Tag Archives: hillary

Quote of the Day: Peter Roskam Explains Just How Much He Loathes Hillary Clinton

by ShanaProbert1 Posted on October 22, 2015

Mother Jones

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It’s time for a break to cast votes, but before that let’s hear some final words from Illinois Rep. Peter Roskam:

Let me tell you what I think the Clinton Doctrine is. Reads from prepared card. I think it’s where an opportunity is seized to turn progress in Libya into a political win for Hillary Rodham Clinton. And at the precise moment when things look good, take a victory lap, like on all the Sunday shows three times that year before Qaddafi was killed, and then turn your attention to other things.

See? This hearing is nothing more than a disinterested investigation into the events surrounding the Benghazi attacks of 9/11/2012. You partisan naysayers who think it’s just about attacking Hillary Clinton on national TV should be ashamed of yourselves.

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Quote of the Day: Peter Roskam Explains Just How Much He Loathes Hillary Clinton

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Early Polls Suggest Hillary Clinton Did Pretty Well in Tuesday’s Debate

by LorrineBucher Posted on October 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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Now it’s time to take a look at the Democratic side of the presidential race. Obviously nobody cares about Webb, O’Malley, or Chafee, so let’s zero in on Clinton and Sanders. Who won Tuesday’s debate? Andrew Prokop summarizes the early polls in the chart on the right.

Now, these results are fairly consistent with Bernie supporters thinking Bernie won and Hillary supporters thinking Hillary won—plus a few extra for Hillary. We’ll have to wait for the big national polls to see if the debate actually changed support levels much for either of them. At a rough glance, though, it looks as if most of the folks who prefer Joe Biden in the polls ended up choosing Hillary when the choice was limited to just her and Bernie.

This makes sense ideologically, since Biden and Clinton occupy pretty similar niches, and it makes sense from a name recognition standpoint too. But I’d point out one other thing that we political junkies might miss: Bernie Sanders can sometimes come across on TV as loud and angry. We’re all so used to his speaking style that it doesn’t affect us much, but for people tuning in for the first time, it might have been fairly off-putting. I don’t know if likely Democratic voters feel the same way, but they might. Just a thought.

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Early Polls Suggest Hillary Clinton Did Pretty Well in Tuesday’s Debate

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Here’s What to Really Expect in Tonight’s Democratic Debate

by ClintHonner Posted on October 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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I assume you all know this by now, but the first Democratic debate is tonight. It starts at 8:30 pm Eastern on CNN, and I gather that it’s scheduled to go two hours. It was originally going to last three hours—which is flatly insane—but apparently CNN got an earful after the endless slog of the last Republican debate and decided to take pity on us all.

So what can we expect? Really expect? My guesses:

The highest polling candidate will be in the center and the lowest polling candidates at the edges. Fox News seems to have set a permanent precedent here.
Hillary Clinton will of course get a question or ten about her email server. She’ll give a standard scripted reply, and the others will all shuffle around nervously when asked to respond. They’d love to take a shot at Hillary, but they’ll be reluctant to look like they’re stooges for Republican conspiracy theories.
Bernie Sanders will be asked if he’s really a socialist. Sigh.
Jim Webb and Lincoln Chafee will both be asked some version of “Why are you here?” This is actually a fair question since neither seems to be running a serious campaign and neither has even the slightest chance of winning.
There will be some kind of question about Joe Biden. Everyone will insist that they love Joe and have nothing but the highest regard for him.
There will probably be some kind of question that dutifully inventories all the conservative complaints about Obamacare and asks what the candidates are going to do about them.
They’ll be asked about Syria, of course. This is an unsolvable problem,1 so no one will offer up anything worthwhile.
Hillary will get asked if Bill is a problem for her.
We’ll be treated once again to a “fun” question. God only know what it will be. Favorite song? Craziest Republican? Person they’d like to see on the ten-ruble note?

Anyway, I’ll be liveblogging it. The thought fills me with dread, but I know that when the time comes, I’ll be there. I’ll hate myself for it, but I’ll do it.

1We are opposed to Assad, ISIS, and all the al-Qaeda supported rebel groups in Syria. This is bipartisan, not something unique to President Obama. This means the only groups we support are “moderate” Syrian rebels who are willing to fight ISIS, not Assad. As near as I can tell, such groups basically don’t exist and never have.

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Here’s What to Really Expect in Tonight’s Democratic Debate

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Two Questions About Hillary Clinton’s Email Server

by CarmeloPerkinson Posted on October 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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Lots of people have asked lots of questions about Hillary Clinton and her email server. That’s fair enough. But I’ve got a couple of questions for the people with all the questions. There might be simple answers to these, but they’ve been bugging me for a while and I still don’t really understand them. Here they are:

One of the most persistent suspicions is that Hillary set up a private server in order to evade FOIA requests. But this has never made any sense to me. What could possibly have led either Hillary or her staff to believe this? There’s simply nothing in either the statute or in the way it’s been applied in practice to suggest that official communications are beyond the reach of FOIA just because they’re in private hands.

On a related note, what was going on in the State Department’s FOIA office? They received several FOIA requests that required them to search Hillary’s email, and responded by saying there was no record of anything relevant to the request. But the very first time they did this, they must have realized that Hillary’s email archive wasn’t just sparse, but nonexistent. Did they ask Hillary’s office about this? If not, why not? If they did, what were they told? This should be relatively easy to answer since I assume these folks can be subpoenaed and asked about it.

Generally speaking, the reason I’ve been skeptical about this whole affair is that the nefarious interpretations have never made much sense to me. What Hillary did was almost certainly dumb—as she’s admitted herself—and it’s possible that she even violated some regulations. But those are relatively minor things. Emailgate is only a big issue if there was some kind of serious intent to defraud, and that hardly seems possible:

Hillary’s private server didn’t protect her from FOIA requests and she surely knew this.
By all indications, she was very careful about her email use and never wrote anything she might regret if it became public.
And it hardly seems likely that she thought she could delete embarrassing emails before turning them over. There’s simply too much risk that the missing emails would show up in someone else’s account, and that really would be disastrous. Her husband might be the type to take idiotic risks like that, but she isn’t.

School me, peeps. I fully acknowledge that maybe I’m just not getting something here. What’s the worst case scenario that’s actually plausible?

POSTSCRIPT: Note that I’m asking here solely about FOIA as it applies to the Hillary Clinton email server affair. On a broader level, FOIA plainly has plenty of problems, both in terms of response time and willingness to cooperate with the spirit of the statute.

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Two Questions About Hillary Clinton’s Email Server

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Here’s Why I Doubt That Hillary Clinton Used a Private Email Server to Evade FOIA Requests

by RobtKirkland Posted on October 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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Thanks to the endless release of her emails, we’ve learned something about Hillary Clinton that hasn’t gotten much attention: As near as I can tell, she’s sort of a technology idiot. She asked her aides for information that she could have Googled in less time than it took to ask. She needed help figuring out how to use an iPad. She didn’t know her own office phone number. She used a BlackBerry. She had trouble operating a fax machine. She was unclear about needing a WiFi connection to access the internet.

In other words, when Fox News reporter Ed Henry asked whether Clinton’s email server had been wiped, and she answered, “What, like with a cloth or something?”—well, that might not have been the sarcastic response we all thought it was. She might truly have had no idea what he meant.

As for setting up a private server with just a single account in order to evade FOIA requests, it looks as though she’s genuinely not tech savvy enough to have cooked up something like that. She probably really did just think it sounded convenient, and nobody stepped in to disabuse her of this notion.

So what was the deal with FOIA? I don’t know, and I suspect we’ll never know. But I’ll say this: there were obviously people at State who knew that Hillary used a private server for email. The folks who respond to FOIA requests are responsible for figuring out where documents might be, and in this case it was just a matter of asking. Apparently they didn’t, which is hardly Hillary’s fault. The alternative is that they did ask, and Hillary’s staff flat-out lied to them and said that she never used email. You can decide for yourself which sounds more plausible.

POSTSCRIPT: After writing this, I decided to do some Googling myself to check a few things. And it turns out that I’m not, in fact, the first to notice Hillary’s technology foibles. Just a few weeks ago, Seth Myer did a whole late-night bit about this.

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Here’s Why I Doubt That Hillary Clinton Used a Private Email Server to Evade FOIA Requests

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Let Us Now Praise Authentically Stiff Politicians

by YoungT08gxixm Posted on October 1, 2015

Mother Jones

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Brendan Nyhan thinks we spend too much time yakking about which candidates are “authentic” and which ones aren’t. For example:

George W. Bush and Al Gore were both born into powerful political families, but were perceived very differently. Mr. Bush successfully reinvented himself as a down-home Texas ranch owner despite being the son of a president with elite New England roots, while Mr. Gore was widely mocked as a phony who grew up amid wealth and power in Washington, especially when he invoked his childhood work on his family’s Tennessee farm. Again, one simple explanation for the disparate treatment they received is that Mr. Bush was a better political performer.

I would remind everyone that Brad Pitt gets paid millions of dollars for doing a very good job of pretending to be authentically charming. The ability to feign authenticity is called “acting,” and it’s a lucrative profession if you’re good at it.

Was Al Gore authentic? Hillary Clinton? Mitt Romney? Sure. Gore is genuinely sort of wonkish and stiff. Hillary is earnest and cautious around people. Romney is careful and detail-oriented. That’s authentically who they are. If they studied up and adopted a hail-fellow-well-met persona, everyone would think they were authentic, but they’d just be pretending.

If you prefer politicians who are bluff and emotional in public, just say so. If you can’t stand being around people who natter on about policy and guard their private lives, say so. But cut out the “authentic” nonsense. That’s not what this is about.

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Let Us Now Praise Authentically Stiff Politicians

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New Hillary Clinton Emails Surface

by RobertaRosenbau Posted on September 26, 2015

Mother Jones

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Uh oh:

The Obama administration has discovered a chain of emails that Hillary Rodham Clinton failed to turn over when she provided what she said was the full record of work-related correspondence as secretary of state, officials said Friday, adding to the growing questions related to the Democratic presidential front-runner’s unusual usage of a private email account and server while in government.

This is the kind of thing that really could hurt Hillary Clinton. But when you scroll down to the details, it looks a lot less sinister:

The messages were exchanged with retired Gen. David Petraeus….They largely pertained to personnel matters and don’t appear to deal with highly classified material, officials said.

….The State Department’s record of Clinton emails begins on March 18, 2009 — almost two months after she entered office. Before then, Clinton has said she used an old AT&T Blackberry email account, the contents of which she no longer can access. The Petraeus emails…start on Jan. 10, 2009, with Clinton using the older email account. But by Jan. 28 — a week after her swearing in — she switched to using the private email address on a homebrew server that she would rely on for the rest of her tenure. There are less than 10 emails back and forth in total, officials said, and the chain ends on Feb. 1.

In other words, we’re missing the very tag end of an innocuous email chain from Hillary’s Senate days that spilled over into her tenure as Secretary of State. That’s a little hard to get too exercised about.

I don’t know what the broader picture is here. Clinton has consistently said she switched to her new email address on March 18, but the Petraeus emails make it look like she might have switched by January 28. Or maybe she partially switched? Or else emails started getting forwarded to the new account as a test for a few weeks, and then got deleted on March 18 when she began using it for good? Beats me.

Either way, this seems typical of this whole affair. Substantively, it’s hard to believe anything shady is going on here. After all, it’s unlikely there’s anything to hide from her first few weeks in office, and certainly not the Petraeus emails. But optically, it certainly looks bad. It seems like another example of Clinton handling her email issue awkwardly and defensively when she doesn’t really need to.

On the bright side for Hillary, this news was released on a day when the media was preoccupied with popemania and John Boehner’s resignation. So at least she’s not getting another round of dismal front-page headlines out of it. Yet.

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New Hillary Clinton Emails Surface

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Debating the Debates: Should Democrats Have More?

by CatharineKoerst Posted on September 25, 2015

Mother Jones

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Ryan Cooper wants more debates. Before we boo him off the stage, though, note that he’s asking for more Democratic debates. And he thinks Hillary Clinton ought to be in favor. Here’s why:

It would stop Republicans from dominating 2016 coverage….While a lot of the attention is negative due to half the candidates being strap-chewing lunatics, it’s still building a sense of excitement.

….It would give the political press something to talk about besides the endless, pointless Clinton email story.

….Clinton could probably use the practice. I still remember the first presidential debate in 2012, when President Obama was roundly defeated by Mitt Romney. Obama looked like a very powerful man who was not used to being sharply challenged, and came off as simultaneously haughty and unsure of himself. Hillary Clinton is a smart, capable person, but sycophantic courtier syndrome is a real thing, and a square debate on equal footing is one of the few ways someone of Clinton’s fame and standing can work against it.

Let’s examine this. More debates would be fun. On the other hand, it would mean yet more long nights of liveblogging for me. On the third hand—wait a second. I’m curious about something. Do other countries have debates? According to Wikipedia, yes. The following countries have regular campaign debates:

Australia
Brazil
Canada
France
Germany
Ireland
Kenya
Malta
Mexico
Netherlands
New Zealand
United Kingdom
United States

That’s not very many. Thirteen countries out of 200—and only seven that aren’t part of the old British Empire. It’s a little odd that the Anglo-Saxon bloc is so gung-ho on debates, considering that Mother Britain didn’t have its first televised debate until 2010. Of course, they only held a grand total of three, but then again, their campaign season only lasts six weeks. At that rate, we’d have 30 or 40 debates in America.

Anyway, what were we talking about? Oh yes: should Hillary Clinton welcome more debates? I’m going to say no. A presidential campaign is obviously a zero-sum affair, and all her competitors want more debates. Unless they’re idiots, that’s because they think it will benefit them—which it would, by giving them priceless exposure. Obviously Hillary has no interest in that, so like most front runners she wants fewer debates.

So all other arguments aside, the DNC is unlikely to change its mind on this. So tune in on October 13 for the first Democratic debate, held at the fabulous Trump Las Vegas. Just kidding. That would be a hoot, though, wouldn’t it? It will actually be held at the fabulous Wynn Las Vegas, owned by a Democratic billionaire rather than a Republican one.

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Debating the Debates: Should Democrats Have More?

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It Sure Looks Like Hillary Clinton Didn’t Have a Cunning Plan to Foil Congressional Investigators

by GiuseppPereira Posted on September 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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This happened yesterday while I was away from my desk:

The FBI has recovered personal and work-related e-mails from the private computer server used by Hillary Clinton during her time as secretary of state, according to a person familiar with the investigation.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s success at salvaging personal e-mails that Clinton said had been deleted raises the possibility that the Democratic presidential candidate’s correspondence eventually could become public. The disclosure of such e-mails would likely fan the controversy over Clinton’s use of a private e-mail system for official business.

Nobody seems to have made the most obvious observation about this: It pretty strongly suggests that Hillary Clinton was not trying to hide anything when she deleted personal emails from her server.

At the risk of boring my technically-minded readers, files on a computer work sort of like an old-fashioned card catalog in a library. If you “delete” a book by tearing up the index card, the book is still there. It might be harder to find, but with a little detective work you can still dig it up. Eventually, though, the book will truly disappear. Maybe someone steals it and no one cares. Or the library needs more space and gets rid of all the books with no index cards. Etc.

This is how computers work. When you delete a file, you’re just deleting the index card. The file is still there on the hard drive. Eventually, though, the file will truly disappear. Maybe another program writes over the file. Or you run a disk defrag program and whole sections of the disk get written over. Etc. Some files will get permanently deleted within days. Others might stick around for years. It’s just random chance.

Needless to say, things don’t have to happen this way. If you want to make sure that a file is well and truly deleted, it’s easy to do. Anyone with even a smidgen of computer experience either knows how or knows how to find out. Here’s one way, which took me ten seconds to Google. If I were really serious, I’d take the time to read a bit more, and also make inquiries about backups. This is IT 101.

But apparently Hillary didn’t ask about any of this stuff. No one on her staff brought it up. They just pushed the Delete key and the emails disappeared. The IT folks were never involved.

These are not the actions of a staff trying to stonewall FOIA requests or foil a congressional committee. Any bright teenager could have done better on that score. By all the evidence, Hillary is telling the truth. She just told her staff to delete personal emails and turn over the rest to the State Department. There was nothing more to it.

But no one’s reporting it that way. Peculiar, isn’t it?

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It Sure Looks Like Hillary Clinton Didn’t Have a Cunning Plan to Foil Congressional Investigators

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Here’s an Amazing Video of Presidential Candidates Dancing. You’re So Welcome.

by GabrielMercier Posted on September 18, 2015

Mother Jones

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Did you know there are more than 400 days to go in the race for the White House? But don’t forget about the dance for the White House! Who’s winning that? We’ve compiled some of the candidates’ best moves, from the past and present, so you can judge for yourself. Hillary Clinton’s life in the spotlight has obviously afforded her many opportunities to dance her heart out. But you can’t miss Donald Trump’s bizarre cameo at the 2005 prime-time Emmy Awards in overalls singing the theme song from Green Acres with actress Megan Mullally from Will and Grace. I mean, wow.

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Here’s an Amazing Video of Presidential Candidates Dancing. You’re So Welcome.

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