Integrity is the essence of everything successful.
R. Buckminster Fuller
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TPP: A Step Forward: Thumbs UP!
See the Cato Institute clip at the bottom of the post (Facebook video embed issues), and I also disussed in FB Corner above. I am very much a critic of mercantilistic trade deals, but up to a third of the global economy involves the Pacific economies. Any positive step forward in opening markets across the region is win-win from an economic standpoint.
Sunday Talk Soup: OK, I've Had My Fill of Hillary Clinton's Bullshit
It wasn't until last weekend that I whittled down my podcasts to the Sept. 27 Meet the Press. Chuck Todd does ask some decent questions along the way, but basically Hillary Clinton basically goes through her memorized politically spun rationalizations, without serious challenge from Todd, of maintaining her official emails on an insecure home server, how she exploited some sort of regulatory gap or loophole "for purposes of convenience" in bypassing professionally maintained email systems "like other Secretaries of State" while her own State Department was cracking down on email practices of suhordinates with less access to state secrets.
There was this quote from Clinton, from before she became Secretary of State:
HILLARY CLINTON (ARCHIVE):It would take too much of my time and effort to debunk each bit of garbage uttered by Clinton (it reminds me of an email exchange I once had with Don Boudreaux when I asked him why he didn't go after Paul Krugman for saying such-and-such nonsense, and he responded that it would be a full-time job just to keep up with everything Krugman says or writes). But just to give a taste:
I want to have a much more transparent government. And I think we now have the tools to make that happen. I want to have as much information about the way our government operates on the internet. So the people who pay for it, the taxpayers of America can see that.
And so there was about a month where I didn't have everything already on the server and we went back, tried to, you know, recover whatever we could recover. And I think it's also fair to say that, you know, there are some things about this that I just can't control. I can't control the technical aspects of it. I'm not by any means a technical expert. I relied on people who were.So we already have an admission, even before we discuss the potential security problems of that home server, that some emails were likely missing and others had to be restored from backups. When did she discover the gap? Recall that even under liberalized rules, she was supposed to turn in copies of messages on a timely basis to be in compliance with federal records retention. Wouldn't have gaps in records point out problems with her use of a home server and get her to be in full compliance with government-maintained email accounts? Not to mention that I have no trust in Hillary Clinton's lawyers, who are paid by her, to determine what's in the public interest. In the discussion she tries to use anecdotal evidence, e.g., that the government returned some emails as personal, to suggest she's returned more than enough. The problem is that we don't know all of the emails Clinton received or sent. It's possible that she may have purged politically inconvenient emails. We only have the word of the fox in charge of the henhouse, not a truly independent third party, like I've repeatedly called for. She also wants to suggest that the government should have copies of emails anyway, assuming the emails came from or went to at least one government email account:
You know, my assumption, because this system was there before I became secretary, it was there when I left, my assumption was anything that I sent to a .gov account would be captured.I would have to look at technology at the time, but I'm sure that there were ways to maintain archive copies. For example, Gmail allows you to auto-forward emails to other accounts and maintains an automatic archive (all mail), Outlook enables cc or bcc account rules, Thunderbird lets you set up incoming filters to copy or forward emails, e.g., when the email sender is from a ".gov" account, and you can also configure cc or bcc of outgoing messages (beyond maintaining an automatic copy in the sent folder). I'm not attempting to discuss these features as exhaustive or distinctive.
CHUCK TODD:
But, you know, that's very difficult to capture all of your emails by going through to perhaps thousands of people and their .gov accounts. It would've been a lot easier if it was sent to your .gov account.
HILLARY CLINTON:
Well, but when you communicate with people in other parts of the government, you're not sending it to TheStateDepartment.gov. And that would've been true either way. Look, I think I have done all that I can
But what really annoys me is her sarcastic tone, notable at the end of the exerpt. No, to the best of my knowledge, there isn't a centralized email system for all government accounts; it's very possible that Hillary Clinton's emails went across various email domains beyond state.gov, e.g., dhs.gov, *.mil. It would be almost impossible to know what emails Hillary Clinton sent without recipients stepping forward. Moreover, the emails may have been deleted in the interim. She is just being disingenuous here: "Look, I'm not a geek--how did I know they didn't keep records of messages going between my email account and government email accounts?" The problem is they could have configured controls and archivals for email accounts under their control. Hillary Clinton knew there were risks with using her own account; she went out of the way to use her own account--and none of this had anything to do with transparency. Maybe stupid people will buy her email excuses, but anyone with a tech background knows that she's full of shit.
The other parts of the interview were equally disingenuous. Watching her justify her politically convenient flip-flops on marriage redefinition and the Keystone pipeline was disgusting. Consider this soundbite after an earlier more positive statement on Keystone:
When it comes to Keystone, you know, I was at the beginning of the process of trying to evaluate what was the best outcome. I did feel that I shouldn't jump in before the president and Secretary Kerry and make my views known, because they're still in the middle of that process.Let's be very clear: the oil sands oil at the higher prices we've seen for most of the past decade will be sold at the right price. Right now a number of frackers are playing an end game becaused by the Saudi price war; production is already falling while the shale developers desperately try to make their loan payments by dumping oil on a saturated market. We have the refiners to process that heavy oil--and we haven't been energy self-sufficient for decades. The Chinese have already expressed interest in Canadian oil. At least she isn't trying to argue, unlike thousands of oil and gas pipelines crisscrossing the US, the Keystone pipeline is some leaky anomaly. Clinton is just acting totally political here, and it's all bullshit. She knows that Sanders and Biden have already sold out to the environmental crackpots of the Democratic coalition. She needs to explain why we are spurning one of our biggest trading partners for oil that can and will be bought in the future, with or without us.
But it was, frankly, uncomfortable to have so many people asking me and my saying, you know, I'm waiting and waiting and waiting, and it still hasn't happened. I don't know when it will happen. It may have to happen when I'm president, I hope. So I've said, "Look, I'm against it." On the total evaluation, when I made that statement years ago, we did not have the kind of energy profile that we now have.
We did not have the full understanding of how the particular oil that would have been extracted from those tar sands was of a different degree of dirtiness and polluting in terms of greenhouse gasses. So, you know, I'm not going to sit here and tell people that I make up my mind. That's the Republicans. They make up their mind. They're never bothered by evidence.
Choose Life: The Gift of Adoption
Crony Brick-and-Mortar Restaurants and Unconstitutional Barriers to Entry for Food Vendors
Choose Life: I Wanna Hold Your Hand
More twin magic...
Facebook Corner
(Cato Institute). [See video below.] "TPP is not Adam Smith's view of free trade. TPP is managed trade, and certainly the TPP will contain components that we don't like. But, on net, if the agreement is good for taxpayers, it's good for consumers, workers, businesses...let's not make the perfect the enemy of the good."
Unfortunately, many of the Presidential candidates from both parties will engage in economic populist demogoguery, including Rand Paul. (Ron Paul notoriously opposed NAFTA on the basis of ideological purity). Of course, most of us who want free trade would unilaterally declare free trade, but the bottom line is, whatever allows greater price competition and variety for the consumer is win-win; corrupt political whores sell out the many consumers on behalf of the few politically connected crony capitalists and unions.
Political Cartoon
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| Courtesy of the original artist via LFC |
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| Courtesy of Glenn McCoy via Townhall |
Roberta Flack, "Jesse"
TPP: Not Free Trade, But Freer Trade
TPP in Perspective: 150 Years of U.S. Trade Policy in Less tha...
"TPP is not Adam Smith's view of free trade. TPP is managed trade, and certainly the TPP will contain components that we don't like. But, on net, if the agreement is good for taxpayers, it's good for consumers, workers, businesses...let's not make the perfect the enemy of the good."
Posted by The Cato Institute on Tuesday, October 6, 2015
