhere.
Hillary has been investigated for 25 years, and never actually accused of anything, ever, by anyone other than political actors. She is the most honest person in public life in the whole country, based upon the facts.
Miss Bianca
@divF: It takes a really talented performer to make doing something badly, look funny. So of course, you’d have to be a *great* dancer or great musician to make “lack of rhythm” funny. I seem to recall Gene Kelly did it too, in some movie – played some kid who had dreams of going on Broadway, but was a really, really bad dancer.
Joel
I cannot wait for the Bill Belichick presidency.
liberal
@Miss Bianca: Google sez at least the founder of some black hat conference endorsed Hillary as “the devil we know.”
Miss Bianca
@liberal: OK…if Hell hasn’t frozen over, I am at least seeing some ice forming on the lakes of fire…
trnc
@Brachiator: I think it’s time to stop answering questions about the email. Refer people to the past year of questions and the 11 hour congressional testimony, and say it’s time to move on to policy questions. Point out that there’s too much work that needs to be done on taxes, corporate responsibility, etc to keep focusing on email. Some people will scream, but some people will always scream. There’s nowhere for the story to go, so it will fizzle.