This doesn't excuse anything Clinton was doing, but it does need some context in order to understand it.
Colin Powell was appointed secretary of state in 2001. Believe it or not that was relatively early in the days of email. Small businesses might not have email at all, especially if they weren't focused on technology. Large organizations would often have an internal mail system, but those internal mail systems weren't necessarily email as we know it today and wouldn't necessarily talk to other mail systems. If a particular worker had a computer on his desk in his office, he wouldn't necessarily have access to a company network, much less the internet.
This is in the United States. Imagine how bad things could be in the hundreds of embassies the State Department maintains all over the world.
When Powell was advocated for the use of a private email account, he was advocating for its use compared to nothing at all.
He left office in 2005, and Hillary was named SecState in 2009. Those 8 years made a big difference in terms of technology and expectations.
UPDATE: I was mostly speculating in the above post, but the Washington Examiner found support for that speculation in the original documents. Powell asked (and received) permission to use private email, because the State Department's email system did not allow contact with those outside the government at the time.
IRS to finally process Tea Party groups it had targetted
Yeah -- now that it's too late for those groups to conceivably influence the 2012, 2014, or 2016 elections, the IRS will finally process them. And then they will go to court and ask to dismiss the lawsuit now that there aren't any groups outstanding.
That's why Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Barack Obama, and every other leftist politician on the face of the earth wants to offer you "free college". So they can control what you are taught.
"Massive" in this case means not quite 4000 cases of potential immigration fraud, which is a non-trivial number to be sure, but also quite a ways away from seriously addressing the issue. Still, you have to start somewhere.
Prominent Democrats call for Clinton Foundation to shut down
At this point, I'd like to remind everyone that when Hillary was serving as Secretary of State, she had signed an agreement to keep all Clinton Foundation activities separate from her government activities. That turned out to be very effective, didn't it?
I had my own encounter with this brand of argument recently. Two people of my acquaintance, who had until recently lived as "moderate" liberals in a reasonably red state and more recently moved to a West-Coast liberal bastion, thought that it would be hilarious to show me -- a right-leaning libertarian in Texas -- a 10 minute comedy sketch of some comedian they thought was famous insulting Donald Trump. Not only did they think that unleashing a stream of contentless insults upon a presidential candidate was funny, they also seemed to think that it would be convincing. Of what, I'm not sure. Convincing me to hate Trump in the same way that they did, perhaps? I've never been a strong supporter of Trump but I was also not going to be swayed by any amount of irrational humor and deliberate misstatements.
They were completely oblivious to the total lack of content or argument. It was their daily 2-minute hate packaged in a convenient weekly bulk buy at Costco.
And they were completely oblivious to the fact that it was this very method of unargument, this very manner of appeal to unreason, the very decision to abandon all rational mechanisms for making decisions, that created Trump. He is the mirror image of their failure; he is the form of their destructor.
Paying people to sit at home and stew in their own anger and resentment is a recipe for disaster. The results won't always be terrorism, but they are rarely pleasant.
I have placed in bold the portion of the quote that CNN aired. Lying by omission is right.
I can't really blame the person in the heat of the moment for trying to make an argument that the rioters would listen to, but CNN's reporting of her statement was absolutely and deliberately misleading.
There's nothing particularly unusual or controversial about the Texas voter ID law. It requires people who plan to vote to have a state-issued ID card, or one of a long list of alternative possibilities. Nothing unusual or tricky about it, and most people will already have the required documents... if they are legally in the country and legally eligible to vote.
Of course, this means the Democrats will freak out, because they desperately need the illegal alien votes to have any hope of ever having a foothold in Texas.
The Supreme Court will likely not decide the case, if it accepts, until 2017 and likely not until after the empty seat has been filled by the new president. However, past courts have generally upheld voter ID laws, despite the appeals court in this case (after 8 years of Obama stuffing his judges everywhere) striking down the law.
This time he's sending 15 detainees to the United Arab Emirates, where they will be barred from traveling and any meaningful communications for however long it takes people to stop paying attention.
Pennsylvania Attorney General convicted on all charges
Those charges include perjury, obstruction of justice, and abusing her official position. Bitter has the details. Funny how the national media hasn't found this interesting enough to report on.
House letter details potential perjury charge against Clinton over emails
Make no mistake, this is a political act. The Department of (In)Justice has already declared that it will not act on the various criminal offenses that Hillary's email setup produced. It will certainly not act on a letter from the other party's House members requesting a prosecution. The purpose of the letter is to convince the public to reject Clinton in the November elections, and perhaps to publicly humiliate the Obama administration for their openly political decision not to prosecute.
It's pretty effective, too, as it manages to highlight a number of times where Clinton's testimony flatly contradicts the facts as determined by the FBI.
What's it's not going to do -- and everyone knows, at this point, that it won't -- is convince the FBI and DOJ to actually issue an indictment. Hillary will win or lose the election, and that will be that. The fate of our republic will lie in the hands of the people.
The indictment is in Politico, so take with a grain of salt, but there are a lot of elements here that seem accurate from my perspective as someone who lived through that time and that political effort.
I would say that the death blow came at the hands of the IRS, tying up the grassroot's attempt to organize for the 2012 election. When that effort failed to remove Obama, the chance of getting actual results from people who actually cared about policy dropped, and the anger fueling that movement saw many of the people they worked so hard to elect coopted by the establishment of the party -- and the few who resisted, like Ted Cruz, were marginalized and shut out rather than supported. Note that Politico, reliably left, spins this as blaming Cruz for "promising too much" rather than blaming the Establishment for "failing to deliver what they promised."
Thus, Trump, who successfully cast himself as an America-first political outsider for the Republican primary despite a history of donations to Democrats and a contradictory set of expressed political principles (and that's being generous). If he wins, who knows what he might do? (It's pretty much certain to not be small-government, though it might be low-taxes). And if he loses, the Republican establishment will spend the next 4 years telling the Tea Party they were TOLD what would happen if they insisted on principles.
Multiple FBI investigations of Clinton Foundation corruption underway
I'm sure that those investigations will run normally all the way up until a week or two from the election, at which point FBI directory James Comey will announce that no reasonable prosecutor would bring charges and that he is closing the investigation.
Hillary may be an ancient, barely-coherent incompetent and walking security risk, but if she (and her handlers) are playing both sides of the board, it's hard to lose.
More evidence for the thesis:
It's like every time Hillary's campaign makes a mistake, the Trump campaign is there to match it with a similar scandal or a fresh outrageous statement that changes the topic of discussion away from one that damages Hillary. And when Hillary has to hide her multiple health issues by denying the traditional press pool access to her campaign, and persists in holding basically no press conferences despite being in the middle of a presidential campaign (!!), Trump is right there to match her.
I bet one of those 30,000 deleted emails Hillary won't let us see is one addressed to Trump, suggesting he run for the Republican nomination and throw the election if he gets it.
ACLJ has an updated timeline for the IRS scandal. Their timeline focuses mostly on the abuses, rather than the cover-up efforts, but it's absolutely damning.
The timing of this lawsuit suggests strongly that the RNC would love to spend the next 4 to 8 years attacking President Hillary for her corruption as Secretary of State.
As far as goals go, that seems... somewhat counterproductive.
What did Trump really mean about the 2nd Amendment and Hillary nominees?
Althouse, and many others, seem to think he was suggesting assassination. That's not just insane, it would be insane for a presidential candidate to suggest it, or even to joke about it. Trump may be insane enough (and filterless enough) to joke about it, but I doubt he's insane enough to really mean it. On the other hand, there are lots of other things he could have meant, many of which seem much more likely to me.
Let's note that we're in a hypothetical situation where Hillary won and is picking justices. The most commonly proposed alternative meaning, that gun rights voters can vote to keep Hillary out of the White House so she can't nominate anti-gun justices, seems a bit of a stretch under that hypothetical. If Hillary has already been elected, you can't stop her by voting until the next election cycle. The soonest that would be is two years after Hillary's election, and that would only effect the Senate. So it's not really likely Trump is talking about voting here.
But, the gun rights movement and the NRA have had dramatic success in blocking gun control legislation, and some success in blocking judicial nominees considered anti-gun. Right now, there is an empty Supreme Court seat that the Republican party (and the NRA in particular) are blocking nomination hearings for. This has been accomplished without intervening elections, simply by making their voices heard by their existing Senators. That is, right now, the gun rights movement and the right in general are successfully blocking an anti-gun Obama supreme court nominee.
It seems obvious to me that's exactly what Trump meant. No need to assume violence. If anyone can block Hillary's nominees and extract a concession from her, such as a Supreme Court nominee who at least claims to support the Heller decision and gun rights, it's "the 2nd Amendment folks" and the NRA. Hillary would hate it, and her nominee would likely lie about it, but no one else could possibly put up enough of a fight to get that kind of concession from Hillary.
And of course, it wouldn't hurt if the gun rights crowd got behind Trump and the cause of maintaining a Republican majority in the Senate. I'm not exactly enthused about Trump as a candidate, but the prospect of a Supreme Court filled with Hillary appointees is terrifying.
Reminder: The IRS deliberately avoided email for their targeting process
This demonstrates high level involvement in the targeting (as if we needed more evidence of that), but it also demonstrates a deliberate avoidance of the use of email for handling questions and issues about the targeting.
The IRS knew their internal email was available to Congress in the context of investigations and oversight, and so they deliberately avoided putting anything in writing.
NSSF to challenge Massachussetts' ban on semi-auto firearms
That a variety of gun-rights groups would challenge the AG's likely-illegal action here shouldn't surprise anyone. The courts will likely deliver a significant smackdown... after the election.
The significant news here is that the NSSF itself is stepping up to challenge the law. Usually that group leaves the political fight over gun control to the NRA and focuses on narrow issues important to manufacturers. This is undeniably an issue important to manufactures, whose whole product lines would likely be banned by the AG's dictate. But it may also represent the industry recognizing gun control laws as an existential threat for them.
And this is why the left opposes any laws that try to protect the integrity of the voting system. They know that in order to win, they need as many votes from illegals, felons, and dead people as possible.
In general, I don't believe in corruption of the blood. The father of a vicious mass murderer and terrorist is not necessarily guilty of the same crimes by mere pedigree. Yet the media accounts at the time strongly suggested that the murderer's father had his own radical anti-US views and potential ties to terrorism in Afghanistan. While not enough to convict him of a crime, it would normally be enough to ensure he wasn't invited to attended media events with a presidential candidate or give interviews to the media afterwards.
I can only assume his presence with Hillary at this event was an attempt to send a message to radical Muslims who support violent terrorism by others that Hillary is a candidate who will protect them and appreciates their support.
