2016 elections - because it's never too early

[Jacob]

The same reason all Muckity Mucks^TM everywhere, government and private sector alike, do it:  to get around the annoying but necessary security measures all the little people have to deal with. 

Yeah, that's fair enough too.

[derspiess]

I read that her private email server was in her house.  That's kinda weird.

[DGuller]

I read that her private email server was in her house.  That's kinda weird.

It's common for old people to do this.

[Malthus]

I can't think of a smaller scandal than this. 

As an outsider, the larger problem with Hillary appears to be that she doesn't seem to stand for much - she seems to be running because, well, it's her turn, and she's earned it.

[crazy canuck]

I know plenty of people in my job who are that age and can understand email. Much less can understand the basic concepts behind communications security, much LESS be the freaking secretary of state and know and understand the importance of communication security!

Your job is related to technology right?

[crazy canuck]

The same reason all Muckity Mucks^TM everywhere, government and private sector alike, do it:  to get around the annoying but necessary security measures all the little people have to deal with. 

Because changing your password every 90 days is annoying.  Because using two-step authentication with an authenticator is annoying.  Because having to take the computer-based training that every Fed using Fed IT assets has to take, even if in the Senior Executive Service, is annoying.  Because my email on my device doesn't require me to type in my User Name and Password, which I already have saved in these little boxes and already has my contacts loaded, and do you have any idea how many people I know now?   Because having to use your ID badge with your laptop is annoying.  The rules don't apply to me.  I'm too busy.  I'm too important.

Not really mind-boggling at all.  Just don't see why everybody's acting as if she's the first and only.  I know of a certain general and former CIA director that's facing jail time this week for more egregious email violations, all for the sake of pussy.  Funny how that story's been nowhere as big as this one.

I find your explanation more compelling than the Jake/CC one.  It's ego, not ignorance.

I am so happy you agree with Grumbler agreeing with you

[garbon]

I can't think of a smaller scandal than this. 

As an outsider, the larger problem with Hillary appears to be that she doesn't seem to stand for much - she seems to be running because, well, it's her turn, and she's earned it.

I think she stands for experience, someone who has actually been around the block. I agree though that she doesn't, to my chagrin in '08, have a simplistic goal/slogan that can win over the hearts and votes of the masses.

[Sheilbh]

God forbid a politician in a democratic society be so vulgar as to appeal to the masses


Having read a tiny bit (this: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-04/clinton-s-e-mail-system-built-for-privacy-though-not-security) I think it is problematic from a transparency and a security perspective. I think it's another of those trivial non-trivial character traits. The other striking thing that doesn't seem to have changed since 2008 is that I'm not sure there's someone in Clintonland who is listened to and can tell the truth to Hillary and Bill. There's just something ever so slightly Nixonian about Hillary.

Also see Maureen Dowd in magnificent form

Call Off the Dogs
FEB. 14, 2015
WASHINGTON — I'LL pay for this column.

The Rottweilers will be unleashed.

Once the Clintons had a War Room. Now they have a Slime Room.

Once they had the sly James Carville, fondly known as "serpenthead." Now they have the slippery David Brock, accurately known as a snake.

Brock fits into the Clinton tradition of opportunistic knife-fighters like Dick Morris and Mark Penn.

The silver-haired 52-year-old, who sports colorful designer suits and once wore a monocle, brawled his way into a Times article about the uneasy marriage between Hillary Clinton's veteran attack dogs and the group of advisers who are moving over from Obamaland.

Hillary hasn't announced a 2016 campaign yet. She's busy polling more than 200 policy experts on how to show that she really cares about the poor while courting the banks. Yet her shadow campaign is already in a déjà-vu-all-over-again shark fight over control of the candidate and her money. It's the same old story: The killer organization that, even with all its ruthless hired guns, can't quite shoot straight.

Squabbling competing factions helped Hillary squander a quarter-of-a-billion dollars in 2008.

As Nicholas Confessore and Amy Chozick chronicled, the nasty dispute spilled into public and Brock resigned last week from the board of a pro-Clinton "super-PAC" called Priorities USA Action — whose co-chairman is Jim Messina, Obama's 2012 campaign manager — accusing the political action committee of "an orchestrated political hit job" and "the kind of dirty trick I've witnessed in the right-wing and would not tolerate then."

He should know.

The former "right-wing hit man," and impresario of "dirty tricks," as Brock has said of himself, made his living in the '90s sliming Anita Hill as "a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty" and breaking the Troopergate story, which accused Arkansas state troopers of setting up liaisons for Bill Clinton and spurred Paula Jones's 1994 sexual harassment lawsuit.

He has tried to discredit anyone who disagreed with his ideological hits (myself and reporters I know included). And that's still the business he's in, simply on the other side as a Hillary zealot. (His conversion began in 1996 when he published a biography of Hillary that was not a total hit job and that began the thaw.)

Just as Bill Clinton was able to forgive another architect of the vast right-wing conspiracy, Richard Mellon Scaife, once Scaife was charmed by Hillary in person and began giving money to the Clinton foundation, so, too, was Bill won over by Brock's book, "Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative," and Brock's Media Matters and Correct the Record websites, which ferociously push back against any Hillary coverage that isn't fawning.

With the understood blessing of the Clintons, Brock runs a $28 million cluster of media monitoring groups and oppo research organizations that are vehicles to rebut and at times discredit and threaten anyone who casts a gimlet eye at Clinton Inc.

As Confessore and Chozick wrote, he uses a fund-raiser named Mary Pat Bonner, whose firm has collected millions of dollars in commissions — a practice many fund-raising experts consider unethical.

Everyone wants to be at the trough for this one because Hillary is likely to raise, and more important, spend more than $1 billion on her campaign.

The Clinton crowd is trying to woo Brock back into the fold because he's good at getting money and knows how their enemies think. The Clintons appreciate the fact that Brock, like Morris, is a take-no-prisoners type with the ethical compass of a jackal. Baked in the tactics of the right, Brock will never believe that negative coverage results from legitimate shortcomings. Instead, it's all personal, all false, and all a war.

This is a bad harbinger for those who had hoped that Hillary would "kill off the wild dogs," as one Obama loyalist put it, and Bill would leave behind the sketchy hangers-on in the mold of Ron Burkle and Jeffrey Epstein.

Hillary's inability to dispense with brass-knuckle, fanatical acolytes like Brock shows that she still has an insecure streak that requires Borgia-like blind loyalty, and can't distinguish between the real vast right-wing conspiracy and the voices of legitimate concern.

Money-grubbing is always the ugly place with the Clintons, who have devoured $2.1 billion in contributions since 1992 to their political campaigns, family foundation and philanthropies, according to The Old (Good) New Republic.

David Axelrod, the author of a new memoir, "Believer," wrote that Hillary's past gurus, Morris and Penn, were nonbelievers — mercenary, manipulative and avaricious. He told Politico's Glenn Thrush that he would have advised Hillary not to cash in with her book and six-figure speeches.

Axelrod reiterated to me that Hillary's designated campaign chairman, John Podesta, Bill Clinton's last chief of staff who left his post as an Obama counselor on Friday, "has the strength and standing to enforce a kind of campaign discipline that hasn't existed before."

But, for now, what Republicans say about government is true of the Clintons: They really do believe that your money belongs to them.

Someday, they should give their tin cup to the Smithsonian. It's one of the wonders of the world.

[Razgovory]

I know plenty of people in my job who are that age and can understand email. Much less can understand the basic concepts behind communications security, much LESS be the freaking secretary of state and know and understand the importance of communication security!

Your job is related to technology right?

No, he's a programer.  He indoctrinates people into cults for a living.

[derspiess]

I read that her private email server was in her house.  That's kinda weird.

It's common for old people to do this.

Yeah, I guess they just don't know any better.  Dunno how many times mom has called me asking how to restart a process on the exchange server she runs in the basement.

[derspiess]

I think she stands for experience, someone who has actually been around the block. I agree though that she doesn't, to my chagrin in '08, have a simplistic goal/slogan that can win over the hearts and votes of the masses.

She's probably had a lot of accomplishments in her years of public service.  But I can't think of any at the moment.  Can you?

[garbon]

God forbid a politician in a democratic society be so vulgar as to appeal to the masses

Yeah politicians promising things they can never deliver is really great!

[dps]

It isn't as big because it isn't as big. Nothing funny about it - he isn't running for President, and isn't one the top few leading political figures in the country.

She wasn't mishandling classified intelligence information as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, which is a substantially a bigger issue than forwarding "LOLcat" pics from her Blackberry.

Which is a good reason why he is being criminally prosecuted, and she is not.

Why you think the differences in coverage is some kind of story itself is beyond me.

Is there really even a difference in coverage?  Seems to me that both stories were pretty heavily covered when they first broke.

[CountDeMoney]

God forbid a politician in a democratic society be so vulgar as to appeal to the masses

Yeah politicians promising things they can never deliver is really great!

I thought this bit was interesting--

The Clinton crowd is trying to woo Brock back into the fold because he's good at getting money and knows how their enemies think. The Clintons appreciate the fact that Brock, like Morris, is a take-no-prisoners type with the ethical compass of a jackal. Baked in the tactics of the right, Brock will never believe that negative coverage results from legitimate shortcomings. Instead, it's all personal, all false, and all a war.

--since, quite frankly, if it wasn't for the Clintons embracing political operatives like Morris and Brock, the Democrats would still be looking for their first Democratic President since Carter. 

[Admiral Yi]

I got a fundraising letter from the DNC!