Tag Archives: political parties

“Innuendo fuels Clinton email saga”

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That’s the headline above Juan Williams’ op-ed at The Hill.

Williams is right, but the innuendo is his as he contributes to the Left’s attempt to cover up Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s misbehavior.

Mainstream news shows have now joined conservative websites and magazines in roiling political waters with the suggestion that Hillary Clinton could be indicted. Such charges, the theory goes, would pertain to her sending secret government information over her personal email account while she was secretary of State.

Or, the NLMSM finally is awakening to the depths of Clinton’s misbehavior.

The email story broke last March when the New York Times reported Clinton “used a personal email account to conduct government business as Secretary of State.” In July, the story escalated when the Times incorrectly reported that requests had been made for a criminal investigation of Clinton’s handling of email.

Even after a correction on that story, her totally legal use of a private server while at the State Department became an acceptable short-hand for political opponents….

Use of the private server may not be illegal, but it is against State Department regulations—her State Department regulations—to use a private email address, much less a private server, for government business. Private email addresses are allowed for private emails, but government business—government emails, for instance—must be handled through government addresses, and so via government servers.

Oh, and that non-existent criminal investigation? The FBI doesn’t do security reviews; they’re running an investigation into the potential of her criminal behavior.

…NBC News reported that emails that had been retroactively declared classified had also been sent to the personal email account of former secretary of State Colin Powell and to key aides of his successor, Condoleezza Rice.

No, they weren’t retroactively declared classified. They were classified from their inception because of the classified information contained in them. They were only marked classified retroactively, in belated recognition of their classified nature.

Therein lies the felony aspect of Clinton’s handling of these classified emails and of her handling them via her unprotected private email server. It’s a crime to mishandle classified information; any markings of classification or their lack is wholly irrelevant to that. Indeed, properly marking classified data is part of the required handling of classified data. Clinton, who has said she’s well trained and knows all about handling classified data—and who, as Secretary of State, is the ultimate classification authority of State-originated classified data—knew all of this at the time of her mishandling.

And that bit about Powell and Rice aides similarly mishandling: that’s the Liberal morality we’ve come to know and love. Somebody else did it, so it’s all right for Clinton to do it, too. The rightness or wrongness of her behavior isn’t at all intrinsic in her behavior. The comparison, also, is cynically disingenuous. Powell’s and Rice’s aides’ dozen or so mishandlings stacked against Clinton’s 1,700? The former are certainly wrong, but the numbers show their accidental nature. This is what’s being compared with Clinton’s deliberate disregard.

It has never been shown that Clinton shared information marked as classified at the time it was sent or received.

That’s Williams’ strawman; no one is arguing otherwise. He’ll have to play with his dolly without me.

And of course there is still no evidence that she broke any law.

On the contrary, there are 1,700 instances of mishandling classified information. 50 US Code § 783 makes this mishandling clear.

More broadly, many people beyond the campaign believe the furor contributes to the perception that Clinton is not honest.

Perhaps that’s because these events are showing her dishonesty. We’re up to those 1,700 emails with classified information in them on her private server, including another 81 in the just-released batch that have been—after the fact—marked classified at one level or another.

Agency Regulation

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On Thursday, the House Committee on Natural Resources released a damning report on the EPA and its handling of the Gold King Mine disaster last August. The report detailed how the EPA and the Department of the Interior were inaccurate and misleading in their conflicting accounts of the wastewater spill, which the EPA said last week released 880,000 pounds of toxic metals.

These are the Federal entities that think they know how to regulate our public lands and our pollutants and pseudo-pollutants.

Chairman Rob Bishop (R, UT):

This report peels back one more layer in what many increasingly view as a pattern of deception on the part of EPA and DOI.

Hmm….

State Department Foundation

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Investigators with the State Department issued a subpoena to the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation last fall seeking documents about the charity’s projects that may have required approval from the federal government during Hillary Clinton’s term as secretary of state, according to people familiar with the subpoena and written correspondence about it.

No word, yet, on whether or to what extent the subpoena was satisfied.

But contributions from Wall Street entities—no influence there. Mm, mm.

Overbearing, or Justice-Seeking?

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The Federal Department of Justice thinks Ferguson, MO, should make changes in the way it polices itself, and in the main, Ferguson agreed. That’s where the rub is, that “in the main” part.

An agreement was tentatively negotiated between Ferguson and DoJ on what those changes should be, but when it got to the City Council, the Council wanted some changes before they’d sign off. Vanita Gupta, Acting Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division, said that DoJ would take

necessary legal actions to ensure that Ferguson’s policing and court practices comply with the Constitution and relevant federal laws.

The Ferguson City Council has attempted to unilaterally amend the negotiated agreement.

Of course, Gupta knows better. Nothing was agreed until the city actually agreed—which is what the City Council was discussing when, on its review of the offered settlement, it decided some changes were desirable. The Council, for instance, is concerned about whether it can afford the settlement. Among other things:

The council also wants Justice to cap federal monitoring fees the city must pay at $1 million….

Another concern is how this settlement would affect adjacent government entities. One change requested by the Council was an explicit statement that

the agreement will not apply to any other governmental entity that might take over duties currently provided by Ferguson. That means, for example, that St Louis County would not be beholden to the agreement if it takes over policing in Ferguson.

Because, for instance,

St Louis County police spokesman Brian Schellman said if the county were ever asked to take over policing in Ferguson, “we would consider the implications of the consent decree before entering into such an agreement.”

DoJ’s response? Since you didn’t sit down, shut up, and do what you were told to do, we’re suing you to implement our agreement diktat. The suit was filed the day after the Council voted to ask for these few amendments. No negotiation. Suit.

Attorney General Loretta Lynch said Ferguson’s decision to reject the deal left the Justice Department no choice except to file a civil-rights lawsuit.

Of course, Lynch knows better, too. The Council’s request for changes is not at all a rejection of the deal. In the first place, no deal can exist until it’s agreed by both parties, not dictated by one to the other. In the second place, a request for changes is an implicit agreement to the basic offer, else there’d be nothing to change.

Then Lynch made this entirely disingenuous statement:

The residents of Ferguson have waited nearly a year for the city to adopt an agreement that would protect their rights and keep them safe. … They have waited decades for justice. They should not be forced to wait any longer.

And yet, rather than negotiating these few changes to a reasonably quick resolution, Lynch now seeks years more delay while her DoJ sues to impose her will. This reaction is nothing more than an egotistical, self-aggrandizing move by Lynch and Gupta. Worse, it represents, regardless of the merits of the tentative agreement or of the requested changes, nothing but an overbearing power grab by the Federal government.

Business Taxes

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Richard Rubin, of The Wall Street Journal, thinks reforming these is not a straightforward proposition. To an extent, he’s right, as business and personal income taxes have become increasingly intertwined with each successive tax reform since Reagan.

The links between corporate and individual taxation inevitably lock policy makers in intractable disputes about popular deductions and the question that divides the parties most bitterly: is the US collecting enough money from wealthy individuals?

But this entangling, or more correctly, the concern about the entangling, simply overcomplexifies the problem.

It’s an easy thing to do conceptually, if political will is lacking, to reform business taxes. Keep in mind a single, core fact: businesses don’t pay very much of their tax bills already. Business taxes are just another cost center, whose value in large part is paid by the business’ customers in the form of higher prices that are set to recover, at the least, a significant fraction of that cost. Customers pay much of those business taxes.

The framing provides the answer. Cut through the Gordian business/personal income tax knot by eliminating the business tax altogether. This, aside from eliminating the tax pass-along to already taxed individuals, also eliminates disputes about popular deductions, credits, and so on: they go away with the taxes.

This also removes the non sequitur of whether business taxes are hitting the wealthy sufficiently. That question becomes focused on the personal taxes where it belongs and thereby brought into sharper relief.