Doghouse Riley could’ve told us, his Congressional colleagues didn’t call him ‘Mike Dense’ because his hair was so thick and luxurious. USA Today:
INDIANAPOLIS — Vice President Mike Pence routinely used a private email account to conduct public business as governor of Indiana, at times discussing sensitive matters and homeland security issues.
Emails released to The Indianapolis Star, part of the USA TODAY Network, in response to a public records request show Pence communicated via his personal AOL account with top advisers on topics ranging from security gates at the governor’s residence to the state’s response to terror attacks across the globe. In one email, Pence’s top state homeland security adviser relayed an update from the FBI regarding the arrests of several men on federal terror-related charges.
Cybersecurity experts say the emails raise concerns about whether such sensitive information was adequately protected from hackers, given that personal accounts like Pence’s are typically less secure than government email accounts. In fact, Pence’s personal account was hacked last summer.
Furthermore, advocates for open government expressed concerns about transparency because personal emails aren’t immediately captured on state servers that are searched in response to public records requests…
Pence fiercely criticized Clinton throughout the 2016 presidential campaign, accusing her of trying to keep her emails out of public reach and exposing classified information to potential hackers…
“There is an issue of double standard here,” Gerry Lanosga, a professor at Indiana University and past president of the Indiana Coalition for Open Government. “He has been far from forthcoming about his own private email account on which it’s clear he has conducted state business. So there is a disconnect there that cannot be avoided.”…
IMAX only wishes their equipment could project with the strength of your average Republican.
Major Major Major Major
I hate the ‘Pence would be worse’ people.
Donald Trump is deeply compromised by an enemy of the country. It doesn’t get much worse.
Yarrow
Oh, Mike Pence and emails?
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Major Major Major Major: And he’s quite insane.
OT: I got a new ride!
Major Major Major Major
@?BillinGlendaleCA: You’re such an out of touch coastal elite.
amk
fuck you, nyt and tapper, the tool.
aso. too. comey.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Major Major Major Major: True, I even drive a Prius.
Yarrow
I also think that Trump will throw everyone under the bus, with the possible exception of Ivanka, before he leaves. That means Pence too. He does not want to admit failure and being forced out of the White House would mean he had failed. You can see his pattern of blaming everyone else for everything–he did it just two days ago when he blamed the generals for the failed raid in Yemen. It’s his pattern and he’ll blame everyone for the Russian stuff until a smoking gun becomes public and he simply can’t anymore.
So if Pence knew anything before the election, if he ever met with anyone Russian, if he knew something that Manafort or Page or Sessions or anyone else did, Trump will blame Pence. The Republicans may think Pence is their savior, ready to step in, but Trump won’t let that happen. He’ll blame everyone including Pence until he’s out of options.
Major Major Major Major
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Exactly.
magurakurin
@Major Major Major Major: I don’t think Pence would be worse. He’s a major dickhead for sure, but he is essentially a rational actor. I’d say Pence is like Iran, major theocratic issues and lack of human rights but a rational actor on the world stage. But Dolt 45 is North Korea…batshit fucking crazy, irrational actor, dangerous wild card. Pence would suck, but in the sort of normal GOP suckiness.
magurakurin
@Yarrow: You are probably correct in this.
Thru the Looking Glass...
@Yarrow:
Starting to look like a circular firing squad…
Hopefully, no matter what the outcome short of WW III, the GOP will end up incredibly damaged by all of this…
So much winning…
Yarrow
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Coastal elitist!
cmorenc
Yes, but if Trump gets forced out and takes Pence down with him, that means we get President Paul Ryan, still true believer in Ayn Rand, without team Trump’s baggage. All the options here are terrible, the only question is which of the three is the least terrible to have to get through three years and a few months with?
Major Major Major Major
@Yarrow: I’m still waiting to see how he throws Ryan under the bus.
@magurakurin: Yeah, basically.
M. Bouffant
Lest we forget, Yglesias on Pence.
Shorter: Pence possibly dumber than a post.
Yarrow
@Thru the Looking Glass…: I hope the GOP gets damaged too. The IC is leaking these things slowly, giving the GOP leadership in Congress plenty of chances to do the right thing. But Congress is not. Probably because they’re just as guilty and deeply tied to Russia as the rest of the administration, so they’re hoping they can somehow bury the story and it will all go away. That’s not going to happen. And at some point, if Congress still hasn’t done the right thing, the IC will leak something implicating a highly placed Republican member off Congress. And then all hell will break loose.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Yarrow: In fairness, I’ve only been a Prius owner for about 7 hours.
Yarrow
@cmorenc: Ryan and McConnell knew. They were shown the Russian intel before the election and chose to do nothing. They’re accessories after the fact. Ryan is damaged goods and you know Trump will throw him under the bus before he’s forced to leave office.
amk
all this talk of twitler being kicked out is just a fantasy. did ya peeps even see the gopee thugs’ ‘standing ovation’ just a coupla days back? impeachment is off the table.
Yarrow
@?BillinGlendaleCA: But you’ve been coastal for a lot longer.
cmorenc
@Thru the Looking Glass…:
You know, that’s what I thought when Trump’s vulgar sex abuse tape came out just a month out from election day, right between the first and second debates (and Trump had already made an embarrassing, ill-prepared mess out of the first debate). And GOP congress-critters were scrambling to attempt to avoid being taken down in the shit-storm with Trump.
I hope you’re right this time around – Trump doesn’t have the assistance of the Russians and James Comey to dig him out of this crisis, even though it’s questionable how much help Comey will give toward shoving Trump overboard.
Anne Laurie
@M. Bouffant:
Pence was hired to be dumber than a post… or his new boss, Donald Trump. Who is, as we keep being reminded, not at all a smart man, nor a well-informed one.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Yarrow:
Hmmm, like maybe The Turtle’s separation from the Army? I’ve heard he likes chicken.
Yarrow
@amk: It’s off the table until it isn’t. Either Trump’s unfavorable ratings go so high that he’s a liability, in which case they’ll jettison him as quickly as possible, or the IC leaks something about a highly placed Member of Congress to increase pressure to get them to do the right thing.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Yarrow: I’ve been coastal since birth.
Thru the Looking Glass...
@Yarrow:
I’m not really looking forward to that (Hell breaking loose) but I a) don’t see anyway we’re going to be able to avoid it and b) it’s probably necessary at this point… again, as long as this doesn’t result in WW III, I’m good…
And I hope this drags the whole Republican Party down with it…
Yarrow
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Could be that. Or it could be something involving his wife and her family, who apparently are deeply tied to the Taiwanese or Chinese. Apparently there’s a lot of questionable stuff there. Her family is quite wealthy. Follow the money.
I’ve mentioned here many times that it seems really clear they have something on McConnell. His sudden shift in body language when he went from refusing to hold hearings to agreeing to look into the Russian connections was dramatic. He looked like someone had a gun to his head making him say he’d investigate. Maybe they did, in a metaphorical sense. They have something on him.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Yarrow: I could see Dolt 45 pissing of Congress by doing something like impounding appropriations, this crew uses the Nixon Administration as a guidebook.
Thru the Looking Glass...
@Yarrow:
Absolutely… I CANNOT imagine that they did not know and they went ahead and let him be their candidate…
Whatever comes of this, they’ll deserve it one hundred per cent…
Yarrow
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Doesn’t that automatically put you in the elitist club?
@Thru the Looking Glass…: Me either and agreed. So long as we avoid WWII or nuclear war I think we’ll be okay. I don’t know, of course. I do think we need some kind of correction and maybe it’s going to take something this dramatic. I just hope a lot of people don’t have to get hurt in the process.
Thru the Looking Glass...
@cmorenc: I’ve never seen people in my circles so worked up… almost every conversation I have these days is about politics and this mess and everyone I know is just furious…
I am so looking forward to the 2018 midterms…
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Yarrow:
If so, someone should inform my bank that my account balance is missing some zeros.
Thru the Looking Glass...
@Yarrow: Yup… a MAJOR attitude correction… and unavoidable at this point… this is what you get when you never hold anyone accountable and let ’em slide over and over and over again… you end up in shit up to your chin… we just can’t let it get any deeper…
Yarrow
@?BillinGlendaleCA: They think they’re using the Nixon administration as a guidebook, but it’s second time as farce. They’re kind of comically inept in many ways. They might try to piss off Congress and fail miserably. They might try to do something they think Congress wants and mess it up so it backfires.
Meanwhile, the Republican Congress was all excited because they thought they were going to get to do so many things since they own both Houses of Congress and the Executive. But between competing factions in the Republican party and Trump sucking all the air out of the room, messing things up, and the Russian leaks dripping out every few days they’ve done almost nothing. I bet they’re mad at Trump for the trouble he’s causing them. They keep hoping for the magical pivot. At some point they’re going to realize that despite one passable speech, it ain’t coming.
Yarrow
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Well, you know your bank balance doesn’t matter to Real Murkins. The fact that you live on the left coast automatically puts you in the elitist column. You just proved those heartlanders right by buying a Prius!
rikyrah
No, Pence would not be worse. Dolt45 and many around him are assets of a hostile foreign power. Pence and his ideas are bad, but nothing we didn’t know existed.Stop with the lunacy of Pence would be worse. Nope. A different kind of rotten, but we know his kind of rotten.
rikyrah
@cmorenc:
No way Ryan doesn’t get Trump’s baggage. His behavior now makes Dolt45’s mess come back on him.
Mnemosyne
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
Sweet ride!
Mnemosyne
@Yarrow:
This. Also, too, it would have been worse if Pence had been elected rather than Trump, but if there’s an impeachment or resignation, Pence immediately becomes Gerald Ford, Caretaker. He would be fighting with the various factions of his own party.
And if we can win the House back in 2018, then we’re looking at President Nancy Pelosi when the rest of the Republican facade crumbles. I could live with that.
ruemara
Pence is as bad, except less warmongery. Pence is already very much directing domestic policy in those areas Co-Presidents Bannon & Kushner don’t care about too much. And nothing is has horrifying as a pathological liar with no value for human life past his own (and, yes, I’d say he’d push Ivanka off a cliff to save his worthless hide) in charge of our country and our military might. Something I tried to get Bernie or Busters to consider to no avail. Removing that man as fast a possible is a service the US owes to the world. I have no problem with shaming the GOP every day at their craven use of this situation to destroy social services and the New Deal. It’s not Dems we need to harangue daily. It’s those fetid scoundrel motherfuckers. Remind them every day that we know why they’re standing by Trump and we won’t forget and we’ll keep reminding their voters. Because they only need to know who to turn on when every decent thing disappears and all the good stuff they’ve been told will happen, doesn’t. If liberals could use the deserved petty vengfulness the GOP have earned in a near constant display of shaming advertisements and tv commercials, they’d actually take over the government in numbers large enough to create a good head start on that socialist utopia.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Mnemosyne: Thanks!
Thru the Looking Glass...
@Mnemosyne:
Who ever expected a midterm to be perhaps the biggest election of their lifetime?
And I’ll be damned if 2018 isn’t starting to look like that…
TenguPhule
@Yarrow: Or they still do nothing and we have a nice civil war that kills a lot of people to finally get rid of them all.
So far, the odds on Civil War are still favored over Republicans actually doing the right thing.
TenguPhule
@Mnemosyne:
1. Will we even survive as a nation to 2018.
2. And if we don’t win 2018 because of GOP schenagigans again? Then what? Can we finally break out the pitchforks or do we listen to the Pollyannas AGAIN and hope 2020 is any different?
MomSense
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
Congrats!
BlueDWarrior
@TenguPhule: what are the “pitchforks” in this case; because part of the problem is you need a way to get liberal Senators elected in conservative states. So if you can tell me how to elect a Patrick Wyden in Louisiana or Nebraska, I’d like to hear it.
TenguPhule
@BlueDWarrior: Call the spades the spades and the traitors the traitors.
Officially acknowledge that the GOP is a terrorist organization with ties to Russia and treat the leadership and base accordingly. Freeze and seize their assets, secure their membership lists and clean house once and for all.
Heck, we might even pay down the National Debt they’ve created a bit.
BlueDWarrior
@TenguPhule: oh something a simple as a leftist coup-d’etat followed most likely by a civil war in which one side does not have total control of a particular geographic region.
Yeah that sounds reasonable.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@MomSense: Thanks.
Chet
Ok, I’ll say it. Who is using AOL in 2017?
Anne Laurie
@Chet:
Old white people, especially in the non-coastal areas.
Trump’s strongest voting bloc, in other words.
J R in WV
@Chet:
Dence people of all races and political affiliations.
Seriously, I used AOL back in the early 2000s to get internet connection at my Dad’s while I was caring for him after he broke his hip and no rehab center would accept him. He was taking a clinical-trial drug from M D Anderson for his leukemia, which worked out well. But no nursing home or rehab center would touch him.
So we hired a local gal for be with him days while I worked and drove 100 minutes to work in the am and back to his house in the pm. Wife went up one night a week so I could be home. Local gal stayed with him one night a week so I could be home with wife. Got him back on his feet and on board a flight back to Houston eventually, but it was a long summer.
Gvg
It’s now in the news and the whole world knows Pence used AOL. Probably he’ll be hacked extensively soon and we’ll know what he knew about Russian connections. If he didn’t know, Trump will probably make something up as he goes down so I think the chances of him getting through this unscathed are low.
A good portion of Trumps support is actually the evangelicals jumping on the winners train. If Trump attacks Pence, he’ll actually lose support. If they see a real choice between Trump and Pence, I.e. VP becoming P by impeachment, they will drop Trump which will make his polls tank which will make Congress more likely to carry through with impeachment maybe?
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@Gvg: That AOL account has already been hacked once, last summer. Would love for THAT to show up on Wikileaks.
Dr. Ronnie James, D.O.
“Ford would be worse!”
–People, back in the day, I’m sure
randy khan
@Yarrow:
This. They’ll turn on a dime if they decide it’s him or them. What you hope is that they reach that conclusion just a little too late to save their own skins.
Jado
“So there is a disconnect there that cannot be avoided.”…”
Oh, really? WATCH THEM!!
Debbie1
I think Ivanka would be the last to be thrown under the bus by TR*mp. That is to say, if he threw HER under the bus, he’d jump on top of her body, er, for protection of course.
Uncle Cosmo
@Dr. Ronnie James, D.O.: In fact Gerry Ford was in key respects Agnew 2.0 for Tricky Dick: An insurance policy against impeachment. The strategizing went something like this: No Congresscritter in his (in those days it was mostly “his”) right mind would remove a relatively competent POTUS, however much a sonofabitch, if it meant elevating an incompetent nutcase. Which was true until it wasn’t.